Tim Sullivan | I Was a Teenage Werebear / 2011

when love bites you on the ass

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tim Sullivan (screenwriter and director), Patrick Copeland (music) I Was a Teenage Werebear / 2011 [30 minutes]

 

Poor cute boy Ricky O’Reily (Sean Paul Lockhart) is being chased by Peggy Lou (Gabrielle West) and can’t quite escape her attentions. This spoof begins with a rocking SUV in which Ricky in his

red tighties is being almost literally attacked by the octopi-like grabbing Peggy Lou, in only her bra and panties, trying to get fully under covers and into the sexual paradise.

      They’re interrupted by his father and little brother, the father delighted with his son’s seeming sexual activities, particularly since he’s been previously so reluctant. Ricky assures the leering parent, however, that “nothing happened.” And as far as Peggy Lou’s concerned, that’s just the problem. Every time they’re together, she observes her boyfriend looking at the other boys playing on the beach, and sings a ballad to help cure him: “Don’t Look Away.” But Ricky sings in response:

 

“Baby give me some time

  So I can make up my mind

  Just know that it isn’t you

  These feelings make me so blue.

 

  I’m trying real hard to find

  The one that makes me feel right

  Til then I guess that it’s you

  That’s just the best I can do.

 

  So I’ll look away, baby

  Guess, I’ll look away.”

      Clearly he’s got mixed feelings.

     And just at the moment his eyes are looking quite away from his supposed girlfriend as Talon and his twin duo show up. Talon takes Ricky’s hand and pulls him away at the very moment that Butch (Adam Robitel) speeds into the scene, running down Peggy Lou, her brains, what she had of them, splattered half way across her face. Butch is not at all sympathetic to either Peggy Lou or Ricky, who accuses the latter of playing with the boy’s balls instead playing ball with the boys. Butch threatens to see Ricky in class.

      Ricky turns to see if he can help Peggy Lou as Talon and his friends, Dan (Chris Staviski) and Den (John McCormick) walk off.

      So begins the quite hilarious Tim Sullivan drive-in movie horror tale spoof, I Was a Teenage Wearbear, one of the short cinema delights of LGBTQ films in the second decade of the 21st century.

      A kind of gypsy nurse, Nurse Maleva (Lin Shaye) suddenly appears to care for Peggy Lou, the gypsy assuring him she’ll be okay, but Ricky’s look away has suddenly focused on something else as he sees Talon and imagines himself and his new love suddenly romping on the beach, the gypsy cursing and shooing away the very object of Ricky’s desires. She recognizes him as a beast!

      At the local teen cheerleading rally and beach wrestling competition, meanwhile, Ricky pins Butch, and Talon appears to take on Ricky, in the process biting him the butt, which, of course, turns him soon thereafter into a fellow werebear.

      This tale certainly has it right, the werewolves of many a horror film were most definitely code for the outsider gays of the stories as I have made clear in the late 1940s and 1950s volumes. Here it’s made quite apparent that a werebear is a gay boy, Ricky now having fallen completely under the sway of leatherboy Talon.

      And already, as Ricky sings, he’s got a feeling that he’s going explode, wondering just much longer does he have hold on to his load. “OOOOh what do I do? I really gotta purge this urge.” “The time is comin’,” he continues, “when I gotta choose. There’s no more hidin,’ no more playin’ by the boss man’s rules.” Now only in his jockstrap, Ricky dances out his recognition that he’s got to “purge the urge.”

      Coach Tuffman (Tim Sullivan) has overheard Ricky’s plea, and takes him into his office for a discussion. Ricky explains that he’s been told to be true to himself, and he tries to be, but sometimes he gets these urges, some of them seemingly “the wrong kind” of urges. Tuffman confesses that he too gets these urges as he watches the boys showering, and suddenly the coach is between Ricky’s thighs ready to do something for him, he promises, that his wife will never do. It’s at that moment, however, when Ricky realizes his new found strength, squashing coach’s head between his legs, blood spurting everywhere, eyeballs popping. Ricky is now a murderer.

      Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending upon how you see it—Talon and his boys show up to help him clean up Coach Tuffman, Ricky realizing suddenly that his new-found powers have to do with Talon’s bite in the ass.

    But just when they’re finished, the Coach, Butch and his gang appear and seeing the two boys together he is out to prove a lesson to the pansy boys. Butch pulls down his pants presumably to fuck Talon.

