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Poverty and Spit! Poverty and Spit! THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981)


 Those of us who were punk rockers at some point in the 70s or 80s now feel old as fuck, clutching onto last ditch straws and first canes; our old hearts and puffy eyes trapped in middle aged, vice-tainted bodies, our tattoos gone to gray blobs, the safety pin holes in our ears and cheeks long scarred over, our livers shot from Hep-C and whiskey. But hey hey hey! In the words of this kid who sang for Black Flag before Rollins came along, below left...

 I was just a suburban poseur moping around the all-ages City Gardens shows in Trenton in the early 80s, smoking myself into a coma while standing in front of the stage, waiting, waiting, waiting... for one crappy opening punk act after another, to get it over with, so I could see the Replacements, Ramones, Iggy Pop, Replacements or X. Pogoing and slam dancing around until the skinheads took over and turned the whole front half into a war zone. Coming back to our parents' houses exhausted and alive, triumphant, to catch NIGHT FLIGHT on the USA Network. None of us ever got a chance to see Penelope Sheeris' punk-breaking ground anthem, DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981). It's never been on DVD or tape.... until this week.... Onetwothreego! Our whole fucking life is a wreck!

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Darby, sings into 'the mic' 
Now, at last the full tawdry skeevy glory of Spheeris' no-holds barred musical documentary can be seen and endured, from the apocalyptic audience bashing and riot starting of Fear's Lee Ving to Jon Doe giving out jailhouse tattoos. Shot on full frame 16mm, the film's never going to look like Kubrick or anything, and the sheer poverty-stricken messiness of the punk lifestyle is better experienced at arm's length anyway. I needed a Silkwood shower afterwards, especially post-the gaybaiting of Lee Ving, and so might you, Harvey. Are we kids or what?

Of all the interview subjects, X are the most charismatic, and Darby of the Germs the least, with terrible acne and townie teeth, playing with a tarantula at breakfast that is so normal and homey but just seeing this kid anywhere near a plate of eggs is enough to send me windmilling out of the room. Spheeris seems to film about six hours of a Germs show in what looks like a parent's basement, perhaps fascinated by his sheer loathsome druggy mania as he crawls atop speaker cabinets and crowds like Harpo Marx in the stateroom scene of NIGHT AT THE OPERA, his vocals dragging behind the 'rhythm' of the band like Angel behind the Generalissimo's automobile in THE WILD BUNCH. Too many film references? Fuck you! Jon Doe wouldn't think so. He references PERFORMANCE and GIMME SHELTER after a tussle breaks out in the similarly orange carpeted basement of Club 88.

What saves Darby from looking like some trainwreck intersection between Sid Vicious and pre-sobriety Iggy Pop is perhaps Spheeris' kind use of subtitles for the lyrics, all cute in the iron-on decal style Cooper font of the period. It's unusual and welcome considering the snarling incoherence. But the speed and downer mess of the Germs is like the frickin' Beatles compared to Slash Magazine writer Kickboy's godawful band 'Catholic Discipline" which we see play to an audience of around six bored people in a Chinese restaurant. Deliver us, Generallissimo Tso! The most disturbing bits come towards the end, with a couple of cute young boys utterly terrifying in their calm discussion of punching out girls and breaking kids' jaws with a tire chain. (Yet his own teeth are perfect!) and the vile gay-baiting rhetoric and unsubtle hatreds of Lee Ving, a kind of undeclared child of Travis Bickle and Sean Penn as the anti-Milk.

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Fear ("You talkin' to them?")

But it's all worth the slog if you're a true X fan, for the on-again off-again marriage/romance between Jon Doe and Exene Cervenka is one of the great punk rock love stories of our time. Even when they're at odds their music only flourishes, singing as frankly and honestly in one song as an entire Sam Shepherd play rolled into one playful glance and howled lyric. Doe was the inspiration for me becoming a bassist, which his bass guitar slid like a serpent across the dorm room and around my leg while the rest of the band was lamenting the loss of the old bassist. That very night I was playing in front of more people than the goddamned 'Catholic Discipline' ever saw. Not X, though. Even giving ratty jailhouse tattoos Jon Doe is magnetic, a future side gig as a screen actor all but assured and Exene is like a relaxed Lady Macbeth who's target isn't the king but the entirety of narrow-minded American adulthood. I remember Exene smiling beaming down at me after one big dude clocked a skinhead who was about to knock my lights out - It was a baptism - I know now that was no fluke.

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I don't even think there was the word skinhead yet - or thrash.

And that's another thing - we definitely wonder just how much Spheeris is being put on by these clowns, Claude "Kickboy" Bessy especially seems to consider himself some kind of media maven whose sneering hatred of everything and everyone provides the entirety of the punk movement with its voice, soul, and spine. But there's the feeling too that he's performing this iconoclast routine for Spheeris' cameras.

Fortunately this vast set includes both sequels (the second making real heavy metal into something funnier than Spinal Tap) and audio commentaries with Spheeris and more key interviews. And the third which takes a more runaway-squatter rights approach.

For me the punk-poseur scene dropped from my repertoire in 1986 when I found out all my (what today would be called Goth but then were just punk-poseur kids (back when 'poseur' wasn't necessarily bad - it just meant you weren't alienated from capital) in the 'Cure-Smiths-Siouxee' branch of the then-big tent punk family (near but not next to crossover-straight bands the more straight meat-eaters of us liked, such as REM and the Dream Syndicate) were all bi or gay and hadn't told me because they didn't know if my jammed gaydar was a result of being jut naive, closeted, or legitimately homophobic. Thus I peeled out in search of acid and hippies, my camp's former enemy. And I windmilled back into City Gardens over breaks, but slam-dancing and pogoing became moshing, where only big ugly skinheads (when they were still called 'baldheads') were really 'safe'. '

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X marks ze Monster
Well, I was too mellow to go full thrash, my parents weren't divorced or uptight to be a squatter; and I was too straight to be (what today would be called goth, there was no emo yet) and too fucked-up to be straight-edge. Without the black nail polish and eyeliner (as I used to wear) punk was just British, in America, hardcore was called 'thrash' and X, the Replacements, Violent Femmes, Husker Du, Clash, Ramones, Iggy, and Minutemen were all crossover artists, like the Clash, and then grunge splintered it still further, and the kind of vitriol spewed by the likes of Fear. "Let's have a war / so you can go die! / Let's have a war! We need the money! / Let's have a war: We need the space!" The kind of stuff one hair away from Skrewdriver or Prussian Blue.

Then again, hearing all these boys' preference for rough masculine contact and their general aversion to girls, it's not a stretch to peg the whole punk thing as stemming from a kind of Jenner-esque macho burlesque, the safety of punching over the terror of embracing, or as Florence of the Machines sings (and BRONSON suggests), "A kiss with a fist is better than none."

Florence and the Machines, incidentally, would have been classified punk in 1981, as was Patti Smith, Television, and REM and, believe it or not, Bob Marley (thanks to UK bands like The Clash and The Slits providing the crossover bridge

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That's so punky: Eugene decries the violence of his scene before confessing he's punched everyone he knows
I haven't pored through all the extras but already think the end shouldn't have been Fear's gay-bashing rhetoric but the 'X signing their Slash contract' a super 8mm extra wherein we finally get a glimpse of Penelope Spheeris herself, with punk-approved oversize suit jacket and panic-blonde hair and the righteous sense that a lot of the pointless steam-vent fight club anarchy of the film we had just seen might be at least a little bit just semi-insecure throat pouch puffery for Spheeris' camera, and at any rate you can't keep street cred and a record contract... and thanks god. Street cred is strictly poseur. What matters is a seven figure hit count; DIY has never been more alive, even if the 'alive' is mostly virtual.

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Spheeris, still smokin'
But it's not us who've aged, it's the vampire celluloid, the vampire forever-youth reverse Dorian Grays throwing their coiled angst upon the pyre that destroys nothing. Goddamned these kids seem younger than I ever was when I was their age. To think I once looked up in awe at the 'adults' Cervenka and Doe as they passed Budweisers out into the all-ages throng like proud parents at some kind of unholy graduation. Here they're like any other fresh-faced kids toughened up by being artistic, drug addicted, boozed-up, maybe bisexual or semi-insane, not getting enough sunshine or sleep, playing their hearts out under overhead lighting in community hall basements, giving themselves terrible home tattoos, and playing every lousy gig like it's the last show on Earth. Boy were they wrong. OnetoothreeFour!



Sever me Member, Scarlet Cinder! EX MACHINA (2015) and THE CREEPING FLESH (1973)

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Is western scientific dogma really just man's elaborate defense mechanism against the arcane force of his own feminine unconscious? Has keeping a sweet young innocent locked away from the world ever preserved her innocence, or protected her keeper... for long? Is there a correlation between these two questions? The eventual mauling the imprisoning male authority figure gets when his captive is finally freed is always relative to the length and virulence of her oppression, even if he created her. In myth, fiction, science, and what happens when all three roll together: Jungian archetypal psychoanalysis, the intractable if unspoken dictum is that the married royal Cinderella, the 'cinder from the flames' as it were, beheads her stepmother and throws her wicked stepsisters into the dungeon. Vengeance is sweet, sayeth the wronged. Drown them in fire, o faire Frances!

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The male of the species is, after all, ultimately an appendage. Woman's ovaries are the wellspring, connected directly to the divine; man's member is there like merely a postman at the gates of dawn, dropping of a package and then racing back into irrelevance, needing to high five and pass out cigars to prove he's essential to the process. Perhaps it's only through fiction he can enter those gates and allow his whole soul to be devoured by the voracious chthonic tide of Woman, to wear her skin without needing to lower lotions in baskets he must unlock the door to the foreboding attic, and let Mrs. Rochester prowl the halls at night.

This applies equally well to film history and to ancient alien 'star seed' theory, whether in science fiction revamps of the Pygmalion myth about the creation (and then restriction) of artificial intelligence (which indicates through fractal-mirrors, our own creation, and the God who hides us from His friends in shame while tinkering with the next edition), or the pulpy-but-true horrors of shock therapy, iron maidens, aerodynamic brassieres and other repressive devices (projection of patriarchy's demons onto the 'weaker' sex). Fiction allows us to acknowledge our prehistoric-alien-insemination roots in ways we can't if arguing them as truth with closed-minded positivists. It's only through Jung, via Freud, that we can grasp that some fiction is truer than fact, and that no amount of Jekyll tea totaling denial can suppress the Hyde alcoholic for long. Either let him out (in fiction, art, AA) or wind up in the lunatic asylum, buried alive in a sterile post-modern tomb of celluloid.


THE CREEPING FLESH
(1973) Dir. Freddie Francis
***1/2

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actual photo (w/child)
Seeing this for the first time, the same week as a fifth revisit to Horror Express (1972) has me wondering if perhaps the zeitgeist of ancient alien theory--which had just broke big a couple of years earlier with Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods-- had an effect on either of them, or every horror film from those years. Consider: both have an ancient alien brought back to life by heedless archeologists in Victorian times, when science was much more open to the possibility of all sorts of tosh (like phrenology!). In fact, mainstream archeology of the late 1800s resembles the fringe archeology of the early 1970s (as per: Scarfolk) in its openness to the validity of right brain thinking (ESP, seances, sea monsters, etc.). Both Express and Flesh star Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as semi-friendly rival scientists competing over a prehistoric humanoid fossil that just needs some jostling to come back to life and start dominating people through telepathy, telekinesis, and various precambrian maneuverings. In Horror Express, we learn the alien is a free-floating soul that was just possessing the frozen caveman (a kind of ancient yeti) who can drink earth creature's memories through their eyes and gain their knowledge, as well as hop to different bodies. In Creeping Flesh the word nephilim or 'titan' is never bandied, but it's clearly what it is, with its goalie mask skull and gigantic skeleton merely needing water to regrow its flesh, its blood ripe with undiluted evil, the kind gods might make floods (and Ice Ages) to erase from their chalkboard earth. Both beings have ancient alien written all over them and perhaps because of the Jules Verne-style liberation of the era, safely poised between the air balloon and the passenger plane, between the ages of religious dogma and scientific dogma, are utterly freed of all the usual dismissive hamperings; no close-minded PM or colonel (such as in Five Million Years to Earth) or witch-burning Christians hamper these Cushing and Lee on their journey into the ancient future. Yet in Flesh, there are those whom Lee and Cushing would sandbag mighty low, and they are Cushing's nympho-schizophrenic wife and lovely daughter, and his lab monkey.

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Cushing w/ Red Angel wife Emily (Catherine Finn)
Flesh starts with Cushing  returning to his lovely mansion with a gigantic prehistoric humanoid skeleton in tow and a big grant on his mind. His virginal, locked-away daughter Penelope (Lorna Helibron) is excited to see him but of course Cushing's more excited to play with his big skeleton, and he forbids her from looking in his laboratory or upstairs in mummy's room. The wife recently died, in half-brother Christopher Lee's asylum, but Cushing told Penelope she died in childbirth, so as to not touch off her madness, as if a whiff of scandal would awaken the madness, ala Irina Dubrovna or Madeline Usher.

In his tearful flashback her descent into the nympho/schizo maelstrom is brilliantly rendered by director Freddie Francis as a splotch of Vaseline blurring a stack of teddy bears in the background, seeming to grow larger as the camera slowly zooms in on her, and there's grim echoes of Argento's Deep Red in her madness and color scheme. Finally working up the nerve to invade mom's scarlet boudoir she's soon wandering the streets in her mom's red dress, eyes alight and jaw clenched like she's on her first big coke high or really good acid. Her drug? Ancient Alien blood, like quinoa, or the vamp blood powder mixed and drunk by the debauched libertine in Taste the Blood of Dracula.

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Penelope (Lorna Helibron) gets her first coke high

Speak of which, I'd just caught Deep Red (1975) on El Rey earlier that evening, and was reeling from the idea that Argento's film was made just two years after Francis' film, as one is like the post-Freud psychosexual shattered mirror reflection of the other's pre-hysteric lobotomy-and-hysterectomy-happy misogynist medical community of 19th century Britain. Each involves a paranoid schizophrenic mother's sins outing in the singing knife of the progeny, and the ultimate trauma of seeing your father killed on your birthday (in a truly bizarre flashback where the son is deliberately made to seem like an automaton of the sort one sees coming out of cuckoo clocks or Macy's Xmas windows). The realization from this being a kind of profound 'we are the gods' own robots" subject to short-circuiting when presented with unfathomable horror.

Cushing's desire to protect his daughter from mom's madness isn't 'merely' his own projection-cum-symbolic repression of his own shadowed feminine or a scientific awareness of her genuine latent paranoid schizophrenia, it refuses to name one or the other, the way in Polanski's films of the same period people are paranoid and everyone really is out to get them. If Weimar Germany was as repressed as Victorian UK, and Emil Jannings ran an insane asylum, the ending of Angel might have been very, very different.

Cushing's inability to accept any guilt results in his jumping the gun like old Janice Starlin of Starlin Enterprise with her wasp serum but man is it worth it: as with the chaste wives and maidens of Hammer, once she's 'turned', Penelope lets her hair down, tarts up her frock, and turns drop dead gorgeous. Seeing her all crazy-eyes in mom's scarlet dress, chased down the street after gashing a sailor with a broken bottle, the red dress tearing around dim magic hour dawn old London street corners is one of the highlights of my cinematic year!

Science and sex marches on, and both have the eternal aim of preventing the scythe-time-swiping maenads from slicing a their members off at the root. Avast ye, mark the way the fleshy finger of the Creeping nephilim giant Cushing's holding in the second from top photo atop; allowed to look like a cut-off dick it is, which is where I got me title. Clever alliteration, aye mate? Have at thee!
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EX-MACHINA
(2015) Dir. Alex Garland
**1/2

Fussy, sterile, hipster, and inert this story of a prototype AI named (what else?) Eva has been told better elsewhere, and I mean recently, even calling the AI the same damn name. There's the West-German Eva; and Ava in The Machine from 2013 (which also has an earlier Asian prototype with a punk cut whispered to in order to instigate the uprising) - the same year as the "Be Right Back" episode of Black Mirror which features the same actor--Domhnall Gleeson. And those are just the ones I've seen. I mean, I get that it's a futuristic riff on Eve, but Jeeze Alex, if you want to be intertextual, call her Pris.... or Ash... ley... and have her say "I want more life... fucker."

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Awkward nerd Caleb (Gleeson)--an employee of a future version of a Google-style search engine-- is packed off for a week to do some top secret research with his burly bald bearded billionaire boss Nathan (the wearingly ubiquitous Oscar Isaac) living in a big post-modern sterile movie-less locked-down research mansion in the middle of the Norwegian fjords with his exercise equipment, fully-stocked bar, and cadre of pleasure models and experimental tech, a bit like Dr. Coppelius from Tales of Hoffman crossed with Omni-publisher Bob Guccione (Caligula) if he hid out on an Island of Lost Souls like he was Dr. Moreau shopping for a Mr. Parker to try out his Lola the Panther Woman and picking dopey, can't-relax super awkward squaresville programmer Caleb, who could handle the situation a dozen better ways than his dorky mixture of smarm and insecurity to hopelessy entangled in today's tech-noir cubicle/coffee shop tables. As Ava, Swedish model-actress Alicia Vikander is beautiful and properly inexpressive, but maybe I'm showing my decadent age as that whole granny dress crew cut Williamsburg hipster thing she rocks leaves me cold, though it could be I dated a few girls with that same androgynous Holly Hobby look 'for real' in the pre-Friendster chatroom era. Cue Silent Bob's post-Selma sexual shudder!

But Nathan is actually worse, seizing on his superiority to passive-aggressively bully Caleb, to basically treat him like a rat in a maze given the challenge of testing the next dog down in the subservient pecking order, 'the woman,' in an even smaller maze. Nathan thinks he's invented a genuine real alien intelligence, one that thinks for itself and its own self-interest rather than merely follows its imitation snob algorithims; and if the film made more of the idea that he considers himself just the means by which evolution supplants itself it would be a good film, but it's hung up on all that artsy bourgeois surface. Filmed in a beautiful but depressing Nordic scenery hotel where every room is either off limits or openable with a pass card (which can change in an instant to trap you wherever your are), with no TV or stereo (but who cares since Caleb has his little iPod?) it's paradise if you've tailored it all to your own needs, but in Caleb's situation it's like that overpriced spa where they freak out if your toenail scratches their perfectly-stressed industrial concrete floor, all while urging you to relax and let it all hang out. I loathe those sort of places. I feel like I'm sleeping in the middle of an overpriced boutique hotel, adding up my every breath of oxygenated air via remote micro-scale sensors. How can I relax in a room where I'm thirsty and hungry and sleeping next to an array of candies and drinks that I can't touch unless I want to feel guilty and humiliated paying $40 for a goddamned Diet Coke mini, even if it's someone else's money? I mention all this in case you wonder why I'm so unhappy with this film, to illuminate my prejudice. Naturally, your mileage may vary.

