Another post celebrating the movies of 1977, here’s John Waters’ Desperate Living — an experimental fairy tale that according to Rotten Tomatoes features Waters’ penchant for “nauseating set-pieces, such as a transsexual lesbian having her new penis cut off with scissors and fed to a dog, women being fed live cockroaches, and Peggy being assaulted at a lesbian glory-hole.”

I was planning to include a longer description but realized I couldn’t improve on that one sentence. Desperate Living isn’t Waters’ best film, but it includes really good performances in a movie that reads less like three acts and more like three separate movies interacting in some kind of tasteless, probably infectious, definitely revolting manner.

You’ll love it.

Here’s the film…

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I know we’re bearing down on the jolliest celebrations of the holiday season, but I don’t seem to be able to free myself from these diabolical movie posts — it’s like Halloween is trying to take over Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa all at once! I think that’s already a movie starring a skeletal Santa which is not the same as this occult thriller which one of my favorite author’s posted on her Facebook page this weekend. Here are Tracy Twyman’s comments on Don’t Deliver Us From Evil…

I’ve really enjoyed the film Don’t Deliver US From Evil (Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal) by Joel Seria from 1971. The whole thing is on YouTube right now. It features two teenage girls living in the Anjou province of France (home of Fulk the Black, who married Melusine, “the daughter of Satan”) stealing consecrated wafers from church (at 18:59), performing a Black Mass/lesbian wedding ceremony (at 54:00), reading from Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont (at 51:47), and also from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal as they immolate themselves in the final scene at the school talent show (at 1:36)…

Be sure to order Tracy’s new book Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled while you watch this supernatural thriller just in time for Krampus…

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This is a pipe.

The influential French filmmaker died on Sunday (9/12) and we were sad to see one of the brighter lights of the New Wave go dark. He lived a long life – 80 years – and he leaves us with his beautiful images.

If Jean-Luc Godard appeals to critics because of his extreme interest in politics and film theory, if François Truffaut appeals to the popular audience because of his humanism and sentimentality, it is Claude Chabrol—film critic, filmmaker, philosopher—whose work consistently offers the opportunity for the most balanced appeal. His partisans find especially notable the subtle tone of Chabrol’s cinema: his films are apparently cold and objective portraits of profoundly psychological situations; and yet that coldness never approaches the kind of fashionable cynicism, say, of a Stanley Kubrick, but suggests, rather, something closer to the viewpoint of a god who, with compassion but without sentiment, observes the follies of his creations.

Chabrol’s work can perhaps best be seen as a cross between the unassuming and popular genre film and the pretentious and elitist art film: Chabrol’s films tend to be thrillers with an incredibly self-conscious, self-assured style—that is, pretentious melodrama, aware of its importance. For some, however, the hybrid character of Chabrol’s work is itself a problem: indeed, just as elitist critics sometimes find Chabrol’s subject matter beneath them, so too do popular audiences sometimes find Chabrol’s style and incredibly slow pace alienating.

—Charles Derry, Film Reference.com

In his honor we present Les Biches (1968). When an architect becomes involved with two, beautiful bi-sexual women, at tragedy ensues. This film is hosted by our YouTube Channel.

Enjoy and leave a comment!

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Joe Nolan <3