Flicker (59 page)

In
The Littlest Rebel,
the buried dimension of the film was more skillfully handled and with a more jolting result. It yielded ghostly images of a black man and a little blond girl, he a leering savage, she an innocent cherub being aggressively fondled. Where had the orphan filmmaker found his performers for a sequence as patently criminal as this? Once again, the association of sexuality with perversity and violation left a nasty taste—though surprisingly less so than in Castle's films, because here the hidden material had so little connection with the surface story, often none at all. This was especially the case in the Ritz Brothers' movies, zany comedies that lacked the macabre texture of Castle's thrillers. Even when the trick was expertly executed—as in
One in a Million
where Sonja Henie spins madly on glittering ice to create the secret sexual vortex—the effect is diminished. She is too bright and bouncy to match Castle's somberly seductive vampires. And the low-comic shtick that follows immediately shatters the mood.

So there was something to be said after all for Saint-Cyr's ideas about “layering.” In Castle's movies, tales of terror, suffering, despair
worked in tandem with the morbid imagery that moved beneath them. That was the advantage Castle enjoyed as a director over his fellow orphans, who had to connive their way into any cutting room that might be open to them. The whole work, cheap and cheesy as it usually was, was his to fashion. Yet, while the orphan filmmakers might not always equal Castle's power, there was no question but that their vision was every bit as bleak as his. Disowned or not, he was a loyal son of his strange, dour church.

Having begged so many favors from Sharkey, I finally gave in and agreed to visit the Catacombs toward the end of the next Simon Dunkle program to sample the kid's work.

The fact was, something more than gratitude drew me. Twice or three times within the past few months, students had lingered after the lecture in my Contemporary American Film course to ask what I thought of “this Dunkle guy.” Who? At first I didn't connect with the name. Then they mentioned the Catacombs and I did. All I could do was apologize, saying I hadn't gotten around to seeing his stuff yet, but I was meaning to. Oh, I should, they told me, I
really
should. Because, oh wow, he was
really
far out. That did it. As a matter of professional pride, I made a point of never letting my students get too far ahead of me.

On the appointed evening, I spent the early hours upstairs at the Ritz suffering through an Andy Warhol double bill: his camped-up versions of
Dracula
and
Frankenstein.
I'd seen the first, not the second, which came in 3-D. I hated 3-D. I hated wearing the little cardboard-and-plastic goggles that never fit the bridge of my nose. The audience, however, was eating it up, yipping and squealing as it cringed back from the splatter and impaling effects. When we reached the scene in which the mad doctor disembowels his female monster, then uses the surgical orifice to have sex (explaining for the benefit of the philosophically minded that “You cannot understand death until you have fucked life in the gall bladder”), I slipped away, goggles and all. It was just past midnight.

I could hear the beat and amplified twanging of rock music from the Catacombs before I opened the fire door that connected it with the Ritz. I could also hear belly laughs and cheering. It sounded like a good-sized crowd. The hastily hand-lettered poster in the lobby gave a full rundown of “The Films of Simon Dunkle” that were being exhibited that evening, some half-dozen items, all of them, I supposed, single-reel eight-millimeter jobs. I ran through the titles, feeling
relieved that I'd spared myself most of what I found listed by coming late.
Attack of the Skullsuckers, Insect Anxiety, Kinderghoulies …
Sharkey, apparently on the lookout for me, came bustling over. “Glad to see you, Jonny. You're just in time for the piece of resistance. World premiere of Dunky's first sixteen-millimeter production.”

He pointed to the last title on the program.
Big Stuffer.
“A whole new genre,” Sharkey announced portentously. “Barf
noir.
It's a classic.”

The
premiere
of a
classic.
Only Sharkey's mind worked like that.

Sharkey gestured me toward the good old projection booth; we slipped in to watch the film from there. Not the most comfortable way to view a movie, but better than crowding into the theater below, which appeared to be packed to the walls. Kids everywhere, including what I took to be some horizontal pairs gyrating in the aisles.

