40 years later, this might still be the most shocking movie ever made about the AIDS crisis
In the provocative German film, the government rounds up & ships gays to a quarantined island called "Hell Gay Land." And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Mark
Two graveyard shift nurses pray their patients pass overnight simply to cure their boredom. A crazed therapist tries to convince a victim that the perfect coping mechanism is matricide. The government rounds up and ships off the infected to a quarantined archipelago named Hell Gay Land.
Forty years on from its release, the first notable feature-length film to tackle the AIDS crisis—dark German comedy A Virus Knows No Morals—undoubtedly remains the most provocative.
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Of course, for those familiar with the works of director Rosa von Praunheim (a stage name inspired by the pink triangles Nazi concentration camps forced queer men to wear as a badge of shame) its taboo-breaking radicalism will come as little surprise.
A leading figure of both the New German Cinema and New Queer Cinema scenes, von Praunheim was credited with sparking his homeland’s Stonewall moment with 1971’s It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives, an avant-garde political manifesto which practically demanded the gay community to reject heteronormative ideals. The proud agent of chaos, who sadly passed away last December aged 83, also caused a major scandal in 1991 when he publicly outed two German celebrities without their consent on live TV.
However, for many, it’s the series of AIDS films von Praunheim made amid the height of the epidemic where his agitprop brand of activism made the biggest impression. Of course, one of them is not like the other. While the 1990 trilogy of Positive, Silence = Death, and Fire Under Your *ss were documentaries which drew upon the real-life experiences of devastated LGBTQ+ communities in New York and Berlin, A Virus Knows No Morals is an episodic blend of Warholian performance art, scathing satire, and surreal sketch comedy so pitch black you almost need a torch to see it.
Von Praunheim doesn’t waste any time going on the offense, immediately thrusting viewers into a ghastly soiree where physicians, scientists, and financiers revel in the good fortune the crisis has brought their way. One gleefully theorizes how the disease is an open market; another delivers a joke which has presumably been lost in translation (“What’s the capital of AIDS? Intestine City”). Interspersing these perverse conversations is an introduction to the film’s motley crew of recurring characters, the majority of which have equally dubious morals.
None more so than Carola Shurksh (Eva-Maria Kurz), a ruthless tabloid reporter who’ll stop at nothing to get a front-page scoop: in one of the movie’s many truly bonkers scenes, she’s rumbled by her gay son pretending to cottage with a strap-on.
Elsewhere, Ms. Tomalik Samenkorn (Ina Blum) is a demented shrink who believes AIDS is entirely psychosomatic; Dr. Blut (Maria Hasenäcker) is a fake news-spreading medic who argues the best defense is shame; and let’s not forget the straight couple who, while vigorously make love, also engage in a heated, often gruesomely corporeal debate about the disease’s socio-political impact (“AIDS victims are the proletariat of tomorrow!”).
Then there’s Rüdiger Kackinski, a promiscuous sauna club owner scarily dismissive of both safe-sex practices and mortality rates. (“Just 10 percent of the infected supposedly die. It’s alarmism.”) played by the filmmaker himself. As with much of his oeuvre, von Praunheim isn’t afraid to castigate certain sections of his own community, serving up just as much disdain for those who willfully flout guidance designed to protect them as the homophobes and governing bodies profiteering from their deaths.
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“Why do gays f*ck in the face of disease?,” comes one of many matter-of-fact questions that double up as a moral judgement. While in the most memorable music interlude, a bunch of drag nurses repurpose happy clappy hymn “He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands” into an anthem of culpability.
Although A Virus Knows No Morals continually leaps from each macabre set-piece with little rhyme or reason, there is some semblance of a narrative thread, one largely tied to Rüdiger and his theological scholar partner Christian (Christian Kesten) as they each come to terms with their respective diagnoses. It’s here where the movie packs an emotional punch heavier than its satire as the latter begins to question whether gay men are being punished for their liberation and the former—not exactly helped by an unsupportive, oversharing mom (“Your father’s sex organ sickened me”)—descends into a pit of self-despair. The bedroom scene in which Rüdiger literally howls in anguish at the prospect of his impending demise is a truly harrowing watch.
The same could be said of a somewhat nihilistic flash-forward finale where radio broadcasts declare that queer bashing is on the rise, the European Congress has called a state of emergency, and the church is demanding the incarceration of every gay man, infected or not. Released at a time when both fears and fearmongering over the disease were escalating, A Virus Knows No Morals appeared to have little interest in providing solace.
Unfortunately, the film’s unashamed insensitivity occasionally crosses over to pure bigotry. Alongside a liberal use of the N-word that goes completely unchallenged, there’s also a deeply unpleasant Africa-based sketch built entirely on racist stereotypes. von Praunheim’s scattershot approach means there was always going to be hits and misses. Yet such overt prejudice, even in the less politically correct times of the mid-1980s, is inexcusable.
It’s an unfortunate stain on an otherwise well-observed and surprisingly amusing curio which sits somewhere between the fever dream imagery of Derek Jarman and the transgressive kitsch of John Waters.
Indeed, despite Germany’s reputation as a comedic wasteland, A Virus Knows No Morals can be genuinely funny, albeit often in a baffling WTF! way: see how one sex-crazed woman attempts to seduce her gay BFF by poetically reimagining certain body parts (“My breasts are a huge shaved scrotum and my pubic hair a mustache in the rain”) or when Carola manically relays an arsenal of potential news headlines which become increasingly deranged. (“Bloodbath In The Homo Bars! Masochism In Mattress Factory!)
Of course, von Praunheim would bolster his AIDS activist reputation with the films that immediately followed, alongside his co-founding of the German branch of ACT UP. But A Virus Knows No Morals still stands as his most searing, and proudly shambolic, call-to-arms.
Unfortunately, A Virus Knows No Morals isn’t currently streaming via any official platforms, though it can be found on YouTube.
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