John Waters Puts ‘The Onania Club’ on His Best of 2021 List, But Says It’s “Maybe a Good Thing” You Can’t See It
John Waters takes his honorary title, The Pope of Trash, very seriously. In the realm of bad taste, the iconoclastic filmmaker is a true tastemaker, and he fulfills that responsibility every December by sharing a new list of his favorite films he discovered throughout the year. Compared to years past, his 2021 best-of list is light on horror titles, but one inclusion sure to raise some eyebrows is The Onania Club, from director Tom Six.
Since we were first made aware of its existence, most of what’s been written on The Onania Club has been about the fact that no one will distribute it. Six, who wrote and directed The Human Centipede and its sequels, has predictably played up this story in an effort to build buzz for the movie, and to appeal to the anti-censorship ethos shared by many within the horror community. (It should be noted, though, that any company’s decision not to buy and release a film does not constitute actual censorship.)
Also Read: Tom Six Now Asks For Fans’ Support to Release The Onania Club
Evidently, Waters somehow found a way to watch The Onania Club—perhaps by way of some direct correspondence with Six. And now that he’s seen it, he confirms that there’s good reason why distributors would want to stay the hell away from it. Still, he felt compelled to stick his neck out for the movie, even going so far as to bump Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film off his list to make room for it.
“OK, I’m really going out on a limb here, replacing Pedro Almodóvar’s exquisite Parallel Mothers, a film everybody should love, with this loathsome unreleased feature everybody will probably hate,” Waters wrote for Artforum. “The Human Centipede director tops himself with a story of rich Los Angeles women who gather together to masturbate while watching news footage of the world’s misery. Often wrongheaded but sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, it has been rejected by film distributors worldwide. All I can say is that the movie sure as hell delivers. You will probably never be able to see it. Maybe that’s a good thing…”
No doubt, Six will milk this endorsement for all it’s worth and then some as he continues to rally support for The Onania Club. With words like “often wrongheaded,” though, Waters seems to signal that the movie may fall short of being the “visionary satire” that Six himself has proclaimed it to be. Waters is obviously astute enough to know when a movie is engaging in pseudo-intellectual posturing, and his capsule review seems to highlight his appreciation for the shameless obscenity of The Onania Club more than anything else. Waters gonna Waters.
Here’s Waters’ full list:
- Annette (Dir. Leos Carax)
- Summer of Soul (Dir. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson)
- Vortex (Dir. Gaspar Noe)
- France (Dir. Bruno Dumont)
- The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (Dir. Kristina Lindström, Kristian Petri)
- Mandibles (Dir. Quentin Dupieux)
- Red Rocket (Dir. Sean Baker)
- The Tragedy Of Macbeth (Dir. Joel Coen)
- Saint-Narcisse (Dir. Bruce LaBruce)
- The Onania Club (Dir. Tom Six)
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