The shot-on-video punk scene relic Twisted Issues is difficult to categorize with a solid, workable genre definition. The project started as a no-budget documentary about the local punk scene in Gainesville, Florida, and scraps of that initial idea make it to the screen in-tact, detectable in lengthy scenes of D.I.Y. punk showcases in dive bars & living rooms and in montages of kids lazily pushing their skateboards down endless suburban pavement. However, sometime during production, someone decided to actually make money off of this endeavor, and the project deviated into the most viable option for low-budget, low-talent backyard filmmakers to earn a spot on video store shelves: it became a horror film. One of the skateboarding slackers became a monstrous horror icon who could hunt & kill his buddies in standalone vignettes, fleshing out the monotonous punk-show footage with the kinds of goof-off gore gags that could later be strung together in the edit to tell a somewhat linear story. It’s in that post-production edit where director Charles Pinion mutated the project a second time into something much stranger and less definable than either its documentary or creature feature versions could’ve achieved on their own. He transformed it into an oddly surreal piece of outsider art, constantly teetering between happenstantial genius and total incoherence.

True to its initial pitch, a large portion of Twisted Issues illustrates songs from local punk acts like The Smegmas, Hellwitch, and Mutley Chix with ironic news footage clips, unrelated skateboarding footage, and staged acts of violence that match the images suggested by their lyrics. The non-music video portions of the film follow one skateboarder in particular, who’s murdered in a hit & run by car-driving bullies straight out of The Toxic Avenger, then resurrected by a Dr. Frankenstein-style mad scientist to avenge his own death. The undead skater picks up a sword, hides his disfigured face behind a fencing mask, and screws his foot to a wheel-less skateboard that gives him a classic Frankenstein limp. Once loose on the streets of Gainesville, he kills his former bullies one at a time in standalone scenes that could be assembled in any order of Charles Pinion’s choosing without affecting “the plot.” The most curious decision Pinion makes, then, is including himself onscreen as a godlike figure who watches all of this gory violence and punk scene tomfoolery on his living room television. His character is clearly part of the scene, as he sometimes shares dead-eyed interactions with buddies who he later watches get killed on the TV as if he were tuning into late-night cable creature features or the local news. He’s also clearly in control of the film’s reality in some loosely defined way, as if everything we’re watching is only happening because he’s observing it through the screen. Is Pinion the punk rock Schrödinger? If a skater falls off his board and no one’s around to watch it, did he really scrape his knee? Could God videotape a gore gag so gnarly that even He couldn’t stomach it? The omniscient television set is the only element of the film’s narrative that can’t be fully defined or understood and, thus, it’s the one that elevates the picture from cute to compelling.

Twisted Issues grinds its metaphorical skateboard straight down the border between sloppily incoherent slacker art and sublimely surreal video art. Given the means and circumstances of its production, that TV-static-fuzzed incoherence was likely the only honest way for these kids to make movies, considering that every single suburban experience in that era was mediated through beer cans & TV screens. The filmmaking is, to put it kindly, unrefined. Every dialogue exchange is dragged out by awkward pauses that double their length. Each vignette is harshly separated by a cut-to-black transition. When it comes time for an original score to fill in the gaps between local punk acts, sequences are set to the most pained, aimless guitar solos to ever assault the human ear. The undead skateboarder’s accoutrements and the weapons used to fight back against him are all props that appear to have been collected from the local nerdy Sword Guy’s bedroom (credited to Hawk, who plays a nerdy Sword Guy mystic in-film to maintain verisimilitude). The whole thing is very obviously a document of friends goofing around on the weekends between punk gigs & service industry jobs, which in a roundabout way fulfills its initial mission. The way Pinion pieces everything together through the all-seeing eye of his bedroom TV set is impressively surreal, though, and it abstracts the entire picture into something that can’t be outright dismissed as home movies of local punk mischief. He mixes his friends’ goof-off hangouts with war atrocity footage recorded off TV news broadcasts. He matches local bands’ lyrics to scripted scenes of violence to the point of verging on making an SOV movie musical. Most significantly, he likens the act of shooting, editing, and watching all of this footage to a kind of godlike omnipotence that underlines the plasticity of reality in all media. He made art out of scraps.

-Brandon Ledet