First off, Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies is the best documentary of all-time. I know, I know: The Act of Killing, Man on Wire, Jodorowsky’s Dune… All of them are great, but do any of them show GG Allin, holed up in the St. Marks Hotel, maniacally chanting, “I HATE you motherfucker, I HATE you motherfucker”? This is the East Village way before Yoga for the People moved in a few doors down (though rest assured, you can still buy a GG Allin t-shirt and a choker on St. Marks. I did once, for Halloween.)
Anyway, Hated is the greatest documentary of all-time, and after Noisey screens it at Nitehawk this Thursday as part of its Music Driven series, director Todd Phillips will talk about what exactly makes it so.
Phillips, of course, went on to direct the Hangover movies — but first, while studying at NYU and working at Kim’s Video, he convinced GG Allin to violate his parole and take his Murder Junkies on what GG’s Hitler-mustached brother/bassist Merle called “the most violent tour in the history of rock and roll.” The subsequent documentary depicted the punk rocker in all of his feces-flinging glory: taking dumps on stage, pulverizing fans and himself, shamelessly showing an appendage that would’ve won the Smallest Penis contest, and scaring off a crowd at the NYU student center by shoving a banana up his ass.
That wasn’t the only time GG terrorized the director’s alma mater: Phillips once revealed that the movie’s premiere at NYU was cut short when the self-declared “underground Messiah” — fresh out of jail, as usual — threw a bottle at the screen and cut a woman’s face open. (As GG once sang, “Everybody knows that I’m a scumbag.”)
Soon after, following a typically turbulent, coke-fueled show at The Gas Station and a rampage through the streets of the East Village that was filmed by Clayton Patterson, GG died not by killing himself on stage on Halloween (as he famously promised Jane Whitney on an episode of her show that also featured Michael Alig and his Club Kids) but by OD’ing on heroin.
Nitehawk’s site (where you can score tickets) doesn’t make mention of it, but the screening, Thursday at 9:30 p.m., is appropriately timed: Saturday is the 21st anniversary of GG’s death.