TERMINAL DEGENERATION

The films of Jon Moritsugu

I admit it. Four months into an industry-wide shutdown I was definitely starting to question my life choices. Thankfully, AGFA’s new boxset of the scuzz punk films of Jon Moritsugu landed in time to renew my faith.

You’d exhaust the index of Film as a Subversive Art to list all of Moritsugu’s influences, but the major ones are John Waters, Jean-Luc Godard and—especially in Moritsugu’s magnum opus Mod Fuck Explosion— Nicholas Ray. Moritsugu first made a national splash in 1993 with the candy-colored sitcom satire Terminal USA. Produced by James Schamus, it set fire to the model minority myth with a Japanese American family falling apart in a fantasia of drugs, sex, evil skinheads, and white girlfriends. In what now seems like a fact from an alternate universe it was funded by, and aired on, PBS of all places.

1994’s Mod Fuck Explosion is the only teen exploitation film that somehow authentically bottles teenage angst. Funded by a settlement from a factory job accident, Mod Fuck Explosion