PopMatters Film & TV Columns Editor
Francis Ford Coppola got it half right. A decade or so ago, he opined that the film industry would soon be overrun by teenagers with portable cameras. These indie moviemakers, rebelling against the studio system, would use their backyards as back lots to make their own “outsider” entertainment. What Coppola couldn’t see back then was the advent of DVD. In the days of VHS, the novice artist still had a hard time getting his or her film seen. Now, with professional digital results just a PC program away, anyone can get his filmic product seen.
In 2005, while Hollywood budgets climbed higher and experts lamented a so-called slump, several sensational features arrived on DVD, flying under the regular radar to find audiences anxious for alternatives. While some of these features function more as illustrations of potential talent than cohesive entertainment, they show a real love of the art form and a desire to engage and entertain.
Tarnation (released theatrically in 2004, and to DVD in May 2005) exemplifies this DIY mentality. Jonathan Caouette’s video scrapbook is a journey into his problematic psyche as well as an investigation of his mother’s descent into madness. Using his PC and a collection of photos and home video footage, this innovator created an uplifting and unsettling an entire legion of home movie wannabes that success could come from the most humble of artistic origins
So Wrong, They’re Right (August 2005) offers another such example. After starting the popular magazine 8 Track Mind in 1990, editor Russ Forster stumbled on a brilliant idea: he would travel around the country and make a film about the diverse group of people who proudly proclaim this passé music technology their private passion. They are frighteningly fanatical, but they also exhibit an admirable sense of social rebellion. Proudly wearing their hilarious eccentric whims like retro thrift store clothing, they can’t be bothered with what the culturally illiterate throng has to say about it.
Horror makes up the largest percentage of homemade movie releases. Like the b-movie mavens of the ’50s and ’60s, digitally-minded distributors realize that the macabre makes for an incredibly easy sell of an unknown creative quantity. Indeed, the indie scene seems mired in zombie/serial killer/slasher knock-offs. In order to stand out, a film’s fiends must seem fresh, as in the Brazilian film, Plaga Zombie. Directors Pablo Parés and Hernán Sáez got together with a group of their high school friends to imagine a worldwide zombie holocaust as homage to every pop concept they love.
This combination spaghetti western, El Santo-style wrestling adventure, and all-out slapstick comedy, along with its sensational sequel, Plaga Zombie: Mutant Zone (as of November 2005, available on a single DVD in the U.S.), represents fully realized independent filmmaking, with a terrific story and instantly sympathetic characters. Taking things a little more seriously is Scott Phillips’ superb living dead drama, The Stink of Flesh (June, 2005). Populated by shredded torsos and flailed flesh, Phillips’ film satisfies both connotations of its clever, quasi-crude title.
With Jerkbeast (July, 2005), filmmakers Brady Hall and Calvin Reeder and actor Brian Wendorf stretch the thinnest of ideas — two slackers and an angry ogre (really just a guy in a papier-mâché suit) start a rock band — into something like a revelation. Channeling the same irreverent spirit that fueled Hall and Reeder’s public access broadcast free-for-alls, the film is mind-boggling, and exceptionally funny.
Not everything works in Jerkbeast. Some of the attempts at humor are obvious or amateurish. The same can be said for a little slice of silliness called Raising the Stakes (October 2005). Here, Justin Channell allows his actors to free associate every manner of pop culture reference from South Park and Star Wars to Family Guy. If it has anything to do with bad ’80s pop songs, cinematic catchphrases or horrid horror films, this cast can’t stop riffing on it. Showing sharp comic timing, Channell’s nominal narrative — two dumb dorks want to be vampires because they think the undead are “cool” — seems like a John Hughes movie made by Dungeons & Dragons’ geeks.
The winner for funniest homemade movie of the year, however, goes to Inbred Redneck Alien Abduction (February, 2005) (love that title!). The brain-addled child of writer/director Patrick Voss and co-writer Adam Hackbarth, this hilarious hoedown is partly a parable about the dangers of wading in the family gene pool, and partly a satire of space invader clichés. After a group of goofy extraterrestrials land near a typical white trash burg, the government steps in to save the day, sort of. Featuring enough blackened teeth to make Jerry Springer’s guests feel like dental gods, this homage to the hokey delivers nonstop cornpone craziness.
Not everyone goes for the simplistic and the sophomoric. Occasionally, directors use the outsider platform for far-reaching aesthetic designs. Such is the case with Jim Van Bebber’s 15-years-in-the-making reimagining of the Tate/LaBianca murders, The Manson Family (April 2005). Audacious, inspired, and sleazy, it’s one of the most remarkable films ever made about the murders. Instead of making Manson the center, Van Bebber captures the essence of his following. Using a ’70s exploitation-style, Van Bebber turns his film into a fragmented frightmare, peeling back the layers of Charlie’s charred mentality.
Cory McAbee’s amazing musical, The American Astronaut (February 2005), is Eraserhead as envisioned by peyote-smoking extraterrestrials. It’s a celebration of imagination, a unique take on just about every film genre you can envision. Simultaneously style-checking sci-fi, westerns, crime dramas, noirish mysteries, period pieces, political propaganda, and horror films, it bewilders as it delights. Telling an eccentric story about a sour space jockey assigned to deliver a fresh female to a planet where the population that worships a young boy who once saw a woman’s breast, the director creates a large-scale landscape on a low budget.
Still, neither McAbee nor Van Bebber can hold a crackpot candle to the demented desperation of one Damon Packard. It is safe to say that his Reflections of Evil (March 2005) is a work of stunted genius, the best outsider movie on DVD of 2005. It is the intricate effort of a freaked-out filmmaker overdosing on ’70s horror anthologies. Like a perverted version of the ABC Movie of the Week, with a little Night Gallery and the Gary Collins Sixth Sense, it’s atrocity as artistic aesthetic. The piecemeal plot has a fat-suited Packard roaming the streets of L.A., confronting citizens with epithets while supposedly looking for his lost sister. In between, we get montages of archival TV, a recreation of a young Spielberg directing a made-for-TV movie, and a hallucinogenic jaunt through the Universal Studio Tour. As a critique of the anger, distrust, and psychosis bubbling under the surface of our suburban social order, these “reflections” are very potent indeed.
Better still, they represent the power of independent cinema. Each filmmaker I’ve named fulfills Coppola’s prediction. Give the masses the technological keys to the kingdom and they will soon own the medium outright. It’s already happening, and the best homemade movies on DVD in 2005 are harbingers of the coming revolution.