Geek Maggot Bingo begins with a quote: “If you cut a face lengthwise, urinate on it and trample on it with straw sandals, it is said the skin will come off. This was heard by the priest Gyojako when he was in Kyoto. It is information to be treasured. -Yamamoto Tsunctmoto [sic], Hagakure“
Hagakure is a spiritual guide for the samurai, recorded in the 18th century at a time when the samurai were no longer allowed to fight and actually be samurai. Their role in society had more or less ended, so what were they supposed to do? What is a warrior without a war? The text ponders that to be a warrior, you must live like you’re already dead. This is the way to freedom and peace. But while Hagakure contains existential musings on how life means more when you’re dead, it also contains crucial information about urinating on faces. How Hagakure is relevant to Geek Maggot Bingo, I don’t know, and I will never know, and I’m OK with that. As my boss once told me, “We don’t know what we don’t know” and that was the most unhelpful thing anyone has ever said to me, which is saying a lot. It’s even worse than “It is what it is.”
Geek Maggot Bingo is about Dr. Frankenberry (yes, like the cereal) who reanimates and combines body parts into a monster mash-up. His hunchbacked assistant dutifully procures corpses by slaying a prostitute, a john, and one cowboy (played by punk icon Richard Hell). At no point does a face get slashed and urinated on.
Written and directed by Nick Zedd, Geek Maggot Bingo is mostly people melodramatically yelling at each other. The performances are high camp at high volume; no one has an indoor voice. The script slogs a bit, with lengthy, meaningless, charmless rants that quickly tire, but the impressive production design and ingenious practical effects amp up the engagement level. The set pieces are hand-drawn, whimsical, and garish; they look like a five dollar version of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. There’s a delightful giant rotary telephone that looks like it was ripped off the set of a children’s play and landscape paintings culled from a junk shop that stand in for matte backgrounds. The monster and make-up effects are an absolute joy: production designer Tyler Smith sewed two alien costumes together and added extra appendages and the result is so effective you wonder why everyone doesn’t do this all the time. And to top it all off, there are cats! One kitten crawling on a desk is so cute, the actors are clearly distracted. You too will be distracted.
Throughout the Eighties and Nineties in New York City, filmmakers like Zedd, Kembra Pfahler, Beth B, Jon Moritsugu, and others created no wave, low-fi, post-punk underground films that retaliated against social norms and aligned to a crusty, DIY ethos. Zedd called this movement the Cinema of Transgression. It continued where our venerated filth-elder John Waters had left off, and so the battle-cry is the same: Fuck good taste, do whatever the fuck you want, and do it yourself. Geek Maggot Bingo is certainly reminiscent of early Waters’ films: there’s lots of yelling, flashes of peen, dramatic eye make-up, over-the-top costuming, and yes, some drag. The visual storytelling is a feat in DIY filmmaking, but the story itself suffers from monotony. It’s disappointing, for sure, but it is what it is.
