User reviews

'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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

This mid-1980's underground short is probably my favorite Richard Kern movie. It begins in an East Village NYC tenement where Lydia Lunch works as a phone sex operator/prostitute. She gets into it with one of her johns, who then abducts her and drives her out to a strange rural location. Along the way they encounter the incredibly deranged Lung Leg, who appears to be in the midst of a mental health crisis. To say any more would risk spoiling it - so I'll just say check out Fingered!

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.