GOLD / APHRODISIAC!: THE SEXUAL SECRET OF MARIJUANA: A Damn Dirty Hippie Double-Feature!

GOLD : 40th ANNIVERSARY EDITION
Starring Del Close, Garry Goodrow, Caroline Parr
Directed by Bob Levis and Bill Desloge
Wild Eye Releasing

APHRODISIAC!: THE SEXUAL SECRET OF MARIJUANA
Starring Harry J. Anslinger, Fiorello Laguardia, John Holmes
Directed by Dennis Van Zak
Impulse Pictures

Review by Louis Fowler

Watching, absorbing and trying to stay awake during GOLD, you not only realize why Kent State happened, but why it was also fully justified. As a matter of fact, I was so charged up after viewing this musty 1968 relic that I went down to my local college campus and shot three kids playing hacky-sack.

OK, not really, but I did kick their sack down a sewer-hole just to spite them, and to spite this movie.

Like many lost-movie obsessives, when word hit that GOLD was going to get a proper DVD release, I was excited, picturing a Jodorowsky-lite countercultural epic, possibly a pre-indie free-love take on the well-documented lost American Dream of the 60s, complete with multi-colored acid trips, psych-rock freak-outs and plenty of flower-power pubic-hair. At least that's what I was promised, dammit.

Instead, I got a fifth-rate group of stoned community theater rejects/draft dodgers—led by "comedian" Del Close—rolling around in the mud while espousing anti-war sentiments and aimlessly driving sputtering jalopies while dressed as famed mass-murderer Che Guevara. Improvised elections are also held on a train. The MC5 mostly blare on the soundtrack and everyone remains happily unemployable. If this is what the young people were doing while our Boys were dying face-down in the Vietnamese jungles, then sign me up to the Ohio National Guard and hand me a bayonet!

With no rhyme, no reason and no proper editing techniques, it's as if the school from BILLY JACK made a movie and decided to actually write the screenplay after the thing was already in theaters. Never clever, never funny and never enlightening, GOLD is just a total unwatchable mess, from start to finish. It's the Altamont of free-love flicks with every frame a pool-cue to Meredith Hunter’s skull.

And this Del Close guy...in every book written about comedy, every tastemaker to come out of Second City or the Groundlings will rave on and on about this dude as the "father of improvisational comedy", "the funniest man who you've never heard of", and so on. If GOLD is any inclination of his talents, there's a reason why you've never heard of him.

GOLD...you blew it, man.

On the other hand, APHRODISIAC!: THE SEXUAL SECRET OF MARIJUANA, manages to blow everything in sight.

Is marijuana an aphrodisiac? While I know some women who would easily fellate you for a dime-sack of high quality hydroponic sticky-icky with no hesitation, I have a feeling that has more to do with low self-esteem and the lack of a positive male role model growing up than it does any type of magically seductive ingredient laced within those tenderly pungent pot-buds.

Sadly, I personally have never been privy to such THSleazy doings--though it hasn’t been for a lack of trying--nor have I ever been to a swanky cocktail party wherein a joint is casually passed around and eventual inhalation of the demon weed leads to a spontaneously nude encounter group session wherein pock-faced, fully-bushed cuties are told to stare at your bathing-suit area and gently caress your mons pubis, as I am repeatedly promised in this 1971 sexploitation relic.

Sorry, APHRODISIAC!: THE SEXUAL SECRET OF MARIJUANA, but while you dubiously proclaim that cannabis is an ancient sexual enticer, a natural Spanish Fly of sorts that will lead even the most frigid broad to drop trou and let you plow, in my experience, it’s typically just two or three dudes chafing it up on a Goodwill couch, barely watching AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE and, almost ritualistically, going to sleep, alone, with a belly full of Salsa Verde Doritos, depressed that in their Maui Wowie haze that they can’t even maintain the most pathetic of erections for some tearful self-stimulation before passing out to side one of Jefferson Starship’s RED OCTOPUS.

Your visual dissertation just doesn’t hold (bong) water, APHRODISIAC! It does, however, hold other, thicker, fluids. While I’m sure in their heart-of-hearts the makers of this movie thought they were presenting a strong case for the use of marijuana as a sexual aide, all that hard work and scientific research is pretty much lost entirely the first moment unapologetic on-screen penetration occurs between two of the saddest, most unphotogenic low-rent porn actors the Bowery-based modeling agency could rustle up.

And, you know, I kinda liked that. The idea of a director trotting out to the nearest homeless shelter, paying a belligerent morphine-addict $10 to mime the most reptilian of sexual encounters with an equally uninterested, possibly dead hooker, using every diseased thrust as an opportunity to feel something other than the lifetime of mind-numbing regret and stomach-growling hunger...well that’s some sexy shit. It makes me feel like a shadowy Italian businessman who just paid $5000 to sit in a hotel room with other equally shadowy businessman--mostly Japanese--to watch a Bolivian snuff flick. I’m sure we can all relate.

