Futz (1969)

A farmer named Cyrus Futz (John Bakos) is having a tender romance with a pig called Amanda. It appears to be the only deeply consummated love affair in a town seething with repressed twisted sexuality.

Like any young man in love, Futz radiates shameless joy. And the villagers go berserk.

Village idiot Oscar Loop (Seth Allen) brutally rapes and murders Ann Fox (Mari-Claire Charba) and blames Futz for stirring him up. He then confesses his lust for his mother and she confesses her lust for him.

The town slut (Beth Porter) runs loose, wanton. The overalled yokels screw her and call her evil, and they all blame Futz. He has unleashed it all by his love for Amanda.

Sheriff Tom Sluck (Peter Craig) struts the streets with boots and leather, wet hands trembling to administer discipline. Oscar is executed and Futz is tried as an accessory to murder.

The submerged passions of the village emerge in a blood-lust lynching orgy. Amanda bleeds very red. Futz is murdered. Love is slain. Morality wins.

There is a constant shift between the cast presenting the hillbilly Passion Play on a square wooden stage surrounded by a bored and confused rural audience (also a part of the cast) and the same scenes then enacted in a realistic setting but performed in the same ritualistic, rigidly cadenced delivery of dialogue in voices ranging from primal shrieking to caterwauling.

The structure of Futz is an extraordinarily intricate, head-scrambling, ambitious, pretentious, work of art. But the message is simple: Horny is good. Moral repression is bad.

But Futz doesn’t make horny easy for the viewer. You will not see beautiful Swedish post-adolescents screwing poetically in green meadows, or Hollywood starlets lifting golden limbs to the sun.

The weird, funky, perverse, ragged La Mama Troupe from New York’s Lower East Side bring to life the bottomless, sleazy garbage can of protestant-ethic-guilt-ridden perversity.

Cyrus Futz
John Bakos
Oscar Loop
Seth Allen
Ann Fox
Mari-Claire Charba
Sheriff Tom Sluck
Peter Craig
Buford
Jerry Owen Cunliffe
Mother Satz
Jeannette Erfelt
Sugford
Frederic Forrest
Jeffrey Weese
Clay Haney
Merry Lee
Sally Kirkland
Brother Ned Satz
Victor Lipari
Majorie Satz
Beth Porter
Bill Marjoram
Michael Warren Powell
Mrs Loop
Marilyn Roberts
Father Satz
Rob Thirkield
Dorn
Eric Wildwoode

Director
Tom O’Horgan

Video