Scorpio Rising (2013)

Thanks for the memories!

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

hyped garbage

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

I found this short film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I remember seeing the image of a character wearing a military cap and smoking a cigarette, and I was intrigued by the title, so I hoped for something good. Basically the film sees a group of homosexual Nazi bikers getting ready for a night out, building their bikes, dressing themselves in leather, and partaking in a cult night out, with pain and pleasure. There is no dialogue in the film, but there are flashes of footage from The Wild One with Marlon Brando and Cecil B. DeMille's religious epic King of Kings with Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus Christ, and the editing moves with the rhythm of the rock and roll soundtrack, including Bobby Vinton – "Blue Velvet", Elvis Presley – "(You're the) Devil in Disguise", Ray Charles – "Hit the Road Jack", The Crystals – "He's a Rebel", and Surfaris – "Wipe Out". Starring Bruce Byron as Scorpio, Johnny Sapienza as Taurus, Frank Carifi as Leo, Bill Dorfman as The Back, John Palone as Pinstripe and Ernie Allo as Joker. It is a very simple film, gay bikers getting ready for a night on the town and masochism, the key themes of the film are the occult, biker subculture, homosexuality, Catholicism, and Nazism, so it is a tasteless film in many ways, but that makes it all the more interesting, a surprisingly watchable short underground experimental film. Very good!

During the early 80's I attended many screenings where Anger was present to introduce "Scorpio Rising." The clips of Jesus are not from "King of Kings" as one viewer wrote,but according to Anger, the clips are from a religious instruction film that he received by mistake one day while he was editing the film. He took it as sign to use some clips in the film. This is a great work of art and one of the best and most influential underground films ever created. It's influence on the modern music video and other aspects of popular culture cannot be dismissed. I urge everyone to get the 2 volume DVD set that's out now. Check out Anger's other films among them "Puce Moment," "Rabbit's Moon," and "Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome." "It's my happening and it freaks me out!"

Scorpio Rising marks the beginning of the mix-tape approach to film-making, the technique of adding texture, flow, counter-point to images by over-laying them with a soundtrack of pop songs. Kenneth Anger takes this technique to its limit right from the start, eschewing dialogue, narrative and everything else in favor of a thirty-minute greatest-hits medley wedded to a chaotic assemblage of pictures having to do with some gay-Nazi-anarchists engaged in all manner of rebellious behavior, from reading comic books to smearing mustard on a fat guy's stomach and tearing his pants off. The result is a bizarre fusion of the innocent and the profane, the quaintness of yesterday's Elvis/Bobby Vinton hits alongside the amateurish depravity and two-bit spectacle of Anger's underground opus.Despite its reputation as a sort of counter-culture landmark, the movie seems largely irrelevant, a museum piece commemorating the excesses of '60s cult movie-making. It consists primarily of badly-lit home-movies of some nameless, faceless leather-fetishists posing like the most slovenly male-models you can remember, then going to some degraded costume-ball that degenerates into the sort of orgiastic hi-jinks that were a staple of "controversial" sixties cinema. For kicks, Anger keeps cutting in little snippets from a silent movie about Jesus, demonstrating a grammar-school-level sense of how to shock middle-brow audiences. This is avant-gardism at its most obnoxiously pointless, the deliberate mingling of opposing elements (bubbly pop tunes over random sexual carnage, cross-cutting between a gay-Nazi orgy and shots of the Last Supper) for the purpose of suggesting all sorts of potential meanings, none of which have been sufficiently thought-out.Anger is so concerned with creating an intense experience that he forgets anything he might've known about film technique and simply wallows in his own fanatical, vaguely Satanic weirdness. Yet despite the film's sloppiness, it occasionally points the way toward what later, better filmmakers would do with the director's indisputably pioneering idea. The fusion of pop-music and pop-image (see the Layla sequence in Goodfellas; bits of Easy Rider; much of Tarantino) can lead to a sense of electricity, a heightening, where a moment can come to summarize the whole of the film texturally. The first glimmers of this galvanizing effect can be felt for a second here-and-there in Scorpio Rising, but either Anger didn't understand what he was on to, or didn't care. As so often happens in experimental film, the pioneer has the inspiration but lacks the expertise, the know-how necessary to employ the technique in a meaningful way. The little ripples of potential energy never amount to anything for Anger, who winds up coming across like Roger Corman without the movie-making acumen.

What is significant about this text is that Anger got many of the shots from the initiation rites of American biker gangs. As such, the butch ruggedness of these ostensibly "straight" men is conflated with the none-too-subtle homoeroticism of their rites--which leads the viewer to question the rigid dichotomies of "straight" and "gay" that dominate North American social discourse.Also of significance is the extent to which, by appropriating "butch markers" such as leather and motorcycles, the homoeroticism undermines the stereotypicality of the "nelly" homosexual male.Not a terribly accessible text, but it becomes pregnant with significance for the viewer who does a little background reading first.