OK, OK...so cinema doesn't exactly equal rock and roll (except when you're talking about most big money trash, which ain't cinema or rock and roll at all). But so what? Josh Slates, veteran of Homicide and John Waters shoots, diver into the depths of all celluloid seas, incisive writer since he was in knee pants, survivor of Columbia, MO, Rochester, NY, and Baltimore, will be holding forth monthy in this space. Check it out if you know what's good for you.

In December of 2000, Hong Kong tabloid newspapers closely documented the trial of Chan Man-lok, Leung Shing-cho and Leung Wai-lun, three loan sharks who were sentenced to life in prison for the bizarre manslaughter of a woman who had allegedly stolen HK$4,000 from Chan. The victim, a young mother named Fan Man-yee, was held captive for a month and subjected to numerous tortures before she eventually succumbed to her injuries. Upon her death, the three men dismembered and boiled her remains before sewing her skull inside of a plush Hello Kitty doll.

Such sensationalistic true-crime foibles seemed tailor-made for exploitation by Hong Kong film producers, who have a long history of fictionalizing local homicide investigations and recycling them into Category III horror-thrillers such as “Dr. Lamb,” “The Untold Story” and “Unpublicized Case: Human Sausages.” But few might have expected that dueling production

If such a declaration is possible, Matrix Productions’ “There is a Secret in My Soup” emerges as the classier production of the two, in that its producers had the means to rent a fog machine and the chutzpah to cast popular Hong Kong cable-television hostess Cherry Chan Chiu-Chiu in the lead. She plays Maggie, a wimpering young woman who flees her abusive husband and does what anyone else in her position would do: join a prostitution ring led by three brutal street thugs. When she steals HK$8,000 from the trio to finance a surgical operation for her grandmother, they react by imprisoning her in their apartment and improvising a routine of tortures to subject her to. After Maggie is assaulted with a cheese grater, drenched in bongwater and tied to a luggage cart, she expires apparently not of the severity of her wounds but rather the sheer indignity of it all. An unpleasant subterfuge begins, but in an effort to pad the running time out to a scant 84 minutes, director Yeung Chi-kin also provides us with an interlude of consensual foreplay involving motor oil, a Wet-Vac and a frankfurter that is used as a drill bit.

Legend Star’s “Human Pork Chop,” directed with soporific competency by Bennie Chan, is a hastily pieced-together hack-job of an insult to its intended audience. Emily Kwan stars as Grace Li, a drug-addled young woman who is pimped out by a trio of unsavory gentlemen. Fate rears its ugly head and she is imprisoned in their flat. One of the pimps’ girlfriends orders

Grace to pretend to be a penguin, which entails her spending hours locked inside of a small refrigerator. After Grace inadvertently free-bases a stash of poisoned dope, a gruesome fit of cookery ensues and the film sputters along to its expected finish. Aside from a barely-inspired

Sanrio, the parent company of Hello Kitty, took an immediate distaste to recreations of a notorious crime involving their most recognizable icon and issued a press release (see below) to protest their distribution. “Our whole corporate ethic is based on social communication, with love, friendship and happiness,” general manager Soji Noyi asserted.

Although neither company was specifically threatened with legal action by Sanrio, “Human Pork Chop” producer Chan Chi-sun reacted to the press release with outright contempt. “Everyone knows that the criminals used their doll to hide part of the body,” he reasoned. “If we didn't have that in our film then people will say we are not being realistic. It would be like not using a car in a film about car accidents because car makers threatened to sue us.”

Perhaps Chan felt confident in his response because his production had the foresight to use a Korean “Miffy” doll in place of the actual feline. Although theatrical prints of “There is a Secret in My Soup” featured a Hello Kitty doll with its eyes scratched out, the video release of the film utilizes digital technology to optically censor the trademarked character whenever it appears on-screen.

Both films opened on January 5, 2001 in direct competition with Kinji Fukasaku’s epic juvenile-violence drama “Battle Royale,” the most controversial Japanese film in recent years. Contrary to early estimates provided by Hong Kong Entertainment News in Review, “Human Pork Chop” bested its thematic competitor at the box-office, earning HK$60,553 on eight

screens to become the ninth highest-grossing film of that weekend. “There is a Secret in My Soup” racked up HK$56,387 in receipts from ten engagements for a tenth-place debut. Splintering an audience that was already familiar with extensive coverage of the story, both films closed on the following Thursday.

