Flaming Creatures

Flaming Creatures

1963

Director: Jack Smith

Starring: Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, Joel Markman, Mario Montez

What… the… fuck.  I mean really.  What the hell is this movie.

From what I can tell, this brief but all too painful film is divided essentially into four acts.  In the first one, people obsessively put on lipstick while a narrator talks about lipstick.  And then penises.  In the second act, a woman (Sheila Bick) is… raped, I guess, and there’s an orgy and an earthquake.  And then penises.  In the third act, a different woman – well, drag queen (Markman) – rises from a coffin and blunders around feeling various penises.  And in the fourth act, aforementioned drag queen dances by spinning around in a circle while a different drag queen (Montez) does a tango.  No penises at the end, actually.

Sound awful?  Yeah, it is.  The film has virtually no lines; all the spoken dialogue is in the first eight minutes or so, and all of it is voiceover.  And has nothing to do with the images we see on the screen, save for the fetishistic sequence where everyone puts on obscene amounts of lipstick.  After that point, director Smith completely throws out the idea of any sort of conversation and we just get images. 

 

Now, I am not the type of movie fan who absolutely needs a solid narrative all the time – Koyaanisqatsi is proof that a compelling movie can be made without anything resembling a storyline – but I usually require that the images I’m seeing in place of plot must be something special.  And in Flaming Creatures, the images are of such poor quality that the whole experience bellyflops faster than you can say “pornography.”  Apparently, Smith purposely used out-of-date filmstock.  To make a “statement.”  So not only do we have bizarre acts being shown that are not tied together in any way whatsoever, you are now straining to make out what is actually going on (even though none of it really matters) because the film itself is decomposing.

There’s a joke in there somewhere about this movie being so bad that the actual filmstock tried to destroy itself, I know there is…

  

What staggers me most is that when I read the entry for Flaming Creatures in 1001 Movies, it positively waxed rhapsodic about the “beautiful” “gauzy” images, how the film is essentially a feast for the eyes… wait, WHAT?  Flaming Creatures isn’t so much “beautiful” as it is “barely coherent,” and I mean that in the visual sense, not even the narrative sense.  We blur in and out, get too much white and then too much black in the shots, and the whole thing just feels messy, as if Smith set up the camera and then left the room and one of his drunken friends took over while everyone was passed out.  Not once while watching this did I consider it “beautiful.”  Clunky, awkward, ridiculous, and amateurish, yes; beautiful, no.

I have never had to vet the screen images to ensure they are SFW more than I have for this film.

And oh, the nudity.

I mean honestly, when does art become porn, and vice versa?  Because when you see someone wearing a ridiculous amount of lipstick wanking off in a room filled with comatose bodies while someone else is jiggling a very large boob straight to the camera, you really start to think to yourself that you’ve crossed that line. 

Nothing like a film filled with penii sporting semis.

And in the final act of the film, the bit with the drag queen Spanish dancer and the only section of the film that was NOT removed from youtube due to explicit content violations, the actors dance by simply twirling in place.  Really.  It’s ten goddamn minutes of watching people spin.  From different angles, sure, but spinning.  All I could think of was The Simpsons Halloween episode where Kang and Kodos take over the bodies of Bob Dole and Bill Clinton and say, “always twirling, twirling, TWIRLING!”  

This right here = more compelling than Flaming Creatures

I don’t know.  I mean honestly, I just don’t know.  I’m incredibly generous towards the “Must See” handle our precious tome claims.  Hell, even with films that I don’t personally like (cough – Titanic – cough) I usually understand why, for one reason or another, they are considered “Must See.”  But I swear to fuck, there is absolutely no reason to see Flaming Creatures before you die.  Absolutely none.

Arbitrary Rating: 1/10.  And we have a winner!  Lowest rated film ever!