It's a future where, as I feared, it seems there is no longer a difference between the store and the home, and the sound of rich people snickering at your every non-gauche thought is audible within the rustle of the leaves. AI testing is apparently common, to the point that testing AIs is a whole craft unto itself (we've come a long way since the Voight-Kampff, baby), and Caleb's got a load of tiresome textbook questions, and won't even try to drink like a normal person (at first), or ask to borrow a pleasure model (at first), so we hate Caleb for being so out of the moment, and hate Nathan for rubbing his face in it. The only good wrinkle with Caleb is a moment where he can't even tell who's real and who's not anymore, which recalls a great, hilarious bit in Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (not in Blade Runner), but the best we can say about Nathan is he likes to get hammered, but if you're drinking with robots, ain't that drinking alone? And I say this as someone who considers W.C. Fields a person while I'm drinking in the morning alone watching International House over and over. But Fields, preserved in 1933 amber liquid and film stock, is more alive in my stoner 1995 living room than the characters of Ex Machina within the context of their little boutique 'chamber piece' future. Is that a metaphor maybe for a closed-off ever-shrinking sense of the public space, of the non-digital, or just writing by someone who, like Terence Malick or Kubrick, got called a genius once too often and so stopped listening to the heartbeat of the world instead of expecting the world to just listen to his, never getting a straight answer from the acre of awed doters as to whether it's already been been done or worse, dumb.



Watching Garland put his well-trod story through its paces I was a little reminded of the first time I saw Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket-that is, the second half, thinking I was in for some real genius of the sock-blowing order, but coming out thinking Kubrick's glacial slowness had resulted in him being about five years behind the curve - because a Vietnam pop culture inhumanity satire choked up with jingoistic jargon, ridiculous pop songs ("The bird is the word") and doublespeak (M.O.U.S.E) had been done and re-done, the only thing left being the kind of self-aware misogyny of more than one man trying to size up and conquer/understand/destroy/mate with - an alien/unknown wild woman (the VC sniper, a robot, a madwoman), which is pure myth, rather than a style, so will never age even as it's older than time. In fact it's all that's fresh in Ex Machina. When it presumes it's breaking new ground and asking tough questions about the future of artificial intelligence and what constitutes 'free thinking' it's like Hardcore Zen "master" Brad Warner smugly bitching out a barista over his latte's temperature. Films like Android, Creation of the Humanoids, the Machine, Demon Seed, Terminator: Salvation, and The Matrix--might be kind of gonzo-nuts, but they go all the way around the track nuts--like a crazy hopped-up hare before crashing into the wall and bursting into flames--and that's a Zen master I'll give my steel pot to any day; Garland's film plods inexorably forward like a jewel covered Huysmans tortoise, pretty in the ambient light but only going 1/10 as far, like that's some kind of crazy first instead of a sane twentieth. Only in the female-male dichotomy--the Pygmalion-Trilby hybrid--does this Machina work, and even there... it works anemic. Give it the nephilim blood and let all the bitches loose into the Freddie Francis dawn rather than just a ribbon trenchant faceless street corner reflection B-roll. And if those dentatas should castrate you for damages already endured, well, at least you did something to deserve it. And at least she had to touch it first, right buddy? If you did it yourself, well, you might go blind and have missed all those views....




Summer of Streaming II: Post-Giallo Nightmare Logic la Netflix

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Dream or Nightmare logic: a lazy way for European directors to just go nuts with non sequiturs and not have to worry about storyline coherence or is it a daring approach to dissociative Freudian void delving based on the symbolist and surrealist movements of the early 20th century?

a: Yes
b: magenta.
c: hollyhocks
d. Mrs. Claypool
e. I'll fucking cut you, man.

2. European art cinema can be very boring and opaque if you're careful. But if you're not--if you're, say, dosed or delirious or bored into falling into a trance, then its abstraction makes perfect 'sense.' Falling half-asleep while watching Rollin or Jess Franco's earlier work, for example, is a truly psychedelic experience, and very hard to avoid. Would you agree?

a. seven
b. no

3. There are five easy ways to understand Italian drive-in dream logic, all based on the Carnival of Souls principle:

a. DEATH: The protagonist is already dead and/or stuck in an endless reincarnation loop stuck in the amber of hell/heaven time.
b. AMNESIA: They have amnesia but don't even know it - they try to hide it, the way you don't want to admit you don't remember someone who comes up and knows your name. The result of lots of drinking in the swinging 60s-70s.
c.  DREAM: Dreaming while awake, caught in a web of true myth, where waking consciousness and unconsciousness have lined up perfectly, like two overhead transparencies.
d. ACID: They're tripping their faces off (LSD was the party drug du jour).
e) INSANITY - They're remembering or recounting from a psych ward.
f) All of the above, for in a way they are all the same. 

Which of these 42 ways is the real one?
a. It doesn't matter, man.
b. Remember that in Europe the language barriers are more immediate and the past is older, than in America. In Europe, a 70s B-movie can take place in a real castle, or a condemned art nouveau mansion cheaper than building a single Hollywood set, so a modern French model in a turn-of-the-century vampire gown running loose amidst the Gothic spires is not only cheap to film, it has so much post-modern frisson it creates a truly 'all times all the time' dream logic loop all into itself. And if the lips don't match the voices, even if there are subtitles, that's okay - a poetic monologue voice over (using words wrote long enough ago the poet falls into the public domain) wraps it all up with a patina that just screeches with elegant subtlety. 

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Beyond the Black Rainbow (top: The Strange Colour of your Body's Tears; Berberian Sound Studio)

For this festival we're talking of a return to the art of those pre-slasher death-poetic times, for eccentric visionaries in Europe--Franco, Rollin, Fulci, Argento-- knew they could go nuts with their zoom lenses and post-modern refraction, with their anti-fascist subtexts and surreal castle-running as long as they delivered lashings of sex and ultra-violence their profit-minded producers demanded. Even Antonioni had to stuff orgies into Red Desert, La Notte, Blow-up and Zabriskie Point; Bardot had to have a nude scene in Les Mepris to justify the expenses of color and Cinemascope...

It was a different time, before the derelict fringe theaters at the edge of America closed. And kids watched tapes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead until they were numb to all but Hostel, Devil's Rejects, Saw, Wolf Creek. Compared to that madness, the razor slash black glove murders of what Mondo Macabro calls 'Eurosleaze' seem almost quaint.

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You and the Night

And so we come to this post-modern age we live in, the last pre-pornographic gasp of mainstream cinema when returning to forgotten old styles and genres is not only fun and rewarding (hence It Follows and Duke of Burgundy, the two best films of the year, though neither seems to be from even this decade) it's easier than it was even back then when the films were released. Many of these old films were washed out pan and scanned blurs but now glow restored by loving labels. And so new films spring up paying homage to the post-modern psychedelic wellspring of experimentalism created by early Argento, late Antonioni, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava, Brian de Palma, Michel Soavi and of course.... the music of Ennio Morricone, Goblin, and Bruno Nicolai.


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The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears

And atop the crest of the post-modern alienation resurgence lurks 'the Darionioni Nuovo' the New post-Dario Argento-Antonioni wave-- Peter Strickland, Helen Cattet and Bruno Forlanzi, Sebastian Silva, Nicolas Winding Refn, Panos Cosmatos, and the post-Carpenter/Morricone music of Sinoa Caves, M83, Tom Raybould, Cliff Martinez, and Rich Vreeland. It's a new setting sun. the two alienation-cum-Freud dissociation style used together to indicate all that is best about red desert crimson rivers of pain and ecstasy, of post-modern disaffect that uses our expectations of a coherent linear narrative against us with the result being, in the right conditions, the most exalted of transcendental weird epiphanies. These young filmmakers use their audience's presumed familiarity with film history, with fairy tales, with Italian horror, with the 70s and sex, with the French New Wave and Betty Blue,  L'Aventura and Easy Rider, as a kind of metaphysical third heat paint brush. The result is what art cinema should always be striving for, an erasure of the line where narrative classical cinema ends and avant-garde experimentalism begins. Madness coheres like a boil atop modern alienation's callouses, and our our own vivid imagination becomes a finger pointing at how innate and irremovable is our compulsion to craft a frame, an order, a meaning, a reason, a psychosocial iconography onto even the most elusive and elliptical of texts. It's only when the symbols are there but we can't connect a single one that we're finally free. So line these up in your list, see them all in order, all at once--obey.... obey... and let go of that tightening noose around your mind called language.

See also:
STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS 
Bad Acid 80: Italian Horror Drive-In Dream Logic


1. PASSION
(2012) Dir Brian De Palma
***

De Palma's Italian modernizing of the Hitchcock homage has kicked back in for the 21st century, crafting old school returns to form like Femme Fatale and this loose remake of the French film Love Crimes and cousin of Soderbergh's Side Effects, which as Alan Scherstuhl notes "ground that other girl with the dragon tattoo through something like the same pharmaceutical Hitchcockisms."  Not unlike Fatale, Passion met with critical hostility from a knee-jerk press to busy sneering at the unrealistic excess and clueless misogyny to notice the sexy genius at work, picking up where Hitchcock left off in proving suspense can be crafted by using only cinema, with almost no reference to the real, except its intertextual relation to other films. If the film came out in 1973, those same critics would be worshipping it today, since Pauline Kael would be around like a protective lioness for edgy imperfect films so anathema to boring 'white elephant' Oscarbait. But here on Netflix, Passion finds its true home, for the giallo genre of which De Palma was an American cousin (see: Two Hearts Stab as One: De Palma's and Argento's Reptile Dysfunction) was nothing if not savvy about the obsessive alienation caused by the endless proliferation of image, foreseeing the frozen terror of having too many options, of choice now implicating viewers in ways the old three-channel system could not. As an heir to the work Argento cannot continue with (good god he sucks now), De Palma's films work best when situated in the frame of its marquee neighbors. Here the boardroom lesbian betrayals and seductions, the split screen with the ballet, all add up to a curious and sometimes titillating exercise in pure bravura style, but so fucking what? Pretend it's a futuristic thriller coming out in 1978 and that it's not a movie at all, it's a lesbian fantasy Catherine Zeta Jones ishaving while in jail in the unwritten Side Effects sequel. So be like the Zeta one and enjoy. Frickin McAdams is the hottest thing ever, man, and brings so much duplicitous brio to her role she's like her old Mean Girl self grown up for the long con.




 2. KISS OF THE DAMNED
 (2014) Dir Xan Cassavetes

Bearded screenwriter Paolo (Milo Ventimiglio) meets alluring but stand-offish Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume) but they can only hook up if he becomes a vampire, cuz she gonna bite him. Love finds a way and five Twilight films are condensed to the opening act of a low budget but artsy and vivid retro-esque vamp tale from the daughter of John Cassavetes. With a score by Steven Hufsteter that twangs towards vintage Morricone without overdoing it, and a delicate romantic chemistry between the hauntingly alluring actors who underplay just right, Cassavetes proves herself quite a talent. The beautifully photographed domestic bliss really sinks in for us, so when Djuna's wild child sister Mimi (Roxane Mesquida) shows up in need of a place to recover after laying waste to her last party town residence, we recoil in frustration like we're Gene Tierney cockblocked by apple-cheeked cherubs in Leave Her to Heaven. It's not set in the past or anything but Cassavetes is clearly showing love and savvy to Jean Rollin's mythopoetic dream world and it hooks us in with the giddy high of feeling like we've just been welcomed into the in-crowd. 




3. BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO
(2012) Dir Peter Strickland 
***1/2

While we wait for his wildly acclaimed Duke of Burgundy to come to Blu-ray, the Argento stylistic anti-misogyny, Bergmanesque post-modern meltdowns and Lynchian "no hay banda"-ism of Strickland's memorable debut Berberian Sound Studio add up to a deeply unsettling visually (and most importantly aurally) seductive post-structuralist fantasia wherein a reserved Brit sound mixer (Toby Jones) is hired for some reason to work on a horror film in 70s Rome. We never actually see the film they're working on, which just adds to the unsettling frisson. No visual violence can really match our sickening imagination, aptly mirrored in the sickening dead-inside feeling overtaking Jones as he rattles the chains, crunches heads of lettuce, drenches it all in echo (from the fractions of script and scenes the film seems one part Argento's Suspiria, one part Soavi's The Church, and one part Fulci's City of the Living Dead). Strickland trusts his expert blocking and cagey actors and actresses in and around the studio's tight places, and though the rudeness of some of the macho Italian filmmakers got on my nerves, it's supposed to, indicating the corrupt, decadent fucked-up misogyny of Italy runs thick as blood under the giallo surface, and this is a masterpiece of enigmatic self-reflexive horror, with all the ingredients of an average Italian trash classic reassembled like a collage into a making-of fantasia that puts broader self-reflexive stuff like Shadow of the Vampire or A Blade in the Dark to shame, and approaches the greatness of Irma Vep, StageFright, and The Stunt Man.

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4. STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS
(2013) Dir. Helen Cattet y Bruno Forlanzi
***1/2

Hélène Cattet et Bruno Forlani, cinema's first and only mixed gender / race / nationality directing couple have been setting my head on fire ever since their 2009 feature debut AMER. I was so blown away by their unique mix of modernist experimental and post-modern 70s Italian horror narrative that I even coined a term to describe them, and a few other filmmakers who have found a creative wellspring in the updating and abstracting and melding of classic Argento, Morricone, and Antonioni, the Darionini Nuovo. Argento may not have made a decent film since the mid 90s, but this pair has taken his blazing primary color iconography and shattered it into a million psychosexual grim Freudian mind-meld slivers. Granted Forlani/ Cattet's unique looping style will no doubt prove alienating after about twenty minutes to people who don't know Suspiria or Bird with Crystal Plumage like the black of their gloves, and who don't swoon at the gorgeous ironwork maze of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance slashed out before them like a blood bouquet against obsidian skies. But even those of us swooning over the ironwork maze of art nouveau architecture and Jungian psychosexual mythic color-coded resonance might need a break halfway through. Don't worry, the joy of streaming is you can just stop and pick up later where you left off. Or start over. There's no difference. So go, run away back to your linear narratives como un po'vigliacco. This split-screen of a couple will still be a thousand heres at once.


5. BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
2010 Dir. Panos Cosmatos
***1/2

Michael Rogers is a batshit crazy psychiatrist named Barry Nyle, who keeps scanner-style mutant girl Elena (Eva Bourne) under sedation in a futuristic Rothko-cum-Kubrick orange or red or yellow room, and tries to analyze her through her a thick protective glass, while jotting down 'notes' and slow-as-molasses-style going even more insane. He also has special super tall robot-like guards called sentinauts and a weird white triangle device that can deliver sound vibrational (presumed) shockwaves to knock Elena to the ground and (presumably) jam her brainwaves if she tries to explode any heads or walk out the door. As the crazy score by Sinoia Caves heats and throbs and pitch modulates around the bizarre retrofuturistic dome which includes the office/drug den of a terminally ill junky, the Buckminster Fuller-ish founder of their geodesic complex. In a flashback to 1966 we see this guy taking Barry on his deep dish drug trip (LSD was legal then and being used by forward-thinking psychiatrists all around the world, including Canada); his trip resembles the 'Beyond the Infinite' section of 2001 and judging by the third eye drawn on his forehead and his patience with letting his face melt and dissolve, we figure he must be ready to transform... but into what. But then he's reborn in an oil slick, crawling out of a black circle like a reptile from its egg, and latching onto the woman, some woman... I don't know...his wife? Elena's mother? Does he kill her by ripping her throat out with his teeth, or is that an ejaculation? Is she coasting on an orgasm, or is the light going out of her eyes? Or is he remembering his birth? Dude, I've been beyond the black rainbow too and I didn't end up killing anyone, so what's this guy's deal? We know Cosmatos's deal at any rate: a glacial melding of Canadian retrofuturistic 70s horror (Scanners, Blue Sunshine) impossible to categorize masterpiece so far ahead of its time it's past hasn't even happened yet. The imagery and the music is the thing... is Cosmatos our new Kubrick? Give him a real script and find out! 


6. ROOM 237
(2014) Dir Rodney Ascher
****
Now we come to the dividing line between present and past, literally, moving from post-modern giallo to TV movie giallo and bizarro refractability. With Ascher's fascinating documentary we understand the impossibility of a text ever meaning anything, regardless of the author's intention. So freed of all understanding, we enter the realm of madness and all is illuminated, and terrifying: first because paranoid psychosis is very contagious so as we hear these crazy theories about what every little detail means we begin to get scared by this movie all over again, for now we realize the insanity that appears when we lose all contact with the outside world. Artists try to work with it, theorists riff on it, and the writer drowns in it. Forget about being reduced to a simple icon, the SHINING is all about losing all connection to icons, all signifiers, until objective consensual 'meaning' vanishes into the fog of the purely subjective. Good riddance! (more)



7. LISA AND THE DEVIL
(1974) Dir. Mario Bava

Elke Sommer's on holiday but when her tourist bus stops in a quaint Spanish villa she reacts strangely at the sight of an old fresco with a demon that looks like Telly Savalas amongst assorted grisly Middle Age wonders. When she sees the lollipop-sucking cigarette-voiced hipster himself buying a mannequin in an antique store, she's thrown into what the Aborgines call 'dreamtime' and Carlos Castaneda calls 'nonordinary reality' and what Bava might call 'Hell.' Obsessed by a little musical carousel of macabre figures chronicling the endless cycle of life after life, she begins to wake into that special nightmare where you turn around and suddenly your parents and everyone you know is gone and you're all alone and lost in an empty narrow streeted maze. She winds up tangling with the malignant director of Freiburg Dance Academy and Harry Lime's suicidally loyal girlfriend, Alida Vialli who tries to cockblock her Satanic-looking son, Alessio Orano, who has been so.... lonely. Sommer looks just like his dead wife and when he later corpses her by his dead wife's sleeping skeleton it's so creepy on so many levels you just have to laugh. Was that vile phrase 'corpsing' born in this film? Mario, you make Edgar Allan Poe seem like a sober health nut.

Anyway, it's all cool as this is all just a tape we played long ago, as Savalas' mannequins come to life as Sommer's past lovers or whomever is needed, a crazed killer keeps knocking them off. Funeral marches are held on the spot as the body's wheeled around on serving carts. The architecture and gaudy antique claptrap of this old villa begins to weigh down with all its centuries of heft. I could have used some more of Bava's purple gel spots. It's almost over-lit in places, but every frame is so jammed with things to see, until you get that sick sad feeling like you've spent too much time indoors amongst dusty banalities on a sunny afternoon in the country with mother.

Then, there's the wardrobe, always a hit or miss affair with Bava, depending on your affection for the giant pointed collar out over smoking jacket lapel look. I still rock that look to this day but even I wouldn't get away with the size of the collar over Orano's jacket. Holy cats. But then there's the sickening key lime green of Elke Sommer's raincoat and shoes, a look that she fortunately changes out of at the villa, and when it's back on at the end we finally get why it's that color. And her horrible make-up makes sense when we see just how much of a mannequin she looks like in profile. The film is full of things like that, so never doubt the master! Trust the mighty Bava acolyte Tim Lucas. Let him guide you through the rapids. Carla Savaina's soundtrack really tries for Ennio swank as an interesting music box-sort of deal with an endless parade of birth to death and back again figures lulls Eckland into a hypnotic trance remembering a past life. The cumulative result isn't exactly powerful but it is amusing in its DC comics House of Mystery sort of way, and Savalas has fun until the end. You just might want to go hunt down an episode of Kojak. I was too young for that show, but sure do dig him in this, Dirty Dozen, and On her Majesty's Secret Service. (1)

Selected Shorts:
KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER
(1975) "The Trevi Collection"(ep.14)


Kolchak on the other hand, I knew and loved. And it was even on early enough I could stay up to watch it. And in this episode we're reminded there's no cheaper yet creepier effect than casting and dressing humans to look like particular mannequins, then interchanging them with the actual mannequin in the background of shots, alternating mannequin and posed human in alternating shots until you go insane. Bava used this trick in Lisa and the Devil albeit more overtly. Like Tourist Trap Kolchak keeps it ambiguous. And this witchy episode is one of everyone's favorites from the era. Right up there with the lizard monster in the tunnels, the headless biker, and the ghostly Native American shaman. Dig man... canceled after one season.