It was difficult to know exactly how to react to the sight of Catherine Breillat -- dimunitive, exuberant and soft-spoken often to the point of unintelligibility -- as she solemnly used her best broken English to introduce her latest film, "Fat Girl" (aka "A Ma Soeur!") to the New York Film Festival. She mentioned how the humor levelled at the expense of an obese and pubescent French girl on a soul-crushing summer vacation with her family might be interpreted by some as fodder for a prime-time sitcom.

"Do not believe the sitcom," Breillat intoned in all seriousness, perhaps in an attempt to foreshadow the unforgettably gruesome act of violence that closes the film and sent audience members leaping out of their seats. "Comedy leads to tragedy."

Anais (Anais Reboux) is a twelve year-old fat girl who lives in the shadow of her manipulative and self-conscious sexpot of an older sister, Elena (Roxane Mesquida). While Anais' emerging sexual desire begins to manifest itself in ways that could only be described as "Breillat-esque" -- including her imagined love affair with a stainless-steel railing in a swimming pool

Anais and Elena happen to share a room at their vacation home. Anais often feigns sleep for hours on end while spying on her sister's sexual escapades, which more often than not involve Fernando's protestations that Elena can still consider herself a virgin even if she offers up her anus for him to penetrate.

Their parents are a boorish lot, and their mother (Arsinee Khanjian, an Armenian-born actress known to most world-cinema wags as "Mrs. Atom Egoyan") is a near-narcoleptic mess who can barely complete a simple drive through the country without extended stops at rest areas, where she makes derogatory comments about fellow travellers. "People are pigs," she snarls while watching a nearby couple munch on vending-machine snacks.

The most unsettling (and most interesting) element of the plot involves how Anais has become an all-but-manufactured scapegoat for this despicable family's petty woes. Her mother and her sister slap Anais around and belittle her pear-shaped figure until she bursts into tears. They assuage her sorrow by force-feeding her buttered baguettes and what one can only guess is taffy. This oft-repeated ritual seems only to inflate Anais' waist-line, which increases her mother and sister's contempt for her, which eventually leads to ... well, more of the same.

Elena is not the annoying adolescent anti-hero of "36 Fillette," who discovers her new-found ability to attract dirty old men and uses it to megalomaniacal effect; Elena finds a worldly and equally manipulative young man in Fernando, one who anticipates her every conversational trap and ensnares her within them.

Anais is not the perenially libidinous titular figure of "Une Vraie Jeune Fille," who spends her summer vacation attempting to seduce a hunky lumberjack; Anais is a creature of disappointment and jealousy, one who can only bring herself to eat banana splits and lie in angry silence while yearning to be violated in the same fashion as her lascivious sister.

Nor is her Italian boyfriend the self-styled satyr and Bukowski-skimming intellectual that Rocco Siffredi portrayed in "Romance"; Fernando is a confident clod who has devoted his vacation to seducing the underage object of obsession and makes no apologies for it until confronted by circumstance.

The oft-alluded-to conclusion of "Fat Girl" will likely strike most viewers as cathartic and expected, given the director's particular fetish for the distintegration of the bourgeois family unit and her self-proclaimed status as a puritanical filmmaker. But its very inclusion appears to be an afterthought, even if Breillat insists that a tabloid's portrayal of a comparable true story is what inspired her to write the screenplay in the first place.

The question-and-answer session at the Lincoln Center that followed the screening was quite a rousing affair. An audience member asked if Breillat felt it was improper to subject a real-life overweight adolescent to on-screen humiliation. "Why should I answer any questions about morality?" she countered through her interpreter. "We're at a film festival, after all."

Making light of the explicit and almost exploitative nature of the film, the director returned to her initial metaphor of the sitcom. Breillat offered that she sought to provide "the opposite of ellipses" in showing what popular entertainment often presents with neutered amusement. She even recounted how she came to distrust the off-screen bond that Reboux and Mesquida had developed in anathema to their characters' antagonistic relationship on-screen. "Their television culture made me furious," Breillat complained.

