THUNDERCRACK!

Thundercrack! is a 1975 pornographic black comedy horror film written, edited, shot and directed by Curt McDowell, and written by George Kuchar based on a story by McDowell and Mark Ellinger. It stars Marion Eaton, Ken Scudder, Melinda McDowell and George Kuchar. Combining an "old dark house" mystery with hardcore sex scenes, Thundercrack! is more recently regarded as a cult film. It bears the influences of Jack Smith’s lush, DIY, camp aesthetic, and Nan Goldin’s glimpses of countercultural bohemia.

Reception: The film is unusual for its time as it is shot in black-and-white and features graphic sexual acts. In terms of its intentional tastelessness, it could be compared to the films of John Waters.

“God gave him a calling in life, and that was to make pornography.” – George Kuchar on Curt McDowell

BACKGROUND:

• Producers John Thomas (who briefly appeared as country singer Simon Cassidy) and Charles Thomas were film students of Thundercrack! actor/writer George Kuchar, classmates of director Curt McDowell, and heirs to a fortune from the Burger Chef fast food chain, which they used to fund the movie. They also provided a rooms in their home for the shoot.
• George Kuchar was a legend in the underground film industry, making hundred of short, campy avant-garde films together with his twin brother Mike. Noteworthy titles include Sins of the Fleshapoids and Hold Me While I’m Naked (both from 1966).
• Actress Melinda McDowell was director Curt McDowell’s sister.
• Kuchar and McDowell were rumored to be lovers.
• The movie was shot for $9,000 and $40,000 in deferred costs.
• Buck Henry used his clout as a judge to set up a (scandalous) screening at the 1976 Los Angeles Film Festival.
• The original negatives disappeared and only five 16mm prints of the film were struck. One print was seized by Canadian authorities and three had been edited in an ineffectual attempt to make the film more marketable. The badly-damaged but uncut fifth print was primarily utilized for the transfer of the 40th anniversary Blu-ray release by Synapse Films.
• El Rob Hubbard’s ((Fun Fact: actress “Maggie Pyle” and her husband (one of the crew members) were my landlords for a short time in San Francisco in the early 90’s.)) Staff Pick for a Certified Weird movie.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Among the various obvious (and mainly pornographic) images to choose from, the one that sums up the spirit of Thundercrack! is the publicity photo of Gert and Bing in a melodramatic clinch—Bing in a wedding dress, Gert staring off into the horizon. It’s iconic, yet subversive, and pretty much encapsulates the film’s mood.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Versatile cucumbers; pickled husbands; amorous bipeds

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The collision of several elements: the lurid melodramatics along with the hardcore action, the visual stylization and the complex wordplay, all combine to make a film much more engaging and—dare I say it—innocent than one would expect from a mid 1970s hardcore sex parody film. Or, is it a parody film with porno elements? You decide…

COMMENTS: “What the heck is going on here—some sort of communal therapy group? Is that what this is?!!”—Bing

That’s probably a fair assessment of Thundercrack!, Curt McDowell’s legendary underground feature.  A collaboration with filmmaker George Kuchar (who wrote the screenplay based on a story by McDowell and composer Mark Ellinger, starred as “Bing,” and also did the lighting and make-up), Thundercrack! is a parody of “Old Dark House” horror films. It has a lot of descendants; The Rocky Horror Picture Show comes closest in tone. The visual style is on par with other black and white indies of the time (Eraserhead, Martin Brest’s Hot Tomorrows) and was carried forward into later films like Forbidden Zone and Singapore Sling. The main difference is that Thundercrack! incorporated hardcore sex, while its descendants did not quite go as far.

That would be enough to stigmatize the film. Most hardcore films are concerned with one thing only, and everything else gets short shrift. But Thundercrack! differs in that the sex is treated as an integral part of the film, and instead of everything coming to a halt while waiting for people to finish, they have conversations, and actual plot and character development happen during sex. This is not the standard for hardcore fare. Also, while almost every sex variation gets exhibited onscreen—masturbation, both male and female; man on woman; man on man; woman on woman; oral and anal sex; bestiality (simulated)—the film passes no judgment. There’s a celebratory aspect to the sex, which along with the melodramatic archness of everything else, lends a certain innocence to the film.

Sex here is a healing element. At the start of the film, everyone is introduced in proper disaster-film fashion, with their various neuroses and naked guilt on display. Due to their temporary forced layover at Prairie Blossom and their various couplings, they emerge as better people than when they arrived. Also notable is that there really isn’t a proper villain in the story: Roo and Toydy are amoral and selfish but not villainous, but even they get a happy ending (sort of) as well as a comeuppance at the end.

All of the actors do well with their “performances,” in both senses. Of note are the leads Marion Eaton as the drunken hostess Gerd, who presides over the events with mismatched eyebrows while channeling Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck simultaneously; and Kuchar,  who matches her in terms of intensity and commitment to the role.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The cult classic of weirdo hardcore, an irresistibly infuriating bad taste whip of raunch and skewed melodrama, like a very horny Soap, that quite literally leaves you unsure of whether you’re coming or going.”–Time Out London

“One of the most unusual films you’ll ever see, I can’t imagine anything more weird if John Waters was abducted by aliens and then regurgitated all over someone making a psychotic horror spoof with political and psychological undertones. If you like cult films this is a jewel.”–Chris Docker, Eye for Film

“This slice of arthouse adult horror-cinema takes the idea of ‘bonkers’ to the extreme in its bizarre amalgamation of genres, blatant sexuality and its unrepentantly long running time of nearly three hours… a surreal viewing experience which is frankly, or maybe thankfully, one of a kind.”–George Pacheo, 10K Bullets (Blu-ray)

366weirdmovies.com

A great many Londoners of a certain age remember Curt McDowell’s notorious art/trash/porn crossover with genuine fondness. Made in 1975, it became a monthly staple at the legendary Scala Cinema in King’s Cross throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, usually double- or triple-billed with similarly outré fare by Stephen Sayadian (Café Flesh, 1982), Doris Wishman (Let Me Die a Woman, 1978) or Edward D. Wood Jr (Glen or Glenda, 1953), and attending it became something of a rite of passage for more adventurous cinephiles, who were best advised not to look too closely at what fellow audience members might be doing in neighbouring seats.