"Danielle"Starring Jennifer Lawrence
Saturday Night Live - Season 38, Episode 11 Time: 43.52-47 - 47:08

The movies this four minute spot parodies are all-too familiar for anyone who remembers pay cable in the 80s. They clearly know their stuff and Lawrence as always is perfectly game to go along, brilliantly capturing the flat but sonorous voice dubbing --clipping sentences together.... tofitthelips as they move... and the crushing banality of it all -- hahaha, look kids I'm a bufoon... it's priceless and worth the finding, for it captures perfectly the icky sensation of watching Europeans try to act like Americans on vacation, and pretend orgy mongering is natural even in the swinging 60s-70s--if you want to stick on this bent - check out Danger 5 if you haven't already. Shaken...and garnished with lemon peel.


8. THE IRON ROSE
"La Rose de Fer" (1972) Dir Jean Rollin
***
The French love their poets the way we love rock stars; for the French the songwriter-producer is famous and often the lover or husband of the chanteuse. This is normal, not something for Entertainment Weekly to passively sneer at. In other words, they love writers as well as performers, and understand that the actors aren't just making this stuff up on the spot. Most of all, though, they love French poets like the Brittany's own Tristan Corbière, one the crowning jewels of the Symbolist 'dead before 30' dozen, with a yen for eternity. I'm not sure which part of Françoise Pascal's final monologue/ voiceover during her nude cross-bearing on Rollin's favorite beach reverie, is from him but I do value that it's hard to tell and that aside from an ominously black train parked in the middle of nowhere and an opening wedding ceremony (at which both characters seem to clearly not belong --as if already ghosts) the film takes place over one trip to the graveyard where a pleasant and banal Rohmer-esque date turns into a nightmare and then a surreal mournful cry for death, for the loving embrace of la mortalité, finalité et l'éternité. 

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Every student filmmaker knows that cemeteries are the best places to shoot films cheap (superstition keeps most people away; and the stones add artsy death drive heft), and a cast of just two actors walking through it even easier -- you don't even need a script, just shoot your actors frolicking or running or freaking out and figure out what the reasons are later via voiceover), but that's part of Rollin's charm. There's a naturally morbid air to Euro-sex anyway, and if Pascal's deranged and demure performance and the plethora of human bones all over the place (Paris has sewers of them). And is there any image more quietly under-the-skin creepy than this image above left? Non.



A purist might wonder how either this or the last film is truly post-retro, rather than pure terrobut again - this is eternity we're talking about. And anyway, it's short, so you might not even have time to wonder where the hell it's going. Just now he boy and girl are dressed in bold primary colors mainly so we can see them in the fading light. There's no glaring spots or anything making Jean-Jacques Renon's photography all the richer for being so dark without going murky, so much more lyrical and poetic--especially when the sun comes up and all the the conqueror worm's snacktime looms. Poe would dig it, too. It's like more Poe-esque in its obsession with death of love through poetry than a little eyed joe or damned if I know. I chose this over the once-thriving Rollin collection on Netflix (now worn down to just a sprinkling, most of which aren't even set in a distant fairy tale past. Iron Rose is decidedly outside of time and space --a few cars passing and the lovers' modern dress instead of horses aside. Even the wedding could really be from any decade..


9. YOU AND THE NIGHT
"Les rencontres d'après minuit" (2013) Dir Yann Gonzalez

You'll either like it or think it's too jejune, or maybe both, but certainly you won't think it's sexy because it's too French for that --rather, its loving. If Radley Metzger and Jean Cocteau collaborated on an off-off Broadway production at some SoHo gallery, this might be it. The French sounding Mme Jannings notes "This is a movie that cannot be seen with the eyes of evasion. It is a movie that needs to be watch it with the eyes of the soul as well as the physical eyes, without prejudgments, and without taboos." Oui, mademoiselle, it may have that pleased-with-itself air that most Americans have bullied out of them by third grade. But it has a warm heart, and if you wish to understand Cocteau, which is to understand France, there you see? It is better at what it's trying to do than Greg Araki (whose White Bird in a Blizzard almost made this list), and better--to my mind anyway--than by Wong Kar Wai, but of his I am no fan. It is a film that explores certain 'lover' stereotypes, "The slut, the star, the stud," etc. coming together for an orgy held in a rich couple's apartment, presided over by a cross-dressing maid, that looks like a more upscale version of a black box theater-meets-retrofuturistic minimalist downtown boutique that with the hip disaffect, pretty people (as with Cocteau, the boys prettier than the girls) and mix of low budget that, with a a great M83 score and a nicely ravaged cameo by the ever-feral Beatrice Dalle as a whip-wielding commissar, adds up to a nice bunch of parts even if they might leave you feeling (as does Iron Rose) there's not quite a whole movie here.

Ah, but it's not alone anymore, it's part of my curated orgie de fête so'cest bon. And this film is all about that. In America we feel empty after sex so get married anyway or run away call the other person a slut on social media, either guilty or vindictive, it's never sex's problem. In You and the Night they are all very sexual already. To paraphrase Dietrich, it is not an obsession so much as a fact. So overall they skip the sex, so they can go home feeling like they've bonded as a unit spending a magical night --their resemblance to a theater troupe or AA group performing a thing that's a lot of monologues followed by a feeling of warm togetherness that we in the audience may or may not feel part of (keep coming back it works if you work it so work it you're with it) depending on our mood and attention span. But it is not whiplash edited, morose, uncouth, violent, or abusive. It's a safe space, and flights of Cocteau-esque fancy await...

And of course, what there is, sexually, is talk, which the French understand (and Americans do not) is much more seductive than the image of sex. Rather than doing lines off each other's bellies and swilling wine like a pack of HBO original rutters, eacg stereotype confesses, and talks and when there is an 'ahem' discharge its from a female (the slut), and in general no one really has intercourse, they're too busy being poetic, and engaging in group astral travel to beaches and theaters, which is why it's so fascinating, bringing to mind two quotes that have helped me, as an American, understand French sexuality more than anything else: "In Europe, sex is a fact. In America, it is an obsession" (Dietrich) and our own Severine Benzimra: "Most French people would tell you that the image neutralizes the imagination in this field and suggest you to read, or ask someone to read you erotic littérature." I've found these things to be true in my own amor fou experiences. And I love at least some Cocteau, and at any rate, I like this film's bold red-and-black colors. There's no violence (unless you count a slit throat) but until the arrival of Van Damme and Luc Besson what did French cinema know about violence? What they do know about is surrealism and poetry, and like the tide of poetry that subsumes The Iron Rose both resound and abound.

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10. THE CALENDAR GIRL MURDERS
(1984) Dir William A. Graham (TVM)

You'll need something nice and bland after those weird films so here's a different kind of pre-pre-post-giallo, the major network-pr watered down drive-in' lurid hot girls endangered by the viewer's own twisted obsession. Lt. Stoner, (!) played by the great Tom Skerritt, hunts for a serial killer of 'calendar girls' - an approximation of Playboy playmates, mixed up with the fashion world in ways that, like the 70s in general, refuse to become clear. Sharon Stone is one of the models, though she seems to have some other job in an office, and there's all sort of televised events involving swimsuits, fire, aerobics, and track meets. (Lest we forget about Personal Best when connecting this film's DNA across a spectrum of R-rated influences) With a peripheral cast of lurking suspects, a peeping tom, a score that at times conjures Deep Red-era Goblin, an obsessive fan red herring, and Robert Morse (Bert Cooper from Mad Men) as a deranged emcee in terrible blonde toupee. It's a kind of Eyes of Laura Mars see Deep Red and Blow-Up meta-refraction as the format of the TV movie dilutes drive-in sleaze potency to a manageable level, imitating imitators of Hitchcock's R-rated 70s heirs until suspicious eyes find Vertigo references even in the opening credits. 

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Calendar Girl Murders
It's from the mid-80s so all the fashion shoots are full of horrifying spandex and tacky post-no wave punk-lite make-up, but Tom Skerritt brings his usual low key ensemble brilliance to his every scene, making us realize it's him, not Sigourney Weaver, who really sets the tone for the first Alien, which explains why that kind of chill cigarette naturalism is lacking in all subsequent sequels. Don't expect widescreen, or a consistent tone, for like all TV movies it's completely aware of its job having to start over after every commercial break, since people were liable to be talking and going to the bathroom and forget what they were watching, or suddenly flip over from some competing option (though major network TV was on the decline thanks to the rise of cable, there were still hordes of people who had the old antenna.

 That's what the age of cable and Tivo has dne to us, there's no longer a need for that - we grow progressively more merged into the image. But hey, it's the kind of meta-retro perfection this curated Netflix program needs, a breezy stopping point between two gruelingly abstract post-giallo masterworks from the past few years set in the 70s to the actual 70s. The only way it could be better would be if they kept the VHS streaks. Instead it does one better.

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Basic Instinct
There's the post-modern critique of the destructive aftermath of the male gaze, as an array of lewd pervs of all sorts spread their red herring across the killer's trail. Of course, I'm a fan of any detective named "Dan Stoner" but Sharon Stone as the alpha female is pretty wow and treats it like the creme de la creme, like it's her big chance, which I guess it was.  Righteous! Why include it as post-modern giallo? 1) The 'jiggle factor' is delivered even as it critiques the morality of its delivery system... in true Italian Catholic twist the knife for mother guilty sickening thrills. 2) the victims are all traceable and crimes discoverable via fashion photographs, and TV recordings, and Skerritt's cop regularly tries to use people as bait to flush out the killer but doesn't tell anyone, so they all die. 3) The recent Lifetime Movie A Deadly Adoption, made by the Funny or Die people and starring Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell, proves one can take a whole straight-faced actual drama with no jokes and frame it as a piece of deadpan absurdist art. 4) If you doubt still, you'll change your mind when Stone answers the door with wet hair in a white terrycloth rob to talk to the cop she's into who suspects her but is too turned on to care, ala Basic Instinct almost exactly which was ten years away and was itself a post-modern twister (i..e all the 'real' murders were in Stone's book as was her romance with a Stoner) and it makes a nice infinite loops of reflections with the first movie in the schedule which is a very loose remake of a French film Love Crime; and here this is a very loose prequel to Verhoeven's film; and Verhoeven and De Palma were the last two directors I was covering for Muze before they pulled the plug - coincidence? 5) There are Italians and Italian-Americans, which are the next best thing as far as the 70s (Saturday Night Fever, Fonzie, Rocky, De Palma) was concerned. They were greasers but not yet made thugs.

And here's a real twist, Skerritt's still married with kids, i.e. not showing up late for joint custody hearings! Not that he's not tempted, mightily. Who wouldn't have to let himself be seduced by his son's pin-up crush? It's right on so many levels, until he starts to get jealous! And in true 70s form, cops and killers hug it out at the end; but the great 'wrap-up' scene back at the station where Michael C. Guinn as Stoner's chief magically lifts the entire film right out the path of an approaching Martin Balsam denouement and into a gritty-but-funny 70s cop show Barney Miller meets Fassbinder fade and puts it in a class by itself.

Coda: 
Basic Instinct is also on streaming and Sharon Stone tears it up. Douglas is a matter of taste but god bless him for not being afraid to show dat ass as well as the less attractive side of being a cop whose not as adorable and macho as he thinks he is, but is used to bullying women around and getting away with it...(he'd make a fine solstice offering in Neil LaBute's The Wicker Man! - and with that ice pick handy at the end of the film, he still might make it)

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Fin

NOTES:
1. it's cinema history that Lisa bombed and producer Alfredo Leone tried to recoup his losses by jumping on the Exorcist bandwagon and shooting a few reels of Exorcist ripoff footage with Elke Sommer coming back to play possessed and a priest doubting his faith while they flash back to the events that led up zzz. Re-released as House of Exorcism, Leone recouped his losses! Hurrah. And naysayers hate it, but I can't blame Leone for not wanting to go broke so Bava can make art that won't be appreciated for at least 30 years. Plus, I think Exorcism is hilarious and there's some added footage not used in Bava's film that makes it an interesting addendum... I think. And since it is also on Netflix streaming here so I'd recommend playing them both at the same time (Netflix lets you do that), kind of like playing Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon together, if you get my drift. 

Here's what you do: put Exorcism on your laptop or phone with the volume low but audible and Lisa on the main screen. Set the laptop/phone down somewhere it's just obtrusive enough, like on the coffee table and let the overlap, duplications, and occasional switches to added footage of Elke being possessed make it all seem like six dimensional reality: Lisa and the Devil is dream poetry, like one long dream some young woman afraid of sex and mannequins might have after an Ugetsu -Wild Strawberries double feature, but stretched to a film length with no 'waking' in the normal sense. But with House on at the same time, Elke occasionally wakes up in an Exorcist 'second level' Inception style dream reality, and then the exorcist himself wakes up and his reality being forced to walk in Father Karras's ungodly shoes... back to that accursed villa. (NOTE: Right as I was finishing this post, House disappeared.... coincidence?) 

The Metatextual Exorcist's Assistant: MAPS TO THE STARS, CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

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Film as a medium isn't old enough that it has a set response as to how to handle the 'problem' of aging A-list actresses. But two 2014 films both recently released on DVD have shown the 'old' way can be made 'new' again through post-modern tweaks. The sexy young bitches of the 80s-90s have found work playing middle-aged actresses fighting to stay young and relevant, the way hot bitches of the 20s-40s did in the 50s-70s, by playing faded stars who go insane from being cooped up in their cobwebbed minds and mansions while the pictures (and cars) get small. Going 'Norma Desmond' allows for a kind of ageist exorcism which then makes the actress playing the actress seem balanced by contrast. So Billy Wilder makes Gloria Swanson seem cool and Robert Aldrich makes Bette Davis seem fearless. Skulking around their eerie mansions, eerie theremins granting their every mirror-ward hiss Grand-Guignol foreboding, the aging actress playing the aging actress is freed from her own Gerascophobe (by Chanel)-scented strait-jacket (starring Joan Crawford).

Now that we're all feminists, so the kind of lurid madness that made Baby Jane and Norma Desmond so indelible won't play-- it has to be a sensitive portrait of Alzheimer's, for senior Academy members to lionize. Independent filmmakers circle the wagons around the A-list as they crest through middle and later age, the way they do older men (notice older men and younger women are so often recipients of Best Supporting Actress, so seldom the other way around?).  And though those Sony hacks reminded us even major starlets are making less money than their less famous male counterparts, there are great directors who love women and love self-reflexive dissertation, love the madness of their business, and no how much Oscar voters love hearing about how their business is to make our collective dreams. And the actress might even executive produce knowing the strategic value a small name-auteur indie about actresses can have, for Oscar ups your price and focuses your obit. But feminism, so you have to be brave, The Sunset Boulevard model has passed through now to the likes of the world's best post-affect auteurs, like David Cronenberg and Olivier Assayas. For them, in this of all years, the post-modern self-reflexive spirit of Billy Wilder and Robert Aldrich endures. It need only be taken one meta-level further to resonate in our new century's junk TV-addicted consciousness and not offend. So here are Julianne Moore and Juliette Binoche playing Gloria Swansons playing Norma Desmonds instead of just Norma Desmonds still trying to play Salome.

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THE CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
Dir Olivia Assayas (2014)
***

Olivier Assayas is to the post-modern lesbian corporate thriller what Jean Pierre-Melville was the French New Wave in the early 60s, a vanguard figurehead whose ability to bring post-modern ambiguity to urban thriller cool opened the door between art and genre for anyone with a Gauloises and a DP to slink through. Scenes of Asia Argento walking through a vast bustling Hong Kong mall-flea market--each booth/stall a vast tapestry of electronics, contrasting languages and music all whirling together one after the other--in Boarding Gate is perhaps the most ear-boggling use of post-modern affect in all cinema, but then... what? Then nothing.

Though there's no lady corporate assassins in Clouds of Sils Maria, but it covers similar existential bases, with a trio of strong female leads ranging along the All about Eve axis, playing versions of themselves and each other as they play characters studying to be themselves and each other with the same weird mix of back-stabbing and compassion with which younger executive assistants are shepherded by an older employers into the abyss. It could use some post-affect modernism but instead there's bourgeois European swank, highbrow events, "seas of gray hair" as Maria (Juliette Binoche), an aging European icon who's been talked into playing the older woman having an affair with a hot young heartbreaker-- a role she herself became a star via 20 years earlier. Kristen Stewart steals the show though, as Valentine, Maria's personal assistant, who handles her job with startling cool, knowing just how to rile or soothe or otherwise push Maria's buttons while juggling deals and cars and hotel rooms and interviews and meetings with photographers without ever seeming to break her cool detached stride or get mad at her cell phone. Chloë Grace Moretz is the rising star playing the younger part in the play; Valentine takes Maria to see the latest superhero movie which Moretz stars in, and Maria's mocking laughter (Val's a fan) gradually comes between them.

In other words, it's Bette Davis' The Star meets Petra Von Kant rehearsing a lesbian version of The Blue Angel at the Alpine lodge home of the play's recently deceased writer. It's these rehearsal scenes that carry the film. Stewart and Binoche connect with such quiet force that we understand immediately why Stewart won the César and the dialogue of the play within the film resembles their characters' own relationship and perhaps Stewart's real-life relationship with Alicia Cargile (left) so much it's (intentionally) impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, except that the line-running they do feels real, while their sudden lurches into directly discussing their own relationship--Valentine complaining as Maria laughs at her impressions of the play's subtext--seems faked. and if Val and Maria themselves have any sexual history or present we never know. As the Binoche-Stewart personae (see what I did there?) merges into itself along with the two characters they're rehearsing via the actress and personal assistant they're playing... there's a sudden mystical shift that... well.. it doesn't work because the whole first 4/5 of the film has been this show business European fly-on-the-wall vérité so to suddenly move into a Freudian ego dissolution parable seems false, as if Assayas didn't trust the relationship to be good enough on its own - he had to keep adding layers until the whole thing deflates like an overdone soufflé. In other words, once again Assayas takes something that's working great, going somewhere new, and derails it with one too many affectations, the same way Irma Vep came to a standstill of pin-scratched Maggie outline celluloid, or that disturbing and strange demonlover denouement, or that so-what escalator in Boarding Gate.


I was really vibing to Stewart and Binoche's chemistry so felt genuinely saddened by the sudden flight into a kind of Peter Weir-ish fourth act mystical disappearance. The big comparison critics have been making of course is L'Aventura, but in that they at least talked about the disappearance, it obsessed them for awhile, until they forgot about it, and we didn't much miss her anyway, since it was Monica Vitti we were collectively falling in love with. Here it's reversed, like Vitti just left without a note toward the end and we spent the rest of the damn movie with the smarmy and insecure Sandro (Gabriele Farzetti).  Some critics hypothesize Val kind of morphs into Chloë Grace Moretz, playing the tabloid-branded scarlet letter marriage-wrecker of years ago (see: Kristen Stewart in the Snow with Poison), but in the end, fancy critics can discuss the use of art cinema 'modernity' vs. vérité realism all they want --it just plum doesn't work... for me at least. In interviews Assayas says he wanted to give the audience something to think about, but frankly, he didn't. We'd rather follow Kristen into the clouds than be dragged along with Juliette Binoche into the dungeons of bourgeois theater. After all, Binoche ain't winning no César. Neither is Assayas, for the French are wary of auteurs who sabotage their own work, just so everyone knows it's their's and not some gamin upstart's.

