"KEEP BUSTIN'."

Shredder Orpheus

tn_shredderorpheus“Listen Boo Boo, you’re lucky you made it back the first time. If you want to join the pantheon of dead skate rock guitar heroes that’s your choice.”

SHREDDER ORPHEUS is a weird D.I.Y. type of movie made in the late ’80s in Seattle by people involved in the underground rock and art scenes of the time. It’s post-apocalyptic or futuristic or something, but more Max Headroom than MAD MAX. The story is based on the myth of Orpheus, played by director Robert McGinley as a skateboarder and lead singer/guitarist of a band called The Shredders. Instead of an Underworld there’s a sinister quasi-religious TV Channel called EBN (Euthanasia Broadcast Network) that hypnotizes the people. Just the normal people, maybe: the one person we see watching TV is the one civilian we see, the one non-punk or music scene type of guy that doesn’t work for the network. And the people who do work for the network look like they might as well be in bands because they’re all wearing white makeup and shit like ghouls. Most of their programming seems to be weirdos chanting slogans like “The Ministry of Sombulance – praise the ray!”

The EBN creeps kidnap Orpheus’s girlfriend Eurydice (Megan Murphy, DEADBEAT AT DAWN) after seeing her dancing (mostly just spinning and waving her arms a little, to be honest) at the Shredders show at the Thrash Bin Club. They decide she’s the key to co-opting the music counterculture for their purposes. “If we’re going to get beyond the corporate crust and expand our viewing addicts,” explains one of the executives, “we’ve got to reach out and put our finger on the main vein of the youth market. We need the heartbeat of America.” But if they kidnap this one dancer and base a show around her he says they can “play in Peoria.”

Luckily Orpheus received as a wedding gift a rare four-stringed glowing electric Gibson lear that, according to legend, was designed by Jimi Hendrix to expand consciousness or something like that. Orpheus finds that playing it can do weird things like open the door to EBN. Inside he sees his dead parents, loses the memory of them, fails to retrieve his lady, but comes home alive.

You know who would love that jacket? Brutus "The Barber" Beefcake.
You know who would love that jacket? Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake.

Like Max Headroom this was a story made right on the edge of something, just to the left of prescient. It looks forward into the information age, but from an analog perspective. It’s all about rays and cathodes and cassette tapes. Memories are represented by literal files in folders which get shredded in the after life. (So shredding can refer to the guitars, the skateboards, or the file disposal methods.) Orpheus has to travel down a hallway completely filled with shreddings.

Once he’s back he performs with his band more, skateboards with his friends and is convinced by his manager to see an Oracle (Gypsy Mandelbaum) about his depression. There’s a scene with a guy doing a bunch of fancy trick skating, and the movie ends on a half pipe, but Orpheus doesn’t seem like a pro in that particular sport. He just rolls around fast at night in parking garages and stuff. There’s one that’s legendarily dangerous, and his friends Axel and Scratch use goofy future slang to talk him out of braving it until the undead EBN network executives tempt him with a magic skateboard. It just rolls up to him, leaving a trail of smoke, and he hops right on.

still_shredderorpheus4
“Rad deck, man. Where’d ya find it?” “I didn’t find it. It found me.”

They need him to play music on TV because with these other chumps they got down there Eurydice’s dancing is uninspired, to put it lightly. They better come up with something quick. Peoria’s gonna hate this show!

Of course when he gets there the Furies or whoever tear his head off. In this version they wear metal masks and carry power drills and get a cool silhouetted entrance like a bunch of American Gladiators or something:

still_shredderorpheus

That’s one of the better shots. It’s all very cheap and home made looking, but sometimes the weird vibe it has going really clicks. I like any scene where the agents of EBN shoot this glyph-beam from their ray guns or portable TVs. It reminds me of some weird MATRIX type shit, some strange other world coming out of the shadows to oppress us.

still_shredderorpheus2
mp_shredderorpheusOrpheus and his friends live in “The Grey Zone,” what the city (never specified as Seattle) considers a low income housing project, but it’s actually just 5 acres of shipping containers. The narrator Axel was paralyzed in “the Contra Drug Wars” and rolls around sitting on a skateboard all day. You may notice that he has a good speaking voice and a knack for flipping out like a Texas Chain Saw character. That’s because he’s the legendary Seattle poet Steven Jesse Bernstein. He had some mental and addiction issues and he committed suicide a few years after this movie. But he was a talented writer and performer and was known for doing crazy shit like reciting with a mouse in his mouth. He had an album on Sub Pop Records that came out after his death, I remember it was pretty interesting.

I’ve never been a punk rocker or nothing but I was around, so I love seeing this movie because it’s a snapshot of that time. Unfortunately for those purposes they (deliberately, I assume) avoid showing regular Seattle shit. There’s one shot of the Columbia Tower, which was only 4 years old at the time so I guess it still looked futuristic. They mention the Showbox a bunch of times, which is my favorite music venue in Seattle, but they never actually get there.

