Thundercrack

I had the pleasure of seeing this at a midnight screening of the Seattle International Film Festival. Wow. This may have been the strangest film ever produced. It is a comedy, a claustrophobic thriller, a love story (well, sort of), a monster movie, and a porno all at once. It would be not enough to simply describe as satire, it is far more than that. You should not pass up the opportunity to see it on the big screen if you have the chance. Any fan of the bizarre can't miss this one. Highly recommended!

Imagine Rocky Horror in black and white and as serious perved-out schlock-horror. Now, let's soup up the story a little . . .

We have a big old mansion on the hill. Some strangers are caught in a thunderstorm as their truck breaks down and decide to shelter. They are shown to a room in which they can change into some dry clothes (this room just happens to contain a wide variety of sexual 'aids'). Maintain an atmosphere of menace.

Soup it up a bit more. One of the characters is love-sick for a sex-crazed gorilla whom he had an affair with back in the days when he used to work in the circus. The owner of the mansion has the remains of her husband pickled in various bottles in the kitchen. Her son contracted a weird condition in the Far East that made his balls so heavy that they crushed things and sent him crazy (so he's behind a locked door and trying to get out).

Into what is becoming an increasingly complicated story that involves clichéd situations treated and re-created with incredible vision, add the odd 'porno' scene (why have pretend ones??). The effect of this is equally unsettling. Just as you get into the comfort zone of camp horror, some carefree full frontals make you feel distinctly on edge - all the better to freak you out for the next scary plot development. I should add that a bountiful mix of hetero and gay sex ensures it is not a film for dirty old men unless they are exceedingly liberal and the sudden shifts between genuinely erotic and scarily weird make you feel involved with the characters rather than observing them from a superior height.

I saw this film for a second time in 2005 and it was apparent that a number of very explicit scenes had been previously deleted. As the graphic sexuality runs simultaneously with double and triple puns explaining the subplots, it makes much more sense with them in and makes the film more cerebral than the average psychotronic experience. The acting by lead character Marion Eaton is also outstanding, almost Shakespearean, and contrasts with the tongue in cheek hamminess of other cast members in a way that makes your jaw drop. One of the most unusual films you'll ever see, I can't imagine anything more weird if John Waters was abducted by aliens and then regurgitated all over someone making a psychotic horror spoof with political and psychological undertones.

If you like cult films this as a jewel. Go and see it with very open-minded friends, or people you know very well! Thundercrack! is a cult classic for the seriously open minded.

THUNDERCRACK! is, in a strange way, a scurrilous precursor of DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID, and with wicked wit and precision, subverts not only the entire `grammar' of film, but an endless succession of Hollywood images, situations and clichés in the process. It even manages to satirise pornography; no mean feat when such images still retain their power to shock and unsettle some people! Using the familiar "lonely-house on a storm-swept night acting as a safe haven for lost and confused travellers" scenario, (some chance!!), it explores the manners and mores of `normal' society with such wicked wit that only the most puritanical would not be capable of responding. Thankfully made in black-and-white, the entire cast and, it appears, crew, throw themselves into the venture without inhibition or qualm, and the result is Hollywood turned on it's head, and all those previously `hidden' and subliminal subplots exposed for what they really are. For broad-minded adults, a most amusing and entertaining tonic, showing perhaps, that even sex should not be taken TOO seriously.

It is uniquely impossible to comment on this film. It MUST be seen to be believed. Early on, when the guy jams his dick into a vacu-jack and cuts loose, you know you're in for a strange, strange ride. That scene could only be topped by the legendary "boinkin' the motorcycle" (yeah, right up the tail-pipe - but it's a Harley) sequence in Fred Halsted's "Sex Garage," another black-and-white gay porn West Coast masterpiece from the '70s. (Halsted, unfortunately, is also dead.) In "Thundercrack," McDowell takes the creaky "old dark house" motif and stands it on its head, its feet, its knees, buttocks... whatever. Every possible sexual combination is worked into the picture. I'm not the world's biggest fan of primate jack-off situations, but "Thundercrack!" has the best. A few weeks before his death in 1986, McDowell was feted at the Roxie Theater here in San Francisco for his contribution to American film and... well... San Francisco porn. Both industries have fallen on hard times. In Hollywood films, quality is practically nonexistent. San Francisco porn is nonexistent, period. We've come a long way from "Behind the Green Door" to "Burbank Sperm Bank." Ah, well. Everything changes. Everything ends.

Three days after watching 'Thundercrack!' I still have to convince myself that I didn't dream the whole thing up. This is quite possibly THE loopiest movie ever made! In its own way as bizarre as anything Warhol, Waters, Jodorowsky, Lynch or Buttgereit have ever come up with. There's no way I can convey just how weird this is, but it's a bit like 'Chelsea Girls' meets 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' on acid, with a touch of 'La Bete' on the side. Part parody, part porno, part I don't know what, this movie is way out. Way, waaay out! Highly recommended for fans of strange movies, the campier and trashier the better. 'Thundercrack!' almost makes 'Pink Flamingos' look mundane...