Defending This Is Not The Point Of The FIlm's Existence, Just Enjoy The Damn Thing: Intrepidos Punks (1980)

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Dir. Francisco Guerrero

What, exactly, is the reason a viewer would watch an obscure "Mexploitation" film about a violent punk, biker gang? Yes, "violent punk, biker gang" would sell to a lot of people, but bear in mind, its narrative is non-existent, and there are plenty of other films that are just as tasteless and gaudy. Yet it's still compelling. A group of cineast misfits over the internet have rediscovered this film, spreading rips of a Mexican VHS type probably never intended for English language availability, given it fansubs, and spreading word on it to the point this Brit hear about it, watched it without English subs raw, watched it again with fansubs and is reviewing it now. It far from great, but still entertaining in a perverse way. Why?

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The narrative as it is splits into two parts. The first is the titular punks, who go about breaking out one of their leaders and members of the gang from prison before going on their personal rampages around the Mexican highways. The second is of two policemen who burst smugglers and drug dealers, and take the job of tracking the punks from their previous history with them. These two strands only connect properly by the end, where they literally cross paths. Infamous Hong Kong director Godfrey Ho, who connected two or three films of varying genres together in one movie, made much more of an effort to connect his loose ends together. The loose ends here are gigantic. It undercuts the usual compromise exploitation cinema usually ends up with, where we revel in perversity before moral law deals with it and normalcy wins out, by making the win for morality feel like a half-arsed joke. The two cops, as well, while allowed to have a chatty back-and-forth interaction, come off as far less interesting and liable to be even more corrupt and scuzzy than the punks for all their wanton carnage. The result is that the true subject of interest, the punks' amorality, is amplified. Those easily offended will find the celebration of rape, brutality and a prolonged moment of a man being set on fire gasoline horrifying. However, not only does the film come off as exceptionally silly, but the film could come off, if you are willing to step back from the moral highground, as a safe, healthy way to consider these images than to let them exist in reality. I cannot help but think of a quote from his autobiography where film director Luis Buñuel admitted that he did have morally offensive thoughts occasionally but that, as thoughts only, they existed as a harmless concept and had to be accepted as being something that exists. The existence of such ideas can be subversive, and while Intrepidos Punks is just pure exploitation without political messages, the punch to the stomach it gives is still effective. The film is only defensible if viewed as a tacky attack on good taste, which is not a dismissal at all but the honest truth about it. Its sordid in its content, but the intentions of the director were probably to do this in the first place, and those offended by it will have to accept that the film's existence is only around this fact.

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The aesthetic and cultural content of the film is what is the main draw of it as well. This could dangerously be translated as a form of cultural tourism that is patronising and places Western snark over another country's genre cinema, but in a positive light it's learning about another country even through its trashier art. I doubt motorbike punk gangs led by lucha libre wrestlers wearing chainmail masks existed even in the eighties, but the rawness of the film and the translation of punk iconography are things unique to this movie. The only "Mexploitation" film I saw before this was Night of the Bloody Apes (1969). The thing is though, while with its own look and female lucha wrestling subplot, that film was Frankenstein played off with real heart transplant footage and Sixties candy colours. Intrepidos Punks, while about menacing Others that terrorise the normal population, is all about, truly, soaking in all the bad taste of it, the rampant nudity and sex, and its look. Celebrating bad taste by showing more bad taste. The punks are a peculiar mix of pop culture and social traits - the Fist of the North Star franchise, the Mad Max and post apocalyptic films, body piercing, New Wave hair dye colours - and as a prescience onscreen, including bikes with the backs of whole cars as their behind, the film can just sustain itself by following these colourful, one dimensional hooligans in their chaos. To the film's credit, even if their nude bodies are still drooled over by the camera, the female punks are as distinct and brutal as the males, able to dish out punishment and settle their own disputes through Russian roulette. The main female leader stands out as the central image of the film just from her look, played by Princesa Lea. Her makeup and huge blonde hair does remind one of Dee Snider from the band Twisted Sister, and I am not the first one to admit to have said that, but Lea with her look, her massive, jaw droppingly huge head of curly blonde hair, and busty and sculpted figure in a revealing body wrap, bondage get-up, is compelling just by standing in the centre of the screen. The minor punks are just as able to grab your attention to them, male and female, and her counterpart Tarzan, the wrestler who leads the pack, is more than a match by, indeed, using wrestling moves and bringing a Tombstone Piledriver to a rock quarry fight. The film is just tasteless absurdity like this, and that was probably the film's intention, and the reason the film has been rediscovered and loved. It's not PC, it's as exploitative as you can get, and it has things you'd never expect to happen in a film. Men fight to choose which female punk they share a bed with together by recreating Medieval jousts with motorbikes and morning stars. A hostage scheme, with the wives of the jailers and jail staff of the prison the male leader is kept in, becomes even more sleazier when the group rape that takes place, chaste but completely titillating in a really seedy way, and the band who composed the film's main them suddenly teleports, in full punk gear and equipment, into the house and play as the act goes on. Then there's the fact that even the female punks are willing to rape people which just takes the scuzz past the ten out of ten mark of sleaze to eleven.

