Movie Review: Splatter Farm (1987)

Writer/Director:

John Polonia
Mark Polonia
Todd Smith

Starring:
Todd Smith
John Polonia
Mark Polonia
Marion Costly

IMDB:
click here



Well, it's been a long time since I posted here. I've been drifting off from the obscure movies kick for a while and, resultantly, have had little to review or write about. Then, just recently, I discovered in my possession a DVD that I had forgotten I even owned, a film with the title Feeders. I stuck in on (a rash act, in retrospect, as it could have been a jazz-movie about human cottage cheese mounds and their psychological gaolers; gladly it was not). The flick, directed by twin brothers Mark and John Polonoia, served to remind me of two things: firstly, how much I love bizarre zero-budget horror (often for the wrong reasons), and secondly, that Battlefield Earth really isn't the most hilariously inept sci-fi movie ever made. Thus, I decided it was time for me to resurrect this blog, and I intend to start off with a short series on Polonia Brothers' films.

Actually, "Polonia Brothers films" is a potentially misleading turn of phrase. Polonia Brothers videos is a far more accurate description of what we will be dealing with here. A couple of the flicks reviewed so far on this blog had cinema releases in their time, while most went straight-to-video. These will be the first movies I cover that not only ended up on videocassette, but were actually shot on it. Presumably, at least in the case of the first film we will review, the primary recording equipment used was the family camcorder. We're done scraping the barrel, folks. You might say we're now hacking at the wood.

But that would be harsh. The Polonia Brothers have contributed much to the world of homebrew filmmaking (something that will be covered in a later article) and their product has always sought to entertain above all else.

With this in mind, it's time to delve into the first review. Setting aside Feeders for the next review, allow me take you back to where it all began: back to 1987, when a teenaged Mark and John Polonia drove into the countryside with a camcorder and a dream. A dream to make a movie of their own. A dream that would become... Splatter Farm.

Splatter Farm is a movie that does not mess around: it opens with a shot of an imbecile redneck disemboweling a female corpse in slow motion (yes, it's an obvious dummy - no young women were harmed in the making of this film, because... there were no young women in this film... presumably having been driven away by all the spots, geek specs and bad 80s moustaches on the set). He then severs one of her arms with what looks like a serrated bread knife, and proceeds to rub his crotch with her mangled hand. Some might call this a crass start, but if you think about it, it's actually pretty kind of the Brothers Polonia to signpost exactly what type of movie this is before the opening credits have rolled. I wouldn't be surprised if at least half of the viewing public switched off there-and-then, and tore back to the video shop with the tape held aloft and the word "refund" on their lips. As a film-making decision, it probably saved several thousand ruined evenings, and prevented at least five-or-six divorces, so hats off to the twins for that one.

But at Obscurity and Beyond we're made of sterner stuff - taking extreme gore, pervy bumpkins and bad facial hair in our stride (if not, you're on the wrong blog, kiddo!) - so we shall press onwards.

We are quickly introduced to pair of identically-bespectacled brothers, played by guess-who, driving into the countryside on their way to spend a relaxing week on their elderly aunt's farm. There's a bit of banter between them about whether or not the aunt once had the hots for one of the boys as a child, and a collective groan arises from the audience as they realise what fresh horrors await us further down the road. Oh yes, the Polonia Brothers are truly masters of foreshadowing.

The grubby feeling doesn't let up much when we actually meet the aunt. If you had predicted the overbearing, menacing old witch stereotype we're all so familiar with from horror films, then you'd be wrong. Instead, image a bizarre cross-pollination of Rosemary West and Herbert from Family Guy and you'll be in the right ballpark. Short on teeth and and high on squirm factor, Marion Costly plays the part disturbingly well (at least, I hope she is just "playing a part"); make no mistake, she is a truly terrible actress, but perfect for the role. In a genuine example of strength arising from limitation, even her incredibly wooden delivery often adds to the suggestion of an unhinged mind and (literal) skeletons in closets.

Also living and working on her farm, fresh from butchering an itinerant tree surgeon and thinning out the local equine population, is young Jeremy. Yes, the lemonade-guzzlin', corpse-lovin', white-trash nutbag from the pre-credits sequence. He is played by Todd Smith, one of the better actors in the film. It's true that he doesn't really exhibit much of a range: he mostly stands around sporting an expression somewhere between lonely vacancy and smouldering mania, but he sports it really, really well. So, if you're a casting agent on the lookout for a vacantly-smouldering lonely maniac, you could do a lot worse than Todd Smith. The twins, Joseph and Alan, take an immediate dislike to Jeremy, but are initially oblivious to the fact that he is actually a serial killing necrophile.

Eventually, after finding some human remains in the woods and noticing Jeremy brandishing a hammer while staring evilly at them for the fifteenth time, the penny drops and they try to escape. Things don't go to plan. What follows defies description, but includes the following, in no specific order: mutilation, torture, rohypnol, date rape, a fist up the butt, a stick of dynamite in a similar location, a character being buried alive, an exploding head, and a poop-smeared face. This all leads up to a surprising, genuinely unexpected (considering the less-than-brilliant writing chops behind it) twist ending that manages to bind all these events together in some semblance of a meaningful plot.