If I'm being unfair, so be it. Most of the film is great, the scenery is staggering, the mountains a clue to the European intellectual heart, where German loftiness, Nordic depression, and French intellectual aesthetics sizzle together and align like constellations. Instead of the lofty cloud atlas stuff, I was imagining what if Bergman were directing, that he might go full-on post-modern and we'd maybe get an interview with Alice Cargile in between takes of the film within the play about a pair of women in a play. That might have worked, but whatever - the Melville of post-affect cinema transcends such things as satisfying destinations. The trip is where he works his magic. Once arrived, he's all out of rabbits.

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4. MAPS TO THE STARS
(2014) Dir. David Cronenberg
***1/2

One can't imagine either actual Hollywood or the Sils Maria bourgeois European intellectual community, i.e. Assayas, making a film like Maps to the Stars. A lurid, slow-burn haunted Hollywood saga of pyromaniac schizophrenics, ghosts, and egomaniacal stars and life coaches, it could only come from a Canadian indie auteur who doesn't need pretentious vanishings to craft a fiune Brechtian dissertation on aging actresses being intimidated by the younger generation. The similarities between the two films are striking: a behind and in front of the camera mirroring; passive aggressive sabotage by the older insecure actress against her personal assistant, and the merging of personae; the Twilight connection: Stewart in Sils, Pattinson (in a Cronenberg limo again) for Maps. Considering Stewart co-starred with Maps star Julianne Moore in Still Alice the same year (top), it's like an eerie reflection across continents, genres, and post-modern layers. But one is ballsy, the other just has a picture of ballsiness in its wallet. 

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In both Sils and Maps there's the idea of being subsumed by another's ego, of being a young female employee trying to have a life while working for a solipsistic middle-aged actress dealing with the dwindling roles / loss of youth aspect. In Sils the assistant leaves without giving two weeks notice or even looking back; in the other... I can't spoil it, but it's far more satisfying. She leaves too, but we know just where she's going. There's a sense of unyielding fatalism, of the inexorable pull of madness so in sync with Los Angeles. 

Written by sordid show biz underbelly chronicler (and Castaneda mystic) Bruce Wagner (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills), this is jet black satire of the type that knows every inch of what it's chronicling, and can match the darkness stab for stab. Everything connects: just as Melanie Daniels brought the bird attacks to Bodega Bay, young Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska) triggers an outbreak of specters upon her arrival in Hollywood. Her estranged brother, bratty child star Benji (Evan Bird), is haunted by a dying girl he does a Make a Wish Foundation visit to right before she dies; her employer, fading star Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) is haunted by her crazy mom Clarice, who set their house on fire when Havana was a child, maybe. A new bio is being made and Havana is  fighting to play her, even while claiming she was molested and abused by her. Ingeniously, the ghost of Clarice is played by luminous hottie Sara Gordon (above, in the bath), just the right kind of weird mind melter that shows a real subversive instinct, the kind Assayas ultimately lacks, afraid, perhaps, of alienating the bourgeois fan base he won with Summer Hours. 


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It's all in the genes.

In comes Agatha as Havana's personal assistant, with the kind of naive prepossession that does well in Hollywood, with a recommendation from Carrie Fisher but a dad (John Cusack) who hates her for setting fire to their house as a child and feeding Benji an overdose of pills. Now she's on meds and doing her ninth step, so is back to make amends, which Cusack, who's made a fortune as a platitude-spouting gestalt masseur, with demons of his own, barely accepts before retreating into a haze of rabid hostility. 


Ultimately that's the difference that makes the Cronenberg film's big shocker climax so effective and the Assayas' conclusion so unsatisfying. Cronenberg has the courage of bizarro convictions. The macabre final act of Stars is there in the fabric of the entire structure from the beginning. We just don't expect it because it's so bravely macabre because for awhile Cronenberg made us forget we were watching a Cronenberg film and not some piece of Hollywood self-regard and near-whimsy about how all we need is a bus ticket and a dream. Stars has courage to go deep into the abyss, while Sils has only a vague eye out towards Lars Von Trier's receding pilot light. Even the ghost appearances aren't trite or cliche. Although they're presumed to be just psychic projection, it's a movie first, so we understand that being actors anyway they're conditioned to let their imagination get the better of them, to confuse their script with their life in ways only we were confused by in Sils Maria, to mess themselves up in the name of a good performance and the understanding that--above all--they're still in an "actual" film as well as a film about film. In Sils, Binoche is Marlene Dietrich remaking The Blue Angel as a butch Emil Jannings, realizing everyone's watching the new Marlene with the strong man, and don't even her her crowing. But in Maps, the better option is finally presented. Rather than retire to the class room to sulk yourself to death, burn the fucker to the ground! Clarice and Agatha, by the power of Chuck D and Flava Flav, Je vous déclare le feu!




The New Triple Long Pig Dare Ya: SHARKNADO 3, CHOPPING MALL


I was shocked watching SHARKNADO 3, which premiered with much Shark Week-esque hooplah on Syfy last week, when one of the "live tweets" mentioned "the theme park worker," and not the Universal Orlando Theme Park worker, which is really doing your promotional tie-in guy wrong. Meanwhile a commercial commemorates one of the recently eaten Secret Service guys, saluting him for being free at last from his wearisome cellular contract. Hey, that's clever, taking a chummy cue from Shark Week's many tie-ins over on Discovery, a fine example of synergy and vertical integration offset by the ultra-dated cliche'd black expression "Oh hell No" white people are now so crazy about. Can using words like "clutch," and "baller" be far behind, yo? "The new ill sausage and baller bacon butter triple hog dare ya from Applebees - baller. Simply baller." or "Patron Blue Tequila - Clutch... simply clutch."

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From the latest Corman offshoot company joint Asylum, wherein they realized they had a great high concept so decided to spend a little more money and do it better than the usual wretchedness, SHARKNADO the First delivered the same kitschy but rock solid vehicles with which Corman had been powering drive-ins across the country all through the 70s and late night cable all through the 80s, and VHS rentals all through the 90s, and brought it even to Syfy, for whom it marks a new self-aware camp crap golden age where if you don't mind crappy CGI and all the breasts staying in their bikinis, it's a feast indeed. And sometimes, I'll confess I don't mind. It's like BAYWATCH for monster movie lovers to fall asleep to on a lazy Sunday. You know, instead of going to church or playing Nintendo.

Nor do I take umbrage with clever ad men tying in on this shark wrangle, because the tie-ins become closer and closer to the actual movie until the two are tangled as two fishing lines hooked into the same two-headed shark's mouths. The result makes for quite a spectacle, wherein your own psyche is a direct participant, like watching America eat itself always is, even as it eats you from the toes up, until all that's left is your finger on the remote hand. We see it all over the net, and on NBC's Saturday Night Live, which does Amex commercials in the same manner as their satiric commercial sketches, making the two impossible to separate. In other words, vertical integration is no mere Jack Donaughey 30 ROCK joke. Check out this Clickhole ad's deadpan mix of satire and straight forward advertising... where does one end and the other begin? Exactly - that difference is long gone. 

That's why the second SHARKNADO was so painful: it had become fully self-aware and was just camping it up, shitshow-style, featuring a string of bloated once-familiar faces hoping to up their Twitter numbers up as they're eaten near NYC landmarks and Fin's hero complex looking dangerously close to terrorism (See Micro-Manager Munchausen). This third go-round though, despite the douche-chilled "Oh HELL No!" tag, makes it back to something like the first film, which worked so well because it wasn't just the tornado that was interesting, but the incoming tidal surge that flooded the drainage sewers and left the water line climbing up into the Hollywood Hills. The tornado didn't even come along until the final act. It was much better that way, the onrushing flood and coastal environment, the way  the whole first 2/3 was one long inward motion from the first bites out in the water, to the bar, the hurricane coming ever closer, the surge of water right as Fin's closing up, the fleeing inland to the car, and then up to the Hills to try and rescue the family. The tornado didn't come along until after all of that, and instead we had sharks in swimming pools and sliding down the highway strips. No one but me remembers that. Time marches on, and the flood was probably harder to animate digitally than just having airborne sharks. And this tie-in bonanza is once-in-a-lifetime. I'm sure none of the subsequent airings will have those same ads, and it's a damn shame. 


But hey, Bo Derek is great, she's eternal like "She Who Must Be Obeyed" as Tara Reid's mom, both of them dragging now designated sharknado expert Fin to Orlando instead of into the thick of the tornado or helping the president prepare for the oncoming tide of inexplicable sharks. Reid's quite pregnant, their oldest son has "deployed" so isn't around and their cute daughter Claudia (Aubrey Peebles) is played by a different actress with dark hair (Ryan Newman), a subject of much small talk. Now Fin and his family are public figures, America's designated sharknado solvers, with the Oval Office quick pass. Fin doesn't like that Cassie Scerbo as Nova spent the sequel off on her own, going all storm chaser Mad Maxine in an armored shark investigation camper with radar, arsenal, and contingency plan (Frankie Muniz is her lovelorn tech guy --you always got to have a little tech guy in your crew, usually named Mouse or Jesse). Once again, she steals the show giving a great raspy voice Jersey girl realness even to her manic obsessive psychospeak and when she says that when she crawled out of the shark in the climax of the first film "it's never been the same." Scerbo, you are the heart and sou of these films and never let them tell you different! You're love for Fin, who only had eyes for his family, was the great unusual propellor that drove the first film's boat. Not having it around in the second made it fairly trite --is there anything more unseemly than some Cali broheim lecturing us on what it means to be New Yorkers as he runs hither and yon chasing his family around like a confused maniac terrorist-tourist hybrid? You weren't there, so the only interesting aspect left was Tara Reid having her hand bit off and replaced with a bionic arm. A part I do not remember.

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I don't even mind that Fin's still got the obsessive hero complex, because it fits as part of a subtextual army recruitment ad, and even further-around-the-curve NRA promotion. When gun nuts take the law into their own hands to save their neighborhoods from flying sharks, we all benefit, but especially the psycho likes of Michelle Bachman and Ann Coulter, both of whom make cameos. And of course NASCAR and military build-up...UFC fighter Josh Barnett blasts sharks for the military--now more than ever. In the ads, Race Car Driver #3 uses being eaten by a shark to escape his cellular contract. Cosmetics in real killer colors; the incessant car insurance barrage "I guess they don't like you driving around on three wheels." And the smug girl chiding her husband with her good driving record cash back; the new Jeep Cherokee; and the M. Night movie about creepy grandparents; Pepsi; and local ads for: the Honda Summer Clearance Event; Broadway superstars of Magic "The Illusionists" and The Book of Mormon. Promos for Syfy's own latest hop-on, "Lavalantula" which will hopefully involve leaping from the couch to the stairs and floating around on the mattress; an miniseries CHILDHOOD'S END, about an alien invasion that brings happiness and peace but what's the downside? What are these peacenik aliens really up to? "I would rather the world go down in flames under our control than live in prosperity and peace under their's!" we hear someone shout. Spoken like a true Republican! "Messing with Sasquatch" promotes rude near-bullying taunts of Bigfoots in the name of jerky; turkey and guacamole (flavored substance) from Subway; Captain Obvious at Hotels.com ("They won't judge your life choices"); some guy with an unbearably pandering sensitive voiceover, the kind so common now, where they talk to you like you're five years-old and just skinned your knee:"All you need to see is the next 200 feet, that's how life unfolds - and you'll get there. (1) Fuck that. The badass anti-smoking ad equates a cigarette with a vicious science class monster with smoking, and that's so clutch. Anything that kills you makes you cool first. If Bogie's life taught as anything it's that real men don't do longevity.  

Subtextual pro-NRA ultra Neoconservative Army recruitment tool or no, Tara Reid give birth while falling through the earth's atmosphere inside a giant flaming shark, Fin cutting a whole in the shark so a parachute can get through as they plummet safely down to Earth, us seeing Fin from inside the shark through the holes burning up its thick hide as it falls down through? Priceless. Even Tara Reid's skin looks much better. And Nova, welcome back. I just hope they wise up and give you your own shark fighting series, because you're worth it.

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CHOPPING MALL (1986) on the other hand, came to me free of all commercials, liens and tie-ins, and seeing it for the first time after the NAD 3 was very satisfying. Why had I waited until now? The poster alone (at left) kept me away back in 1986- it looked like a cheap slasher film, which by 1986 was tired as shit, and it seemed gratuitously gruesome and a downer. Some bloated mentally challenged mall cashier with a metal hand starts chopping up and eating the long pig, I figured. I was wrong. I found out last week that it's a Julie Corman produced joint about security robots run amok, going up against three young furniture store clerks and their dates meet at the furniture store for a night of passion and drinking, for sex as a teen in the 80s wasn't something you could easily do with parents home, so you needed to get creative (especially if, like me, you've never really figured out sex in the car). It's Wynorski's directorial debut and he'd go on to much worse things but he has been busy, and he's always better than he needs to be, even his work in the pre-NADO Syfy-Asylum monster hybrid schlocker PIRHANACONDA (2012) but here he's on his "A" B-game. He gives it his all, and gives the film real inexorable fun momentum, all while ladling on the in-jokes: "Peckinpah's" gun store delivers the Romero mall arsenal; the nerd shows his blind date ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS while the non-virgin couples get it on in other areas of the furniture store; there's also a Dr. Carrington and a whole slab of dialogue verbatim from the original THING; one character tries to dispel robot attention by saying "klaatu barada nikto;" Corman company posters adorn the pizza shop walls; Mary Woronov and Paul Blartel are store owners who roll their eyes at the robot debut ceremony (with plenty of ROBOCOP allusions); and Corman regular Dick Miller is a cranky custodian. Now that's entertainment! 

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Best of all, all the teens may be generally horny, but are resourceful, relatively likable, and brave. They eschew the seven stages of grief (as seen in THE MIST) and go right to the savagery switchpoint. Even the designated strapping jock type Mike (John Terlesky) has a certain amount of good-natured charisma, and the blind date's a crack shot (Kelli Maroney, who was in the excellent NIGHT OF THE COMET--which I did see in the theater) and the sexy older girl an ace mechanic (Karrie Emerson). Rather than sobs, they make bombs with cans of gas. Barbara Crampton (YOU'RE NEXT) makes it almost to the end, and isn't afraid to toss a pipe bomb. The robots are badass, real remote controlled little maniacs on tank treads, with Gort eyes ("klaatu, barada, nikto") and Robocop-style platitudes ("Have a nice day"), lasers shooting out of their eyes (not in the original design) put there along with their evil intentions by a freak storm ala GOG--which Wynorski credits for the robot concept in the extras. And in the end they are what make the movie truly a classic. Wynorski's using really interesting fully automated robots rather than just CGI or guys in cheap robot suits. Plus, malls are a great place to set horror movies, I can only imagine seeing it at a theater inside the mall where it was filmed. Then you walk out and bam, you're right there, same stores, fountain, etc. Baby, that's my kinda meta.

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But hey, Wynorski's currently working on something called SHARKANSAS WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE. Now that the Corman-Asylum-Syfy brand has the shark CGI in the hard drive, you bet we'll see those air sharks once again. Dominique Swain and Traci Lords will star. I will certainly watch it, maybe... probably not. But I'll watch CHOPPING MALL, aka KILLBOTS again. For it is a TERMINATOR rip that cares, that does it's own thing and branches out to riff on other films besides just being a bore or trite or tawdry.

I have nothing against rip-offs, because film is a living evolving myth, and when one myth strikes a cord, when it reverberates out into a huge imagination-firing, inspiring hit, every hack and B-movie auteur starts thinking about how they would do it slightly different. The cat is out of the bag. JAWS launched a whole genre, then ALIEN, then ROAD WARRIOR and then TERMINATOR. CHOPPING MALL gets the latter while evoking the DAWN OF THE DEAD suburbanite amok consumerist fantasy of running amok in the mall, getting whatever you want, without paying.... so clutch.

Just as the recent masterpiece IT FOLLOWS did, CHOPPING MALL knows that great horror begins at home, not in some trite Hollywood idea of a perfect suburban small town either, but in the real normal middle class suburbs, the grocery store, and at the mall, and in our TV sets, anywhere we go to feel safe, or sated, or comforted. And America has always been and will always be slightly paranoid, the way criminals feel a resentful guilty anger towards those they robbed. It's only natural that whatever we make in our own image would try to kill us. For while nature is a monster, forever killing and eating smaller versions of itself, we're forever fighting back our natural urges. Aside from swatting a fly or two we need never kill things, let alone our own food; we never need fear the dark as long as our electricity bill is paid, or go hungry for one can always get food stamps. People, old and diseased, who could never kill or procure their own food have it brought to them on wheels. 

But we feel the ghosts of all our prey haunting us in the dark--the guilt of all the pain our lives inflict, below and above us, within and without us--hammering at the walls of our easy first world consumer-oriented life. Meanwhile our own animal DNA has our brain hardwired for hardship, it releases that special dopamine reward for killing your own meat through some savage effort, or living through the night, of starting and maintaining a fire, or vanquishing one's foe in combat. Without those kind of basic challenges, the ones the movies provide us only by proxy, those dopamine chemicals gradually tone way down. We get just a handful with a good movie that taps those instincts,  but as for real life dopamine-flood primal caveman victories, what's left? Sex, procreation, maybe kickboxing... in other words, mere scraps compared to the staggering endorphin rush we get when you kill a sabre-toothed tiger with nothing but a sharpened rock.



Goofy but sufficiently deadpan horror movies like SHOPPING MALL and SHARKNADO tap into this need for the kill, but in the process expose the utter ridiculousness of this need in our consumerist fantasia society. When we have everything we need, we have to create our own artificial calamities, and every step of the way through them, the advertising dogs our heels. And so it comes that even the tools of consumerism have their demons, the shark eating you is financially obligated to remind you about the new Applebee's shrimp platter, and the security robot trying to kill you is only trying to protect that ultimate consumerism signifier, the mall. And if the vertical integration continues as it has, soon, even horror movies won't feel safe in the night, as product placement lurks waiting to devour even the most amorphous fears before they can reach us. Until then, airborne sharks and amok robots are our wicker man, our straw dog, our effigy burning at the stake. If we can cathartically tap all those repressed terrors, cathartically exercise them in a bloody shark chainsaw inside-out space ride bonfire, then--for a little while anyway--we're free from the fear that consumes us.

But we all know effigies only buy us some time. They only postpone and distract the reaper of souls coming for thee, like appetizers or the opening band. Sooner or later it will be our turn to take the stage and be devoured in fangs of flame, and all that will be left will be a pool of blood.. and guts... glory... Ram. Lease the new Ram truck today - you pay nothing before 90 days; once you're dead you automatically owe nothing. Offer void in Ohio.