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Without a proper narrative, the point one could only make for the film is a series of punk related anarchy, of group sex, of petrol station invasions and general violence you are supposed to enjoy as pure anarchy. If you cannot find enjoyment in such a film, then it's useless to even consider viewing it. It is however the kind of film for those who want something edgy, silly and completely impossible to take seriously. Like how trash and paracinema fans interact with films like this, it's the content around the botched storytelling that's of worth, wanting to be shocked by its content, wanting to be amused by how said content is lurid is in the safe environment of a film, acted out by actors and not real, and wanting to view something completely against the notion of what "quality" taste is. The film comes off as the filmic equivalent of a three minute, shock rock, punk song being blasted from the tiniest and loudest speakers possible live with a blind drunk guitarist. Purposely offensive, colourful and about the surface of the content than a deep meaning to it. That in the last minute it feels like the director had to compromise and let the goodies win actually adds to it, the gaping chasm it causes in the film's nature making it more fascinating. Its token violence, token sex, and abuse of Mohawks, but it shows that even the base level of filmmaking has an energy that is infectious and can cleanse away any pretence of nasal gazing. Its a shrine to everything cinema shouldn't be, and I confess why I've viewed it as much as I have and written this review.

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I've got an Ape Head, Yes I do... [Night of the Bloody Apes (1969)]

Regardless of the review, this cover has a ramshackle charm.
From http://thatwasabitmental.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/night-of-the-bloody-apes-gorgon-vhs-front.jpg

Dir. René Cardona

Mexico

Film #11, of Thursday 11th October, for Halloween 31 For 31

Simians across the world can breathe a sigh of relief. Taking a time machine back to 1969, they see the only gorilla-to-human transplant to ever take place suffer from a setback when, as a father secretly performs the operation on his dying son, it causes the younger man to transform into a half beast creature who rips men apart, and tears the clothing off and assaults the (mostly red headed) female cast. Now the global ape population can gloat as the porcine mammals the pigs were discovered to be appropriate organ donors, asking such in-poor taste questions as ‘if a man has a pig’s heart surgically placed in his body, does eating a bacon sandwich after quality as cannibalism?’ to mock them.

Also connect into this a subplot about a female lucha libre wrestler who is having setbacks in her career choice. Her boyfriend is pursuing the man-beast, so she passes by in the main story with no direct participation in it, exactly how this sort of event involving man-beasts would happen in real life. I have to question though, despite my lack of knowledge on Mexican wrestling, why she walks around in public without her mask on. Is it a custom only practiced by male wrestlers like Santo, or have I gotten the codes of Mexican wrestling wrong? Maybe if going into a hospital to see your hospitalised opponent from the ring, it’s polite to take the mask off like a hat? I need someone to inform me on the rules on this in full detail.

