THE BUNNY GAME is no game at all...

THE BUNNY GAME (2012)

 D.Adam Rehmeier
Autonomy Pictures

HD

Some horror fans pride themselves in searching the outer reaches of the genre for those films that will psychologically scar them. Recent years have seen the genre move to those outer edges in a reaction to a not so subtle seismic shift in our culture after 9/11, ten years of a war in Iraq, and watching our economy plummet while people blame each other. The horror film has always been a mirror to the anxiety of the society of the time, and with the viciousness of our current times it is no surprise we have ended up with films like EDEN LAKE, MARTYRS, BROKEN and of course the very ugly and controversial A SERBIAN FILM. Now we have another very unsettling film to throw onto the short list of movies that will lay a long and nasty scar on your brain. Adam Rehmeier's and Rodleen Getsic's searing cinematic assault, THE BUNNY GAME. 

But this one is quite different than even the other (some quite excellent) films mentioned, as it is as much an art film as a horror film. Shot in harsh black and white, and edited with near brilliance at times, this is a movie that is very aware of the artifice being used to bring it to the audience. The film-making on display is never less than completely assured, coupling with a nerve wracking use of sound design and loud and abrasive music all collide to make THE BUNNY GAME an experience that only a brave few will make it out alive from.

The story is really very simple. A young woman played by co-scripter Rodleen Getsic, is BUNNY, a woman who has found herself a prostitute. Whoring her way on the streets to survive. These early scenes, which make up roughly the first quarter to a third of the film, are deeply unpleasant and the perfect flip side to a movie like PRETTY WOMAN which makes prostitution look easy, clean, and never really dangerous. BUNNY is shown plying her trade in hardcore close up, sucking cocks but never for a second enjoying it. Soullessly getting roughed up, but taking it because it means enough money to get through the day. We see her in the shower in tears as she adjusts to getting past her last encounter and on to the next nasty John. Much of this is scored with super loud and abrasive death metal music just to add to the even more aggressive feel.

Soon she is picked up be a seemingly benign old truck driver played by Jeff Renfro. After a brief discussion of exchanging money for sex, he offers her some drugs and next thing she knows she has been kidnapped and her life is about to become a living nightmare.

From here on out the film is an aggressive onslaught of humiliation and torture. The Trucker systematically sets out to break her, emotionally, spiritually and sexually. Holding her captive in the back of his tractor trailer, stripping her down, shaving her head and playing an extending, extremely brutal S+M based game of total dehumanization. Oddly enough he never actually sexually penetrates her, but the entire enterprise is basically one long extended emotional rape of her very being. During some moments she has a rather disturbing rubber Bunny mask on that further dehumanizes her. All the while the Trucker laughs maniacally becoming a very demonic presence, leading the charge in this nightmare.

THE BUNNY GAME could have been just another torture exhibit freakshow for gorenographers to jerk off to. But instead the film-making on display sets it apart from that. There is real force of nature at work here. Seriously unpleasant stuff, but not without merit. Even if I had not known the back story why this was made I would look at this film and see there was more to what was on screen than simply an exploitation of a woman’s suffering. 

One thing that indeed set's this apart from the horror film of it's peers is that NOTHING on screen is fake. That very fact risks making this a bit of a geek show, but it also lends the movie a visceral, raw authenticity that makes it impossible to escape from. So when we see BUNNY being bound, gagged and tormented it is for real. When her head is shaved and she is force fed a whole bottle of vodka, it is real. In the same scene there are cars in the far distance driving by that are clearly not part of the film-making crew. Just people tooling down the highway that adds a very disturbing edge in that we are watching this bound, naked woman being abused and people are just driving past. The sexual scenes early on are not fake, and there are several scenes of things like cutting and branding that are not fake either.

All of this is possible because Rodleen Getsic comes from a performance art background. Most of her former work dealt with feminist and political themes. She also was very involved with things like political activism and was well known for her charity and philanthropic work during the Katrina disaster. It is this background that allowed her to take the punishment netted out in the part. But more importantly is the WHY she conceived the the film and role. It is my understanding that some where in her past she was indeed abducted by a sexual sadist and suffered greatly while held hostage. To wipe the experience from herself she conceived this project as a way to exorcise the demons. Getsic fasted for forty days to get to a physical place to play the role and they shot the for film for 13 days during which she committed to taking all the abuse as close to reality as possible. Including the very real violence. Once the shoot was finished she went away to a retreat for a month to rid herself of the emotional experience of the shoot and the memories it was based on. 

