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| Images courtesy of Saturn's Core Audio & Video |
Five years after unleashing his transgressive pornographic
shocker of a SOV (shot on video) zombie horror film Shatter Dead, Black
Eyed Susan writer-director Scooter McCrae returned with incredibly an even
more taboo imagery shattering sleazy body horror extremity in 1999 called Sixteen
Tongues. Described as the
pornographic version of Blade Runner or perhaps the late 1990s answer to
Café Flesh by way of David Cronenberg’s Crash, it’s a nonstop attack
of smut and cyberpunk, sex and surrealism all mashed together firing off every
cylinder at once for every millisecond of its brisk but jam packed eighty-minute
runtime. The kind of mixture of explicit
sexual content, science fiction worldbuilding and general transgressive
dystopian Hell you’d have a hard time adapting into a full length feature film
let alone getting it released in theaters, the Saturn’s Core release of the
original digital video production in conjunction with OCN Distribution and
Vinegar Syndrome’s webstore represents for fans of edgier cinema an indelible
if not aggressively tawdry and gross cyberpunk freakout.
Renegade cop Adrian Torque (Crawford James of The 6th
Day) lives in a scuzzy apartment complex surrounded by perpetual pornography
on his television, his walls and all the hallways of his flat. Disfigured by a terrorist explosion from
years ago, he has undergone an unusual surgical procedure which grafted the
tongues of sixteen of the terrorist’s victims over his flesh wounds. As a result, his sores are particularly
sensitive to the physical touch. Meanwhile
Ginny Chin-Chin (Jane Chase) is a genetically engineered prostitute living with
her lesbian lover Alik Silens (Alice Liu from Wolf and She Hate Me). On the murderous hunt for the scientist who surgically
implanted sex organs under her eyelids, Chin-Chin is unaware Alik Silens is
spying on her through the netherworld of computer hacking the abyss of digital pornography. Over the course of the movie, these disparate
and violently psychosexual paths will inevitably collide into a crimson filled
mashup of sex, fluids and brutal death.
Featuring arresting makeup effects work by Glenn Hetrick and
Paul Sutt of The Hunger Games and Watchmen and appropriately
grimy and depressive electronica rendered by Cerebellion and Geek Messiah and
nearly all of the camerawork and editing by Scooter McCrae himself, Sixteen Tongues
is a SOV transgressive pornographic shocker with a difference. At once openly filthy dirty but also loaded
with intelligent science-fiction worldbuilding conceptualizing, it easily
outdoes Scooter McCrae’s previous feature Shatter Dead in terms of full
realization, size and scope. Though primarily
set in an apartment hallway ala Jimmy and Stiggs where the mayhem and
messiness gradually ratchets itself up, there’s a vastness implied in Sixteen
Tongues not present in Shatter Dead’s open zombie world. There’s also a much better sense of lighting,
color timing, production design and above all the performances from all the
actors. In a film that constantly flirts
with pornography with the walls and television screens constantly displaying
graphic sexual content, you’d expect the cast to mostly consist of porno performers
but that’s not the case here. It is a
real film with real actors alive with genuine ideas that just so happens to be
buried deep in the world of online psychosexuality and frequently repellent set
dressing.
Centered around the triangular relationship between Jane
Chase, Crawford James and Alice Liu, the film does still manage to be an ensemble
piece and even works in Shatter Dead star Stark Raven. Jane Chase and Alice Liu go the full distance
as far as casual screen nudity and/or sex scenes though in contrast Alice Liu
has had a much more extensive film career in big Hollywood movies before
agreeing to disrobe for this microbudget digital video production. Crawford James would show up later throughout
television programs like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and The
Guardian but here is almost like a Cronenbergian dark lord of this porn-heavy
purgatory whose body and facial scars may or may not give him physical
pleasure. Some of the film’s sexuality
can be a bit much and borders on some Antichrist levels of bloodletting
from places that should never bleed thanks to the props department. But somehow unlike the out of nowhere explicit
shock that hit viewers watching Shatter Dead, everything that happens
within the universe of Sixteen Tongues however vulgar seems somehow appropriate
and consistent.
In recent years, Vinegar Syndrome and particularly Saturn’s
Core Audio & Video have taken a liking to the works of Scooter McCrae who
at the film’s introduction at Fantasia Festival (in the bonus features)
describes it as ‘toilet paper displaying an image on the screen’. While self-deprecating, it speaks volumes to
the strange awe and no-man’s land outlaw wonderment of the shot-on-video
microbudget film. However you’re able to
get your images and ideas onscreen is of the utmost importance irrespective of
the perhaps shitty quality of the medium being used. All things said, Saturn’s Core have done an
amazing job on their new limited edition Blu-ray special edition of Sixteen
Tongues which is so stacked with extras including a handful of the director’s
short films and a music-video tie-in to the film itself that you’re enamored
whether you liked the film or not.
Featuring his bonus short film Saint Frankenstein which includes
a score by the legendary Fabio Frizzi (Zombie), Saturn’s Core Audio &
Video have given this anarchic and perverse shocker of a film the elite home
video treatment and fans of Shatter Dead and the darker, more extreme
version of what we think to be the SOV film will not be disappointed.
--Andrew Kotwicki
