Andy Warhol's final factory film production caused quite a hoo-hah when released in the UK back in the seventies, with the tabloid press running shock-horror stories about its content, especially the scene where the baby is thrown from the tower block window. Yet Bad is more than an exercise in bad taste - although it was clearly influenced by the work of John Waters - it's rather an anatomy of the social and ethical consciousness which Capitalist society creates in its citizens.
Hazel (a stupendous performance from Carroll Baker) is a middle-aged woman with a daughter-in-law on welfare who runs her own business: she gives electrolysis treatment as well as running a hit firm from her kitchen! What makes the film's portrait of Hazel and her milieu so extraordinary is that her money-making schemes are shown to be perfectly ordinary, reasonable and even morally equivalent; there's little difference between removing someone's unwanted body hair and removing a person who irritates or annoys them from their life. The most striking aspect of Hazel's routine of hit jobs - effected mostly by dumb young women, task-orientated as the Protestant work ethic has trained them to be - is that so many of the hits involve parents disposing of their unwanted offspring because there's something wrong with them, they get in the way of their comfortable lifestyle. The film shows the final product of late Capitalism's insistence on the consumer's right to their own lifestyle just as they want it once they've fulfilled their task of being a productive, money-earning citizens.
The people in Bad are stupid, petty, vindictive and, when they can get away with it, lazy. This form of consciousness is epitomised by Perry King's L.T., a wandering hunk who Hazel (who would prefer to employ women) promises a hit job. L.T. lolls around Hazel's house, masturbating over porn mags, laughing over the cruelties of daily life, arguing with Hazel and generally just waiting for someone to give him something to do; he's eye-candy but seemingly completely without any volition to create a life of his own. Yet at the moment of crux, when he is called upon to kill an autistic child whose mother wants to share more quality time with its father, L.T. refuses the job, his humanity somehow re-asserting itself. Elsewhere in the film, Hazel's mentally challenged daughter-in-law has mouthed protests against the immorality - but her dumb Cassandra act and L.T.'s sudden sense of revulsion against the prevailing nihilism are merely jerks of a dead human spirit, barely registering as more significant on the level of narrative-importance than someone committing an act of pyromania at a cinema, attacking a neighbour or getting some hair removed from your back.
Bad underplays its nihilistic scenes - the evils portrayed are banal and quotidian. It's horrifying portrait of a humanity reduced to spite, casual violence and idiot babbling is all the more shocking for it feeling, as a filmed portrait of daily life, more accurate a depiction of how people are than most Hollywood films ever achieve. It also feels very now - the people who populate Bad have multiplied throughout the Western world. Andy Warhol's final film makes you wish that more crazed, sarcastic, bitchy, ironic millionaire artists would plough their money into making films of their vision...
Hazel (a stupendous performance from Carroll Baker) is a middle-aged woman with a daughter-in-law on welfare who runs her own business: she gives electrolysis treatment as well as running a hit firm from her kitchen! What makes the film's portrait of Hazel and her milieu so extraordinary is that her money-making schemes are shown to be perfectly ordinary, reasonable and even morally equivalent; there's little difference between removing someone's unwanted body hair and removing a person who irritates or annoys them from their life. The most striking aspect of Hazel's routine of hit jobs - effected mostly by dumb young women, task-orientated as the Protestant work ethic has trained them to be - is that so many of the hits involve parents disposing of their unwanted offspring because there's something wrong with them, they get in the way of their comfortable lifestyle. The film shows the final product of late Capitalism's insistence on the consumer's right to their own lifestyle just as they want it once they've fulfilled their task of being a productive, money-earning citizens.
The people in Bad are stupid, petty, vindictive and, when they can get away with it, lazy. This form of consciousness is epitomised by Perry King's L.T., a wandering hunk who Hazel (who would prefer to employ women) promises a hit job. L.T. lolls around Hazel's house, masturbating over porn mags, laughing over the cruelties of daily life, arguing with Hazel and generally just waiting for someone to give him something to do; he's eye-candy but seemingly completely without any volition to create a life of his own. Yet at the moment of crux, when he is called upon to kill an autistic child whose mother wants to share more quality time with its father, L.T. refuses the job, his humanity somehow re-asserting itself. Elsewhere in the film, Hazel's mentally challenged daughter-in-law has mouthed protests against the immorality - but her dumb Cassandra act and L.T.'s sudden sense of revulsion against the prevailing nihilism are merely jerks of a dead human spirit, barely registering as more significant on the level of narrative-importance than someone committing an act of pyromania at a cinema, attacking a neighbour or getting some hair removed from your back.
Bad underplays its nihilistic scenes - the evils portrayed are banal and quotidian. It's horrifying portrait of a humanity reduced to spite, casual violence and idiot babbling is all the more shocking for it feeling, as a filmed portrait of daily life, more accurate a depiction of how people are than most Hollywood films ever achieve. It also feels very now - the people who populate Bad have multiplied throughout the Western world. Andy Warhol's final film makes you wish that more crazed, sarcastic, bitchy, ironic millionaire artists would plough their money into making films of their vision...