What do you get when you mix a blended-up cartoon baby, a cocktail of bodily fluids and gore that makes “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” look like “Bambi”? Burning Paradise Video has the answer.
“Satan’s Drive-In” is a video mixtape distributed by Burning Paradise of underground footage from around the world, and the only way to describe it is “f***ed up.”
The video starts with a cartoon of a man shooting a baby in the head and then eating it, moves on to live video of a man peeing in a woman’s mouth until she vomits, and mixes in some actual war footage of people being killed from a gunship — a full hour and a half of this stuff.
Burning Paradise Owner Kurly Tlapoyawa said the video was assembled by Burning Paradise employee Brian Unfried, following “Forbidden Transmission,” a tamer mixtape show he used to have on public-access television.
He said he recommended a few scenes to Unfried, and the footage used in the movie came from underground independent films from all over the world.
“People think they’ve seen weird shit, you know, until they see the stuff we’ve got,” Tlapoyawa said. “And then they realize that everything they’ve seen up to that point is nonsense.”
The first question that comes to mind while watching this (if you can even sit through it) is “why?” Why would Burning Paradise want to distribute this?
“It’s good to kind of just stick your d*** in people’s eyes every once in a while,” Tlapoyawa said. “Like, ‘OK, you’re used to all this safe, saccharine bullshit that Hollywood’s spoon-feeding you. Now, here’s something different.’ And just throw it in their face.”
And that’s not all: Tlapoyawa claims that some people actually like this stuff.
“We’re not forcing people to watch it,” he said. “But if people want to check it out, they usually come back asking for more. Which is awesome, because you turned people on to new, interesting things.”
The movie contains a disclaimer that it’s for adults only. Tlapoyawa said that while the movie is definitely meant for adults, the concept of what’s appropriate is relative.
“That movie, ‘Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,’ what’s that movie rated? (PG-13.) There’s a scene where the guy’s like, fingering her, and it’s all being recorded,” he said. “And it’s played out in the movie like a tender moment. I’m like, ‘I don’t want my f***ing kids watching this shit!’ Jesus Christ!”
No one has the right to decide what anyone else watches, Tlapoyawa said.
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“Who is anybody to say what has any merit? What has artistic, cultural value to somebody down the street might not mean anything to me. It might be garbage to me. Twilight to me has no artistic or cultural merit. But who am I to tell them what they can or can’t watch?”
The artistic merit in “Satan’s Drive-In” is easily established, Tlapoyawa said.
“With the mixtapes, you think of the filmmaker as a DJ,” he said. “And he’s pulling stuff from all over and remixing and adding his own flavor to it, and editing. Definitely it has artistic merit to it because it’s a creative process. And that’s the truest definition of art, right? It comes from the heart.”
Tlapoyawa said “Satan’s Drive-In” also proves its merit by showing people a side of filmmaking that they’re usually not exposed to.
“There’s truly underground stuff. Really independent stuff. Not like Fox Searchlight or MTV films, which are faux-independent studios, but that are actually backed by major corporations,” he said. “There’s real, underground, gnarly shit out there, and most people don’t know it exists.”
Until they step into Burning Paradise.
