This is too disjointed to be enjoyable - even if you know a bit about William Reich. One story is a fictional account about a Yugoslavian woman who falls in love with a Russian ice skater, and is at least well filmed and interesting, but you can easily get lost in the surrealism. The other "stories" are factual: interviews with people from Reich's hometown, Jackie Curtis talking about his first gay sexual encounters, the editor of Screw magazine getting his penis cast, Tuli Kupferberg prancing around with a machine gun, and the most interesting parts: various doctors talking about Reich's orgone therapies, and the effect of orgasms on various patients. Oh, and we get to see one of the few remaining orgone accumulator and we even get some short snippets of a cloudburster - unfortunately that is not explained to the audience so you either know it's a cloudburster or you don't. Three things inherently wrong with this film - the attempts to be clever with the juxtapositioning renders the film quite incomprehensible; the white subtitles over an often white background means much of the footage cannot be understood (unless you speak Russian or Serbian) and, quite importantly, one image is so graphically disturbing that I will have difficulty dealing with it: we see a poor prisoner being given electroshock treatment by the Nazis. It's horrible, absolutely horrible, and whilst it's important that we know of the atrocities that happened in WWII and before, I would rather have been mentally ready for it. The scene is thrust on you suddenly, and it is extremely disturbing. Beware before watching this film, and decide whether you are really ready for a completely incomprehensible mind***k... with some nasty nightmarish scenes thrown in for luck. This is certainly not family viewing. You have been warned.
Review of WR: Mysteries of the Organism