Some films are not meant to be enjoyed, or even be entertaining. Some are meant to be endured as they very act of making them were acts of rebellion for the filmmakers. THE BUNNY GAME is one such film. It isn't for everyone, only a select few will be able to stomach the horrors on display. Approach it with extreme caution, and understanding that what you are seeing is an act of extreme catharsis. It could damage you if unprepared. 

Andrew Copp © Review

Humping trash could give you an infection...

Day twenty of the September Exploitation Challenge (yes I have fallen WAY behind) is when I took out the trash...

TRASH HUMPERS (2010)
D. Harmony Korine
Alcove Entertainment
Shot on VHS!!!

I will freely admit I went into this wanting to hate it. Figuring I would hate it. The trailer doesn’t try to sell it for anything it is not. The movie is basically just Harmony Korine and a couple of other people dressed in cheap joke store old people mask, running around acting stupid and literally humping trash cans. To make matters worse it is shot on old school sub-standard VHS equipment, edited between two VCR’s (the play, pause and rewind on screen displays have as much screen time as some of the characters) complete with tape drop out and fucked up color balance. The whole thing is designed to look cheap, immature, and like it was done by people with no skills or talent. I suppose the argument here is that the movie is designed to be “anti-art” or “anti-filmmaking” since Korine was part of Lars Von-Trier’s whole DOGMA 95 deal back in the day, and Korine’s best film came out of his time working within those constraints (I am immensely fond of JULIAN DONKEY BOY, but generally detest the dude’s other work).  So maybe that is his point. Or maybe he was just screwing around. Who knows. 

 "One critic called this JACKASS for the Psuedo-intellectual set. I can see that being accurate."

Which ever, he managed what would have been completely impossible had any other person made this exact same movie. He got it released, put into major festivals, it played art house theaters and now is seeing the light of day not only on DVD but in some rather cool special edition packaging.  Had any other underground filmmaker made this exact same movie they would have been laughed out of town, called an idiot, and had their equipment smashed. Their career would be effectively over. But oddly enough Korine has seen some of the better reviews he has gotten in a long time. Which I think goes to show that a cult of personality can certainly get you a long long way in ths business. 

 "Trash collection for the 21st century."

But what is most important is the actual work itself. Irregardless of my wanting to hate it because of everything I state above, I actually did not. TRASH HUMPERS is far from a good movie, hell you almost cannot even call it a movie, but there is a certain quality about it that becomes mesmerizing after a while. While most of it is inane, stupid, puerile and without a purpose, once in a while there are images that stumble across the screen to grab hold of the mind’s eye and stay there. Sometimes those will be humorous such as the little bespectacled kid in the three piece suite explaining the proper way to bash a baby doll's head in. Sometimes it is just a flash of beautiful scenery or landscape. By the half hour mark I found myself wondering if Korine knew, or even cared what he was putting on screen at all, or if this was just complete randomness. Then suddenly there is a jarring shot of a nude dead body, laying in a field, just like a piece of trash the movie has been obsessing over. This feels like the filmmakers just found this dead man and shot it for the movie (though clearly they did not). At this point I became aware that the cameraman is supposed to be a character in the movie too as he is singing a little nursery rhyme about “three little devils who jumped over a wall” as he surveys this corpse. The moment is supremely haunting. Maybe because so much of the half hour leading up was so deadening, I don’t know? But it got my attention. From this point on a tiniest thread of a plot had started to emerge in which the four characters we have been watching fuck around, break shit and hump trash are also traveling around killing people. There seems to be an obsession with baby dolls going on throughout the proceedings (one of the “characters” is female it is important to note) which eventually ties in to a haunting and surprisingly, in its own twisted way, tender finale. 

 "I think she was one of my high school teachers."

The movie is still more of an art piece/ endurance test than an actual film, but in the second half it at least starts to resemble a narrative. With more of the startling and haunting moments seeming to be on purpose as opposed to things that just happened to be in front of the camera at the right time.

TRASH HUMPERS might be best described as a movie to watch once. It might be fun to see in an art theater with a crowd though. To see who it pisses off and who over pontificates it to the point of great art. Because at the end of the day I still get the feeling Harmony Korine is having a laugh at the art scene that has embraced him as much as he was just tooling around fucking off while making the movie. But to my shock and surprise his end product has something there to offer when I seriously thought it would not at all. 

Review © Andy Copp

The NEA Under Fire, Now and Then...