Right, let's get down to the nitty gritty:

Video looks like shit. I'm not being a cinema snob here, I'm not bad-mouthing the fancy digital 24fps progressive scan HD video camcorders and DSLRs that they shoot low budget movies on nowadays; I'm talking about that cruddy, analogue VHS-C Handicam you used to stick in your brat's tear-streaked face on birthdays, and is now lying unused at the back of your closet. Yeah, THAT kinda video. There's no point in beating around the bush: no matter how great your cinematographer, how expensive your lighting rig, or how big a budget you have (and the Polonia Brothers had none of these things), you can spot shot-on-tape footage a mile off and it looks crummy; all cheap and sterile and low-contrast-ratio. This movie is no exception to that rule. Bright backdrops become white blurs, dense foliage becomes a seething wall of fizzing noise. Ugh! If you are used to crisp HD visuals, you will not like this. I will say, however, that within the realm of bad shot-on-video 1980s horror films, Splatter Farm looks slightly better than average. This is not to suggest that the movie looks good in any respect, simply that there is much worse out there, and a lot of it. The brothers at least seem to be aware of the limitations of the medium, and play against them.

Locations are good, looking suitably grubby, seedy and low-rent (because they were grubby, seedy and low-rent). The direction is alright, insofar as we can usually tell what we are supposed to be looking at and can follow what is happening on the screen. The camera roves around the characters and locations, voyeuristically, creating a fair sense of unease. There is nothing particularly artful going on in the cinematography department, but it's functional and it works. Pacing is something that could have been tightened up somewhat; one of the boys seems to spend an age pondering over a rotting skull in the woods, before coming to the conclusion that it is indeed a rotting skull.

But, presumably, most people who watch a movie called Splatter Farm don't do so for poetic visuals and nuanced storytelling. You're probably asking how the gore stacks up. Well, the special effects are imaginative and enthusiastically executed, if not exactly convincing (you have to look past some pretty watery blood and stiff fx-dummies). Although, by my count, there are only five living humans shown on screen during the film, the boys manage to serve up a surprisingly varied smorgasbord of splatter from such a limited pool of victims. In this department at least, they did a damn good job.

Now, given how hard the filmmakers were clearly trying to push the viewers' disgust threshold, the film should be a tedious exercise in mean-spirited repulsiveness. But it's not, not quite. The youthful naivete of the filmmakers is apparent at all times, and this serves to lighten the mood considerably. Likewise, the darker moments stem not so much from the visual images of gore and mutilation, but from the candid, and quite inadvertent, glimpses the film offers into the minds of the two grubby teenage horror geeks behind it. Freud would have had a field day with Splatter Farm. So, the flick manages to be both endearingly innocent and disturbingly creepy at the same time, for much the same reasons. It's an oddly compelling paradox and almost makes the movie worth watching in its own right.

It is an entertaining film, but it will only appeal to a very, very narrow audience. If you've read my review and think "yuck - this is terrible, why would anyone want to watch a film like this?" then you will hate it. You are also 100% correct: it is ragingly terrible. Stay well away.

But if, based on the review, you think there is a chance Splatter Farm might be worth your time, then you almost certainly will enjoy it; it takes a certain kind of person to like a film like this. If I was to turn my back, shout "TROMA!" and turn around to see whether or not you were running away, that also would be a pretty good litmus test.


Splatter Farm was shot in 1986 and released in 1987 through Donna Michele (or Michelle) Productions, a super-obscure video distributor that advertised for new material in the back of horror magazines. According to Slasher Index, this outfit only ever released seven films over the course of its existence, of which this and Cannibal Campout (written, directed by and starring one Jon McBride, a name that will be popping up again in the next review) were the two most successful. Information on this company is hard to come by, but it appears that Donna Michele Productions operated primarily on a mail-order basis, although it also seems that Splatter Farm did appear on the shelves of a few "mom and pop" video rental stores in the US, so there might have been some limited retail distribution too.

Actually, something I have just noticed now: the screen-grabs on the Splatter Farm video case are not from the actual movie, and feature characters and situations not shown in the film. This in itself is not so strange - a lot of exploitation flicks have been marketed using trailers and posters that are virtually unconnected and often totally misleading (check out this hilariously irrelevant trailer for The Last House on Dead End Street) - but such material is usually either pieced together from pre-production publicity shots or mocked-up by the distributors without the permission or input of the production team. What's weird here is that while at least one of the Polonia Brothers does appear in a couple of the shots, he is locked in a cage being menaced by an actor wearing the same outfit as Jeremy in the film, yet is noticably older and has a receding hairline that Jeremy doesn't. On the front cover, standing alongside the Jeremy-imposter, there is a short female wearing a Stetson and jeans who is most assuredly not Marion Costly, and there is also a third shot featuring both of these characters harassing one of the Polonias on the hood of a car which I certainly don't remember seeing. Maybe it was decided by the brothers that they wouldn't submit grainy screencaps from the film itself, but instead shoot their own promo materials on a 35mm stills camera, but could not get a hold of the original actors. Either that, or maybe they're grabbed from some unknown, lost Polonia Brothers film. Who knows? Answers on a postcard, please.

Anyway, Donna Michele released their last film (Attack of the Killer Refrigerator) in 1990 and presumably ceased to exist soon thereafter. Thanks to the death of the distributor and the very limited number of tapes produced, copies of Splatter Farm became quite a rarity in the horror video underground of the 1990s and early 2000s. Most people who managed to see it during this period did so on second or third generation bootleg copies and, given that the film was far from eye candy in the first place, it must have been a pretty ugly experience.

Probably in reaction to this, the Polonia Brothers re-released Splatter Farm on DVD in 2007 through Camp Motion Pictures in a remastered special edition. Yes: remastered, and yes: this is the version I have just reviewed - it still looks like crap. Well, I guess there is only so much you can do to tart up awful 1980s video footage, so that's no big surprise.

