THE GRUESOME DEATH OF TOMMY PISTOL

THE GRUESOME DEATH OF TOMMY PISTOL

Tommy (Aramis Sartorio) is a hopeless loser who dreams of making it as an actor. Unfortunately he’s so inept at all things in life that he turns up for auditions late, and finds it impossible to hold ways-to-make-ends-meet jobs down.

It all gets too much for his long-suffering partner, who decides to leave him. She gives him an ultimatum: Tommy must choose between his dream, or her and their young son. He chooses the former: she leaves with the kid.

Fast-forward 12 months and Tommy is living in squalor. His apartment has become a dark haven of junk food and porno on the TV. On one particular night, he pops a hotdog into his microwave to warm it through, and then settles down in front of the telly with a porno video and a penis pump.

But then he drifts off ...

The bulk of the film is dedicated to the outlandish dreams Tommy experiences, highlighting how different life may be if he made it in Hollywood.

In the first vignette, he journeys to LA from his New York abode, staying at the worst motel ever en route. When he arrives in town, an oversized gangster (Caleb Emerson) offers him an acting role. Unbeknownst to our dim-witted protagonist, the girls he is called upon to slay on camera are not actresses but genuine victims: this is snuff cinema!

Cue rudimentary scenes of gore in the style of early Herschell Gordon Lewis, with Tommy taking a cheese grater to one woman’s limbs, and mangling the fuck out of another’s breasts.

Following a vague twist in that tale, the second dream episode finds Tommy blagging his way on to the set of the latest Arnie film. He manages to get close enough to the hulking Austrian star to drug him and skin him alive. The purpose? So he can wear Arnie’s flesh and pretend to be him ...

The conclusion to this segment is especially fucked up. From chicken feet being blended into a protein snack, to one character being confronted by her own spirit in the guise of a dog ... Lord knows what the filmmakers were sniffing at the time ...

Finally, we get to see what life may hold for Tommy should he choose to become a director working on underworld pornos. His starlet Daisy (Daisy Sparks) turns up to the shoot with a weird pus-riddled infection on her leg, which she claims is the result of a spider bite.

But her infection spreads, first between her legs and then to the various crew members, turning them all into zombie-like nymphomaniacs.

All of this, and Tommy is still yet to wake up. But will he? Penis pumps and unattended hotdogs can be a lethal combination when put in the charge of someone this dumb ...

Aramis Sartorio stars, directs and co-writes (with Karen Sartorio) this demented comedy-horror, showcasing a less explicit side to the Tommy Pistol persona that people may be familiar with from porno titles such as THE XXXORCIST and RE-PENETRATOR. Here, he keeps his pecker in his pants and concentrates on comic timing instead. And, it must be said, the guy is a natural. He’s funny, goofy and warm all at once. It’s nigh-on impossible not to like him.

The script is as mad as a paedophile on fire; the dialogue veers wildly between snappy one-liners and almost stream-of-consciousness meandering; the visual excesses of the film occur in a dizzyingly random manner (characters turn invisible without explanation; racist humour comes and goes casually; moments of home video footage sit awkwardly beside scenes of gross-out cartoonish violence).

In all honesty, I got about 10 minutes into this and I thought it was terrible. People couldn’t act, the jokes were shit, dialogue was stumbled over at regular intervals. But then it started to become oddly compelling. By the time the frankly insane Arnie segment was in mid-flow (complete with an overweight extra playing the star, conveniently filmed from the neck down only), I was hooked. This film is absolutely barmy – it shouldn’t work but, disturbingly, it does.

I can’t deduce whether there is real talent here – Sartorio is exuberant and elicits game performances from all concerned; many of the dream sequences display an agreeable energy and visual flair about them – or whether the massive watchability is nothing more than a happy accident. Either way, the end result is invigorating.

Like a mix of Troma and Seduction Cinema, but madder and far more unpredictable than either, Sartorio’s film needs to be seen to be disbelieved. It won’t be to all tastes (some will balk at the gross-out visuals; others will have issues with the no-budget comedy style), but there’s one thing that’s certain: once seen, you won’t soon forget this film.

Even better, the final scene of the film, the very last line, altered my perception of Sartorio’s motivations for making the film. I won’t spoil it here, but I found it quietly heartbreaking – and it made me want to immediately watch the whole thing again.

THE GRUESOME DEATH OF TOMMY PISTOL has no DVD release pending at present. But I’m sure that’s just a matter of time. Cult status awaits this title: it’s too derailed for fans of the weird and gross to ignore.

Shit, brilliant, surreal, stupid, profound ... THE GRUESOME DEATH OF TOMMY PISTOL somehow manages to be all of these things and more. Lloyd Kaufman, eat your heart out.

Review by Stuart Willis


 
Released by BabyYetti Productions
Back