Sins of the Fleshapoids (review)

The Kuchar brothers are the pre-eminent filmmakers of an absurdist and ramshackle underground film aesthetic that they first pioneered in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their bargain-basement, no-budget approach was then, and continues to be, perfectly suited to their outlandish small-gauge experiments in semi-narrative experimental cinema. The Kuchars' films run a gamut of genres, but consistently feature a variety of storytelling that flaunts an idiosyncratic and joyfully overblown blend of melodrama and fantasy. Their films of the 1960s showcase a remarkably consistent homespun interpretation of Hollywood's most lurid B-movie clichés in which every woman is big-bosomed and each performative gesture is equally generous. In their visual and dramatic excesses, their films embrace the comic book aesthetics of postwar America, as they cast their narrative net into the collective adolescent fantasies of a playfully deviant and anarchic cultural milieu.

Directed by Mike Kuchar, Sins of the Fleshapoids (US 1965) is a camp sf mini-feature, set one million years from now on an Earth that shares its visual iconography and costuming with a cartoonish version of ancient Greek civilisation. At this point in the distant future, a small portion of mankind has recovered from 'The Great War' and has successfully engineered an entire race of robots – the Fleshapoids – to do its bidding. These creatures, visually indistinguishable from humans, are forced to complete all the tedious labour and work so that their masters may selfishly enjoy the sensual and carnal pleasures life has to offer. Because of their technological success in the creation of a robot race, humans are finally free, in the words of the film's narrator, 'to indulge in the fulfilment of the senses'. This enthusiastic and openly theatrical voiceover guide takes us through the story of the Fleshapoids. Like many Kuchar works, the film does not have a synchronised-sound dialogue track. In fact, it has no spoken dialogue whatsoever. In a pop-art gesture that borrows directly from comic-book iconography, the film's characters occasionally provide phrases or interjections that are communicated by thought bubbles printed on the screen in white handwritten text. These occasional bits of written language punctuate the operatic phantasmagoria of Mike Kuchar's playful adolescent dreamscape. In its visual fabric, the film borrows from a variety of sources that share the degraded position of pop culture detritus, including 'sword and sandal' movies, exploitation film, Hollywood melodrama and B-movie sf. Sonically, the film features wall-to-wall music of the most sweeping and theatrical varieties, as it presents an uninterrupted collage-like deluge of emotionally charged Hollywood compositions. The film's soundtrack was assembled by Bob Cowan, the film's star and a frequent collaborator with the Kuchars, and boils over with an outrageously overstated emotional signification.

The Sins of the Fleshapoids is a blend of utopian and dystopian fantasy. Though we are told that 'the humans now live in a true paradise', it is one in which people eat Clark candy bars, Wise potato chips and soft-serve ice-cream cones. It is a slothful utopia infused with American junk food, which aspires to a sedentary lifestyle that is not dissimilar to that of the suburban couch potato. Its idealistic referents are simultaneously Plato's Republic, in which a privileged philosopher class is free to meditate on 'the forms' of nature, and the world of Archie comics, where teenagers loaf around lazily. In its loose interplay of American cultural products and a caricature of the lifestyle of the ancient Athenian Acropolis (featuring large vases, laurel wreaths and line drawings of semi-nude Olympian athletes), the film pokes fun at the very idea of civilisation itself, suggesting that ancient Greece and postwar America both held leisure above all other interests, as the highest goal of civilisation. For the Kuchars, humans are always ridiculous and always funny. To reinforce this concept, Sins of the Fleshapoids presents us with a race of robots physically indistinguishable from us in order that the sloth and selfishness of...