Flaming Creatures (1963) User Reviews

A surreal jumble of moving sexual images

[klausming · 5/10 · 10 September 2013]

US 43m, B&W Director: Jack Smith; Cast: Francis Francine, Sheila Bick, Joel Markman, Mario Montez, Arnold Rockwood, Judith Malina, Marian Zazeela

Flaming Creatures is an often comedic sexually explicit experimental film which begins with an "advertisement" for lipstick which features close-ups of men and women applying lipstick adjacent male genitalia. Deemed "obscene" upon its release, Flaming Creatures is a surreal jumble of moving sexual images, often shot in close-up which serves to further confound the already sexually ambiguous participants, including a vampire in drag who rises from the coffin to the unlikely country vocal styling of Kitty Kallen and 'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels". Irreverent and shocking, Flaming Creatures might be described as pop pornography, and along with the likes of Scorpio Rising (1964), inspired the films of Andy Warhol and John Waters (Klaus Ming July 2013).

Strange

[marino_touchdowns · 5/10 · 4 September 2011]

Though every film on this list is supposed to have some kind of importance in the history of movie making, I have struggled to find merit in a number of the pictures I have watched. Some films, like Dog Star Man, were made from interesting ideas. While others, like Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, do not seem to have any redeeming qualities at all. Flaming Creatures is a film like none that I have ever seen. It is perverted, trashy and important only because it helped define cinematic vulgarity.

Flaming Creatures was directed and written by the provocative filmmaker, Jack Smith. Here is a man that had no interest in entertaining the masses. I am not sure that his films could even entertain himself. He was a major proponent in simple aesthetics. He was the godfather of the underground film world, and he is credited with creating the drag-queen culture as we now know it. Smith was also a major influence on the films of Andy Warhol and the movies of John Waters. All of his films, with Flaming Creatures being the most incendiary, were shot under incredibly small budgets. But Smith was never worried about how much money it cost to make a movie.

According to underground legend, Smith filmed Flaming Creatures on stock film that he had actually shoplifted. It has also been said that he paid his actors in either gay sex or drugs. True or not, this still remains one of the most bizarre films I have ever seen. It is a parade of camp-queens, transvestites, hermaphrodites and prostitutes mixed in with the occasional flaccid penis or saggy breast. There is no noticeable story being told, but Smith had said that his work was showing you "a comedy set in a haunted music studio." I must have missed this, because all I saw was the showing of some very questionable acts amongst one of the cheapest looking sets I have ever seen.

If I have to give this film any credit, I will say that the images were exhaustively challenging for my poor Midwestern eyes. I was made uncomfortable almost immediately, and I would go as far as to say I was disgusted at times. Flaming Creatures is one of the most emotionally disturbing works in film that I have seen. But it does not frighten you. It uses music and absurd imagery to make you uncomfortable. You would have to be a pretty weird person to not be challenged by Jack Smith.

In one of the only secular moments of Flaming Creatures, we see an actress getting raped by way of cunnilingus. We are treated to the intense visual of a woman being held down and violated by more than one male figure. Of course, these men are naked and performing all sorts of "hand acts" on each others limp penises. This type of perverted sexuality becomes normality throughout the 45 minute running time. It is not an easy film to sit through.

Obviously, any film that features this type of rough imagery comes with loads of controversy. In fact, Flaming Creatures was seized by New York police directly following its debut screening. Along with Jack Smith, the film became a target of the infamous idiot, Strom Thurmond, during his crusade to end all pornography. Do not get confused – this is not a pornographic film. It is a classic work in performance art. And though we would all love to pretend that this genre does not exist…we still know that it does. And in terms of successful endeavors in the genre – Flaming Creatures isn't really all THAT bad. I will never watch it again, but some esteemed opinions, like Frederico Fellini, hail this picture as a masterpiece in trash cinema.

Yes, Jack Smith may be an under credited influence on the Waters' and Warhol's of the world, but this does not make his films entertaining in any conventional sort of the word. This is the type of film that a pedophile would enjoy. And though I defend Smith's right to make trash, I also understand why the backlash forced him to withdraw from making films. Smith would go on to become a major pioneer in surrealist theatre. He worked in this field until his death of AIDS related complications in 1989. He was 56 years old.

