Apparently, I am doing this “blogging at 3 am” thing again.

Anyhow, tonight I came across a 70’s classic, animated movie The Point. And to my surprise, I ended up watching the whole 74 minutes of it.

I won’t got too deep into the plot, but it’s about a little boy born with a round head where everyone else’s head is pointed. Eventually, this gets him and his dog Arrow exiled from the Pointed Lands, and he goes on a psychedelic adventure that teaches him that everybody has a point, even if you can’t see it.

It’s for kids, so, not subtle in the slightest.

Anyhow, at the end of it, I saw that it had been made by Murakami/Wolf, the same people who would go on to do the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. But not before they made one of my favorite movies of all time, The Dirty Duck, also known as The Down And Dirty Duck and Cheap.

Here’s the movie in its entirety, if you are brave enough to try it :

I originally encountered the movie as an impulse rent from the Hollywood Video near where I lived when I was attending UPEI. It looked messed up and obscene and just plain weird, and I figured, what the heck. Let’s give it a try.

Then I watched it. And it changed me forever.

It was way more than just some dirty cartoon. It actually had a very deep and powerful message of self-acceptance and embracing who you really are. It is at times hilarious, at times beautiful, and at times so sharp in its satire that it leaves me breathless. And it does it all with such ease and color that it makes me want to cry.

It also has amazingly beautiful songs by Flo and Eddie, who used to be the two leads in the band The Turtles, and holy crap you can tell. That big big symphonic rock sound is all through the movie. Not only did they do the music, but they also voiced the two main character, Willard Eisenbaum and The Duck.

Here’s one of the less obscene ones.

As that implies, the movie is filthy. It glories in its own cheapness, perfectly reflecting the “cheap thrills” ethos of the Seventies,and is filled with nudity, depravity, madness, fantasy, surreality, and just plain filth.

Is there any wonder I love it so?

To me, all that cheap nasty stuff not only serves the plot, but it serves to weed out the sort of people who were never going to understand the film anyhow and who frankly don’t deserve to, in my bitchy yet humble opinion.

It takes a strong, open mind to see the glorious life-affirming beauty underneath the tits and drugs and psychedelia. The lesser minds will, no doubt, be offended and take it out on the film. They will say it is cheap vulgar trash with a juvenile sense of humour that wallows in its own depravity and has no socially redeeming value whatsoever.

And they will be right.

But it is so much more than that. These are the same sorts of people who will never understand the Rocky Horror Picture Show either, and that is fine because, to paraphrase its protagonist, “it wasn’t made… FOR THEM!”

I am entirely confident when I put those two in the same category. They are both highly sex-positive, open-minded, audacious movies that celebrate life in a way that is rarely seen. Every time I watch either movie, I come away feeling wonderful. It makes me feel so good to see something so clearly made for the freaks, weirdos, dropouts, losers, perverts, addicts, and all the other people society doesn’t want and doesn’t want to think about whom I consider my people.

Call it the ultimate in outsider art.

Back to our story. Having been reminded of the movie, I decided to see what of it was available on YouTube these days. Previously, I had felt like I was the only person in the universe who had seen the movie and actually liked it.

And that impression was not challenged by anything I saw. Sure, there was more about it on YouTube than ever before, including the whole darn thing, and I was very happy to see some of the song were on there (yoink!), but then I clicked on a link for some thin but even layer of anal scum calling himself The Cinema Snob reviewing the movie, and I ragequit five minutes into it.

Here it is. I highly doubt it will make you as mad as it does me.

Despite what he says at the beginning, he clearly doesn’t get it. Add in his calculatedly irritating voice, and it’s no wonder I want to smack him with a pair of panties with a rock in it.

And then I made the worst mistake… I looked at the comments.

Such a total wasteland. What the hell did I expect? YouTube comment sections are where all that is pure and good in the world goes to die. They are a hotbed of stupidity, malign ignorance, the worst of human nature, and the grammar of a retarded Speak and Spell on low battery.

And that’s when I realized that it has finally happened. The fate I have dodged, more or less, over many years of being into things way out of mainstream. I have become a person I did not wish to be.

I am the angry critic railing against people for not appreciating real art when they see it and instead preferring to worship social status and wealth by watching the Kardashians and caring what happens to them.

Luckily, I know I will get over it. Writing this all out helps a lot. I am into a lot of other stuff that is bizarre and disturbing and not at all to the public’s taste.

I mean, I love The Residents, and they made music like this :

That’s one of my favorite of their songs. And it’s one of the more normal ones!

So in the future, I will go into looking up my favorite stuff with a much more guarded attitude.

Maybe I am the only one who gets it. But at least there is me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.