By Jim Ridley

"On top of the TV sits a collection of videos from an Arkansas fan that provided a couple of hours entertainment a few nights previous. The fan had directed a series of bizarre vignettes that include Satan sitting at a desk in the middle of the Ozark wilderness. Another involved a sheriff and his paramour having a fight, the local actors playing them doing so with hysterically vigorous ineptitude.

"'You old Scrooge!' screams the woman, accusing her lawman lover of neglecting her.

"'Scrooge! What about them moon-shaped panties I brung ya?' he protests in complete sincerity. Just mentioning the phrase 'moon-shaped panties' sends Lucinda into gales of laughter, and she repeats the words with the practiced ear of one who has lived in Arkansas."

—Margaret Moser, "Moon-Shaped Panties and the Saint of White Trash," The Austin Chronicle, October 26, 1998

And thus, after almost 25 years of working in absolute obscurity, the oeuvre of an Arkansas security guard and back-closet auteur made its first cryptic appearance on the Internet. The story goes that six years ago a package arrived at the home of singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, herself a native Arkansan. It was addressed simply to "Nashville."

Inside was a tape of original compositions: deeply felt but twisted '60s-style folk-rock, interspersed with instrumental dirges of horror-movie organ, spaghetti-Western atmospherics and heartbeat bass. A line in the accompanying note caught the eye of Williams and her friend Dub Cornett, a Nashville film and TV producer. It said that the music was used mostly for film soundtracks. The logical question followed: what kind of movie could go with that score?

That led Cornett to Phil Chambliss, a 51-year-old native of Camden, Ark., who bought his first 8mm camera in 1975 to commemorate a deer-hunting trip. Since then, Chambliss has made 27 films and videos of varying length over the past three decades: at 58 minutes, a 1992-3 blackmail saga called Pink Christmas (the source of the "moon-shaped panties" quote) is his Berlin Alexanderplatz. But it wasn't until last spring, at the Nashville Film Festival, that Chambliss had his first public screening.

Phil Chambliss

Since then, curators and programmers from California to Columbus, Ohio, have expressed interest in his work, and Chambliss's films will be shown at the George Eastman House's respected Dryden Theater in Rochester, N.Y., as part of a program of "outsider cinema." Ethan Coen, no stranger to the barbershop noir, is said to be a fan. By this time next year, Phil Chambliss may likely have gone from total anonymity to the newest holy grail for collectors of regional exotica. And therein lies a conundrum, as voiced by an audience member after his Nashville screening: "Do you think people are laughing at you or with you?"

"I write 'em to be funny, kinda like abstract art," Phil Chambliss says. He is talking from a cell phone during a night away from his job as a security guard on the graveyard shift for the Arkansas Highway Department. He has had this job for 32 years: it's a day gig, like Charles Bukowski's, that subsidizes his work. He makes $14.96 an hour, "the most I've ever made in my life, and you can mention that if you want to."

It has been an unusually rough day, worthy of one of his convoluted plots. Earlier this evening, Chambliss confides, he was involved in his first fistfight in many years. He went to pick up a woman and ran into her jealous companion. The fight ended when Chambliss clubbed his opponent with a flashlight, then an electric fan. The early morning hours find him winding down at a Camden car wash, where he says he might have to sign off quick: "These guys out here keep lookin' around my car."

"Outsider" doesn't begin to describe Chambliss's staggeringly odd films. The majority of his work consists of unhinged absurdist comedies, backwoods noirs, and morality plays filmed with cardtables and filing cabinets in the middle of some Ozark holler. The actors, made up mostly of neighbors and co-workers, appear to be reading off cue cards without their glasses. Long takes frequently end in people looking off camera or waiting uncomfortably for guidance, and the performers' bone-dry line readings and deep Southern twang give their lurid dialogue a surreal disconnect. Pilfered music cues erupt from out of the blue, and when a scene requires atmosphere, Chambliss just cranks up some recorded bird calls.

"I call them 'folk-art films,'" says Cornett, who comes from a deep rural background and has a reputation as an underground connoisseur. He's worked with Jacob Young, a West Virginia filmmaker best known for his oft-bootlegged documentary The Dancing Outlaw, a favorite among collectors of homespun weirdness. "If we live in an era where people decide to paint the Bible in a barn somewhere, out where nobody can see them, why aren't there organic filmmakers doing the same thing outside the system? That's what Phil does. He's the Dead Sea Scrolls of film as an art form."

A typical Chambliss film—if such a thing exists—is Shadows of the Hatchet-Man (23 min., 1982), a grisly tale of dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Shot in glorious black-and-white 8mm so grainy it looks like a dusting of sugar, it concerns a cheating husband who plans to blame his wife's murder on a rampaging hatchet killer. The plot suggests Skinemax standard-issue, but Chambliss's script, direction and working methods reduce the grammar of genre cliches to rubble.

