Satan made me booze it

I’m not about to divulge the where and how of last week’s Sacramento Satanic Film Festival. I know what happens when you snitch on devil worshippers; I’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby.

Still, let me ease minds by saying there were not any human sacrifices or satanic ritual abuses inside the small warehouse space where the festival films screened. Only hot dogs, chips and cola. I myself, however, indulged in a bit of the devil’s own: a six-pack of Hamm’s, because I read somewhere that Lucifer is from Minnesota.

Anyway, I’m embellishing: This film screening wasn’t an officially sanctioned satanic gathering. Just a couple-dozen local cinema enthusiasts in an undisclosed dark room last week watching the films of Kenneth Anger. I’m pretty sure no one was an actual Satanist. But it makes for a good whale tale, you betcha.

Anger, who is still alive, makes underground, experimental films known for their surreal, homoerotic and satanic flourishes. This retrospective of his work was curated by two locals, and was relaxing and informative. For instance, did you know that Anger’s film Scorpio Rising includes Hells Angels footage long before the counterculture bikers stomped the shit out of Hunter S. Thompson? I didn’t. But I now know it surely influenced Vincent Gallo’s making The Brown Bunny, what with that film’s everlasting motorcycling and Chloë Sevigny fellatio.

Most guys will take a Sevigny blow job eight days a week, but Anger’s flicks are actually pretty good. Such as Lucifer Rising and its bizarre back story: Former Manson Family associate Bobby Beausoleil wrote the soundtrack while in prison for the 1969 murder of fellow Manson man Gary Hinman. Finally released in 1981 but filmed in the late ’60s, early ’70s, Lucifer is a mishmash of psychedelic imagery, including impressive feats of cinema, such as location footage of towering sphinxes and hot-red Prince of Darkness UFO spaceship special effects. And a whole shit-ton of transfixing, weird occult ritual practices. And a ’70s ax-wielding score that sounds a lot like an acid-washed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

Maybe it was the Hamm’s, or maybe it truly was a cinema masterpiece? Only sobriety will tell.

So it goes with the summer’s rituals of choice: beer drinking and watching flicks.

I for one will admit I’ve drank way too much suds this year (which, incidentally, is the Year of the Tiger, not the beast—except for Tiger Woods). And I realized this the hard way: I have to go to a different ritual this weekend, one that Woods likely should never have undergone himself—marriage.

Hold on—I’m not getting hitched. Just attending. That is, if I can fit into my only suit: I’m about a dozen six-packs big in the gut.

I blame Satan.