Why so much hype?

Touches You

Memorable, crazy movie

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Of all the movies that made up what came to be known as New Queer Cinema Bruce LaBruce's "The Raspberry Reich" is considered to be amongst the most radical. The sex is certainly explicit and it's nicely shot by James Carman though LaBruce's mixture of guns, sex, revolution and extreme left-wing politics is still a difficult pill to swallow. It might have helped if the acting or the script were any good, (they're terrible), but this is just a porn film with better camera-work and editing than most and what LaBruce assumes is a political agenda that will appeal to intellectuals. He shot it in Berlin but it could just as easily have been Budapest or Barking. You could view it as a comedy in bad taste though I doubt if it will make you smile. On the plus side it's marginally less boring than Godard's political pictures which might have benefited from a dose of explicit sex but don't take that as a recommendation.

I'll admit my ignorance on The Raspberry Reich. I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be a comedy, spoof or serious drama. I couldn't tell if it merely had horrible dialogue or just extremely badly dubbed. And I couldn't tell if it was an erotic film or just simple porn.What I do know is, The Raspberry Reich is a hilariously bad movie. I can absolutely see this movie as a perfect drinking game or movie to watch for a night of laughing at the horror it was.The five-minute plot stretched incredibly to 90 minutes involves a woman who spews out quotes from various sources in order to develop some kind of "revolution" that (spoiler!) never comes to pass. Yeah, I'll ruin that because, other than a binge night of drinking, there is absolutely no reason to see this porn-disguised-as-propaganda movie.Part of her (ha ha ha ha) master plan to take over whatever (yeah, that's another aspect that flew past me – the main character, Gudrun's adversary, who whoever that was) is to get her minions – all male comrades, to have sex with each other by stating they shouldn't worry about their anti-revolutionary heterosexuality and make the revolution their boyfriend. (??? – if they were straight (another ha ha ha ha) then wouldn't that be girlfriend?) So…we're to believe these guys are truly straight and I believe it was the director/writer Bruce La Bruce's vision was for us to believe they were not gay, yet they give VERY little resistance to having sex with each other. On the flip side, it's like believing the women in straight porn never "actually want it" and their consistent battle to avoid penetration is "real." Honestly, this movie is a joke, a waste of time. UNLESS…of course, you just want to see porn. My advice is to head over to the adult shoppe because, though there are many explicit sexual scenes (definitively no holds barred) and full frontal male/female scenes, they are interlocked with rancid acting, laughable dialogue, molestation of guns and a whole bunch of the script scrolling on the screen. Yeah, I heard them, and making me read it makes little difference in my opinion on their comical beliefs.Oh, and switching from color to black & white is about as an art form these days as drawing a circle and teaching a 64-week college course on the depths of the object. SKIP THIS MOVIE.* * - Again, unless you have some kind of party with (either gay or VERY OPEN-MINDED) buddies who want a good laugh.

The Raspberry Reich is about a dominatrix terrorist, Gudrun, her sexual revolution, and her clan, Raspberry Reich. They kidnap the son of a wealthy businessman to get public attention. Pornographic sexual revolution ensues.The film was, essentially, porn. However, it was porn with a plot, a message, and really awesome music, all captured by a true artist, Bruce LaBruce, rather than some pornographer or big studio blah. Oh, and I would have to say... the porn was well done. I happened to be counter-revolutionary, myself, (if you know what I mean) while watching the movie.It was funny with lines like, "the revolution is my boyfriend," "cornflakes are counter-revolutionary," that guy who kept jumping and clapping his hands: "shoplifting! shoplifting!" and "pornography! pornography!" and a sequence in which two boyfriends made out with each other right after robbing a bank, like, right outside of the bank... oh, and the sex in the elevator.I found it ironic and interesting that while Gudrun spoke against oppression, she was, in turn, oppressing her own followers.The acting was soooooo bad. If only the acting was at least okay, I would have liked it more.All in all, it was a good movie, if only for the artistic aspect of explicit sex. I think I want to be Bruce LaBruce when I grow up.

It's really sad that the gay community comes to the defense of such an appalling bad movie as Raspberry Reich. This film has no redeeming features. It does have non-event actors; a rubbish script and a truly irritating habit of superimposing quotes from George W and Blair over scenes of graphic intercourse. That doesn't make it a cutting-edge alternative movie. It's just facile and boring. It is quite the worst movie you will see this (and any ) year. Life is just too short and precious to give time to this unmitigated rubbish. And now IMDb want me to write 10 lines minimum about a film which deserves a two word summary. Hey ho.