The director also insisted that "Fat Girl" was always the intended title of the film, even if it is an exceedingly loose translation of its French title, "A Ma Soeur!" She explained that the latter was a local colloquialism commonly used for toasts; as such, she found it to be a more

Most tellingly, she recalled taking particular joy as a child in frightening her younger sister with the tale of "Bluebeard," elaborating in graphic detail how the title character took to hanging his wives by their hair. By doing so, Breillat was able to allay her own fears of being hung from her

While vacationing in sunny NYC for the weekend, I had many choices of quality art-house and independent films to see. Go figure why I decided to see a re-release of Catherine Breillat's debut 1976 feature, "Une Vraie Jeune Fille" -- roughly translated, "a real young girl," as opposed to all of those phony young girls, whose camp I believe Breillat was clearly a member of when she made this paean to youthful indiscretion.

All that said, Breillat's debut non-sync feature -- the dialogue of the lead character, Alice, was dubbed by Breillat's sister -- may truly be her finest film. While the intolerable "Romance" also sported the strength of its moronic convictions, "Une Vraie Jeune Fille" is simply too infantile to even be considered intellectual fodder and the audience is better off for it. There is also a certain suspense that accompanies the film -- namely, which piece of set dressing will end up inside of the lead actress next.

The "story" centers around the plight of Alice, a 15-year-old girl who has returned home for the summer from boarding school and cringes at the thought of spending that time with her repressive parents (dubbed by, of course, Breillat's parents, who I would imagine were flabbergasted by the narrative content that follows). Breillat illustrates the fact that she's coming home to a repressive home by intercutting her arrival with a zillion shots of flies stuck in flypaper, but the parents don't seem all that terribly repressive, unless you consider feeding and housing your first-born daughter an act of repression.

Trouble begins when Alice starts writing in her diary with the pen she was given for confirmation and promptly throws up all over herself. Her parents are understandably concerned, but she is "comforted by the vomit's warmth and sweet smell." She remembers her none-too-happy schooldays, where she sits on a toilet with the seat up so the imprint of the bowl will be left on her buttocks and proceeds to urinate, the act itself preserved by Breillat's all-too-cozy lensing. She uses her toe to make designs in the filth on the tiled floor of the water closet, while other sickly girls pound on the door, jealous of her emotional liberation.

Being summer vacation, Alice decides to go to the sawmill that her father owns and parade around like a slut in an effort to gain the affections of a chiseled-jaw monkey named Jim. She can't understand why Jim won't sleep with her, even as she lays sprawled out on the ground with her panties around her ankles while urinating into the earth and fondling herself with pebbles. But she respects him for having the strength to resist her temptations (lead actress Charlotte Alexandra, whom I only pray was of the age of consent when making this film, certainly has temptation to spare -- see the photo below). She instead fantasizes about their myriad possible encounters, where she is bound by rusty barbed wire and Jim tears an earthworm into three segments before inserting them into Alice's area ... again, all LOVINGLY preserved forever by Breillat's snoopy camera. In a bizarre set piece, Alice inserts feathers from a recently butchered chicken into her anus and parades around on all fours for Jim's disapproval.

A recurring subplot involves Alice's fetishistic penchant for removing her undies and dirtying them into the ground below. This motif's illogical zenith is realized when Alice, vacationing on the beach, places her panties upon the rotting carcass of a dead dog after sodomizing herself with a bottle of tanning oil. (To be succinct, the only other things this poor actress had to insert into herself are a spoon, a wad of dandelions and a fingerful of red ink.) I hope that Breillat's budget included several trips to a qualified OB-GYN for Alexandra, who can also be seen in such films as "Emmanuelle 3" as well as Walerian Borowzcyk's "Immoral Tales," where she again suffers the indignity of having foreign objects inserted into her most private of areas.

Curiously enough, there are conflicting reports as to why Breillat's debut, shot in 1976 and based on her novel "The Air Duct," is only receiving a release now. "Variety" stated that the film was mired in legal limbo after the producer declared bankruptcy, although one wag on the IMDB asserts that it was because the film was just so shocking for 1976 that it was banned outright. Aside from a liaison with a beagle that is THANKFULLY implied, it's hard to imagine this causing much of a stir in a Paris that had already been exposed to the hardcore pornographic excesses of the late seventies. The film's release here in the states, in a lone theater in NYC with a 59-seat capacity and on a screen the size of a Fruit Roll-Up, provides us with a glimpse into the mind of a none-too-talented filmmaker exploring themes that she would later beat to death for the next 25 years.

