The Dark Backwards (1991)

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Director: Adam Rifkin

Screenplay: Adam Rifkin

Cast: Judd Nelson as Marty Malt; Bill Paxton as Gus; Wayne Newton as Jackie Chrome; Lara Flynn Boyle as Rosarita; James Caan as Doctor Scurvy; Rob Lowe as Dirk Delta; King Moody as Twinkee Doodle

[SPOILERS THROUGHOUT]

Synopsis: In a rundown urbanscape of an unknown time, garbage man and aspiring stand-up comedian Marty Malt (Judd Nelson) may finally be able to get into the big time when a third arm inexplicably grows from his back. However being both manipulated by his best friend and co-worker Gus (Bill Paxton) and his new agent Jackie Chrome (Wayne Newton) as a freak show act, Malt will eventually learn that nothing is sacred for the sake of fame especially as he has already lost his girlfriend Rosarita (Lara Flynn Boyle) due to the new appendage.

The nineties is a strange era. Arguably the last true era of celluloid film as digital took over after the Millennium and the former format became more of an aesthetic choice. Arguably a post modern era which looked back at old pop culture and also dissected high brow thoughts in very unconventional ways. It was also a time where American films like The Dark Backwards could come to exist. Yes, strange films still come out with well known actors, but the nineties is full of these oddities that wouldn't have stood a chance a decade later. Particularly not with some of the lavishness this production has as, whilst it's still a film which emphasises awkward moments of conversation and small scale weirdness, this still builds up a world surrounding the story that could've gone into other narratives, a world of fifties American aesthetic if it had gone to the dogs. The film's existence is stranger knowing Adam Rifkin a year before made comedy horror The Invisible Maniac (1990), a pretty goddamn awful film that's evidence of poor man's Troma movies existing, and a year afterwards made Nutty Nut (1992), a comedy so bad I gave up on it years ago after the first ten to fifteen minutes. Here however, even if a viewer was too repulsed by The Dark Backward to appreciate it, Rifkin could be forgiven for any other film because he brought such a distinct, idiosyncratic work to the screen. A unique vision, one based on a script which he wrote at the age of nineteen so there was a clear emotional significance to adapting The Dark Backwards, which he had the budget and cast to depict with considerable resources. Occasionally the music of Marc David Decker betrays the production with cheap synth but even then there's a carnivalesque tone to the score which adds to the material.

Starting off a fairy tale, bookended by an actual hard bone tome being opened, isn't necessarily ironic considering fairy tales could be much darker and misanthropic, more moral lessons to which this one deals with the inevitable backstabbing and misery a person will go through. If The Dark Backwards had any deeper meaning, it's the story of Job only with significantly less reason behind the agony he suffers from a deity and just the pure greed of his garbage eating, greasy co-worker Gus being the cause. As a fairy tale goes, it's pretty hopeless here in a world that's utterly rundown. Hints of a nineties fifties modernism are shown decayed, its wholesome signs of the same  stereotypical housewife found everywhere from garbage trucks to a giant sign for suppositories on a billboard above towers. It's as much a film, whilst shot in California, that evokes the real life aesthetic of pre-cleanup New York City of late seventies and eighties genre cinema, even more garbage on the streets here that Marty and Gus' work truck has to actually plough through it all before anything is collected. This world is the combination of all the nightmares of urban city living where everything is grim. Polluted water running out of pipes in front of a Texas bar club's door, even live fish popping out of it. The sense that everything is in extreme poverty and the diners are greasy, mostly empty places rather than the beauty of a Edward Hopper painting. The interiors are as extreme, between kitsch objects cluttered in scenes (the black cat clock whose eyes go back and forth, the entire colour coding and decor of Jackie Chrome's office) to utter degradation. Where Marty's home is a claustrophobic environment and everything in the fridge has been rotted for a while, the chicken still eaten by Bill Paxton melting in his fingers in various coloured goo in one of the more repulsive moments of the movie.  

