I’ve been a fan of White Gardenia (the underground artist collective helmed by controversial performance artist Daniel Valient) for quite some time now so naturally the idea of a definitive collection of their work was very appealing to me. Mutilation Theatre combines films from previous White Gardenia collections such as Blood Tastes Like Perfume and How to Raise Women from the Dead plus substantial additional footage. The film, released by Goredrome Pictures, comes in at a hefty four and a half hours and is billed as “The Definitive Short Film Collection”, which at that length it certainly should be. It’s definitely comprehensive but as far as definitive goes we’ll talk more about that a little later.

For fans of WG, Mutilation Theatre does provide the hits and features many of my personal favorites including The Oracle at Mesopotamia, Akasha’s First Time, m.i.p.a.m.h., Mobius Strip and more. These are the kinds of films that feature White Gardenia at their best and embody the surreal, unique experience that they are known for, featuring discordant audio soundscapes, bizarre onscreen text popups, and of course, real body mutilation and blood drinking. It also kicks off with a bang featuring a short that was new to me called The Oracle at Erythaea that was a sublime piece of disturbing art and featured a startling scene where Daniel viciously nails his own hand to the table before letting Allison drink his blood. The inclusion of the unsimulated shit-play/shit-eating scene later in the collection was genuinely surprising and good to see that WG can still find new shocking avenues to explore.

When your collection is longer than the extended cut of Return of the King, you’re bound to have some ups and downs in the quality of the material. White Gardenia is strongest when they focus on their well-honed format of surreal self-mutilation but falter a bit when it comes to narrative segments. While these scenes aren’t bad, they lack the forethought and substance to make them pop and are leaning heavily on the use of unsimulated cutting, explicit sex, and occasional special effects to keep the viewer engaged. There is also a bit of culling that could have been beneficial such as the segment The Oracle at West Gate Mall (Oct 1985) which is literally nothing more than a short clip of an animatronic skeleton inside a Spirit Halloween and was clearly shot well after 1985.

It’s great that there are underground companies like Goredrome willing to put out obscure content like this but there are a few things left to be desired about the release itself. The fact that this is branded as a definitive edition yet lacks some key WG segments is pretty disappointing. We only get V.O laden clips of the infamous finger-severing/eating from A Midnite Snack and segments like Allison’s Mouth Fills with Blood and Semen and Cher Nevin’s annihilating vaginal mutilation clip Yummy Fur are entirely absent. This is most likely due to their current inclusion on the Vore Gore and XXX: Dark Web compilations but still, these are keystone WG clips and you’d think they’d find a way to get them included. It’s also downright baffling to me that this collection still includes clips that are cut-off partway through with text directing you to a website for the full, uncensored version. Isn’t the whole point of a definitive collection to present artists’ work in its uncut entirety? And if these segments aren’t archived in physical media here then it seems unlikely it will ever happen for them.

If you know me then you know there is nothing I find more obscene and distasteful than censorship, self or otherwise. To that end, I was quite surprised that a collection that features bloodplay, explicit sex, and snacking on human feces would only include the censored version of A Perfume Made from Blood and Tears. And finally, not to sound overly nitpicky but it would have been really great to have more labeled subchapters to help find individual films rather than everything being dumped into a timeline and cut into four giant segments.

Ultimately, while there is good stuff here there is also room for improvement. The issue isn’t the content so much as the presentation that’s undermining it. We have yet to obtain a truly definitive gold-standard release of the work of White Gardenia but this is still a solid and comprehensive collection and a great way to dive in headfirst and experience the provocative, disturbing and thoroughly unique art they have created.

Availability: Limited

Limited copies are available from Goredrome.com while supplies last.