What is surprising is that a) they're still using shots of those same weird impostors on the artwork, including some shots that didn't appear on the old boxart, and b) the movie has been extensively re-edited from its original form. In fact, around ten minutes are missing from the running time.

Before you ask, the strange scenes shown on the box are not among the chopped footage, I checked. By comparing notes with a friend in the US (Billy A. Anderson) who had access to a copy of the original VHS, I've found that in addition to a few trims to improve the editing, the majority of missing time boils down to the exclusion of two key scenes:

Firstly, there was a nightmare sequence in the video version, in which one of the brothers excretes several major organs. This was immediately preceded by the character's announcement that he was going to "take a shit", which remains in the re-edited DVD. Secondly, the "buried alive" scene was originally much, much longer, with the camera lingering for the entire burial, during which one brother is actually buried alive in the cold ground, showcasing some immense dedication and bravery on the part of the young actor/co-director (I couldn't tell you which one, though). Since this was the most genuinely, subtly chilling scene in the movie, and obviously the most gruellingly difficult shot to film, it does seem odd that the Polonia Brothers would choose to excise it all these years later. The scene did feature the movie's only glimpse of frontal nudity, and this alongside the fact that society is probably much more aware and alert to the exploitation of minors now than it was in 1986 (the brothers were only 17 at the time of filming), may in fact be the reason for the cut. That would be understandable. However, it seems bizarre that it would result in this scene being chopped while the sexual battery scene remains intact. Weird. Perhaps the brothers themselves have explained this somewhere, but I couldn't find anything on it.

Anyway, since I've not seen the original version, I can't really say whether these cuts contribute or detract from the movie.

If you want to see Splatter Farm, Amazon is your friend. $6.88 (at time of writing) really isn't too bad a deal, and makes the movie worth taking a chance on even if you're still undecided. Just don't break my balls if you hate it, okay? The original videotape version remains very difficult to find, and I'm told you can expect to pay anywhere between $50 - $200 a pop on the rare occasion that one shows up on eBay. Is it worth it?

Nah.

Well, that was Splatter Farm. I'll be back soon-ish with the next instalment in my Polonia Brothers series. Until then, take care and keep dancing naked in the hills!

Movie Review: Vermillion Eyes (1991)

Director:
Nathan Schiff
Written by:
Nathan Schiff
Starring:
John Smihula
Arlene Burns
Barbara Balmer
Hope Sender

IMDB:
click here



I promised, a few months back (Jesus!), that my next review would be on something truly obscure. So, here it is, finally - Vermillion Eyes - a surreal 117 minute 8mm nightmare that was never officially released anywhere, in any format, ever. A film so rare and unknown that few have even heard of it, and surely no more than a few thousand people in the whole world have ever actually seen it.

Some time ago, I reviewed a peculiar, home-baked cinematic oddity from Long Island called Weasels Rip My Flesh, directed by Nathan Schiff. So incomparable was the experience that, even to this day, I cannot decide whether it was an unreal work of artistic genius or the juvenile, fevered visual ravings of an unhinged teenager with a camera. The fact that the film was interesting enough to even raise this question perhaps rendered the question itself moot, but the intriguing, bizarre atmosphere of the film continued to haunt me like a strange song stuck in my head. So, like any good film obsessive, I immediately set about hunting down the rest of the director's back catalogue. This task, however, was a lot tougher than you might expect...

Until the mid-2000s, not a single one of Schiff's films had been given any kind of legitimate commercial release. They were not so much "lost films" as "never-were films". He produced his movies on literal zero-budgets, never intending any distribution wider than occasional neighbourhood screenings, projected on a sheet hanging in his back yard. At some point, Schiff decided to make some individual VHS copies of his films (filmed directly off the "screen"), initially for back-up purposes, and later to distribute amongst friends. Somewhere down the line dupes were made, videotapes changed hands and, eventually, Nth-generation copies of four of the director's homebrew epics began to trickle out onto the horror convention circuit, and perhaps more crucially, the mail-order bootleg markets. The titles were: Weasels Rip My Flesh, The Long Island Cannibal Massacre, They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore and Vermillion Eyes. I have seen photocopied "black market" underground mail-order forms from the late-1980s, the darkest days of UK video censorship, upon which these titles rubbed shoulders with the likes of high-profile "banned" fare such as Cannibal Holocaust, The Last House on the Left and Zombie Flesh Eaters. Weasels even made it into the British tabloids when, on the 8th of May 1992, the notorious rag The Daily Star laughably included it on a list of "depraved videos" supposedly seized by customs in a "snuff film" raid.

Then, the internet happened, making it possible for individuals with even the most obscure and arcane interests to share them with like-minded souls, and gradually, deep, deep in the trash-horror underground, something resembling a small cult following began to grow around the films. In 2003, in an astoundingly unexpected move, a major player in the home video market - Image Entertainment - announced that it had acquired the rights to all four movies and would be releasing them, fully remastered from the original 8mm materials, in lavish DVD sets. At last, Nathan Schiff's films would see the light of a legitimate public release. However... when the DVDs finally shipped in February 2004 (to much bemusement and head-scratching among the mainstream horror community) it transpired that one of the movies had been quietly shelved.

