Saw Crash, not the more recent and famous film about race relations but the 1996 one about car crash fetishism. It's easy to confuse the two, I know. Anyway this film is a fine, lurid, perverse film by Cronenberg based on a book by J G Ballard who made a career of inventing and pursuing strange obsessions to their insane conclusions. This film follows a filmmaker named James (named after J G himself) who collides with a woman's car on the highway. It turns out she is a member of a bizarre group of car-crash fetishists who induct him into their fold.
The film is very over-sexed. James' girlfriend is constantly nude and gyrating on his lap. The car crash cult is run by this heavily scarred guy who everyone fantasizes about having sex with (James included.) There's like 12 sex scenes in this 90 minute long film. Watch it alone if at all, yeesh!
Anyway, I loved how the insane fetish hung together. No one has this fetish but car culture permeates American society strongly. The cult leader is regarded as extremely virile because of his giant car. He is obsessed with celebrities who died in car accidents and at one point rattles off like six of them. He recreates the death of James Dean in a car wreck. No one has this fetish in real life, but it seems almost plausible: a sadomasochistic version of car worship.
The film is pretty good. There's a ton of sex scenes which must be (for me) endured, however the obsessions of the film are interesting in their connection to real life. Like the Matrix, there's a suggestion of a shadowy nether world which runs in the shadows of this one. It's also morbid good fun to see how far the characters take their obsession. This is such a fascinating, lurid, filthy little film. I feel some of the sex scenes ideally would be removed, but as it is, they serve to underscore the decadent, pleasure-seeking nature of the main characters. It got a bit slog-ish at parts, but the concept is so good and so crazy, I feel that I will love it more in retrospect.
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