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Check out an account of the Miami screening at Churchill's at the Miami New Times: http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2007-12-13/music/raw-meat/ Or below: |
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Raw
Meat A movie
with lots of porn and some weirdness glows at Churchill's. By Elyse Wanshel
"Ho, ho, ho, it's that gift-giving time of year," he says, holding in his right hand a red Christmas stocking jammed with copies of his latest film, Meat Weed America! — a wholesome, highbrow flick about cannibal farmers in Durham, North Carolina, who show their patriotism by smoking terrorists' foreskins. In Dillard's other hand, he's clutching a bullhorn, complete with a function that blares car alarm sounds.
The plot of Meat
Weed America!? The same. Except there's a jihadis-versus-nuns twist that
Dillard says resulted from the suggestions of liberal, left-wingers who
picked up some of the film's tab. "I'm mainly
into the trash and the sleaze because I'm a very repressed, perverted
person," he adds. "I try to let everything out in my movies.
Otherwise I may go around attacking people and whatnot." He says all of this
mere minutes before Meat Weed America! is to make its Miami debut on Churchill's
starlit patio. The screen is already in place, surrounded by paintings
of the London Underground symbol and a pig with bursting teets. About
30 bodies occupy half of the vacant, paint-chipped seats. Dillard and I stand
behind a flimsy cotton curtain that separates the screening area from
the rest of the patio. He holds the bullhorn, which he plans to use "like
a circus promoter," as he adjusts his wig and secures the plastic,
air-filled legs around his neck. Then he busts through
the dark cloth, enters the densely populated bar area, and sounds the
bullhorn's car alarm. The crowd doesn't respond, so he starts shouting
what sounds like "Fkdhfskfhskdfh corn holing eiurowrueworu macrobiotic
pussies kkdsfslfjslfjd," into the bullhorn. After 10 minutes,
about 10 more people have filtered onto the patio for the start of the
movie. When the projectors roll, Dillard appears onscreen making a monkey
noise. He's completely naked, revealing a lean, cut body with nether regions
badly censored by a superimposed image of Osama bin Laden's head. "Hello,
my name is Aiden Dillard and I am the director of this here motion picture,"
he says as he kicks, wiggles, punches, and flings his limbs about like
a ninja on meth. The smiling face of bin Laden floats around slowly, lazily
covering his package, leaving nothing to the imagination. He quietly explains to me that the actors are friends (or friends of friends), so they weren't paid much. The story line was greatly affected by "who'd call in sick, who'd wuss out and didn't really want to do it, or who's car broke down and couldn't make it."
"If I was a
smoker, I'd be smoking right now," says Maurice, a 31-year-old, well-groomed
guy with a budding 'fro who sits next to me. As he says this,
on the screen a farmer who lives in Meat Weed Manor is being circumcised
by a gang of turban-wearing Suicide Girls (terrorists) in an act of revenge
for smoking the foreskin of their leader, bin Smokin. Maurice's hand covers
his face, leaving a small space between his fingers for viewing purposes.
"Is there some kind of political, social point to this?" Maurice
asks as one of the terrorists butt-rapes the farmer with a giant ear of
corn. I turn around and
find Dillard in the back by the curtain. He's smiling as he observes the
audience. He jerks his torso back and forth, resembling a Punch-a-Clown
or someone who's had one too many Red Bull and vodkas. I walk over. "How
much acid did you take before making this movie?" I ask. "Actually this is really embarrassing to admit," he says, turning his head and confiding in a neighboring wall, "I've never even had a single beer in my entire life.... But I'm not opposed at all to drug use or alcohol use or any kind of use. I just don't do it myself. I make these movies because I wish I did it. I wish that I drank. I wish that I smoked pot. I wish that I had sex a lot."
A guy in the front
starts laughing hysterically as the audience thins to about eight people,
most of whom are smoking cigarettes, biting nails, or looking around embarrassedly.
Dillard tries to entice more viewers. This time he's armed with a picket
sign that includes the image of The Hempress (Troma star Debbie Rochon)
mounting a pretty Southern belle, Jessie Bell Meat Weed, who is wearing
a marijuana-embellished corset. Sitting around the
corner from me, a swoopy-banged, 27-year-old pretty-boy named T.V. does
his personal rendition of Ebert and Roeper for a friend sitting next to
him. "The shots are too tight and the actors are too heavy with their
hand movements," he says. "You never see any wide shots, which
gives the viewer time to think. That's important in a movie. And there's
no silence." "So I'm assuming
you're not a fan?" I interrupt. "I'd never be involved in this movie," he says through bee-stung lips. "I'm too conservative."
Onscreen, a naked
nun begs a bull-like creature with a giant cigarette for a penis to give
her some of his "purple puss." Suddenly the bull splooges all
over her chest. A couple of people get up and walk out. Most of the audience, now about 50 strong, laughs.
Nice. Dillard explains
he built the creature out of papier-mâché in 2004, when he
lived in a converted motel at NE 79th Street and Biscayne Boulevard. "I
observed the seediest side of Miami — hookers and plenty of noises
from my neighbors," he says. He also saw rich people who "owned
a half-million-dollar condo which only their dog lived in." This extreme separation
in class is the inspiration for his next movie, Special Angel. The film,
he says, "was shot on better equipment, and the actors are talented
and less prone to take off their clothes." Then the credits
roll on Meat Weed America! I turn to Maurice, who's one of the few people
who stuck it out for the duration. "How'd you like it?" I ask. "It had a couple of good lines," he says, smiling and gazing at the topless women who wiggle about in the credits, "but it was the titties that were nice."
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