TRASH FIRE

The fires that Richard Bates Jr. burns in his movies, which display behavioral problems, definitely get part of their heat from the less legit universe of b-movies and trash cinema. For instance the aggression, with which he punched the burgeoning, monstrous sexuality of a young woman into the heads of the viewers in “Excision”, has leveled off somewhere between the universe of John Waters and the land of David Cronenberg. From that point of view it’s quite surprising, that he proposes the antisocial yuppie-esque Owen (Adrien Grenier) as the main target of his third movie “Trash Fire”: Every psychoanalyst’s wet dream, his angered girlfriend persuades him to return to the root cause of his mental suffering. There, at the place where everything started and ended after his parents died in a fire, his grandmother awaits him. The devoutly religious old woman, breathing fire and brimstone, puts Owen through an acid test, while his sister, disfigured by the fire, still dwells in her bedsit. “Trash Fire” is the merciless, fancy story of a derailed family, that recognizes the core values of conservative America as the primordial soup of much psychopathology, a horror movie that finds the monstrosity on the interior and drags it to the surface. As ugly as it may be, it’s still loaded with black humor. And then we dance on the charred corpses and drink champagne. And John Waters will surely stop by too.