So many people want to say something profound. If there’s one thing that’s true of most artists it’s that they seek to comment on the human condition in a meaningful, poignant way. They will find artful ways to enlighten us, or scold us, or simply entertain. Few ever intentionally try to offend us. But that’s where Drew Bolduc comes in. You see, Drew Bolduc also wants to say something profound, but he isn’t interested in exploring human nature as a way to provide a profound commentary. And he has no time for artful diversions or fanciful language. No, Drew Bolduc wants to rip out humanity’s heart, shit down its throat, and make crude phallic-inspired cave paintings in its blood while it looks on in horror.
The revenge film typically is a very rigid format to work within. Its dictates are simple: unrepentant evil, an easily relatable protagonist, and lots of blood. And on a very basic level Ms. 45 fulfills that purpose, but beyond that it also stretches itself into much darker territory.
Given enough time, every genre will have individuals who will branch out into diverging paths. Today it's so common that it's almost more shocking when a movie isn't incorporating or blending elements from various genres. In the early 1980s the revenge film was still experiencing a nascent success propelled on the back of films like Death Wish and First Blood. Despite this, there had already been some rumbling within the barely established structure of revenge-fueled thrillers. In 1972, acting as a precursor to what would become an entrenched subset within revenge films, Wes Craven's Last House on the Left debuted to shocked audiences. While being billed a straight horror movie, the story would influence decades of film to follow, specifically its success acting as a catalyst for distributors to begin releasing more sexually violent films. This would culminate in the release of 1978's I Spit On Your Grave, another "horror story" that owed little to the era's supernatural thrillers of Hammer or undead gut-munching of George Romero. With I Spit On Your Grave, a new sub-classification within revenge films was born: rape-and-revenge.
War is a sanitized concept in today's world. You can pick up a controller and teleport directly into World War II through any numbers of titles. Commercials show square-jawed Supermen climbing mountains to slay the dragon; or, even more terrifying, men silently hunch over a computer screen playing the new high-tech video game -- piloting an unmanned drone. Our movies even connect to our subconscious with shallow visuals of things going boom while faceless models bravely throw themselves into the fire, consequences be damned.
It's rare we're ever greeted with those consequences. You rarely hear about the men when they try to re-assimilate into society and fail; you rarely hear about when they become the victims; rarest still, is when those men are consumed by their own demons. The stories we hear are those of triumph and bravery, not fear and cowardice.
Combat Shock is a movie that deals only in fear and cowardice.
Frankie Dunlan is a pathetic man. He's not pathetic in the same way Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle is pathetic, a wayward loser with redeemable qualities. He's pathetic in the way most normal people are pathetic, incapable of coping with the intense monotony of a "normal" life yet slowly stumbling through it one mistake at a time.
Frankie lives in poverty with his over-bearing wife and special needs child, a creature almost directly transported from David Lynch's Eraserhead. He can't find work. He's haunted by the images of what he did in service of his country. His own father thinks he died in Saigon. This is his life. He's never presented with the possibility of something better coming along. Even when he finally decides to do something, in this case commit a crime to finally get his hands on some money, the consequences are terrible.
To say the movie is nihilistic would be a severe understatement. It's climax suggests the only logical conclusion for Frankie is a murder-suicide. But that isn't an attack on the film. In its nihilism there is a dark, unrelenting honesty that rarely goes addressed in civilized society. We simply can't understand how men, especially our veterans, can go crazy one day and snap, and often it's not something we even want to understand. This movie is trying to find a place where an answer to that question might reside. Combat Shock isn't arguing that the men who fight war are free of the consequences; to the contrary, it's arguing that the men responsible for war are free of those consequences while the men who fight it are the ones forced to continually bear the crushing weight of that burden.
A lot of attention has been devoted to what should be a minor footnote in the history of exploitation cinema. Hobo With a Shotgun isn't the first movie of its kind; it's not even the first movie in recent history to ape its multiple influences. What distinguishes Hobo With a Shotgun from genuine faux-exploitation misfires like Machete is the sense of awareness that is present in the film and the sincerity that follows from it. Many modern retro-leaning films that raid the sleaze bin of exploitation cinema do so in an almost condescending manner, taking what is "cool" from it, the gratuitous nudity and violence, and cast aside the charm and goofiness that make those movies "uncool."