So what happened to Vermillion Eyes? Image were silent on the matter but, in Sleazegrinder.com's fascinating interview with the director, Schiff offered the following insight:

"Everything was set to go—the artwork was done, the interview, the commentary—everything was done. If you read the liner notes on the other DVDs, it mentions Vermillion. I guess they did things backwards and they showed it to their legal department later, and the legal department found something objectionable to the point that they thought they might get a lawsuit. So they cancelled it, and I got a phone call and a letter—'We cannot release this movie because of its violent nature and content.'"

That was all the encouragement I needed. I sent out

feelers, trawled the internet and sold my soul, until finally I cradled in my hands (or rather, on my hard drive) a busted up, fuzzy, bootleg VHS rip of this uber-rare Z-epic. I settled down, beer-in-hand, ready for a trashy, throwaway, amateurish gorefest filled with crazy twists and bad effects...

...And boy, was that a misjudgment!

The plot revolves around an unnamed man (played by John Smihula, previously the detective in Weasels, here virtually unrecognisable) who, by the time we meet him, is already well into a downward spiral towards death-fixated madness. The whole picture unfolds from his perspective, his psychoses form the structure of the plot and affect every aspect of the film's look and feel: from his perspective, he seems to exist in a world populated almost entirely by women, in a solarized, soulless suburban landscape where bloody murders, fatal car accidents and tragic suicides are commonplace events. Completely disconnected and engrossed in thoughts of violence and mortality, The Man trudges from accident blackspot to suicide scene, donning a face mask and hazmat suit to photograph the earthly remains of the unfortunate victims he finds. Before long, he is moving and posing his "subjects" for morbid "portraits" which he later pours over obsessively. Gradually, his fixation begins to shift from the aftermath to the violent arrival of death itself, and he is consumed by horrific hallucainations and uncontrollable fantasies of mutilation and murder. Various women cross paths with The Man, including his sister, an old girlfriend and a wistful blind girl he meets at a deserted beach. They intrigue him, yet his attempts to reach out to them from inside his disassociated shell are all doomed to end in outburts of savage violence which he seems unable to control (and which may, or may not, be taking place entirely in his imagination).

My description does not do the film justice. Vermillion Eyes is something completely different. If you read my review of Weasels, you'll remember I quite enjoyed it as a piece of innocent juvenalia, with some mesmerizing flourishes of originality and surreality which I considered at the time to be the accidental result of the director's youthful ineptitude. However, this movie now shines a whole new light on Nathan Schiff and has forced me to re-evaluate my opinion of the man. While the constraints of a zero budget are visually apparent throughout, there is nothing juvenile or inept about Vermillion. It is a deeply intelligent, sensitive, frightening and horrific film that mesmerized and disturbed me far more than I was expecting, or was prepared for.

Images of sex and violence permeate the picture, with the two sometimes overlapping in shocking ways (such as when The Man suddenly and unexpectedly executes a blonde-haired prostitute with a gunshot to the head after a long, feverishly stylized "love" scene). There are also extended, unflinching sequences in which living humans are reduced to unrecognisable masses of bone and gristle. In once particularly gross and visually disturbing scene, The Man drugs a girl and splits her open as she lies in the grass, tripping and screaming "there's a worm in me, there's a worm in me", while he removes a long, quivering, serpentine tube of intestine from inside her stomach.

In spite of this extremely shocking material, the film never plays out like a "gore flick", nor does it ever really come across as mysogynistic (which must be a fairly tough statement to believe based on what you've just read, but bear with me). This is not a film about hatred, but about a man's journey into obsession and detachment from reality - either from the reality of his victim's suffering, or the reality of his actions as a whole - and the self-destruction to which any such journey will ultimately lead.

Schiff really seems to have progressed over the course of the four films into a genuinely competent director and cinematographer, and yet he manages to retain that incomparable, noncomformist style. In the likes of Weasels and Long Island Cannibal Massacre, this "uniqueness" looked to be an accidental result of nothing more than his lack of formal training and technical knowledge, but here it seems to have condensed into a consistent, distinct and deliberate filmmaking style that is all his own. Vermillion Eyes is a difficult film to compare with others, as nothing I've seen comes close enough to allow me to do so without being misleading, but the dreamlike visuals and twisted atmosphere are more in the ballpark of David Lynch than H. G. Lewis.

The film is not a perfect nor a very slick one. The general performances, with the exception of Smihula's smoulderingly intense turn, are execrably wooden, and the editing and sound production are often jarring and disorientating. Schiff's greatest trick, however, was to recognise these technical limitations and turn them to his advantage - the stilted dialogue is presented in such a way that highlights The Man's emotional disconnection; the choppy editing and hissy soundtrack actually contribute to the overarching sense of a "bad trip".

You can see the cracks, and there's madness seeping out of them.

Nathan Schiff's career as a filmmaker failed to really go anywhere after this movie. The "Long Island Cronenberg" has not made another full-length feature film in almost twenty years and has directed only two short features in that time: The Last Heterosexual was a six-minute oddity of which I can find neither a copy nor anyone that has seen it; Abracadaver! was a 2008 British-produced camp horror short starring gay cult icon Peter De Rome as a mysterious magician that was decently received at several film festivals before disappearing off the radar completely.

It's a crying shame really, because I'm now dying to see more of his stuff.

Lost Movie Detective: Him (1974) UPDATED

Director:
Ed D. Louie (pseudonym)
Written by:
Unknown
Starring:
Unknown

IMDB page:
Click here


NOTE:  Although my review contains no "adult" content (i.e. pornography), some of the sources quoted in this article include strong language and sexual references. For the purposes of journalistic candour, all are reproduced here in their full, unexpurgated form. Reader discretion is advised.