DAMNED IN THE USA (1991)
D. Paul Yule
Made For British TV
Full Screen

Fascinating and well done documentary made at the height of the moral panic fueled by the American Family Association attacking the National Endowment For The Arts in late 1989 and 1990. The artists that got their ire up were primarily Andres Serrano, the late Robert Mapplethorpe, and oddly enough rap group 2 Live Crew who ended up getting the most mileage out of the whole situation. This documentary is broken up by the on-stage comedy of Jimmy Tingle, and at first it seems like a really bad idea to have a comedian break up the proceedings to at levity to the proceedings, but it actually works well because his comedy is very topical and fairly caustic in keeping with the material at hand. His stand-up is used more as a Greek chorus to the points being made than as a cool down place to laugh.

First off, we meet Donald Wildmon, the man who started the whole ball rolling with his American Family Association, a Christian watchdog group that spends millions of hours watching TV and movies and listening to music to catalog all the indecency and offense to Christians. The idea is to put pressure on the networks, studios and advertisers to get them to back off because Christians want cleaner entertainment. Wildmon, sometime circa 1989, gets wind of Andres Serrano's controversial photograph "Piss-Christ" and wages war. He gets even more pissed off when he discovers that Serrano and many of the galleries at which his work has been shown have received grants from the National Endowment For The Arts and alerts uptight Senator Jessie Helms. Soon all hell is breaking loose on the Senate Floor as Healms and fellow conservative prick Alfonse D'Amato attack Serrano, The NEA, and pretty much art in general in an attempt to get the NEA shut down, as well as much of the "offensive" art censored.

Some of the most frightening, yet unquestionably amusing, moments in the documentary are of Helms and D'Amato freaking out when faced with the work of Serrano and most importantly the gay photographs of Robert Maplethorpe. When D'Amato throws some of the photos to the ground in anger declaring the "absolute garbage!" you can't help but to laugh at his outburst. Helms is much more savvy as he takes the nastiest of the Maplethorpe pieces and takes much time explaining how explicit, agonizing, and degrading they are, then explains how he can only hold them up for a split second because the TV cameras "will catch this obscenity".

The other side, thankfully, get their say, too, starting with Serrano who just seems confused by all the fuss. He mentions that he was raised Catholic and that it is his own business to use the iconography of his own faith to explore in his artwork. The documentary shows some of his other work that actually would be more offensive had the people trying to be outraged taken the time to look at what it actually was. But they missed the photos of come shots flying across the room in the hurry to attack the statue of Jesus being defiled.

A huge portion of the documentary surrounds the incident in Cincinnati, Ohio when the Contemporary Arts Center was temporarily shut down and its director arrested for displaying the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. Seven of his photographs were seized as obscene, including pictures of Maplethorpe himself with a bullwhip up his ass, two men engaging in water-sports, and the most controversial of the photos, two involving children with nudity. Not explicit sexuality or activity, just nudity.

Lastly, we explore the case of rap group 2 Live Crew and their album "As Nasty As They Wanna Be," which was declared obscene in several parts of Florida in 1990, resulting in several record store owners jailed for selling it. Eventually the groups lead singer and business owner Luther Campbell was arrested for obscenity for performing the material and lewd conduct on stage. A national free speech firestorm brewed, with 2 Live Crew becoming synonymous with freedom of expression. The irony here being that their music was pretty bad. Had this whole incident not happened they would have been a novelty act that had a small fan base and would've never made it big in the rap world. Musically they are nothing special and their raps are incredibly weak, even for the lightweight late eighties. They didn't create a song worth listening to until their rebuttal to the system that crucified them with the tune "Banned in the USA," but even then they lifted almost the entire musical accompaniment from Bruce Springsteen.

As I write this, President Obama has earmarked fifty million dollars toward the National Endowment for the Arts as part of his stimulus plan for the country. A good portion of that is supposed to help art programs in schools, after-school art programs, neighborhood arts programs ect., but thanks to the likes of FOX NEWS, the media is being told the money is being used by the NEA for "smut projects" and filthy "pornographic art" of which they found a whooping TWO examples: A playhouse in San Francisco running an off-color sex parody play, and a 501 C-3 funded movie theater that has played, god forbid, the movie THUNDERCRACK as a midnight show! FOX NEWS even played clips of THUNDERCRACK while the bubble-headed bimbo, robotic newscaster cried out "THIS IS WHAT YOUR TAX DOLLARS ARE GOING TO!!!"

I fucking WISH my tax dollars were going to something like that. In fact, I wish specifically my tax dollars were going to a restoration of THUNDERCRACK so it can finally get a dvd release. I'd be thrilled about that and I know a LOT Of other people who would be too.



And interview with Robert Mapplethorpe (NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!)