A FORKED WORLD
2004

Self-mutilator Barry (Bruce Bennett) is a misanthropic suicidal mess, who early on sets the tone for the rest of the film when he stops a robbery by getting in front of the robber’s handgun. When the would-be robber runs, he says, “Come back here and shoot me, Tupac!”
This 2004 indie low-budget feature was co-directed by James DiGiovanna and Carey Burtt. I’d seen and liked some of Burtt’s shorts, grouped together on a disc entitled Films That Hurt Feelings. Some of the main themes Burtt explores in his short films are present in the feature, namely violence, emotional abuse and cultism.
Barry impresses Angela (Christine Fere) at a party when he’d rather humiliate some dumb girl than bang her. Drawn by a mutual disgust of humanity, Barry and Angela become a hate power couple, or to use the movie’s tagline, “The story of two mean people who struggle to remain mean in a world that wants them to be nice.”
We’ve all known (or been) people like these miserable bastards, smug in their righteousness, clinging to their hate of humanity like a life preserver. Angela and Barry each have little solo projects they do to irritate the suckers and the squares. She poisons pigeons. He eats meat. She makes dolls with notes inside saying things like “Mommy why’d you kill me?” and puts them outside abortion clinics. When people find them, she tapes their horrified reactions from across the street. He throws dead rats off a roof onto passersby. She leads on horny married guys and blackmails them with the audiotapes of them hitting on her.
Then Barry starts hanging out with his cultist friend, starts meditating on “spoon consciousness”, and Angela starts to lose him. His heart just isn’t into rough sex and misanthropy anymore, and that’s where the conflict in the film arises. Will he continue to be a new-age wimp, or will he get his mojo back and be the same hateful fuck she had grown to love (and hate)?
The sharply funny and insightful spoof of circular logic and half-baked metaphor used by the cult leader betrays someone’s impressive knowledge of cult workings. The rhetoric is close enough to be workable for a real cult.
(Live and allow. Live and allow. The fork penetrates, cuts, stabs and imposes yourself on the world, while the spoon cradles, giving up, giving in and giving peace to the world.)
A Forked World is also packed full of amusing anti-social dialogue that must have been fun to write. “I’d like to cut the smile right off her face,” she says early in the film. She punches Barry in the gut and asks if that hurt. He says, “Compared to just being alive, no.”
I would be negligent if I didn’t mention Nic Ratner’s enjoyable portrayal of the delightfully sleazy priest with the sticky bible that bangs Angela, when Barry is busy meditating on spoon consciousness.
Unlike a lot of indie films, this does not suffer from under lighting, shaky-cam or focus problems. The script is crisp and subversive, the acting isn’t bad, and the main couple have a snappy Nick and Nora-type dialogue going on, if Nick and Nora called each other names like fuckface, snatch trap, dickweed and clitlick!
The 2004 Boston Underground Film Festival awarded A Forked World the prize of “most effectively offensive film.” Your mom probably wouldn’t like it. But what the fuck does that bitch know anyway? Go buy this film directly from the filmmaker for a measly $12! E-mail him at tbickle2001@aol.com.

-Hysteric Eric