I gave a nod to Gabe, the Catacombs' dirt-cheap projectionist. Gabe, a burned-out Vietnam vet who was a stiff-faced Buster Keaton lookalike, had become one of the resident attractions for the younger film crowd. Sharkey let him live in at the theater where, after the last show, he would drop some acid and spend most of the night running the same movie over and over: the psychedelic fourth section of
2001.
Gabe claimed it was the best turn-on movie ever made—next to
The Sound of Music.
He'd picked up a small following among the kids, several of whom would stay on after hours to offer him their stoned companionship. Not that anybody had to wait that long to get high at the Catacombs. Even here in the booth, the air was bracingly toasted with the aroma of pot. Gabe took the free smoke as a perk.

I'd come in on the middle of a gritty little film which, if I remembered the listing in the lobby, bore the uninviting title
American Fast Food Massacre.
Glancing at the washed-out, jiggling square of light on the screen, I saw at once that it was the usual amateur effort, the product of a single unsteady camera and lousy lighting. But I also noticed that there were cuts; the film had been edited. That was encouraging. So too the fact that there was camera work: close-ups, pans, a change of setups, all quite primitive yet planned. I could see, too, that the movement that filled the meager little patch of light, while wildly frenzied, was rehearsed and organized. In short, there was evidence of direction, a quality one didn't expect to find in the underground, where witless impulse ruled the scene. Turn the camera on and get your friends to horse around in front of it until the
film runs out. A bit of slapstick or grab-ass, most of it sliding off camera or going out of focus, anything that avoided the appearance of the dreaded Hollywood decoupage. Unfortunately, the little film before me sported sound: the blasting rock music I'd heard through all intervening doors and walls, and now loud enough to stun the ears. It was low-grade stuff, poorly performed and miserably recorded—but that seemed to be the going standard of the style. Whether the music had anything to do with the film was impossible to tell; the lyrics were an indecipherable avalanche of animal babbling.

What was I watching? And why was the audience so riotously amused? The scene was a fast-food restaurant, the typical McDonald's. All that seemed to be happening is what usually happens in such places. People ordering, eating. Smiling kids on duty behind the counter serving it up. The close-ups, which came cruelly, distortingly close, producing huge noses and bulging cheeks, featured a run of zany adolescent faces clearly selected as a cast of moronic uglies. Pimply skin, crooked teeth in torturous braces, cockeyes behind heavy lenses. All of them were wearing absurdly big, stiff smiles. Then I saw: their mouths had been Scotch-taped into shape.

The customers were just as grotesque, especially the main group, a family—father, mother, four or five kids—all of whom were wearing pig-snout noses and packing the food away in porcine proportions. The action of the movie was made up rhythmically of fast-motion and normal sequences; the music speeded up to a runaway high pitch, then slowed to keep up with the visuals. I quickly got the joke of the piece; it was hardly subtle. As customers left through the exit still chewing on their last mouthful, they were waylaid by a couple of monstrous brutes in leather aprons and boots. They wore masks—the familiar smiley face—and “Have a Nice Day” buttons. The customers were poleaxed, dragged off, and tossed on tables in the kitchen where, now in fast motion, they—or the too-obvious dummies that had taken their place—were chopped, dissected, ground, and cooked. There was plenty of very real-looking gore spread around the kitchen, leavings that I assumed (or hoped) had been purchased from the butcher. Finally, the remnants were served up at the counter to new customers coming in the door who ordered from an overhead menu on which a kid precariously perched on a ladder was chalking the items shouted out to him from the kitchen. It was the sort of turngreen list that a high school imagination might invent. Handburgers. French-fried fingers. Brainballs.

The kids in the pig-family group kept demanding more and chasing back to the counter, where they jumped up and down until they got what they wanted. Sure enough, they returned with hands on a bun, fingers in a paper boat, other such ghoulish treats. In its up-close details, the film was a stomach-turner, no question. But it moved briskly and with great precision, so that, in spite of myself, I was beginning to find it satirically effective. A great American cannibal feast as Mack Sennett might have handled it if he lacked all inhibition. Nobody in the restaurant cared what they were being served, but wolfed down the recognizably human pieces and parts, eating and running, and getting chopped at the door. Meanwhile, at the cash register, the manager, played by a two-ton teenager wearing a Groucho nose and mustache, occupied himself counting scads of money. There was an accelerating slapstick choreography to the little film that made the blood-and-guts elements seem surrealistic, though still sardonically charged.

