We'd trip on movies when we were younger. More Kenneth Anger than Pink Floyd. Franklin: A Symphony of Pain would have been the ultimate film to experience while altered. It is almost a call to arms, upping the cinematic ante, producing high-definition art to hypnotize you while you're peaking. Giving you a play-by-play of this psychedelic film isn't going to sell you on it. It would be like attempting a synopsis of a Jodorowsky film. The power is in the visuals, and now that I've put that out there, here's a rough outline:Franklin is having one f'ed-up day. Actually, that's an understatement. While out wandering, he's abducted by unsavories hearkening from some sort of pagan cult. Soon sodomy ensues with the aid of a ritualistic wooden artifact. Franklin soldiers on with his splintered anus, however, because he my friends, is a trooper. His reward for perseverance is a beating from hostile thugs where he is further stripped of dignity, sight and identity. Like overexposed film lit by neon, the story is surreal and emphasized to give the full acid effect. Disorienting as the drugs he uses for mental escape, colors blast the screen as violently as the blows Franklin receives. He attempts to self-medicate by dropping acid with a seemingly fun-loving couple. That trip begins with this kinky chic slicing up her chest in the front seat of a car. He can't catch a break what-so-ever, so he eventually folds, and resorts to religion. Father Pearcy only confuses his mind further in that special way that only the clergy can truly achieve. Lets recap: Franklin gets anal raped, physicated and then brain washed.The creepy cast surrounding Franklin's story seem to have stepped right out of a 70's grind house flick. In fact, the character "Her" played by Dee Dee Seruga, wears a mask reminiscent of The Last House on Dead End Street (1977). Her look and performance is nothing short of mesmerizing. My only qualm with the movie is there wasn't more screen time for that character. Costumes and set design vacillated between stark to ornate and overlapped in an intentionally disorienting way. Greg Freeman visually transformed himself to achieve the hollow look of the wizened Father Pearcy. This film is a visual feast of psychedelic extremities, which is an attribute sorely lacking from the cannon of cinema, even including counterculture or transgressive cinema. At times it is the the ethereal equivalent of stepping into an Alex Grey print. Franklin: A Symphony of Pain is the quintessential flick to drop acid to with a bunch of friends on a Friday night, so you can melt into the TV and unwind. They didn't have HD trip flicks like this when we were kids, folks. We'd have to improvise, but somehow we prevailed in our pixel-deficient insanity regardless. The kaleidoscope of tripped-out overlapping hypnotics in certain sequences are so strong and impressive that you can literally taste the strychnine as they unfold. You can't fake this kind of LSD cinema, people, so pick up what you need to watch this, and secure a copy to absorb. Be sure to watch your posture, and have lots of supply on hand for the comedown afterward. If you're non-commercial cult cinema lover that gets excited with something original, I can't recommend this one enough.

There is no easy way to explain this movie. The only thing I can say is sit down, buckle up and prepare to take a ride through the mind of a psychopath! If you ever wondered what it was like to trip on LSD and Shrooms with the Manson family on Barker Ranch, you need not wonder anymore. "Franklin: ASP" is amazing! It's one of those rare indie flicks that has production value all the way around. From the writing to the editing (that would make Oliver Stone proud) to the Production Design. And for actors having to display a wide swath of emotions they did a surprisingly believable job. Especially the lead, "Franklin". For those of you who have a hard time following story lines and reading into the "mise en scene" you may have to watch it more than once to really get it. Once you do, you will bask in the brilliance to which the characters were written. If you find movies like "Natural Born Killers" offensive you this movie is NOT for you. This movie makes NBK look like it was made for PBS. If you are a fan of the drive in era or indie flicks in general than you will not want to miss seeing "Franklin!" Check it out, and remember it's only a movie, it's only a movie...

