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The
Hardcore Collection the Film of
Richard Kern (1986-1993)(2á¼è¹¨º)
(บรรยายäÁè¨Óà»ç¹) |
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Director:Richard
Kern Music by:Bewitched,
Black Snakes, Joe Budenholzer, Jim Coleman, Cop Shoot
Cop, Dream Syndicate, Lydia Lunch, Sonic Youth, SPK, The
Butthole Surfers, J.G. Thirwell (Foetus), Thurston
Moore, Wiseblood and others.
Country:USA Language:English
Genre:Experimental,
Art - House, Avangard, Underground, Erotic, Trash,
Horror Subtitle:translate
don''t needed (few english dialogs) Starring:
Lydia Lunch, Kimbra Pfahler, Henry Rollins |
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This exclusive video collection is jam-packed with the gritty best from noted
New York filmmaker Richard Kern. His sexually-charged work has been alternately
dismissed as “violent” and “offensive” by the mainstream press, but embraced by
the underground as the perverse standard.
Says Kern, “I''ve tried it all: crime thrills, drug thrills, sex thrills.
Nowadays, I get most of my thrills by offending people with my films. I don''t
even have to be there. I can sit far away and think, “Someone''s watching my
video right now and thinking, Yeeughh!”
Featuring punk rock diva Lydia Lunch; funnyman Henry Rollins; the exotic
genitalia of Kimbra Pfahler and the churning music of both Sonic Youth and
Foetus, this urban jungle excursion is guaranteed to satisfy your dark craving
for the unusual.
The Hardcore Collection has been totally remastered, and includes three movies
exclusive to this DVD release: Manhattan Love Suicides, Submit To Me, and The
Evil Cameraman
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Disc 1 Contents:
1. Death Valley ''69 (1986)
2. Right Side of My Brain (1984)
3. You Killed Me First (1985)
4. The Bitches (1992)
5. The Sewing Circle (1992)
6. X is Y (1990)
7. Fingered (1986) |
Disc 2 Contents:
1. Horoscope (1991)
2. Submit To Me Now (1987)
3. My Nightmare (1993)
4. Manhattan Love Suicides
5. Submit To Me (1985)
6. The Evil Cameraman (1986, 1990) |
On DVD 1 (Side A):
"Death Valley 69" (1986) 6 minutes (4/5*)
Directed by Richard Kern, Judith Barry, and Sonic Youth
This is a bizarre mix of images combined to make what amounts to a music video.
Faked crime scenes, cruise missiles, gun toting band members, a secreted
switchblade; it is all funky and the song isn''t half bad either. Some of the
footage is from the later "Submit to Me" films.
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"The Right Side of My Brain" (1985) 25 minutes (2/5*)
Directed by Richard Kern
Lydia Lunch comes along and puts the "hardcore" in "The Hardcore Collection,"
and promptly bores the audience to death. This surrealistic poetry reading makes
no sense and drags on for what seems like forever. Almost worth it just to see a
young Henry Rollins with shoulder length hair.
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"You Killed Me First" (1985) 11 minutes (2/5*)
Directed by Richard Kern
Teen angst is taken to a bloody finale in this badly written and directed short.
The actors struggle with ad-libbing, tripping over each other''s lines, and the
sloppy editing highlights this. A definite letdown, considering the strong
ending
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"The Bitches" (1992) 9 minutes (4/5*)
Directed by Richard Kern
Two competing women seduce a man, and the trio participates in a threesome that
ends up reversing gender identities. The black and white film is creepy, and not
that sexy, but still good.
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"The Sewing Circle" (1992) 7 minutes (2/5*)
Directed by Richard Kern
Two women sew another woman''s vagina shut in living color…I am realizing Kern''s
performers are as sick as he is…
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"X is Y" (1990) 3 minutes (2/5*)
Directed by Richard Kern
Despite some good sound mixing, this is a pointless exercise in images as
attractive women sport guns and rifles. Pointless.
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"The Evil Cameraman" (1990) 11 min. (4/5*)
Directed by Richard Kern
Kern is himself, putting female models through hell. Kern''s final film on the
DVD may be one of his best.
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Transgression seems more like concept than reality in these no-boundaries days,
but in the ‘80s and early ‘90s there was in fact a Cinema of Transgression, a
mini-movement devoted to the far fringes of sex and violence among alienated,
tribal urban youth. Based in New York City and closely allied with the music of
Sonic Youth, Jim Thirlwell (of Foetus fame), Dream Syndicate, et al., its
luminaries included Nick Zedd, Lydia Lunch, Beth B, Leg Lung, and most notably,
Richard Kern.
Kern, born in 1954, has had a dual career as photographer and filmmaker, but in
both realms he works the same themes and motifs: New York as Boschian hellhole,
pierced and pouting drug-swilling youth, Mansonesque tableaux of guts and gore
(rendered in cheesy special effects), big guns, big knives, and rough hardcore
sex. This DVD collects a hefty sampling of his filmography (180 minutes¹ worth,
or 13 of his 26 films) from throughout his career, 1985 to 1992. These are
shorts, running from a few minutes to more than half an hour, shot in video and
Super 8 (often in black and white), starring Kern’s sleazy stock company and
friends: Lunch, Zedd, Henry Rollins, Karen Finley, David Wojnarowicz, Lung Leg.
Kern himself appears occasionally, making up in dick size what he lacks in star
power.