Are you curious about HIS sexual life? If this ad is a little too coy about giving away exactly whose sexual life it is referring to, let me spell it out for you: J-E-S-U-S - H - C-H-R-I-S-T.

But this isn't just any old scandal-baiting religious art-flick, no siree. Look a little closer, at the strapline under the title: "X-Rated... All Male Cast".

That's right boys and ghouls, Him was a hardcore gay porno... about Jesus.

Oddly enough, despite the explosively controversial potential of the subject matter, surprisingly little is known about the film. It seems to be an example of a truly "lost" movie; to all appearances, it has fallen off the face of the Earth, with nary a dusty bootleg videotape or a scratched-up old film print having shown up to prove it ever existed. Indeed, there are some who maintain it never did, but, by piecing together all known information on the film, as well as dabbling in a little original research of my own, I reckon I've proven the naysayers wrong. Him did exist, and it may still be out there... somewhere.

The film's first, and to date only, mainstream media exposure didn't come until 1980, in Michael and Harry Medved's book The Golden Turkey Awards. In this book and its sequels, the Medveds would hand out "Golden Turkeys" to films, in numerous categories, that they considered to be of particularly low quality. In the first book of the series, Him appears as the winning nominee in the "Most Un-Erotic Concept in Pornography" category and is described as follows:

This innovative film, designed exclusively for gay audiences, goes into excruciating detail concerning the erotic career of Jesus Christ. The ads for the film show the face of The Savior (with a cross glistening in one eye) while the headline inquires "Are You Curious About HIS Sexual Life?" Filmmaker Ed D. Louie satisfies that curiosity by showing us that the Son of Man was a voracious homosexual. (After all, why did he spend all that time hanging around with the Apostles?) The central character of the film is actually a young gay male in contemporary America whose sexual obsession with Jesus helps him to understand the "hidden meaning" of the Gospels.
[...]
For sheer tastelessness, this film has no equals. In one scene, our homosexual hero goes to his local priest to confess his erotic fixation on Jesus Christ. The priest sits in the confessional, listening to the young man breathlessly elaborating his perverted fantasies, while taking advantage of the situation to reach under his cassock and masturbate grotesquely on camera. This charming episode surely marks one of the absolute low points in the history of American cinema. Those pathetic few who might want to see Him ought to come to the theater dressed in plain, brown paper wrappers, that hopefully cover their eyes along with the rest of their faces.

However, on the very first page of the book, the Medveds proclaim: "Over 425 actual films are described in this book, but one is a complete hoax. Can you find it?"

This statement has prompted many to believe that Him was the fake film in question, to assume that it never actually existed outside the pages of the book. Likely, given the uniquely obscure and outlandish nature of the alleged picture (in comparison to other films featured in the book), any Golden Turkey readers whose interest might otherwise have been piqued into researching further would have come up against this mention of a hoax, put two and two together, and declared that the end of the issue. Possibly, this goes some way towards explaining why such little interest and controversy surrounds the matter today.

The big spanner in this theory, however is Dog of Norway; a supposed boy-and-his-dog film nominated in a different category, illustrated with a "screenshot" that is, in actuality, a photograph of the Medveds' pet pooch who also appears with them on the "meet the authors" page. Dog of Norway is the true fake. This is quickly backed-up by a simple Google search which turns up no relevant results, except those that specifically connect the title with the Medveds' hoax.

Nevertheless, there has been grumbling from some of the more conspiratorially-minded denizens of the interwebs about the motives the Brothers Medved might have had in including (and, according to some, fabricating) Him in The Golden Turkey Awards. Not as part of a jovial game, in this case, but in furthering an ulterior agenda. Dog or no dog...

These days, Michael Medved is better known for being a cultural firebrand and religiously-motivated right-wing political crusader than he is for reviewing films. Of course, there is nothing a conservative media commentator loves more than a good, old-fashioned furore to help whip up support for their personal brand of "family values", and on the surface Him - with its magic trinity of sacrilege, homosexuality and pornography - reads almost like a pre-packaged moral panic in a (conspicuously absent) film can. All in all, a little too perfect, according to some suspicious souls. Could it really be that Medved invented the movie, gruesome details and all, to help surreptitiously plant the seeds of righteous protest against the "liberal" media of his day? There have been other, more recent, hoaxes about gay Jesus films. Most of these appear to have gestated in America's bible-belt, and have been propagated across the face of the earth via waves of angry chain emails (Snopes has an excellent article on these, although their reference to Him could do with updating, as we shall soon see). Whether we look upon these panics as the fruition of Medved's "secret scheme" or more simply as evidence of the politically emotive power of such claims, they do seem to help the conspiracy theorists' case. But, as with everything surrounding this movie, look a little closer and another layer of the onion peels away:

The first problem with the "conspiracy theory" is timing. The book was first published in 1980 and, although Medved began to voice his political support for the Republican party in this year, he did not become a true fire-breathing political commentator until much later. Secondly, Medved is devoutly Jewish, so his alleged motives for trying to rile specifically the Christian Right into a religious frenzy just don't seem as clear and characteristic as they might at first glance. Moreover, if the description of the film was intended to be inflammatory, it was planted in the wrong place; latterly, Medved has proven himself to be an expert at targeting his intended audience (his talk show on the Salem Radio Network has been ranked as the eighth-most listened-to in the USA), and even in the 1970s Medved was already a seasoned author and journalist who would have had no problem with getting his message out via a more suitably conservative channel than a humour book aimed at transgressive movie buffs.

