Joy comes in many, many forms. For instance:
“Hey man you fucked my woman last night I’m going to kill you.”
Such a phenomenal “sentence”. You don’t even need the context of a film to justify something like that. It arrives as a fully-formed, self-sustaining entity. At this moment, there’s nothing I can think of that encourages joy in quite the same way as rereading that unpunctuated statement over and over and over. So take that feeling, and imagine a man with a very-large mustache walking into a empty, dilapidated ballroom. The ballroom is supposed to be a dive bar. It doesn’t look anything like a dive bar. But the man walks in, stares at the ground, and delivers that statement with the fiery determination of a 93 year old man. Another man turns around, points a gun, and says (in an exotic-yet-indeterminate accent): “That’s right and the night before that I fucked your sister and the night before that I fucked your mother.”
That’s a lot of fucking. That’s Gunblast.
At this point, Nick Millard has nothing to prove — to me, you, or anyone else in the world. Earnest in his intent and inspiring in his tenacity, Mr. Millard remains the most singular, inventive, and beautifully disconnected filmmaker that no one cares about. The more films of his that I experience, the deeper my veneration. Gunblast follows .357 Magnum and The Terrorists as Millard’s final thrust into action, after dozens of soft-and-hardcore curiosities (Oddo, The Pleasures Of A Woman) and trash-horror revelations (Criminally Insane, Death Nurse). So think of it this way: Gunblast is the most sequential film in a triune most notable for its strange accents, shoot-out absurdities, and FOB (face-on-boobs) super-sexx. In other words, this one has an ending and a character explains the plot to us. Twice. Aside from that, this is exactly what I want from Nick Millard, and, I assume, exactly what Nick Millard wants me to cull from his work — heavenly gratification through inexplicable irrationality. Do you ever think about Beans And Wieners?
Freshly released from prison, Roy hangs out in his hotel room, eating Beans And Wieners, reading Playboy, smoking, walking, doing whatever. He goes to a XXX theater and watches Uschi Digard lick her own boobs in a scene from Millard’s Fancy Lady. There is a strange stain on the door of Roy’s hotel room. It looks like Hershey’s chocolate sauce. Soon, a woman shows up and offers Roy “50% of a half-million dollars” to help her steal heroin and/or money from an ex-boyfriend at the Mexican border. He declines. He rubs his face on her boobs for ages. Then, he agrees. Five minutes later, the same exact thing happens, but in a different hotel room. A bodyguard (he’s the guy who fucked everyone else’s woman) engages in the most hysterical and insane target practice I’ve never imagined. There are one-sided conversations with blank walls standing in for actual conversations, guns that blast 1000 times in the span of four seconds, creatively recycled nudes from other Millard sex films, and an alarming doorbell which caused me to laff more than I laffed during Laurel & Hardy’s Putting Pants On Philip. That’s pretty serious.
It’s difficult to communicate how powerful Gunblast can be. Like most of Millard’s films, it runs just over 60 minutes. And, like .357 Magnum and The Terrorists, this movie is filled with shockingly terrible compositions, uncomfortably misplaced music cues, and the same exact people playing the same exact roles with different character names. Elements are reused with such rapid proclivity (the car from Doctor Bloodbath, the house from pretty much every Millard film spanning 1976-1988), that the blurring of filmic perimeters becomes inevitable. This is a lovely netherworld. It never changes. It just spreads, organically, in 60 minute increments. But Gunblast, in contrast to .357 Magnum, requires no commitment to accept. There’s no need. This film is instantaneous elation. It moves quickly and never stops to ponder anything less than complete hilarity, bafflement, and talk of the “shooting off” of people’s balls. As such, it’s Nick Millard’s most consistently fulfilling “action” film.
As such, I can’t stop thinking about FOB.
