GEEK MAGGOT BINGO – An earlyish film from NYC underground doyen Nick Zedd. Viewer alienation plus or minus basically having a party with your mates in front of a Bolex were both possible directorial goals. After opening with Zacherle doing his thing for a bit, it plays like a post-Kuchar homage to old bad horror from the forties and fifties, with an over-ripe mad scientist type waxing megalomaniacal over sets that look like a playgroup’s reconstruction of The History Of Expressionism In Early Cinema. These sets are also populated by various NY counterculturalists from the time (early eighties), not least Richard Hell, here playing a rootin’ tootin’ cowboy adventurer. He’s the best thing in it, though maybe I’m only saying that cos I’m a Richard Hell fan. Then again, I’m supposedly a Nick Zedd fan. Otherwise, the performances are as tow-curlingly awful as they’re contrived to be, although Donna Death has a bit of presence as a stern looking Vampira-type (she doesn’t have any lines). It’s utterly incoherent and, considering it’s played for laughs, isn’t much of one most of the time; the Hallowe’en gang-show larking-about thing only carries so far for the audience, although it looks like it was probably quite fun to be there. Having said all this, ‘Geek Maggot Bingo’ does work on other levels beyond simply being part of the filmography of an artiste, and the whole trashy aesthetic is quite attractive; it feels like it was held together by Sellotape, and in some scenes that’s probably literally true. It’s full of wonky edits, bats on string, big time cheapskating (they play a record by Chrome on low in the background for part of the soundtrack!) and ad libs, including the bit where Richard Hell asks “Nick, can we have some direction, please?” All this is aided along by bits of gore and fx from a young Ed French, and some of the prosthetics look really nice – the Formaldehyde Man, a twisted head etc. Old Fangoria editor Bob Martin crops up. It depends on how you play it really, but if you can get past a certain level of disconnect then ‘Geek Maggot Bingo’ offers… an experience.
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