The disparity in the comments for this film really speaks to how much Fassbinder is a matter of taste, although a lot of the complaints might be due to all the references within the film to other films and to Fassbinder's own life. I'll just add that I loved this film, but I enjoy all of Fassbinder's work, even to the point where they make you dizzy or despise the man and all he wants to say. He is definitely NOT for most people...especially those who don't appreciate dry German humor. I was laughing through this whole thing...especially the way he mocks the way the traveling film company treats the local Italians (the film was set in Spain, but I believe it was actually shot in Ischia.)

You might enjoy it more if you understand a few things I noticed about it: 1) No one really pointed out how autobiographical it is...to an extreme. Since Fassbinder is using many of the friends he worked with in experimental theatre, they are essentially all playing each other, and obviously enjoying it. This makes the movie essential for Fassbinder fans. 2) There's Eddie Constantine, so this, technically, is Fassbinder's contribution to the Lemmy Caution series, much as Godard did with "Alphaville". 3) Another cinephile noted the reference to "Last Year at Marienbad"; the entire broken style of the end of the film seems to me a gentle mocking of all the Nouvelle Roman and experimental film coming out of Europe at the end of the 1960s. 4) This makes an interesting comparison not just with "Day for Night", but also "The State of Things", Wim Wenders film-within-a-film. I've also seen this film called boring, and it certainly could be seen as such; making movies IS boring. Fassbinder's interpretation is actually racing along compared to Wenders', but Wenders always has his exquisite cinematography to fall back upon. If you call it "boring", it is only because you've failed to accommodate the intent of the film. If it was trying to tell an exciting story, yeah, you would see it as a failure. But as a character study of a film company on location (I believe they were actually filming "Whity" at the same time in Ischia),this is relatively quick, to the point (less!) and a great opportunity to see how the earliest Fassbinder envisioned his own early success.

"Warnung Vor Einer Heiligen Nutte" (1971) is everything else than an obscure, hermetic and highly stylized movie. Before you watch this masterpiece of the middler Fassbinder, you should read the biography by Peter Berling, "Die 13 Jahres Des Rainer Werner Fassbinder" (1992). Peter Berling was also the producer of the "Holy Whore" and acted a part in it. It is a very precise description of practically all members of Fassbinder's troop since the time of the "antiteater". However, the persons have been exchanged. So, f.ex. Magdalena Montezuma plays "Irm", i.e. Irm Hermann, who also is the dubbing voice of Montezuma. She accuses "Jeff Kocsinsky", the director of the picture "Morte o Patria", of having stolen her years, promised to marry her and have children with her. Jeff is of course Fassbinder, while Fassbinder himself plays the role of "Sasha", probably an invented role. However, it is astonishing that Fassbinder's family agreed to unwrap their own and not only personal but highly private problems in front of the public. A highlight in this respect is "Fred" alias Kurt Raab. He is the artistic director of the movie - as he was in his real life, a weak and subordinate creature depending on love or hatred of his always changing lovers. It shows anew what a magnificent actor Raab was. Lou Castel as Fassbinder alias "Jeff" does a very great job. The same man who is determined to make a movie against brutal state force is using on the set all imaginable means of force up to terror against his actors and staff. Concluding, I would even say that "The Holy Whore" is a example of bravura of how one can make a movie with basically nothing, if there is a group who is determined to create something together.

Fassbinder wasn't known for comic hijinx (if you've sat through SATAN'S BREW, you'd remember it),but probably the most sheerly pleasurable of all his movies is this rather premature but quite welcome self-parody.

The maestro's Bavarian-slob ripoff of Warhol's Factory is keenly lampooned in this oh-so-languid art-movie take on TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN. Fassbinder plays a grubby and wildly sadistic producer holed up in a half-swanky, half-tatty seaside hotel with half a movie in the can and no finishing funds. That's the Beckettian setup for a lobby full of achingly sexy and heroin-esque Fassbinder heroines, pretty boys getting their feelings hurt, drinks swallowed and thrown, and a lot of people getting yelled at in public. If that sounds like par for a familiar course, the difference is that here it's all played for yuks--but with such an exquisite deadpan you can practically hear R.W.F. smothering his guffaws behind the camera.