Memorable, crazy movie

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Blistering performances.

One of Kenneth Anger's most popular and thematically accessible short films, "Scorpio Rising" consists of a series of montage images overlain by thirteen pop songs of the early 1960s. The film expresses nonconformist themes that herald the onset of the American counterculture movement. As the visuals focus on a group of New York City motorcyclists, viewers perceive a bohemian lifestyle, a nihilistic subtext, elements of erotica, and an amusing sense of irony from the juxtaposition of images and music.There is no plot, no dialogue, no sets, no acting. Anger simply records on camera what he finds as he happens onto these bikers, who are not actors. Sans music, the film could easily be thought of as a polished home movie. It conveys a sense of realism and frankness. Cinematography is somewhat grainy; colors are muted. There are many close-up camera shots, and quite a few extreme close-ups.The music gives thematic depth to the images and imposes varying moods and feelings, not the least of which is nostalgia, along with melancholy, lost childhood, rebellion, humor, and just a hint of fatalism. Probably one of the better sequences is the Bobby Vinton recording of "Blue Velvet" recorded over images of a couple of young guys who don their biker uniforms. A sequence or two in the middle seems either unnecessary or out of place. Editing is a bit fast and erratic in the second half.Prospective viewers should expect the unexpected, given that "Scorpio Rising" is a 1960s underground film. It is definitely different. This is one of several that Anger made, all experimental. In retrospect, he can be thought of as a poetic visionary whose cultural influence is still being felt in the 21st century, especially in cinema.

This is from the second DVD of a set called "The Films of Kenneth Anger"--a collection of avant garde films by this odd film maker. I found the first disk to be more satisfying--the second has a lot about Aleister Crowley and Satanism that I found a bit dreary.The synopsis listed on IMDb is incorrect. I watched this film and listened to Kenneth Anger's commentary and the bikers are NOT meant to be gay Nazis. While they might appear to be homosexuals to some, Anger explains that you don't see their girlfriends who are off camera because the bikers didn't want them in the film. And, incidentally, the Nazi imagery and paraphernalia that appears later in the film was the property of the film maker---not the bikers. And, incidentally, Anger did not say he was making a film about gays or Nazis--the swastikas were there more for a sense of alienation and contempt for social norms.The film follows a biker nicknamed 'Scorpio' as he does some of his normal routine (such as getting dressed and hanging out with his cats--the feline type). In addition, the biker and his friends put on a show for Anger--dancing about and acting up in a soon to be demolished church. Afterwords, you see scenes from a motorcycle race in which a guy is killed right in front of the camera (he breaks his neck). Anger chose to keep the footage as well as a closeup of the dead man's face as a shocking ending to the film.While the film has a lot of artsy touches, this is a mostly documentary style film set to 60s biker music and with no dialog. It's not high art or something that the average person would enjoy, but it's moderately enjoyable and well filmed.

Scorpio Rising marks the beginning of the mix-tape approach to film-making, the technique of adding texture, flow, counter-point to images by over-laying them with a soundtrack of pop songs. Kenneth Anger takes this technique to its limit right from the start, eschewing dialogue, narrative and everything else in favor of a thirty-minute greatest-hits medley wedded to a chaotic assemblage of pictures having to do with some gay-Nazi-anarchists engaged in all manner of rebellious behavior, from reading comic books to smearing mustard on a fat guy's stomach and tearing his pants off. The result is a bizarre fusion of the innocent and the profane, the quaintness of yesterday's Elvis/Bobby Vinton hits alongside the amateurish depravity and two-bit spectacle of Anger's underground opus.Despite its reputation as a sort of counter-culture landmark, the movie seems largely irrelevant, a museum piece commemorating the excesses of '60s cult movie-making. It consists primarily of badly-lit home-movies of some nameless, faceless leather-fetishists posing like the most slovenly male-models you can remember, then going to some degraded costume-ball that degenerates into the sort of orgiastic hi-jinks that were a staple of "controversial" sixties cinema. For kicks, Anger keeps cutting in little snippets from a silent movie about Jesus, demonstrating a grammar-school-level sense of how to shock middle-brow audiences. This is avant-gardism at its most obnoxiously pointless, the deliberate mingling of opposing elements (bubbly pop tunes over random sexual carnage, cross-cutting between a gay-Nazi orgy and shots of the Last Supper) for the purpose of suggesting all sorts of potential meanings, none of which have been sufficiently thought-out.Anger is so concerned with creating an intense experience that he forgets anything he might've known about film technique and simply wallows in his own fanatical, vaguely Satanic weirdness. Yet despite the film's sloppiness, it occasionally points the way toward what later, better filmmakers would do with the director's indisputably pioneering idea. The fusion of pop-music and pop-image (see the Layla sequence in Goodfellas; bits of Easy Rider; much of Tarantino) can lead to a sense of electricity, a heightening, where a moment can come to summarize the whole of the film texturally. The first glimmers of this galvanizing effect can be felt for a second here-and-there in Scorpio Rising, but either Anger didn't understand what he was on to, or didn't care. As so often happens in experimental film, the pioneer has the inspiration but lacks the expertise, the know-how necessary to employ the technique in a meaningful way. The little ripples of potential energy never amount to anything for Anger, who winds up coming across like Roger Corman without the movie-making acumen.

What is significant about this text is that Anger got many of the shots from the initiation rites of American biker gangs. As such, the butch ruggedness of these ostensibly "straight" men is conflated with the none-too-subtle homoeroticism of their rites--which leads the viewer to question the rigid dichotomies of "straight" and "gay" that dominate North American social discourse.Also of significance is the extent to which, by appropriating "butch markers" such as leather and motorcycles, the homoeroticism undermines the stereotypicality of the "nelly" homosexual male.Not a terribly accessible text, but it becomes pregnant with significance for the viewer who does a little background reading first.