George Kuchar | Ascension of the Demonoids / 1985

stripped of all pretenses

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Kuchar (screenwriter and director) Ascension of the Demonoids / 1985

 

With his first and only grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, George Kuchar produced a bit longer work then usual, with a few more sophisticated tricks, but basically not so very different from his usual zany fare produced out of his bedroom and on the streets.

    The subject here is a common one for both him and his brother Mike, unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Except this time, our central figure actually does see and visit a flying saucer controlled by women, which so changes him that no one wants to believe him, including himself, despite his photographic evidence.

     It begins with three naked men huddled in a room, “stripped of our pretenses,” so declares the narrator, wondering how it all began. One of the members (David Hallinger) is massaging the central figure, Rock Ross, who after spotting a flying saucer, runs back to get his camera to take pictures as an alien woman leads him into the golden covered innards of the saucer. The ship's commander speaks a hippie-like gobbledygook about semi-philosophical ideas: “Time for us is all immediate. As part of creation, I experience the creation in small things, even a microbe.”

   In this case, however, the experience changes him, turning Ross into a sexual pervert who attacks women and sometimes even men. Many a time with a woman in the kitchen another handsome male with only a small towel wrapped around his waist enters and distracts him in his sexual business.

      All three, Ross and his two friends naked in the bedroom, evidently belong to the local UFO club, but at the weekly meeting one member merely recounts his recipes for how to make the perfect pot roast, while the chairman complains that he’s burned out and wants to get away to Hawaii. Ross’s experiences which are now necessarily hooked up as well with Big Foot, never get discussed.

       Much of the rest of the movie plays out his change in personality, where the formerly meek and shy man begins attacking women and fighting the men who might protect them.

       In between Kuchar waves undulating bands of color over supposed sex scenes while the camera follows Ross on his adventures.

       Eventually he is cured, and the head of the UFO club actually does get away to Hawaii to where the last fourth of Kuchar’s film follows him for far too long, trailing off into a kind of Hawaiian love story.

       As one Letterboxd commentator (Zara), new to the Kuchar world describes it, quite beautifully: “[It] almost feels likes something a teenager would make in the most positive way, a wild ride, playfully immature. …The real absurdity lies in the absolute mundanity of these paranoid UFO enthusiasts and their sex lives opposed to their off-kilter escapades…but it’s also kinda uninteresting?”

       And, of course, this like so many of his other films, Demonoids makes grand fun of all those hundreds of UFO movies, including the grandest puff-dragon of them all, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

 

Los Angeles, August 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 6, 2024).