Flaming Creatures

[jboothmillard · 4/10 · 17 December 2016]

I found this short film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, from the title I had absolutely no idea what to expect,and I didn't do any research on it before watching, so I just went with the flow. Basically the film has no story, plot or narrative, it is a series of weird and disturbing images concocted together, there is no real explanation for the title, it can assumed the "flaming creatures" are the characters and their behaviour. The images include many male transvestites and drag queens, various men putting on lipstick, a man playing with his willy (flicking his penis around, not masturbating), a lot of people lying around and partaking in orgiastic behaviour (it looks rough and I almost mistook it for rape), a woman's breast being played with (poked and bouncing), the various people dancing around to the foreign music (probably French) playing, and many close-ups of eyes and faces. Starring Francis Francine as Himself, Mario Montez aka Dolores Flores as The Spanish Girl, Joel Markman as Our Lady of the Docks, Sheila Bick as Delicious Dolores, Arnold Rockwood as Arnold and Judith Malina as The Fascinating Woman. There is voice-over in many of the sequences, the black-and-white footage is grainy and slightly jumpy, and there are many cutaways and flashes of white, it was controversial at the time, and still remains so, I suppose it can be defined as fascinating, for both good and bad reasons, it is a very unusual experimental film. Okay!

Why is this one of 1001 films one must see before you die?

[AlsExGal · 2/10 · 6 January 2017]

This is a short film recommended by the 1001 Movies to See Before You Die book, and this one was directed by the star of Blonde Cobra, Jack Smith. Smith was something of a character in the NYC underground art and film scene of the 50's and 60's. He was also an out and proud gay man, in both his life and art. Shot in black and white on over-exposed stock and using a lot of roving, soft focus close-ups, there's no plot at all here. It's just a lot of Smith's friends, mostly men with at least one or two women, in cheap, dime-store drag, posing and gyrating and laying in piles of each other on the floor. Oh, and there's a ton of graphic male and female nudity, and a lengthy sexual assault scene. This is rough, X-rated stuff, and I was rather stunned that it was on YouTube. This caused a lot of furor in the 60's, with multiple arrests as a result of its exhibition.

That notoriety may be a reason it's in the book, although some critics state that it has a "transcendent beauty". To me it was just self-indulgent garbage. It has also been posited that it's a precursor to the John Waters school of outrageous shock/camp. That may be, but Waters does that material much better. This runs 42 minutes, and only its brevity saved it from a 1/10 rating from me.

Jack Smith's Masterpiece of Sexual Perversion and Dionysian Art

[mr.smith-2 · 13 October 1999]

Jack Smith's 1963 short Flaming Creatures might be one of the most sexual perverse film ever made. It has ever amount of sexual deviance that made up the New York underground in the 1960's- transexuals, S&M, lines such as "do they make a lipstick that doesn't come off when you s*** c****?", drug use, and a radically innovative orgy scene that plays more like a Greek tragedy than a work of pornography. On the surface, Flaming Creatures appears to be art at its lowest, but a closer examination of the film proves that Flaming Creatures is not only high art, but a siminal piece of film in the cannon of The New American Cinema. Filmed on top of Smith's New York studio on a basic 16mm camera, Flaming Creatures embodies the true independent spirit of The New American Cinema. The orgy scene in the film is perhaps the greatest combination of art and film. The "creatures", as Smith puts them, engage in a rape-orgy scene of sailors and a transexual. The orgy plays like a tragic meeting the old America with the freshly birthed new morality in America. What is even more remarkable is the "earthquake", caused Smith's shaking camera at the end of the orgy. It as if the world is opening up on Smith's creatures and swallowing them and all their perversions. No one can deny that Flaming Creatures is a difficult film to watch- both in its content and deep artistic meanings, but the spirit of the film is the reason it should be preserved for generations to come.

A barbaric Dionysian

[samorcraft · 2/10 · 26 June 2005]

I've just seen the movie and his first (only ?) quality is to make me writing my first commentary here. Like a previous writer here, I have nothing against avant-garde especially transgressional one but I think we are in this picture far away from an interesting point of view on the subject of eroticism or whatever the purpose is. On such works as Bataille's books or Bunuel's movies, the transgression was upon the things we're hiding when our representation is giving us something to look at (and eroticism is only one of the way to reveled the invisible and constitutive side of art) ; and I think jack smith made a huge mistake with this "cliché" orgiac scenes where everything is explicitly directed to "shock the bourgeois". The line about the lipstick on the male attribute is just the first wave of the so-called sexual "liberation" which is only a new way to stay under the alienation of what is obvious. This film has probably an historical interest but it's the better way to have no artistic one. ps : sorry for my English which is not fluent.

