Fingered

Richard Kern (or R.Kern as he is better known as)has never made it easy for audiences to warm up to his films. He refers his films as "cinema of the transgressive". The plot concerns punk singer/performance artist, Lydia Lunch (who also co-wrote the screenplay)as a phone sex woman,who's encounter with one of her customers,ends up in a day that's one bum trip after another. What follows is a truly ugly exercise in explicit sex,murder,near murder,rape,statutory rape,a endless supply of raunchy language,etc. The obvious point of this film is what monsters some men could be (and are). No rating,but is saddled with a self contained 'X' rating on the DVD case (as well as on the old VHS video box),as it possibly couldn't earn less than an NC-17,if rated by the MPAA.

I saw this movie unexpected on public (!) television while I was zapping through the channels and I was captured at once. What was this? A sex movie? No... But it had some sex scenes. A fighting movie? No... But it had a lot of violence. A documentary? No... But everything seemed so realistic. This was a very anarchistic, brutal, throat-squeezing movie that grabbed my attention instantly. You really hope that it will never be reality that there are persons on the street like that and yet.... if you are really honest, it thrills you to see it happen (on screen).

If you haven't seen a Richard Kern short film then it's time to get disturbed! Black and white, low budget filming techniques help emphasize the ugliness of the graphic rape scene. It's not graphic in an erotic porn film manner -more like ugh I don't think I should be watching this.

'The Cinema of Transgression' was a small underground film scene in New York.Richard Kern along with Nick Zedd were the most prominent and widely known directors from that scene."Fingered" is possibly Richard Kern's most shocking and unsettling short film.It features punk rock queen Lydia Lunch as the phone sex operator.After a violent and explicit sexual encounter with one of her phone sex clients,the two set out on a rampage of murder,brutality and attempted rape leaving the viewer aroused and disgusted."Fingered" is mildly shocking by today's standards,but having seen such fare like "August Underground's Mordum","Scrapbook" or "Niku Daruma" I wasn't particularly offended.Still if you like them nasty and violent you won't be disappointed.7 out of 10.

Fingered, from what I've seen so far, is Richard Kern's masterpiece, ranking alongside The Sewing Circle and You Killed Me First. No matter how you slice it, the short is a wickedly devilish representation of punk-rock pornography and has gone on to be a much loved piece of work by the cult director John Waters. We open by focusing on a phone sex operator (played by the gorgeous Lydia Lunch), who, we see, leads a life of tending to the perversions and fetishes of her callers, one in particular loving the idea of mother/son incest. Upon engaging in one successful call with another depraved soul, Lunch's character finds herself taken under the wing of another punk-rocker (Marty Nation) and the two engage in rough sex and an ill-behaved road trip, acting as if they're Bonnie and Clyde.

Lunch and Nation form a hilarious dynamic, as the two try to one up each other in their depravities, and Lunch's repeated acts to break free of Nation's violence also had a recurring element of fright to the picture. The no-budget aesthetic of Kern's, mixing very grainy black and white with a thrash metal soundtrack, assists in making this film look as visually grimy as possible, as if the events in the film weren't dirty and perverse enough. Finally, the sex in the film transcends eroticism into pure horror and rough unpredictability, as if Kern, who has already made very arousing shorts like The Bitches, is now trying to subvert sex into a more horrific sight than a pleasant one.

Fingered is messy and vile, but it's those traits that make it so watchable and so intoxicating as a short. Like most works of Kern, it contains visuals you can't unsee and material that you would've never believed to exist, if you were strange enough to ever even think of it in the first place.

Starring: Lydia Lunch and Marty Nation. Directed by: Richard Kern.