Satire may not be the best revenge against AIDS but it goes a long way in Rosa von Praunheim's A Virus Respects No Morals. Irreverent and at the same time deadly serious, many-layered and ultimately enormously powerful, this is gallows humor as furious provocation. As a fantasy, it is painfully obviously inspired by reality and von Praunheim spares no one his poisoned harpoon. On the establishment side there is the reporter who turns pernicious voyeur in order to keep her public in-the-know, a cold-blooded scientist whose comeuppance comes from behind, a rash of "new psychologies," and forked-tongued government ministers whose plan to deport the infected to an island paradise known as Hellgayland (where Christmas comes once a month) sounds vaguely familiar. Most of the straight-world heavies seem to be women, but then von Praunheim himself plays an avaricious gay bath-house owner whose denial-for-dollars turns into a real-life, five hankie melodrama when the disease hits home. Meanwhile, chorines chant "Who would not feel the pain?" and the Army of the Sick and Impotent grows. Von Praunheim, a leading AIDS activist in Berlin, is still an underground artist and here his deep colors, agonized angles and vaudevillian antics serve up a genuine cry-hold the pathos.