Extreme European Horror: A Serbian Film and Martyrs

Censorship is a funny thing, recently I've looked at material that was banned somewhere, and I find myself stunned that anyone would bother banning it. A Serbian Film was released back in 2010 and has become illegal in a number of countries, with one person being imprisoned in Spain for showing it at a film festival. Just as Human Centipede 2 is merely a well-done horror film involving an odd scatological pre-occupation, just as Michael Savage is actually just a conservative talk show host who brings up some very legitimate points, A Serbian Film is more-or-less just a horror film/thriller in which the villains are extreme sexual perverts. That's all a Serbian Film is. It's not child pornography or a snuff film. It is a fictional horror film in which child pornography and snuff cinema exist as plot elements. I'd have to take a long cold look at the censors on this one, because if you take this film deeply seriously for a second you've probably taken it deeply seriously for too long. Granted, this movie is not recommended for mixed company, polite conversation, children, or the easily offended. The villain, who is an unforgettable and a very convincing one, is a sexual pervert of the most intense kind. Vukmir is an educated man who speaks of art, a trained child psychologist. He is a man who defiles for the sake of defilement. He loves rape, incest, torture, and- a term that would appear to make it's first appearance in this film- "newborn porn". It is stated that he is working with the Serbian government, so the element of fascism comes in as well. The protagonist Milos is a retired porn actor in Serbia who lives with a wife and very young son. His brother is a crocked cop which becomes important at the end, there is an early scene with the brother receiving oral sex while watching a video of the young son's birthday party. This is not a subtle film there is a lot of very heavy-handed foreshadowing. I could see exactly more or less where it was going fairly early on. A former porn star contacts him about a potential job that will pay for his family for life and he meets this director Vukmer. Very quickly it becomes clear that this is no ordinary porn, when he is told to beta a woman and masturbate on her face with an underage girlfriend. It goes from there: Milos goes in to quite, Vukmer shows him a cute little porn genre called "newborn porn", Milos is drugged with animal aphrodisiacs and forced to perform one heinous and unnatural sex act after another- raping a woman- decapitating the woman- raping her corps while blood spurts out. Of course it ends with the Greek tragedy and there's the forced rape with the family members I knew it would go there from scene one. Vukmer is killed at the end, no tears there, and Milos commits shoots himself and his family, and in the last scene, Vukmer's cohorts are there with a camera ready to use the families bodies for more super sick porno. Meaning, these villains will defile for the sake of defilement from the moment of birth until even after the victim is dead. Vukmer is a very convincing and very troubling character. Should it be illegal? That's insanity. In fact, I even found the descriptions of how disturbing this film supposedly is on-line fairly ridiculous. These European extreme horror films though, they're really scaring the hell out of someone in charge though, so they must really be hitting on very sensitive issues for governments to come in and suppress this material. Of course, if you rally enough for a return to Judeo-Christian ethical tradition as the fundamental guiding principle of the state, governments may come after you for that, just ask Michael Savage. The French film Martyrs from 2008 didn't get banned or create legal problems, but is considered to come out of the same wave of extreme European horror that produced the Human Centipede films and A Serbian Film. It exhibits a very similar fixation with torture, but it is taken in a different direction which has far less to do with sexuality. The films starts with a girl in underwear running down the street away from something. There is a film shown of the girl's being taken in by doctors to an orphanage that reveals that while tortured and abused this little girl, Lucie, was not raped at all. Spoiler alert! In religious art, there are those images of the saints who are being burned alive or are set on fire and have the look of some sort of transcendence. The torturers in Martyrs are religious fanatics that are trying to recapture. the phenomena of the martyring, of a kind of metaphysical transcendence through extreme pain. In rough plot summary, because the film is long, Lucie and her friend Anna from the orphanage as adults go to exact revenge on Lucie's torturers. Lucie comes into a family home and executes the family with a shotgun, and then Anna shows up. There's an odd bit about Lucie hallucinating that a dead girl is attacking her. Lucie kills herself. Anna finds a woman in the basement whose been gained up much the way Lucie was. Then a bunch of black clad figures with guns shot the girl that was chained up in the basement, this female cult leader type explains the concept of martyring to Anna and then they chain Anna up and of course torture her in hopes of creating a martyr. There's a certain logic to it. At the end Anna, skinned alive, becomes a martyr. I am far and away more impressed by Martyrs then by A Serbian Film, although a Serbian Film has the distinction of being disturbing enough to be made illegal and a really chilling and very believable villain in Vukmer. A Serbian Film really has the stink of sexual sleaze to it, which Martyrs does not. What they both share is that they partake in the process of upping the ante of depictions of torture on camera, and cinematically they've gotten quite good at it. A Serbian Film is what it is, but I feel Martyrs is really clever, I highly recommend it. Less extreme but another good horror film to come out of Europe in recent years is the Norwegian film Dead Snow. I'll probably get around to reviewing Dead Snow on here at some point. There's a British film that showed at festivals called Inbred that looks very good.

