... I was just curious if any of you had heard about this movie? I only heard about it for the first time when John Waters brought it up during a Q&A at for the Criterion release screenings of his two movies last week. So if you're like me and clueless -- first off, I apologize. So The Onania Club was directed by Tom Six, the dude who made the Human Centipede trilogy (which of all things was just announced to be getting an enormous fancy 4K box-set from Umbrella in Australia btw, in case you're into those terrible terrible terrible movies.) Six made this movie is 2019 but supposedly very very very few people have seen it -- one of them being John Waters, who put it into his Top 10 list in 2021; and here's what John had to say which I think will give y'all the gist better than I ever could:
"OK, I’m really going out on a limb here, replacing Pedro Almodóvar’s exquisite Parallel Mothers, a film everybody should love, with this loathsome unreleased feature everybody will probably hate. The Human Centipede director tops himself with a story of rich Los Angeles women who gather together to masturbate while watching news footage of the world’s misery. Often wrongheaded but sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, it has been rejected by film distributors worldwide. All I can say is that the movie sure as hell delivers. You will probably never be able to see it. Maybe that’s a good thing . . . "
And sure enough nobody has released it in the seven years since it was made. There's a thread on Reddit about it that says Six is just holding out for an inflated check for the film and that several labels including the fine freaks at Severin have indeed offered to release the movie -- this makes sense to me since everything I've ever heard about Tom Six is he's a total maniac. Of course you could just read the logline for the Human Centipede movies and assume that, but it's surprisingly rare -- look at Wes Craven! Most horror directors are like him -- perfectly nice people who get their subconscious freak-shit out on screen. Six seems to be one of the exceptions. Anyway we love an urban legend movie like this so I had to do a post -- Waters brought the film up in relation to a question about whether movies and art still had the ability to shock in our current world, saying that watching rich ladies jerking off to footage of 9/11 shocked even him lol. Anyway this makes me realize I didn't post the video I took of John Waters introducing the screening of Hairspray I attended over the weekend! So I should do that.
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