The bill of fare in "Futz" includes: zoophilia (the hero Futz, in carnal love with his pig, Amanda), homosexuality, transvestitism, troilism I (man, woman, pig), troilism II (two men and a repugnantly porcine girl, naked, gamboling in the mud), coprophelia (the slaughtering of Amanda right before your eyes, the villagers smearing themselves and one another with, and wallowing in, the pig's gore), pyromania, masturbation, fetishism, varieties of sadism, sex, murder, incest and sacrilege (an idiot and his sexually doting mother compared to Christ and the Virgin Mary), voyeurism, exhibitionism (every kind of gratuitous nudity, and particularly a shapeless bodied and sick faced Sally Kirkland riding naked on a pig - this scene, like several others, not integrated into the plot, just dragged in for the sheer beauty of it) and various forms of mass copulation. The amazing thing is that out of this pleasant assortment of of bestialities, the scenarists, Joseph Stefano and Rochelle Owens, and the director, Tom O'Horgan, have not been able to create anything more than totally asexual boredom.
Why? Because neither Miss Owens (on whose dreary play this drearier film is based) nor Tom O'Horgan (who having misdirected the play, mis-misdirected the film) has an ounce of genuine feeling. Miss Owens is a primitive: she writes "poetic" banalities ("lust for animals is like a run in spring rain"), illiterate English ("How can well I go describing on?"), cute, pseudo-folksy patois ("Flahfy Amanda ya faymale!"), and flights of fancy that plummet into bathos ("his kneecaps high like the two hemispheres"). But there is worse.
Though the hog-hugger may not be the ideal image of the nonconformist martyr of a conformist society's intolerance (Futz is killed by the villagers), we could accept him as such if only his author could love him. But she laughs at him, patronizes him, even belittles him as a coward; under pressure , he denies his love for Amanda. And Miss Owens and O'Horgan are equally craven. They never come near showing us Futz amorously embracing his sow; so we get the irony of a film that postures as a gallantly shocking provocation of the establishment actually copping out into mere off-screen grunts. Furthermore, in their hatred of "normal" society, Miss Owens and O'Horgan have made the villagers themselves so flagrantly bestial that it is hard to conceive of them not condoning and joining in the Futzian fun.
O'Horgan, however, is no naïf, or fauz-naif, like Miss Owens; he is an effete, campy, fey sophisticant manque, who coats her subliteracy with layer upon layer of window-dresser's style. he uses, with meretricious indiscriminateness, every technical device - from negative exposure to solarization, from superimposing monochrome gelatins of two different colors to shooting the film both as a filmed play and as a "realistic" film, and continually shuttling between the two modes. There is grotesque distortion, elaborate foolery with the depth of focus, shifting from color to monochrome; there is rapid cutting almost with single-frame shots; there is Futzing around with the soundtrack (misplaced oinks) and sets (in a seemingly authentic countryside, a paper moon); there is slow and accelerated motion, and much zooming out from a narrator in close-up to action in longshot. O'Horgan, who also wrote the abominable pseudo-folk-music score, will dwell on one repeated bar more maniacally than Carl Orff; or he will indulge in cheap parody, as when the words "Nobody knows and the pig won't tell" are set to Tchaikovsky's "None but the lonely heart" - just as in the midst of Dogpatch shenanigans we get a visual parody of Michelangelo's Pieta or the Creation of Adam.
The effect of all this is to kill any erotic involvement we might feel, while not substituting for it anything more intellectually stimulating than gimmickry. The mind is drawn away from Miss Owens's shallowness only to hurtle into the picturesque abyss of O'Horgan vacuity. Needless to say, there is no such thing as consistency of plot, character. or anything else; the village idiot will speak of Mozart and Shiva, and the un-tutored Futz will invoke Zeus. It is this adulterous hodgepodge of everything (to use Corbiere's phrase) that makes the film an esthetic obscenity as well as an eloquent document of the sickness of its makers.
But Clive Barnes found that "Miss Owen's play presumably has a moral purpose." Personally, I don't know what a presumable moral purpose is; the only possible morals I can derive from the movie "Futz" are that society won't buy a poke in a pig, and that you cannot make a slick farce from a sow's rear.
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