Film Review: The Antichrist (2009)

A Serbian Film is in the mail, so I'll do this one first, as it just screened at The Sci-Fi Center in Las Vegas. This one didn't get quite the kind of controversy that Human Centipede 2 did as it was not made illegal for months in England before 32 cuts were made, but is another example of extreme horror cinema coming out of Europe in the last few years. I also don't really like it as much as Human Centipede 2, but that's just me. I'll tell you what though, one person you don't want to be is the shrink in these films. There's a great bit in the beginning of Human Centipede 2 where the psychiatrist overseeing Martin the retarded security guard throws out a Freudian bit of psycho-analysis and notes that Martin's obsession with creating a human centipede is "probably just a passing phase." Of course, the shrink is wrong- Martin is deranged beyond psychoanalysis. Later, Martin shoots the shrink in the groin, a relatively painless death compared to what he has in store for some of his other victims. The failed psychotherapy in The Antichrist goes on for almost a 100 minutes and ends with partially similar results for the attempted therapist… The film starts out with a full graphic sex scene with William DeFoe and Charlotte Gainsborgh, in which the couple's small child in the other room steps out the window. William DeFoe's character is a psychotherapist of some kind and he starts doing something a therapist is not supposed to do- he begins trying to treat his wife. Well, he takes his wife to a cabin they have in the woods where the wife had been working on a thesis (turns out to be about witchcraft and witch hunts in European history) and his wife begins to become much unhinged. He really does not know what he's screwing around with. There is quite a humorous bit when a fox pops out of a foxhole and pronounces that "chaos reigns!". Similar magical goings on involving animals take place in the film. DeFoe's attempts to decode and treat her obsessions with nature and witch burnings only seem to make matters worse. Spoiler alert! The female lead maims William DeFoe's character in a couple of different ways, one of which involves his genitalia. She also mutilates her own genitalia. There's a whole lot of odd activity involving animals such as the talking fox that seems to be based in European pagan tradition. Nature is a whore witch, and as it ends, well, what happens with witches? These European directors are getting fairly good at producing graphic images of torture, I'll give them that much. I was biased against this film because the director, Von Trier, worked on set for a different film with Bjork and committed a great travesty against art- he was close enough to Bjork to slash her voice box out but did not do so. In all seriousness, the fact that Von Trier worked with Bjork is something I really had to look past, because her music is excremental and irritating. The Antichrist is good enough that I will forgive him. I have read him quoted as saying that he is the greatest director in the world. I don't know about all that. I like Tom Six more. I don't see why this film would deserve controversy. There's a few parts where I winced imagining the physical pain involved. I like the "therapy fails" angle. I kind of want the talking fox for a pet.

