Thundercrack! is a true original in the world of cinema, one of those hybrids that defies one genre even as it dabbles and sticks its 160 minute (yes, *160 minute*) run-time in-to (ahem) every genre orifice it can. It's a dark comedy, and yet its also extremely campy (on purpose, like I imagine this was written and performed for a tiny off-off-off-off-off-OFF-off Broadway production in the early 70's, and certainly Marion Eaton plays to all the balconies); it's shot in a 16mm black and white style that evokes Romero with Night of the Living Dead and, more-so, Faces by Cassavetes, and while the cinematography is rich it doesn't stick long for either relationship drama or stark horror; it *does* have some horror elements, or rather some parts that mock the idea of what a horror movie is. I direct you in the immediate path of the gorilla and a character who may or may not be locked behind a door...
Oh, and did I mention it's a porno? Because that is what it primarily is. This is f***ing, but it's also 1970's people f***ing and it's hairy (one of the women, god bless her, I could tell didn't shave her legs) and sweaty and it's an equal-opportunity sex movie. Director Curt McDowell and writer George Kuchar have their scenario set simply as this: Eaton is a mad woman living by herself in her home (as she readily tells anyone who even half-listens, her husband is dead and kept... in places, and her son "does not exist), and due to some accidents and other mishaps on the road nearby while it's raining (ala, uh, Psycho I guess?) they all have to crash at her place for the night. She'll feed them, and (again, akin to Psycho) may have a peeping-tom set-up to look in on her non-existent son's bedroom which is lined with sex toys and images galore and... yeah, everyone ends up f***ing each other. A lot.
I saw someone else on Letterboxd describe this as being like a haunted house film where the ghosts are instead (gulp) stains that are left after the sex acts. That's not a bad way to go about it, but I think that undersells just how insane this whole production is. Kuchar's script is incredibly tasteless, but it knows it is and embraces it, and Eaton is digging so deep into this character's psychosis that you're not sure if she'll be genuinely-great at being like a Blanche Dubois crossed with the old lady from Hansel & Gretel, or so not great at it that it works a different way. And I should also mention there's an intermission - yes, a goddamn intermission - where one can settle for ten minutes and think about what has transpired just before. Indeed the filmmakers even give us a set-piece where Mrs. Gert Hammond describes what happens to her husband, in a long monologue we can only half hear due to the only halfway passable sound recording, and the way it's shot and edited is... mesmerizing.
... And then after the intermission, Bing shows up for the rest of the run time (he's introduced briefly early in the film but then disappears while everyone else shows up), and so does the gorilla. This is when the movie gets... really good.
I think Kuchar may be the best of the non-Eaton actors here - no wonder, likely, since he wrote it - but he actually has a lot to play. While he didn't write it originally for himself, he knows just what to do to make this, uh, ex-circus worker who somehow through one odd night got the attention of a female gorilla seem completely compelling. And through that, naturally, more laughs and crazy humor emerge. It seems even weirder for me to try and criticize any of these other performers since this is, I must stress again, an *adult film* in all that entails: this is graphic sex - straight and, eventually, gay - but it's also inventive right off the bat with some of the, uh, toys that get used. But how does one judge performers when they may not have been picked for their acting prowess but because they can keep "it" up or look good without a blouse on? It's fair to say some of the cast finds the crisp campiness in Kuchar's dialog, and some (the good-hearted wife of the country star character) are not.
I'm sure I could try to criticize the production quality either, but what good would that do except to make me look like a fool for trying? This is something that can't really be considered a typical porn film because there's much, much higher ambition to the filmmaking (at least on the whole) and even in simply shooting it in rough 16mm black and white; it can't be regular sexsploitation because it's too long (a legitimate flaw I think, though exactly where to cut is hard to say); it's not something that you could easily show an art-house crowd because of the sex since it goes beyond even the typical breaking-point limits like Romance or In the Realm of the Senses. It's basically a wild underground experiment that doesn't give two million hells what you think of it. It knows what it wants to do, and Curt McDowell and his team want to surprise the audience and, hopefully they think, their audience will be in on the joke. It may be a very long, over-sized joke, but you know what they say about long, over-sized things...
Thundercrack isn't great, but why carp? Like mother! (another movie with an exclamation point at the end), it exists in the world that it's in, and we can either take it or we can't. I did, for the most part.