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NOTES:
1. My voiceover career stalled out when clients stopped wanting the deep Tom Waits rasp and moving towards that touchy feely "high" voiced food co-op nonsmoking smug sensitivity in my voice so I may be prejudiced, but fuck that namby-pamby shit.
2. I literally watched that movie last week, and at his age had the same shy boy trouble busting first moves, some say I still do. I'd show them weird old movies til they'd either get tired and leave or throw themselves at me. But that was before... the meds. 

Aussies gone Wild is Redundant: WYRMWOOD,THE ROVER


Horror festival favorite knockabout labor of love Aussie debut of brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner, WYRMWOOD: ROAD OF THE DEAD (2014) kicks off already at risk of becoming a bit too WALKING DEAD meets ballsy-wallsy Aussie dingo-aitcha-baby macho, with so much wobbly-booted whiplash camera movement, slow-mo splatter, mud flecks, grime streaks, diesel oil drips and blood splatter (both dried and fresh) coating every makeshift black spray-painted football pad surface that pretty soon a little spot of cleanliness would go a long way, even if just for contrast. At times, with nary a wowser to bounce shit offa there's a bit too-much macabre laddie deadpan humor, but it all eventually locks into place and once the momentum hits, you're in, thrice-buckled to the boosted ute, mate.

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The main focal character point getting off the ground is Barrie (Jay Gallagher) who loses wife and child to the outbreak of disease madness early on, in a great extended fleeing in the middle of the night sequence (you don't have to get bit to get the Roache-Turner plague but it helps). Barrie and his sister Brooke (Bianca Bradey) who's busy in her art studio in the wilds of wherever, spend most of the movie trying to find each other, a bit like the Gish sisters in ORPHANS OF THE STORM, but with one of them garnering something genuinely new in the by-now overdone zombie genre. That thing is a psychic link sister Brooke gets to the infected due to inhuman medical experiments performed on her by a creepy dude in a yellow rain slicker hazmat suit, like HOSTEL meets Virginia Leith's head in THE THING THAT WOULDN'T DIE bonding with the unseen monster in the closet -- one of my favorite monster movie alliances. "I am only a head, and you are whatever we are, but together we're strong!!" Meanwhile there's so much grime and grit that it makes THE PROPOSITION seem like THX 1138. If you get that analogy, very ace of ya, mate. But still the torturous chod of slimy dancing scientist chaining Brooke up in back of his weird portable HOSTEL-esque truck, all rapey-vibed but then just sucking brains out of her neighbors in chains like that bug in STARSHIP TROOPERS. Still chod, though, mate. Just inconveniencing her would have been enough justification for his rending as far as I'm concerned, 'cuz Brooke rocks. You can read tomes of savagery switchpoint courage in her heavily blackened thousand yard ESP stare, and her big Zoë Bell-on-a-Dodge Challenger moment is one of the highlights of the junk cinema year. Not nearly enough aggro bingles, boosted cars smashing through the center of caravans in slow motion, or servo fireballs to warrant the ROAD WARRIOR comparison. But that's okay. Just walk away. What a puny plan. You see what you get when you miss with the Orphans? Wrong movie. Just walk away... losers! Losers wait! 

So we're left with, then is real, more NIGHT OF THE COMET or old AIP-Corman budgeting tricks, i.e. you imply the zombie attacks from other films are taking place at the same time your own movie is going on. You borrow our collective cinema memory. But I ain't whingin'. I'd rather WYRM be AIP-COMET honest than simply packed with the CGI macro-calamity and hence part of our post-Syfy channel era. Plus the whole doing experiments with the brains and blood of the immune in relation to the zombies having a cool jet black humor superhero side effect of the damned and Brooke's torturously slow race against time trying to telepathically control tied up zombies into patiently cutting their way out of straps, is all genuinely new to the genre, commenting perhaps on the nature of video games (and perhaps their macabre future, as in GAMER) rather than just trying duplicate them, i.e. to duplicate movies based on games that were trying to duplicate movies in the first place, like RESIDENT EVIL, movies which themselves were copies of earlier movies, and down the rabbit hole until we're back at square one, the terror of children worrying their dad will turn into a monster again once he spends half his paycheck at the local tavern, like a Jekyll/Hyde fundamental human split we all still carry like an archaic memory of the days before we learned how to start fires.

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And then, just when it was getting so badass, it's over. Needing perhaps more crowdfunding to continue on into sequels. Well they should get it, as this WYRM may digest the same sources as all the other Romero-zombie rules (the head shot thing, after all, wasn't part of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, which came out the same time as DAY OF THE, and had zombies talk and be obsessed with eating "braaainnnns"), it does generate some interesting mutations and manages to do quite a lot with actually very little, thanks to all that grime, solid acting and Michael Lira's droning junkyard 'Stravinsky meets the Cramps at a John Zorn concert' score. I kept hoping for a didgeridoo in there, all low and alien and mean and maybe processed through flanger. It didn't come, but I still liked WYRMWOOD. Give it a squizz when yakka's got you stonkered and you need to rip a rollie and coldie. Shout's Blu-ray has an insightful-Turner commentary, deleted scenes, and an array of helpful bis--crowdfunding trailers, pitch meetings, that should be a great little crash course in using social media to get your scrappy little horror-action movie off the ground. But more importantly, the Blu-ray has the movie, and a full bore kickass stereo mix all but screaming for max volume and/or kickass headphones when the rest of the household is at peace. No didgeridoo, though.

And the movie itself... ah yes, what is it the Aussies say about a nice buzz and low expectations? Nothing - because it's such a natural state for them they don't know any other way. And that is just one reason why we still love them, despite everything... and by 'everything' I do mean Yahoo Serious.










THE ROVER
(2014) Dir David Michôd
**

Ozploitation films set in the endless miles of Australia's interior, the harsh, alien, truly strange Outback, has--beginning in American minds with MAD MAX and CROCODILE DUNDEE and cumulating in the torturous WOLF CREEK but with ON THE BEACH never far from our minds, apocalypse wise. It's left many of us in the States declaring we do want to visit Australia, just not go farther away than a few miles from the coast (and then not too deep in the ocean, cuzza shahks). To judge by films, in the Outback the apocalypse seems to be eternally happening. Inhospitable and strange, the Outback sucks in whole swaths of 19th century schoolgirls, and kangaroos and wobbly-doos (all the Australian wildlife has great weird names reflecting perhaps some hybrid of English and Aborigine in the distant past) run wild, and there's insufficient petrol reserves or manpower to police the whole damn wasteland area. THE ROVER is set in some future where military patrols try to keep the peace, but the best they can do is lumber along down the endless highways in the direction of the criminals, driving through the parking lots of any motels along the way, occasionally shooting someone or getting shot.

But t's a chance for Robert Pattinson to stretch his limber chops as a contorted half-starved young snot who for some reason rocks a Southern (as in the USA) accent and hooks up with a John Lurie-esquely taciturn rogue (Guy Peace) who has such a homicidal fixation on his car that you just know some little Iowa State Quarterly-esque twist is coming. The deeply seedy impoverished look suffers from being too earnest and downbeat and what's worse, the way--as in MAX--this collapsing civilization works by some seriously inconsistent rules. A dwarf arms dealer is dumb enough to take a lone wild-eyed customer to a secluded room, hand him a gun and ammo and then tell him he can't afford to buy it, like he was just dropped down into the Outback from frickin' Dumbville. Another man wisely works behind thick walls with automat-style sliding doors for items bought, but when they need gas, he sells them a five gallon jug, which should be about enough to get them just smack dab in the middle of nowhere before they run out. How these guys ever keep these vehicles going over these vast distances seems a little vague. Out here in the perimeter there are no hospitals or AAA. A person could die by hitting his head on a rock after diving in a lake, and only Toni Collette would ever know (as in JAPANESE STORY).


Pattinson, hair cut lice inspection short, is one weird little freak and this role. His whole body taught and lean and crouched like his hamstrings were all shortened by a sadistic Gepetto, a runt of a litter born hunched up to deflect kicks, his big T-shirt barely fitting over his lanky, underfed trunk. But to me his role here is one more link in the chain that will one day show modern naysayers that he, like his TWILIGHT co-star Kristen Stewart, one of the more underrated actors of his or any generation. Not that this makes it any more pleasant of an experience, becoming instead as glum as THE ROAD but with a worse smell. You know that moldy smell some old cars get, like a tent left too long rolled up in the basement? That dirty, moldy smell? Well, the whole movie smells that way. It's the most malodorous film I've seen since the recent Blu-ray of CONVOY, which also had that vaguely sulphuric tang of hot asphalt and dust, diesel gas exhaust hanging breezeless alongside moldy naugahyde and motor oil. If that's what good literature does, prithee to what end? There was never a doubt why the MAD MAX movies existed--for drive-in thrills! But whither our ROVER? For a few weird twists that would seem interesting only to someone who's been in a grad school fiction workshop so long they're afraid of admitting their own un-PC urge to shoot people and guzzle amber fluids. Better there be a red-tinted desert shotgun ancient cinema flooded with sand odyssey like in John Stanley's DUST DEVIL (set in South Africa, but the vibe's the same) 'cuz it at least has a hot chick, tantric voodoo sex, and some metaphysical weirdness underneath the sand and blood surface.


But one thing Australia did right, mate, was old Croc Dundee, the Jack Burton of the Outback, and if you go to the land down under where women grow and men thunder, and they ask about me, how's old Erich the Rah-Shmerick doin' or what's Erich into these days, you tell 'em he's hunky doro and preaching the Crocodile Dundee (also Burt Reynolds) non-duality approach to self-defense in the face of evil, a philosophy that might have spared Billy Jack, Sgt. York, The Quiet Man, and all those other game-as-Ned Kelly but pacifist dubbos a lot of soul-searching. Croc teaches that even going lemony berko on some shickered yobbo can go fair dinkum... by which I mean, the man beyond duality does everything with love, even a knockabout blue with a big smoke bounce. Just avoid wallies... in any language. For not even wildmen can withstand their withering mundanity, a mundanity so withering it reduces even the grimiest bonzo philosophy to a grandma souvenir-ready T-shirt platitude and crossing guard coloring book tie-in. If you doubt, just ask the Men at Work to make you a vegemite sandwich, and take cover.  

Analog Hacks, Italian-disguised-as-American-Style: GHOSTHOUSE & WITCHERY (aka LA CASA III and VI) Double Feature



Saw AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON or 'Robots smashing Robots in endless pixelated scrimmage II." Was it entertaining? Sure, but also spectacularly uninvolving, battle-wise. There was a time when we'd dread the sight of a flashing knife going into a stomach. Hurling a spear or waving a sword took at least some muscle or dexterity. But watching our amped-up immortal superheroes battle Ultron and his many robot soldiers, everyone armored up and invulnerable and so fast and so absurdly dextrous and so little is at stake, no one can really die, or really get hurt, unless they're machines, all investment is lost, like being a teenager who plays the same video game every day after school, repeating levels 1, 2, 3, 4, trying to climb to the next, but each lower level is now down to a science, not a move wasted, each opponent conquered in a few 'hack' moves practiced daily.

That stultifying level of control and savvy how narrative works, that's not a problem in the 80s. Especially not in the disreputable world of exploitation, and especially not in in Italy, and even less when those Italians are hiding who they are and trying to seem American. Then you're about as far from ULTRON's problem as it's possible to get.

So far away, in fact, you're practically all the way around again.

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I didn't come here to bash, though, I came to make a ridiculous claim, that the new GHOSTHOUSE & WITCHERY Blu-ray double feature is better than ULTRON, that 80s nostalgia goes deeper than pouffy hair and rotary phones. It goes to the innocent time when we were still too young to not be horrified at the sight intestines being pulled out of a screaming Tom Savini. We dreaded it --every slow walk through a darkened hallway was fraught with an anxiety we could feel in our gut. We needed to be able to sneer at the fakeness of the gore. Our dates would be closing their eyes over those parts anyway. And when we just laughed, we seemed like warriors...

It's important to note, though, that by this late in the 80s, no one cared about these kinds of films, except video stores and indiscriminate late night cable programmers, which is where most people who saw either of these saw them, and if they were too young to know better, they may have been scared or at least bemused, and now they're older and these films remind them of being young, easily scared and bemused. I admit I would have felt that these sorts of movies were irredeemably vile back in the late 80s. But now I'm a fan, and anyway maestro di Mario himself invented the formula long before even Jason's mom was the killer. No matter what kind of slasher fan you were or weren't back then you had to appreciate their dogged attention to high weird style, and even if we never saw these films back in the day they have become cherished nostalgia and leave only a vaguely nauseated after-taste when their nasty Italian Inquisitional sadism surprises us.

By us I mean me, of course. I hadn't seen either of these ever before getting this disc... and I blame society. But now I'm experiencing nostalgia anyway, just because of the look, the music, the vibe, the pre-CGI analog, and the way time numbs all wounds, well almost. Either way revisiting these monstrosities now on Blu-ray is a unique experience, somewhere along the line between what's known in academic circles as 'body horror' and the so-bad-it's-good 'did a child write the script?' ineptitude. American actors lured overseas by the promise of any work included Linda Blair and David Hasselhof. What they find are windswept shores... in New England. It's Lovecraftian mouth-sewing madness, international style!

LA CASA 3 rode the sequel train in Italy by pretending to be sequels to Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD movies, there called LA CASA ("the House"). I guess that worked because they both have a house where evil comes in from other dimensions. Both are produced by the "Evil Ed Wood", Joe D'Amato (1), each glows with a quaint air of cheap ambivalence that suits horror especially, a certain ominous feeling the Italians do well, even if they're just imitating Fulci's imitations of American imitations of Argento's imitations of Bava's imitation, or imitating Sean Cunningham's imitation of John Carpenter.


And the cheaper the better, for this was also before HD video, so they were still shot on film, and they were Italian and had to go for drive-in dream logic distance. And considering the brutality and lax safety regulations on a wild and wooly Italian set, the casual attitude towards sadism that a childhood spent hearing about and possibly enacting 'the Passion' made the traumatizing violence seem heartlessly real in ways it just wasn't outside of the grindhouse, or the video stores in the days before censorship figured out a way to monitor what kids were renting. These movies were made for that kid, the 'this ain't your momma's POLTERGEIST, son," crowd, clearly meant for the bottom of the drive-in bill for something like NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET IV or WAXWORKS if at all, before coming straight to video... then to complete obscurity... gone and unmissed... but now, restored on Blu-ray in a double set from Shout, GHOSTHOUSE and WITCHERY demand your agog disbelief! 

"La Casa III" (1988) Dir Umberto Lenzi (As Humphrey Humbert)

"Oh Paul, I saw death..."

Teenagers, even in Italian films, will be kids, so in 1988 they're fiddling with ham radios, and picking up a signal of someone screaming for help, so they triangulate so they can come to the rescue days later! It's coming from a deserted house where long ago an evil kid--in league with her evil singing clown doll--killed her parents. Now her ghost is still down in the basement, killing up anyone who ventures there, including good-natured squatter punks, who team up with our ham radio couple to hang around and provide copious victims for our killer doll and very very pale little girl (if she's a girl - there's a bit of the boy playing a girl Melissa Graps in KILL BABY KILL vibe). A fat black kid hitchhikes, uses a corpse hand puppet for shocks and pick-pocketing, shows up at the house later and meets his predictable fate, leaving us to wonder how he got there and why.

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Soon murders in the basement, set to the creepy clown song and the girl's Melissa Graps stare; the kids squatting there / camping outside all wonder what to do about how they're all getting murdered. I mean, they couldn't just leave... right? Considering they're all trespassing on private property. And have a camper, which is mobile... they could split any time. But the cops don't even suggest that maybe trespassing on private property in order to be murdered isn't a highbrow way to spend a weekend. There's a visit to an undertaker, and other elements I forgot as soon as I saw.

Considering it's Italians disguised as American and dubbed you'd think they'd get good actors for the voices - but the lead kid is up there with the cast of TROLL 2 as far as gleefully flat amateurish performances- everything sounds like a cold read at a junior high school audition.


On both, the Blu-ray image reflects a problem with some of these Italian films transfers, wherein somewhere between the HD transfer and the pancake make-up used by the make-up artist, everyone looks very sickly pale and you can see the thin color differentiation where the make up line is around the base of their necks. The result is the impression the entire cast has been living in a basement for the past decade, or worse, England. Is this a gambit to make Italian actors look more Nordic, along with the general obsession with red hair in these films, resulting in one little legitimate redhead, Satanic, snaggle-toothed moppet, Nicoletta Elmi, appearing in a slew of horror films - and dozens of other clearly swarthy actors with terrible red hair dye (as in the grotesque McBain family wiped out by Fonda in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST). Either way the cumulative effect is... demoralizing.

But there's joy in the little life-affirming details: the way the shot of a hand swinging a hammer down on a guy's forehead lasts just a lazy frame or two too long, so we see the hammer slow to a stop an inch from the guy's real head before the cut comes, a little accidental Brechtian relief, with the reverse angle make-up shot of the hammer buried in the forehead, like the director presumed the editor would cut those frames out so it moves from the fast part of the swing to the gore reverse shot. But why bother? That kind of mistake is why we're here. As GHOSTHOUSE lumbers towards its required 90-95 minutes, one kid drowns in a lake of cream of wheat brought to a boil - surrounded by skulls-below the basement floorboards, a cheap great din of 80s Suspiria wannabe howls in the bones of the soundtrack; the little sister is cut in half at the waist - another by a fan blade - blood comes out of the sink. The clown doll is too similar to the one in POLTERGEIST and the scenes of tombs recall all the touchstones of the Fulci and Argento canons (in the best of worst ways) for some reason there's a ghost doberman like in FACE OF MARBLE, probably because of THE OMEN. 


WITCHERY 
"La Casa IV" (1988) Dir Fabrizio Laurenti (as Martin Newlin)

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WITCHERY is both much worse that GHOSTHOUSE as far as nauseating yet unrealistic gore scenes, but better as far as cast, with several American names, and a more understandable reason for hanging around as your fellow travelers are picked off (stranded on an island). Linda Blair is a pregnant lady looking to buy or sell a remote casa (IV), a former hotel, its gray shingles flapping in the ocean wind. Catherine Hickland is squatting there while writing her term paper on the 'witch light' that occasionally appears out of the window. Hickland's then-real life husband David Hasselhof plays her sexually frustrated boyfriend/photographer who keeps pressuring her to have sex but her grimoire book says "that virginity can be a virtue and not the barrier that separates innocence from knowledge." He can't argue with that, though he knows it's really a fear of penetration, and he can't argue with that either.


I've never seen Hickland before but I like her; she has a great slurred drowsy way with a line, like she spent the whole shoot on Valium, but who could blame her? Last imdb.com heard, she was working as a hypnotist, which makes perfect sense as her delivery and pacing with dialogue makes her a natural to put conscious minds to bed, which is a skill not everyone has. And as in the top shot, she's not afraid to show her dismay at the shitshow project she's involved in, and though we feel for the horny but patient Hasselhof, it's again a bit like the kids who could just leave but won't.

