THE MASTURBATING GUNMAN (a.k.a. Masked Avenger Versus Ultra-Villain In The Lair Of The Naked Bikini) **** Australia 1997 Dir: Mark Savage. 90 mins
With film, you can enter a world. Lose yourself in the characters, the situations, the conflict, the action, and the adventure. In the case of Writer-Director Mark Savage’s 1997 ridiculously Indie film The Masturbating Gunman (1997), you just go what am I watching but it all fits. Not a horror film or for some a horror film, the picture is also known by its less provocative title of Masked Avenger Versus Ultra-Villain In The Lair Of The Naked Bikini, this is cult fifth at its finest and at times its most brutally violent. I mention this as a warning so if you think moral-bending work like Ilsa: She Wolf Of The SS (1975), Night Of The Bloody Apes (1972) even Venus In Furs (1969) is in your alley of viewing then you should screen this. It’s odd, it’s outrageous, it’s brutal yet you will return to it again with a sense of ‘That’s interesting’ and then feel you need a shower.
The film features a cast of family, friends, and livestock Limpy the Goat. Australian Mark Savage gives you a tale that says it is ‘based on a true story’ – of extreme violence, wanking, nuns, and olfactory senses.
I kid you not about the story as you have the Masked Avenger or Robin van Hootin (Robin Brennan) is a hero. He wears an overall and a zipper black leather bondage mask. He battles and literally kills his evildoers using martial arts, double-blasting pistols like in John Woo’s Hong Kong Cinema masterwork Hard Boiled (1992) and handsaws. His hands are so powerful they can go into an exposed abdomen which in fact it does in one moment of madness. He is an unstoppable force that puts Harry Callahan to shame except for one thing. All super people have their version of Kryptonite, and the Masked Avengers is the sight of a woman. No matter what the situation at the sight of a female our intrepid hero must, to put it politely, gratify himself. Kryptonite was a rock, well this is rocks off. The Masked Avenger keeps a collection of women’s underwear on the line which to put it again politely he uses his olfactory organs to guess their identities and clothes they wore.
The nemesis of the film is megalomaniac Helmut Gunta (Peter Beitans) who rails against modern culture. He dreams of a child in the world who will be the next messiah. The Messiah will cure the world of its ‘polluted by beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking, party-loving, tabloid-reading degenerates’. For his immaculate conception, Helmut Gunta needs a virgin, so he dispatches his ski masked army of men to find him one. Looking oddly like the Henchman of the Penguin in the Batman TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward, these dastardly people find a Nun who is Sister Mary van Hootin (Nene Powell) who is also the sister of you guessed it, Robin, alias the Masturbating Gunman. The Masked Avenger steals money to fund his sister’s orphanage. The picture becomes a series of epic crazy battles of The Masked Avenger tracking down his sister. Gun battle with an intestine lasso literally tossed in to disarm an evildoer. Of course, there are the gratification moments as inevitable women show up prompting a reaction that must happen in all its outrageous tendency. Determined to track down his sister, our hero must learn to control his self-abusing hero inside himself and rise to the occasion.
The Final battle is when Helmut Gunta has a plan to stop The Masked Avenger from getting in the way by organizing a gang of strippers to keep him pre-occupied until Sister Mary is pregnant.
The Masturbating Gunman is not for all considering the brutality of some of the moments. A hero who grabs guns with intestines then pounds guys with their torn-out hearts then stops and gratifies himself at the sight of a female. The film is cheaply made, the colors are washed, the sets are just sets even the outdoor ones look like beloved Ed Wood put them together. The women leer and prune themselves outrageously while disrobing causing trouble with our hero. Dialogue is so deadpan in places yet it fits everything that is going on or about to happen. Total twisted fun.
The Masturbating Gunman (1997) is right up there with Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) as something you see to call yourself cool. I don’t do that, but I do occasionally enjoy good trash cinema “It’s so far out its in” as the saying goes. Enjoy at your own peril. ‘It’s Diabolical’.
Review by Terry Sherwood