The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the rise of a so-called “shock rock” subgenre of hardcore punk in which the lowlife likes of G. G. Allin, The Meatmen, GWAR, and others who were short on musical talent but long on the ability to anger Christian “moral majority” politicians (and satisfy their masochistic teeny-bopper fans) with sick humor, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and assorted exhibitionist stage antics often involving bodily fluids, self-mutilation, and general dumb-guy violence. Perhaps the most infamous of these “shock” groups was the Mentors, led by the late former failed fusion drummer Eldon Hoke (aka El Duce), who as a youngster had fairly conventional rock influences but soon realized the only way he could get anyone’s attention was to be as offensive as possible—hence the band’s onstage image of hooded executioners and their coining of the term “rape rock” to describe their music. The El Duce Tapes, ostensibly directed by Rodney Ascher (best known for the excellent horror doc Room 237) actually comprises mostly VHS tape footage of Hoke and his band both onstage and in conversation with aspiring LA actor Ryan Sexton, whose copious recordings of El Duce and Mentors live performances sat idle in a storage vault for ages and eventually discovered by Ascher. Luckily Sexton’s original intentions in these interviews seem to be less than reverent.
Sexton’s headstrong inquisitive spirit at times seems to unveil the everyday schlub behind the executioner’s mask: a guy who may or may not be a Nazi, a violent misogynist, and a homophobe, an anti-immigrant xenophobe as his public persona would suggest. (In one segment, Sexton waylays Hoke merrily cashing a welfare check, a scenario that clearly makes the head Mentor uneasy.) Along with others of his ilk such as G.G. Allin, Hoke became a regular freak-show attraction on the daytime talk show circuit in the 1990s, serving as the sort of sociopathic chew toy whose rote misanthropy boosted ratings for sub-mental couch-potato TV fare like the Jerry Springer Show (we see clips of Hoke on Springer in full El Duce mode, making himself an easy target for the crowd’s derision). Sexton also interviews other members of the Mentors, namely bassist Steve Broy. Compared to Hoke’s carefully cultivated pseudo-lunatic ravings, Broy comes off like a Ph.D. candidate sitting for his oral exam, trying to intellectualize the Mentors’ manufactured hate in a way that can’t come off as anything but unintentionally tragicomic. The El Duce Tapes probably would have been fairly shocking had it come out back in the 2000s, but Hoke’s El Duce persona seems fairly tame now after four years of Donald “El Duce” Trump’s presidency. Not Recommended. Aud: C.