It's not a surprise how negative the reactions were to the film when it was first release, grotesque to an extreme just in appearance before you get to the plot itself and the characterisation. Marty Malt is the most nervous protagonist you could have, easily manipulated and doomed to be pulled along by others. A man whose jokes no one laughs at and has none of his concerns taken into consideration. When a lump appears on his back, it's arguable the third arm that eventually appears is a linearization of how ostracised he is, its place his gift to advance but also a curse others exploit and provides him nightmares as a dream sequence when he becomes a multi-armed mutant on a beach demonstrates. Dismissed as a mere lump by Dr. Scurvy, James Caan in a hilarious role as the worst bedside company you could get, the arm that appears and requires a modified suit jacket for the back for his stand-up is a burden as much as a success. One which has Chrome chose him more as a sideshow act with Gus taking advantage to be on stage to play his accordion. A story of blunt exploitation which even with the strangeness that appears onscreen constantly - a woman in  a Valkyrie outfit playing a "human accordion" of dwarves in sailor suits - is pretty real. Too uncomfortably real in some ways and as much the cause of the odious mood The Dark Backwards has but also why it succeeds, a real grimness that just happens to be depicted with Marty suddenly waking up one day with a fully usable arm sticking out of his back.

The humour feels decades too early as a result. The stand up itself is anti-humour, odd non-sequiturs whose humour is found in the low energy Judd Nelson puts in the line delivery. Unlike more modern comedy such as Tim & Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (2012) - another intentionally grotesque and weird film with the same tone of humour - there's no sense of being deliberately crass for the sake of it, closer to John Waters in how it takes a series of tastelessness but has more going on in scenes beyond them. The aesthetic look of the film plays as much a part of its tone. Whilst capable of just being utterly bizarre, such as having the late Paxton writhe around with three very large women in scanty underwear, there's a greater emphasis on a drama in seeing Marty constantly pushed around. Most will find him too weak to sympathise with, but for me it's impossible not to sympathise with him. The cast itself is vital as much as the colour and vibrancy of the world's degraded look for this humour to work. With this in mind, whilst everyone in the main roles plays their performances in an exaggerated way, there is noticeably a lack of "wackiness" to their performances, never with a sense of winking to the camera and still acting in a film with a full narrative structure, just one which exists in a more exaggerated world. Nelson for me works in the lead as someone who, with the mop of black hair over his eyes and spectacles representing all his neuroses, feels like a distillation of all socially shy figures beaten down over the decades. His ending, learning to use his eventual failure and being backstabbed for his act and finally getting laughter from the crowd, is a happy ending that inexplicably exists in as nasty a film like this.

Bill Paxton, as the blunt and vulgar Gus who gurns in most of his scenes, makes the most of his character. There's a scene early on which would immediately be too far for some viewers and force them to leave the film, where Gus finds a female corpse in a landfill site and starts to lick her body with a horrible intention, but Paxton manages even after this to make the character compelling. This again is closer to the reprobates John Waters depicted without bias in either direction in his films, characters who do deplorable acts but are fascinating to watch. Paxton's role is the one the most on a thin tightrope because of this, but he manages to succeed in creating a character who is always a bastard and deplorable throughout, but never someone so bad you don't want to follow him. Adding to the main trio is real life performer and singer Wayne Newton. There's a delicious (and intentional) irony in having such a performer playing the type of talent agent he's probably had to suffer with and maybe even ripped off by in his profession, slicked back hair and bright coloured suits hiding a slimy charm that's out for money. Again his performance in any other context would've been too off putting, yet Newton manages even to make the viewer have an emotional attachment to him trying to finally succeed in his life with Marty.

The Dark Backwards also openly embraces it weirdness. One that, wisely, builds itself up from grounded reality. A sense of a world that's cluttered into details which other films would ignore. That there's products made just for this world such as bacon juice in cartons. That the amateur talent show that's on TV all the time is screened through tube cameras, a strange programme that's picked up from another planet's signals and whose level of talent to entertain the kids is a man rolling on an old mattress. It's a film, considering where the script comes from, which Adam Rifkin clearly held with a personal closeness to and he managed to succeed in at least providing it the right production value.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Personal Opinion:

Material that is able to put two-thirds of a potential audience off but for the third that remains The Dark Backwards is the bleakest of laughs and one that some modern anti-humour can learn from in caring about shaping a world where its perversity is actually appropriate for the atmosphere.

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