Rick Moody and "Democratic Need"…

You know, it's funny. in 1994 a studied with the the author Rick Moody at Bennington College in Vermont, Two years after that I ran across a compilation from the goth label Projekt records that featured Patrick Ogle under the name Thanatos. Years later I became friends with Patrick Ogle. They have mysteriously become the same bad, bad writer. If you go back into Patrick Ogle's work he reviews some horribly bad bands. I used to say that I stopped being friends with Patrick Ogle because he interviewed Silverchair. That was actually the end of a long line of excremental bands. If memory serves Patrick Ogle interviewed Interpol's drummer at one point. Rick has pulled some similar crap moves in recent years. He interviewed Moby not long ago. Patrick has worked more on film in recent years, but it is not film that I care about particularly. Actually, my Dad contacted me specifically to tell me that I should add the Tree of Life to my worst films ever made list. I haven't done it because I'm sure that it is, and I don't want ton watch it. Patrick Ogle liked it. It makes very little sense to me. I've discussed the censorship issues surrounding Human Centipede 2 on here, A Serbian Film has been banned in a number of countries. If you go into the whole MIAC documents controversy and related issues you'll find a similar state suppression of right wing ideas. The Sex Pistols at the height of punk weren't banned anywhere. I think Moody and Ogle there have picked some serious non-issues to write on. I'm not sure what exactly happened to those guys. It would seem to me that Moody and Ogle were somewhat edgy or relevant in the 90's. Not anymore. Moody is re-playing his fixation with the 80's college radio band the Feelies for no good reason. Whatever was interesting about what he was is no longer there. Maybe it was never really there. Surely, there is more to existence, even if it is to stand against the emptiness of existence with a loaded firearm. It is, granted, difficult to write reviews. I don't see why a double review of Inseminoid or Humanoids for the Deep or a review of "Satanic Royalty" by Midnight would attract the most attention. Those are mediocre films and a mediocre bands, I had to be quite careful to be quite critical of them. Inseminoid is a film I laugh at. I was amazed to see how many people found that review looking for pornographic images of rape. I wondered if the same would be true of snuff films, so when I reviewed Snuff: A Documentary about Killing on Camera, I gave the review a title that I suggested that I had my hands on real snuff films. I was right. I have in this way submitted to what Rick calls "democratic need"-I suspect this was a dimension of democratic need he had not envisioned...

Promo for a Local Vegas Horror Event With My Music In It...

PollyGrind Friday the 13th Rewind Weekend Series (2012 promo) from Chad Clinton Freeman on Vimeo.

Ah, life's ironies. A track I wrote on GarageBand software in late 2005/early 2006 sometime while I was still involved in the art scene in New York, at the same time I wrote Hollywood Wiretapping and released the first (and only still available) issue of an art book/publication AeonElectron. Where is it now? It's being used to promote local Vegas Neo-grindhouse/horror events. I would not have seen that one coming. With regards to the film footage, I am sad to say, that is me in the beginning. It is unused footage from the film Johnny Reaper by Michael Zayas. I'm not sure why that thing is not on-line yet. I apologize for my repulsiveness in this clip. 1. I am trying to loose weight 2. the camera ads weight. 3. I was told to play a crazy homeless person. 4. I still look better than Genesis P. Orridge.

Artwork by Voivod's Drummer Away

I've mentioned Voivod on numerous blog posts. I've also slapped paintings of Human Centipede 2 director Tom Six's paintings and Rozz Williams of Christian Death's film on Jerry Magoo. I also just posted video art by John Zewizz of Sleep Chamber. The next step of course, is to get some artwork by someone from Voivod, and it so happens of course that someone in Voivod was a visual artist. This was MICHEL "AWAY" LANGEVIN. I've been a longtime fan of his illustrations for the Voivod album covers. In the 80's Away really accomplished something as formidable in artwork as in music. To match Voivod' science fiction themes and obsession with post-nuclear mutant warriors and such, Away created a visual language of expression to go with it. Not surprisingly, it looks a lot like comic book art. He has had a real look to his art. I'm particularly a fan of his poster and t-shirt designs. I don't really have any ambition of becoming a rock star or anything anymore, but I'd like to play in band that covered Joy Division and Voivod, which would be called Joyvod, until we recorded an album worth of Oi covers, at which point we'd be called Oivod.

