THE SECOND COMING VOLUME 1

Stars: Michael Tierney, Richard Wolstencroft, Gene Gregoritis, Kim Fowley, Kristen Condon, Boyd Rice, Shannon Goad, Larry Wessel, Tora Wessel, Giddle Partridge, Brianna Garcia and Pete Doherty.
Writer/director: Richard Wolstencroft.

Screening at Sydney’s A Night of Horror/Fantastic Planet Film Festival; visit the official website for details.

Rating: 3.5/5

The urge to apply a conventional critical eye to The Second Coming Volume 1 is damn near overwhelming; your critic (who has viewed it twice) regularly muttered to himself, “this needs tightening” and “should’ve cut that out” and “what the hell just happened?” But underground icon Richard Wolstencroft’s ‘vision’ compellingly demands that you accept it on its own terms, in its own voice and at its own pace. Whether you find it an incoherent, self-indulgent mess (as it occasionally seems) or an auteur’s bold, deeply personal interpretation of the classic art that inspires him (which it certainly is), there is no denying that Wolstencroft has crafted a vast, ambitious, truly independent piece of free-spirited cinema.

The Melbourne-based director’s muse is poet William Butler Yeats, whose post-World War 1 poem The Second Coming has been embraced as a mystical musing on mankind’s demise. Wolstencroft utilises the poem’s opening lines to chapter-title his own apocalyptic narrative and arrange his mosaic of key players. ‘Part I: Turning and turning in the widening gyre’ introduces Michael (Michael Tierney), who, having wandered his personal desert and  sought heavenly guidance, unwraps his Baphomet idol and re-engages with his favourite book, Aleister Crowley’s 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings, before heading for the red-light districts of Thailand; ‘Part II: The falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ is set largely in Los Angeles, where hot-tempered author Gene (Gene Gregoritis) is pitching a Charles Manson project, while becoming quietly consumed with the notion that the cult leader’s vision for global mass-murder is nigh; and, ‘Part III: The blood dimmed tide is loosed & everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned’, which relocates the production to London and invokes the unsettled spirit of Marc Bolan as it peaks inside the drug-fuelled existence of dark spiritualist, Jerome (Jerome Alexander; pictured, above). The director casts himself as Owen O’Hearn, a shadowy facilitator-of-sorts, bringing together all the disparate personalities in service of the end-of-days prophecy.

In addition to Yeats, Wolstencroft has cited American iconoclast Kenneth Anger as a key influence. The underground filmmaking legend’s predilection for frank depictions of sexuality in his landmark shorts is echoed in Wolstencroft’s casting of such adult industry figureheads as longtime collaborator Tierney (aka, retired X-rated woodsman ‘Joe Blow”) and William Margold, legendary 70’s performer and porn industry historian (he thematically binds the sex-and-violence inherent to the premise when he screens a clip from Teenage Cruisers, a 1977 x-rated pic featuring an alleged Manson disciple). Also echoing Anger’s oeuvre is Wolstencroft’s use of occult imagery, a recurring motif in many of Anger’s most revered works. The use of a vast bibliography of reference works in the end credits is a nod to Pier Paolo Pasolini, who did the same in Salo.

Despite boasting of sequences shot on four continents, The Second Coming Volume 1 is a guerrilla effort that was clearly realised on a shoestring budget with a ‘one take’ guiding principle. One can assume from the footage taken in restaurants, airports, hotel lobbies and, quite unexpectedly, the UCLA campus and Manson’s infamous compound Spahn Ranch, were accessed sans permission; Wolstencroft takes a co-writing credit with ‘The Cast’, mostly non-actors forging ahead with improvised dialogue (Gregoritis gamely unravels ‘forgitton’ back into ‘forgiven’ and ‘forgotten’ in one memorable fluff); on more than one occasion, shots are sourced through a dirty lens. But the rough edges, unstructured plotting and no-holds-barred staging Wolstencroft captures bristles with a beat poet/jazz musician energy that services his aesthetic genuinely.  

There’s no denying the film does occasionally run off the rails in spectacular fashion, most notably when a confluence of eccentrics meet up in a flouro-tinged LA living room. Along with the increasingly unhinged Gregoritis, Wolstencroft unleashes such anti-establishment giants as the late Kim Fowley (ex-manager of girl punk group The Runaways and infamous LA debaucher) and bombshell Giddle Partridge, reimagining 80’s alt-scene great (and Gregoritis’ real-life ex), Lydia Lunch; as the improv restraints crumble, Fowley starts ranting straight to camera as his scene partners try to be heard off-screen. Similarly abstract (but, it must be said, very beguiling) are the free-style lyrics of Brit pop bad-boy Pete Doherty, who oddly materialises late in the third act.

Wisdom dictates that a Volume 2 shouldn’t be necessary. Even at 85 minutes, a great deal of footage could have been excised, especially a lot of scenes of people walking. One understands Wolstencroft’s desire to honour Yeats with an epic modern dissection of the Irish wordsmith’s great poem, but a single film clocking in at two hours (and providing the barely-glimpsed Kristen Condon time to expand on her role) may have sufficed.

What Wolstencroft and his dedicated team have produced is a flawed but fascinating low-budget genre work with high-brow ambitions; a deconstructed reworking of vital existential themes that a great artist explored a century ago and whose words can clearly still inspire today.

READ the 2014 SCREEN-SPACE interview with Richard Wolstencroft here.
READ the 2013 SCREEN-SPACE interview with Michael Tierney here.
READ the 2015 SCREEN-SPACE interview with Kristen Condon here.