APHRODISIAC! is a resin-crusted treasure of timeless misinformation and counter-culture propaganda, making the viewer not only never want to smoke reefer, but never procreate either. That’s a hell of a lot more effective than anything Nancy Reagan ever did, unless there’s a topless “Just Say No” PSA of hers floating around out there somewhere that I don’t know about. And I hope there is.

THE CRIPPLED MASTERS 2: TWO CRIPPLED HEROES / THE CRIPPLED MASTERS 3: FIGHTING LIFE: Enter the Crippled Dragons!

THE CRIPPLED MASTERS 2: TWO CRIPPLED HEROES / THE CRIPPLED MASTERS 3: FIGHTING LIFE
Starring Frank Shum and Jack Conn
Apprehensive Films
Reviews by Louis Fowler

I like films that inspire me to be a better person. Films that inspire me to overcome adversity, be it physical or mental. I like films that inspire me to stand up and defend the downtrodden, bring justice to the forgotten and, in the end, still have mercy on the wicked. If I happen to learn a little something about myself, well, all the better.

Unfortunately, I also like movies where pissed-off masters of ancient Asian fighting-arts violently slam their well-trained iron foot into an enemy's waiting and well-deserved face. Is it possible to combine heart-warming inspiration with well-choreographed Kung-Fu fight scenes? I'm sure PRECIOUS is a fine film, but I'm also willing to bet my last HIV-positive inner-city teen-mom that it's not gonna really have the type of beautifully violent inspiration that I’m looking for, no matter how many television sets Monique throws down a flight of stairs in a well-deserved Oscar performance.

Enter the Crippled Dragons!

Does it get more inspirational than Frank Shum and Jack Conn? I'm gonna go ahead and pre-empt you and say “no”. First introduced in the martial-arts exploitation classic THE CRIPPLED MASTERS (1978), this disabled dynamic duo—one has tiny little nubs for arms, the other atrophied, withered legs—unleashed the handi-capable dogs of Hell on anyone who ably stood in their path, teaming up to bring down an unjust Empire that refused to allow them their God-given right to live a happy, fulfilled life. It’s so damned inspirational that I almost expected Sandra Bullock to show up at the end and adopt them both.

Others must have agreed with me, because they were brought back for two more equally exploitative films: TWO CRIPPLED HEROES (1980) and FIGHTING LIFE (1981), both released recently by upstart Apprehensive Films, to a world in need of true hope and, possibly, a little more social change.

HEROES is more of the same good stuff that was seen in MASTERS: a simple farmer with useless legs, just trying to make his way in the world, armed only with gumption and a pre-Vision skateboard-like apparatus that shoots hooks at would be assailants, takes in an armless wanderer who’s best friend just happens a terrified chimpanzee led around by a chain. They have a very Riggs-Murtaugh relationship, one based on respectful bickering, and that works for them until a local girl, temporarily blinded by local thugs, finds them and teaches them that all you truly need is love. It’s the first Kung-Fu rom-com.

Also, the chimp gets murdered. It’s pretty heartbreaking. No one wants to see that.

FIGHTING LIFE, however, moves the action from the rural past to the semi-modern day, taking Shum and Conn’s bumpkin asses to the big city of Taipei, all via their foot-controlled rickshaw. While one brother makes a living doing tricks for the gawking passersby, the other one quits his job as an apprentice at a lumberyard to train for the big upcoming Kung-Fu Championship. Gangsters and thieves try to get all up in their shit, as usual. (I don’t know about you, but I am really starting to dislike gangsters and thieves!)

But the physical fighting in FIGHTING LIFE—which is awesome, mind you—is nothing compared to the civil rights battling the brothers do to earn and maintain their dignity from a cold, uncaring city that looks at them not as people, but, because of their deformities, as possible demons, spit forth from Hell, sent to curse their crops and eat their children. That’s just discrimination, pure and simple, and FIGHTING LIFE goes out of its way to not only dispel these myths, but to also show that the disabled can—and should—be treated valuable members of society. Especially when they can totally kick your ass.

Apprehensive Films’ transfers, by the way, are horrible. They feel like they were duped directly from a fifth-generation VHS tape. That being said, I honestly loved it and it made me feel like I was kid again, buying bootlegs from the back of ‘zines for $25 a pop. I applaud Apprehensive for not bothering to do any of this remastering-from-the-original-negatives crap. This is exactly how cult martial arts movies should be viewed and it makes the CRIPPLED experience all the more palpable, no matter what your disability is.