There must have been something in the air. How else to explain what happened in Europe during the 1970s, when four world-renowned filmmakers inexplicably elected to ditch their usual fare in favor of bizarre ALICE IN WONDERLAND-inspired phantasmagorias?
Arrabal’s films are very much in the mode of Bunuel’s seminal UN CHIEN ANDALOU, which, you’ll recall, opened with a close up of an eyeball being slashed and continued in that vein, outraging, scandalizing and shocking cineastes the world over.
Here’s a Yuletide favorite I’m betting you won’t find on any traditional Christmas reading list: SANTA STEPS OUT by Robert Devereaux, a true “Fairy Tale for Grown-ups”
A profoundly vile piece of work that I’ve long wanted to read. L’ANGLAIS DECRIT DANS LE CHATEAU FERME was initially published in Paris (under the pseudonym Pierre Morion) back in 1953, and then banned for over 25 years
THE INVISIBLE MAN gets a thoroughly twisted updating in this forgotten relic from the early 1970s, when major publishers were actually willing to take on a perverse oddity like A PERFECTLY NATURAL ACT
A graphic novel that may not be horrific enough for my readers, yet will almost certainly be too freaky and aberrant for the mainstream
If nothing else, this gross-out anthology definitely lives up to its billing. It contains (as the back cover proclaims) “Tales of the Darkest Biological Extremes and the Psycho-Sexual Imagination”
For an adults-only novel that actually lives up to its billing check out THE REAL THING by the late William Carney, an elegantly crafted account of revenge and psychosis among gay leathermen
Yet another book whose title and packaging (at least in its mass market incarnation) are directly at odds with its content
Those of you desiring subtlety and/or refinement take heed: you won’t find any such things here