One of the earliest entries here is the 1985 The Right Side of My Brain, which
could have been subtitled "Or Salvation Through Face Fucking." This exercise in
psychosis and paranoia stars Lydia Lunch (who also wrote some of the droning,
dissonant music) as an urban casualty who talks in voiceover about being "sucked
into an endless vacuum" and entering "a place where reality was no longer
necessary." The usual rituals of daily life are suspended in this study in
psychological free fall, as Lunch spends her time squirming in bed, undressing,
fondling her tits, and submitting to some violent sex with a mysterious grunge
boy with a gun. New York never looked so grim, reduced here to dilapidated
apartments and dirty streets that recall the work of novelist Hubert Selby.
Also from 1985 is You Killed Me First, whose main inspiration seems to be John
Waters. This critique of middlebrow American life has hilariously bad,
Waters-style declamatory acting by several of the superstars of ‘80s performance
art. Zucchini fucker Karen Finley plays Mom; the late art-queen David
Wojnarowicz is Dad; and Lung Leg, the ‘80s answer to Mink Stole, is the demented
daughter who screams "I really hate you!" and "You’re just as disgusting as I
am!" before mowing down the family at a Thanksgiving dinner. Waters isn’t the
only influence here. The Warhol/Morrissey touch is noticeable in mangled dialog
that Kern doesn’t bother to reshoot. Like both Waters and Warhol/Morrissey, Kern
gives full play to the personalities of his stars, and no doubt a personality
like La Leg is as crazed in real life as she is here. Despite the tinny
trappings and amateurish feel, You Killed Me First succeeds as a grainy snapshot
of a particular time and place: Richard Kern’s brain in the mid-1980s.
Gore also dominates Death Valley 69 (1986), which features "the bad kids"
running amok, far from the institutions society has erected — the family, school
— to control them. The film is a catalog of violent teenage wish-fulfillment
fantasies via giant switchblades, martyred teens who’ve been eviscerated (shown
in loving tacky detail), and attacks by cops with tear gas. Sonic Youth provides
the soundtrack to these twisted lives, and Kern employs some crudely effective,
if now dated, montage work.
One of Kern’s most ambitious works is Fingered (1986), whose sarcastic
disclaimer says "Although it is not our sole intention to SHOCK, INSULT, or
IRRITATE, you have been warned that we are CATERING only to our own preferences
as members of the SEXUAL MINORITY." The film opens with Lydia Lunch as a
phone-sex operator chatting up an adult baby who turns on her: "You don’t give
one good fuck for me, do you Mommy!" From there the film devolves into an evil
road trip with Lydia and her boyfriend, who have rough sex and assault various
friends, strangers, and a hitchhiker played by poor Lung Leg. There are echoes
of Terence Malick’s Badlands and of course the Manson family here. Typical of
Kern’s world, gratification must be immediate, and every slight, real or not, is
answered with a knife in the gut or a gun in the head. The ever-versatile Lunch
provides some of the music here.
Two of Kern’s more notorious works are Submit to Me (1985) and Submit to Me Now
(1987), which dispense with narrative entirely, being simply a record of brief
performances by some of Kern’s friends and actors. Self-mutilation, crucifixion,
bondage, blow jobs, and other divertissements are on florid display here,
accompanied by the music of the Butthole Surfers. Kern himself appears in the
1993 My Nightmare, which features masturbation (by the naked Kern), spanking,
and bondage scenes. In the quasi-epic (35-minute) omnibus film Manhattan Love
Suicides (1985), a loopy David Wojnarowicz’s arm falls off and he’s sketched by
a creepy artist.
Kern’s background as a photographer is evident in the attention to posing by his
characters, and their general objectification. In the 1992 The Bitches (not to
be confused with Chabrol’s Les Biches), Annabelle and Linda (per the credits)
glare, dress up, give attitude, change clothes, curl their hair, read, smolder,
and make over an anonymous guy who also glares, gives attitude, etc. They
abandon these formal rituals briefly to jack off their new pal, and he
eventually embraces more of their insular little world by playing dress-up with
them. Eventually he gets plugged from both ends by the now strap-on wearing
girls. The Bitches reveals other influences that run through Kern’s work: Ed
Wood’s softcore sleaze scenes from Glen or Glenda, and the bondage fantasies of
legendary photographer Irving Klaw. Jim Coleman’s dissonant clatter soundtrack
adds a disturbing frisson. Also from 1992 is The Sewing Circle, which preserves
for all time (or until the mylar in the DVD disintegrates) the sewing up of
Kembra Pfahler’s vagina by ace seamstress and performance artist Lisa
Resurrecion. Pfahler’s seeming delight in this event — "It’s so fabulous!" —
undoubtedly bolstered some critics’ view of Kern as a misogynist taking pleasure
in the literal suppression of female sexuality.
Despite his work’s often laughable special effects, arguable misogyny, and
dogged insularity, Kern successfully showcases the pleasures of trading
bourgeois life — and the angst that inevitably accompanies it — for sex,
violence, drugs, and music. His films are at the very least a welcome tonic to
those sleek, empty, picture-perfect teen dramas from the John Hughes school that
occupied so much cultural space in the eighties.
Bright Lights Film Journal
If you are into guerilla and underground film making, this DVD is for you. You
can see Kern as either a brilliant artist or a sadomasochistic exhibitionist…or
both. If your film tastes run toward the bizarre and extreme, enjoy.
eFilmCritic |
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