Jon Moritsugu’s demented slabs of proto-punk weirdness have arrived in high definition courtesy of folks at the American Genre Film Archive and are sick, crazy and fun as hell! Cool tunes, a mean streak and a delicious sense of anarchy await!
After a series of experimental lo-fi shorts, Moritsugu directed his first feature My Degeneration which sets the tone for the rest of his career. We follow the rise of the all-girl rock band Bunny Love and their quest for fame as the spokespersons for the beef industry (at least I’m pretty sure that’s what was going on in this weird slice of counter-culture cinema). It’s a strange flick with talking cow heads and what not but that’s pretty much par for the course with Moritsugu. Another element of the film that also helps set the tone for the rest of Moritsugu’s career is his use of vitriolic hardcore and punk music from bands like Gov’t Issue and Bongwater. Cool stuff!
Moritsugu follows up My Degeneration with another lo-fi black & white slice of odd with Hippy Porn where we again follow three teens as they navigate the world. These guys are way less ambitious than the girls of My Degeneration though. They seem to be mostly interested in sitting around drinking, smoking and talking about nothing. Hippy Porn does have some pretty entertaining dialogue, crass non-sequiturs that amount to little. The music is still cool even though this film feels like a little of a step down from My Degeneration.
Up next for Moritsugu is the delirious and crazy candy-colored anti-sitcom Terminal USA. It follows the wacked out implosion of a supposedly regular Japanese-American nuclear family. Except that the daughter is a nymphomaniac boning the family lawyer, one son is a drugged out waste of space and one son is seemingly straight-laced but harboring a secret gay crush on a neo-Nazi. The movie gets more and more fun the violence escalates and the performances become pitched at Douglas Sirk levels of melodrama but with the fucked up sensibility of John Waters. Terminal USA may be my favorite film of the set actually.
Following up that winner is another really fun, ridiculous film Mod Fuck Explosion. With a title like that, you know something bizarre is in store. Moritsugu returns to a theme common to most of his films as we follow a disaffected teen dealing with her family and the world around her in swinging London, or at least London as through the filter of Moritsugu’s strange sensibilities. The film has a West Side Story-like story involving mods and bikers at war with each other as well. This one feels a little more scattered than Terminal USA but is still one of Moritsugu’s best.
Up next we have the film Fame Whore, a film that jumps back and forth between three different stories involving people who delude themselves to hang onto fame or adoration. We follow a famous tennis star who is taken down a peg when a rumor that he’s gay leaks to the press, a fiercely determined and endlessly untalented woman who is relentless in her desire to succeed in the fashion industry and later in the music business, and a weird, insular guy who wants to do good in the world by working at an animal shelter who starts hallucinating a giant talking St. Bernard. This is another one that cracked me up pretty hard at times and was a lot of fun in general even if the stories have little to nothing to do with one another.
For his sixth film Scumrock, Moritsugu unfortunately makes the switch to video (I’m sure as a cost-cutting measure) to tell the story of a filmmaker trying to make his masterpiece but having to face the harsh realities of a world where not everyone is destined for greatness. Mirroring this story, we also follow a punk chick who tries to keep her band going despite their dwindling crowds and crap venues they’ve been forced to play in. In a lot of ways, this one reminds me a lot of Moritsugu’s first two films in how lo-fi and rough around the edges it is. It wouldn’t surprise me if Moritsugu made an intentional decision to go back to his roots while also reflecting on where he is in life. At this point, he recognizes that he is probably not going to have a massive Sundance hit and has accepted his place in the world of underground indie filmmaking.
In the last film in this set, Pig Death Machine, Moritsugu seems to have firmly embraced his wild side with his most aggressive uncommercial film to date. It almost seems like an amalgamation of everything he has done up until this point. Taking the incredibly lo-fi DIY shot-on-video of Scumrock and fusing with the John Waters-on-crack manic insanity of Terminal USA and Mod Fuck Explosion, Pig Death Machine gives us Moritsugu’s most bizarre punk rock smorgasbord involving some kind of Dr. Frankenstein-esque insane woman who has a telepathic link with plants. The film is full of hallucinatory dream sequences and general weirdness that defies categorization. I didn’t love it as much as Terminal USA, Mod Fuck Explosion or Fame Whore but it’s still a wild time worth checking out if you want to delve into some of Moritsugu’s most unfiltered tendencies.
As one would expect of a DIY indie filmmaker set, the transfer quality is a little all over the map, particularly since they are all coming from either 16mm or tape/video masters. Still, AGFA has done a pretty solid job of preserving what I think Moritsugu intended with the look of the films. Overall, they probably look as good as they ever will. The audio is also something of a mixed bag, again due to the source limitations but overall I never had trouble understanding what was said. And the awesome soundtracks that most of these films are rocking come through quite well for the most part.
This set has a very healthy set of extras including commentaries by Moritsugu and actress Amy Davis for My Degeneration, Terminal USA, Mod Fuck Explosion and Fame Whore and Moritsugu is very candid with where his ideas come from and how various scenes were shot. In general, they’re good commentaries if you want some stories on indie filmmaking in the ’80s and early ’90s. Mod Fuck Explosion also includes a commentary by AGFA’s Elizabeth Purcell. Also included are a couple of Moritsugu’s short films, Little Debbie Snackwhore of New York City and Crack and both are the kind of wonky lo-fi experiments you’d expect. We also have a Q&A with Moritsugu that was conducted over Zoom for Fantastic Fest and is a nice interview with Moritsugu giving lots of info like in the commentaries. One of the craziest things about Terminal USA is that it was actually funded by and broadcast on PBS, in a censored form naturally. This censored PBS cut is included on the disc as well as a rough cut of the movie. Mod Fuck Explosion and Scumrock include outtakes and auditions as well. To top it all off, we also get a nice booklet included an interview with Moritsugu conducted around the time of Mod Fuck Explosion that has some overlap with some of the things Moritsugu talked about elsewhere on the discs but is a nice summary for folks who don’t want to pour through all the extras on the discs.
I gotta say, taking a trip through the mind of Moritsugu was mostly a blast and at their best, Moritsugu’s films are a great representation of the punk ethos and anarchic drive of the beaten down but always persevering DIY indie filmmaker. This set is definitely worth checking out if your sensibilities skew toward the lo-fi and unusual.