Asia Argento stars as Anna Batista, a flaky and sexed-up actress who appears to spend more time shooing away grab-happy fans than she does in front of the camera. When she is on set, she irritates the production assistants who are sent to fetch her by refusing to exit the trailer where she is getting reamed by Schoolly D, playing a character named "Hash-Man." Through flashbacks, we discover how the two met and how this sets in motion a series of events that lead ... well, nowhere.

Anna combs the alleys of a Paris ghetto searching for hash and finds plenty of it, stashing it within her nether-regions ... to keep it warm, I guess? One of Hash-Man's sleazy friends takes a fancy to Anna's friend Veronica and leaves her bound and gagged, only to be rescued by Anna. Anna dutifully uses a pair of garden shears to liberate Veronica, who is once again brutalized by the beau in question in front of Anna, leaving her to throw up her hands at Veronica's masochistic and self-destructive leanings.

At some point, Anna wanders into a rock n'roll club and gazes upon Kirk, a sweaty and scruffy prettyboy who has his way with Anna. Their brief hotel-room tryst leaves Anna awe-struck and in love with this wayward songwriter. While Kirk is enamored of Anna's tattoo of an angel ascending from her own delicious goodness, the demands of touring soon tear the young lovers apart.

A lovelorn Anna is left alone in her apartment to lament life by standing in front of a mirror while licking her armpits and smearing make-up all over her face. Along comes Quelou (played by Italian porn-star Selen), an odd girlfriend whose big bosoms comfort Anna in her time of woe. Yet even Quelou's selfish sexual conquest of Anna leaves her yearning for more. To distract herself from endless calls from her business manager and the flurry of faxed side scripts that clutter the floor of her apartment, Anna begins a round-the-globe expedition in search of ... well, you tell me.

At a photo shoot, Anna snorts a line of Special K and almost drowns within the meshy billows of her swimsuit. Anna is courted by a mysterious producer named Mr. Paar (played by NYC serial-killer portraitist Joe Coleman, whose own life is documented in the film "Rest in Pieces"). Mr. Paar tries to sell Anna on the idea of travelling to Hollywood to play the titular role in a film called "Cleopatra's Dream," written by Gus Van Sant(?!). Anna has ideas of her own, namely a loosely autobiographical film called "Scarlet Diva." We begin to slice through what Wes Craven would describe as "a layer-cake of reality" as Mr. Paar demands that Anna rub massage oil all over his hairy belly while she pitches her film to him.

Anna soon boards a plane for Los Angeles, where she angrily walks off the set of "Cleopatra's Dream" when asked to smooch a septagenarian thespian -- ironically the least deviant act Ms. Argento commits during the film's 87-minute running time -- and retires to a nearby IHOP, where she pontificates the presence of a drag queen who is sullenly nibbling on french fries.

All the while, Anna is haunted by childhood memories of her doomed incestuous relationship with her brother and the suicide of their mother (played by Asia's real-life mum, Daria Niccolodi). Spiralling through a maze of hash bars and the sleazy admirations of desperate junkies in Amsterdam, Anna completes a one-sentence treatment of "Scarlet Diva" on her word processor before contemplating how to end of her own hopeless life. Awakening in the fluorescent confines of her doctor's office, Anna receives a surprise -- part of Kirk is still with her and growing inside of her womb. All of this leads to an unfortunate confrontation that leaves Anna with a newfound sense of her spiritual self. I think.

Surprisingly, Asia Argento makes a confident directorial debut, hopscotching from locale to locale with a variety of filmic formats and optical-printing trickery. Most of the camerawork is naturalistic and hand-held, in sharp contrast to her father's efforts. Her own performance, while chock-full of mood swings and screaming fits, is self- conscious but refreshingly free-spirited compared to her wooden-to- the- point- of-petrification appearances in films such as "B. Monkey" and "The Stendahl Syndrome." Considering her allegation that none of the scenes of sexual intercourse in "Scarlet Diva" were simulated, she also shows uncharacteristic restraint in staging the many erotic interludes.

