30 Nights of Horror (for Inthemostpeculiarway)

Strangers in the night - Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation. Until recently I had only seen the rated version of this film. At the end of the credits of the original vhs release in '96, Araki berated the distributors, the Clinton administration and everyone else imaginable for nobbling his gory road movie. I did some quick research before sitting down to write. When will I ever learn? The only piece of useful information I found was, of all places, on wikipedia. ( My rule with wikipedia is simple. If I can only find a fact on wiki it's either a factoid, in Mailer's original sense of something unproven repeated until it's accepted as truth, or a lie interpolated by a prankster, propagandist or provo.) The "no thanks to Cheryl Ladd" at credits' end was Araki's flipoff to the former Charlie's Angel for not allowing her daughter Jorfan to play Amy Blue, the Rose McGowan character. Ladd did appear in the dystopian Nowhere, GA's next film.
Like The Living End, TDG is a road movie, a gruesome hilarious and finally numbing road movie. The sexual geometry of Jordan ( James Duval at his beautiful doofus best), Amy and Xavier ( the handsomest man-man to adorn an Araki picture) has been compared to Pasolini's Theorem but in a twisted way i was reminded more of Rebel Without a Cause, if Ray's classic had been dark and post-analytic. X is a sex object and a father figure to Jordan, who is fascinated by X the second he lays eyes on him. Although J and Amy are "virgins", Amy's clearly the more experienced virgin. She functions as a maternal figure to cute, sweet but sofuckindumb Jordan. The increasing attraction between her man and her bf doesn't faze her in the least, her protestations notwithstnding. Before I get to the horror ( and if this isn't a non-genre horror film, what is it?) i want to say that the bathtub sex scene between J and A is immensely lovely. The comic verisimilitude of James Duval having trouble getting his jeans off fast enough, hairy ass crack and all, is worth a thousand Pitt - Gainsbourg - Garrel fashion layout sex scenes.( The Dreamers is almost as false and sickmaking a film as Oliver Stone's NBK monstrosity, a film I detest.) I gasped when I recognized the foreshadowing in J's nosebleed as I witnessed the rape - murder -castration finale, filmed as if seen in secondary glimpses through hands covering eyes.

This night of terror is dedicated with admiration and respect to a young man with a critical future.