Heads Up, Ears Down

This blog accurately identifies depictions of violence and cruelty toward animals in films. The purpose is to provide viewers with a reliable guide so that such depictions do not come as unwelcome surprises. Films will be accurately notated, providing a time cue for each incident along with a concise description of the scene and perhaps relevant context surrounding the incident. In order to serve as a useful reference tool, films having no depictions of violence to animals will be included, with an indication that there are no such scenes. This is confirmation that the films have been watched with the stated purpose in mind.


Note that the word depictions figures prominently in the objective. It is a travesty that discussions about cruelty in film usually are derailed by the largely unrelated assertion that no animals really were hurt (true only in some films, dependent upon many factors), and that all this concern is just over a simulation. Not the point, whether true or false. We do not smugly dismiss depictions of five-year-olds being raped because those scenes are only simulations. No, we are appalled that such images are even staged, and we are appropriately horrified that the notion now has been planted into the minds of the weak and cruel.


Depictions of violence or harm to animals are assessed in keeping with our dominant culture, with physical abuse, harmful neglect, and similar mistreatment serving as a base line. This blog does not address extended issues of animal welfare, and as such does not identify scenes of people eating meat or mules pulling plows. The goal is to itemize images that might cause a disturbance in a compassionate household.


These notes provide a heads-up but do not necessarily discourage watching a film because of depicted cruelty. Consuming a piece of art does not make you a supporter of the ideas presented. Your ethical self is created by your public rhetoric and your private actions, not by your willingness to sit through a filmed act of violence.

Luther the Geek

Luther the Geek. Carlton J. Albright, 1988.
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Edition screened: Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray #100, released 2016. English language. Runtime approximately 80 minutes.

Summary: Numerous depictions of cruel killing of chickens.

Details:
1) Off camera, a man implicitly bites the head off a chicken, 2:25, then spits the gore, 2:48.
2) Image of the decapitated chicken from the previous scene, 3:42-3:45.
3) Butchering of a dead chicken, starting with decapitation at 8:52, and continuing through chopping, 9:13.
4) Graphic special effects of biting off a chicken’s head, 17:34-17:45.
5) Dead deer hanging from a tree, huntin’ style, 37:07-37:24.
6) Dead chicken thrown at a person, 1:05:09.


It is unfortunate that the nucleus of Luther the Geek is the historic carnival character ‘The Geek’ who bites the heads off of live chickens. For otherwise, Luther the Geek is among the more interesting horror films among the 80s-90s dump of slasher garbage. Edward Terry’s performance as a homicidal maniac who has taken on the mannerisms and personality of a chicken is quite entertaining, quite good.

Luther the Geek also provides one of film’s more authentic portrayals of mainstream mid-80s fashion. Pop films from or evoking that period are excessively anxious to emphasize New Wave and mass market Punk styles. Too much green or pink coloring in hair that too often is some variation of a Mohawk; too much cheap leather in goofy colors; too many spiked dog collars. If we accept these depictions as accurate, all this and more was worn by 90% of girls to high school every day as though lime green fishnet bodysuits were sold in Penney’s. 

I attended high school and college in ho-hum rural areas (Luther the Geek is set and filmed in ho-hum rural Illinois). At that time I knew all about Cindy Lauper as well as Wendy O. Williams, and was tearfully aware that their fashions did not appear in my world, be that world real, false, mutant, or authentic.  Girls I knew, whether good girls, trashy girls, popular girls, or AFS girls, all aspired to unflattering high-waisted saggy-assed jeans, ugly petit popcorn-knit shirts of various constipated micro-collared design, and had hair somewhere on the continuum between the cheerleader flip-back and Mall Hair with a poof in the front resembling an angry Pomeranian.

Luther the Geek authentically shows that 1980s. Teen girls wear prematurely dumpy clothes in pastel colors and drive pastel-colored cars with light tan vinyl seats that degrade prematurely along the raised welts. A scene in a grocery store documents period packaging style in which even famous brand names have a ‘generic’ look to the graphics, and a USA Today vending box on the sidewalk looks strikingly like an android from the original Star Wars trilogy. At one point a college boy in nondescript clothes produces his hideous wallet made of khaki vinyl held closed with a wide velcro band. That was the real 1980s and I still have the identical wallet in a drawer.

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