However ... it should be stressed that these are the opinions of long-time admirer of Asia's kooky shenanigans, unwatchable and otherwise. Anyone else's appreciation of this multi-linguo effort is sorely dependent on their toleration of her pornographic excesses and self-infatuation.

Already drunk on Mr. Boston Blackberry Flavored Brandy, I settled down to a viewing of "ThreeBewildered People in the Night" at the BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn this evening with the twelve bewildered people who populated the dark theater. To me at least, a screening of Gregg Araki's long-unreleased first feature film -- a lip-synched black-and-white freakshow of light leaks and declarative statements that took home the Bronze Leopard and Young Cinema Jury Award at the Locarno film festival -- seemed like a rare occasion to sample the embryonic work of a prominent "enfant terrible" of the American Independent filmmaking scene.

The conceivable demand for such a rare screening -- after hearing sad tales of a sold-out screening of "Battle Royale" at the same theatre earlier that month -- prompted my purchase of advance tickets, a feeble decision on my part considering the low-to-piddling double-digit attendance. I would attribute this to the fact that those in the know were probably upstairs watching Takashi Miike's "Audition." The confused reaction of the few movie-goers who made the trek was one of indifference, aside from an audience member who got a laugh out of a set dresser's decision to glue a Laurie Anderson album cover to a microwave oven in order to spruce up one of the film's many throwaway sequences.

Shot for $5,000 -- that's 1987 money, kids - and wearing its low budget as a merit badge on its sleeve, the alleged narrative concerns the exploits of a highly dysfunctional trio of Hollywood teenagers who populate a Rae's restaurant and attend an endless series of increasingly indigestible performance-artshows. Alicia (Darcy Marta) is self-absorbed

"diarist" video-maker who is living in sin with Craig. Craig (John Lacques) is a self- absorbed photographer who is tiring of Alicia's obsession with her latest shot-on-video tirade of woe. David (Mark Howell) is a self-absorbed bi-sexual wise-ass who wears an eye-patch and serves as a shoulder for the endlessly morose Alicia to cry upon.

Most of the film illustrates the nocturnal activities of this sad-sack collection of lonely losers. David finds himself being stalked after jokingly introducing himself as "Jean-Luc" to a turtleneck-clad graduate student and concocting a story about his conception at a revival screening of "Breathless." Craig's sudden and largely annoying interest in photography (and his tendency to spend hours alone in a dark room listening to unlicensed R.E.M. songs) puts a strain on his relationship with Alicia. This sends Craig into the reluctant arms of David, who tries to remain diplomatic as he explores his own complicated feelings for Alicia. These supposed plot elements culminate in a not-at-all- surprising non-resolution that brings the film to a much-belated close.

Even those who complain of the amateurish quality of Araki's other efforts will find themselves unprepared for the sensual assault that this film provides. In a regrettable way, "Three Bewildered People in the Night" actually made me yearn for the days when a

criminally underexposed black-and-white feature film stood a realistic chance of making the rounds on the festival circuit. Araki revels in the crackling fluorescent lights that are present at most of his Los Angeles locations and uses synthesized dance-music to keep pace with the flicker. The leisurely stretches of black leader that punctuate the film are just long enough to allow an audience member to take a deep breath or rein in his or her temper.

Araki is an arguably competent and sometimes ambitious filmmaker (his 1997 film "Nowhere" is a masterpiece of stunt casting) yet many cineastes who utter his name do so along with a derogatory epithet. A movie-going compadre of mine attempted to walk out of "Three Bewildered People in the Night" almost seventy minutes into its running time, hoping that the end was right around the corner. He defeatedly returned to his seat many minutes later and was greeted with a high-pitched squeal on the soundtrack that accompanied one of the characters' endless shot-on-video confessional soliloquies.

This is not the sort of film you would recommend to anyone you respect or talk to on a semi-regular basis. But "Three Bewildered People in the Night" lives up to its status as a pure curiosity, one that will rile Araki's already disgusted naysayers and intrigue his fans with its almost sadistic test of audience endurance.