Sometimes, a great project falls into your lap. Less often, it falls into your bushes.
Yet such was the case for struggling actor Ryan Sexton (The Toxic Avenger) when, outside his apartment, he found one Eldon Wayne Hoke blackout-drunk. As Sexton soon discovered, Hoke was not only better known as El Duce, leader of shock-rock band The Mentors, but also quite a character whose wayward, doomed-for-brevity life was worthy of chronicling with a camcorder. Some two dozen VHS cassettes later, shot between 1990 and ’91, the resulting shenanigans and conversations live on as the documentary The El Duce Tapes.
Whipped into fine narrative shape by directors Rodney Ascher (Room 237) and David Lawrence, who also edits the film, The El Duce Tapes begins with a crash course in the executioner-hooded Mentors and the bald, bearded, bulky frontman who proudly salutes Hitler and more proudly brands their music as “rape rock.” His lyrics are simple yet juvenile rhymes one would expect from drunken high schoolers — to wit, “My woman from Sodom / Lets me fuck her in the bottom.”
His zeal for misogyny and white supremacy is matched by perpetual homelessness and full-blown alcoholism, resulting in not just a warts-and-all doc, but an all-warts look at the raucous L.A. club scene and the sad reality awaiting Hoke between gigs, from which he tried his best to numb. A product of abuse, Hoke admittedly spits back the kind of hatred he received growing up. While not exactly smart, he was certainly shrewd, knowing how to push PC buttons and slam them into disrepair.
Judged from a standpoint of “any publicity is good publicity,” his antics worked, landing him on the hostile stage of The Jerry Springer Show and, his lyrics, decried in U.S. Senate hearings of Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center. A decade later, with major-label backing, the likes of Marilyn Manson rode a similar strategy all the way to the bank; El Duce got no further than the welfare line. (That’s not a metaphor, either; visits to pick up his government handout are in the film.)
Although The El Duce Tapes isn’t the only documentary on this ever-colorful character and his awfully patient bandmates, Sexton strikes something akin to gold with the unfiltered rawness of his subject. It’s as if a particularly vile segment of Penelope Spheeris’ Decline of Western Civilization trilogy were spun off into a full, free-standing case study of the anthropologic and anarchic. On its own, Sexton’s footage would be captivating, but Ascher and Lawrence amplify it with clips of Hoke’s influences — everything from Walking Tall to Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass (!) — and his cultural environment, informing or reminding viewers of what was in the water — or cesspool — at the time. In the closing moments, the line they draw from Hoke to, well, today is staggering. —Rod Lott