Short Films By Todd Verow

A collection of queer short film and video from indie filmmaker Todd Verow that includes Built for Endurance – the short film Frisk is based on and Nob Hill – unused super-8 footage shot for Frisk.

Amen
Falcon Video awarded Amen with a statuette. Safe Sex, avant garde style. Sort-anatomically-correct dolls have sex with condoms!

Thigh-High
Extended music video for SugarBitch’s tune “Toys” staring Alyssa “Frisk” Wendt and Issa “Preen” Bauser.

Fetal
Produced for the “Illicit Acts” Sidebar of MIX FEST ’98. Philly decides to try on all her shoes. Outstanding music video with high camp value.

Fluff
A quick and totally hot look inside the all-male strippers at the notorious Nob Hill Cinema in San Francisco. Very stylish and hard.

Superstar Make-Up Tips
Philly shows Eric Sapp how to achieve ‘that bruised mutilated look’ in one of the high points of this collection.

All-Star
Philly takes on the All-Star baseball game at Fenway park in Boston. As she wanders this totally straight crowd, the stares are the best.

Nob Hill
A super-8 experimental short shot at the Nob Hill Cinema in San Francisco where dancers take it all off for the gay porn lovers.

EAT-ME
Verow superstars get down to business with a bunch of bananas.

V is for Violet
“…a kaleidoscope of color, sex and American Pop Culture. Verow seduces the viewer with a vision of America that produces youth cultures bent on self-actualization and self-destruction, an America that has changed only superficially throughout the decades after World War II. Violet is an actress wandering through the years of her career with remarkable ease and media attention despite her lack of an attention span or talent. A young man also tries to make it in New York City but his naivety leads him to a life of hustling. Verow captures the events with his signature frenetic camera style, emphasis on saturated color, pattern and facial expression. Warholian, Orwellian, yet as American as a tv dinner.” – some NYC ArtRag

The Death Of Dottie Love
After a flamboyant man named Charlie is brutally murdered in Bangor Maine, a mysterious prostitute arrives in town to avenge the death. The woman, who calls herself Dottie, begins a grisly pattern of revenge, first seducing then drowning the assailants one by one in her hotel room’s bathtub. Graphically violent, yet eerily beautiful, Dottie Love contains themes Verow later explores in A Sudden Loss of Gravity.

The Flesh Is Willing
Using ancient romance novels as dialog and footage compiled while under the influence, Flesh tells the tale of a bisexual heroine destined for the big time, or at least a better frock. “That’s a very yummy dress.”

Operator
Verow’s radical re-take of Cocteau’s “Human Voice” is a pay-for-play melodrama set amid a world of technology in which you can call your grandma, your silicone mistress or launch missiles at a moments notice. Susan Becker stars as the fiber optics femme fatale.

Built for Endurance
A treatment for the later work known as Frisk, Endurance is perhaps one of Verow’s most talked about shorts and probably his best. Gives new meaning to carving turkey. Stars Frankie “Frisk” Payne.

• USA