Scripted by McDowell’s sometime mentor and lover George Kuchar, Thundercrack! fuses the delirious melodrama of a Douglas Sirk or Tennessee Williams with a creaky old-dark-house setting (only the hairstyles betray its decade; the black-and-white cinematography and blatantly cardboard exteriors could have come from a 1930s cheapie). The house in question, cheerfully named Prairie Blossom, is owned by Gert Hammond (Marion Eaton), who during the course of a long and stormy night ends up offering shelter to a variety of visitors who look as though they might be on their way to a John Waters audition (Waters, unsurprisingly, is a fan). While Gert delivers autobiographical monologues, her guests (including an escaped gorilla) end up having sex with each other for a variety of reasons: desire, recreation or as a bargaining chip. Intriguingly, two characters are named Chandler and Bing, which has led to unconfirmed rumours that Matthew Perry’s character in the perennially popular 1990s sitcom Friends is a walking Thundercrack! reference.

Predictably, from a commercial perspective Thundercrack! fell resoundingly between multiple stools – it was too daft for the horror crowd, too overwrought for the drama crowd, and too filthy for just about everyone. The frequent combining of soul-baringly confessional dialogue with the kind of hardcore sex scenes that are normally performed in grunting near-silence seems to have been particularly off-putting, as indeed was McDowell’s admirably catholic (if far from Catholic) intermingling of gay, straight and bestial copulation, only the last of which is simulated.

But for those on Thundercrack!’s highly individual wavelength, it’s an absolute hoot, and this restoration will be a particular revelation to anyone who struggled to make out much of Kuchar’s reputedly hilarious dialogue over the Scala’s less than state-of-the-art speakers and the film’s own poor-quality recording. Eaton has the stage-trained chops to convincingly evoke Blanche DuBois in her study of a woman driven sexually demented through loneliness, but many of her colleagues were clearly cast more for their willingness to rise to somewhat different technical challenges.

Until now, Thundercrack! has only been available on video courtesy of VHS and VHS-sourced releases of dubious provenance. A 30th-anniversary DVD was announced in 2004, and five years later Synapse Films promised a high-definition restoration for the 35th. It finally emerged in late 2015, a full 40 years on, but it was well worth the wait. Much of the delay was caused by some considerable restoration challenges. The original negative and magnetic sound recordings vanished decades ago, only five prints were ever struck and only one of them preserved the film at its full length. Much projected, it was in less than optimum condition, but footage and frames from the other prints (one of which contained unique material, duly spliced back in) and additional digital restoration has produced some remarkable results. Thundercrack! will always look like what it is – an extremely low-budget black-and-white 16mm semi-underground film – but unless the negative turns up it’s hard to imagine a better presentation.

In life, McDowell rarely settled for less than an outrageously impressive package, and it’s good to see the same principle being so firmly applied here.
Michael Brooke, Sight & Sound, March 2016

A contemporary review
Curt McDowell and George Kuchar’s Thundercrack! has become a staple trash/underground/gay cult classic – featured every week at the Saturday midnight special at West Los Angeles’ notorious Nuart Theatre (a venue which also promoted the films of John Waters and Tobe Hooper). From its inception this was a curious and contradictory enterprise: its makers set out to combine an ‘underground’ revamp of The House on Haunted Hill – i.e., to parody a parody – with an ‘underground’ porn film of the hard-core variety. To a degree it succeeds in both ambitions; and although the nature and duration of the porn sequences dictated the choice of a cast whose thespian abilities are to say the least minimal, the movie undeniably has the conviction of its own tastelessness.

Its parodies and burlesques have been taken up second-hand from the cheaper schlock and horror films – inversions of traditional sexuality, of traditional middle-American hospitality, and of the whole syntax of suburban interaction – and these are often hilariously handled. (The tone is set early on when Marion Eaton, drinking alone in a nylon slip, hears her doorbell ring and rushes to ‘dress’ before answering it. She sets a cheap wig on her head, then decides to make herself throw up – lest the unseen guest detect her state of inebriation. In the process, her wig tumbles into the toilet bowl, but she simply slaps it back on her head and staggers to the door, mouthing platitudes of welcome.)

Thundercrack!’s particular endeavour – splicing slapstick and hard-core sex scenes into a single viable package – descends directly from the costumed camp repertory of polysexual stage collectives like the Flaming Creatures, the Cockettes, the Cycle Sluts and Les Ballets Trockadero. In Thundercrack!, inflatable dolls, French ticklers, suction tubes, salamis, giant vibrators and dildos may conspire to make the viewer feel a relentless voyeur, but what really seals his fate is a pervasive sense that the cast – ripping through their wretched script at a frantic pace – seem to be having a slightly better, more stoned and way-out time than any spectator possibly could.
Cynthia Rose, Monthly Film Bulletin, December 1980

Jane Giles is a filmmaker and writer currently shooting a feature-length theatrical documentary based on her award-winning book Scala Cinema 1978-1993 (FAB Press). She was previously a film distributor and exhibitor at the BFI, ICA and Scala.