After a traditional horror-movie shot of the killer sharpening his blade, the title appears over what looks like a yard-sale landscape painting, complete with posed deer. An actor playing the town sheriff sits bare-chested at his desk in front of an Arkansas flag, puffing a pipe and cradling a pump-action shotgun while James Bond music blares incongruously on the soundtrack. Every so often, Chambliss himself turns up as an abrasive TV reporter—a recurring figure in his films—to deliver breaking news about the killer's latest victim. "Miss Banks was 19 years old and was currently an employee of the Dub Wells Toy Shop," drawls Chambliss' newscaster into an ancient tape-recorder microphone, as the tracking on his VCR "newscast" goes haywire. "I can see she was a cute li'l ol' girl."

At first Chambliss's handmade melodramas seem like the ultimate so-bad-it's-good discovery, and then the movies' strikingly peculiar dialogue and unpredictable editing rhythms (cut mostly from VCR to VCR, or camera to camera) sink their hooks in a viewer's brain. Especially the dialogue, an endlessly quotable stream of non sequiturs, bizarre aphorisms and low-life fatmouthing that approaches ragged poetry. "I'd trade my place in hell so you could listen a little better," snarls the murderous husband to his wife in Shadows of the Hatchet-Man, after telling his girlfriend of his deadly intent: "All I need now is a plan and a hatchet, and I think you know the plan." Fed up with her prying roommate, the girlfriend snaps, "You don't know just how temporary you are"—a line Terrence Malick would kill to have written.

A kind of homegrown surrealism permeates most of the humor, as in his most recently completed film, 2002's The Mr. Visit Show. A pushy TV interviewer ambushes the proprietor of a "bird day-care center" on camera, grilling him about the character of another Arkansan, former President Bill Clinton. (They were in a jug band together.) "Let me say this and then I'll hush," the irritated farmer says. "If you was to take and cut off Bill's head, then there wouldn't hardly be any meat left." This appears to be a compliment. Responds his pushy interviewer: "I've got money...in two banks!" The subject turns the tables by robbing the host and cameraman on TV, then enacting the most lackadaisical fistfight in movie history in a cow pasture.

Watch enough of Chambliss's films, and running motifs and fixations emerge: deer hunting, fleshy women with bare midriffs, the invasiveness of television. The titles are always written in a font that might adorn an eighth-grade girl's notebook, with the "i's" dotted by stars. Above all, there is an indescribable mix of playtime and melancholy, of real people not quite losing themselves in make-believe. Actors deliver their lines, then break character just as Chambliss cuts—but it's not the actors who seem fake. It's the conventions they're acting out—the hidebound clichés of narrative moviemaking that routinely lull audiences into a collective stupor—that come off as bogus and intrusive.

"I'd call it a really crude, raw avant-gardism," says Nashville Film Festival artistic director Brian Gordon, who gave Chambliss his first screening. He cites the beginning of a 1995 Chambliss short called The Devil's Helper, in which two hunters encounter Satan's minion at an office desk in the woods. To evoke the thrill of the hunt, Chambliss cuts back and forth from the two men tromping through underbrush to a still photograph of a prize stag—a jarring juxtaposition of real and fake that triggers belly laughs every time.

Yet the effect has more in kin with experimental film than with the TV westerns and Sergio Leone films that Chambliss claims as his main influences.

That may be lost, however, on the sniggering hipsters who will inevitably become part of the Chambliss cult, or the snooty sophisticates who will write him off as a backwoods Ed Wood (just as they wrote off Ed Wood). More than a decade ago, a Little Rock film professor heard about Chambliss's films and invited his class to critique them on video. The filmmaker was mocked brutally, and he still bristles at the memory. "I was hopin' there'd be some braggin'," he remembers, "and instead there was this black guy sayin' I needed to be beheaded."

His Nashville premiere had its share of viewers who hee-hawed. As Gordon puts it, "Somebody who wants to 'laugh at the hillbilly' will get some satisfaction, even if I feel sorry for them." Cornett took note of the few who walked out. "This is just my jaded elitist view," he says, "but if those same people had been told it was something cool and popular that other people liked, they would have stayed."

But Chambliss was more encouraged by the people who stayed for the Q&A and walked around quoting his dialogue. He was also struck by the difference between his friends' reaction and that of the festival audience—especially at the moment in Pink Christmas when the white barber addresses a black teenager as "watermelon breath." There was a collective gasp from the good liberals on hand. "I could just tell people wanted to laugh but felt ashamed," Chambliss explains. "I hadn't heard that before."

For years, Chambliss has passed out films to friends and cast members, and they've rarely been seen outside his hometown, where the local electric company passed around a well-worn tape copy for years. Now, with Cornett's help, Chambliss wants to get his movies to a wider audience. He's also shooting his first music video, for Nashville singer-songwriter Dan Tyler, and finishing a long-delayed opus called The Pastor and the Hobo that stars the song leader at a local Baptist church. And he's already been warned by Cornett not to listen to anyone who wants to change his style.

"I'm going to do 'em like I've been doing," Phil Chambliss says. "If I try to make my films to suit you or this girl right here, I'm not makin' what I want." Then he mentions, just before signing off, that he's sitting in the same lumbering white sedan that plays a crucial role in Pink Christmas. This seems fitting. In the movies of Phil Chambliss, life and art are bound together as tightly as deer hunters and the Devil.

(This article appeared originally in Cinema Scope magazine. Many thanks to Mark Peranson.)