FREAKS — SHOCKTOBER!

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In spite of the tremendous success he enjoyed with "Dracula" in 1931, Tod Browning's directorial career was effectively ruined after he made "Freaks" the following year.

Informed by Browning's youthful experiences working as a performer with a traveling circus, "Freaks" broke cinematic ground by being the first film to feature performers with deformities.

"Freaks" was banned in Britain for over 30 years. “Freaks” only enjoyed theatrical success thanks to its rediscovery in the early ‘60s by cult horror film aficionados whose appreciation enabled it to be discovered again in the ‘70s during the Midnight Movie craze.

This Pre-Code movie is set amid a circus sideshow traveling through France. The story turns on a romantic drama that plays out between Hans (Harry Earles), an engaged midget, and a cunning trapeze artist named Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) whose warped sense of humor is matched by her twisted morals.

Although Hans dearly loves his similarly-sized fiancée Frieda (Daisy Earles), he can't help falling in love with the full-sized Cleopatra when she seems to reciprocate his politely expressed affection. Little does Hans realize that Cleopatra is in league with the circus strongman Hercules (Henry Victor) to separate him from his from his vast inheritance.

After significant cuts by censors Browning tacked on an opening scene with a circus sideshow exhibit where a master of ceremonies introduces a curious group of spectators to a deformed woman in a cage that resembles a large baby crib. He calls the unseen woman the “Feathered Hen.” Not until the film’s end will a payoff scene allow the movie audience to see what the circus crowd find so shocking.

Although severely criticized at the time of its release as an "exploitation" film, "Freaks" takes every opportunity to humanize its characters. The story presents its group of human oddities — a hermaphrodite, several microcephalics, conjoined twins, and several limbless characters — as performers whose real-life existence was hardly if ever addressed in the media. The real horrors in the story come at the hands of the "normal" people who attempt to take advantage of an oppressed group of people, who live by their own strict ethical code of conduct.

As happened to Michael Powell, whose brilliant filmmaking career came to an abrupt end decades later with “Peeping Tom,” “Freaks” is a unique horror film that was ahead of its time. It’s a testament to Tod Browning’s vision that even with 26 minutes removed by censors before its release “Freaks” stands up as a fully realized horror movie unlike any other.

Not Rated. 64 mins.

A SERBIAN FILM — SHOCKTOBER!

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Co-writer/director Srđan Spasojević plays hardball on the field of transgressive cinema in one of the most banned films in modern history. Since its release “A Serbian Film” has been outlawed in eight countries, including Spain, Norway, and Brazil. Only heavily censored versions of the film have been shown in England.

You couldn’t ask for a more succinct and evocative title for Spasojević’s brutal film-within-a-film indictment of wealthy exploiters of post-Kosovo-War Serbia.

The filmmakers work within the paradigm of calculated filmic satires such as Pasolini’s “Salo” to connect jarring social metaphors concerning powerless family structures pillaged by government and industrial bodies.

The attacks are literal, psychological, and physical.

Hardcore.

The increasingly disturbing narrative is about Miloš, a semi-retired porn star and family man. Serbian everyman Miloš (‪Srđan Todorović‬) lives with his wife and their six-year-old son in a well-appointed house afforded by his years as Serbia’s most reliably stiff porn star. Miloš’s ever-randy physical condition causes him to take regular gulps of whisky to tamp down his ever-simmering loins. Miloš’s policeman brother Marko has the hots for Miloš’s wife Marija ‪(Jelena Gavrilović‬) to the point that he can barely stand to be alone with her without sneaking off to masturbate. No one is loyal.

A princely offer from a heavily financed pornographer with the traditional Serbian name Vukmir (meaning wolf of peace) ensures Miloš financial security if he will make one last porn movie baked in the extremes that modern porn audiences expect. The offer comes with the caveat that Miloš isn’t allowed to see the script.


It’s obvious that the black-suited Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic) and his skeleton film crew are more mobsters than filmmakers even if Vukmir passionately expresses his desire to reinvent pornography in the guise of a “uniquely Serbian” work of art. Miloš senses something is wrong on the first day of filming at a disused orphanage where he’s called upon to receive a blowjob while watching a dual-screen movie of a young girl named Jeca eating an ice cream. Jeca’s abusive mother became a whore after her husband’s wartime death so, in the context of the film, it’s only fitting to Vukmir that she should give Miloš a blowjob while Jeca is made to watch.

A Grand Guignol episode refers to what Vukmir excitedly refers to as “newborn porn.” The repulsive scene is as repellent as anything imaginable, and therein lays its transgressive effectiveness as a subatomic particle of micro-macro import; the depth of war’s violent depravity is unmasked. The sequence points to the most vile aspects of human nature that are publicly and privately acted out in all sorts of perverse acts committed daily by soldiers, priests, police officers, and by members of polite society. The mother is complicit in the horrific murder of her child by a steroid-stoked mercenary because this is what they both desire.

The escalating incidents of pedophilia, incest, and necrophilia that follow reflect a country traumatized by otherwise unspeakable acts of violence committed under the auspices of war. We witness the disgusting underbelly of a broken civilization where human values no longer exist.

There are no degrees of separation from a communal psychosis that affects every citizen. By putting the narrative in a psycho-sexual-cinematic context Spasojević invites the viewer to compare his made-up pornography of death to the similar underlying nature of capitalism’s commercial cinema of the West and its attendant sponsors. In order to see the message of Srđan Spasojević daring work of filmic art you need only consider the capitalist aspect that makes it possible.

Rated NC-17. 104 mins.

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE — SHOCKTOBER!

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There's Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange," and then there's everything else.

Kubrick's 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess's complex literary satire of crime and punishment is an earth-shattering cinematic experience that elicits an unprecedented visceral response from its audience.

Malcolm McDowell plays British thug and sociopath Alex De Large, who wanders around a futuristic, economically ravished Britain where trash fills the streets.

It’s a spitting image of the bleak socio-political landscape that gave rise to the British punk rock movement of the late ‘70s.

Alex lends friendly narration to the audience that he calls "brothers" as he incites violence with a band of delinquent misfits (called "droogs") at his command. Alex gets imprisoned after viciously raping and murdering an upper-class woman in her home with a large plastic phallus intended as an ironic piece of modern art.

Kubrick’s sense of visual irony is spectacular. Rather than go to prison Alex opts to undergo a torturous rehabilitation therapy (the "Ludovico technique"), involving forced viewings of Nazi war films accompanied by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. A scene involving Alex being "cured" with clamps holding his eyelids open, presents a fierce artistically infused portrait of torture. The proven effects of the treatment lead to Alex's release into a society where he is repeatedly punished for his past transgressions until he isn't. 

"A Clockwork Orange" proved a crucial touchstone for significant cultural shifts in music and film. '70s era filmmakers like Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese were liberated by Kubrick's visionary approach to style, form, and subject matter. As well, many aspects of the punk rock movement are directly attributable to it.

The film is intoxicating in its use of atmosphere, music, and paradox to excite and inform the viewer's imagination at a palpitating tempo. Everything comes as a surprise for the voyeuristic spectator who is implicated in every criminal act of citizen and state. We are all victim, killer, police, and legislator.

Sleep on that.

Rated X. 136 mins.