Shot in eyeball-scorching Panavision, Jon Moritsugu’s Asian freak-out magnum opus shocked America when it was broadcast on television in the mid-90s.

Holly (Jenny Woo), Marvin (Jon Moritsugu), and Katzumi (Moritsugu again) are average Asian-American teenage siblings with not-so-average predilections for backstabbing, kinky sex, and drug-fuelled freakouts.

Neglected by their parents, the kids turn to outside “help” (including the scene-stealing Amy Davis, Moritsugu’s wife and longtime collaborator) in order to escape their bored existence. Naturally, this leads to gore killings, sex tapes, and the most hilarious phone conversations ever captured on 16mm film.

A candy-coloured hellscape that feels like an episode of Strangers with Candy filmed by Dario Argento during a three-day acid bender, Terminal USA is a crucial piece of 1990s alternative cinema, smart, shocking, and one of the most deranged films ever funded by American taxpayers.

In its highlighting of the unnerving and the otherworldly within the American immigrant experience, Terminal USA also sits alongside the work of West Coast punk contemporaries Roddy Bogawa and Gregg Araki. Produced by New Queer Cinema mainstay Andrea Sperling (best known for her collaborations with Araki) the film channels that movement’s anarchic energy while gleefully dismantling the clean-cut “model minority” myth.

This is the film Heathers wished it could be.

Content warning: This film contains violence, drug usage, sexual content, and racial slurs.

"Funny, anarchic, provocative and exhilarating. Recalling the works of John Waters, Mr. Moritsugu’s films are wild and aggressively alternative without descending into easy nihilism" NEW YORK TIMES, Mike Hale, 6-17-2015

"“Father Knows Best” meets “Pink Flamingos”… a post-punk soap opera about an Asian American family that single-handedly shatters the clean-cut, hard-working image of the model minority." NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

"Jon Moritsugu turns the American sit-com family on its head with TERMINAL USA, a post-punk, psychedelic picnic brimming with wholesome depravity." VARIETY