The ending was predictable enough and rather limp. The pig-family kids, who are insatiable, finally order a couple of handburgers too many. The kitchen has run short. The obnoxious little punks make a scene, throwing fits and rolling on the floor; the parents come running over to join in. The manager intervenes. He checks with the kids and, on their approval, calls in the two bloody brutes who proceed to chop the pig father and mother. The voracious kids cheer. In a jiffy, they are served a platterful of what goes on the menu as two new items: the Daddy-Mac and the Mommy-Mac. Kids rush in from all sides tugging their parents by the hand, demanding the goodies. The pig kids eat hearty, pat their bellies, grin with satisfaction. The brutes begin rounding up parents and leading them to the slaughter. Amidst mayhem in the kitchen, the film vanishes into an old-fashioned iris-out.

By the end of the movie I'd finally succeeded in deciphering some of the lyrics on the sound track. They were barked out in an aggressive growl by abrasively nasal voices.

Fast food, yeh, yeh, yeh
Fast food, yeh, yeh, yeh
Meat, meat, generic meat
Meat, meat, sail that I eat
Don't care what kind, whatever I find
Just gimme generic meat

Fast food, yeh, yeh, yeh
Fast food, yeh, yeh, yeh
Can't lose my job, same as the mob
No time to chew, I'm tellin' you
Gotta shit on the run, ain't no fun
Ten-hour day, fuckin' bad pay
So what if I‘m eatin' you
Fast food, yeh, yeh, yeh …

The little movie exhibited all sorts of cheap and amateurish flaws that would have made easy targets for criticism. For one thing, all the so-called actors playing adults were far too young for their roles, a cast of gawky, giggly teenagers. Also the camera work, though ambitious, was strictly substandard. Still, when the picture was over, I had to admit to Sharkey that it showed all the signs of talent working against the limits of a tight budget. My studies of Castle had taught me to be charitable about that, without necessarily conceding that more money meant better movies.

I could feel Sharkey waiting beside me for a comment. “Well, it's pretty gross,” I said finally. “But the satire saves it, not that it isn't pretty heavy-handed.”

“Satire?” Sharkey answered.

“Satire. It was meant to be a satire. The American family … McDonald's … have a nice day. What do you suppose everyone was laughing at?”

“Oh yeah, I see what you mean. It's got satire too. That's a groove. But the effects, what d'you think of the effects?”

“You mean the gore, the mayhem?”

“Yeah, that.”

“I don't need it, Sharkey.”

“But you see why he's catching on. The kid's really into it. And the music. Hey, what about that? Dunky gets all the primo groups. Crib Death, Virginkillers.”

“Mostly I couldn't hear a word.”

“No, no, it gets in through the pores. Those were the Stinks. Dunky got them together for his flicks.”

“Am I supposed to know who the Stinks are?”

“The Extinction Now Boys Choir. They're hot, really hot. Strictly a class act.”

Clearly, Sharkey and I hadn't been watching quite the same film. “This is one of his latest things?” I asked.

“This? No. He made this three, four years ago. When he was about thirteen.”

“Well, for thirteen, what can I say? Shows promise. The Mack Sennett touches are clever. Does he always work for humor like this?”

“Mostly he does. But his best stuff is pure visual poetry. You gotta see
Insect Anxiety.
Oh, man. Just nothing but this kid pulling apart a cockroach. No, listen, I know how it sounds, but believe me, the way he handles it, it's a thing of beauty.”

A couple of apprentice projectionists who looked none too bright had shambled in to help Gabe set up the next movie. On his own, Gabe was far from speedy; with two klutzy trainees assisting him, things slowed to a near stop. It took close to half an hour to get the film on the screen. Meanwhile, down below, the theater was rapidly becoming another Black Hole of Calcutta as more and more latecomers crushed in. The delay raised no complaint from this audience, which seemed to have settled into Sharkey's basement like its natural vermin, ready to spend the night cutting up. They were punky kids mainly, garbed in what passed that year for shattering bad taste. Fringed leather and clanging metal, burlap, shaggy furs, fluorescent hair, Day-Glo makeup. They looked like no human population. Yapping and whooping below me in the pit-dismal wattage of the Catacombs' one bare bulb of an intermission light, they might have been a scene out of Dante's
Inferno.
I was surveying the gathering hoping to spot our guest of honor. But how could I expect a mere albino to stand out in a crowd like this?