This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Sometimes experimental films have to be endured rather than enjoyed - this isn't the case with Scorpio Rising, which is utterly compelling from start to finish. This film's imagery has clearly been carefully studied by the likes of John Waters and David Lynch and it's hard to believe just how modern it still looks. My take on this is that it's an exploration of the present day cult of toxic masculinity. Any truly great work of art allows you to suddenly see the familiar in a new way and thus adds to your own layers of understanding. Scorpio Rising looks at western culture through the eyes of a gay man, and through the juxtaposition of images and use of pop songs highlights its absurd fetishisation of masculine power and dominance. This can be seen by the masculine, phallic shapes of buildings and vehicles in western culture, which are invisible to us, as we are integrated into this culture, but clear to any outsider with a rudimentary understanding of Freudian psychology.As I understand it, and I'm no expert, there are twelve Astrological Ages in total; one for each constellation of the zodiac. Each Age lasts for approximately 2160 years. Anger was a student of the work of Aleister Crowley and, like many in the 60s, believed that the present age would soon end and we would usher in the Age of Aquarius, characterised by a dominant world view in which the individual is allowed his/her freedom to actualise as an independently liberated being yet still participate in group life in the spirit of altruism and humanitarianism. The age we are living in now, however, is dominated by Scorpio, which is concerned with issues like sex, power, control and death. As traditionally feminine values are derided in our culture we have built machines in our own masculine image. We have over-powered weapons which can destroy the globe 100 times over and we revel in our mastery over machines. We fetishise cars and weapons in our films and books and we celebrate creativity which is destructive rather than constructive. Our God is an angry father and our religions are male death cults; the cutting between the images of Jesus and the all-male disciples and the images of the all-male biker gang hammer this home. Masculinity has reached its zenith and this celebration of the ridiculous and over-inflated male ego suggests that it will all end as it began - in violence. I loved this film.

I found this short film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I remember seeing the image of a character wearing a military cap and smoking a cigarette, and I was intrigued by the title, so I hoped for something good. Basically the film sees a group of homosexual Nazi bikers getting ready for a night out, building their bikes, dressing themselves in leather, and partaking in a cult night out, with pain and pleasure. There is no dialogue in the film, but there are flashes of footage from The Wild One with Marlon Brando and Cecil B. DeMille's religious epic King of Kings with Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus Christ, and the editing moves with the rhythm of the rock and roll soundtrack, including Bobby Vinton – "Blue Velvet", Elvis Presley – "(You're the) Devil in Disguise", Ray Charles – "Hit the Road Jack", The Crystals – "He's a Rebel", and Surfaris – "Wipe Out". Starring Bruce Byron as Scorpio, Johnny Sapienza as Taurus, Frank Carifi as Leo, Bill Dorfman as The Back, John Palone as Pinstripe and Ernie Allo as Joker. It is a very simple film, gay bikers getting ready for a night on the town and masochism, the key themes of the film are the occult, biker subculture, homosexuality, Catholicism, and Nazism, so it is a tasteless film in many ways, but that makes it all the more interesting, a surprisingly watchable short underground experimental film. Very good!

This is an art-house movie, that is being shot as a documentary but without really telling a story. I like it! Yes, as weird as the concept of this movie sounds and its execution may seem, this is really a great short to watch. The style of filming and editing as simply superb and seemed to be ahead of its time. I can definitely see how this film inspired some well known film-makers and why this is a relevant movie to show in movie classes for instance.It's a movie filled with great looking shots and some nice quick editing, which provides the movie with an unique looking style. It all got shot on the spot and without a script, which is the reason why this movie comes across as a documentary, while it isn't trying to tell a story really with its images. It's just simply a movie that you have to experience.A special nice touch is that the movie features no dialog or spoken lines at all. All the movie consists out of are popular and well known '60's musical tracks. And as far as music goes, the '60's of course wasn't the worst decade for it. It truly enhances the mood and style of the movie.Don't let the subject scare you off, this is a movie well worth watching.8/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Scorpio Rising marks the beginning of the mix-tape approach to film-making, the technique of adding texture, flow, counter-point to images by over-laying them with a soundtrack of pop songs. Kenneth Anger takes this technique to its limit right from the start, eschewing dialogue, narrative and everything else in favor of a thirty-minute greatest-hits medley wedded to a chaotic assemblage of pictures having to do with some gay-Nazi-anarchists engaged in all manner of rebellious behavior, from reading comic books to smearing mustard on a fat guy's stomach and tearing his pants off. The result is a bizarre fusion of the innocent and the profane, the quaintness of yesterday's Elvis/Bobby Vinton hits alongside the amateurish depravity and two-bit spectacle of Anger's underground opus.Despite its reputation as a sort of counter-culture landmark, the movie seems largely irrelevant, a museum piece commemorating the excesses of '60s cult movie-making. It consists primarily of badly-lit home-movies of some nameless, faceless leather-fetishists posing like the most slovenly male-models you can remember, then going to some degraded costume-ball that degenerates into the sort of orgiastic hi-jinks that were a staple of "controversial" sixties cinema. For kicks, Anger keeps cutting in little snippets from a silent movie about Jesus, demonstrating a grammar-school-level sense of how to shock middle-brow audiences. This is avant-gardism at its most obnoxiously pointless, the deliberate mingling of opposing elements (bubbly pop tunes over random sexual carnage, cross-cutting between a gay-Nazi orgy and shots of the Last Supper) for the purpose of suggesting all sorts of potential meanings, none of which have been sufficiently thought-out.Anger is so concerned with creating an intense experience that he forgets anything he might've known about film technique and simply wallows in his own fanatical, vaguely Satanic weirdness. Yet despite the film's sloppiness, it occasionally points the way toward what later, better filmmakers would do with the director's indisputably pioneering idea. The fusion of pop-music and pop-image (see the Layla sequence in Goodfellas; bits of Easy Rider; much of Tarantino) can lead to a sense of electricity, a heightening, where a moment can come to summarize the whole of the film texturally. The first glimmers of this galvanizing effect can be felt for a second here-and-there in Scorpio Rising, but either Anger didn't understand what he was on to, or didn't care. As so often happens in experimental film, the pioneer has the inspiration but lacks the expertise, the know-how necessary to employ the technique in a meaningful way. The little ripples of potential energy never amount to anything for Anger, who winds up coming across like Roger Corman without the movie-making acumen.