Of course, not one of these points actually disproves the "Medved Conspiracy" and, in the absence of any actual prints, images, footage, reviews, or (apparently) anyone who had actually seen the damn movie, for the longest time the only things inquisitive folks had to go on were the unsupported claims of the Medveds and pure speculation. It wasn't until the mid-2000s that new information would start to bubble up from the depths of the internet.

In 2003, the now-defunct Pimpadelic Wonderland, a site dedicated to 1970s psychotronica, included Him on a list of lost films, and featured what appeared to be an actual newspaper ad-slick for the film (the one reproduced at the top of this page). The text itself simply states: "Yes, this gay porn take on the life of Christ does (or at least did) actually exist!". Given the address of the cinema mentioned - the 55th Street Playhouse, a small arthouse theatre-cum-porno fleapit, now long defunct - it seemed likely that the ad originated in one of several mainstream newspapers in the New York City area that were regularly publishing advertisements for adult films at the time. Unfortunately, the image was presented out of context with no additional information on its source. Short of catching a plane to New York and trawling though newspapers on microfiche, there was no way of corroborating the ad's authenticity. (You can see an archive of Pimpadelic Wonderland's lost film list here).

Others since claimed to have seen similar ads for the film in own local papers, including The Ottawa Citizen. According to contributors to the 55th Street Playhouse page on Cinema Treasures, the film may have played there for as long as two months and was later shown at the South Station Cinema in Boston. One poster, "Samschad", even quotes a Variety review dated April 17, 1974:

Pic depicts graphic sex acts involving Jesus Christ and includes a scene in which a priest is seen masturbating while listening to a confession. The gay-oriented film is about a young man with a sexual obsession for Christ.

This would be a groundbreaking discovery if only the review was verifiably real. Unfortunately, no such write-up existed in Variety's extensive online archive. Had it been omitted or overlooked, or was Samschad lying? One step forward, one step back...

Then, out of the blue, in December 2005, "Billy A. Anderson", a contributor to the Mesmerize forums, uploaded a full, detailed review of Him by Al Goldstein, editor of Screw, from the April 29, 1974 edition of that magazine:

DIRTY DIVERSIONS
By Al Goldstein

Queen of the Jews

CHRIST'S SECOND COMING

A bizarrely engrossing new film called HIM, playing at the 55th St. Playhouse, between 6th and 7th Avenues, has more to recommend it than some of its mismatched shots, mishmash editing and cheap budget would have allowed. I sat in the theatre next to the delicious Marcia Bronstein, editor of BITCH, so much of my enthusiasm for this film may simply have been the proximity of my thighs to hers. Then again it may have been the vividly poetic photography that loudly proclaimed in favor of cocksucking, ass fucking and other lofty pursuits of this downtrodden group of perverts.

The plot of HIM theoretically is about a faggot who is preoccupied with Christ and constantly has sexual reveries about balling that great Son of God. The plot might have worked, had it been explained to the viewer, but the movie begins inexorably slowly and, for its first 40 minutes, it consists of some solid hard-core in the gay vein and the meaning of the title HIM eludes the spectator. Only deeply into the film does one get the necessary material to permit the audience to comprehend the meaning of the plot. By then it's too late and you really don't give a shit, which is a shame, since so much of this film transcends most of the porno pap that permeates our perimiters.

I thought I had seen everything, but this movie brings in a whole new battery of barnyard banterings, from the opening credits, which are played against a stiff cock being licked by a very pretty white pussycat, to a delicious decadent sequel where a guy fucks a vacuum cleaner with such love that I started to hum, "I want a vacuum cleaner just like the vacuum cleaner that married dear old dad." As they say on Fire Island, it was one of the more legendarily meaningful relationships of last summer, and a blowjob par excellence. Another torrid little scene had a priest jerking off in his confession box as he listened to the tawdry and tear-stained confession of the wandering faggot. The sex on the cross, in particular the graphic anal probings, which is not unlike a World War II boat launching depth charges, was exciting, and, of course, the hot searching lips of Marccia waxing poetic over my body kept me truly excited. At least I thought it was Marcia. Then when I looked down I saw it was the manager of the theatre.

HIM is a hymn to sodomy and the other brazen activities that mark the twilight world of perversity with so much pain and prurience, yet to those who are not so frightened by any blemish on their masculinity and can respond to the heated sensuality of another human being, it's a film that will be innervating and titillating.

Mr. Goldstein's "Peter Meter" Rating of the film, from 0-100 %

I PETER-METER HIM AS FOLLOWS:

INTEREST--POSSIBLE- 60%, ACTUAL-45%

SEXUALITY-
EROTIC POSSIBLE-20%, ACTUAL-20 %

SEXUALITY-
EXPLICIT POSSIBLE-10%, ACTUAL-10%

TECHNICAL-POSSIBLE-10 %, ACTUAL- 10 %

TOTAL-85 %

Until now, the Screw article has been the strongest piece of available evidence supporting the existence of the film. Granted, it was not an actual scan of the page, simply a typed-out re-quoting of the text, but where it differed from the Variety review was in the fact that it appeared on a message forum where its poster is a respected and long-standing contributor and who, it would seem, is unlikely to jeopardise his reputation by fraudulently referencing non-existent information from a checkable source. Furthermore, the discussion is linked to by both Him's Wikipedia and IMDB pages, receiving a relatively high volume of traffic from these sites, and the review has also been re-posted in various other message boards, so it seemed fair to assume that, in the five years since its re-appearance, someone with access to back issues of Screw would have come forward to debunk the Goldstein review, if it was a hoax. In any case, there was absolutely no reason to believe Billy A. Anderson was trying to scam us.

