the raspberry reich

The Raspberry Reich is a mess. Written and directed by someone calling himself Bruce LaBruce, the movie is designed to be an-in-your-face send-up of Europe's revolutionary passions by the youth of the Seventies. Here the leader of an inept boy gang is a left-wing, well-built harridan name Gudrun, who shouts, rants and copulates energetically with her hetero partner. Gudrun discovers that hetero sex is not all that revolutionary or liberating, so she insists that her gang members have sex with each other. Cue in plenty of gay sex acts.

The visual look of the film is vivid and bold. The story is amateurishly written, acted and directed. The sex looks like it was fun. The movie, after the first half hour, wasn't. The ranting was loud. The sex, ultimately, seemed merely a way for the writer/director to provoke all the grannies in New Jersey.

The Contrivance
The self-style "Sixth Generation of the Baader-Meinhof Gang", later referred to in the film as "The Raspberry Reich" kidnaps the son of a wealthy industrialist, with a view to making demands of the said industrialist. In moving towards making those demands we learn of the dogma of the leader of the group (Gudrun) which includes the importance of personal life in revolution, including the breaking of heterosexual and possessive sexual norms. This she claims as the Homosexual Intifada, which did provide a rather humorous basis for the movie.

The Prose
Director Bruce La Bruce was also the writer, and it's hard to see in which role he was worse. There were some classic lines: "How many times have I told you that homosexuality is only to be used for revolutionary purposes?", "The Revolution is my boyfriend" and "Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses", amongst others. But really the script could have been written on the back of a beer coaster.

The Talent
It was remarkable that Director Bruce La Bruce could have amassed such a list of truly ordinary actors. I did not know Susanne Sachsse (aka Susanne Sachße) who played the lead female role, and so was very surprised to learn that she had starred in over 30 movies, and in fact had professional training. I can only put it down to bad direction - there is simply no other way to get such gogglingly-bad acting. Okay, so I made up the word gogglingly-bad, but you get my drift.
Out of the 30-something credited actors, only one stood out, and that was Pünktchen who played the Drag Queen Bouncer. A small part, but oh so convincing.

To talent of the other kind, and this movie was chockers with it. They were all pretty vanilla, and pretty much bloke next door types, but so long as you're not looking for muscles, there was plenty to keep most entertained.

The Summation
As other reviewers have noted, make sure that you buy this (Region 1) version. There is nothing more annoying than on-screen censorship as the other version contains. This was of sufficient humour value - and of mainstream porn value - to warrant a viewing. A classic, however, it ain't.

This film had me clutching my DVD's of Latter days, Beautiful thing, Beautiful laundrette, Liles and quite a few others in glee that some people know how to make good gay genre films!!!

It's rubbish! The acting was dire, the constant yelling of the main female made you want to press mute all the time. The well overlong and tedious sex scene at the beginning where she bonked everywhere, yelling and screaming,made me so many times want to press stop. Just stop the endless dirge. But I thought, maybe it gets better... maybe all will be alright....but nope. Maybe it was funny and sending over some ironic message, I don't really know as my attention wandered to other exciting things like counting the hairs on my arms and wondering if it was going to rain. It was a mixture of noise, annoying words floating across the screen that she had just said so really didn't need to be there and bits of long boring rhetoric and bare flesh. Guess if you just wanted to see some male bodies and a bit of sex, turning the sound off and pressing forward will give you some of that, but all in all I can't really see why anyone would wanna watch this again. If you like torturing yourself, by all means watch this, if you don't, there are most probably about a million much better things you could be spending your pounds, dollars, euros, yens, whatever on! Avoid big time!