Virtue Writes White
Hitler did not outlive the warped characteristics of adolescence. In 1939, in front of a German diplomat, the middle-aged Führer screamed: ‘I shall build aeroplanes, build aeroplanes, aeroplanes, and I shall annihilate my enemies’ just as the twentysomething ‘Dolferl’ had raged at random cafe-goers at the top of his voice about the impurity of the Jews. Hitler’s ‘Table Talk’, the late-night sessions in which he would bore colleagues and intimates almost to the point of unconsciousness, also speaks of an adolescent mind curled in on itself. It’s only as adults that we discover compassion and respect and have the epiphany that the world does not revolve around us. Perhaps evil men are simply trapped in an earlier stage of being – the boys that never grew up.
Max Dunbar reviews Claus Hant‘s Young Hitler.
Saturday Night at the Movies
By Andrew Stevens. With Werner Herzog’s disclaimed ‘reworking’ of Bad Lieutenant riding high and provoking the ire of Abel Ferrara, revisiting the original appears in order. The 1992 original and its PMRC-baiting (if not goading) themes of Christianity, drug abuse and perversion ended a run of Ferrara films which took New York, alienation and Catholicism […]
Gore Opera
With a little help from her friend Kiffany Boston-Gifford and the quite fanciable Sunglasses Steve, Bunny is determined to get Mick Jones back for sacking her from the horror magazine Bloody Rag. On top of that, she is going to close down The Doll House and stop the appearance of the apocalyptic Psyche and The Sisters. If this were just a pure gore opera it would be a negligible read, an evening spent with a wry smile on one’s face, forgotten the next day; but Kelly has a lot to say about families, relationships, the shifting sands of gender and sexuality, and about the horror genre the novel so cleverly exploits. This is pulp fiction at its pulpist and cultist.
Steve Finbow reviews Alan Kelly‘s Let Me Die A Woman.