*Not your usual Savant review.*
As a student in the 1970s I worked as an usher at a couple of FILMEX exhibitions at Grauman’s Chinese. I then volunteered to work in the film prep room for the 1976 FILMEX gala at the now-gone Plitt Century Plaza theaters. I heard that press screenings for some of the films were going to be held not far from my house, in an art center annex of the Frank Lloyd Wright Hollyhock House, up on Vermont and Sunset. Editor Steve Nielson and I wandered up there, and drifted into about an hour’s worth of the weirdest thing we’d ever seen. Were we in the wrong place? The show being screened was a 16mm B&W porn epic as hard-core as anything we’d seen, so profane that we expected to be arrested. But unlike most porn that pretended to have a narrative, it was wickedly funny. It played like an overheated combination of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, with the funniest intentionally ‘bad’ dialogue I’d ever heard. It was very strange seeing XXX-gauge sex footage — every variation I’d seen
and a few I hadn’t — with a mixed audience of film aesthetes, laughing their heads off. I can’t pretend a full understanding of what I saw but it was definitely not your garden-variety smut. Since the advent of TV’s Batman the word ‘Camp’ had become diluted, losing its original meaning. Clearly a freak artist of the highest order, director Curt McDowell reclaimed the Camp flag: outrageous counterculture filmmakers had hijacked hardcore porn.
Don May and Synapse films have rescued Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! from obscurity; until now I knew little about it and was sure I’d never see it again. Actually, the attraction wasn’t a case of wanting to see it again so much as confirming that it had ever existed. In the ensuing decades experimental films have become less difficult to see, even some of the more transgressive examples. I finally reconnected with this one through the movies of George and Michael Kuchar, especially their highly creative Sins of the Fleshapoids, which is both an artistic achievement and a silly hoot. George Kuchar is the screenwriter of Thundercrack! and plays a key role in it. He is also responsible for the film’s expressionistic lighting and the freakish makeup.
Hailing from the Bronx, the Kuchars specialized in colorful 16mm epics recreating Campy universes of exaggerated dramatics and show-biz extremes, often with grotesque female protagonists that endure highly theatrical emotional agonies. Costumes and sets are purposely amateur-hour yet achieve an honesty that parallels the elaborate melodramas of directors like Douglas Sirk. There are no direct parodies: just because the women have clownish eyebrows doesn’t mean they’re meant to be Joan Crawford. No, the Kuchars’ films present original little worlds of unrestrained imagination. Their ’60s ‘classics’ are fairly restrained, but later stuff gets into scatology. Aspects of John Waters spring directly from the Kuchar sensibility. Likewise, Richard Elfman’s one-shot exercise in pulp vulgarity Forbidden Zone partially resembles the Kuchar universe. A real expert on American Experimental Cinema would make more official connections, I’m sure.
Synapse’s disc introduces us to Curt McDowell by offering a score of his early films as extras. I’ll guess that as queer cinema they’re advances on older work by Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith. What’s special about Thundercrack! is that McDowell and George Kuchar fashion a coherent, consistently funny epic in which the rasty and nasty sex, in grainy B&W, is free from cultural restraint of any kind. Every character talks as dirty as hell, but I don’t recall much actual profanity. Each is some kind of freak, a perv with an agenda.
Lightning! Thunder! Gnarly sex! On a dark and stormy night, flooding prompts a number of maniacally libidinous travelers to take shelter at the creaky old house of Mrs. Gert Hammond (Marion Eaton), an alcoholic, sex-obsessed and generally insane widow. The first arrival is Willene (Maggie Pyle), a born-again neighbor whose husband is a country western singer. Two shamelessly forward young women have already picked up a hitchhiker, and his two mysterious wooden crates. Even more crazed is Bing (George Kuchar), who has crashed his truckload of dangerous circus animals. That completes a crazed company of sex fiends that talk exclusively in over-emphatic, arch-melodramatic declarative statements. Several of the characters change in Hammond’s son’s room, which is a museum of smutty photos and drawings. The action alternates between polymorphous sex scenes of every description, and overwrought dramatics between the characters, most of which involve outrageous back-stories, each more dreadful than the last. When the house proves to be surrounded by ferocious circus beasts, some of the characters talk about escaping to the highway. Bing’s back-story is the most insane: he’s both terrified by and madly in love with a monstrous she-gorilla, with whom he is having an intense bestial relationship. Nobody’s perfect.
If you’re waiting for this prude reviewer to describe the sex scenes, you’re barking up the wrong dog. But as they say in the K-Tel ads, Thundercrack! has so much more to offer. McDowell auditioned a squad of porn performers in sync with his mind-warping view of cinema. Their performances hit an engaging note of enthusiasm; everybody emotes (explodes?) in claustrophobic rooms, with the storm alternating dim-outs and flashes of lightning. As with the Kuchar pictures, there’s no sense of a film lacking in production value or resources; it’s all of a piece. Some of the non-sex content makes us wince with proto-Waters grotesquery, as when the impossibly degraded Mrs. Hammond receives her guests in a wig that we know to be soaked in vomit. Her demented-clown makeup is more gross than some of the hairy body parts on view in the sex scenes.
As with many of the Kuchar pictures, there’s a sense of pure fun that I don’t normally associate with hardcore porn. The particulars are inventive, to say the least; every backstory is a Gothic horror tale. The late Mr. Hammond perished in a fairly unique way. We expect to find his remains in the basement, but not preserved in a row of gruesome-looking jars. The sight of Bing pursued by the amorous gorilla in a white wedding dress — the dress is on Bing, not the she-gorilla — is the absurd payoff for all those scummy ’50s melodramas about ‘apes lusting after white women.’ The greatest moment sees the group panicking as a KILLER ELEPHANT trumpets at them through a doorway. The pachyderm is indicated by a silly shadow on frosted glass, but the camera goes nuts and the actors cower and fall over each other like The Three Stooges in extremis. It’s unique, to say the least. I don’t think I need to see Thundercrack! again, but for the transgressive movie freaks that walk among us, this just might be essential viewing. Please don’t mention my name when the Christian Morals Police nail you to a tree. “I only looked once, honest.”
I fully expect some readers to ask why I write so openly about this grossly pornographic picture, yet have such harsh words for a show like Team America: World Police. The Team America filmmakers surely have a right to express themselves too. But I recognize artistic value (such as it is) in one film and not the other. I have little respect for Team America, a commercial product that talks dirty to titillate a basically infantile repressed American sexuality. They talk the talk, but Kuchar and McDowall walk the walk, pushing the Taboo Button with genuine artistic courage. Or recklessness. It impresses me that Thundercrack! is filtered through a lifestyle and mindset alien to my preferences, yet it persists in striking me as artistically legit. It goes its trippy way knowing full well that there’s no place for it anywhere near the cultural mainstream.
