Drowning in Odium

Directed/ shot by Richard Kern

Richard Kern is one of my favorite directors, so when I saw this DVD at my video store, I immediately snagged it. “Richard Kern: Extra Action & Extra Hardcore” is a collection of outtakes from photo shoots Kern did with various models, with music scored by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. While I’m more interested in Kern’s films than his photography, this still proved to be rather entertaining, especially since it comes with some unreleased older films (though, wasn’t “The Hardcore collection” supposed to have all of them on it?)

In concept, this is very much like the photo DVD Steve Diet Goedde released a few years back, only it’s video and not still images coupled with the music. Actually, I can see some similarity between Kern’s recent work and Goedde, at least in the fact that they both prefer a more natural look…

There are various clips of at least a dozen different girls engaging in various acts of undress and self-penetration on this DVD, with the occasional lesbian scene coming into play as well. Instead of being divided by girl, the footage is categorized by theme (”legs”, “wet”, “rub”, etc)
wich is actually more interesting. The majority of the girls are rather attractive, and they all seem to be having a good time. I got more than one boner while watching this thing, so it certainly doesn’t lack in that department.

Actually, the only real grief I have with this thing is the music by Thurston Moore, or more so the lack of it. It seems like the guy only did 5 or so tracks for the movie, some more noisy, some more SY sounding, and they looped them over and over throughout the majority of the film. The songs themselves were ok, but it got tiresome hearing the same couple of tunes every 10 or 15 minutes. Dude should have either made more shit, or they should have found someone else to add more stuff, because it gets pretty redundant pretty quick.

The extra short films are by far what makes this worth watching overall though, to me. Especially the 42 st short, which was one of Kern’s first movies, showing what the strip of 42 st looked like in New York back in the 80’s, complete with awesome porn and exploitation theatres, with posters for Cannibal Ferox and fucking Scarface! I know there was a lot of bad stuff in that neighborhood too, but it sucks that the grindhouse joints couldn’t have been preserved. They looked fucking awesome. All the other short are asskicking as well, as one would expect. I particularly dug “Nazi” and the one with Nick Zedd I forgot the title to.

Overall, this is pretty damn spiffy stuff from one of the cooler subversive American art icons of the past century. Check it out if you get the chance for sure.