When you include a Hitler cosplayer in a skin-tight wetsuit, you shouldn’t expect any anthropologist to take your social commentary seriously. Troma Entertainment SUMMARY Troma’s films, like Surf Nazis Must Die, were looked down upon by the movie industry and ridiculed by reviewers, but they still found fans. The film raises awareness of the reality behind the glamorized So Cal surfing scene, shedding light on the boorish behavior of some surfers. While Surf Nazis Must Die may not be a great movie, it captures the seedy aesthetic and ethos of authentic 60s Californian surfing better than other films. Troma never had a great rep in the movie industry as a film studio, looked down upon even by Golan-Globus. To describe their films as schlock is an insult to schlock. Troma’s output was ridiculed by reviewers and relegated to the back corner of the Blockbuster. Still, they found their fans here and there. While it’s not quite up there with the likes of Schindler’s List, Peter George’s 1987 apocalyptic-Nazi revenge film Surf Nazis Must Die is socially significant. It raises awareness of the reality behind one of the most deceptively glamorized subcultures on earth. Surf Nazis Must Die isn’t nearly as vacuous, crass, or random as it initially appears. (…) He wasn’t an outlier. Nazi iconography for decades had a weird appeal to the surfing community. Stroll down a beach in Malibu in 1961, and you’d see swastikas painted on the surfboards, surfers dressed in Nazi uniforms, giving Heil Hitler salutes, or spraying swastika on local Jewish people’s houses, and even beating up outsiders who infringed on their beach territory to surf “their” waves. Surf Nazis Must Die suddenly makes a disturbing amount of sense. Despite all these idiotic antics, friends still revered figures like Dora. He had a messianic like role in the surfer world. His 2002 New York Times obituary completely glosses over how much of a scumbag he was, with only a passing reference by a friend who said Dora “epitomized California surfing in the 20th century–everything that’s wrong with it and everything that’s right with it.” Surfers to this day idolize his memory; “Dora Lives” graffiti in Malibu memorializing him for his role in popularizing surfing in pop culture, fans indignantly and repeatedly ignoring any racism in the sport despite obvious evidence to the contrary.
via movieweb: Surf Nazis Must Die: Is the Despised Cult Classic Secretly a Documentary?
siehe dazu auch: The Long, Strange Tale of California’s Surf Nazis When I set out to become a surfer, I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into. The first time I saw a swastika in the wild, I happened to be carrying a surfboard. The year was 1989. I’d just come home from college hungry to claim the California identity that felt like my birthright. I could not have told you what that identity was except that its highest form appeared to be something like a blue-eyed, blond surfer with a golden tan, preternaturally skilled at riding the waves of his native beach. I was a pink-skinned redhead who’d grown up too far inland to learn the way you’re supposed to — as a kid, at the surf spot down the block. My mom and dad were more about left-wing politics than California identity, and my years at Berkeley High School involved more protest marches than beach parties. On the upside, I had a cool surfer uncle who’d ridden all the most famous waves in Hawaii and California. I’d always wanted to be like him, and he’d obliged with a couple of lessons in my teens. My uncle taught me the lingo, too, and gave me confidence that surfing could be mine. Around the time I graduated from college, he bought me a pointy little surfboard with two fins. To get started, I drove from Berkeley to Santa Cruz, the hippie town where locals once sued Huntington Beach over the trademark Surf City U.S.A. I parked near a sea cliff where beautiful youth strolled sunny sidewalks radiating physical well-being and belonging. Looking out over the waves, I watched somebody soar across a blue sparkling wall of water. I wanted all of it, always and forever — freedom in the Pacific, daily contact with infinity. Pulling on my wet suit, I started down concrete steps toward the sea and saw that swastika spray-painted next to the phrase, “Kooks go home.” I remembered that swastika last month when video surfaced of high school water-polo players in affluent Garden Grove, Calif., making the Nazi sieg-heil salute and chanting an obscure Nazi marching song. This kind of idiocy has been on the rise since last year. Anti-Defamation League statistics show anti-Semitic attacks in California up 27 percent between 2017 and 2018. Last March, in the still-wealthier-and-whiter town of Newport Beach, Calif., students arranged plastic red cups in a swastika for a drinking game, then photographed one another gleefully sieg-heiling as if that were just totally hilarious. In April, a young man with an assault rifle marched into a Southern California synagogue, shouted anti-Semitic insanity and proved his heroic masculine bravery by murdering an unarmed 60-year-old woman. In early June, 12 miles from my own childhood home, some creep built a 10-foot-wide concrete swastika in his front yard. Among the many disturbing things about my personal swastika memory is that I recall feeling less horrified and disgusted than intimidated. I knew exactly what a swastika signified. My grandfather flew bombing raids over Nazi Germany, and I grew up across the street from an elderly couple who’d survived the Holocaust.