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From: blp Category: Films Date: 25 January 2007 Time: 09:40 AM Review: Made under the aegis of Andy Warhol and frequently wrongly attributed to him as director. I presume I'm not alone in recognising Morrissey's genius since Film 4 have been screening these late night, along with his earlier trilogy Flesh, Trash, Heat. Take any one of these on its own, especially the horror ones, especially Blood for Dracula, which is the most porny, and you could mistake it for a bit of cheap exploitation with a naively bad script. I don't know. It's confusing. The Film Shop on Broadway Market puts all these films in the trash section and I really don't like the idea that I'm a fan of the genre, but then I keep finding things to like in it - often quite pretentious things, like I really believe Beckett would have felt a kinship with Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill, would that he'd ever had the chance to see it. In fact, it's the connections with absurdist drama I keep noticing - and, in fact, Warhol's first scriptwriter was Ronald Tavel, who went on to found The Ridiculous Theatre company. In the earlier Morrissey trilogy films, Trash and Flesh anyway (Heat's a rare duffer in my view), there is a certain amount of exploitation going on, particularly of Joe Dallesandro's naked body, particularly in Flesh in which he plays a hustler and spends the day having sex with girlfriends and male clients. It's like porn, but the sex is often desultory and you'd be, ha ha, hard- pressed to get turned on by it. The scenes go on too long, what nudity there is is relentlessly undercut by absurdity and the absurdity, in turn, is undercut by a sense of the tragic and the human, as well as a hefty measure of existentialist Man in a Situation tedium/anxiety, much aided by the mostly fixed camera positions and the aforementioned scenes that go on too long. The old English queen who picks up Dallesandro and puts him through a series of classical poses is a good joke, but also, surprisingly, ends up seeming a good bloke too. Cinematic conventions, porn, comedy, cinema veritée, constantly bump up against each other and, in undermining one another, acutely deliver the message of sixties avante garde film: you are watching a film; you don't know what you're watching. The later 'horror' films were shot in Europe in real castles and stately homes. They're more expensive looking and stick much more closely to their genre conventions and, as such, are probably much easier to mistake for junk. Who knows? Maybe they're really not as good, but I loved them and I think they found something unique, which I find hard to describe. The 'too long' thing is still going on, but less and in slightly different way - horror type things with severed limbs spouting blood and, in one instance, Dracula vomitting the blood he's just drunk (and also making weird retching noises throughout the film), which take you through some weird squeamishness barrier. I don't know. I just don't know. These films are so funny, but in such an unobvious way. I really can't figure how how anyone figured out that this combination of heavily accented Euro English, Hammer Horror styling, adult material and the hilariously perfect Udo Kier (who plays both Dracula and Frankenstein) would be so funny. Actually, written down, it sort of seems obvious, but the genius thing is that none of it's played for laughs. It's all totally straight and the things that are funny seem to have no reason to be funny, e.g. Dracula's manservant telling him to get off to bed and promising to prepare his 'special salad'. Feh. I dunno. I guess that I just don't know.