Ashtray Heart

Experienced the incredibly strange Reflections Of Evil last night on DVD. Why? Cuz Henry Rollins was all over the box cover going on and on about how raaad this movie was. Is that a lame enough excuse for everyone? Well gosh darnnit, he's pretty much spot on. I don't think I have seen anything quite so original or bizarre or completely unexpected in a very long hippopotamus age. It wasn't so much the use of experimental camera work and overdubbing that made it original, as I have seen dozens of indie films by the likes of Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, et al that have gone that same route before. But it was just how original it all felt to me, how for the first time in forever I was watching a movie and I had absolutely, positively no idea what was going to happen next. Original enough for you out there who are tired of the same predictability in film?

I suppose if there is a plot to follow at all, it follows the story of an obese, bellicose man trying to sell watches on the seedy streets of Los Angeles. You would figure the man to be homeless at first, wandering aimlessly in his layers of ill-fitting clothing, arms laden with bags, stopping at times to scream obscenities at random like a Tourettes victim, getting into fights with dogs and other homeless people in his travels around town. Yet he appears to live in the hollowed out living room floor of his grandmother's house, lining the walls of his nest with boxes of sugary children's cereal. Meanwhile overhead government-enlisted jets leave streams of exhaust clouds called "chemtrails" that poison the people in the city, making them more compliant and easy to suggestion, as well as hyper-violent and physically ill. The movie is gore-splattered with scenes of people vomiting in the streets and blood pouring out of their mouths and foreheads. Spliced in between these scenes are flashbacks to this man's childhood, of his older teenage sister who died of a PCP overdose in the 1970's. Amid images of him and her running in slow-motion through Universal Studios theme park, the two seem to be searching desperately for one another.

Nearly everything in the film is told through the man's eyes, his brain half-devoured by the chemicals in the chemtrails overhead. The world is a blurry, sun-baked, vaseline-lens filter of hostility and misery, as a constant barrage of raging people and angry dogs are perpetually locked in his line of vision. The movie keylights Los Angeles in all of its washed-out, colorless decay -- its twisted exhibitions of humanity, its ugly suburbs, its tacky faux fantasy Hollywood world. It's part horror movie, part comedy, and heavy on the social commentary. Its images tend to stick with you long after the movie is over, as you try and make some sense out of it all.

I think this just came out on DVD this week so keep an eye out for it. Definitely something that doesn't leave a person with a lack of anything to say about what they will be seeing.

And food for thought concerning those jet streams every time we look up to the skies at those passing planes.