Tribute to Sanity 

That One Night

A Retrospective on Romance

My Crepitus

Directed by Michael T. Schneider
www.angelfire.com/tn/tcthepackrat/crepitus.html

What with the old guard of transgressive underground filmmakers relegated to mainstream porn - if they're even still in the game at all - I figure it's high time for a new voice of the restless, wild, and disenfranchised to emerge and flicker and breathe new life into confrontational cinema. Enter Pittsburgh based Michael T. Schneider. He looks like the bass player for Alabama Thunderpussy, he's obsessed with zombies and madness, and he's as talented at creating jarring splatterpunk imagery as a rattlesnake is at paralyzing his prey. Looks like we've got a new cult hero on our hands. 

Tribute to Sanity
"No matter what happens, I will always love you." How many times have you heard that? And has it ever been true? That brutal, hollow refrain is tearing the fragile psyche of Tribute's main character, a nameless, pill-popping mass of raw nerves, into pieces. His head is an orgy of warring voices, quelled only by yet another handful of prescription meds. When that doesn't work, he drinks. Even with all his desperate self-tranquilizing, his mind seems to be having an increasingly difficult time filtering out all the static, and floods of violent images continue rolling in like bloody surf, until he's no longer sure whether he's killed his girlfriend, or he's just thinking about it. As his thought processes disintegrate, the camera documents the downfall with art school experimentalism, music video jump cuts, and a jarring juxtaposition between natural lighting and saturated neon colors. Things take a weird spin into brutal splatter in the final act, when Elizabeth, the girlfriend behind all this tension, takes on the role of living dead girl intent on literally eating the heart that she's broken. "A Tribute to Sanity" is high tensile stress cinema.

That One Night
A very short piece about a guy screaming at his toilet because it won't flush right. I've been there, brother. 

A Retrospective on Romance
Self-imposed puking, wrist slashing, and a couple of 20-something guys pontificating on the pitfalls of young love, all in a heavily stylized montage of flash and color. 

My Crepitus
Jeffrey (Schneider- who looks perfectly natural in hospital pajamas, by the way) wakes up in a psyche ward. Screams himself awake, more accurately. He digs a hidden razorblade out of his mattress, and messily slices off his I.D. bracelet, taking a good chunk of skin with it. Across the room, there's some kind of heavy metal zombie demon raping the bloody corpse of a woman. No wonder he's looking to get the fuck out of there. 

Meanwhile, inside his head, (which looks like a meat encrusted garbage bag), an evil goth chick torments him. But more on her later, because the devil is afoot. 

My Crepitus has about 15 plots, all firing off in rapid succession, like a plasma gun. You could argue that they are all just tangential fragments swirling around in Jeffrey's fevered brain, but there's hardly time to theorize about anything, because there's a vicious, skin-masked serial killer running amuck on the streets of Pittsburgh. Jeff's doctor tries to shoot him in the face, but he changes into a goo-eyed monster. 

Meanwhile, back at the hospital, Roger, another patient, uses his art therapy time to warn anybody who's paying attention that "The funeral will bring many demons". Eventually, it does. 

But first, the goth chick comes back to fuck Jeffrey and then vomits in his face. 

Then Iron Maiden's mascot Eddie shows up to give Jeff a magic octopus.

And then, the flashbacks come flooding in, and it's like finding yesterday's newspaper on the Moon. Amazingly, Schneider has found a way to tie everything together, and even though a good portion of this feature length film's running time is taken up by Mike screaming soundlessly at the camera while grinding industrial noise blares away on the soundtrack, it all makes a terrible, irredeemable sense. Love, death and guilt all come crashing down in a hallucinatory orgy of perverse imagery and obscure but poignant metaphor, and I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that if Alexandro Jodorowsky started out with nothing but a hi-8 video camera and a few sympathetic buddies, his first effort would look just like this. Who knows just what strange inspiration drove Schneider to create this absorbing atrocity exhibition? I see the influence of death metal (the title, for one), Dario Argento, "Panorama of Hell", David Lynch, rock and roll decadence (just like Marilyn Manson's guitarist, Jeffrey likes to, uh...eat his own), Throbbing Gristle, Coffin Joe, Nick Zedd, and JG Ballard, but that's all just conjecture. All I know for sure is that this magnum opus is an engrossing, enthralling, complete motherfucker of a film, and Schneider's either got a long and intense career as America's new favorite outlaw filmmaker or a self-inflicted gunshot wound ahead of him. At the very least, there's a collaborative high octane zombie flick, "Chrome Baby" on the horizon, so let's hope it's the former. Rock and roll. - Sleazegrinder