Hobo With a Shotgun wastes little time on irony or posturing, instead opting to embrace every last cliche the exploitation and low-budget action genres can offer. There's the stoic hero, the irredeemably evil villains, the hooker with a heart of gold, and the gallons (and gallons) of blood.
None of this is wasted. Instead of using these cliches to make a movie mimicking sleaze cinema from 42nd Street theaters, this movies looks like it could have played on a double bill with Death Wish 3 or The Exterminator 2 or, blog favorite, Street Trash at those same theaters. Characters respond irrationally, the villains have a cartoonishly insane disregard for the concept of proportionality, and the violence goes so far into the realm of bad taste that it's almost impossible to take the overall film seriously.
What brings things back down to earth, and holds the film together, is the package the film is wrapped in. Crafted with a garish sense for the macabre, Hobo looks like the most beautiful yet insanely terrifying acid trip you've ever stumbled into. Blood can alternately look like candy-colored syrup or mind-bending molasses; a yellow cloud of sleaze looms over many scenes creating a stifling sense of claustrophobic panic; and, every character has been designed to look like they've stepped right out of a back alley abortion, ripped from the womb of Charlie Bronson and Alejandro Jodorowsky's deranged love child.
This isn't a movie that simply asks you to remember what sleazy B-movies used to be like. This is a movie that wants you to experience the gloriously depraved mania of villains who use manhole covers in place of guillotines. While Hobo With a Shotgun will never be seen as a "conventionally good" film, it contains a reckless spirit and frightening creativity that most "good" movies will never approach. In short, it's the best piece of trash ever made.
Some movies are made for the sake of art; some movies are made for the sake of money; and, then there's Street Trash. It seems the only reason Street Trash was made was to offend. What group, you ask? Everyone. Every single person alive.
The movie tosses off jokes mired in multiple -isms (racism, sexism, classism, etc.), scatological humor, rape, necrophilia, and generally every taboo subject you can think of, plus a few you probably didn't know existed. This intention to offend is nothing new, even within the decade it was created given that the 1980s was the decade that gave us Troma Films, but what sets Street Trash apart from its many low-brow peers and imitators is the sense of craft with which the offensiveness is set upon us.
Make no mistake; this is no literary achievement. There's no subtext to the plot exploring the plight of New York's downtrodden homeless population. This is the purest form of exploitation in that it seeks to garner entertainment from the sad, pathetic lives these characters lead. No character here is ever presented with the opportunity to lead a better life, and even when they harbor such illusions, their dreams are still caught trapped by the muck and filth that surrounds them.
BUT, and this is a very large but, the exploitation here is tossed at us to such an absurd degree it eventually lapses into the realm of parody. And a deceptively clever parody, at that. Where Troma would simply be content to mess around with bodily fluids, Street Trash launches them at us in full force -- homeless men are introduced to a rare alcohol that causes bodies to melt, explode, and disfigure into incomprehensible shapes and colors. It's almost as if Andy Warhol decided to rip control of his '70s exploitation films from the hands of Paul Morrissey and try to one-up George Romero in the gross-out category. The death set pieces fuse pop art camp with horror movie gross, creating a surreal vision that no filmmaker has been able to match since.
This cleverness also extends to the characterizations, which, while no great achievement, play with what had by then become genre conventions. The main villain of the film, Bronson, is a deranged Vietnam vet who can't let go of the violence he perpetrated while in 'Nam. This type of character was an extremely tired stock character used not only in the exploitation genre (Rolling Thunder, The Farmer, etc.) but also in mainstream cinema of the era (Platoon, Casualties of War, etc.).
Here, Bronson is a far stranger creature. While outwardly visions of war fuel his racist paranoia, he finds himself attracted to a female character of unspecified Asian heritage. In his dementia, she becomes intertwined with the Vietnamese he killed during the war, adding an oddly sympathetic aspect of self-loathing to what should be a one-note villain. While you never end up feeling sorry for Bronson as a character, there are moments when he passes from stock villain to a damaged, ragged reality.
