Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

I very much loved the editing, as if a virus took over your computer and is playing with Halloween soaked characters on your screen instead of the usual porn popups.

Most underground films are some guy basically masturbating with his camera, but this is really something else. An exercise in pure style that actually works; there's probably a fancy word for it somewhere, but I like to call it "the poetry of sound and image". It all just seems right -- not quite an opera, it hits you with one indelible image after another that just reeks of art of an older and possibly better world, one that had nothing to do with mutual funds or K-Fed or PDAs. Totally awesome!

Some deity-types drink some kind of potion that sends them into a very colourful ecstatic montage. Impossible to tell to what degree it is intended seriously, but the appeal was quite limited for this viewer. Gaspar Noé apparently has a different opinion.

Anger's got a great eye for striking images, but this is essentially forty minutes of a really theatrical occult ritual. I mean I get why people were influenced by him so much, since he was out making such fascinating and bizarre images at a time when there was a dearth of such. But I don't find it particularly worthwhile beyond that.

Kenneth Anger #1

immense work of theatre, fashion and passion, but i just hate to admit that this really isn't my sort of thing at all, and the result for me is more tedious than anything. oh well. sorry kenneth anger!

Completely alien, but it manages to provoke some really odd and powerful emotions. The last 10 minutes are completely unique and the definition of sensory overload. I dunno, you just have to see it to believe it.

[rating is for the 1978 re-cut, set to Janá?ek's JW III/9].

Would work better at 15-20 minutes rather than 38, but when it gets frenetic and all the images are blending in and out of each other it becomes sublime.

Tedious after awhile but vivid and wild. Proto-psychedelia that's more powerful than most actual psychedelia.

Strange and mysterious, and maybe a little goofy. I think it goes on a bit too long but it's mostly worthwhile.

With Anger's bright sense of colour and a nice soundtrack this is a pretty little operetta, with some really creative moments. It drags, though, and isn't really my thing.

A psycho-brilliant product of Satan-worshiping and LSD. Its Thelemic combination of superimpositions, cross-religious imagery, neon costuming and 'attack' editing are completely unique to anything I have ever seen in cinema. Seeing the gods use Magick to drink Satan's power and turn into pseudo-Cenobites is certainly an iconoclastic statement.

Very silly but also really, really fun when it gets going.

Well, this is just silly. It looks like a bunch of friends playing dress-up (which is pretty much exactly what it is) with a bunch of mythological and occult gibberish tossed in for the heck of it. C'mon... Aleister Crowley? What are we, 19 years old? The colors are incredible and I'm sure it's innovative filmmaking, but it's too annoying and ridiculous for 38 minutes. Recommended only for people who take Current 93 seriously.