PRE-RAMBLE: OF ALL US JOURNALIST SOBs, I THINK MOVIE CRITICS ARE BY FAR THE MOST CONTEMPTIBLE. A MORE UNDESERVEDLY SMUG, SELF-IMPORTANT GROUP OF HACKS YOU WON'T FIND, AS THE VAST MAJORITY OF THEM COULDN'T MAKE A FILM ABOUT PAINT DRYING IF YOU SPOTTED THEM THE CAN OF PAINT. LET THE RECORD SHOW I NEVER CLAIMED TO BE AN EXCEPTION TO THAT RULE; I AM, IN FACT, FULLY AWARE OF MY HYPOCRISY IN POSTING THIS WRITE-UP:
If you are thinking about seeing "Zoo," the new semi-documentary about the Seattle man who in 2005 screwed an Arabian stallion and died of a perforated colon, don't. It sucked big hairy horse balls -- and not in a good way.
I am still marveling at how it is even possible to make a boring movie about a real-life secret coven of professional family men who risk everything to hook up with farm animals on the weekends. But damn it if "Zoo," which was based on the biggest news story to come out of the Pacific Northwest since the serial killer Ted Bundy, wasn't the most tedious thing I have sat through in ages.
Now for the obligatory backpedaling. I commend director Robinson Devor and writer Charles Mudede for taking on material which can safely be described as difficult. To recap: A man, barely conscious and bleeding from his anus, was droppped off at an emergency room in rural Enumdaw, Wash. He died within hours of, for simplicity's sake, serious ass problems. Authorities soon traced Kenneth Pinyan, who had been an otherwise normal engineer for Boeing, to an underground group of "zoos," short for "zoophiles," aka folks into hard core bestiality. When it turned out Washington didn't technically have any laws against man-on-animal sex, the public went apeshit and a few opportunistic politicians started pushing for legislation. Pinyan's case became late night talk show fodder and the Seattle Times' most read story ever.
Mudede, who doubles as the editor of the alternative weekly "The Stranger," told reporters about his and Devor's project, "We didn't want to focus on the tawdriness. That had been done. We wanted to look dispassionately into a world that exists here, but prior to this case few had ever known about."
So the two went the arty route, leaving out déclassé descriptions of Arabian boners and filling their reels instead with endless graceful silhouettes of horses and dreamy shots of dawn breaking on Washington farms. The filmmakers never put Pinyan's fellow zoophiles in the hot seat; I got the impression that Mudede and Devor thought it would be too rude to subject the "zoos" to a bunch of questions--especially the ones I was most jonesing for them to ask: Why are you attracted to horses? What does it feel like to have sex with a horse? How do you, uh, get the horse, you know . . . warmed up?
Instead, we get a handful of zoos whining from afar about how unfairly they have been treated since their story broke. I say from afar because we can't see them; we can only hear them (reportedly a condition of their participation in the film). Their disembodied voices float over reenactments of Saturday night card games and other see-they're-just-like-you-and-me activities Pinyan and pals supposedly shared in addition to their unsavory pastime of choice. All this set to a score that sounds like a piano being tuned. The result is a very tasteful, very serious, very high-brow film . . . about horsefucking.
Hmmmm.
Watching this movie, I felt like I was back in Catholic school, fighting the urge to make fart sounds with my armpits during morning prayers. As it is never explained to us why the film's subjects are being treated with such reverence, the reverence just feels absurd. These are, after all, horsefuckers--one of whom admits to having used the Internet screen name "Mr. Hands."
Not that I couldn't have been persuaded to care about Mr. Hands. As an indie flick frequenter, I have been suckered into feeling sorry for all sorts of sickos: drug addicts, criminals, transsexual Filipino immigrants living in Tel Aviv . . . (the latter are the subjects of the 2006 documentary "Paper Dolls"). But the burden of making people give a damn about their characters is on the filmmakers, and in this case they failed to deliver the necessary goods.
For one thing, we never find out very much about Pinyan; his family refused to participate in the film and none of the other zoos seem to have been particularly good friends with him. What's worse, I was disturbed by the unmistakable manure stench of a hidden agenda to portray the surviving zoophiles as the newest misunderstood minority group--the implication being that society is denying them their freedoms to have sex with whomever, or whatever, they choose. That is not a position any responsible person could possibly endorse after learning how Pinyan died.
"Zoo"'s biggest sin of all is its refusal to get off its high horse, so to speak, and answer some of the basic hows and whys. The easiest way to do that would have been to simply show the footage of barnyard romps shot by Pinyan's circle. Yeah, that's right--it turns out the zoos not only enjoyed making videos of their sex acts, they had an entire library collection worth of horsefucking on DVD. This infuriating fact we learn about halfway through the film. That Mudede and Devor had this stuff in their possession and didn't push to include it in their movie is akin to burying one's head in a textbook about long-necked mammals when there is a giant purple giraffe standing in the middle of the room.
If you remember nothing else from this blog entry, remember this: when I fork out ten bucks to see a movie about a bestiality accident, I expect to see some goddamned equine cock.