    We know immediately where this will end. Talon turns into a true werebear and he and his duo turn the room into a blood bath.

      But this time Ricky doesn’t join in, and he doesn’t turn into a werebear. “I’m not like any of you,” he insists. Poor Ricky, between a rock and a hard place surely. In only his jock, Ricky runs to Nurse Maleya to beg for her help, telling her that Talon and the twins are not “just different,” she interrupts him “they’re werebears.” She explains: “Where I come from there is an old saying. Even a boy who thinks he’s straight, but shaves his balls by night, may become a werebear in the hormone’s rage and the latent urge takes flight.”

      Where can Ricky turn? Peggy Lou is now a drooling idiot (just as perhaps she has long been inside). When Ricky gets a hard-on for a picture of a muscle-man that Maleya produces, he knows that he is truly now a werebear, even though Peggy Lou is convinced he’s just a homo.

       Ricky hurries back to his van, where he finds Talon waiting, ready for sex. But Ricky refuses, saying Talon has done this to him, Talon insisting it is beast in himself, and sings “Love Bit Me on the ass” with the twins as backups, finally our cutey Ricky joining in:

 

                  Love, love bit me on the ass,

                  Bit me deep down too.

                  Love bit on the ass,

                  But I’m in no way like you.

 

                  I may be quite different,

                  But I am not a beast.

                  I just want to cuddle

                  And you just want a piece.

 

    Nonetheless, the lovely Ricky also turns into a flabby, hairy-faced monster just like Talon. Talon tells him to meet him down at the luau where they plan a bloodbath for all the slights they’ve received. But even now Ricky refuses to join in, arguing that’s now the way you gain acceptance. Talon knocks him out.

     At the luau the lead singer performs “Sexy Waves.” But the next up in Talon and his gang, who sing “Do the Werebear,” the entire remainder of the class dancing agreeably along.

     Ricky shows up just in time, masturbates until he too turns into a werebear again and challenges Talon, but fails. Maleva knows just what to do. With the metal bat Ricky has brought she jabs it up the asses of the twins which immediately turns them back into dead human beings. She hands the baton to Ricky he jambs it up Talon’s but three times, falling him, Talon admitting there should have been more like him, as Rich holds him in a position that can only remind one of James Dean’s Jim Stark held Sal Mineo’s Plato at the end of Rebel without a Cause.

    Ricky sings a song just for Talon, a pean to gay life that Talon and his duo weren’t able to realize: “There’s Room for All.”

 

     “I dig bananas, and you dig pears.”

       Just because we’re different, there should no squares.

 

      Grab girl or grab your buddy, whichever way you play.

      Come on let’s face it, everybody’s gay.”

 

    In the end, accordingly—at least California—love is open to everybody. But what about the venom left in Ricky’s system by Talon’s bite? Next time he gets aroused by a passing lad, will he safely remain in his cute red tighties or jock strap or go wild in a leather strap.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).   

 

Jenifer Malmqvist | Na koncu ulicy (At the End of the Street) / 2007

table

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jenifer Malmqvist (screenwriter and director) Na koncu ulicy (At the End of the Street) / 2007 [14 minutes]

 

Directed by the Swedish born Jenifer Malmqvist who studied filmmaking in Poland, this Polish-language film features a woman, Aleksandra (Ela Komorowska) angrily trudging through the city streets to visit her former lover, Monika (Joanna Glen).

     She is stopped by a local policeman (Mikolaj Osiński) and fined for crossing a crosswalk against the light. He tries to explain that the small fee surely is worth possibly saving her life.

      But so focused is Aleksandra about her hurt, anger, and most of all the pain of having lost her lover, that it hardly seems to register. She arrives at her former apartment and calls up to Monika, who refuses to come down even for a few moments to talk with her.

      Aleksandra insists she will simply wait in the middle of the street until Monika does come down, and she lays down in the middle of road, but to no avail.

      We soon see her putting her old key into the lock and tip-toeing into the apartment where Monika is celebrating her new novel with friends, including her new lover, Dziewczyna Moniki (Masza Steczek), the two of them regularly exchanging kisses.

     From around a corner, Aleksandra watches the affair, becoming more hurt and infuriated by the moment. Finally she reveals herself, Monika explaining once again that she cannot talk to her at this time. “As you can see, I am busy.”