A good friend of mine, when faced with his own mortality, once said, "To face the infinite requires profound sobriety, endless patience, and guts of steel." The same conditions must be met when facing FRANKLIN: A SYMPHONY OF PAIN, an unsettling cinematic masterpiece that one does not so much watch as endure. Directed by Jeremy Westrate, who also co- wrote the script with Richard R. Anasky and Sean Donohue, FRANKLIN takes the audience past the Ninth Circle of the Abyss, bludgeoning the consciousness until one is forced to read cinema as if learning a new language. High praise but also solemn caveat--FRANKLIN is not for the silly and the ignorant. You will need a robust digestion and an even more robust spirit. FRANKLIN follows the nightmare of its titular character (Nikolas Franklin), who in the film's opening reel is accosted in a public restroom by a pair of masked thugs. After being rendered unconscious, Franklin awakens bound and bleeding as a trio of "handlers"--two men and one women--torment and torture him, culminating in Franklin being sodomized with a jagged wooden implement. After a failed escape attempt Franklin awakens in a dumpster, seemingly free from his captors … but the nightmare has only just begun. What ensues is Franklin's own series of unfortunate events as he wanders through a concatenation of fresh hells with seemingly no end in sight. Interspersed throughout this journey is a meta-narrative in which Franklin recounts his nightmare to the bullish Father Hyde Pearcy (Greg G. Freeman), who may have ulterior motives for walking Franklin through this "therapy." FRANKLIN is not an easy experience. The barrage of tortures is as horrifying as anything you'll see in Japan's infamous GUINEA PIG series. The disjointed narrative and relentless shift in style are difficult to follow (I was reminded of Stone's NATURAL BORN KILLERS). The crazed retro cinematography, incessantly textured with psychedelic overlays reminiscent of Bran Ferren's paint splatter light show in ALTERED STATES, is distracting and almost seizure- inducing. Yet despite being difficult to watch, the film is nevertheless quite watchable. Its nonlinearity, while frustrating, is perhaps its saving grace: by never allowing us to fully sympathize with Franklin we never get too close to the nightmare and are instead forced to decode the troublesome narrative. Deep into this landscape, it becomes apparent what we are witnessing is Franklin's torture-induced dream. Layer by layer, Franklin's identity is flayed before the viewer's eyes. Sodomy is an affront to his masculinity (a theme explored in Boorman's DELIVERANCE). After his alleged "escape," thugs destroy his driver's license (his identity) and a photo of his wife (the feminine energy, which "civilizes" man according to John Ford's westerns). Franklin's face, man's discernibly "human" feature, is disfigured with acid. He loses one of his eyes, the "window to the soul." He projects cultural influences onto his memories, establishing one particularly traumatic experience as a 1960s black-and-white sitcom (another NBK homage). He revises episodes in his head so that we, the audience, witness them multiple times with different outcomes. Just when we think we have a handle on his story, our perspective shifts, following the misadventures of the bizarre masked "handlers" who plague him. There are hints of a method to this madness, and we begin to suspect that Father Hyde Pearcy is the architect of Franklin's suffering, a point further clarified by the film's "Prologue," which occurs at the end of the film. A post-credit quote makes vague reference to the CIA's Project MKUltra in which test subjects were subjected to psychedelics and torture to "promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness" (a droning computerized voice of the film's many hallucinogenic sequences further alludes to this). Even if you're unfamiliar with MKUltra (as I was), the film can still be appreciated on its own terms (much the same way one can appreciate PINK FLOYD THE WALL without knowing anything about Roger Waters or Syd Barrett). I was reminded of the internet urban myth that suggests victims of torture often recreate a seemingly "normal" alternate reality to escape their anguish … suggesting that the reality you currently experience could be a torture-induced dream (creepy stuff). If this is indeed the case, then FRANKLIN takes us on a journey through those realities, and it does so with great aplomb. The script is a messy mosaic of horrors that manages to create a unified whole like Seurat's pixilated dots. Westrate's direction of this material is assured, and actor Nikolas Franklin, taking on a role usually relegated to women in torture porn, delivers one of the most fearless performances I have seen in a while (think Helen Buday in ALEXANDRIA'S PROJECT or Monica Bellucci in IRREVERSIBLE). If it seems I am referencing too many other well-known films, it's because thematically FRANKLIN is something of a pastiche. As a work of art, it has an odd self-awareness, personified in the character of Fernando (Angel Martin), a grinning hippie who often appears with camera in hand, videotaping the torture. It is during these scenes that the point of view will often shift the most, at times putting us inside Fernando's camera, making us complicit with Franklin's tormentors (okay, okay, I'll eschew the reference to the opera glasses in SALÓ). This allows the film's reality to constantly be destroyed and reborn, to write its own rules. Late in the film, when Father Hyde bellows "I'm the one who controls what goes on in your reality!" the film shifts to a series of surrealistic moving snapshots (Franklin's fading memories?), each separate from the other by the scratchy static of a TV changing channels. Could television, what Harlan Ellison calls the "glass teat," be our own "handler" controlling our minds?

The Dark Side. We all have one. We accept it, we own it, but seldom, if ever do we share the thoughts,and images that come from it. In a perverse way we seem to enjoy knowing there is a side to us that's hidden from those people that think they have us figured out.However, in a far deeper place in the mind, there is a darkness of a whole other kind. The thoughts that bubble up to the surface from this place can be so frightening that we quickly turn away from them in our mind's eye. Similar to happening upon an accident scene that turns out to be vividly gruesome, and we quickly turn our heads, hoping that those images don't follow us into our dreams that night. It is from somewhere deep in this darkness that " Franklin; A Symphony of Pain " was clearly born.I congratulate, and commend the film makers for having the guts to take what they have dredged up from this forsaken place, and document it to film. The running time of this feature is approximately 90 minutes, and when it was over I was left somewhat drained, uneasy, and surprisingly exhilarated. Mostly, I was left with a lot of questions about the themes, the characters, the unique soundtrack, and even my own affinity for stories from this dark side. Questions, I'm excited to say, that may very well get answered as I'm told a Prequel is in production. So many angles the film makers could come from to tell the origins of Franklin. So many other levels of darkness left to be dredged. Whatever it turns out to be I will watch, and so should you. After all, it's in our nature. We all have a dark side.