Still, it has a very identifiable late ’80s Seattle attitude to it. It was before Kurt Cobain and before anybody outside of Seattle gave a shit what was going on here, and there were all these weirdos passionately doing their thing just because they wanted to. And what else were they gonna do? I guess in that sense this is our shoddy, overcast version of SLACKER. It reflects this belief that the counterculture has always had, especially at that time, that corporate America is using TV to brainwash the normals and is gonna try to steal our shit and turn it into a product to open up new markets and hypnotize even more people into their drones. THEY LIVE did it better, of course, but this is the music world version of that, they’re specifically worried about the suits commodifying the youth and music culture. Actually, that did happen here just a couple years later. Hmm.

I like that Hendrix is held up as a mythical figure to these mythical figures. We will always claim him, even though he left. Sorry, Jimi.

One of the villains from EBN, the guy with the camera that Orpheus gets into a scuffle with at the show, is Frank Harlan. I remember him as Bill Bored, the host and creator of Bombshelter Videos, a show that played late at night on a local station and showed weird local videos, mostly punk, but other stuff too. And a short film or two and low budget ads for local places that could never advertise on any other TV show.

This wasn’t Public Access, this was KSTW Channel 11 (then switched to UHF station KTZZ TV 22). So regular people might see it. If they stayed up all night.

And man, I completely forgot about this until the movie, but one of the crazy bands they played on there was Metaphonics, these insane percussionists who made music by banging metal junk together. I seem to remember a video where they were using power tools, shooting sparks all over the place, wearing wigs made out of bicycle chains. Well, they perform in this movie and I think at least one of them is doing percussion on the score. I’m not sure if Linda Severt, who plays “the andogyne” Scratch, is a Metaphonic, but she’s introduced playing a beat on an oil drum. This was a good idea for a post-apocalypse movie, there should be more junk drumming in the future.

So even if this isn’t the best telling of the ancient myth of Orpheus it’s pretty cool that all these creative people got together to tell it. It’s a story that has lasted over time but it’s an absolutely dated movie, in a good way. It could only be made by those people in that time and place.

For years SHREDDER ORPHEUS has only been on VHS, but Seattle’s own Light In the Attic Records recently released the soundtrack on vinyl, and it comes with a DVD of the movie. My pals the Cinefamily are showing it on Saturday, April 11th, 2015 at midnight for the 25th anniversary. Check the official Shredder Orpheus websight for info.

McGinley only directed one other feature, JIMMY ZIP, in 1999.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2015 at 9:28 am and is filed under Fantasy/Swords, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

11 Responses to “Shredder Orpheus”

  1. This was back in that all-too-short time period when the cool kids made wacky little B-movies, too. Now it’s just the nerds. That’s a shame. I think you get a whole nother level of weirdness when the people involved really believe that they’re onto something that you don’t get when it’s made by fanboys who just want to emulate the stuff they love. Both have their place but no nerd is gonna go out on a limb with the art school gibberish that SHREDDER ORPHEUS is pumping out. And the world of weird movies is poorer for it. Now the cool kids just make shitty dramedies about skinny white people with unlikely jobs and relationship problems, and the nerds just make genre throwbacks using fonts they remember from childhood.

    I’m pretty sure both parties need to do more drugs.

  2. Oh man, I’m agreeing with Majestyk on everything these days! I watched that first Bombshelter video promo (and got confused at first because they were playing TV Party but the video for Big Time Operator came on followed by Elvis is Everywhere) and thought “why don’t they do this kind of stuff anymore? Where are the kids that do this sort of thing?” It just doesn’t seem to exist. I guess Dan Deacon does some of that and maybe that mindset has ended up more in the Adult Swim/Abso Lutely world – anyway, I what happened to the days when people who made little films weren’t only film nerds or comic nerds or horror film nerds or even nerds at all, but included the rebellious outsiders, the too-cool-for-school kids with new wave hairdos, the lunatic creeps and the stylish weirdos…

  3. I think the DIY cool kids are all making Vines

  4. I watched this last night and it certainly reminded me of TERMINAL CITY RICOCHET… in both good and bad ways. SHREDDER ORPHEUS needed Jello Biafra in it, but there’s always room for Jello.

  5. Oh shit – Terminal City Ricochet! I sought that movie out because it was the only movie I had heard of for which Alternative Tentacles had licensed any songs…

  6. Also, I’m an old man – is there interesting stuff happening on the Vines? Or is that sarcasm? Because I’ll watch some Vines if there are legit recommendations…

  7. I’m going to see this at Cinefamily tonight. Fuck yeah, midnight screenings!

  8. The whole film was on YouTube when this review was posted, but has now been taken down. I have learned my lesson and will now watch every video the second I find it

  9. I remember reading about a similar low budget DIY sci-fi film being made in Cleveland back in the 90s, but I have no clue what came of it. I wonder if there was a low budget DIY sci-fi trend for a couple of decades.

    I was actually in Seattle for work a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed a big sign saying that a new Niketown will open this summer. Hopefully this bodes well for a Niketown: the book sequel.

  10. LOOK IN THE MIRROR STEVIE!!!!!

  11. RBatty024: Are you thinking of JR Bookwalter’s “Ozone”?

    Saw this one at the CineFamily show a few months back. It was a total hoot!

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