Brocani conjures together all your favourite European cultural and historical myth figures in order to attack the centuries of ‘sublimation’ that have produced our cities and their inhabitants. The gang’s all here: Frankenstein’s monster gropes towards the awareness that his mind is a universe; Attila, naked on a white horse, liberates his people from their ignominy; the ultra-caustic Viva bemoans the frustrations of married life and drifts into the elegiac persona of the Bloody Countess Bathory; Louis Waldon is a hip American tourist searching for the (missing) Mona Lisa. The range is extraordinary, from stand-up Jewish comedy to a kind of flea-market expressionism. Brocani’s approach is contemplative rather than agitational, which confounds the impatient; Gavin Bryars’ lovely Terry Riley-esque score matches the ambience exactly.
Category: Cult
Bruce LaBruce teams up with photographer Rick Castro in a wild re-imagining of Sunset Boulevard, set in 90’s Santa Monica. Anthropologist Jurgen Anger heads to LA to research hustling as a social phenomenon, but after spotting angel-faced hustler Montgomery Ward, he falls hopelessly in love.
A bank accountant, who moonlights as a high-priced call girl, becomes embroiled in the lives of a money launderer, his seductive wife, and his bodyguard who blackmails her to help the FBI entrap him with his latest money laundering scheme.
Flesh was filmmaker Paul Morrissey’s first production for Andy Warhol. The story concerns a bisexual hustler who does tricks so that he can pay for his wife’s lover’s abortion. The film made headlines when it was confiscated by the police during one of its earliest showings in 1970. Though this event is unlikely to repeat itself, Flesh is still explicit enough to elicit gasps from even the most jaded of underground-film enthusiasts.
Dustin is the leader of a rock band on the brink of super-stardom. Until now they have juggled their music career with cocaine smuggling. The musicians, and their manager Raf, wish to sever ties with organized-crime, leave the drug world behind and concentrate on music. However they are coerced into doing one last job for the Mob. They lose the $2 million of cocaine, and find themselves marked men unless they can fulfill their obligations.
The work of artist and photographer James Bidgood, Pink Narcissus is a breathtaking and outrageous erotic poem focusing on the daydreams of a beautiful boy prostitute who, from the seclusion of his ultra-kitsch apartment, conceives a series of interlinked narcissistic fantasies populated by matadors, dancing boys, slaves and leather-clad bikers.
In Hamburg, West Germany, a rocker biker gang helps a kid avenge his brother who was murdered by a rival gang, a mortal enemy of rocker gangs.
The third installment in the Coffin Joe Trilogy, The Awakening of the Beast, follows Coffin Joe’s sadistic experiments on four drug addicts who volunteer to take LSD. The experiments are intended to prove that drug use is related to sexual depravity. Director José Mojica Marins once again plays Coffin Joe, who sits with a panel of psychiatrists on a television show, using videos of the addicts as proof of the connection between drugs and lewd sexual behavior.