 Dude, if you want sex go get some. Dost thee not know how Hof thou art!?
WITCHERY is brilliantly summarized in Leonard Maltin as "uncomfortable." I don't mind a certain level of gross-outs, but the victims here get sucked into some kind of HELLRAISER dimension, consisting of what looks like a barn converted into a crappy haunted house without removing the straw; there's a mocking old lady and Pagan looking dude ("Satan")--who look a lot like rejects from a Bruegel painting--thar reach out through a wooden fencing as victims try to pass by, very very haunted house carnival-style attraction, but much more depressing; all that's missing is the chicken wire fencing and cheap strobe light., it would be e relief. Each victim stranded on the island is there for a special reason of the stern German witch's spell as it goes through the seven deadly sins, or something: For the pregnant Linda Blair the Bruegellish duo fight over and then eat a premature infant; the bossy Jewish mother real estate mogul gets her nails broken off, her lips sewn together and hung upside down in the chimney with care and so can't yell for help when they start a fire right under her hanging head; Hickland is afraid of sex and a virgin so--in the most vile sequence--gets raped by a sickly youth with his own lips sewn shut, while the Bruegel twins and co. chant Satanic -- Yeccch!! 


All that unpleasantness, plus Hildegard Knef as the modern-era witch lady--most unseemly with super pale make-up over aging skin offset cruelly by tacky bright red lipstick and an abrasive Germanic manner-- made me ill. And while I never find fault with Shout's impeccable transfers sometimes they do err on the side of washed-out, missing chances to go for bold or warmer colors in the interest of being as true to th source material as they can (I just turn up the color, but the damage to my sensitive stomach is done ). Now that the HD is here we can see the line between where the actors' pancake make-up ends and their real skin begins (it's especially glaring in the lips sewing sequence). But when the nympho real estate girl starts seducing the Matthew Broderick-ish dweeb real estate guy and there's a big swordfish on the wall, you start to gird your misogyny-dar loins, but instead they're thrown into the dimension of fire. Crucified in ways Eli Roth might like, though thank god their suffering is nowhere near as well acted as it might be. But also lacking is the kinky equilibrium of Clive Barker, who would be too outrageous and creative to let the nausea sink in. What is real and what illusion? In the Barkerverse you understood both things as real while here both seem false. In Barker they were funny, here they're just 'uncomfortable.'

But for all that, WITCHERY is fascinating --not least because the baffling ignorance of the script in how American real estate works, the yuppie-esque sales bro says: "I think in about a year you'll be living here rent free." Does anyone even know what they're talking about here? Who invests and buys a place and then pays rent on something they bought and then 'earns' freedom from rent altogether?

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There's other solid elements here too though. Set fifty miles from Boston, a remote island the boat to which has been set adrift through witchy ways. Much more so than GHOSTHOUSE it has a certain inexorable tick-tockality and eerie isolation there at this remote building (though the gray shingle-based American bland architecture is dispiriting compared to the wild buildings of, say Escherstrasse in SUSPIRIA), with the eerie wind and dim lapping waves. No one dares take a boat out to rescue them, because the ocean is allegedly so choppy no one dares go, even though it's just slightly overcast, and I like that --like this is some kind of lost zone where everything seems tranquil but nothing is. Linda Blair's hair gets wild and she gets possessed-ish of course, and there's other elements that make it almost add up to something, just get high or drunk to ease the nausea if you're going to make this jaunt, and let the slurring mellowness of Hickland guide you through.

Oh and Shout, if we're listening --keep up the good work, but for god's sake, add some merciful color to those poor complexions, your super clear Blu rays are a terrible revealer of every last pore and blemish, every congealing spot of badly dried pancake make-up and error in coloring between neck and face. Sure, past versions were layered through what looked like sunglasses to get things right, but some slight color alterations will make it all work 100 times better. I'd feel safer anyway...more comfortable... Instead of feeling sick imagining the pale old skin of Knepf with those hideous red lipstick.... with a little attention to lighting she could have been scary (ala the Mother of Tears) or disarming (ala the Castavets), instead of just... as depressing as a visit to a real German grandmother who still tries to pass for 35.

Maybe my reaction is extreme because she reminds me of my stern and disapproving German grandparents who died decades ago (and my ex-wife's Argentine-German grandparents, equally intimidating and dour). Old Germans, man, are the worst - somehow more decadent than any Aquarian yet as joyless as a lifetime of Puritan imprisonment while they set about it. Their favorite thing is to torture their grandchildren with endless long lunches and dinners und Schwarzwaldkuchen, followed by criticism of how you cleaned the bathtub followed by 30 minutes watching them scrub it with a bucket of water and regular soap and an old scrub brush, down to a shiny patina so dirt-free it's depressing and pointless). Hours and hours with nothing to do but try to understand their wearingly adult conversation, as the only book or magazine they have is a Reader's Digest from 20 years ago. It's the sort of thing that Germans like Dietrich's husband Rudi Sieber drove his mistress to suicide via, and daughter Maria Riva captures so well in her book. I can't even imagine. I only saw mine on visits to Chicago, and I learned to bring many... many comic books. For there would be nothing fun to do for the duration. Just being bored near to death every single goddamned day and night, hushed into children aren't heard symbolic lips sewn-shutting, waiting... waiting as lunch turned to dinner and dinner turned to drinks und mehr kuchen. Being crucified upside down, stabbed with a swordfish and set on fire is an indulgent luxury by comparison... log azzits annalong.

1. Though squeamishness prevents me from seeing most of D'Amato's output (especially BUIO OMEGA and EMMANUELLE IN AMERICA--which I loathe to condemn on heresay but have to wait until one of my rare 'strong stomach' stretches to see to ensure I avoid weeks of post-traumatic shock and depression - I'm still recovering from seeing HOSTEL 2 over a year ago - not for gore but from great acting, knowing one of the murdered actresses personally, and imagining humanity as so vile such a plot concept could ever seem viable in any red-blooded American mind, but then things like the recent Cecil the lion murder or 'The Destruction Company' make me think the world is full of rich kid sadistic cowards just waiting for 'permission' to kill an destroy things, probably because they're so cowed by either a boss, parent, or spouse's browbeating that they need 'permission' even to vent built-up violence), I am a big fan of Aristide Massaccesi (his birth name) who was an above average DP on future cult films like the heads-above-the-rest Exorcist rip ANTICHRIST and as a producer gave us worthy gialli such as the Soavi's admirable STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS/

Summer of My Netflix Streaming III: Deadpan Comic Horror International

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"Take any fire, any earthquake, any major disaster, then wonder." - Plan Nine from Outer Space
Summer's in its last dying gasp and thank God. I was working on a list here of something else... something more serious and sociologically important, like lesbianism, or 'The Incredible Dissolving Father' which is, as you know, my unfinished thesis capstonezzzzz for the course not taken. But instead... doesn't anyone remember laughter? And horror? Death's too short for lofty theses and lifestyles from which I am twicefold excluded and therefore fascinated by.

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The horror-comedy hybrid on the other hand, is all-inclusive. Fear leavened with laughs is like whiskey and ginger ale, like campfires and a leavening quip after a scary urban legend. After all, by day we joke about the monsters that scare us at night. At least I do. Whatever the reason, it's global - and as old as time - and we deserve better than Haunted House 2 and Scary Movie III and V (I won't allow myself to see 'em - but you can on Netflix).

Luckily, an array of options exists from all around the world, each with a mixture all its own of both elements. Some might be unintentionally funny, some are just 'witty' or 'stoner' horror/sci fi movies, not comedies (what I call 'fuzzy' - like John Dies at the End, Iron Sky, orCabin in the Woods- none of which are included here, for differing reasons), some are just unique unto themselves, maybe just wry or macabre. More obvious and acclaimed choices like the hilarious Re-Animator and touching Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, are also left out. But they're there, oh man. But you know this already. See them, and Cosmopolis. Then wonder.

"Wui wan yeh" (1995) Dir. Stephen Chow
***1/2

Lucky for America, we have most of the Stephen Chow oeuvre on Netflix Streaming (still need the great and hilarious Forbidden City Cop). Here's one I'd never seen before. A huge star in HK and Mainland China, here he's mostly unknown, partly because he's not Jackie Chan or Jet Li and his satire skewers a pop culture partially different than ours (albeit with plenty of crossover), but if you've seen any Asian horror movies in the last ten years -- Ringu, Ju-On, Pulse, Dark Water, Suicide Club, Tale of Two Sisters, Audition, A Chinese Ghost Story, etc. --and western films beloved of China, like The Professional and Evil Dead, you should get at least 80% of the jokes (though amazingly, it prefigures the entire J-Horror crossover boom here in the states (none of those films came out until years after). Chow stars as a crazy ghost hunter called to a towering HK apartment complex to exorcise the vengeful spirit of a couple's recently deceased mother. The daughter (the great Karen Mok) is bored and restless and finds the ghost chaser--with his long black coat, sunglasses and mysterious Chow Yun Fatty ways--intriguing. And soon she's showing up where he lives (a lunatic asylum) dressed like Natalie Portman in The Professional.  He even lets her carry his houseplant, with its flower that acts as a diving rod, pointing in the direction of the spirits. 

There's too much going on to name, but I particularly loved the juxtaposition of Chow's exorcist qualification biography of his childhood haunting experiences with a flashback montage trip as a child to the carnival, misinterpreting all the papier mache monsters as real (left); and when he tries to train the security force of the building to conquer their fears via games of hot potato with lit dynamite. And they'll need that training, because the spirit is not giving up, possessing random people and pursuing our hero and his coterie around the building with a chainsaw. In other words, its comedy and horror are both unsparing, and it had me laughing giddily from beginning to end (it's only 70 minutes long) and wiped away all my ensuing dread at 3 AM, the witching hour. (In Cantonese w/ English subtitles) See also: God of Cookery, Shaolin Soccer

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New Zealand 
HOUSEBOUND
(2014) Dir Gerard Johnstone
***

Who is Morgana O'Reilly, where did she come from and why do I have an enormous crush on her after seeing her sneer her way through a bravura turn as Kylie Bucknell, an under-house-arrest punk partier and a cross between DEAD FILES' physical medium Amy Allan and Nicky Marotta from TIMES SQUARE (1980)? Oh yeah, 'cuz she's badass. A bit of a self-absorbed bitch, but hey, who wouldn't be a bitch if stuck, ankle bracelet monitor-first, in a haunted house presided over by a sweet but nonstop babbling mum (Rima Te Wiata), mostly absentee stepdad, and bordered within and without by maniacs, ghostly visitors, and squirrel-skinning suss angus neighbor. Aided by a hometown security officer who's got the enviable job of being first responder when her ankle bracelet goes off (which it does frequently) df is the decent bloke who's perhaps smitten or just bored and fascinated by her crazy hot anger --luckily we're spared a romance with him or anyone else as the film chugs its way merrily through a Fosters six-pack of weird genre double twist expectations. I can't reveal more about the plot, as it veers off this way and that on it's way to a rainy rooftop climax, so just relax and let go as your genre expectations are fucked with but never in an over-obvious cheeky way... it's deadpan enough to work, funny enough to win you over, and weird/scary enough to keep you watching even when it lapses into that Kiwi quirkiness. Just keep your eyes on the cool, fearless Kylie who, among other things, isn't afraid to sneak into the suspected killer's house while he's asleep, in order to steal the bridgework right out of his mouth. As the kids there say, it's hardout sweet as! (See also: The Babadook)

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Spain
WITCHING AND BITCHING 
"Las brujas de Zugarramurdi" (2014) - Dir. Alex de la Iglesia
***1/2

The great (like Chow, unjustly off the American mainstream radar), Alex de la Iglesia's ballsy 'comedy of the sexes' film bursts with mucho original ideas, carnal energy, wit, acumen, and Jungian archetypal initiation ritual mysticism. It's like a gender-reversed The Magic Flute if Mozart smoked meth and was married to a hot-tempered girl from Seville). Starring Hugo Silva as a stuggling divorced dad, driven past the point of his insanity by his hyper-intense and angry nurse ex-wife (Macarena Gómez), the story begins with a gone-awry pawn shop robbery--with son and fellow divorcees in tow--of a big box of pawned men's gold wedding bans --representing the epidemic of divorced, beaten-down-by-unrealistic-child support/alimony payments in Spain--hiding out in the wrong town on their way to the French border, where they wind up on the menu at a bizarre witches' sabbath, overseen by a three-generational female enclave: the older slightly senile, but always ready with her sharpened steel dentures, Maritxtu (Terele Pávez), the grand dame of the coven Graciana (Almodovar regular Carmen Maura), and the hot younger daughter Eva (Carolina Bang who, with her wild Kate McKinnon-style eyes and punk haircut, is the scary-sexy dynamo persona we all dream of. These witches leap through the air, crawl on the ceiling, and live on a steady diet of psychoactive toad secretions and cooked children. In short, they're so badass they make the witches in Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem seem like the ones in Bewitched... See it twice, to savor all the craziness (for it's very fast paced) and bask in its gleefully amoral madness and even-keeled celebration of woman's unholy power. Too bad about the tacky American title, though... and the poster art that makes it seem like a Disney movie. (more: Bitches' Sabbath) (In Spanish with English subtitles)


Ireland
 GRABBERS 
 (2012) Dir Jon Wright
***

It's an Irish horror-monster-comedy hybrid that's part of the lineage of solid drinking films from the more remote and storm-swept parts of the Emerald Isles, loosely following the 'new cop in small remote town falls in love with local while solving mysterious string of murders structure, and movees rom there). The newcomer is a by-the-book prim young lass (Ruth Bradley), similar to how Holly Hunter used to be, pre-Piano, but cuter even, looking with some dismay but also attraction at her new curly-haired drunkard partner who's too drunk and insecure to do anything about it. But when it turns out the attacking monsters can't process alcohol, so avoid drunk victims, the whole town gathers in the pub to get hammered, for their own safety. Bradley's charming enough to carry the film over the rough spots, and when her character get drunk for the first time, like a little two-fisted Gallic faerie, falling for the drunken officer who decides to stay relatively sober just this once, she's a wet-eyed mussy haired miracle. They have a delirious extended stake-out in the rain scene, craftily lit to make every rain drop in the deluge glisten with pregnant menace and/or romance. Director Wright ably captures lovely sunsets and the stark treeless beauty of the coastline, though there's a few too many green and azure filters, overdoing it just a dram like we're watching the film through emerald-tinted sunglasses, but the whole third act goes down over one long night, filters gone, so 'tis no burden. And like all my favorite films, it ends as dawn breaks... my favorite time of the day - as long as I've been up all night rather than getting up early... not that I ever do. I've said too much.

South Korea
THE HOST
"Gwoemul" (2006) Dir. Bong Joon-Ho
***1/2

Bong's a pretty solid storyteller, able to inject more satiric comedy into horrific circumstances in an organic flow than Shakespeare, Howard Hawks and Chaplin combined. So this monster movie encompasses a broad satire against America's containment, pollution and political policies down on the democratic capitalist side of the 49th parallel, a nail-biting endurance test as one brave but dysfunctional family try to escape a mass quarantine of all monster witnesses to rescue their young daughter/granddaughter before she dies of consumption, or is consumed by the weird mutant plesiosaurus-frog monster while hiding amidst the rotting corpses deep inside the monster's deep sewer stash (like an alligator, it spits them out for later consumption). It can be a rough transition between this resourceful girl's dwindling optimism and the dysfunctional strivings of her extended family unit battling through rain and American-controlled security and quarantine. The bronze medalist Olympic archery sister gets one last chance to hit the mark, the kindly gullible nearly-Cauldwell-esque bumpkin grandfather presumes he can bribe his way out of any scrape with money and a hangdog look; the brother who's 'been to college' which means his constant criticism of everyone else's decisions leaves him too busy for any right action, and the girl's dimwitted dad. Bong loves setting up our expectations for a 'giant monster' film and then skewing them, but he has a vision for mankind so dark and disturbing it almost rings true as stealth optimism. Time and again his heroes destroy themselves on the altar of a better future for their children... and in the process he gives the west a more satirically complete translation of SK's national mindset than we're perhaps emotionally prepared for. (In Korean with English subtitles; see also: Snowpiercer)

Chinatown (SF, California)
BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA
(1986) Dir. John Carpenter
****

Released towards the end of sci fi's golden era, it took the small screen for Carpenter's satirical badass answer to Indiana Jones to find an audience. Initially bewildered, half-asleep kids watching cable on Saturday afternoons snapped out of their stupors in awe. Was this thing for real? Was it a comedy? We didn't really have the deadpan weird horror genre then. We loved the over-the-top Flash Gordon (1980) but didn't make the connection that it too had a tongue in cheek, nor did we have much access to the old matinee serials Indiana Jones was a tribute to. Now we know how to savor Carpenter's knack for deadpan Hawksian comic adventure, and a few of us even recognized it in Ghosts of Mars, and of course Escape from L.A. The Wayne to JC's Ford, Kurt Russell gets the deadpan flavor as blowhard trucker Jack Burton, who winds up embroiled in mystery, monsters, and magic around behind and under the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown with his buddy Wang (Dennis Dun) whose green eyed bride is abducted from the airport by a gang of junior Triad members, setting off a big battle of good vs. evil. Carpenter packs the film with an array of welcome familiar Asian-American face, like John Lone (as the tittering evil Lo Pan, both old man in wheelchair and ghostly Chinese demon) and the great Victor Wong is subtly hilarious as a white magic wizard herb expert who's been waiting for the big showdown a long time. But there's also a gorgeous green-eyed young creature, Kim Cattrall as intrepid reporter Gracie Law. Russell is hilarious, his chemistry with Gracie riveting (we all wanted an intrepid reporter girlfriend after this). I know nearly every line by heart. 






Norway
DEAD SNOW: RED VS. DEAD
"Dod Sno" (2014) Dir. Tommy Wirkola
***

The Bride of Frankenstein of Nazi zombie horror movies, meaning an instance where the sequel's even better than the original, which has itself become something of a worldwide classic. And like Bride, it starts in the climax of the last one: Martin (Vegar Hoel), the final boy of the last film now has the the dreaded Colonel Herzog's (Ørjan Gamst) arm sewed onto him, and can raise the dead with it. So in this case he's resurrecting a bunch of Russian POWs executed by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave, to go up against Herzog's crew (who've liberated an old Panzer tank from a nearby museum, making them the first of Europe's legion of undead Nazis to ever one). Marin is aided by three American nerds, 'the Zombie squad' who fly in to help out (causing the cast to all speak in convenient English --not dubbed, at least not here): Martin Starr, a familiar face to all comedy nerds (Party Down, Burning Love), Ingrid Haas and Jocelyn DeBoer, who I fell in love with on the spot, as a Star Wars nerd, the type who can have her pick of the San Diego comic-con but probably doesn't even realize it, which makes her even more inside the 'Goldilocks Zone.'   And everyone plays it dead straight, as nature, science and Nordic tradition demands. Miss it at your own risk (see also: Troll Hunter)


France
ZOMBIE LAKE 
"Le lac des morts vivants" (198) Dir. Jean Rollin
**

With Franco favorites Daniel White--delivering a typically great lite jazz / avant cacophony score--and Howard Vernon as the mayor, this still has director Jean Rollin's (posing as J.A. Lasar) usual mix of rural tranquility amidst flowers and castle ruins, fake blood, ennui-crippled actors and a French vibe where everyone seems to be under a love spell even when allegedly dragging each other off to be killed and blood drunk from. Sentiment is dragged up in the form of one of the soldiers taking the opportunity to reunite with the daughter offspring of his romance with a local girl (before his unit was killed by French resistance fighters and thrown in the local haunted lake.) This film gets a bad rap from even the Rollin/Franco contingent, but it's a great melancholy chablis blanc after the steak tartare and whiskey meal of Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead as far as zombie Nazi movies. I like it better than most of Rollin's films, mainly because it's so very French, with a big shoulder shrug as if zombie horror movie conventions were no more to be listened to than an annoying American tourist. And now, thanks to a nice HD restoration, Max Monteillet's pastoral photography captures a note of lyrical pastoral reverie, particularly now that we can see inside the dark shadows that only come from narrow ancient architecture streets in early evening. There's very little dialogue, lots of White's macabrely contrapuntal piano, lounge themes, and silent passages where we can tune into the ambient nature of the French countryside, a locale where Nazi occupation is still fresh in the flashbackable minds of the elders, and nearly every woman in the village is young, gorgeous, and caught completely off guard when a zombie comes shambling into her backyard. Very French! And very French that it's so quietly amusing and gently life affirming the more it tries to be serious and horrific.  In French with English subtitles.) 




