Take This Film and Shove It

Telling your shitty boss to fuck off is the most delicious “fuck you” ever. From that instant forward, hundred mile-an-hour winds of awkward triumph push you far, far away from that godforsaken Blockbuster/grocery store/wherever you worked at when you were a kid—and it’s totally worth it. But, at the same time, it’s easy to simply mouth the words “fuck you.” It’s a whole other ballgame when you combine the Spirit of Christmas, Satanism, and a group of innocent children, consequently becoming the Ghost of Take This Job and Shove It Past.

On a warm '70s Christmas afternoon in a downtown L.A. theatre, the notorious filmmaker J.X. Williams made something special for his last day on the job as a projectionist. The innocent victims of his stunt – mostly kids and parents expecting to bask in the glow of a Christmas matinee – were instead subjected to an impromptu screening of his original film Satan Claus. The three-minute short about a boy meeting Satan caused the younger half of the audience to poop their pants, while their parents formed a lynch mob foaming at the mouth and ready to dismember whoever was responsible. Williams fled the scene immediately, leaving his wage-withholding boss to refund every ticket and endure a vicious beat down.

Borderline psychotic? No doubt about that. One time during his brief stint directing music videos for late 70s and early 80s punk bands, he scared the shit out of the Germs. The incident involved a Hitler moustache, snorting drugs that “even Darby [Crash] wouldn’t do,” and a loaded gun. Here is the drummer, Don Bolles, explaining the encounter:

The b-movie auteur currently lives in Switzerland, hiding from the public eye and refusing do interviews. In the rare occurrence that he does call anybody, it’s from random payphones to avoid tracing and he speaks through a voice modulator à la ex-CIA UFO experts. There are also rumours that plastic facial surgery has made him unrecognizable.

Of his 54 feature films, ranging from pornos like Nunf*cker to slasher flicks called You Axed For It, he never broke out of the b-movie circuit. Blacklisted as a communist, the major studios would not hire him. Turning to the mob for funding, he accumulated over 6000 pages of FBI files. Along with being credited for inventing the porn parody—the originals being A Streetwalker Named Desire and High Poon—the making of his three-hour Satanic horror epic, The Virgin Sacrifice, is often regarded as having the most sordid mess of drugs, violence, and death on set in the history of cinema. During the course of its production, addiction to hard drugs was rampant, a set designer was maimed, an actress overdosed, among several other debaucheries. After a laboratory fire destroyed most of the negative, only ten minutes of the film now survive:

And all that is the tip of J.X. Williams' shit-disturbing iceberg. There are hundreds of tall-tales surrounding the elusive madman and regardless of whether or not any of them are true, the collective insanity of his films is enough to make me believe them.