|
Cocteau's vision of film as death, the chocked South America of Pinochet and Bordaberry and Médici, the curdled counterculture, exploitation cinema deforms and illuminates them all. Easy Rider is the starting point of analysis, roadside vistas and Steppenwolf knock-off and all, in the portrait of a harem of scraggly banshees lorded over by a Mansonite lunkhead. Contrasted with their rituals and depredations is the insipid romance and "false morality" of a pregnant actress and a loathsome playboy in Montevideo, after reels of carnival footage both sides are brought together in the living room of the arms-selling European industrialist. "All my life I've been in one bondage or another," says one of Satán's followers, he rapes her in a protracted initiation (a blue-tinged close-up like a Warhol loop) and points to the bourgeois sanctuary: "The time has come for slaughter." Michael Findlay's original Argentine potboiler is plodding, greasily shot, and pockmarked with artless Peckinpah steals; added to inflame controversy for the U.S. release, Simon Nuchtern's mock-vérité coda is a bit of carny deplorability that would have had Herschell Gordon Lewis himself calling foul. And yet, grubby schlock rubbing against grubby schlock produces a document of accidental grindhouse self-reflexivity, a spectacle of theatricalized horror against a backdrop of true horror. (Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS and Cannibal Holocaust are its mates.) Discolored gore and disembodied voices, the body politic butchered, "vida es muerte." In the end there's nothing left to do but literally shove innards in the face of the audience that came to see them.
--- Fernando F. Croce |