Barcelona, Spain
[REC] 3: GENESIS 
"[Rec]³: Génesis" 2012 Dir. Paco Plaza
***

I don't really like, or haven't seen enough of to keep watching, the first two [Rec] films but I knew a wedding video would be an ideal zombie subject - since it would basically be all your friends and family in one contained place, making their subsequent trying to take a chunk out of you like wedding gifts in reverse. And as the Spanish are a people in whom romantic love runs so strong it trumps self-preservation, I knew there'd be comical twists. With her popping Clara Bow eyes,  Leticia Dolera is a great heroine, gallivanting around in wedding dress and chainsaw, and Diego Martin (the sheriff in the recommended Dusk to Dawn series on El Rey) struggles gamely inside his medieval helmet and armor. And having it all take place on one big mansion wedding-hosting estate in Barcelona, is genius. The freedom from the constraints of found footage and the flowery architecture of the manor itself enables a vast depth of field, with all sorts of nifty falling and fighting off in the distance and pull focusing menaces emerging from the dark sans cues, and party lights, tableclothes, nice clothes, grand fixtures and DJ booth are all so familiar to anyone who's ever spent fortunes going to weddings every other weekend all spring and summer. Favorite comic moments: the girl who admits she almost didn't come, the rifle-wielding SpongeJohn (not SpongeBob, for trademark reasons), the two of the revelers miss the whole first half of the outbreak because they're off in the billiard room having sex by the fireplace, or the fatal old man hearing aid. (In Spanish with English subtitles).

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Hollywood, USA
INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS
(1973) Dir. Denis Sanders
**1/2

Displaying kind of the reverse problem of Zombie Lake, Bee Girls' (AKA Graveyard Tramps) only real problem is its dreadful Gary Graver cinematography, which gives everything that amateur look of a man who cannot block shots correctly, light anything effectively, or do much more than keep things in focus (80% of the time). He was a busy man, though, working on six other exploitation films in 1973 alone, including Bummer, and The Clones. It could be there's a better negative somewhere but I doubt it. Who cares? Fuckin' love Anitra Ford, the Cronenberg-esque research center setting, the lucky break caught temporarily by the gay scientist (and the agent's relatively enlightened reaction to same) and the great buzzing soundtrack and jet black eyes. See also: Re-Animator.



















Saskatchewan, Canada
WOLFCOP
(2014) Dir Lowell Dean
***

Shot in the wild woolly wilderness towns of Sasketchewan, this weird fusion of lupine weirdness, copious drinking, cop car weaponizing to rock montage music and a hot bitch bartender who visits Wolfcop in his full moon holding cell wearing a sexy red riding hood cape and bearing a basket of candles, erotic lotions, and fine Canadian whiskey. There's even room for old lady Satanists, a good lady cop, and duplicitous heshers. Is it kind of tawdry around the edges? Sure, but how many films are set and shot way up in the provinces, Canada's version of Alaska? Nice to know they have convenience store robbing thugs up there, too. It's aboot more than just dumb Troma snark or Japanese arterial spray comedy, so earns its spot herein. (See also: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil)


A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT
2014 Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour
***1/2

This unique crowd-pleaser isn't funny haha, but funny in that it's like something Tom Wait might make if he was an Iranian girl drinking Skid Row dry in Touch of Evil. A Persian language film rich with Jarmusch interconnectivity, it connects indirectly with two druggy black and white NYC art movies from the 90s, Nadja and Ferrara's The Addiction. (See: Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City)And despite the cultural differences (different coast, decade, language) the similarities to those two films are striking, especially in the importance of alternative music on the soundtrack. Like Nadja made great use of Portishead, and Addiction made great use of Cypress Hill, Girl makes great use of White Lines, and is way better than Jarmusch's same year similarly music-guided vamp film Only Lovers Left Alive. Either way, Persian language horror films are so rare this had to be included. Set in "Bad City," actually the graveyards and oil derricks of Bakersfield, CA., "pumping up money" as Hank Quinlan would say, or "blood" as vampire Plainview would say. As "The Girl," Sheila Vand guzzles a coke-dealing thug and a junky dad who lets his sons support his habit, and we cheer their gruesome demise by a specter of feminist vengeance wrapped in her black cape hijab like Dracula's cape. I love that she waits until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move, all the better to get high off the blood (though this is never spelled out, she barely speaks, but it recalls the druggy blood-harvesting of Dark Angel). Gauging their response to her silent staring and seemingly everywhere at once, her playfulness as she stalks and mirrors carries itself a long way, especially into her touching romance with the semi-cool lead boy.  (In Persian with English subtitles)

The Subterraneans: RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS, THE BOOGENS


As bi-polar March melts and freezes and jumps 30 degrees up and down almost every day here in NYC, I'm a veg, Danny, my SADD dragging me around like Angel tied to the back of Mapache's automóvil. My mother died last month, so who am I trying to shock with all my crazy gonzo rambling now? Who's next in the Agatha Christie keelhaul? In the hell of my natural Brooklyn habitat the prices keep going up up up up; I've been writing about the lysergic properties of The Green Pastures all week, but with all the instant crucifying going on in the blogosphere, I'm worried it's racist instead of merely clever. If the weather wasn't so unendurable I might hazard a guess, but the barometric pressure makes clarity impossible. Soon enough, chillin' with some entries in the drive-in triple feature canon instead. Because good recycled trash just might be the only haven from the demons at our doorstep, who be us. And I turn to Joanne Nail to fuck the shit up on my behalf, for my god is one of wrath and vengeance and he's tired of bureaucrats and bourgeois liberal tenure-trickers bearin' false witness. Hear these words long written down: the Jezebels will be back! 

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RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR

Dir: Bruno Mattei 
1984 - **1/2

El Rey has delivered the great trashy 1970s-80s Italian goods like clockwork these days, and the best so far is Rats: Night of Terror (1984) -- which is different from Willard or Food of the Gods, or Rats, as in the Frank Herbert series about giant rats: Rats, Lair, and something else, which Stephen King recommended in Danse Macabre, and I found at the school book fair and bought and read avidly and so was crushed by the lame movie of. Whew!Anyway, it's the post-apocalyptic land wandering phase of junk 80s Italian cinema, the time when Escape from New York, The Warriors, The Road Warrior, and Conan the Barbarian all swirled together in the Italian trash auteur mind.



Since the advent of DVD a lot of these once-maligned gonzo Italian trash classics have found a new vibrance, as instant nostalgia for the era - even though at the time we'd just sneer at them, and with the glorious El Rey channel, we don't even have to seek them out. And you can feel the love and eye for deep blacks and deep color restoration on a lot of these, not all, but Rats: Night of Terror looks amazing, and that helps us get over the general grimy look of all the abandoned buildings where the film was shot, and our natural displeasure seeing masse of rats congregated in a room with no clear direction from their alpha leader what they're expected to do in order to seem menacing. The rats don't seem to have anything better to do than hang around though, so why not? Bruno Mattei, el director, makes sure there's other subplots as the events unfold, and so why not? Were rats harmed during the production? This is Italy, mate. So yeah. Probably. But in a hellscape like this, the dead are the lucky ones.

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More than just the rats, it's got sci fi futurism as a Road Warrior style biker gang with tricked out vehicles that must have been left over from the 1983 Enzo Castellari film I nuovi barbari (The New Barbarians AKA Exterminators AKA Warriors of the Wasteland) which were from his classic 1990: The Bronx Warriors (1982) and its sequels. In fact, in Germany, Rats: Night of Terror was billed as the Rifts III - Die Ratten von Manhatten i.e. one of those sequels, billed as third in the Bronx Warriors trilogy--hey, there were others still to come, and hey, they borrow from the best, and probably used the same cast and vehicles -- these guys use so many Anglicized names in their credits, how would we ever know unless Tim Lucas was interested enough to find out?

So these Bronx "Rifts" (yeah, "right!") pull into a deserted (bombed out in WW2 and never restored?) Italian (not supposed to be) villa and soon are besieged by shots of nonplussed en masse ratten, never funnier than when being pulled via an 'unseen' carpet towards our terrified post-apocalyptic biker antiheroes and their molls. There's a room with futuristic radio equipment and an opening scrawl that delivers a whole series of post-apocalyptic upsets, evolution amok, up and under.

This biker gang though seems to have dropped into this world from an amnesiac nightmare, initially super psyched to eat uncooked flour, soon enough wondering where it came from, and how to protect it from the rats. There's a long stretch where the camera urges us to think killing the bigger white rat will end the hostilities, and gang members lock eyes with it, but do nothing. Mainly, it's just gonzo 70s-80s Italian nonsense, the gang killing each other as much as the rats, with the fake Charles Bronson going up against the fake Richard Chamberlain; but the music is great, it looks foxy and retro-chic all tarted up by El Rey (or someone) with a lot of drive in fan geek love to the deep blacks and dusky dusty ratty colors. For those of us who saw the Escape-Road-Warriors trifecta over and over and over as kids, it's enough that this film tries hard to look like them, at least on some level. Could-a done without the rats, though. Twist ending!

SWITCHBLADE SISTERS

Dir. Jack Hill
1973 - ****

"The only thing a man's got below his legs is clay feet."

If you love to see men the target of feminine violence, then for you, almost always, lurks Jack Hill, the auteur behind SPIDER BABY, COFFY, THE BIG DOLL HOUSE, but second most importantly, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS, a loonys cross between the old Warners gangster pictures, and a preconfiguration of what was to become a street gangs/amok youth craze that fused HAPPY DAYS/AMERICAN GRAFFITI-style do wop greaser nostalgia with the urban grime apocalypse of 70s New York:  ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976), THE WARRIORS (1978), SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), THE WANDERERS (1979), THE LORDS OF FLATBUSH (1974), GREASE (1978), HEY GOOD LOOKIN' (1981), and the likes. So of course there's Lenny Bruce's daughter Kitty as Donut (lower right), the gang member who gets picked on regularly by doll-faced, sweet voiced but tough-as-nails Lace (the great Robbie Lee).  No one fucks with new girl in town Maggie (Joanne Nail) though. She don't back down. Lace isn't threatened by her spirit, though she should be. Lace's consigliere Patch (Monica Gale) may have only one eye, but she sees the writing on the wall: Maggie's gonna steal Patch's man, the goomba Alpha of their male counterparts, Dominic (Ashner Brauner). Maybe she's just jealous of losing her beta spot in the pack, but ole Patch is right, the sparks between Dom and Maggie are real, and even his breaking into her room to rape her can't change that. In short, this is Jacobean tragedy of the first order, with a roller rink subbing for the town square, and enemy houses in the form of a drug dealing bunch of smartasses posing as a local political group who run up against Dom's operation.

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Anyway, it bombed. The film's original title THE JEZEBELS made drive-in audiences think it was that hoary old Bette Davis southern romance (maybe?).  SWITCHBLADE SISTERS as a title is also a little tacky. By the time the distributors changed the title, word had gotten around JEZEBELS was the film to see, but now they couldn't find it. D'oh!! If it had been called  I'LL SLIT YOUR FUCKING THROAT, it would be talked about to this day.  Hill's other great film, SPIDER BABY had the bad luck to be made in black and white right as drive-ins didn't want black and white movies anymore (NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD had broken the mold the year before, I guess). That title was dumb too, making it seem like some ditzy Andy Sidaris softcore lesbo thing it should have been called THE SPIDER GIRL GAME or I'LL SLASH YOU TO FUCKING RIBBONS!

Anyway, you can guess the story, SISTERS is great when you're really pissed off, like I am right now. It goes all the way and keeps going long after other films pull back and say 'that's far enough, laddies: we don't need, say a feminist black militant ghetto uprising with a badass armored Cadillac or a shocking Cagney-by-way-of Lorre raving mad closing monologue, or an Othello style jealous mind poisoning or the foxy Daryl Hannah-prefiguring eye patch of Patch and heavenly blonde jawline of Bunny. But Hill gives us all that and more, and Quentin Tarantino brings us to the Hill by way of Miramax, looking damn good by way of Netflix Streaming. Forever.


Maybe I'm really pissed off right now, and taking it out on the infinitely carvable idiots in my mind who kept us working until four on while a blizzard raged because they had a meeting with Girl Scouts. I sulked in my office, blasted this movie on Netflix, felt like a badass, then tripped on my snow boot shoelaces like a four alarm ponce. But either way, SWITCHBLADE SISTERS is the shit, see it when you're in the mood to stomp on someone, and that it's on Netflix in HD with gorgeous colors is one of cinema's current great gifts. See it when you're super furious at the world, or just strung out with the shakes because your dealer never showed, and bask in the film's gonzo cathartic powers of the fabulous Joanne Nail. She'll be back all right! In the fascinating drive-in capstone, THE VISITOR!

Dir James L. Conway
1981 - ***

Am I crazy to have had to get this on Blu-ray? I had to see what was going on better as all early videos were notoriously too dark in the mine scenes. And I knew that, and having known that, waited until the Blu-ray to see it at all. Which wasn't hard, as copyright disputes seem to have sunk it in limbo off and on since it's brief theatrical release. It's got a pretty dopey title too. "Boogens" is like what some gross kid in the cafeteria might call the peas he stuck up his nose, for example. Another reason: it came around during the slasher boom and seemed part and parcel with all the bland baghead movies coming out of every corner of bleeding indie filmdom and sending my alienated tweenager fledgling feminist pose all a-kimbo. I told you about how I suffered at the hands of imagined slashers in every shadow and branch against the window sound at night at the time! Eventually I realized the slashers probably weren't coming, and then drugs and alcohol wiped all fear away. But in 1981 I was right in the thick of it, and Boogens then had the double whammy of slashers +gross cafeteria mental conjuring. Well, maybe it just needed 30 years for us both to get our shit together, because now I think it's fucking great. Okay, good, okay... good enough.


The monster stuff is all pretty rote, which is great for lovers of said genre, such as myself. What really sets it apart is the snowy environment and the relative cool of two young men (Fred McCaren, Jeff Harlan) fresh out of engineering school taking a job re-opening an old silver mine, and the two young women--one the girlfriend, the other just there to be set up  visiting them for the weekend for sex and skiing (Rebecca Balding, Anne-Marie Martin). I've been on all sides of their foursome and the casual but mature hookup between the girlfriend's friend and the guy's roommate is amazingly well etched. Unlike most scripts, the dialogue has to voice of two separate people, which makes sense considering it was written by two dudes, and then re-written by still more. But for once that works pretty well and we're so used to the usual geeky virgin nerds and hunky alpha bland lotharios, sluts and final girls, that we only realize here in Boogens how under-represented is the gap in cinema between those polarities. Boogens asks: What about the guys and girls old enough to know what they want and not care about their reputations, but young enough they're still a little insecure when real emotion intrudes on the mechanics of a weekend stand? I went into this because I needed as many 80s monster movies I could muster, but what won me over was seeing the dudes and girls who are little nervous about hooking up, but not to the point of geekiness and who hook up with each other without it being about sluts or virgins or getting lucky to the date rapey snickering of baseball cap-wearing douche bags, but just connecting casually when the lover of one roommate brings her friend up to the cabin for the weekend? We must be in Europe! Or Canada. Or in a John Carpenter movie. But we're not!

This was filmed in Utah and Colorado, out there in the woodsy wild. And the monsters have an ingenious connection to all the homes in the neighborhood. The monster are hilarious, cool, and even a little scary. I shall not reveal them here, because the film takes its time not showing them too early, which is how it should be. And by my troth, I shan't be the one to break that most sacred bond for you. You can dig it, right, literally? There's some real terror with a girl in one of the girls fresh out of the shower getting chased around the basement and an explosive ending and some good (presumably real) mine scenes, which we can see and appreciate.... now.

Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, THE ADDICTION, NADJA


If the old adage is true that no one ever thinks about you as much as you think, then and only then, Bad City, Unreal City, the City of Devils. You can at least write about how no one ever thinks of you, or change it so they do, either way, will your muse tell you? And like so many before me in the swamps of the East Side and Brooklyn, I've submissively followed my vampire anima like a doting Renfield, scooping up any fly turns of phrase or spider ideas she cares to drop behind her, protected from harm only by some half-remembered Hegel quote kept around my neck. Lonely in the throng of my fellow lonesome vampire secretaries, aging and dying as far back as those modernist vagabonds being ejected from the White Horse Tavern, all of us old, decayed, drug from one Annexia to the next, while the same vampire muses stay young and lush and flush in their coffin pages and occasionally celluloid.

Artistic communities are druggy communities or they're hack communities. The East Village now can only be afforded by rich NYU students, old bastards with rent controlled apartments, and German or Japanese ex-pats. The rest of us, the Allies, are chased across to Brooklyn, scrounging in the cracks between the ghetto and the rich hipster zones for a cheap rent that doesn't involve getting jumped when coming home in the dead of night, drunk as a lord, and often. But back when you could live there for only $500 a month (with a roommate), there was a rash of female druggie vampire artists there, serving well as metaphors for the city itself, and AIDs and drug addiction. The thriving anonymity and the mad dash of youth through the gates of decadent pleasure that was downtown existence lent itself to the vampire who relished that the city never slept. Now we live in squalor in Park Slope and make double what we used to, everyone's in bed by midnight, and we can barely afford a gallon a day Coke Zero, cigarette, and coffee habit (luckily AA is still a buck).

But there's always the 90s to revisit, and now, thanks to a genius female Iranian director, there's an indication some element of the black and white vampire urban druggy denizen dream lives on, in a sub-section of the Interzone, where its forever the 80s and LPs and cassette mix tapes are still the hard currency of connection. Iran's Bad City (aka Bakersfield, CA) the paradise of an eternal spring break in a town one step away from the clankety-clank of Eraserhead. In Persian with English subtitles!



THE ADDICTION
1995- Dir Abel Ferrara 
****

"Dependency is a marvelous thing," states Lili Taylor to her doctoral thesis advisor as a segue for shooting up with him. "It does more for the soul than any formulation of doctorate material." Of course she's going to give him more than a taste of the white horse; she's going to drink that opiated blood and bask in a double craving being satisfied. The point is, this girl's got interesting things to say, both out loud and in the coolest voiceover narration in all of cinema, a veritable doctoral thesis in action courtesy longtime Ferrara collaborator, screenwriter Nicholas St. John. And Taylor brings just the right mix of zonked conviction to his words; never pretentious, always cognizant of word's inadequacy, the ideal doctoral candidate who's following her thesis to its "the horror, the horror" nadir/pinnacle, embracing the madness and physical decomposition (i.e. the rotting teeth so common to heroin addicts). It all starts when she's accosted on the street by vampire Annabelle Sciorra who throws her into an alley and gives her the bite while telling her to say go away, which Taylor just can't do. Sciorra's hot, exotic, who could say no? Therefore, it's all the victim's fault, but is that rationalization on the vamp's part, or one of those things like they have to be invited in or can't cross your threshold?

