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Director: John Albo
Screenplay: John Albo
Cast: Trevor Goddard as Monty; Rudi
Davis as Bertin; Sally Kirkland as Lillith
Synopsis: Living together, Monty (Trevor Goddard) a physical education teacher at a university fitness
obsessed muscle man with a homophobic streak, complicated sexuality and complex
due to being raised by his grandmother, who believes in being the best in
physical might. His teenager younger brother Bertin (Rudi Davis) is more sensitive, an intellectual but also with a
severe complex for a mother he never met and Christian mystical thoughts. Their
lives are to be drastically changed when an eccentric nun Sister Lilith (Sally Kirkland) enters their lives.
Among films left unfinished, only
to be finally completed decades later and released, Flexing With Monty is a one-off even a person like myself, a jaded
viewer of many a strange film, was taken back with. Starring Trevor Goddard, who most will know from
playing Kano in the 1995 live action Mortal
Kombat film, Flexing... was an
early nineties production that started in 1994 only to be finally released in
2010; in that time Goddard sadly
committed suicide in 2003, and one of the producers of the film also passed
away. That it's a film of the nineties, regardless of its actual release date,
means a lot to me. It's strange for myself, born in 1989 and a child of the
1990s, to see a production from that era and distinctly see the idiosyncrasies
from that time, completely separate to now as a time ago. Like The Dark Backwards (1991) or nineties Gregg Araki movies, these films are
going to grow in cult status now the nineties will probably get as much attention
as the eighties even in the mainstream. Those references are not out-of-place
either as they are the perfect comparisons for the oddity that is Flexing With Monty. Imagine the kind of
transgressive story found in classic Greek plays to William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus
- incest and gory revenge abound here - but with bright gel lighting Mario Bava would be proud of
and an idiosyncratic, mad script filled with enough religious symbolism to make
your head burst, and enough scatological and profane material to piss yourself
laughing over.
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| From http://sinsofcinema.com/Images/Flexing%20with%20 Monty/Flexing%20with%20Monty%201.jpg |
The tone is where you where you separate the casual fans of weird cinema from the obsessives as its a mad hodgepodge. Some feels retched from director/writer John Albo's own life clearly, especially with its Catholic references, and issues deal with sin and the place of women as corrupting forces in Christianity, and aspects that can never be explained such as Bertin acquiring a rare bird, actually a diminutive man in a cage (Manny Gates), who varies between masturbating to suddenly bursting into an aria for a profound moment. There's points in Flexing... where even I was surprised by where the tangents went, both in dialogue and when visualising some truly strange images. The dialogue's enough before Goddard, in arseless leather chaps and a cowboy hat, starts humping a stuffed polar bear in from a prostitute on his birthday as they elaborate the tale of his ancestor impregnating a bear in the forests. The combination is delirious, especially as the film, mostly set in deliberately artificial interior sets, adds to the deliberately sense of exaggeration on display.
That it's a tale of weird
psychosexual issues is amplified by the tone. Monty the brash, homophobe who
yet places ads in newspapers for gay cruising. Even that sequence, with leads
to him brutally harming the gay man who expects a pleasurable time, has the
strange mix of Monty harming him but still giving him the pleasure he wanted
only in a violent way. Obvious, with moments like this, this is going to turn
people off for how nasty the film is as out-there it is too. This is alongside
the truly weird moments like Bertin dreaming of giving birth to his own mother,
given an abortion by their grandmother with a knitting needle, extracting a
ball of wool from him. Or the incestuous moment about said nightmares between
the men. This type of drama is not common nowadays in mainstream storytelling,
which is strange as, as mentioned in the beginning, this is not that different
from the type of storytelling even Shakespeare
and the ancient Greeks wrote of, classic canonical art which dealt with the
complexities of human beings through extreme content. The issue is that this
type of storytelling is rarer in modern art baring that which is dubbed
"extreme" and gets divisive reactions from professional critics.
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| From http://sinsofcinema.com/Images/Flexing%20with% 20Monty/Flexing%20with%20Monty%207.jpg |
Flexing...'s plot is effectively the downfall of a completely amoral man, as told in classic literature and even cinema. Where the strangeness comes in is the tone and the heightened dialogue. As much as this type of extremer material has a basic in classic work, you still have to work around moments likeSally Kirkland's entrance into the film as Sister Lilith. Talking about a charity campaign to deal with pollution undermining the biology of the populous' brains. Which leads to her talking about having to lay eggs in a ditch. Which leads to a cut to Academy Award nominated actress herself in a post apocalyptic environment, naked and squatting in a wasteland ditch laying an actual egg. It's one thing to have a story, like Shakespeare's tales of revenge, which eventually gets into dismemberment and toxic family relationships, it's another to have scenes like this or dialogue as ripe to rattle off terms like "fried rat cunt" or muscles having their own souls with constant regularity. It's something special but also giddy in its madness that you have to be very prepared for.
As a result, however, it's also never
boring. It's also too well made to dismiss. Production wise, it's a low budget
film restricted in sets that stands out. It's also worth comparing, not only to
Araki, to the work of Stephen Sayadian, a.k.a. Rinse Dream, films like Cafe Flesh (1982) and, for a
non-pornographic production, especially Dr.
Caligari (1989) in its completely artificial look that feels on theatrical
sets. The central one, with Monty's gym that includes a giant hamster wheel for
him to run in, is spectacular especially with the deep, rich coloured lighting.
The cast as well are trying their hardest and chewing the scenery, and this is
where Flexing With Monty can get
away with being this mad in tone. Tragically, as mentioned, Goddard would pass away at the age of
forty, a true shame as whilst his Australian accent is over-the-top, actually
born in England, he's utterly compelling. Aware of the tone of the film, he's
in tune to the film's take on the extremes of masculinity within Monty, one
which arguably has a clear point to in within the weirdness again his toxic
macho attitudes, the whole misogynistic streak by way of Christian faith he has
subconsciously within (even with a sex worker who visits on his birthday talking
about Lilith as the first true wife of Adam), and the quasi (and frankly overt)
homosexuality in spite of his homophobia. He's an energised ball of energy, the
character constantly exercising or flexing, Goddard
at the peak of physical health on camera, the life force of the film whose
profane dialogue is richer due to his ridiculous fake Australian twang and
forcefulness. Monty is an utterly loathsome character who you yet follow
throughout gladly, the perfect anti-protagonist whose downfall is hideous as it
is sickly funny.
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The rest of the cast do as well though, especially Kirkland. In a film, among bizarre moments after another, where Monty's soul possesses his own penis, or Kirkland's scene where she reveals full body tattoos and goes into a frenzied religious monologue about the Whore of Babylon, you had to have a cast willing to both take the material serious but also, to quote Spinal Tap, go up to eleven to make it credible. It's here the film fully succeeds even if it's an acquired taste, a revenge tale like the nastier classics of yore brought kicking and screaming into the nineties. The extremes of people, over the top in tone and performances on purpose. The perversity, entirely appropriate and not out of place in context, telling a tale not that different from the likes of Oedipus only the later is of historical legacy and Flexing With Monty isn't. What separates it as well is Flexing...'s tone and style is something that makes its tale of bad blood and neurosis, until its calm and disquietly serene shot of a cabbage field, even more twisted and rewarding as a result.
Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychodrama/Psychotronic/Weird
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium
Personal Opinion:
Absolutely a ripe, bizarre
discovery still needing more coverage on. Flexing
with Monty will be very divisive for many viewers, but the few that can get
onto its wavelength will be morbidly delighted.
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| From http://sinsofcinema.com/Images/Flexing%20with%20 Monty/Flexing%20with%20Monty%2010.jpg |
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