Popular reviews

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  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus] ★★★★★ 14

  preparation of the ritual ground

  dirt leather oil chains

  cat hair skulls smoke

  
  Dear Jesus:

  I hope you can help me understand. My boyfriend whom I love dearly isn't in love with me. He's in love with Death and its avatars on this earth, especially Marlon Brando, James Dean and Adolf Hitler. He is kind of into you, but kind of not, I guess that makes sense because you are all about eternal life but you did die pretty gruesomely? When we hang out all he wants to do is read comix and get high and rearrange his outfits for hours before we can go out to the Halloween party or the motorcycle race. I have a feeling he isn't…

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½

  Kenneth Anger might be the greatest
  music supervisor in cinema history.

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  Review by Liz ★★★★★

  The opening salvo in the ongoing war against the straights. Masculinity so amplified, so fetishized, and so eroticized that it becomes weaponized and turned into outright fascism. Brando is Christ and leather is god, leading to a sadomasochistic mass with a piss communion. A call to arms for the pre-Stonewall age. Blessed, blessed oblivion.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 2

  94/100

  Iconography and homoeroticism shaken through vibrant montages; a groovy, siren red preparation light show. Music transforming into images, inverting stature and celebrity, God and various followers into a jovial tagalong motorcycle ride. Electric.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 5

  Several attractive men dress in biker gear to classic rock hits, and then everything goes Nazi for some reason.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black ★★★ 3

  The Nazi imagery, though not apparently uncommon in the biker scene of the era, still violates an otherwise gorgeous set of images: leather, drag racing, motorcycles, Jesus Christ, and queer masquerade sex parties. This is violent homoeroticism, defiant, pushed beyond boundaries. This is what happens when you criminalize whole sets of people: they turn to the extremes. One violation gives way to another. A masterpiece of editing and color and soundtrack marred by a contextual rebellion that lends itself to bourgeois divisiveness.

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  Review by amaya ★★★★ 3

  i feel so bad for having such an aesthetic attraction to this because it's mostly gay nazi fuckery

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  Review by Stephen Gillespie ★★★★★ 3

  CW: Fascism and Nazi Iconography

  This would feel ahead of its time ten years later, maybe even twenty. As reductive as it sounds, forget Scorsese and Tarantino, check this out. The way it uses pop music is unparalleled. This is not just a, now tired, juxtaposition of upbeat music to moral depravity; the songs clash with the imagery but also recontexualise it. The lyrical content is smartly paired to what you see and the feel of the music reshapes the imagery in front. Harshness and aggression becomes sensual, erotic and glamorous (all for a purpose).

  Here, Anger criticises masculinity but also co-opts it. He presents its holy texts and codes them as queer or sexual, finding the subtext and making…

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  Review by evilbjork ★★★★ 1

  I'm pretty sure David Lynch's entire career is him trying to copy this.

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  Review by Noah Thompson ★★★★★

  Fools rush in...

  Watched with commentary from Kenneth Anger, which brought along a lot of really interesting little tidbits about the behind the scenes making of the film. Some of my favorites include many of the sets just being places Anger found and kept as is, Anger actually getting permission to use "Hit the Road Jack", the glass bottle of crystal meth being authentic meth, and most shocking of all, the death at the end being an actual biker whose demise was caught on film. (The biker who falls off of his bike in one of the last shots legitimately broke his neck upon impact. I still love this movie, but it's going to hit different from now on knowing…

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  Review by BananaPudding ★★★ 1

  Some people say this movie is a critique of the biker subculture, nazism, and the worship of rebel icons of the era but I think it's just about guys doing what they do best: racing and having rough gay sex.

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  Review by Wes ★★★★★

  Hit the road, Jack
  And dont you come back
  No more, no more, no more, no more...

  the scariest concept for this halloween is that it took me this long to pop my kenneth anger cherry.

  he wasn't gentle.