FESTIVAL ROUNDUP



 

New York Underground Film Festival

Now in its fifth year, The New York Underground Film Festival has proven that stability can engender revolution and that subversion will always be best propagated by those with little stake in the mainstream.

Started in 1994 by Todd Phillips and Andrew Gurland (producers of Screwed and co-directors of the Sundance hit Frathouse),The New York Underground Film Festival spilled some bad blood around in its early days, with filmmakers complaining of insolent treatment, over-sold screenings, and a sense that the festival was being used as a career-launching pad for its directors. Now transfused with the passionate and festival-savvy blood of director Ed Halter, the New York Underground has renewed itself as a friendly stomping ground for both the criminally-minded and perversely-enabled. Halter, a former volunteer and programmer of The New York Underground and The San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals, attracted more films, viewers and media attention this year while never forgetting that it’s the filmmakers who make a festival. Thusly, he indulged them with free lunches, drinks, nightly parties.

Paul Duhoffman and Bonnie Dickenson in Todd Verow's Shucking The Curve

"Underground film is about the underground filmmaker," remarks Halter. "Transgressive content may be a factor, but as it gets harder to shock an audience, The New York Underground becomes more about where filmmakers position themselves in society." Halter cites Jeff Krulik (Heavy Metal Parking Lot) and James Schneider (Oasis, Blue is Beautiful), two DIY filmmakers from Washington D.C. who traveled around the country showing their films in basements and bars without any concern for industry recognition. Halter adds, "We also have filmmakers like Todd Verow, who went from experimental films, to indie features (Frisk) and now he’s directing and producing a series of films with his own Warholian-type ensemble. These are filmmakers who blur the lines, who by hook or crook, find ways to put their vision up on the screen." True to his vision, Halter implemented the Film Core Fund last year, comprised of membership fees and festival revenues, and it’s the only place celluloid sociopaths can go to acquire finishing funds for their latest in-yer-face opus.

The guest of honor this year was Doris Wishman, the grand dame of ’60s exploitation films, who confounded the audience after the screening of Bad Girls Go to Hell by claiming, "I don’t know why they call it sexploitation – there’s no sex in my films!" Wishman, the queen of contradiction, has made over 25 films featuring lascivious men and lesbian seductresses, fishnet-covered flesh and more than a few rape fantasies. Featured were her classics: Nude on the Moon, a silly sci-fi fantasy about two scientists who arrive on the moon only to find it populated by buxom moon goddesses wearing gold-lame bikinis and tinfoil antennae; Double Agent 73, starring the overly-endowed stripper Chesty Morgan as a private detective with a hidden camera surgically implanted in her gargantuan 73-inch breasts; and Let Me Die A Woman, probably Wishman’s most sincere film, about the life of transexuals in New York City during the mid-’70s. Whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em, – and Wishman insists you better love ‘em – her languorous pans of voluptuous bodies and gory delights are the stuff that spawned this festival; early grindhouse cinema which pandered to the male libido, and now, 30 post-feminist years later, cool and hip enough to be featured on E! Channel. Wishman held court in the lobby of the Anthology, selling posters and signing autographs.

There were also plenty of "repeat offenders": Eric Brummer, director of the Hollywood Underground Film Festival with his claymation zombie gorefest, Electric Flesh; Huck Botko’s creepy Cheesecake; Annie "Super-8" Stanley’s bloody love story Hub Cap; and the ubiquitous Nick Zedd, creator of the Cinema of Transgression and chronicler of the early ’80s downtown film scene. His film, Screen Tests, a Warholian send up of juicy babes and hunky studs preening before the camera, transcended the obvious through pure performance pleasure and a punchy soundtrack.

The opening night film and winner of the Best Feature Award, Surrender Dorothy, managed to transcend the "guys-hanging-out-shooting-dope film" to be a twisted story of one junkie’s unknowing gender reassignment. Unfortunately, the film failed to deliver in its final act. Director/star Kevin di Novis’ explanation that the story was based on Nero, who after giving his wife a fatal kick in the stomach castrated one of his slave boys and used him for his sexual pleasure, was far more fascinating than the actual movie. Creating a greater buzz was Todd Verow’s feature Shucking the Curve. A follow up to Little Shots of Happiness, Shucking the Curve follows Verow’s regular lead Bonnie Dickinson as she transfers her empty obsessions from Boston to the streets of New York.

It’s really the shorts that make up the meat of the Festival, and this year’s most mind-blowing films were the ones that combined various elements of live action and stop-motion animation. Todd Downings’ Dirty Baby Does Fire Island, inspired by the crash of Flight 800, had the audience screaming in laughter at the sight of a naughty baby doll who washes up on Fire Island and discovers the sweaty pleasures of fornicating males, poppers, doll-size hallucinations and assorted types of nose candy. Winner of the Best Animation Award was Jim Trainor’s The Fetishist, a pen and ink portrait of William Heirens, the 1940s Chicago serial killer who waxed beatific on Nazi propaganda while committing crimes against nature dressed in female drag. Wig Rodeo by Marcel deJure features workers in a coat hanger factory jerking spasmodically through brute Super-8 animation and feeling like a post-apocalyptic German Expressionist revolution. And where else could you see Dyke Rat, Tony Nittoli’s portrait of a wise-cracking dyke rat left hornier-than-hell by a jilted lover.

The "Pervo-a-Go-Go!" program stood out with Lisa DiLillo’s Cockfight, an experimental video on macho bonding sports, which cross-cuts boxing and cock-fight footage. Black Oolong by David Groptell showed sexual pleasures you never imagined could be had with a teabag, and Janene Higgin’s We Hate You Little Boy cuts to the quick about parental fears, child abuse and every adult’s lost childhood

Presently Halter is expanding the New York Underground not only to include the yearly festival and completion grant, but also a monthly screening series at Void gallery starting in July. "MTV, Comedy Central, the big distributors, they all come to steal our cool..." muses Halter. "That’s cool, but our main interest is funding the types of films we want to see and creating a space to screen them."



 
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© 2005 Filmmaker Magazine