Fingered

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).

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.

This film is trashy, but I love it! Enough said!

If you like "hardcore" crassness... equipped with Lydia Lunch getting gunf***ed... this is a great 35 minutes of poop! If you dont want to be offended, keep watching the Jerry Springer show! HAH!

All the while that I watched this film, I kept thinking that it was perfect for a liberal college male who was just DYING to look at something pornographic, but didn't want to offend his feminist masters in school and at the local cafe. So he purchased the home video "Hardcore," a compilation of Richard Kern's films, to get what he really wanted while appearing as though he was a student of underground art. Deep, in other words, pushing the envelope, blah blah blah...

And if the bloke isn't too particular about what the woman in the feature looks like, then Lydia Lunch is his dream date.

The film is grainy, low-low budget, and grotesque. Sometimes a filmmaker who needs a few hundred hours of intense psychotherapy simply puts his nightmarish fantasies in a short film to hopefully inspire others to suffer from the same psychosis that he has. Kern definitely fits the bill, and so does "Fingered."

The way that Lung Leg is treated at the end is the perfect metaphor for how any sane audience member feels after seeing this rubbish. I wish that they had done it to Kern instead.

Around the time this was made, I went to a "modern" concert. The "musicians" merely beat some members of the audience with their instruments. There was noise, there were instruments and people calling themselves musicians. Was it music?

Concept art has to be clever and profound, or possibly overwhelming or enchantingly strange. Just giving the audience the finger shouldn't be enough. This is a film only accidentally, a camera only happened to be the handy instrument.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.