Trash

Despite the gracious full frontal male nudity which is shocking now days, this film is boring! Even though D'Allesandro (the random hung naked guy of many Morissey / Warhol films) is every inch (literally) gorgeous (despite crawling around looking like a homeless man), nothing prevents the crawling creeping restless boredom of this film. (If that was the intent of this film, well then-well done.) If nothing else it serves as a prompting for a liberal's worst nightmare awakening: that hippies and alt. culture are hated for some good reasons. It serves well too as a proverbial "van down by the river": it will deeply motivate you to do something with your life and never end up like this. Nancy Reagan should've thought of this film when she was telling kids to just say no.

The movie is really trash. The movie starts out showing Joe Dallesandro's [rear] and Geri Miller go-go dancing naked. Later on in the movie we meet Holly Woodlawn a trash collector who is a transvestite and a former prostitute. More graphic nudity and sex come up when Jane Forth and her husband come in the story. An all right beginning,middle, and end but the story is terrible.

This film deals with drugs, very precisely heroin. We are in the post hippy period when drugs became an addiction after having been a life style. The drug addict is reduced in his sexuality, in his thinking and in his social life. He only survives in a hostile environment. But that was in 1970. The environment of the drug addict is either looking for easy kicks by flirting with drugs (high-school students for example), or for sexual kicks among young middle class couples or people who try to use the uninhibited life of the drug addict to have physical contacts with them or to beef up their own boring and fading relations, or for some advantage they can get from them in exchange of some welfare money (social workers for example). This leads to the sad conclusion that drug addicts who look for a certain liberation in a trip beyond limits find themselves entirely trapped in a fake world where alienation is demultiplied by their addiction. The film is of course also a piece of art by the fact that it refuses any kind of special effects or heavy production and the pictures only speak because they are plain, simple, and yet tremendously worked on by the simple technique of the camera, physical acting and voices. The expressivity of the film comes from those simple elements and the realistic revealing dialogue that goes along with it. The feeling we get is that of a totally poignant fatality that pens up the drug addict in a fully lost battle for survival. There seems to be only death at the end of the road.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU