Someone needs to really take the time to write a huge book about the underground in America from around the 60s up through the mid-90s.  Seriously, otherwise it's unlikely stuff like this will reach the audience it needs to, or maybe that's how it should be.  The fact is, the American underground is probably the most under appreciated underground in the whole fucking world.  Does anyone out there know who Harry Smith is?  No, then how about Destroy All Monsters?  No, you fucking fake, not the Godzilla movie.  Yeah, cool you know that, but we're talking about something else now.  Sheesh.  The fact is, capitalism has done one really bad thing to America, it's turned the majority of our popular culture into a sweltering pool of psychotropic drugs we take to feel better about the fact we listen to R & B mixed with Cheetos run through intestines infested with IBS.  What the fuck is he on about?  We don't pay attention enough to creativity, we only pay attention to what what's advertised.  We feel more comfortable wearing the recent winning team cap and eating pizza, watching "sports" as we discuss the next Seth Rogen film like it's going to be good.  See, he's funny, he's in "funny" movies so we need to watch that.  We're fucking robotconsumerdroids.  Get it?  Go out and do something for once, take the time to join in creation you bastards.

Had to get that out.  So what is this about?  Destroy All Monsters was, in fact, an art collective from out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, formed back in the early 1970s.  In addition to cut-up, collage fanzines and music, they also engaged in film, and this DVD, Grow Live Monsters, pretty much sums up everything they're about.  The DVD contains early films of the collective, a film they used for live performances, outtakes from the filming of Grow Live Monsters with some concert footage, a selection from a 3-hour performance in Seattle, and a slide show of band photographs and film production stills.  Really, if you're a fan of these guys or want to learn about them, this is an excellent release.  Great to see this on a professional DVD, with an awesome, purposeful insert featuring an highly informative (with stepping stones into other avenues) interview with one of the collective's founders, Cary Loren.

That being said, if you read a bit about these guys online, you should have an idea of what to expect.  This stuff is upper-level weirdness.  Cut-up montages of people in crab costumes, weird shots of people with fake blood all over them intermingled with snips from old, forgotten sci-fi movies, Grow Live Monsters takes a clue from its title and pulls together all of the cheesy culture we remember from the 60s and 70s and throws it together in a mess of trash.  The good kind of trash, stuff that throws George Méliès-styled fantasy with Robot Monster and wraps it up in a thoroughly read copy of Shock Suspenstories.  Plus, they've thrown their music over it, so noise/experimental fans have something else to take in.  But there's nothing to grasp here, simply sit back and take in what it has to offer because if you try to search for any semblance of plot you can forget it.  This is about creation, about doing something for the hell of it and not giving a shit what it turns out to be or where it goes.  The back quote pretty much sums it up when it says "We were designed to be a 'fuck you' to the prevailing popular culture."  Grow Live Monsters tears down everything you could imagine and builds up a fortress of all of us that want to keep it weird, and, well, creative.  These guys embody everything that made the underground great, and today we could learn a lot from it.  Awesome cutting, collaging, and a bite of heavy raw cheese, this is an awesome DVD for the art film fan, and we don't mean that in the pretentious kind of way.

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Written by Arkus

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