Imagine if “Frankenstein” wasn’t made by Guillermo del Toro for Netflix with a $120 million budget but by a feral 19-year-old on a shoestring budget for a B-movie schlock house.
That’ll get you close to the vibe of “Born of the Wind,” a 1962 film by Mike Kuchar that’s playing at Anthology Film Archives on Monday, capping a tribute series to two of New York’s most joyously bizarre underground icons: Mike and his brother George Kuchar, twins from the Bronx whose no-budget films of camp, melodrama and excess helped define (and defile) the city’s 1960s avant-garde art and cinema scene.
In the 24-minute flick, a mad scientist in garish clown makeup steals a museum mummy and brings her to life, only to fall head-over-heels for his creation. The pair sashay and carouse through homemade sets and improved special effects, oozing camp and longing. Stop-motion bats flit through castle halls while the music swells, and every absurd moment feels like a collision of gothic pulp and homemade spectacle.
At a time when underground filmmakers including Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger were making formalist experiments — like movies of people sleeping or splotches of abstract color — the Kuchars’ early films feel like fast-fowarding into a Pee-Wee’s funhouse future. The pair went on to make movies for decades more.
Still from Mike Kuchar's 'Born of the Wind'
Running from Dec. 13 through 15, Anthology’s mini retrospective on the Kuchars coincides with the reissue of the brothers’ long out-of-print memoir, “Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool,” newly republished by Inpatient Press. The screenings feature rarely seen 16mm prints, recent digital videos by Mike, and a seasonal program of George’s irreverent Christmas videos.
Prepare yourself for an onslaught of garish Kodachrome dreamscapes, kitchen-sink dramas and pulpy plots featuring android rebellions, broken hearts and torrid affairs — all staged in living room sets or on Bronx fire escapes.
“You can’t get more local than George and Mike,” said curator Andrew Lampert, who organized the series with Anthology. “And you also can’t get more Bronx.”
The Kuchars grew up off Mosholu Parkway, Lampert said, the sons of a truck driver and a stay-at-home mother. Their early education came from double-feature afternoons watching Hollywood genre flicks in Bronx movie palaces, absorbing special effects and camera moves.
At age 12, they were jointly gifted an 8mm movie camera and began staging homemade Hollywood parodies starring their family members and high school friends.
In an interview for the YouTube channel mediafunhouse, Mike Kuchar said the brothers’ early pictures had no scripts.
“It was organic, actually [the film shoots] were parties,” he said. “Instead of getting together to drink and dance and play records as youngsters would do … we were going to make a movie. It was going to be a movie party.”
The movies they made at the first party would be screened at the next one, Mike explained.
The brothers began by making outrageous parodies of then-popular films, with their own Kuchar spin. “Things that were totally camp before the word ‘camp’ was in use,” Lampert said. “Just total gut-bucket melodrama.”
At first, their early shorts like “I Was a Teenage Rumpot” and “Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof” had an unlikely audience. The teenage brothers took their work to a home-movie society where doctors and dentists gathered to show off their vacations to Rome and Athens.
“George and Mike showed up with their films and were kicked out,” Lampert said. “It was just unbelievable that these kids would show up with such smut. And that’s what led them to become the darlings of the underground.”
The Kuchars eventually connected with artists and actors who introduced them around town, and after a screening at Ken Jacobs’ downtown loft, they became overnight sensations.
“The sophisticated beatniks and outré people of the scene were exposed to their works and [Anthology cofounder] Jonas Mekas, who was then one of the film critics of the Village Voice, declared their arrival,” Lampert said.
By the late 1960s, the two brothers struck out on their own. George’s breakout film, “Hold Me While I’m Naked,” remains his most widely known work: an autobiographical meta text about a director (played by George) struggling to make movies and connect with people. Mike’s “Sins of the Fleshapoids” is a candy-colored sci-fi tale about sentient robots in love.
By 1972, the pair were sufficiently established that George Kuchar was a guest on WNYC’s Arts Forum, where he and guest host P. Adams Sitney spent an hour discussing “Thundercrack!” — a cult comedy horror film George wrote featuring hardcore sex scenes.
George eventually moved to San Francisco, where he taught filmmaking for decades and pioneered diaristic home video projects. He died in 2011. Mike remained in the Bronx into the 2000s before relocating to the Bay Area, and is still making movies. The Anthology program has his 2023 video “The Voice in the Man” as part of the lineup.
The Kuchars’ offbeat sensibility is also preserved in “Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool,” which they self-published in 1997. “It has the best translation of their sensibility to paper I could possibly imagine,” Lampert said. The reissue, with a foreword from longtime fan John Waters, includes both brothers’ alternating chapters: part autobiography, part how-to manual for living weird and making art.
Lampert stumbled upon a copy at the Upper West Side’s Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in the 1990s. He called it “riotously funny.” But he also said, in tribute to the truest Kuchar spirit, “It felt like a user manual for how to break free from convention in filmmaking and in life.”
