One of the most interesting bands to ever surface on the American music scene was a band called Kettle Cadaver. The hardcore band earned cult status during the 1990s due largely to their lead singer Edwin Borsheim whose many shock tactics on stage included self-mutilation – including genital mutilation. As well as being the frontman of this Southern Californian outfit Borsheim has also become a backyard wrestler and worked as a professional in the BDSM world where people paid him to torture them.
Over recent years though Borsheim has disappeared from public view. There were many rumours that he had died, it was a popular theory at the time that he would kill himself on stage one night during a show, but the new documentary Dead Hands Dig Deep shows that Borsheim is still very much alive and living in his own ‘house of horrors.’ I caught up with Australian director Jai Love who has put together the documentary.
“He’s not really up to much these days,” Jai tells me when I ask about what Edwin has been doing over the years. “After the band broke up, at the end of the 90s, he’s done a couple of one-off things every now and then, after that he just got really, really into other things like wrestling, stuff like that. He tried to do that for awhile and then he just got really mixed up in drugs and his own little spiral. He’s even isolated himself from the rest of the world, and that is pretty much what he has managed to do now. He’s been living like that for ten years now.”
As we talk about how Jai first learnt about Borsheim and tracked him down, he tells me. “I first heard about him when a friend gave me the Kettle Cadaver DVD, and I saw this guy Edwin Borsheim and all this crazy stuff back in the 1990s. I was about to start film school at the time. I was freshly eighteen, and I was into that kind of music – punk and metal and stuff like that – and when it was suggested I was like ‘oh that would make a great documentary.’ Then I saw the stuff that Edwin did, and I was like ‘oh my God this is crazy… I have to make a film about this!’ When we decided to do it and got the money to do it I was like ‘shit what do we do next’ because nobody had heard from him for about half a year and we didn’t even know if he was alive or not. People had gone out a few times to see him, but the way his property works is that he has a trailer out the front, like a motor-home, and then a shack that he built behind the trailer, then behind that is a house where he lives called The Black House and between all that is two or three killer dogs that would just rip you apart if you try and get in there. So whenever you go and see him, you have to call him, but he doesn’t answer the phone, he doesn’t like phones he says he is afraid of phones, so it was a nightmare to get a hold of him. Every time we went out there, he would never come out, so we weren’t even sure if he was in there and he was dead. Then his little brother Danny heard that we were from Australia and wanted to make a film and his whole family are into Mad Max so they have this fascination with Australians and Australian cinema like that, so Danny managed to get out there and in there and see him and then he convinced him to do the movie.”
“He was fine because I approached it by becoming his friend first,” says Jai when I ask what it was like to sit down and interview Edwin. We wanted to make the film seem like you were getting to know Edwin in the way as if you were there with us as opposed to doing an exposition on Edwin. It was more like trying to make it feel what it is like to first meet somebody and the little things that happen. I didn’t want it to be like him just sitting there and telling his stories I wanted people to see his personality. We really only had a couple of sit down interviews, and every time we seemed to do that it was incredibly f**king uncomfortable. It was horrifying because he would hate any kind of lighting… whenever we turned lights on he would say ‘oh my god it’s like a f**king beach in here’. He really didn’t like that, so whenever we tried to do those sit-down interviews to see what we could get out of him, it really didn’t go well.”
One of the striking things about Dead Hands Dig Deep is how much private footage it contains of Edwin so how was Jai about to get that all together? “Edwin has pretty much documented his whole life since he was fifteen years old. I’ve never seen anything like it, it was almost like he knew that one day somebody was going to try and make a film about him. It was all on a Handycam, but he has kept it all in this vault that he calls the blackest vault. Instead of getting him to hand it all over to me I got him to make tapes so he would these VHS tapes of things that he would think would be great for the movie. It was things like him playing in a garage or footage from various shows but then when he realised that we were interested in all aspects of his life he was like just take it all and use it in the film. He had all the backyard wrestling stuff because he had a wrestling ring in his backyard and there was all this footage of this crazy, insane stuff…. there was all this blood and stuff. He said he showed to a girl he had over once and she vomited. And that’s Edwin he loves to show you footage of stuff that he knows is going to make you uncomfortable. Every time we went over he would show us a new video that he had shot of his faeces because he thought he had contracted some kind of parasite and he thought that there was some kind of demon inside of him. So I had eight hours of footage of Edwin’s poop. So to work out what went into the film was really hard but in the end we just used what fitted in with the interviews with the other people. I even got showed stuff that was very incriminating because he used to work as a fetish dominatrix and he would torture people for money. Sado-machosists would come over to his house and then he would put them in this torture chamber that he has there and he would just torture them for 12 hours at a time and it was all filmed along with everything in his life. So he has all these videos of torturing women and it is crazy.”
Dead Hands Dig Deep is available on iTunes
Dead Hands Dig Deep is screening as part of The Monster Fest Travelling Sideshow in Sydney on March 9-11
Tickets for The Monster Fest Travelling Sideshow are on sale now at:
Event Cinemas George Street
505-525 George St, Sydney Australia
+61 (0)2 9273 7300
https://www.eventcinemas.com.au/Cinema/George-Street/EventsFestivals/MonsterfestTravellingSideshow#cinemas=15
http://www.monsterfest.com.au/events/monster-fest-travelling-sideshow
Single Session Tickets: Adult $21 / Concession $17.50
5 Film Multi-Pass: Adult $82.50 / Concession $71.50
10 Film VIP Pass: Adult $132 / Concession $110
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