Which leaves Al Goldstein himself. A love-him or hate-him character, Goldstein is well known for being... well, a bit of a rogue. It doesn't stretch the bounds of credulity very far to picture him slipping fake reviews into his magazine for shits and giggles. I have attempted to contact Mr. Goldstein by email, regarding Him, but received no reply. Failing that, I tried my best to research Marcia Bronstein and Bitch magazine, in the hope that she may have followed up with a review in her publication. Sadly, Bitch went out of business soon after it launched, and precious little in the way of information on the magazine exists today.

So was the whole kitt'n cabootle Goldstein's invention, which subsequently escaped into the wild, and picked up by the Medveds? Unlikely perhaps, given the other information available, but not entirely outwith the realm of possibility. Until now.

The impasse may finally be at an end. New information has come to light, thanks to the wonders of Google News Archive, a recent spin-off of Google News and Google Books. The site allows searchable access to the digitized back issues of various newspapers which providers have chosen to make available.

Among them is The Village Voice, the famous arts oriented alternative weekly based out of the Greenwich Village district of New York. While preparing to write this article, and speculatively browsing through issues of The Village Voice from around the period of March-May 1974, I uncovered not only another review of the film, but a whole series of different large-format advertisements for Him, some including actual screenshots from the film!

From The Village Voice, March 28th 1974 (click):

From The Village Voice, April 11th 1974 (click):

From The Village Voice, April 25th 1974 (click):

From The Village Voice, May 16th 1974 (click):

This is The Village Voice review of Him from April 18 1974 (click for higher res):

So there we have it, it would seem that reasonable doubt has been quashed - the Medveds, Al Goldstein, Pimpadelic Wonderland, Billy Anderson and the guys on Cinema Treasures - they are all vindicated. Both the Variety and Screw reviews are quoted in the ads, and I was also able to track down the source of the Time quote, which is, to my knowledge, the first time that publication has been drawn into this search.

Whew! God knows, as a straight male, I never imagined I would ever spend so much time trying to prove the existence of some gay porn! Now only one question remains: where the hell is it now!?

More investigation is required, and perhaps you can help. Do you have any info on the subject that I haven't covered here? Maybe you saw Him on its release in New York, or elsewhere? Perhaps you saw a copy on video years ago (was this thing ever even released on video?) or hell, maybe you were involved in its production, or know someone who was (someone made this movie)? If you know anything, I'd love to hear from you so drop me a line via the comments box below.

The hunt goes on...



UPDATE 22/04/10:

Having read this article, "Billy A. Anderson", credited above as the "re-discoverer" of Al Goldstein's Him review, contacted me and very kindly supplied some photographs of the pages in question (available here and here). In the very same issue of Screw, he also uncovered some new information on the 55th Street Playhouse (pic available here), including, perhaps crucially, the fact that it seems to have shown films exclusively in 16mm format, which helps narrow down the search for any would-be film detectives out there...

UPDATE 14/07/10:

More info from Billy Anderson. By perusing the pages of The Village Voice and The New York Times for ads, he has definitively pinpointed the exact start and end dates of Him's theatrical run at the 55th Street Playhouse. It played from 27th March to 23rd May 1974, a total run of over eight weeks! Here is an ad for the same theatre, from the preceding day, advertising a "Jaguar film festival", and here is a familiar ad from the 27th, Him's opening day. Finally, here is an ad from the last day of Him's run (note the small print beneath the Cowboy and the Old Man ad: "Last times: Ed D. Louie's Him"). Kudos, once again, to Billy for his perseverance and inquisitiveness.

Video Review: Contamination (1980)

Director:
Luigi Cozzi
Written by:
Luigi Cozzi & Erich Tomek
Starring:
Ian McCulloch
Louise Marleau
Marino Masé
Siegfried Rauch

IMDB:
click here


For Obscurity and Beyond's first (pseudo) video review, I've picked probably the least obscure film I've looked at so far: Luigi Cozzi's 1980 science fiction gorefest Contamination. I have a real soft spot for this movie, but it gets a bad rap. The review is below, and the trailer is included at the end of the video:



I'll be back soon with more reviews and I'll be covering some really obscure movies again.

Movie Review: Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)

Director:
Massimo Pupillo
Written By:
Romano Migliorini & Roberto Natale
Starring:
Mickey Hargitay
Walter Brandi
Luisa Baratto
Rita Klein

IMDB:
click here

That must be the most archetypal exploitation film title of all time: it promises so much, and yet gives away almost nothing about the movie itself. And Bloody Pit of Horror is the archetypal psychotronic exploitation film - an old castle, torture chambers, a gaggle of partially-clad models, a bad guy complete with his own supervillain costume, whips, screaming women, lurid colours, homoeroticism, blood, bodybuilding, a basso-sleazy 60s soundtrack and a clean-cut, square-jawed hero - it's all here folks!

Bloody Pit of Horror starts out with a pre-credits sequence showing the buff and dreaded Crimson Executioner being led into a dungeon by a pair of medieval soldiers. A voice over - presumably, and ironically, that of a Spanish Inquisitor - condemns him to death for torturing and killing innocents in an obsessive quest to destroy moral and physical imperfections in others, and informs him that he is to be killed by one of his own instruments of torture. That's proper tabloid newspaper justice, right there. They were, however, kind enough to let him wear his favourite bright red costume and cape for the big day, and so he goes to his grave looking like a criminal mastermind from an old Batman and Robin TV episode. Which is what he'd have wanted, I'm sure. Anyhoo, he swears revenge, yadda-yadda-yadda, and Crimson Executioner is killed by iron maiden (the torture device, not a surprise cameo by Bruce Dickinson et al) and the castle is sealed up for centuries.

