It has been way too long since I last looked at some proper underground cinema. And this is about as underground as it gets, from what I can tell. Much like with The Exorcism Of God, you can thank a late-night scrolling session on YouTube for me stumbling onto this thing, and… yeah, I admit it, it also peaked my interest out of sheer morbid fascination. Except this was even harder to find out anything about its creation, leading to what is probably the most intensive research I’ve had to do on a film review all year (for this blog, at least).
So, let’s get everyone up to speed. Crazed Gender Twisters From Planet X is an anthology film made up of three shorts in the Bitch & Slut animated series: You’re All So Fucked, Lesbian Maniac Heterosexual Killers, and Psychopathic Transgender Annihilators. They follow the madcap adventures of alien sisters Bitch and Slut, who crash-land on Earth and get into ultraviolent and cosmic shenanigans. Once they land on Earth, they proceed to shoot up a bunch of people, shove a giant wooden cross up a reverend’s arse, bite a man’s head off with Slut’s “man-eating cunt”, drown a baby at its own christening, have sex with a corpse, eat people, and then shoot at Superman (yes, Superman) until there’s nothing left but his engorged penis. And this is just the first six minutes of this 58-minute-and-change feature.
The animation might be the worst I have ever witnessed in an actual film. When I say I found this on YouTube, I don’t mean that it was just uploaded on an account somewhere; this was listed for rental/buy next to stuff I’ve watched in cinemas this year. Amidst all the stock pictures and explosion effects, most of the characters are hand-drawn with what appears to be black pen on white paper and animated with cut-outs. No joke, Little Foot had more actual movement than what is shown here.
The hell of it is that, as an intentional design choice, I can at least see where the influence is coming from. The roughness shares similarities with quite a few bits of niche animation, from Sick Animation’s YouTube work, to that weird Post-Apocalypto series Tenacious D did a few years back, even Tom Green’s cartoon work. On top of that, there’s a lot of Heavy Metal imagery here in the main story of intergalactic warriors landing on Earth, and subsequently being sent into the past and future by hermaphroditic Mother Nature, where they encounter two different types of authoritarian regimes. And with how all these different elements are layered on top of each other, it even looks like a scratchier version of Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python.
That last one, along with the Viz-Comics-tier graphic sexuality on display, seems the most fitting, as this has a very British approach to its gratuitous attempts at satire and just complete bugfuck insanity. While the first part sets things up for mindless violence, with Bitch and Slut just laying waste to Earth, what comes next actually has some teeth to it. When they get sent back to the ‘80s, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, they’re basically given a hard lesson in empathy as they experience life as now-reincarnated lesbians. Considering their trip to the future involves dealing with a murderous gynocracy that has more than a few shades of TERF ideology in their hatred of anything that isn’t ‘purely female’, it’s easy to see why this would come from the place known as TERF Island.
This is where the film’s proper merits as underground giveth-no-fucks satire really rings true, as all the violence isn’t really coming from a nihilistic place; it’s more a sense of frustration that comes through. Director Max Barber’s own projects up to this point show a lot of genuine allyship on his part, from his documentary Seven Secrets To Perfect Porn which deals with the shockingly recent legalisation of gay porn and homosexuality in general, to the film Little Devil starring disability advocate Samantha Demke, itself a nice bit of microbudget cripple punk cinema. I mean, his production company is called Born This Way; that’s the kind of creative we’re dealing with here.
And this is no different, taking two extraterrestrial misanthropes, making them come to terms with what aggression and violence can do to a people, and then actively questions just how far the path of pacifism will go in response. It’s weird that, in a film that features Nazi Shrek with a spiked baseball bat and a Predator orgy on Gallifrey, it’s with the admission that dealing with heteronormative nonsense can make one long to burn everything to the ground that this film is at its most daring.
On the basis of this film’s mere existence, I have to recommend this to my more adventurous readers, if only to confirm for myself that I didn’t just hallucinate all of this. But as something that deals in sexual politics, and indeed actual politics, what it has to say about humanity’s innate aggressiveness and why the phrase ‘be gay, do crime’ has a lot of tempting empowerment behind it rings surprisingly true. Calling it an acquired taste might be the single biggest understatement I’ve ever put down in writing, but considering my liking for out-there and Stylistic Suck animated features, I really enjoyed what I got here. The animation may be… no, scratch that, is the roughest I’ve ever paid to see, but it’s an insane ride that points all the fingers at the systems that allow for oppression of LGBTQ+ people, telling us all to stay strong. Stiff upper lip, hard clitty, and bullets for nipples; words to live by.
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