Sleep Chamber

John Zewizz is seriously underrated. It has become cliche to describe this and that as underrated, but John Zewizz, he is underrated in my eyes. He was the focal point figure in the Boston area goth band Sleep Chamber from the 80's and 90's, a band I remember well from high school and a band that probably doesn't get played or listened to nearly enough. They where in it from the beginning in the early 80's, but they've never been a band that people seem to bring up in conversation or know about much. That's kind of a shame. They got fairly into the longer soundscape side of things.He was in T.O.P.Y, (Temple ov Psychick Youth) which is that cult that Genesis P. Orridge had in the early 80's, but he apparently Zewizz broke away from it. Zewizz did, however, retain that odd spelling that Genesis P. Orridge uses. That's good that Zewizz broke away from that, because as I've written many times elsewhere I've grown sick of and disillusioned with Genesis P. Orridge, some of these other somewhat akin figures like Rozz Williams , Ian Curtis and John Zewizz still fascinate me. Zewizz is obscure and also prolific. You never hear him anywhere or about him anywhere, and there's hours and hours of great music by him floating around, some of which is a very clear goth rock kind of thing, but a lot of which is lengthy sonic exploration. I hate using the term "experimental" in this context because goth music itself is generally fairly marginal and he was involved in the genre at the very beginning, so saying that an early goth band was 'experimental' is redundant and vague. The other thing that strikes me about Sleep Chamber is how much they played top the connection that goth music had to the whole fetish S&M scene, which became really focal in Sleep Chamber. Since it was a male singer it was like a sexually aggressive male asserting himself on the world. Getting a bald spot and a pot belly did nothing to deter him either! Oh well, it wasn't as bad as Genesis P. Orridge and those stupid looking breast implants. That to me has always had a kind of campy or humorous value, intentional or not. Sleep Chamber is truly unique in that as campy as Sleep Chamber they were also a very innovative band- and the better bands around these days like Xeno & Oaklander or Children of Technology seem to agree. I find digging through weird old goth or metal bands far more rewarding then listening to current bands. One side of the coin is Venom, Voivod, Celtic Frost, and the beginnings of Norwegian black metal, the other side of the coin is Christian Death, Sleep Chamber,Joy Division,Bauhaus, Death in June, Executive Slacks or whoever else. Why am I so into these kinds of bands? Well, to be honest, it's because I can't stay in my house all day listening to Michael Savage on the radio and watching Human Centipede 2 over and over again. I'm getting close, but I'm not quite there yet. That's my heartfelt ambition, but I'm not there yet. I have to dig up some decrypt goth culture from my childhood or some black metal periodically. There is an odd and un-explained, in truth unexplainable, drive within my psyche, a compulsion, to be a fan and only to be a fan of certain goth bands and certain metal bands- and that drive his been encouraged by the success of blogs on that topic. If you want to really look at the provocative and central issues, take a long look at Michael Savage and Human Centipede 2, Savage is still not allowed to step foot in the U.K. and they only let Human Centipede 2 in after something like 32 cuts. That actually shows that there are filmmakers and authors that are still challenging the social order in substantial ways. The old goth and metal albums are not as explosive to examine as that, but there is still that curious compulsion. Also, I live in Las Vegas so I hear all the commercial pop music when I have to buy a nail clipper from the casino gift shop or whatever, I don't need to be bombarded with that in my own room. Then of course, there's his video art. Just like Orridge had a a bunch of strange video art and Rozz Williams made that bizarre film just before he died, Zewizz has plenty of incoherent video art to show the world, centering around occult and religious iconography, abstract forms, and seemingly hypnotic optical illusions. What is it and what does it mean? Zewizz would likely tell you that what he is doing is a form of ritualistic magic. I haven't done strong illegal psychedelics like LSD in many years and do not hear voices in my head, so I'm a little skeptical about that. However, if this kind of video art was driven by inner madness, then that makes it of course no less intriguing. There is something about to these old goth bands like Christian Death of Sleep Chamber, and I'm opened minded enough to include their video work in that sentiment. ` Zewizz disappeared completely for a while. My understanding of what happened was that Zewizz had a really bad heroin problem, and then to make matters worse, in the late 90's, there was an unsolved case where a Swedish nanny was found murdered on his block, and he was investigated as a suspect or person of interest by Boston police in the murder, because he was into black magic and it was right on his block. Apparently, this made his drug problems and mental health issues a lot worse, and he dropped out of sight for a while. It's a very unfortunate story. He's floating around on-line lately I've seen, he now spells Sleep Chamber "Sleepchamber". He's…he's weird. I never met him,I don't think the murder was him, but he's weird.