      Aleksandra insists that she has come to claim some more of her belongings, by Monika reminds her that she has long ago removed everything from the apartment. But the very table in which Monika and her friends are dining evidently also belongs to Aleksandra and she demands it back.

      Appalled, her guests quietly stand and begin clearing it off, Monika’s new lover attempting to comfort her for the rude embarrassment and the interruption of the celebration of her new novel.

      In the hall where Aleksandra waits, Monika comes to her, attempting to calm her down with a kiss. But the table soon is delivered up, and Aleksandra drags it out onto the streets and begins to clumsily pull it back in the direction from where she has begun her visit of revenge.

      The policeman, now in an auto, stops, asking if she needs help. She refuses, suggesting all that she needs is a drink. He stops the car, gets out, opens his trunk, and pulls out a bottle of beer which he hands her, and she begins to swill down.

      Noticing votive candles and flowers in the trunk, Aleksandra wonders if he had been visiting the cemetery, the policeman replaying he had intended to, but it closed before he could. His wife died six years ago, he explains, at the end of the street, hit by a car.

      The two are now brought together by loss, and he attempts to pull legs off the table in order to place it into the trunk in order to help her get it home. But the legs, which she affixed, seem unmovable, and before long, these two lonely individuals standing closely next to each other, fall into a series of shy kisses.

       When he attempts to get more serious, however, she hits him hard, wandering off in the director of his wife’s death. However, she soon returns, apologizing, explaining that she misses her lover so very much.

       Together they sit in his car for a short period of time just to get out of the rain and perhaps calm down their respective emotions.

        She asks if the place where she hit him still hurts, and he scoffs it off. She is ready to leave, and he asks about the table. “You can have it,” she answers, leaving the car and walking off.

       A few seconds later, the policeman drives off in the other director, the table remaining on the side of the road where the two have left it, symbol of how both their communal lives have been turned over by the loss of their loved ones.

       Malmqvist’s work is a gritty testimony to Beckett’s oft-quoted phrase, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2025).

      

Gaspar Antillo | Nadie Sabe Que Estoy Aquí (Nobody Knows I’m Here) / 2020

the invisible man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Enrique Videla, Josefina Fernández, and Gaspar Antillo (screenplay) Gaspar Antillo, director Nadie Sabe Que Estoy Aquí (Nobody Knows I’m Here) / 2020

 

Chilean director Gaspar Antillo’s first feature film, Nobody Knows I’m Here, is now being broadcast on Netflix.

      It’s a lovely film if you stay with it throughout its early long scenes. Several critics have commented that because we don’t know the reasons behind the central figure Memo Garrido’s (played with great subtlety by Jorge Garcia) silence and brooding emotions until the very end of the movie, the director does not provide us with enough information to have sustained sympathy for this gentle, morbidly overweight hulk.

    We do know that whatever has happened in the past, his uncle Braulio (Luis Gnecco) has taken him in to his large, hermit-like Llanquihue farm, surrounded by water on all sides, in Southern Chile.

     Maybe those viewers simply missed the early clue that the young Memo, growing up in Miami and dreaming of becoming a young celebrity singer with a voice that would make any young girl—and even boy—cry out in joy, is told, after his father’s reticent acceptance, that he is too unphotogenic to take the stage, but will be forced to sing for a handsome young mohawk-haired heartthrob, Angelo, who grows famous while Memo remains invisible, much like Debbie Reynolds behind the scrim in front of which Jean Hagen (as the horrible Lina Lamont) pretends to sing her heart out in Singin’ in the Rain.

     While it is true that the action is very slow-going throughout most of the film, with Memo basically cleaning sheep skins for his uncle and secretly reading books he has ordered up by Angelo (Gastón Pauls), now a celebrity hawker of popular, somewhat new age advice, the long scenes which we experience with this speechless being—whose only adventures, it appears is breaking into people’s homes while they are out and sewing up spectacular multi-colored costumes, presumably, in his imagination, for a would-be comeback as a performer, facing his audience for the very first time or perhaps just day-dreaming about what might have happened if he’d been given the chance.

     Most critics seem to be in accord that he breaks into houses just to have a look-around, while I thought that his illegal entries were, in fact, connected with those quilt-like costumes, that Memo entered others’ homes to find small swaths of cloth and sequined material in order to create his outlandish costumes. Is it any wonder that he is later attracted to enter a fashion designer’s home?

