The Disc Jockey

Movie nuts have a taxonomy for everything, even varieties of bad movies. There's the "craptastic," the so-bad-it's-awesome catacombs where you'll find the likes of On Deadly Ground or the 1980 sci-fi disco whatsit The Apple. There's the more prosaic "turkey," the near-weekly major-studio whiff that dies on arrival (hello, Man of the House). Then there's a far more lively and interesting subgenre, one that disputes the movies' very badness. This is the world of the film maudit. I leave it to you to decide where these three new DVD releases belong.

The film maudit—the phonetic pronunciation sounds like an '80s rapper: Film Moe Dee—is the wandering orphan of the cinema. It was drubbed upon release, usually so violently that the filmmaker's career never fully recovered: think Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Elaine May's Ishtar, Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart. Yet each of these films had lonely champions at the time who argued they were misunderstood masterpieces—that what the rest of the world saw as "bad" was actually some kind of adventurous formal or tonal component. If the movies sometimes looked like hell, that's because at some level their subject was the hell of making movies.

Run a Google search online for "film maudit," and you'll eventually get to a movie that practically defines the term, Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. This scuzzy, squirrelly road movie was considered career suicide for director Peckinpah when it was released in 1974. Today, in MGM's respectful new DVD edition, it looks less like self-parody than self-autopsy. As such, it has aged better than some of Peckinpah's more "reputable" movies, and the chummy, anecdotal commentary track by a posse of Peckinpah scholars makes a good case for the film as an uncompromising masterwork.

Like John Cassavetes's The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Brian De Palma's Blow Out, Alfredo Garcia is a thinly veiled allegory of the muck that a filmmaker will wade through to get his movies made. Peckinpah's stand-in is a washed-up pianist (the mighty Warren Oates) who stands to score a bundle if he completes one simple task: fetching the severed head of the yutz who impregnated a Mexican warlord's daughter. When the pianist isn't defending his not-unwilling girlfriend (Isela Vega) from rapists (Kris Kristofferson and Donnie Fritts!), he's carrying on a boozy...uh, tete-a-tete with the brown-bagged head on an endless drive down Mexico way.

But Oates's character isn't the villain. That distinction is reserved for the effete suits (Gig Young and Robert Webber) on his tail. The pianist is just a guy trying to maintain enough of his integrity to see a dirty job through—one of those screw-you Peckinpah heroes who completes his assignment just so that he can wage war against his bosses. The movie has such a gritty, oozing, maggoty feel that you could almost swear it was shot on flypaper. Each cut is like a dying man's blink. In its sick, ornery way, this is one of the director's most personal movies, and worthy of far better than its laughingstock status.

If the director surrogate in Alfredo Garcia is a compromised but dogged professional, in Jim VanBebber's hair-raising The Manson Family he's a cult leader with a persistence of vision capable of blurring everyone else's. VanBebber, the Ohio underground filmmaker who made the impressive no-budget splatter movie Deadbeat at Dawn, spent 15 years completing this gutter-punk grindhouse telling of the hippie apocalypse that culminated in the Tate-LaBianca murders. In a fascinating making-of documentary, one of two feature-length docs on the 2-disc set, cast members remember hurling themselves into the director's elaborate satanic orgies, only to look afterward at their gore-smeared bodies with eerie confusion.

In VanBebber's version, Manson (played by Marcello Games) is merely the ringmaster of a vampire circus; it's the wild-eyed faithful like Bobby Beausoleil (VanBebber) and Leslie Van Houten (Amy Yates) who do the creepy-crawling with knives out. Using the hysterical (in pretty much every sense) framing device of modern-day Charlie worshippers on a rampage, the movie alternates bogus newsreel footage and interviews with shock cuts of cavorting demons, explicit sex, and horrific re-creations of the climactic homicides.

The movie is pure gutter pulp, unrelentingly crummy and lurid. And yet its balls-out exploitation seems more honest than the moralizing solemnity of Helter Skelter. The choppy, hallucinatory style suggests Kenneth Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother, the Count Yorga movies, a cargo of decaying '70s drive-in nitrate and one of Larry Buchanan's dubious "docudramas" heaved into a woodchipper, and the spew evokes countercultural cataclysm with a fury Oliver Stone couldn't muster on crack. Raggedly acted and written, with the seams of its 15-year production history showing, it doesn't have the polished professionalism of a quote-unquote good movie. But it's exactly what the subject demands.

Going beyond "film maudit" into uncharted wilderness of celluloid oddity, Damon Packard's flabbergasting Reflections of Evil (Vital Fluid) is the movie of the year for viewers who think they've seen it all. Imagine Taxi Driver and A Confederacy of Dunces had a baby, and Lloyd "The Toxic Avenger" Kaufman dropped it on its head; Packard's labor of love is even more deformed, as the writer-director-editor-cinematographer dons an outlandish fat suit to play an obese watch-peddler staggering through the Los Angeles streets in the advanced stages of sugar poisoning. It got press when Packard deluged Hollywood with a reported 29,000 DVD copies, which earned him notoriety as well as the exasperation of quasi-celebrities like Jim Belushi (who ended up with multiple copies).