Flaming Creatures is a film loved by underground film enthusiasts and trannies alike, so it shouldn't be any suprise to find it's one of my all-time favourite movies. When I decided to write this little eulogy, however, I had to think long and hard about my reasons for liking it; exactly what it is I find so appealing about it. For it hardly needs saying that Flaming Creatures is an ambiguous, oblique work; and to the unitiated, an awkward, difficult experience at best. So perhaps it'd be best if I start off by giving some account of how I first came across this strangest of underground films; one that's had me under it's spell for fifteen years now.
 The first I heard of Flaming Creatures was in Parker Tyler's "Underground Film", a book I discovered at the age of fifteen in my school library. The description of a gang of trannies raping a woman, then writhing around in a great big pile, groping each others' genitals was more than enough to stir my interest; so when I saw the film listed in Time Out, as one half of a Jack Smith double bill (the other film on show was Jack Smith and Ken Jacobs' Blonde Cobra), I decided that this was an opportunity I couldn't afford to miss! Goofing off school was no problem - a faked dentist's appointment card took care of that - and one summer afternoon a week later, I took my seat in the otherwise completely empty Electric cinema and waited for the show to begin. And was I disappointed? Shit; are you motherfucking kidding? Blonde Cobra was on first; and from the first frame onwards, I was hooked. The revolutionary editing techniques employed by Smith and Jacobs, the way in which they took every single convention and threw them right out the window, were enough to fire my imagination with a thousand possibilities. I particularly dug the way Smith's wild monologue continued while for several minutes at a time, the picture descended into the pitch darkness of film leader. Hell, the film made such an impression on me, that while at art college several years later, I went to the effort of creating my very own homage/remake/rip-off; into which I piled every bit of film leader, found footage, and whatever else I could get my hands on...
 Impressive as Blonde Cobra was, however, it was when Flaming Creatures began that I got a real dose of what Jack Smith was all about; and I must say, in all the years since my epiphany on the Portobello Road took place, I can think of only a few other occasions when the celluloid tapeworm has had such an effect on me. Granted, I hadn't the slightest understanding of what it was Smith was trying to express, trying to achieve; yet the moving tableux acted out on the roof of the Windsor Theatre, New York in the summer of 1962 and filmed on decaying black and white army surplus stock were - to me, anyway - so romantic, so enchanting, so...visionary...that no explanation seemed necessary.

 Well, that's how it seemed at the time. Later on, of course, I discovered Smith's influences; his love of Hollywood exotica, in particular "the mysterious east", as portrayed in films such as Arabian Nights (1942), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944) and Cobra Woman (1944); all starring actress Maria Montez, or as Smith described her, "The Wonderful One". I learnt of his introduction to the (at that time genuinely experimental) world of "underground film", through the auspices of Ken Jacobs', who was perceptive enough to recognise what an exceptionally individual star Smith would make, and based some of his finest films around him - Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice (1957); Little Stabs of Happiness (1958-63); and of course, Blonde Cobra (1959-63). And I learnt of Smith's desire to create an underground version of his favourite Hollywood films - a sort of "home movie epic"; part homage, part piss-take; and with loads of sex thrown in. (Smith more or less declares this as his intention, in the voiceover at the very beginning of the film; a line taken directly from the soundtrack of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, it announces, quite simply, 'today - Ali Baba comes today!')
 Yeah, I know, I know; the way I'm describing it, you'd think Flaming Creatures was a porn flick designed to stick a great big strap-on right up the ass of conformist commercial entertainment. Leave your preconceptions outside the auditorium doors, however, and you'll find Flaming Creatures to be a suprisingly innocent and playful spectacle; not so much one of transgender terrorists laying waste to bourgeouis society, more one of adult-sized kids rooting through the dressing-up box, then playing make-believe with an assortment of improvised props. (The strap-on, the cucumber, the phone receiver...you get the picture...) And though Smith may have wished to provide a sort of reductio ad absurdum of the exotic Hollywood B-Movie "set in far-off lands", it was a genre of cinema he loved with all his balls, and as such wished to emulate and celebrate - albeit in a gently mocking way.
 Anyway, feels like I've said all I can on the subject of why I love Flaming Creatures so much ("Why I Love Flaming Creatures So Much"...sounds like the title of an eight-year-old's school essay)... For those of you who'd like to know a little more about the golden penis of underground cinema, I've included some links below. If, however, you want to skip the theorizing and start the sucking, click on the bottom link, and you can find out for yourself if there really is a lipstick that doesn't come off when you suck cock!

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