God Damn Religion is a30 minute movie made by Sir Richard Bishop in 2006 which was one of my purchases on my recent visit to London’s Rough Trade East.
Sir Richard Bishop (SRB) was previously one of the three-piece Sun City Girls who the writer Erik Davis once memorably described as a “postpunk jazzbo tantric freakout band”. Sir Richard’s brother Alan was also in the band and both Bishops are tireless Third World travellers.
It includes graphic details from Buddist torture paintings from Burma, Laos and Thailand, film of a bizarre phallic shrine in Bangkok and Tibetan monks filmed in Dharamsala, India.
The numerous painted depictions of the devil are crude and grotesque – lascivious Satanic monsters with cruel leers and serpent tongues shown gleefully inflicting pain, principally upon women and children. The kaleidoscope of fast changing images in the movie as a whole is a horror show catalogue of gruesome deeds – bodies are burned, boiled, disembowelled, decapitated, garrotted, impaled on spikes, forced to climb thorny branches and devoured by animals or birds. In short it is not for the faint hearted nor is it recommended as something to watch on a full stomach. There is no let up on the barbarism even when the subject matter shifts to more familiar biblical scenes, as the focus is chiefly on the suffering of Christ.
As the title foretells, this movie is intent on highlighting the barbaric methods artists use to emphasise Hell as a place of genuine pain in order to strike fear into the hearts of we sinners. The clip of the extraordinary 1922 Swedish silent movie ‘Haxan’ puts most modern horror movies in the shade. T
SRB’s atmospheric soundtrack is entitled Elektronika Demonika and the music comes as a separate audio CD when you buy the DVD. Anyone expecting examples of his virtuoso guitar playing that feature on his solo albums will be disappointed. Here he uses synthesized sounds, interwoven with effects such as a menacing whispered voice which sounds like a deranged version of the Lord’s prayer and demonic laughter.
I suppose the chief moral to the drawn from all this blood letting is that the pursuit of carnal pleasure and the practice of religious belief are activities which are mostly violently at odds with each other. SRB describes his film as:
“a diabolical experiment in hypnotic mind control—a phantasmagoric presentation of demonic and divine imagery, meticulously assembled and designed to put the viewer into an altered state of darkened awareness“.
The scenes of torture illustrate the price fanatics dream of reaping on those who succumb to the sins of the flesh.
You have been warned
