John Waters said that this hourlong documentary was one of his three favorite films of 1993. Actress/talkshow host Ricki Lake, who saw the film with him, wasn't as glowing in her praise. Waters told the San Francisco Chronicle that Lake said, "I wish I never knew this person had lived. Thank you for a horrible evening!"
Now's your chance to judge, as director Todd Phillips' movie about the least-inhibited performer ever to grace (if that's the word) a stage comes to Johns Hopkins University for a limited run. It's showing on a double bill with Waters' landmark Pink Flamingos. And that's a good mating, when you consider that Divine's character in Pink Flamingos was supposed to be the filthiest person alive, while GG Allin literally was.
And how filthy is that? Well, let's just say that the late John Wayne Gacy found the late Allin's bodily aroma physically disgusting. (This is from a guy who had 33 corpses in his basement, remember.) Of course, you tend to be a little niffy if your stage act consists, in part, of taking a dump, then rubbing your feces all over your body, not to mention flinging said waste material at your audience and eating anything that was left over. Or to quote Waters again, Allin was the guy who "came out on stage, beat up the audience, ate shit and was nude."
Okay, so we're not exactly talking about Noel Coward here, but if you can suspend any judgment and put off eating dinner until after the movie (like maybe three days after), you may find yourself, if not enjoying, at least being fascinated by Todd Phillips' weirdly affectionate piece of work, which copped the Hunter S. Thompson Award for Documentary Filmmaking in 1993.
Allin, who put together a 15-year career as a performer (singer is not the right word), hailed from the small town of Concord, Vermont, where he was evidently an outsider from the very beginning. He sometimes wore girls' clothes to high school and generally behaved in other ways calculated not to result in winning Most Likely to Succeed balloting for the yearbook. But in a way, Allin was thoroughly successful, because he seems to have genuinely hated himself, the world, and everyone in it, and he successfully projected and vented that hate for a substantial period of time before snuffing himself with a mix of heroin and alcohol in July of last year.
In front of the camera, Allin, while obviously not stupid, seems unable to explain how he got this way, yet he's unerringly able to pinpoint the source of his appeal to his very specialized fandom. GG is the kind of guy who will do anything onstage. Rock-and-roll performers have long postured at being outlaws, but few of them have the balls (or inclination) to constantly get busted for provoking riots. Allin was no musician, but he was a genuine outlaw (he violated parole in Michigan to come to New York City and make this movie), and that was a large part of his attraction to his overwhelmingly male and, shall we say, underachieving audience.
If Phillips has chated anywhere in telling his tale, it's with that audience. He presents a guy named Unk, filmed on a New York rooftop, as the typical Allin fan. But as is clear from Phillips' concert footage, Allin's fans were a drunkenly aggressive lot who went to his shows looking for a fight. Unk, however, is amusing and ironic, saying that what Allin does is funny, "as long as it's not comin' down on me."
You may think it's funny too. Or simply disgusting. Whatever you feel when you see Hated, you definitely won't feel neutral.