Did you people see the same film I saw?

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Andy Warhol very very loosely adapts "A Clockwork Orange". Gerard Malanga tells us all how much of a juvenile delinquent he is and then furious dances to Martha and the Vandellas while Edie Sedgwick watches. Then Ondine, playing his buddy Scum Baby, turns him in to a cop who has been sitting in a chair and laughing the whole time. The cop turns him over to a doctor who tortures him, which seems to be a real S&M kinda deal ... no faking. Malanga is reformed. All of this happens on one set with the whole cast present the whole time. At just over an hour long, it's way too long ... but the peak moments, like Malanga's dance or any randomly selected minute of Sedgwick sitting on the sideline, make the whole thing worth watching.

I found this film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I am pretty confident I would never have even heard about this film were it not for the book. I was most interested to watch it when I found out it was a work by artist Andy Warhol, and then finding out it is an early adaptation of the Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange was even more interesting. Basically it is all set in one room, all the characters are actors hanging around waiting for their cue, or just watching the play-like scenario unfold. Victor (Gerard Malanga) is the leader of the gang who loves violence and being bad, you see a man in the background being tortured throughout, and Victor loves music, including "Nowhere to Run" by Martha and the Vandellas. But Victor is caught by police, the Doctor (Tosh Carillo) is determined to cure him and change his ways, using aversion therapy, which sees Victor strapped to a chair, put in a gimp mask, and made to watch what he originally used to love. Victor appears to be better, but slowly descends into a kind of madness, the film culminates in a short orgy, before Victor slumps down to rest for a cigarette, the film fades to white. Also starring Larry Latrae, J.D. McDermott, Ondine, Jacques Potin and Edie Sedgwick. The acting is very amateurish, you see the actors fluff their lines and drop things, seeing them all in the background suddenly appear as a character is daft, and the worst bit comes ten minutes towards the end when loud music is playing in an opposite room, everything becomes inaudible. I wish I could say I enjoyed this film, but it is so bad that you can't take it seriously, even if it was onstage as a play, you should definitely stick to the brilliant Stanley Kubrick version and not bother with this nonsense, unless you really have to study it as a dedicated cinema fan, a pretty pointless experimental satire. Adequate!

This footage is little more than a filmed rehearsal in a corner of a warehouse. Warhol demonstrates the 'less is more' mantra to an unplumbed basement of embarrassment. This vision of Warhol's really has nothing to do with the medium of film, and all that is learned is that he was very spoiled to have the resources in order to make this, for there are bound to be more important artists and concepts (and even adaptations) that went un-filmed in this era of early experimentation.Warhol fills a stage with the cast, and we can only sympathize with them, for their talents are criminally obstructed by the moronic limitations imposed upon them. With presumably only the source text (a novel) to go by (for who would argue that any useful screenplay was written?), the actors go about filling out the bare guidelines of the inappropriately treated material. Warhol, like a spoiled child, asks so much of his cast while giving so little; and beyond that, he almost seems to obstruct or minimize the source material.Given this, the performers do what they can when they can, and without them, this film would have nothing to give. Warhol's demonstrated contempt for cinema acts as a saboteur; the performers at the mercy of his nonconstructive (mark it, not 'de-constructive') approach, and we are forced to watch them feel for cues, lines and staging directions. Shamefully, it is left for them to stick their necks out. Warhol, like a selfish undergraduate, seems to hide childishly behind the camera – the very last place any true artist would escape to.Carillo, Latrae and particularly Malanga are victorious even with these enormous obstructions (not, I argue, because of them). Their lines are delivered fairly robotic-like and sporadically; a rhythm is established because of this, but it abandoned well into the 'second-reel'. Here we are treated to some off-camera sadism, while even the most hardened of extras (E. Sedgewick for example) remain distant, unmoved and as bored as anyone else involved: actors and audience alike. When the cast display indifference and the director promotes his carelessness, we are only left with spectacle. Even there, 'Vinyl' has little to give. The highlight of the film (or at least the most memorable set piece) is that of Malanga dancing to 'Nowhere to Run'.Twice.Following this there is a smattering of whipping, strapping, beating and struggling. The film then descends into further unscripted stumbling and ramblings. Most of it stays in frame.I can't see what Warhol gave us with this film. The narrative is lost, the actors are maltreated, and the production values do more harm than good. Warhol fails on virtually all grounds here – the real kudos needs to go to the performers. This film is a very selfish one, spawned from a selfish, lazy director.

One hungover morning, Warhol and a bunch of his compatriots decided to re-enact Anthony Burgess' science fiction novel "A Clockwork Orange". Warhol packed all of the characters into a single frame and in two long takes half-improvised the entire thing to the occasional pop music score and a long line of sadomasochist imagery. And like anything Andy Warhol, it's delightful even if it's not.The most interesting part of this movie, if you could call it that, is the fact that all of the scenes, characters, and actions take place in that single framing. What looks like Victor and the Droogs is actually Victor and his victims, the police, the background, and everybody else involved in the story. Without any previous experience in the plot of A Clockwork Orange, this movie would be absolutely nonsense. With previous experience in the plot of Clockwork Orange, it's only sort of nonsense.The best part, in a way, is its worst aspects: the sound of traffic outside, the static framing, the bad acting. Andy Warhol has basically created a really bad snuff porn. Think about it: the acting is about as random and displaced as porno movies; the framing is set to show either everything or confusingly close-up to accentuate nothing; and it all degrades into sex and drugs anyway. But he seems to have found something compelling in this, largely in the way he re-works and satirizes Burgess' novel. Don't bother with the specifics--they don't matter. Just think about how memorable it is seeing some guy yell at some other guy, "You're a bad boy, a bad boy, you'll be a bad boy!" and the other guy's response being, "But I want to be good!" There is also the strange thing going on with the fact that the other characters are either busy doing their own stuff in the frame or literally just sitting there watching the movie go on around them. The framing is that specific framing of bad that your eye doesn't really have a whole lot to do while watching, so while a continuous moment of S&M goes on in the foreground, one can literally get distracted by trying to figure out what that spinning thing in the background is. And the movie is punctuated by the credits read aloud off-screen.Hey, it's amateurish, almost lazy, and dull. It's also, in those very same ways, kind of disturbing and fascinating. In general, it's just like Andy Warhol. And specifically, it's an interesting look into the wish-fulfillment aspects of Burgess' famous text.--PolarisDiB