CHUDSPLOITATION: WATER POWER

There was a real Last Days of the Roman Empire feeling about the whole Two Girls One Cup phenomenon, especially the minor YouTube fad of recording the reactions of people - including grandmothers! - to the infamous video of two girls shitting and puking on one another. This, surely, is the depths of depravity, a low point for our culture and society.

Watching Water Power, Shaun Costello's obscene film from 1976, I realized that Two Girls One Cup was nothing. That was shock, the sleaze merchant's version of the cat jump scare in a horror movie. Water Power... that's the real thing, a movie of pure vile sickness. A movie that will disgust you to your very core, but is still bizarrely watchable. A movie that is so far beyond the boundaries of good taste and possibly sanity that it even scared off the pervert crowds in New York City's 1970s porn theaters. It's amazing.

To really understand Water Power you have to shed all of your modern concepts of porn. The overly-lit, professionally hair-done world of modern porn is related to the world of 70s porn in the same way that Grand Theft Auto IV is related to Pong*. Water Power came along at a strange time in the porn world, when the short porn loops were turning into porn features, and when the mainstream world briefly flirted with porno chic. Today's world is one where porn stars are indistinguishable from mysteriously famous heiresses and celebutards, but once upon a time the straight world and the porn world did not meet. That began to change with the release of Deep Throat; cultural movers and shakers - even Jackie Onassis! - went to see the magical tale of a girl whose clit was located in her throat.

Porn and 'straight' films were, seemingly, on a collision course (the only place they really collided, though, was Blake Edwards' SOB, which paralleled (or parodied) a potential hardcore Hollywood version of The Joy of Sex, starring Julie Andrews). Today porn stars want to cross over and make legit films, but in the 70s it was starting to look like porn could itself become legit. Water Power feels like a one-man effort to put a stop to that.

Shaun Costello had been working in the porn world for years when he made Water Power. His career included all aspects of the business, including acting in porn loops, and he directed movies under dozens of names, completely unbeknownst to the financiers who were delivering multiple paychecks to him per week. While Costello excelled in the world of One Day Wonders - porn loops with budgets of 5 grand or less, shot in a day and edited in two - he made his porn directing (he had been acting in porno loops for some time) debut with 1971's Forced Entry, a film that itself is a candidate for a CHUDsploitation column. That film plays like a precursor to Taxi Driver, with Deep Throat star Harry Reems as a crazed Vietnam Vet raping and killing women. Forced Entry, as sick and twisted as it was, feels like a pretty tame picture in comparison with the magnum opus that Costello would eventually unleash.

Costello was shooting his porn for the mob, who were the biggest funders of the still technically illegal sleaze at the time. The money was coming from the Gambino crime family, and while Costello (or other porn auteurs) would often come to the goombah money men pitching quickie storylines, occasionally a request would come down from the top. One day Costello found himself chatting with a highly connected mob guy (who would later get his brains blown out by Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano) who made a very specific, very strange request. He had a tape of the police interrogation of the high profile criminal known as the Enema Bandit. This, the mobster told Costello, would be the basis of his next porn feature. He gave Costello carte blanche, with one proviso: he didn't want to know (or see) what Costello ended up with. The mob thought there was money to be made with this sick story, but even they were too squeamish and prudish to deal with it. For Costello this was great news - he would get to make a movie so completely insane it still lives in infamy.

If you're a fan of Frank Zappa you may already know the strange true story of the Illinois Enema Bandit, Michael Kenyon. Starting in 1966 with the forced enemas of two sisters, 16 and 18, he terrorized Champaign, Illinois (and a few other states where he lived during this period). Kenyon's MO was to don a ski or gas mask and break into the homes of women he would see on the street, tie them up, give them enemas (at least one victim was forced to endure two enemas in one night) and then steal money or an item from their home, presumably as a souvenier. Kenyon got away with his bizarre proclivities for a decade, but over time got sloppier, obviously wanting to get caught. Right before he was finally busted in 1975 he hit his peak, assaulting six women in one night. Eventually he was arrested for unrelated burglaries and was unable to keep his mouth shut about the Enema Bandit. His subscription to Enema Digest (seriously) didn't help him any, either. Because of weird vagaries in the law, Kenyon's enema assaults were either past the statute of limitations or didn't carry all that big a penalty, so the cops took him down for armed robbery, earning him six concurrent sentences of 6-12 years. He was questioned in the Tylenol poisoning case in 1982, but otherwise Kenyon has slipped away from the public eye.

Costello's mandate was simply to use this sick fuck's story as the basis of a film. He hired his friend and swing club partner Jamie Gillis to play the role of Burt, the Enema Bandit. In a rare display of fidelity to his craft, Gillis asked to be flown to Illinois so that he could interview Kenyon to get the flavor of his character. Costello, unsurprisingly, turned him down.


*which is a terrible example. Imagine that video games started out with Grand Theft Auto IV, but rendered in the crudest way possible, and has evolved into a spectacular looking version of Pong (which I think Rock Star Games actually did a couple of years ago). That's a better analogy.