And in what is probably the cleverest aspect of the film, Street Trash subverts traditional depictions of New York as a cultural and intellectual epicenter by throwing its low brow pedigree in your face. For the entire duration of the movie we follow homeless men drinking themselves into literal messy, splatter-filled graves. Nary an intellectual comes within vomiting distance of the screen, although, the movie displays a disgusting wit about itself. So in that sense, Street Trash owes as much to gross-out existentialist writers like Georges Bataille and Charles Bukowski as it does violent horror features of the previous decade.
But really, this probably the best way to summarize the experience that is Street Trash:
Shivers is the film that introduced the world to auteur and all-around sex-fiend David Cronenberg. Cronenberg, like many young directors, found it far easier to gain notice making low-budget horror features than working his up through the studio system in hope of maybe one-day being granted the possibility of helming a film with an actual budget. Unlike many of those same directors, Cronenberg wasn't satisfied making violent, misogynistic slashers that exploited the lowest common denominator's lust for blood and nudity. Instead, he subverted that lust, luring unsuspecting audiences into an exploration of themes that he would continue to pursue for the majority of his career (and to some extent, still does): man's disconnect from reality, modern science as a means of transformation (both physical and mental), and, more important to this rant, sexual taboos.
In the title I jokingly refer to Shivers as, "Attack of the Sex Zombies," but in actuality, that would be the best way to describe the creatures in the movies. They attack blindly in pursuit of one purpose -- sexual fulfillment. In much the same way George Romero used zombies as a metaphor for racism and blind consumerism, Cronenberg uses the zombie as a metaphor for sexual repression.
Shivers, Cronenberg's first feature, introduces us to a group of residents living in a new high-rise apartment complex. Throughout the course of the film the residents become infected with a parasite that turns each into a mindless zombie intent on infecting others through a kiss. Despite the timid nature through which the parasite is transmitted, the zombies increasingly display stranger sexual tendencies ranging from incest to rape and eventually pedophilia.
While many might look at this as an example of a filmmaker attempting shock for shock's sake, it's important to look at the context in which this film was made.
Created in 1975, Shivers can be seen as a direct response to the sexual revolution that was in full-swing throughout most of North America. The characters contained therein are mostly average, everyman archetypes that are forced to respond to a world gone crazy with sex fiends. The interesting part is that the zombies, while viewed as a menance, aren't necessarily villified. Their sexual perversions are used to give the audience an uncomfortable feeling, but are not necessarily condemned.
At one point, we see two mostly nude young men pursue the hero with the implication of homosexuality, but in a lesser movie the two would've been bludgeoned to death with a phallic stand-in or killed in some other non-ironic manner by the hero to allow the audience to return to a state of "heterosexual normalcy." The hero is never granted this opportunity, and in fact, must hide from the deviants, leaving the audience emasculated. Cronenberg doesn't allow anyone the chance to feel morally superior. He forces the audience to confront what are viewed as immoral sexual behaviors. Is this because he himself condones the actions? I don't think so.
In many ways, Shivers can be looked at as both a horror movie and a pitch-black satire. The sexual revolution in the late '60s and early '70s created a generation more open to their own sexuality but it also produced a backlash from those in conservative circles who viewed most if not all young people as deviants. Shivers is parodying this notion of a world gone crazy with sex by taking it to such an extreme degree; it's lumping together all forms of sex as deviant, regardless of their nature. In an interesting twist, the zombies themselves retain almost everything about their original personality they originally had, they're just now completely sexual beings ruled entirely by their id. This is taking the conservative view of young people as sexual monsters and turning it into the joke it rightly is.
Another interesting footnote to Shivers is that it actually acts as something of a harbinger for the AIDs epidemic of the '80s. The zombies in the film must infect each other through sexual contact, although in this case it's merely a kiss. But it is something of an eerie coincidence especially given Cronenberg's later remake of The Fly, which explored the AIDs epidemic in similar pulp fashion.
