Final Flesh (2009)

 

Director: Ike Sanders

Screenplay: Vernon Chatman

An Abstract Candidate

 

My beauty is a force, my beauty is a weapon, and that's why I must commit optical suicide.

Ah, Final Flesh...it is a film which never got a release in the United Kingdom, and has disappeared after its DVD print run in the United States, yet it haunts the world. Befittingly it was online, through word-of-mouth, through versions of the film existing online, and being possible to book through the American Genre Film Archive for theatrical screenings. Final Flesh is also a film I openly admit to despising when I first saw it, and I have huge reservations now whilst the opinion has softened, one whose premise is compelling as an idea, has snippets that are inspired, but can stil be worked on for new ideas as this version is far from perfect.

Ironically, the problems I have are entirely from the work of the person who is the most recognisable figure in the film and came up with the project, the writer of the scripts Vernon Chatman. Beginning as a stand-up comedian, Chatman would eventually be a co-creator on such titles like Wonder Showzen (2005-6), and for Final Flesh, he decided to pen deliberately absurdist scripts, full of irrational stream-of-consciousness, and send them to different adult film companies who specialised in filming scripts sent to them and paid for to be produced. This concept is not new even in context of the 2000s, as whilst softcore, some readers may be aware of W.A.V.E Productions, a cult outfit who filmed work from submitted scripts and financed from the public, Where cult figures like Tina Krause worked with as actresses, these were kind of films which do not have Chatman's deliberate intent for perverse surrealism but catered to fetishes; Eaten Alive: A Tasteful Revenge (1999), W.A.V.E's most infamous work, fully encapsulates this because, about a female executive who decides to climb the corporate ladder by shrinking and eating her opposition, it predates vore fetish in internet meme parlance from the time the internet was still a fledgling oddity.

Final Flesh was made in an alternative way however, where the film's main driver, rather than filming others' work, was the person who sent the scripts to unsuspecting adult production teams, who with full professionalism create what is close to the scripts. They have to make heads or tails of deliberately abstract, deliberately random and weird word salads of narrative. There is a danger of this being exploitative, but I suspect the actors and filmmakers were aware of the weirdness they worked on, a day's work, and clues throughout will show this in the film itself. Far more an issue for me is none of the performers or the directors, one audibly giving directions in the third group's film, are properly given credit for being co-authors, something pertinent with how each side of Final Flesh's collaborators influence the final piece. History views this as a Vernon Chatman work, with the figure of "Ike Sanders" given the directorial credit; the lack of reference to who made these does leave a bad taste about Final Flesh, especially when how these are interpreted, from the source material, is just as important for the experience.

The set up for Final Flesh is a family - mother, father, daughter called the Pollards - who live in a post-apocalypse or an imminent one, seemingly being reincarnated in different bodies for the structure of all four parts to the point of being almost cyclical. The first segment sets the tone - in nuclear fallout, the daughter births a meat steak named Mr. Peterson whom she breastfeeds, the mother births eggs and has to bathe in the tears of children, and eventually the father is punished for his behaviour by his mother and daughter. That involves by being tricked into believing he is not a forty plus year old man but still an infant, encouraged to crawl back into his mother's womb, his mother being played by his wife, only for the obvious practical issues of a grown man's size making this physical impossible to pull off. Here, you get the full awareness, alongside a shower scene early on with the tears of orphans, that these are professional adult actors comfortable with being not only naked but performing real sex acts, as you see how impossible this is even if it is comically a man's head between his colleagues legs as a result, the image as if he is comfortable being there between her. More so as the first segment starts the film with a greater positivity for me, than encountering Final Flesh the first time long ago, with this almost being a bonding experience, and strangely sweet for this family, adding to the weirdness.