Babes (1991 TV Show)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ssgOyL0JLM (cut and paste link into browser) I would like to point to the aesthetics of the short-lived and now impossible to find television show Babes from the early 90's. It did not make it through more than a season. is largely forgotten, and for good reasons. Babes is about three overweight sisters who live together in the same apartment in a city somewhere. Babes is really the depths of bad television. It does not in a anyway deviate from the norms of the sitcom formula and revolves almost purely on fat jokes. There is a reoccurring- that's right- repeated- gag about the three sisters lying in the same bed and the bed collapsing. The joke- which of course is not that funny to begin with- was frequently repeated. as with other film and television that no longer has any financial value worth suing over, it has resurfaced in bits and pieces on youtube. So far as I could find, there wasn't even a full episode available on there. This is culture that has become very marginal not because of any deliberate transgression or because of a lack of advertising budget behind it at the time. This is culture that exists in an extreme margin because it was actually too stupid for the television consuming masses. It fascinates because it is completely repulsive and mongoloid. Babes is unbearable- an extreme flop in television history. It revolved around fat jokes that fell completely flat. Babes is the intellectual equivalent of announcing at an important business meeting that you've just defecated in your pants deliberately. The artist Mike Kelley made some similar observations about the Baby Huey cartoons. There are some fairly washed up people still flopping around the art world left over from the 80's and 90's. I worked for the art magazine TRANS>arts.cultures.media back in the 90's as an intern, I should know. One of the most tedious things I've ever done is trim down lengthy text from a recording of the artists Tony Ousler and Mike Kelley for an article for TRANS. It was like water-boarding. It was an internship too so I didn't get paid. Mike Kelley's name comes up in some context or other every so often. I'm not a huge fan. There's a video that was posted of him on the Jerry Magoo blog that I write for sometimes that sort of annoys me. There were a serious of YouTube videos that were done as adds for the music store Amoeba Records where various people show what they've purchased at the store. He goes through his CDs, he goes through Sun Ra, Joe Meek, etc. with the kind of pseudo-intellectualism that an employee at a store Other Music in New York has about obscure art rock bands. Here's the ad that was on Jerry Magoo once again. i find it more annoying than anything else. There is this one essay by Mike Kelley that does kind of work, where he writes about the old Baby Huey cartoons and how they succeed as art because if you watch them as an adult they will make you extremely uncomfortable. The essay is called Filmic Regressions: The Baby and Baby Huey. It deals with a film from the 70s that I haven't scene from the 70's called The By and with the old Baby Huey cartoons. It went into more specific detail then this, but the essay Kelley wrote about how very uncomfortable, how unbearable it is to watch the old Baby Huey cartoons as an adult, and that this very discomfort made Baby Huey cartoons successful as art. They're utterly infantile. It's children's entertainment with no real educational value. The infantilism of it will simply make your skin crawl. Of course, Mike Kelley's right- it is very difficult to sit down to watch a fat retarded duck as an adult. Observe: if you can sit through this crap for more then a minute to two, you've got me beat; in so far as that is true the psychology of it is sort of interesting. Right up there with Babes.