Jump forward to the swinging Sixties and a gang of photographers, models and a sleazy old man (who I guess is a publisher or some such thing) show up at the marvellously preserved castle and break in to shoot cover photos for some lurid pulp novels. They soon discover that the building is not abandoned as it first appeared, but home to a wealthy recluse, played by former Mr Universe Mickey Hargitay, and his camp male servants who wear stripey sailor suits (!). Initially reluctant, the owner eventually relents and allows them to carry out their photoshoot in the dungeon. Cue montage with funny music and footage of scantily-clad models cavorting around in front of the camera with suits of armour and torture devices, plenty of Carry On-style near-nudity and the immortal exchange:

Photographer: Now Nancy, honey, give me the feeling of a cat... you know what I mean? ROWR!
Model: *meow*
Photographer: NO, Nancy! That's too domesticated!!

Before long, one of the group is bumped off in an "accident", another pair are caught making out by the Crimson Executioner and are iron maidened to death. From here, the movie takes the viewer on non-stop tour of numerous execution and torture methods, ranging from the gruesome (a "drawing"wheel that stretches its victim to death) to the imaginative (a man is shot in the neck with an arrow while trying to escape in a car and the vehicle is left to drive in an endless circle) to the ludicrously convoluted (a mechanical "spider" device that poisons its victim unless the hero can navigate a treacherous web of cables that, if tripped, causes a hail of arrows to be unleashed!). If this all sounds very morbid and disturbing, rest assured the film is actually surprisingly low on gore and the torture scenes are served up with a massive side-order of high camp that renders them more comedic than sickening. While the format certainly pre-empts the modern wave of Hostel-esque torture-thrillers, the melodrama, formulaic plot, masked villain, and camp murder mystery elements mean the film has more in common, thematically, with Scooby Doo than it does with Saw.

It was hilarious to see the heroine take time out at the finale to explain in detail the madness and wicked machinations of the Executioner to both her companion and the viewing public. The characters are all cartoons, but for a crowd of bimbos and himbos they are not as irritating as you might expect, and their absurd dialogue and general naivete lends them a certain endearing quality. I won't go as far as to say I actually cared about any of them, but it's at least enough to make things vaguely interesting when their lives are in peril.

Solitary A-lister Mickey Hargitay (AKA. Mr Jayne Mansfield) enjoys himself far too much in the dual roles of Crimson Executioner and Travis Anderson, the castle's owner. He spends the majority of his screen time prancing around in a pair of red leggings and a mask, flexing his muscles for the camera, and going off on rants about physical perfection at every opportunity. He is a lot of fun to watch, and you really can't help but wonder about this misogynistic character who did a bunk on his attractive fiancé to live in an isolated castle filled with whips, chains and torture devices with only his his hunky sailor-suited servants to keep him company...

Production-wise, the film looks... decent. The copy I reviewed was, unfortunately, an old washed-out VHS cut, but there are some pretty shot compositions and a cheery day-glo production design that nicely offsets the horrors on display. It's no Suspiria though; sometimes things do look a little flat and stagey, but that's mostly down to the budget and, to be fair, it supplies a lot of the movie's charm.

There's not a lot more to talk about - it's just a fun, hokey old Euro-horror film that was neither original enough, nor bad enough, to generate a wide cult following. It's a little sad, because it is an amusing and entertaining camp exploitation film. It won't blow your socks off but it ticks all the boxes with panache, Bloody Pit of Horror is certainly worth a watch and would fit nicely into any camp horror marathon.


---


It now seems ludicrous that Bloody Pit of Horror was actually banned when it was first submitted to the BBFC for a cinema classification. Granted much of the film deals with torture and murder but, while mildly ghoulish, there is nothing distressing or disturbing about the way the violence is presented. This is all "James Bond having a laser aimed at his nads"-type stuff. Since then, to my knowledge, the movie has never been given a legitimate release in the United Kingdom.

In the US, Bloody Pit of Horror had a fairly successful run at the drive-ins and early grindhouse fleapits before itself falling into the Bloody Pit of Forgotten Eurotrash Exploitationers. In the 80s, the only version available was an awful VHS print by Vidimax (AKA. The Macabre Video Underground) a sleazy mail order outfit, specialising in fetish-oriented, zero-budget horror quickies, who operated out of ads in the back of horror magazines. Vidimax actually marketed this picture as one of its sleazy pseudo-pornographic titles despite the fact that it's really quite an innocent little exploitationer. Happily, the movie was rescued in the early-1990s by Something Weird Video, who came out with a video release and, subsequently, a nicely remastered DVD edition. Both are available from their website.

On the other hand, if you're feeling cheap, then you'll be happy to hear that Bloody Pit of Horror has, in the decades since it's release, fallen into the public domain. Therefore, I have uploaded the entire uncopyrighted version of the film onto YouTube for your viewing pleasure. Consider it a Halloween present:

Click here to fire up the playlist

Do note that this is not the pretty-looking Something Weird DVD version (that particular edition has been remastered and is now copyrighted by Something Weird), but seems to be an old VHS rip of the muddy Vidimax release. I've tried to fix the picture as much as possible, and it's perfectly watchable but the colours are a little faded a image is still a bit fuzzy in places - but it's free and legal, so don't moan. :P