      Suddenly, however, something else, or rather, someone else enters his secluded life in the form of a rather plain-looking, but loving and sharp-thinking woman, the young fashion designer from town I just mentioned, who boats out to the Garridos’ island, Marta (Millaray Lobos), bringing some of her sick uncle’s lamb skins to be prepared by Nemo and his uncle.

     Over time, Marta chisels away Memo’s reticence, and discovers behind this quiet man someone of substance, who strangely has painted his nails with a gaudy, glittery silver, but whips up designs of his own.

      Unable to speak normally to her, in order to stop her one day from leaving, he sings out to her is most popular song, “Nobody Knows I’m Here,” Suddenly, and quite by accident, when she records his beautiful voice on her cell phone revealing another being hidden behind the taciturn man.

     Later, teasing Marta about their relationship, her would-be boyfriend, a journalist, grabs her phone in search of photos of himself, only to discover Nemo singing what appears to be Angelo’s hit, which he quickly links to a video of the young Memo entering the popular singer’s set after one of his performances to beat him up, and event which landed the young Angelo ever after in a wheelchair.

       Now, we can explain Memo’s attempts to remain hidden. The unknowing fans of the telegenic Milli-Vanilli-like performer,* the attacker is a villain without logic. They cannot know—and by film’s end probably will never know—that the assailant was simply attempting to reclaim his voice.

       Call me a contrarian, but here also I disagree with the majority of those who have written to date on this film who find the very next scene, after several of these irate fans show up at his uncle’s doorway, as the first of what they uniformly describe as “surreal” scenes.    

     These scenes have little to do with actual dream-images or distorted views of reality, despite their insertion in what otherwise is basically a naturalistically conceived work. Rather, I’d argue they are simply visual representations of Memo’s inner feelings (his sudden disgorgement of a thick, mucus like red substance that seems to never end), a later face-to-face meeting in the forest with a drone (revealing Memo’s fear of being now watched), and the long penultimate scene of Antillo’s work, where it appears that Memo has been seduced by his callous father (Alejandro Goic) to make one final appearance when interviewed with the wheelchair-bound Angelo, who insists he has forgiven Memo, while still refusing to reveal the reason for the original assault: that he has stolen from the man his greatest gift, his voice, after which Memo grabs the microphone, beautifully singing his pop-hit with a sudden accompanying orchestra behind. We can easily comprehend this as a righteous fantasy that the man, who did not take up his father’s offer, stirs up to assuage his anger. For Memo, it becomes obvious, there is no difference between what happens in the world outside and what goes on in his head. These are not surreally conceived chunks thrown into Antillo’s realistic film, but are internalized explanations, externally revealed, of Memo’s actions throughout the entire work.

      Just before this scene, we observe a more symbolic incident, in which Memo enters the water, a true leviathan, while his uncle tells him that he should remember that he is a good man at heart, “a large gentle man”—suggesting a kind of leviathan with no Ahab chasing after.

      The last frames of this film show Memo, once more in the garb that we wore previously, bib overalls, while lying in bed, side by side, with Marta, whom, when he rolls over, hugs and kisses him.

      By film’s end Memo has been able to demonstrate his talent, even if only in his imagination. And perhaps he too can now forgive the studios, his father, Angelo, and, most importantly, himself. Clearly, through this film, he has helped us to all see he is “here.”

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).

 

*In 1989, the group, consisting of singers Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, known as Milli Vanili, were revealed, after problems with their amplification system (one recording kept skipping and repeating part of a single line) and the revelation by one of their real singers, that they were not actually performing their own songs such as their hit “”Girl You Know That’s True,” but rather were lip-synching their songs.

     It must have been that same year or soon after that Dick and Dee Sherwood invited us, along with artist David Sallle and choreographer Karole Armitage, who were then a couple, to dinner at their home.

     Somehow the six of us got into a discussion of the recent break-up and lawsuits surrounding Milli Vanili, with Karole volunteering that it was she who had choreographed most of their moves, suggesting they weren’t very able when it came to their terpsichorean talents. The similarities between Antillo’s work and this German-born performing group are many, except that Milli Vanili used a wide-range of other performers to sing their ditties, several of the singers later suing the producer and the performers themselves.