Enjoy your masculinity

[zvonnydamne · 1/10 · 28 April 2018]

Funny story about how this movie was loved by police forces in the 60s is much better than movie. Enormous tons of drag, bizarre scenes of sex, lots of dancing... In 42 minutes it's easy to feel a bore just to watch this stuff. Of course a long time ago this would be very shocking for public who grew up on Leave It To Beaver or The Honeymooners. But today...

Today homosexual people can marry each other, drag can't surpirse anyone and avant-garde filmmakers make better pictures. Seeing this today is like see a very old home movie made by crazy psychopats who never knew better things to do with 300$.

So, is this movie can make you change your opinion about sex or sexuality? You can be that stupid asking questions like this. It never tries and you should never try to watch this.

A film which inspired John Waters

[SylvesterGlenGaul · 3/10 · 16 February 2020]

This film was begging me to write a review. I love campy films, I am a big fan of Ed Wood, John Waters, Todd Solondz and the likes for their obscene creativity. This obsession led me here, and let me tell you how disappointed I was. Flaming Creatures is essentially an assault on your sensory, the picture is shoddy due to the ancient camera being used and the soundtrack was full of high pitch noises, especially during its most infamous sequence.

There's really nothing much redeemable about this, I think it may have been salvageable if the quality of the film was improved but most of the time you can hardly make out what is happening on the screen while being screamed at by banshees. It wasn't a pleasant experience and it shouldn't have been banned, the film's notoriety made it into a sensation, otherwise it would have been forgotten by now.

A Beautiful Film

[jromanbaker · 10/10 · 10 March 2021]

Writing a review of Jack Smith's film is difficult because so much has been written about it. Some claim it to be a masterpiece of cinema and others trash it. Having seen it I consider it to be a very great film indeed, and it quite definitely has a ' story '. The decor in its simplicity concentrates on an interior garden of Eden, with a blazing white tree in a white vase. In this garden are the very human creature of this idyllic world, and their sexuality is one of freedom, and with very innocent fleeting images of the penis, the vagina and breasts, there is nothing to offend, because this is quite simply part of all our bodies. There is nothing to ban or obliterate here, but of course there are those who want to destroy, and destroy they do ( censors ? the God we have created with his flaming angels driving ' them ' out of Eden ? ) Take your pick, but whoever ' they are ' they kill with their violent sexuality and murder innocence. But Jack Smith refuses this annihilation of innocence and resurrects his creatures, and the final scenes are one of rejoicing and a return to the world that went up in flames with the earthquake of persecution. This ' story ' of innocence, fall and resurrection is incredible to watch. Like all Passion plays it is enacted on an artificial ' stage ' and with minimal money Smith creates his paradise of being. His Eden is arguably a Queer/Gay one, but such limited definitions are not really the point. For me it is the Serpent of Evil ( again a destroying God orthodoxy has created, or worse the invasion of normative values that rape, murder and believe that this is good ) and that we will always need the creative artists like Jack Smith to liberates us. He shows how truly beautiful this Eden is and that it is the essence of true completion and humanity. That this miracle of cinema can still be considered ' obscene ' shows that any misguided threat to Eden will perhaps always be with us and as Jack Smith did in his powerful film to be overcome. His creatures are still open to be destroyed, and all of us who believe in the innocence of our fragile bodies should be on our guard. A film to watch to realise that there is transcendent beauty, and that it is made by us, on condition that we reject the apes of orthodoxy.

The blasphemous autism that was Jack Smith

[nunculus · 22 December 2001]

His own performance style--half dashing, half mongoloid--is better preserved in the Jack Smith routine that caps off Andy Warhol's CAMP: the great man, looking dapper as a Lower East Side Clark Gable, does a ten-minute performance piece about, literally, coming out of a closet. And the late, great Ron Vawter's extraordinary "Roy Cohn/Jack Smith" preserves the molasses, the stupor, and the head-thumping epiphanies that made up a live Jack Smith performance.

CREATURES, one of the most notorious of all American "avant-garde films," seems at first to be a queer-theory seminar avant la lettre. Then Smith's processional of silent-movie-looking waifs and queenies repeats and repeats. I find George Kuchar and even Kenneth Anger more interesting on similar territory; but Smith is a man-god, and CREATURES should be seen...once.

MASTERPIECE OF FLAMING CINEMA

[bookbeat-1 · 10/10 · 15 November 2004]

FLAMING CREATURES is the bedrock of all underground cinema. Even if it was only a title without a film, it would stand as a masterpiece!