Final Flesh wants to be irrational, transgressive and shocking. It feels of its time period too - Vernon Chatman shows a clear disdain for organised religion throughout also includes a Koran being read on a toilet, a real copy involved despite none of its sacred passages being read and an improvised story involved as well. It is also apparent however too that, whilst returning to Final Flesh includes a lot of surrealism I admire, it is Chatman himself who proves the weakest link in this collaboration. My hated for Final Flesh originally when I first saw it was from the perspective of it being among titles which represented how badly misunderstood the word "surreal" and the word "weird" are, with the issue that it signposted these with wacky exclamation and without building a logic, usually based on real life, to wrap around itself. I have softened to the film, more so as I will get to the adult film makers and casts' sides of this production, but this is still a film which, for most of the time, will try for humour by having characters quote politics or religion in an inappropriate moment, which outstays itself welcome for being entirely gauche than striking.

The problem is also that Final Flesh manages to be too random in its scripts at times. Non sequiturs are a common gag in general, be it strange turns of phrase to the political references, and eventually Chatman's penmanship does suffer from being a word salad on purpose, never connecting the tissues of some of these ideas at all. I admit, some of the films I would defend now in the obscurer corners of surreal and weird cinema would be random for many to the point of detraction - I admit to being once someone who never got on with the abstract cinema I want to talk and write about now, so I come from the sense of having had the difficulty with getting the logic of even an obscure and easily divisive work. A great example of surrealism with its transgressive and shocking content from the 2000s, from this era, is Takashi Miike's Gozu (2003), which ties itself into a logic, a crime boss' lackey trying to find him when he goes missing, the subtext of his love for him amplified when a beautiful woman appears claiming to be the boss in a new skin. That film was shocking too in how Miike regular actor Renji Ishibashi plays a criminal leader who needs a ladle up his anus to be able to have an erection, and in reverse to one of Final Flesh's more successful moment, concludes with a woman gives birth to a grown man, all done with a blackened humour coursing through its veins and even whimsy.

A surreal film, even if with huge flaws you can accept, should feel like a dream where everything makes sense in mood even if it does not make sense written out. Final Flesh at times feels like a mass of white noise you dream that wakes you up, even the sub consciousness unable to process it, before you fall asleep again only to be woken up again when the mind still cannot process it, over and over in a cycle. It also does not wish to be Brechtian either, to be deliberately jarring, which could have given more to these jarring shifts. In contrast, the homemade pornographic filming helps more in Final Flesh's favour. I write this as well, with how much time having changed, with a maturity now rejecting my dismissal of how the material is very basically edited was acceptable for me now. Nowadays I have no care if the acting can waver. I was once one who said I could not stand with fellow cult film fans in enjoying any z-grade, straight to video production, saying I needed some aesthetic craft or it has to be a rare one-off, the "1% to the dreadful 99%". That has changed considerably, my appreciation for the hard work of any production, especially the lowest of budgeted, grown over the years away from that opinion. Vernon Chatman is still a significant auteur on this project, but the filmmakers who he sent the scripts to are also providing influence on the final form. Knowing they are not properly credited over the years does add a contentious nature to the film's reputation which should be challenged, when they have to figure out how this all connects and add to the results.

The home made form of adult cinema, in clip forms online, is inherently fascinating. With aesthetic choices can actually be described as rooms out of furniture catalogues, there is an inherent surrealism possible from the more stripped down verisimilitude and even the explictly corporal eroticism their casts are willing to bare onscreen, a paradox in how natural reality is interpreted is just as strange as the fantastical. Parts 2 and 3 of the film do show the flaws as much as the virtues of this entire project, Part 2 especially as it has the more fleshed out of the plots, that the family realises they are trapped by God. Able to hear him through the notes He slips under their front door, they try to escape and there is enough here for a bizarre farce already. Chatman derails this with a lot of tangents in just the dialogue, which could have been jettisoned entirely when it has two clear set pieces he could have emphasised - the attempted escape, the daughter distracting God by offensive to let Him see her naked, and the father on his deathbed, in one of the film's most iconic and best moments, being informed by his wife that she is seeing someone else, and then putting a skull mask on as the new boyfriend.