A long time passes until a man-ape appears on screen and a while until he gets momentum and gets a body count going. The film looks promising in the opening credits with Eastmancolor red gore dripping on black card, but the film’s rudimentary creation is exposed by how lumbering its pace is. You may question the morals of entertaining yourself with gushings of blood and quasi-sexual molestation acted out on screen by the ape-man – ‘quasi’ not in a dubious way to offend any female readers, but because the man-ape is baffled by how to lay on another person let alone consider taking his pants off – but exploitation films exist to promote the basest of humanity. Some are masterpieces or gems who use this to provoke powerful emotions, others as far back as the beginning of cinema just to show female nudity and blood being spilt. If they cannot pace themselves well or engage the particular viewer through their nudity and gore is useless. You can go see other films with as much, or more, of these things that are better made or more interesting. The fickleness of genre cinema is that it can produce films more-to-the-point and intelligent than overbearing award fodder, the termite arts able to hobble the lumbering white elephants with bites full of enough critical re-evaluation and cult praise to take down ten more, but it has to sacrifice so many of its own kind, making them into tedious cheap products, to make this happen. That more bad films exist in the hundreds compared to good films is an established rule, but it seems like a sick joke when pointed out in genre cinema, especially horror cinema. It has been picked on, dismissed as trash and laughed at by critics in the cinematic playground, a cheap target when the more popular dramas in the class get away with things incomprehensible in the manners of quality film making. Something like Night of the Bloody Apes, for me at least, does not help things.

The ape-man does his best – like David Banner if he didn’t turn green and developed a very hairy noggin instead – with eye trauma the Italians would be proud of, but the film is tedious. It plods along, never getting to even cheap titillation that snaps you in with its illicitness or grossness. For Mexico’s entry in the Video Nasties list for the United Kingdom, it’s another film off it that really does not stand up when The Evil Dead (1981), Possession (1981), Inferno (1980) and the rest of the critically acclaimed entries that were banned outright or temporarily are sat next to it. In an uncomfortable place between the rich 1960s colours and paint red blood of Hershell Gordon Lewis and the scuzzier 1970s films, it doesn’t take advantage of both worlds very well.

And yet, even though this film was excruciating to sit through, I want to leave on a positive light and show the four good things I got from the viewing :-

1) As someone who grew up watching wrestling, and for a brief but great year or so a whole channel dedicated to wrestling, it was great to see the lucha libre sequences. And for anyone who only grew up with the WWF/WWE Divas like me who wandered around shaking their bottoms and could only throw pissy hip tosses, the sight of stocky masked women throwing forearms and snapmeres with enough force to probably batter a man who was dumb enough to fight them was refreshing.

2) One interesting editing flourish, which the Nucleus Films DVD uses as a menu transition, is that to progress to the next scene the film sometimes has shots of a camera going along a wall covered in multicolour paint. Who painted this rainbow coloured wall? Whoever it was they deserve some credit for one of the most memorable parts of the film.

3) I have to talk about the use of real heart transplant surgery footage, probably the biggest reason this film may have been put on the Video Nasties list. Considering this possibility, it actually adds another shame about the whole 1984 Video Recording Act fiasco and the banning of these films. A life saving procedure that happens countless times in real life and yet, regardless of its dubious placement in a Mexican exploitation film, we are shocked when a scene of a real person’s body being cut open is shown, his heart extracted while it’s still beating, a crimson mass of pure muscle I have never seen in this detail except with any footage involving this film, and think it’s going too far. Regardless of my negative opinions of the film, that it’s an Mexican exploitation film that’s willing to show a real life medical procedure, the sight of the blood squirting out shocking but levelled by the anatomical beauty of the organs and flesh of the human body, deserves praise on the behalf of director René Cardona and contempt for respectable people who sweep these images under the metaphorical rug.

4) Along with natural blonde hair on women, I have a lust and passion rich for naturally red hair too, making the largely fiery maned female cast eye-catching for me. So shoot me...

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