Exclusive: Set Report & Photos From Filthy!
*WARNING: These pictures are NOT WORK SAFE!**
Man, the shit you can get yourself in just by walking down the street…
A couple of weeks ago, I went for a stroll along one of Montreal’s main drags to escape the afternoon doldrums, and soon after I was literally up to my eyeballs (and past) in shit. And garbage. And dirty diapers. And writhing, naked middle-aged female flesh.
Sound enticing? I’m sure to someone out there this sounds like the dream fetish scenario. For me, getting this close to that horrendously perverse fantasy will be more than enough for this lifetime, thank you very much.
You’re probably wondering – being amongst the trash with other feces covered individuals groping a naked woman … how does that just happen by walking out your front door on a normal, sunny springtime afternoon? The answer, not surprisingly perhaps, is because I was fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it) enough to cross paths with Montreal nightmare merchant Karim Hussain, a man who is certainly not what you’d qualify as unversed in the vile when it comes to screen creations. If you’ve seen Subconscious Cruelty, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If not, go get yourself schooled in trailers for Subconscious Cruelty and other subversive Hussain-helmed epics on his MySpace page.
Teaming up with UK’s Mondo Macabro, Karim is working towards bringing a vision of grim scatological satire to life in the form of Filthy, a rather nasty sounding scenario where a sub-sect of the wealthiest in society take perverse sexual pleasure from copulating with the poor in the most wretched gutter/garbage backdrops imaginable. It seems Karim wants to fuse these disparate social realities and let them have at it in a symbiotic hate-fuck to increasingly degrading degrees… as the copious coprophagous copulation delves deeper into disgust and masochistic degradation, the cracks in the vision of this strange union between have-alls and have-nothings start to show, revealing further disturbing and blackly comedic truths about our greedy world and its polarized hypocrisies.
That’s what I got from what he told me anyway. Sound heavy? You bet, but it also promises to be funny in a sick and twisted way. Consider me intrigued!
And this, my friends, is how I got into serious shit just by walking out my front door. Karim invited me to the shoot for the teaser trailer of Filthy, and I agreed to be a pair of hands within the trash, the symbol of poverty groping the rich at their lustful urging.
As I got to the set a day later, the sea of garbage in front of me was daunting and truly quite a terrible sight. I wondered “Are we going to get that shit out of here before these guys start shooting?” until I realized that this was what we would be shooting – and acting in! Literally! Myself and several other pairs of hands (one of which was Rue Morgue’s own Rodrigo Gudiño) spent the better part of the day beneath a foul air mattress covered in coffee grounds, soiled nappies, nasty household trash, and various poo-congeners of random consistency. My hands and arms kept getting re-greased with what looked like a mix of cum, diarrhea, and motor oil. From beneath the garbage pile, I couldn’t see what I was grabbing, nor could anyone for that matter. All of our hands were suitably grunged, scabbed, and bloodied by on-set make-up from Dread Central’s own Evil Andy. The cum and runny-shite substances were apparently created from cream-donut filling – consider me scarred into eternal absence from Krispy Kreme!
The real heroine though was the woman amongst the garbage, Rasili, who had to be groped by all these nasty hands from unseen owners. It was graphic and full-on. I felt bad for her at points – not because of the groping, she seemed fine with that as simply being part of the role. What I was concerned about, being one of the hands grabbing her hair and shoulders and face, was all this donut filler stuff getting accidentally pushed into her ears. It certainly was going pretty much everywhere else! When you see the Filthy trailer, you’ll see the full extent of what went down, and it’s… um… it’s very nice in a Karim Hussain kinda way!
Other noteworthy things about the shoot – Andy Starke, Filthy’s producer from Mondo Macabro, was on hand in-person, wisely opting to play the role of on-set editor. Yes, you absolutely cannot have the laptop and the technical gear anywhere near all the messy stuff. Now I know what I’ll volunteer for the next time I’m invited to a set like this! Andy had a workable rough cut for us to get a look at what the end result might be like (I’ve subsequently seen the real cut myself and I can tell you that it looks really good). Later that day, Fantasia mastermind Mitch Davis showed up with none other than Gaspar Noe! Pretty cool. If there was an epicenter of audience suffering and distressed-theatre-walkout-causers that day, it was almost certainly the set of Filthy.
Having lived to tell the tale of this vile experience, I can also tell you that this is going to be a film worth crossing your fingers for, because it most definitely will be an extreme film. We’ll keep you in the loop as new info comes in from Mondo Macabro … let’s hope all of us can get Filthy together sooner rather than later.
Go ahead, take a shower before joining us in the Dread Central forums!
Categorized:
