Like a blotter of that strong late 80s acid, Becca Kozak’s Lisa Suckdoll doses the rock documentary with an experimental art short approach that liberates the format from its former boundaries. While the conventional 65 to 90-minute collection of concert footage mixed with interviews of bandmates and management works fine for most band retrospectives, it is limited by how subjective the audience reaction will be.
If you are not a fan of the band or genre of music, then a conventional music doc will usually not convert you into one. However, the experimental short allows the viewer to experience the meaning behind the compositions and performance, which in the case of Lisa Suckdog allows the uninitiated to understand the intention before reacting to the onslaught of her act.
“…the vibrant counterculture that sought freedom from the laws and conventions of the dominant tastelessness.”
Many survivors of the era have been jonesing for a film on Lisa Suckdog, Lisa Crystal Carver’s punk performance art band. It was another element of the vibrant counterculture that sought freedom from the laws and conventions of the dominant tastelessness. In the movie, Lisa Carver points out the repression back then only made it more fun to act out against, and what better way to act out in the turn of the 90s than get f****d up and naked in public. She also points out that she has been called the female GG Allin countless times, as his shows were basically a get f****d up and naked in public. Carver wishes someone would finally describe a man as the male Lisa Suckdog and she has a damn good point.
It is frustrating that woman artists need to be compared to male counterparts to be defined while the opposite usually never happens. This is why this review doesn’t frame this film as Todd Philips’s GG Allin: Hated meets Todd Haynes’s Karen Carpenter: Superstar, even if that would help get viewers to watch it. Also, it doesn’t take much inquiry to determine that while both Lisa Suckdog and GG Allin share similar performance styles, and also both were based out of New Hampshire, GG Allin simply doesn’t have the depth of what Lisa Suckdog was doing. GG Allin would break rules on stage to break them, nothing further. Lisa Suckdog was actually dangerous because, like Videodrome, the nude noise berserker ritual had a philosophy behind it.
"…using plastic dolls in order to animate the proceedings..."
