The color science fiction film, financed by paychecks from Mike?s day job as a photo retoucher, was Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965). Sins would stand as Mike?s best-known film and the single most significant, creatively realized example of ?60s camp cinema sensibility. Pulsating with excessive colors, Sins unfolds while the camera?s eye floats indulgently over bright flowing fabrics, jewelry, tropical plastic foliage, and platters of glowing fruit that evoke a corrupt paradise.
"My specific aim was to bombard and engulf the screen with vivid and voluptuous colors," said Mike of Sins in a 1967 Film Culture interview, "because Sins is a fantasy of science fiction. So I tried to boost the colors according to its category: ?fantastic? or ?unreal.? I intentionally used a color film that when reproduced in the final print becomes ?unnatural? and ?souped up,? especially in the reds."
Sins starred Gina Zuckerman, Maren Thomas, Donna Kerness, and Julius Middleman (who later became a cop). Bob Cowan, who narrated the film and chose the music, gives a jerky, deadpan performance as the lead male robot, and George steals the show as Gianbeano, evil prince from the future.
The story transpires a million years in the future, after "The Great War" has depopulated the earth and ravaged the landscape. Mankind, reduced to a debauched few, has forsaken science for greedy indulgence in all the carnal pleasures afforded by art, aesthetics, and lust, leaving work to be done by a race of enslaved robots. One rebellious male robot (Cowan) tires of pampering his lazy masters and murders a human woman after a failed rape attempt, then engages in successful robot sex ? the touch of fingers ? with a female android. Thus the Fleshapoids join their human masters in sin ... and in procreation, as the female android gives birth to a baby robot.
Although Sins is set in the future, there is a classical look to the costuming and set designs that foreshadows Mike?s fondness for an ancient, muscular, Roman sexuality that he would elaborate on in later films and in his published gay pornographic comics.
Sins of the Fleshapoids played midnights for three weeks at an established theater in Greenwich Village and went on to become a staple of the underground. Mike was now able to quit his day job and live for six years off the income of his films, which included, among other things, sales of prints to museum archives worldwide and honorariums for presenting his work at university and film society screenings. (This was more a testament to Mike?s modest expenses than to any vast sums generated by the films.)
Along with Anger?s Scorpio Rising (1964) and Warhol?s The Chelsea Girls (1966), Sins of the Fleshapoids remains one of the three most influential works of the ?60s American Underground, if one of the least self-consciously scandalous. It was never busted like Scorpio Rising (for a snippet of frontal male nudity), nor did it have the aura of fashionable decadence that radiated from everything Warhol attached his name to and that propelled Chelsea Girls to heights of fame and financial success arguably greater than the film?s value. (At a sold-out 1991 screening of Warhol?s film in Boston, the entire audience left during the unannounced intermission.) That Sins achieved the influence and success it did without sexual scandal or the scenester celebrity that many other underground films exploited is notable. |
