Jack Smith’s 1963 work of hothouse erotic exotica caused trouble everywhere it went. Read this NSFW Flaming Creatures movie review to find out how.

Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures: Movie Review

The scene opens on a linened landscape of tangled limbs and powdered flesh. A cock pokes out from the hem of a floral skirt. Everything is seen through a fog, a celluloid miasmah that makes Flaming Creatures, Jack Smith’s controversial arthouse erotica experiment, seem like it could have emerged from Paris in the ’20s, the Weimar republic in the ’30s, or even a fin-de-siecle London magic lantern show just as easily as the tar-paper roof of the Windsor Theatre (now a Rite-Aid in New York’s Lower East side.)

The use of outdated film-stock let director Jack Smith create a glamorous alternate dimension over the course of a week in the summer of 1962, letting him and his cast of drag queens, Middle Eastern beauties, blonde vampires, and pouty beatniks create a cinematic masterpiece with only a few shoddy backdrops and some scratchy pop 45s.

Film critic J. Holberman, whose On Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures” – and other Secret-Flix of Cinemaroc) discussed the film at length, describes the experience as “the flickering ethereality of a world half-consumed in the heat of its own desire. At once primitive and sophisticated, hilarious and poignant, spontaneous and studied, frenzied and languid, crude and delicate, avant and nostalgic, gritty and fanciful, fresh and faded, innocent and jaded, high and low, raw and cooked, underground and camp, black and white and white-on-white, composed and decomposed, richly perverse and gloriously impoverished.”

Flaming Creatures is loosely a triptych, freely floating from vintage tableaux to porn film loop to camp musical and back again. Seattle’s KXSU, who wrote about this film just 5 days ago coincidentally enough, describes the film as “formally chaotic” and that’s apt. The “plot”, which was not immediately obvious until reading the description at MOMA’s website, goes

“We see men applying lipstick to their puckering mouths, the set appear to crumble in an earthquake, and a vampire in a blond wig suck the blood of an unconscious victim. Shots of bared body parts and fluttering eyes punctuate these scenes, set to a soundtrack of vintage music.

The Afterlife Of Flaming Creatures

The chaotic plot and stylized presentation helped Flaming Creatures climb out of the porno gutter and enjoy a second life as a masterpiece of early American Avant-Garde cinema, as the Hays code began to loosen its death grip on the film industry. Which is a blessing, as the film was largely unseeable during its first run. When the film debuted at the Tivoli Theatre, the police were waiting. The film was seized as pornographic – as was an Andy Warhol film also scheduled to show, which was never recovered – and all three parties responsible for the showing were ultimately charged with obscenity charges.

Something vital would have been lost, had Flaming Creatures never re-emerged. More than anything, it is a film firmly existing at the crossroads, in a liminal state between Hollywood glamour and B-Movie trash, between European decadence and America pop culture, between high and low, a Nirvana of trash culture, of drag queen angels and half-lidded vampires. Many of Flaming Creatures characters, themselves, exist in the in-between. Gender roles are subverted and discarded, willy-nilly. Men dress as women, women dress in nothing. Another reviewer describes Flaming Creatures as “orgiastic”, and that’s another good way to put it.

The film would go on to play a major influence on up-and-coming New Wave directors like John Waters, who would elevate Jack Smith’s concept of Camp to Guggenheim-worthy fine art.

Flaming Creatures is an exotic tableaux, a fewer dream of erotic impulses and cinematic imagination. It loves, and loves deeply, the trashy melodramas of early Hollywood and European arthouse cinema in equal regard. It is a riot of fragmented images and fluid identities, a libidinous waking nightmare, equal parts sexy and grotesque.

For those who haven’t seen it, the first third of Flaming Creatures features a rather graphic and disturbing sexual assault. Consider this a trigger warning for those sensitive to such things. It’s really worth it to endure if you can, however, for the film’s visual poetry, sense of humor, and overall atmosphere. Not to mention its historic significance.

Have been researching and working on an essay or queer and erotic cinema for the website Film And Fishnets. Have seen so many great films and have so many great things to say about that, so wish me luck with that. Proposals are open until 12.20, so there’s still time, if you care to put together a proposal yrself. You can follow @donnauwonna on Twitter for more details as well.

Want More Movie Reviews?

Looking for more movie news, reviews, thoughts, and insights? Follow @for3stpunk on Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd!

Want to support quality, in-depth literary criticism? Every donation allows us to comment more fully on the world we’re living in.