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LOVE GOD
This unrestrained blast of cinematic anarchy won’t please everybody, but if you like your retro B-movies jam-packed (and I do mean packed: the film features an astounding 3700 edits, which has to be some kind of record) with gore, mad doctors, freaky brain parasites and mutating penis monsters, than LOVE GOD is for you! If you can find it, that is...
The Package
LOVE GOD, made in 1997, seems destined to be best remembered (if at all) as
the first-ever digitally shot feature. It’s also one of the absolute
craziest movies of all time, which shouldn’t come as any surprise to those
lucky enough to have experienced director Frank Grow’s previous film, the
incredible 1989 short RED AND ROSY. In the premiere issue of FILM THREAT VIDEO
GUIDE, Grow spoke about that film’s mind-roasting editing style thusly: “I
wanted it to be like click, click, click, like you have a remote control
in your hands” and that “the problem now is trying to make that work in a
feature.” Evidently he figured it out, as LOVE GOD is the logical outgrowth of
RED AND ROSY’S frantic sensory overload aesthetic.
Unfortunately, in what is becoming an all-too-common occurrence these days,
LOVE GOD was never released on VHS or DVD in the US and overall has been mostly
forgotten. This is despite the attention it initially received as a pioneering
effort in the digital field and the fact that it was made under the auspices of
Good Machine Productions, who also produced high profile indies like HAPPINESS
and AMERICAN SPLENDOR. Those and quite a few other Good Machine films have been
released, to varying degrees of success--why not LOVE GOD?
The Story
Budget cuts force a mental hospital to discharge a number of their loony
patents, including Victor, who has Tourette’s syndrome; Kathleen, a
schizophrenic woman who believes she’s Kali, the Hindi goddess of destruction;
and Larue, a meek fellow with a plucky parasitic critter stuck in his head (we
get several glimpses of the thing bopping around) who causes a “reading
disorder” that gives Larue an uncontrollable compulsion to read aloud and
destroy written words.
The hospital’s heads, the nutty Dr. Noguchi and his sex surrogate therapist
(correction: sex surrogate therapist in training) sidekick Darla, are
attempting to track down an ancient prehistoric worm that’s loose in the city
sewers and has a foul habit of bursting out of people’s toilets and transforming
them into lumbering mutant blobs with apparently insatiable sex drives. Larue,
meanwhile, spends his days making bubble gum sculptures and has fallen in love
with the mousy Connie, who lives next door and works with her domineering mother
cleaning up crime scenes. The offending flatworm finds itself attracted to the
creature inside Larue’s head, which saves him from getting turned into a sex-mad
blob. The same cannot be said for Dr. Noguchi, who wants desperately to be
transformed by the worm into a “Love God”; he gets his wish, mutating into a
gigantic penis-and-balls creature while Connie and Larue set out to prove that
love really does conquer all!
The Direction
Watching this film often feels like viewing a Troma movie (star Will Keenan
is a Troma regular) in permanent fast-forward. The experience, as you might
expect, is a kinetic and ultimately exhausting one. If often seems like Grow is
trying to see how fast he can push things without completely losing control,
with plot points often doled out via offhand bits of dialogue and quick, near
subliminal edits. This scattershot approach means Grow inevitably misses nearly
as often as he hits, resulting in quite a few dead spots; luckily, the
hyper-kinetic cutting ensures that the film never lingers on anything long
enough for boredom to set in. The cutting style also makes the prosthetic
creatures look more impressive than they probably really are, ensuring that we
never get a good enough look at any of them to make much of a distinction.
Grow also throws a number of animated interludes into
the mix—a mutant face often pops up to finish character’s sentences and an
octopus-like representation of the Goddess Kali frequently intrudes to address
the schizophrenic Kathleen—along with chaotic voice-over narration (at one point
a peripheral character audibly wonders whether Larue will ever find peace
through Jesus) and an ever-present punk rock soundtrack. It’s far from perfect,
but this is one film that really moves.
BTW, those who continue viewing after the end credits
get to see all the film’s creatures have an orgy!
Vital Statistics
LOVE GOD
Good Machine Productions
Director: Frank Grow
Producer: Anthony Bregman
Screenplay: Frank Grow
Cinematography: Terry Stacey
Editor: David Frankel
Cast: Will Keenan, Shannon Burkett, Kymberli Ghee, Kerri Kenneny, Michael
Laurence, Dale Soules, Yukio Yamato, Kevin Joseph, Jon Easley, Caroline Clay,
Zoe Jenkin, Ramona Jenkin, Mike Weix, Leslie Samuels, Gwen Snyder, Christine
Holt