Tommy Turner is considered a key figure of the Downtown No Wave and Cinema of Transgression movements. While working days as a genetic research scientist and nights as a bartender at the Peppermint Lounge, the New York native rose to prominence through his zine Redrum and collaborations with Richard Kern and David Wojnarowicz.
In the years before Ronald Reagan took office, Manhattan was in ruins. But true art has never come from comfort, and it was precisely those dire circumstances that inspired artists like Jim Jarmusch, Lizzy Borden, and Amos Poe to produce some of their best works. Taking their cues from punk rock and new wave music, these young maverick filmmakers confronted viewers with a stark reality that stood in powerful contrast to the escapist product being churned out by Hollywood.
Oddballs dancing, leering at camera, guy shaving a nontraditional part of his body and man ripping his own throat out, woman stabbing herself to death.
Death Valley '69 was the first music video by Sonic Youth. The video features the majority of the band in various states of bloody dismemberment interlaced with live footage of the band.
Loosely based on an infamous 1984 Long Island murder case involving Satan-worshiping, teenage drug freaks (Knights of the Black Circle), David Wojnarowicz and Tommy Turner’s Where Evil Dwells is a low-budget D.I.Y. movie that walks the jagged lines between splatter flick, experimental film and transgressive art. The original footage was destroyed in a fire and the only footage that survived is this 28 minute preview that was put together for the Downtown New York Film Festival in 1985.
A woman takes each of her boyfriends - one poor and one rich- for a drive in her new car. Each argues with her and insists on taking the wheel. She beats one of them up, before crashing into a group of youths and, finally, a wall.
In the unsettling, absurdist SIMONLAND, a grotesque, televangelist-style demagogue leads his studio audience and isolated viewers through a psychotic game of Simon Says with twisted results.