How the segments figure out Chatman's work is really what succeeds for me, where the random ejaculations do become unnecessarily numerous, changing the point when the lengthier sequences in themselves and their set pieces are the real meat, literally in the case of Mr. Peterson in the first segment, forcing the viewer to accept the reality of this. The reality porn has, trying to make everything make sense in a grounded, stripped back reality, even if faked, is an aura you already have as an advantage if you wished to use it, and the best of Final Flesh is less the juggling of new lines and weirdness, more in sustaining those which linger as long as possible before moving on. With limited resources, the casts make do with what they can and prove the more rewarding in engaging with these stories, even in terms of acquiring some of the more unconventional items like seashells for unconventional moments in their working lives to have shot onscreen. They themselves are auteurs for this work too, and even before Part 4, the final one, Part 3 clearly shows the creators influencing the script by feeling it should still qualify as porn - here you get an actual erection onscreen, with self-fluffing, and a pencil being self inserted as an erotic act even if it mean to abort a mind baby.

Throughout as well I could not help but have greater sympathy for the casts for this reason, more so as, whilst professional filming, this does feel like real people in the same way as no budget genre cinema has. Pornography's change from the older films copying cinema has ended up with a lot of verisimilitude as much as the artificial clichés still appear, as any medium honestly, and even the one figure in Part 3 who could be seen visually as the stereotype of a female porn actor, with her dyed orange/blonde hair and buxom figure, still feels like someone who you could bump into on the street. There is a humanising aspect to this type of filmmaking even if its content can be extremely artificial, the extreme artifice of this work in Final Flesh contrasted by the real people bending and uttering these words. Even the one man in Part 4 who looks like Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins, if he was a David Lynch vampire, is a real person as much as he has a good look for a porn actor as a result.

Part Four, as mentioned, is special as the creators were aware what was posted through their letterbox from Vernon Chatman, this the most successful of the four segments because everyone on and off screen realised they were given a strange object, not a script for someone's sexual fantasies. Alongside the sense they work on more Gothic slanted erotica between this, it is so clear from the dark rooms and the micro budgeted mood that they went head first into making an art film. The other aspect that undercuts Final Flesh with its flaws is the existence of Steven "Rinse Dream" Sayadian, who from his hardcore work as director and/or screenwriter, even his one softcore film Dr. Caligari (1989), managed to balance out explicit sexuality with a legitimately weird stream of consciousness turn of dialogue, full of pop culture and references, weird turns of phrase, which is a height above what Chatman does here. You can sit through a later Sayadian film which is just a compilation of hardcore sex like Party Doll A Go- Go! (1991), and still find a grain of virtue to appreciate even if a lesser one, because even someone like Randy Spears, a figure most know for just being a porn actor in a lot of adult films, gets to run with some of the most idiosyncratic and poetic streams of weirdness possible for basic dialogue between the sex scenes. I have become to appreciate now too how Sayadian even repeated lines over and over again through his actors, like a mantra; here Chatman was pecking at his feet by coincidence and could have taken the lesson from that touch of less dialogue, and more repeating the weirdness he already hit the target with earlier to dumbfound the audience more.

The fourth and final segment does have a Sayadian air around it. Rinse Dream would approve, as everyone watches outside in fear of the atomic bombs being dropped, the main trio beginning to say "They're coming" over and over again until they are all collectively orgasmic, something befitting the other's work. That even unique to Chatman's script here is where he manages with success, what was in pockets beforehand, with the added impact of the onscreen creators filming this are adding to the images by just fleshing them out. We witness birth and reincarnation when the daughter has her parents' corpses copulate, birth many raw chickens which become them again under a sheet a la a magic act, and that is a bizarre image already to picture; it grows in a micro-budget Goth erotic piece of weirdness where everything works. If Final Flesh has focused on fewer strange ideas, and still let the adult filmmakers figure out how to film them, I would be softer on the film more than I am already. When it succeeds, it succeeds. Enough is here that Final Flesh is still abstract, completely so, but with its randomness actually undercutting this at times. This is still a film whose nature I admire, only with both the sense that history has lied by just saying Vernon Chatman made this, and that it could have done with a few rewrites before he sent the scripts off. My compliments to him, for all my criticisms of the work, as he has continued to have success in his own ventures and Final Flesh has a notoriety to this day, is that if he ever decided to try this again for a sequel, in the PornHub and Only Fans era of online pornography, he could make a film that is still special, with lessons learn and still dumbfound the mortified viewers who even liked this one perfectly as it is.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Quirky/Random/Weird

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