Jack Smith is the exotic gilded director of mouldy dreams...

his value is rising daily as a shinning star above the junk-heap of no-good commercial film-making.

We genuflect at the altar of his magnificent glowing cinematic masterpiece... scotch-taped together with glitter and

rhinestone studded splices. Where have all the brave film-makers gone?-- No one but Jack has had the balls to change our awareness-- FLAMING CREATURES has the atomic structure

of a new reality and consciousness.

shocking even by today's standards

[framptonhollis · 8/10 · 26 March 2017]

Somewhere in between the poetic and manic lies "Flaming Creatures", Jack Smith's infamously odd avant garde classic. I find this to be a movie that is very difficult to rate because it really isn't a typical movie. Even for experimental underground cinema, it comes across as really weird and unsettling.

The first half is easily the highlight. The notorious "rape" sequence is one of the most f*cking crazy and disturbing scenes I have ever witnessed. The chaotic atmosphere is only boosted by Smith's drunkenly soaring camera, capturing the ear piercing shrieking of the film's "creatures".

The second half is less compelling, but still interesting. It is the much more positive and comical half, as the "creatures" joyously dance with one another behind old pop music. It is entertaining and amusing to an extent, despite dragging on a bit.

Most people probably will not enjoy this little oddity nearly as much as I have, which is totally okay. This movie is so damn bizarre, graphic, unsettling, confusing, and chaotic that it is almost surprising that ANYONE could appreciate it that is not mentally ill. However, I did manage to find much within Jack Smith's mad masterpiece to adore.

Put them out

[unrated · 27 August 2002]

I consider myself a fairly open-minded person. In principle I have nothing against a movie featuring a pack of transvestites frolicking around and--this is what it looks like--acting out parodies of bad silent movies. It's just not all that interesting to me. I can only take camp in small doses, and there's just way too much here. By the way, did the Everly Brothers even know one of their songs was used in this thing? (P.S. If you ever see Warhol's "Screen Test #2," you'll hear Mario Montez talk briefly about his (her?) role in this movie.)

Samson in Flaming Creatures

[mrdonleone · 10/10 · 18 April 2009]

it's really annoying I couldn't concentrate very well while watching this picture with a friend of mine in the Filmmuseum of Brussels. but on the other hand, he was concentrating too much on it and afterwards he told me it was a 'horrible' experience for him.

and he was right. this was a terrible experience. even for me. but it wasn't as shocking as, for instance, Pasolini's Salo, so I could handle the situation. but why? strangely enough, because I was thinking about Samson.

if you don't know Samson, he's a dog from the show 'Samson & Gert', a white dog who can 'talk' (in fact, it's just someone else who does the talking and even the dog isn't real). anyway, some of the 'female' participants of the giant rape orgy in Flamng Creatures was wearing a white wig, and because this picture is in black and white, the white wig looked like the dog Samson from the children show on television from when I was a kid.

so it's obvious I couldn't concentrate on what I saw on the screen. well, I cannot concentrate very well, that's for sure, but from the moment I saw 'Samson' crawling between these horny drag queens having sex with one another, it was too much for me. I couldn't focus anymore.

and I don't understand why this movie is so important in movie history...

Lair of the White Worm

[tedg · 3 February 2006]

Film is serious business, but useful in so, so many ways.

One way is as a path to discover who people are, which is why, I think, movies are such popular date activities. I mean, on the face of it, you are two isolated souls in the theater. The bonding comes in how you share the experience.

You can tell a great deal about your future lover by discovering what sort of comedy he/she penetrates.

The next step will be the arts and perversion. Not what he or she considers perverted — that's uninteresting, where the line is. But once you cross over, you move into territory that has artists here and there forming things that may have merit.

So if you are serious about your partner, and serious about a life in film, you'll drudge through many of these "experimental" films. Some will stick and some not.

Some, like this, rely on the casual and accidental while referencing "old" art. Perversion in several dimensions, adding to enchantment, or so it is intended.

Whether this is one you will use is a matter too personal for me to fathom. But for my taste, it tries too hard in the wrong directions. Perhaps in the 60s it was useful to just fart loudly and musically for the effect. But those days are past. If you want one to look at after this, try one of Derek Jarman's little films from the 70s.

Oh shucks. I was going to recommend one but I see that some unappreciative reader has arranged to have all my comments of those removed. You can see them as extras on the DVD of "The Tempest," which is suggested viewing in any case.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.