Monday, October 04, 2010

Up To Snuff

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S&Man is sort of meta-documentary on the weird world of Z-grade made-to-order horror fetish films, where we meet some of the real people who make them and some of the fake people who pretend to make them. The latter directly for our benefit of course, which is where the sticky, smart commentary takes hold. It's a film about what we're willing to look at, and what drives that, that's actually really curious about all of those questions and not only exploiting them for exploitation's sake.

And in the middle of this standard talking-head documentary format a dramatic narrative unfolds, which opens up the questions and answers these folks are working out, getting the viewer actively engaged in the moral dilemma. Some of that works and some of it doesn't, but what worked for me worked in more of an intellectual sense, than in a visceral one. I never bought what I was seeing, but I recognized - and the film wanted us to recognize, I think - that this was still something they got people to act out for the benefit of illustrating a point, and that there's disturbance emanating from there enough.

I just made it all sound so dry! But it's isn't, it's very funny - some of these folks, like the director Bill Zebub (say it out loud) and the actress Debbie D, are fantastic characters. Sometimes they're shown to be fully aware of the strangeness of the space they inhabit, and sometimes they're amusingly misjudged about their station. But they're always fascinating to watch, with the oft absurd point of view of someone looking out from an unexpected place.

S&Man is playing at the reRun theater in Brooklyn through Thursday, and will hit DVD on October 12th.
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