George Kuchar received his only funding grant for this film ($20,000 from the NEA), and so, freed from the usual financial restraints, he was determined to have a good time and make a “spectacle” with “tons of color” and dazzling superimpositions. A big, colorful tapestry about rumors that are in all of the previous UFO movies. A loose story line that weaves in and out of the UFO phenomenon.
Blend of documentary and domestic melodrama featuring a series of sexually charged vignettes inspired by a piece of toilet graffiti.
Sarah Lou Phillips
An eccentric and alcoholic widow hosts a motley assortment of travelers (four men, three women and one gorilla) who arrive one eventful night to get out of a torrential rainstorm.
Angie
"One of Kuchar’s few feature-length works is this ribald pastiche to postwar Hollywood melodrama, that period when the studios were trying very hard to be adult. The intricate, overheated plot involves a nurse trapped in an unhappy marriage who escapes the big city in search of greener pastures in Blessed Prairie, Oklahoma. Swerving from earnest homage to dark satire, Kuchar simultaneously imitates and savages the legacy of Sirk, Preminger and Minnelli that inspired him, gleefully intertwining the suggestive and the scatological, while also pointing towards the later postmodern parodies of Cindy Sherman. The Devil’s Cleavage is also a rich time capsule of 1970s San Francisco, replete with cameos from Curt McDowell and Art Spiegelman." —hcl.harvard.edu
A series of vignettes illustrating sexual fantasies.
