GholamSlayer There are bad movies, and there are BAD movies. After 70 agonizing minutes, I realized this is genuinely in the running for worst movie I've ever seen. I can't think of a single redeeming feature, just the bad ones, from the wooden acting, truly unimpressive cinematography and staging, (I'd complain about the editing, but there is none), etc. Best to just read the book and watch the Kubrick movie.

Dylan Ramsay "Vinyl" was the 1965 experimental film by, none other than, Andy Warhol himself. This is a crude adaptation of the classic Anthony Burgess novel "A Clockwork Orange". I wasn't expecting a groundbreaking performance when I put the movie on to watch, as you'd probably know if you've seen such classic Warhol films as "Poor Little Rich Girl" and especially "Sleep". But Warhol films can be fun if you have a lot of patience, as I had very little to begin with (I lasted about 30 minutes before I started getting antsy for the film to end). I won't give too much of the plot away but I can tell you that it has it's moments, such as the name-calling, the candle wax being poured on the protagonist's chest, and the awful acting (or improv apparently).In short I believe any Warhol fan would like this film. My advice to the people is give it a shot if your a movie lover, just to say you watched it (or tried to), but if you have no patience for these kind of movies then this may not be your cup of tea.

Polaris_DiB One hungover morning, Warhol and a bunch of his compatriots decided to re-enact Anthony Burgess' science fiction novel "A Clockwork Orange". Warhol packed all of the characters into a single frame and in two long takes half-improvised the entire thing to the occasional pop music score and a long line of sadomasochist imagery. And like anything Andy Warhol, it's delightful even if it's not.The most interesting part of this movie, if you could call it that, is the fact that all of the scenes, characters, and actions take place in that single framing. What looks like Victor and the Droogs is actually Victor and his victims, the police, the background, and everybody else involved in the story. Without any previous experience in the plot of A Clockwork Orange, this movie would be absolutely nonsense. With previous experience in the plot of Clockwork Orange, it's only sort of nonsense.The best part, in a way, is its worst aspects: the sound of traffic outside, the static framing, the bad acting. Andy Warhol has basically created a really bad snuff porn. Think about it: the acting is about as random and displaced as porno movies; the framing is set to show either everything or confusingly close-up to accentuate nothing; and it all degrades into sex and drugs anyway. But he seems to have found something compelling in this, largely in the way he re-works and satirizes Burgess' novel. Don't bother with the specifics--they don't matter. Just think about how memorable it is seeing some guy yell at some other guy, "You're a bad boy, a bad boy, you'll be a bad boy!" and the other guy's response being, "But I want to be good!" There is also the strange thing going on with the fact that the other characters are either busy doing their own stuff in the frame or literally just sitting there watching the movie go on around them. The framing is that specific framing of bad that your eye doesn't really have a whole lot to do while watching, so while a continuous moment of S&M goes on in the foreground, one can literally get distracted by trying to figure out what that spinning thing in the background is. And the movie is punctuated by the credits read aloud off-screen.Hey, it's amateurish, almost lazy, and dull. It's also, in those very same ways, kind of disturbing and fascinating. In general, it's just like Andy Warhol. And specifically, it's an interesting look into the wish-fulfillment aspects of Burgess' famous text.--PolarisDiB

matt-201 Warhol's adaptation (for lack of a more shambling word) of Anthony Burgess' A CLOCKWORK ORANGE begins with a giant closeup of the glowering droog antihero, then moves backward to reveal him narcissistically preening while a crowd of poshy socialites sits blithely by. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's the same opening Stanley Kubrick designed for his version of the book--except that Warhol, working on a sub-Z budget, could only zoom backward, not track.VINYL is staged in what seems to be a corner of Andy's Factory loft, where a knot of S&M kidnappers, languid dilettantes, plainclothesmen and JD's act out Burgess' fable of a thug's "cure" through mind control. The moralizing of Burgess' novel gets instantly burned away in the wake of a kooky combination of elegant minimalist mise-en-scene, rough-trade heavy breathing, and the usual Warholian giggling at seemingly blithe freaks and damaged goodsSome of the picture lags under the burden of Ronald Tavel's clunky sixties-off-Broadway writing, but the first sequence is sheer amazement--climaxing with the droog Gerard Malanga's motto-delivering monologue (a pinnacle among Warhol is-this-supposed-to-be-bad? scenes) and his nutty chicken dance to Martha and the Vandellas' "Nowhere to Hide"--played all the way through, twice. (The start-up of rendition #2 gets the movie's biggest laugh.)As always in Warhol, the stasis of the image gives the picture the feeling of a window onto eternity. And the combination of extreme glamour and fox-in-the-henhouse cruelty, framed in compositions that recall heads in a vise, suggests the excitement this work must have had for an ambitious young Bavarian actor-playwright named Rainer Werner Fassbinder.