Great news for people who like watching three minutes of a film in the middle of the night on SyFy, then feeling like you’ve seen enough of it to get the gist, then switching off and going to bed – Tom Six has got a new movie coming out.
That’s right. You saw The Human Centipede, and were secretly disappointed that it wasn’t as interesting as the premise suggested. You saw The Human Centipede 2, then spent a full month wondering why you bothered. You ignored The Human Centipede 3, because you have a vague recollection of someone once telling you not to feed the trolls. And now it’s time for you to actively run away from The Onania Club.
Little is known about Tom Six’s new film The Onania Club, except for the following. It’s set in California. Its tagline is: “Come and see, see and come.” It’s almost definitely going to be about masturbation. And, inevitably, its own press release has described it as “one of the most vile, inhumane movie experiences of all time”.
Now, normally it isn’t the job of a press release to call a movie vile and inhumane, let alone historically so. That’s usually the job of critics and audiences, or anyone who streamed out of Lars von Trier’s latest tinpot attempt at teenage provocation. It’s the sort of line that a studio would pass over for poster inclusion, instead landing on the next best review, which in this case is likely to be something like: “I suppose it exists” or “On the plus side, at least it’s short.”
But at this point in Tom Six’s career, this is essentially all that he has got left going for him; roaring loudly about his own irreparable wretchedness in the hope that a handful of dimwit would-be incels will watch it as a dare. And The Onania Club’s own poster – tweeted this week by Six himself – does nothing to dispel that notion.
The poster is an amateurish collage of aggressive stupidity. There’s a terrorist with a gun. There’s a row of what look like military prisoners on their knees. There’s a crying baby. There’s a charred corpse in sunglasses. There’s a cancer patient. There’s an actual real-life photo of the World Trade Center being attacked. There’s also a large image of a woman with her eyes closed, but it’s honestly hard to tell whether she’s in the throes of sexual ecstasy or just disappointed that she signed up to star in such a trainwreck of a movie.
Honestly, what is the point of Tom Six? It can’t be to make art, because he’s spent an entire career doing the precise opposite. And it can’t be to act as a walking distillation of all of humanity’s ugliness, because we already have Twitter.
In fact, there’s a very good chance that Tom Six exists for exactly this; for members of the press to get riled up by all his knuckleheaded posturing. Which means I’m part of the problem. So well done Tom Six, you win this time. Someone remind me not to react when he farts out The Onania Club 2 this time next year.