JAMESFEST #6: Homocula Likes White Blood, Aim for the Eyes!

In the leadup to Jamesfest, James’ was happy to hype up his two crown jewels, starting with : Homocula Likes White Blood, Aim for the Eyes! As James told me, there was no subtitle file on the internet available for this film, so he had to upload the film to a private YouTube channel, use the automated approximate Japanese subtitles that YouTube generates, copy and paste the automated transcript, upload it through two different English translation programs, and then encode a new subtitle file by hand after reverse-engineering through context clues and comparing the two translations. It was a herculean effort by Cinema’s Strongest Soldier, and I felt (and feel) a deep, horrified awe at how much one man can love movies.

His effort almost certainly guaranteed that this was the first time this film had screened in America for a non-Japanese speaking audience. Homocula is a Pink film, a genre that includes “erotic” elements and is otherwise a fairly expansive designation for films that, by my very limited understanding, seems to include any sort of explicit nudity, sex, or otherwise sufficiently “adult” situations. Japan has a fairly famous (even to non-Japanese audiences) ban on explicit genitalia in artistic works, which has been a frustrating roadblock when it comes to adding Japanese films to my “Peen on Screen” Letterboxd list. In my ignorance, I wondered idly if this film’s status as an explicitly gay Pink film would let it avoid those rules. That was not the case, although the filmmakers’ roundabout solution is worth praising. We’ll get to that.

Homocula begins by establishing, first, that Dracula is real and lives in the Shetland Islands (a detail that will not matter at all past this point), and that Homoculas are a unique type of gay Dracula that drink cum instead of blood. Two Homoculas, one who looks like a carnival barker, and one who looks like Pee Wee Herman, are sent to Japan to suck off three specific people due to their… cosmic significance/astrological sign? Here, as your humble reviewer, I must acknowledge that I did not think to write down any of the characters’ names and that, without besmirching James’ incredible work, I feel like my plot summary as a non-fluent Japanese speaker is going to be unavoidably incorrect. (Also worth noting that the plot of the film feels more like loose scaffolding held in place in order to contextualize all of the sex escapades.) So, all that is to say: Bear with me.

As Homoculas, the duo don’t offer a lot of similarities to cinema’s greatest depiction of a master of sucking people off (Dracula)—these Homoculas can walk in the sun, don’t seem to be bothered by the cross, can possess people’s bodies as ghostly spirits, can hypnotize men, are allergic to garlic, and burst into a pile of dust if they touch a woman (or maybe just a woman’s vaginal fluids?) Their powers seem less supernatural and more like a free use fantasy (I’m not linking what that is, you non-perverts can google it if you want to); it exists as a shortcut to how the various boy victims end up getting blowjobs from the Homoculas.

The meat (or should I say white blood?) of the film is the sucking off scenes. The first hypnotized victim is introduced jogging through the park, his meaty hog flopping against the constraints of his beat-up grey sweatpants. The camera lingers here for much longer than you’d expect, bookended on either side with the Pee Wee Herman Homocula (abbreviated as PW for the rest of the article) gazing hungrily at the camera. The scene feels eternally long, and while I can’t say it’s particularly sensual, there is a familiar ring of senseless desire present. Not to hit another film with a stray mid-article, but it’s far more of a striking depiction of being down bad than any amount of bathwater drank. PW hypnotizes the man into jogging in place while he pulls down his pants and, shockingly, what looks to be either a CGI dick or extremely unrealistic dildo pops out.

This, it turns out, is how Homocula will be getting around the law forbidding explicit on-screen genitalia: the film will feature dicks silhouetted in shadow, outlined in grey sweatpants, depicted through the use of dildos, and possibly brief CGI use. It’s fascinating as a cultural byproduct of legality, but not exactly erotic. There is always a certain level of adjustment one must make when experimenting with a new genre, but what I wasn’t expecting was how uniformly awkward and un-sexy so many of the scenes in this film were.

Dick depictions aside, the focus in so many scenes is on wide-shots of the men’s butts clenching or shirtless in barren rooms. In one scene, PW possesses a man mid-tryst and is unpleasantly surprised when he’s penetrated from behind. This leads to PW hopping out of the man’s body as a ghost and rubbing his asshole while yowling like an alley cat. It’s played for laughs, but the movie’s not a sex farce.

The second half of this 60-minute movie follows PW connecting with a young man who may be the reincarnated soul of his centuries-dead brother after the latter is nearly killed by a car. PW learns that this familiar-looking man is one of the cosmically-ordained victims that he needs to suck off in order to continue living as a Homocula (it’s unclear if this process kills them or not.) He’s left with a dilemma: Either suck off his maybe-reincarnated brother (I suppose this could be an old lover, instead, and the subtitles missed it) or run up against the week deadline by finding another Japanese man with the rare blood (cum?) type he needs.

Once again, this part of the film, whether through script issues or a problem of translation, was extremely difficult to decipher, but the tone in question was not. We are meant to feel sadness at PW’s longing for connection, and I’m left wondering what the audience for this film was coming for. To compare to the prior film, DeCoteau’s films don’t always have a sensuality onscreen, but I do believe that the director himself finds his films (or at least his actors) hot. I’m not sure I can really understand anyone that would find Homocula hot, except by dint of its ultra-specific concept.

Still, how often does one get the chance to watch a film titled Homocula Likes White Blood, Aim for the Eyes in a movie theater? Such is the magic of cinema.

This is Part 6 of Jamesfest.

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