Copyright The Austin Chronicle
If you’re not upset by Fuck My Son! then Todd Rohal probably hasn’t done his job. Right from the title, his resurrection of the kind of movie that put the X into exploitation is designed to offend, drop jaws, and cause at least a few members of the audience to storm out – even if they thought they knew what to expect. For Austin audiences, Fuck My Son! feels informed by Weird Wednesday, the Alamo Drafthouse’s no-rules deep dive into the strangest corners of filmdom. It particularly evokes the series’ early days, during Rohal’s residency in Austin, which unreeled depraved oddities like bestiality shocker Snakes and diaper-clad mind melter The Baby – the latter of which happened to be a favorite of Aaron M. Fernandez Olson. Rohal said, “He’d be like, ‘Have you seen The Baby?’ and I’d go, ‘Yes, I’ve seen it on 35.’” And in the tradition of the exploitation circuit, Rohal is keeping the film as a theatrical experience which arrives in Austin this week for screenings at the Alamo South Lamar – a theatre that many see as ground zero for the modern grindhouse revival. What defined those flicks is that they were created by filmmakers with seemingly little concern for what the audience might think. That’s what appealed to Rohal about this project, “to do something really scary to take on. … Everything now feels like such a shrug of a movie. You see so many movies now where you say, ‘I wish you really went for it. I wish you really did it. I wish this was forbidden.’” Even for the director of weirdo creations like Sundance hit The Catechism Cataclysm and Adult Swim’s “M.O.P.Z.” adapting underground comic A Tale of Terror Issue One: Fuck My Son seems pretty forbidden. After all, only a crazy person or a cinematic hero would try to make a feature out of a single-issue comic about a deranged old lady who kidnaps a woman and forces her to have sex with her mutant manchild of a son. It’s the work of artist Johnny Ryan, and Rohal admits to being a longtime fan (“I can look at his comics and laugh and go, ‘This is so wrong,’ but I think he’s a genius”) even before the fateful day, two and a half years ago, when he read the comic that would be his next film. Rohal said, “The cover just said Fuck My Son and there’s an old lady and a woman crying, and I’m like, ‘Whatever that is, that’s all I need to know.’ I got the comic and started reading it, and went, ‘I know how to make this, I know who I would cast in this, I know where to make this in Austin.’” So former Austinite Rohal relocated from his current home state of Washington back to the ATX for filming, casting Tipper Newton (who appeared in Rohal’s 2016 film Uncle Kent 2) as the kidnapped woman and Mike Flanagan regular Robert Longstreet (Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, Mohawk) as the mother who loves her son a little too much. Filming in Austin also meant he could call on the services of a coterie of local familiar faces and old friends with similarly decadent tastes, including Macon Blair (The Toxic Avenger), John Merriman (I’ve Got Issues), and Bryan Connolly (Make Popular Movies). There’s one scene starring local talents Vincent James Prendergast (The Carnivores) and John Gholson (Man Finds Tape) that will be hard to squeegee from your brain (try as you might). Their scene was actually shot in two halves, on the very first and very last days on location, and on the final day, Rohal said, “I had this idea that I’m not going to direct John or Vincent at all. I’m just gonna put them in the room and say, ‘This is kind of what happens, this is kind of where you need to go to, now go. And it was fun because I didn’t tell them that I wasn’t going to direct them. I was just going to let it go and if they were frustrated by it, fine. It was an experiment. But it was so great, just sitting down and watching it all happen in real time. They were coming up with so many ideas. That scene’s only a few minutes long, but I could have cut it to be a half hour long.” Their scene is just one more sickly cherry on the outrageous sundae that is Fuck My Son! It’s served just when the (remaining) audience is both satiated and nauseated. Rohal said, “We have these rules put on it now – self-imposed rules that you can only go so far because you want to sell it to a streamer and you don’t want to offend anyone, and it has to work for every culture in every country in the world to be a hit. And I’m just like, ‘Let’s do an X-rated movie that’s crazy and goes for it.’” Ah, the dreaded X-rating. The precursor to NC-17, it was the kiss of death for most movies, a rating to be avoided like the plague since it meant most theatres wouldn’t take your film, and most newspapers wouldn’t run ads. But for a certain kind of sicko, that X was a siren song, and that’s what Rohal was selling to his backers – as he made very clear from his first pitches. “People are going to say ‘no’ to it or they’re going to say ‘yes’ to it, and that’s how we’re going to proceed.” And that also meant getting a cast who knew exactly what they were agreeing to – starting with Longstreet. Rohal said, “Robert tells the story that he was all onboard but he’s like ‘It’s never gonna happen. I’m all in to this goofing around and talking to you about this idea that is never gonna happen,’ and then I’m calling him back a year later and going, ‘We’ve got the money,’ and he was like, ‘Oh no.’” After all that fooling around and crazy conversations, now Longstreet had to actually pull off a complete transformation to create this insane old lady at the center of the story, “and that’s terrifying for an actor, to feel that weight on his shoulders of pulling that off, but once he was in the makeup a few days before we were like, ‘You can do it.’ I don’t think anyone’s watching the movie and thinking ‘where did you find this 98-year-old woman?’ but there’s something about it that works, and that’s completely on his performance.” After all, the gut check here for Rohal is to make something that really, truly lives up to his promise to deliver a movie in the jawdropping tradition of the X. The first problem, Rohal said, was for him to get over his own natural prudishness. The second was to truly get wild enough. After all, ratings have always been notoriously arbitrary – Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Jaws were both infamously PG, while just this week Richard Linklater’s positively prim historical drama Nouvelle Vague arrives in cinemas with an R for … reasons. Mostly the X tag was reserved for porn where the tag became catnip, “and the MPAA didn’t copyright the rating, so with Deep Throat and Emmanuelle the X-rating became this hip, downtown New York thing to go to and porno theatres would go, ‘Oh, we can do X and XX and XXX’ so it got out of control.” However, it was also affixed to some truly transgressive horrors like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Dead Alive. Where it gets truly weird is in the case of films like the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy and blaxploitation masterpiece Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, where the rating was used as a tool of cultural censorship against who gets to tell their stories. Rohal observed, “The straight version of Midnight Cowboy wouldn’t have got an X-rating. The white version of Sweet Sweetback wouldn’t have got an X-rating.” Then there’s Wild at Heart, which was threatened with an X-rating in America and so U.S. audiences got an edited version (the cut that would have faced a de facto ban is what was released everywhere else). So how does Rohal know when he’d gone far enough? He said, “It’s easy to say ‘unrated’ now which everyone does, but in terms of asking, ‘Is this dirty enough?’ yes, it scared me because of course I have some limits. There are certain lines I’m happy to cross that other people won’t, but in this I had my own morals.” During the process of making the film, Rohal found his personal lines in the sand shifting. He explained, “Editing it, I really thought I’d made something PG because I got so used to seeing it over and over and over. I showed it to some friends and they were just disgusted and they were like, ‘No, you don’t need to add to it.’” Yet it’s not like the process turned Rohal into a ravening cinematic pervert. “I realized, it’s like some whose career is giving colonoscopies. They’re like, ‘Eh, I don’t care. I see this every day.’” The same cannot be true of audiences, many of whom have never been exposed to anything quite as delightfully debauched as Fuck My Son! Rohal recalled running into a married couple after the film’s Fantastic Fest screening “and the wife knew that I directed it because I’d introduced it. I was sitting out in the hallway, and she came out, and I said, ‘Is it too much?’ and she said, ‘Yes, it was too much for me.’ And usually those interactions feel combative – the person’s mad at you or doesn’t like you or feels uncomfortable – and we were just out there joking around and laughing about it. … I am fully OK with people leaving and going ‘This is not for me.’” With Fuck My Son! now in cinemas (and cinemas only) and achieving the kind of divisive response that leads to true late-night cult status, Rohal described the experience as “freeing. I understand much more about freedom of speech, and what Larry Flynt was such a proponent of, and why the front line of free speech is the most disgusting and hideous things in the world. So it just became more and more exciting even to the day we were putting it out and more things were being banned, and there’s more threats to what you can and can’t do, and more and more people bowing to that.” And Rohal isn’t just proud of making a stand for X-rated moviemaking – he’s actually calling for the MPAA to restore it. But don’t start thinking that his prudish side is winning out. “There’s no censorship that ages well,” he warned, and that he would like to bring it back as a badge of honor. “You’d have to apply for an X-rating, and your film would have to be certified transgressive. It unfortunately would have to be the MPAA that would have to do it, but you are pushing boundaries here and the X-rating is appropriate and constitutes art in film.” Fuck My Son! screens Thursday 30-Friday 31 at the Alamo South Lamar, plus there will be a live Q&A at screenings on Saturday, Nov. 1 and Tuesday, Nov. 4. Tickets and info at drafthouse.com. For further screenings, visit linktr.ee/fuckmyson.