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Too zonked to care, and so I relate to Taylor's subsequent journey, her rapture over her newfound abilities and widened perceptions, even if they compel her to confront the horrors our usual sensory blinders obscure; her later decomposition similar to, say, Cronenberg's Fly remake, watching their own slow motion decomposition with a scientist's dispassionate eye.  They're in it for the knowledge, for the cracking it wide open, like true investigators. They don't cling to outmoded parameters of self. I remember scaring girlfriends and co-workers with my own rants about how I could see through time and space was an illusion, foam flecking from the sides of my mouth. Her fellow doctoral candidate and study buddy Edie Falco, for example, is pretty horrified by how far off the deep end diving board Taylor's going.  Taylor all but sneers: "Your obtuseness is disheartening as a doctoral candidate." She's right, and it's clear just who's gonna ace the thesis dissertation because she's seen beyond the veil and waltzed past all the old dead men still wrestling with phony differentiations between past and present, free will and destiny. Taylor's addiction, her disease, has organized her life, broadened her perspective, and made her as quintessentially New York as Wendy Kroy in The Last Seduction (1995).

With its artsy black and white photography, The Addiction would look great on Blu-ray, but like so many Abel Ferrara movies seems mired in royalty disputes with international consortiums, so all I have to remember it by is my letterbox DVD of dubious origin. Even under such primitive conditions  it's a stunner that manages on a flop house budget what Coppola's Dracula couldn't with all its smoke and Zoetrope mirrors, to create a piece of durable horror pop-art cinema with mythopoetic Murnau roots. The hydra polyp magnifying glass lectures and plague likenings of the first Nosferatu are here reflected in microfiche revisitings of the My Lai and a visit with Falco to an Auschwitz exhibit. No one just dies in this vamp universe, there's no time - and they were never living anyway, not in the sense you mean below 14th Street. Instead, their cool undoes them, as being artists and academics they're smart enough to know that unless they say yes to dangerous experiences (unprotected anonymous sex, heroin, biting) they'll have nothing interesting to say in their art or thesis, and wind up just another flyover hack. Victims are told all the time that receiving the disease was their decision, like a "welcome to the disease which there is no cure for" bathroom mirror urban myth.

Taylor is so good in the lead its almost supernatural. She's low-key, sexy and very convincing. She owns the role, the film, the city, and with nothing but a low purring whisper that seems born to say Nicolas St. John's clear-eyed lines. Abel must have lost his shit when he saw how good she was, how great this film was gonna be. Too bad more people can't get behind it, perhaps from lack of experience with either STDs, drugs or philosophy or New York and its druggy artsy undertow, the stolen shot seediness Abel captures better than anyone else, the NYC that's still wild and woolly, every storefront a decaying mass of failed punk band stickers. You could fold images of Taylor in her shades (below) right in with Warhol's black and white Edie Sedgwick, Velvet Underground, and 'moving portraits' factory footage and not miss a mink-lines "beat."


Re-watching it lately for purposes of this post, I started writing down relevant quotes and found myself wanting to write down the whole script. So many great lines that are like manna to any starving college graduate alcoholic or drug addict: "Existence is the search for relief from our habit, and our habit is the only relief we can find." I lived by those words while drinking myself into oblivion along with this movie. Watching Taylor convulse on the street in withdrawal reminded me of when I would try to get to and from the liquor store, literally right next door, and one flight of stairs, a twenty taped to my shaking hand, trying to get my 1.75 of Ten High and make it back up to safety of The Thin Man without falling, vomiting or convulsing on the street and winding up at Bellevue in the care of old Bim.

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"... little turkeys in straw hats."
So yeah, this is right up there with The Lost Weekend for the authentic NYC 90s addict-alcoholic experience. "Self realization is annihilation of self." Skooly D, a longtime Ferrara collaborator, appears and scores while Taylor wrestles with her habit's thousand dimensions and finding a way to excuse and forgive thd self-destructive tendencies clotting human history's arteries with crimes so vile they crash time's mainframe. Christopher Walken shows up for a few killer moments, luring Taylor to his apartment, draining her nearly dry, while boasting how well his habit is under control and urging her to read Naked Lunch. What a dick. Cypress Hill beatboxes the soundtrack with druggy raps pitch-shifted through a blunt and a half: "I want to get high / so high" while Ferrara's camera prowls the sticker-and-graffiti-caked turf, and if you were a big partier in NYC in the 90s, then damn, this be like a goddamn scrapbook. Meanwhile, your city is gone but the buzzy flashback of that first e and c stroll at dawn after an all-night sesh lingers decades in the blood, which is why Taylor wants to drink it. Like all good druggie downtown vamps, she wants the blood rich with opiates and pheromones, the double nice secretions once the drugs trigger massive release from the pituitary gland (just ask the drug-dealer alien in Dark Angel [1990] AKA I Come in Peace). That's the best there is. By comparison, sex is strictly for the tourists.

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NADJA 
1994 - Dir Michael Almereyda 
***

As quiet as the Girl in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Nightis, Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) talks incessantly. "I want to simplify my life, even on a superficial level," she blathers at a bar to some future victim dude who buys her another drink as if hearing nothing she's saying, and she's barely saying anything, except that compared to NYC, Europe is a village, and that the city actually gets more alive and exciting after midnight. "I was born near the Black Sea, in the shadow of the Carpathian mountains," she says. Dig. She may be rich East Village Eurotrash from old Transylvanian money but she's far less erudite than newbie vamp Lili Taylor in The Addiction. Here excuse, she's grieving her father, Dracula (Bela Lugosi, via ingeniously overlapped and incorporated images from [the public domain] White Zombie), even though she hated him, for making her eat butter. He was a monster. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda) has just staked him after finding him strung out on drugs, old "confused, surrounded by zombies. He was just going through the motions," Van H's nephew Marin Donovan plays the most fey boxer ever and just happens to be married to Nadja's new love interest, a cute little closeted even unto herself Galaxy Craze. Nadja is weary of her jet set life and longing to love again, even if she knows it will hurt in the long run: "Life is full of pain, but I am not afraid. The pain that I feel is the pain of fleeting joy." She's also dying, "for a cigarette."

We don't blame her, that pain is rough, man. I felt it all through age 16-20. They meet when Galaxy asks her for a cigarette at a nameless coffee house and we fall in love too, right off, with her strung out 'love child of Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy' look. We know right off that she would make a great vampire, her speech vaguely slurred but very open like she's talking to a therapist while trying to hide that she's sailing along the Oxycodone sea. Nadja and her pretty boy servant pick up Drac's body from a confused David Lynch as the morgue attendant. It starts to snow as she walks down the street at night, smoking and gliding, and then Portishead starts, "How can it feel / this moment?" 

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Galaxy Craze
Nadja's writer-director Michael Almeyreda displays a clear love of cigarettes, Universal pre-code horror, and the the lesbian vampire movies of the 70s, with Gothic shots that wondrously fuse the downtown grit of NYC with the Universal pre-code Expressionism of Karl Freund. Structured like a loose remake of the 1935 Universal horror classic, Dracula's Daughter, there's also unambiguous references to The Vampire Lovers, Daughters of Darkness, the occasional lapses into pixelated imagery culled from a then-the-rage Fisher Price Pixelvision movie camera create a feeling of dreamy disconnect, reflecting perhaps the Nadja eye view (especially when she disappears into parallel dimensions, like Frodo when he puts on the ring) and making the rest of the film's grainy video-ish look seem like high grade nitrate by comparison. It's under the Pixelvision we're treated to one of the hottest lesbian bite scenes ever. It's subtle, beautiful, strange, and outclasses Jean Rollin at his own game in one button. 

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT
2014 Dir Anna Lily Amirpour
****

At last there's an Iranian vampire love story, told in resonant black and white and set in "Bad City," actually amidst the graveyards and oil derricks of Bakersfield, CA., "pumping up money" as Hank Quinlan would say, or "blood" as vampire Plainview would say. A place where rock anthems are still and forever relevant, it's forever the 80s, all while Madonna stares out from her poster and the days are marked by a junkie father's itchy paranoia. "The first western Iranian vampire movie" has a startling doppelganger effect in Sheila Vand's similarity to the film's writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour, as she's an amazing character, a specter of feminist vengeance for oppressed women in Iran's repressive milieu, wrapped in her black cape hijab like Dracula's cape (or Nadja's hood), she preys mainly on male predators, waiting until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move, all the better to get high off the blood (though this is never spelled out). Gauging their response to her silent staring and seemingly everywhere at once, her playfulness as she stalks and mirrors carries itself a long way; most of the men in the film yammer away like spoiled vain children, figuring out how to come onto her or why she's shadowing them, all but young, insecure but semi-cool Arash (Arash Marandi), a Lynch-ish young go-getter forced to give up his prize car to dad's evil drug dealer (Dominic Rains, below), a giant, buff, coked-up, abusive tattooed pimp with a habit of sticking fingers in girls' mouths (which turns out to be a big mistake). Thanks to a chain of events, Arash gets his car back, and a suitcase full of drugs and money. Even with his blood rich in ecstasy, though, after a costume rave, our girl holds off indulging, instead engaging in a slow motion moment, beautifully set to a madly whirling disco ball and White Lies'"Death," a perfect song to bring them together as it builds slowly from just another click track into emotional sweep and grandeur all the more special for seeming to come so guileless and true, the Let the Right One Inverse of Sixteen Candles: "I love the quiet of the nighttime / the sun is drowned in deathly seas / I can feel my heart beating as I speed from / the sense of time catching up with me."


A lot of movies use pop songs, but how many 'get' the heady deep tissue impression pop music makes on the young, how the right songs come pouring from radios like poems conjured from their own unconscious, there to linger and associate this moment, this now, which has completely stopped, or at least slowed way down, with this song? Dazed and Confused, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Rushmore, The Big Chill, i.e. not very many. A Girl Walks Home Alone might be the first where not only does a song enhance the mood, pages of dialogue are being beamed silently outwards while characters barely move and the music plays.


Slight as it is, Amirpour's film sits nicely between the druggie black and white vampire girl genre, the Jim Jarmusch-Tom Waits graveyard at the edge of town tramp vibe, and the 'down and out' black and white 16mm post-neorealist movement from the early 00s in South America, films like Bolivia and Suddenly (Tan de Repente). I would have dug it if the film slowly turned to color during the ecstasy scene, then slowly back down to black and white for the come-down, but I'm always hoping more films will try that. Or any, besides Coffin Joe's Awakening of the Beast (1969) and Oz. God damn it.


Either way, the film does nail exactly what ecstasy is like via the rush of blood in the ear sound editing and the way a teasing hottie will surround you with auric tentacles of come hither only to brush you off in an instant and send you reeling, with the double kick of heady intoxication and sudden, short-shock shame. And in its own way, Amirpour's film does it all one better, because she brings real storytelling to scenes that in Jarmusch's hands would just be actors waiting around inside skid row shots until Jim's film can runs out. Instead slow motion really reflects the temerity of the moment, while we wait for Anash's hand to come out of a glove compartment and the slow drone music drives us onwards, we move into the future, tapping our typewriter train ride way to Annexia, Zentropa, and on and on, loyal as Oskar, doomed as Håkan before him, ready for our William Tell routine, one goddamned Seward asylum fly at a time... and no drug ever so sweet as to turn the city ever again to color.

Great Acid Easter Cinema: THE GREEN PASTURES (1936)


This 1936 all-black folk interpretation of the Old Testament draws 'Uncle Tom'-style flak from liberal academia, and maybe they're right (1), but on the other hand, God is portrayed as a black man (Rex Ingram), and He is a God of Wrath and Vengeance. So, while he may talk gentle and folksy, and heaven may be just clouds and an endless singing, fish-fries, five cent ceegars, and cups of firmament-deficient custard, it's still no place for buffoonery. And I personally love the shit out of this movie, and if part of that love comes from a kind or round-about racism, then stone me not lest ye be first stoned, as I was when I had it on a six-hour tape sandwiched between a host of 30s Betty Boop cartoons and Death Takes a Holiday (1934). The tape was labeled "In case of Emergency" - knowing this blog you might guess what kind of emergency I meant. For nary a month or so went by that my weird self-medication regimen wouldn't fail on me, to the point I'd drunkenly and ill-advisedly take too much acid in order to pull myself out of a spiritual tailspin and instead wind up spinning even faster, the yawning chasm of Hell opening up before me. In those dark moments, with Death so close I could see its reflection in the toilet bowl mirror, I'd reach for the Boop-Pastures-Holiday trifecta tape, and lo, I would be healed. "Nothing dies forever," (perhaps) a (mis)quote I heard while in the other room during Expendables 3.  Ain't it apt?

Because for all its folksy drinkin' mammy wine racist caricature stereotypin', Green Pastures won't stay dead. At its core it's not about the black experience, it certainly means no ill will. In its clear-headed mystical scissor complexity it is a very modernist film, fusing the mythos of the Old Testament to the mythos of the Carl Sandburg south. It's darker than blue, wrong as acid rain, but it goes down sweet as vanilla extract bottle downed as a last resort on a blue law Sunday when the shakes are so bad you can't even get off your knees, when just reaching up into the baking cabinet takes ten minutes of deep breathing and courage cuz you're so damn low from the all-day Saturday brain fry. At such times the gentle but properly aligned gravitas of Ingram's God is like a salve to a wound that's bled your soul, mind, and spirit raw, wide open, like a freshly de-legged origin story Ahab.  When situated twixt Boop's Max Fleishcer animated, Satchmo-scored surrealism and the Frederic March-starred "Hurrah for the next who dies" love story, all three personified great archetypal forces in play and provided a soulful comfort to a poor space cowboy fallen so far off his horse he'd already passed the ground three times. It was surely meant to heal this way, for 1930, the year it was written (as a play) was a rough year for this great country, a whole lot of once middle class white folks--many decorated war heroes--were suddenly very enlightened in how it felt to be poor as hell, spat on by the cops, and forced to sleep in Central Park and to take whatever demeaning job was offered. The market crashed, the Depression was on, and you couldn't even drown your sorrows, thanks to Prohibition. FDR was still three years away, but Hitler was coming right on into view.

I'm sure there's a weird undercurrent of unconscious white liberal wish fulfillment in my affection for the film, but like a lot of us who grew up in 70s Middle Class White America, I was used to black people only on TV, via Good Times, The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son, and What's Happening! and of course the radio, where you couldn't tell. Our sense that the racist jokes and cartoons we saw and heard were wrong didn't really sink in until Roots came along, and we were all like, holy shit. That happened! 

At the same time, I regard with suspicion the uber-liberal academe for whom ever single word spoken in popular media is either vile and racist or else (in my mind) painfully didactic, flavorless, and dour. A black actor for these folks has to 'represent' color, one way or another, elevating or denigrating with every step and word. To quote one of the Angels near the end as he watches Jesus down on the cross, that's a terrible burden for one man. But a great actor uses every ounce of whatever he's got in his DNA, whatever his racial heritage, he plummets down in there. He recognizes the universal man as black via accentuation of the black man as Other rather than the kind of sanitized PC sermonizing that reinforces stereotypes even as it denies them, treats minorities like Katniss treats Peta in The Hunger Games. White fans of black culture like myself look at the vibrant soul of the black performer with vampiric envy. We recognize it as something we lack, and feel it in our bones, long to absorb it. Spike Lee will tell Tarantino's fans to be ashamed for loving his dialogue, but art flowers in the offal of wrongness; it withers and dies when subjected to 'peer-reviewed journal' correctness... in an artistic sense, strictly speaking, they let fear of PC Inquisition snuff their possible mass appeal in its infant cradle. That, and they're either part of or at the mercy of Communist dissent-promoters entrenched in a covert tenure pyramid stretched across this great nation's liberal arts departments since the 1950s. As Marlene Dietrich would say, "Joe... where are you, Joe?"

And so goes my rambling preface to my telling you that The Green Pastures was written in 1930 by the great white wit Marc Connelly, one of the Algonquin round table, from Roark Bradford's source text called Ol Adam and his Chillun. And critics are right, it's racist. But so is Mark Twain. Don't forget, in the same era the popular books were savage satires of white poverty and deviance by eugenics proponents like Erskine Caldwell. Relative to Caldwell, Pastures is socially progressive, wise, and humorous, if some of the black actors embody exaggerated grotesques, it should be remembered that the source text basically chronicles Eden, the Flood, ancient Egypt, Babylon, and so forth, and the idea of humanity ever-oscillating between humble reverence and depraved decadence, between higher human and bestial indulgence, is something humanity in general, and America especially, still struggles with today.

We should also remember that the most racist of all biblical films are those deadly dull ones that cast only white actors, sometimes in black, brown, or yellow face, to play the biblical figures. Based on the relatively small geographic area where most of the Old Testament transpires, characters should all actually be North African. Where else in popular culture, aside from that Isaac Hayes album Black Moses or on Kwanzaa tapestries, are biblical characters black? The black man is the original man, true? So no other race should portray Adam, or Noah for that matter, and that means everyone else in the damned burg should be some mix of Northern African and Middle Eastern heritage, Jews included as part of the Israel / Ishmael divide. (2)

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Right
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Wrong!
Now, I'm no fan of the bible and its obtuse user-unfriendly 'folk' language, but when its folked up even more and in a more homey direction by old man Connelly, it suddenly becomes clear as a powerful vehicle of myth that, alone amongst biblical films, works to cohere God's actions throughout the Old Testament--God's periodic visitations, judgements of wickedness, and raining destruction to start anew, over and over through the ages--to find a common thread. And in its folksy way, Connelly's work actually manages to make sense of the huge difference between the Old Testament God and the New. "Maybe we was tired of that old God," notes Azrel, who doesn't notice the guy he's talking to is actually God and played by the same actor as himself, and he's feeling wrathful. But Azrel lays a trip on God that cuts deep: He needs to be a god of mercy, and to understand the concept of mercy, even God must suffer. Suffering brings forgiveness. Azrel won't even acknowledge the wrath of the old God. The new God is merciful and kind, and God doesn't have a say in the matter.


So in a sense this movie does what my lame Christian Science Sunday school teachers never could, make sense of what is, in a literally biblical sense, a bizarre unheimliche mix of historical fact and mythic 'telephone game' translation and editing. Having it be a folksy narrative along the lines of something Mark Twain or Carl Sandburg might write is perhaps the 'truest' way to tell the story.

If all that doesn't mean anything to you, o judger of my love as racist, then just this: The Hal Johnson Choir does some great singing as the Heavenly angel congregation, the kind of music we don't hear nowadays when gospel is either Mahalia Jackson style or stodgy Catholic classical; the choir is more attuned to, say, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, another old trippy favorite of my clan. The film is not a musical and the songs mostly serve as transitions between scenes, as God meddles with or just visits the folks on his Earth, then comes back up and decides whether or not to wipe out this latest version and start again.

And if the language seems outdated, note of the original bible text (which I looked up wondering what the hell firmament was):
Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day (GENESIS 1.6-8)
Jeezis that's bad speaking on old God's part. I far prefer de Lawd's version:
"Let there be some firmament, and I don't mean no little bit of firmament. I mean a whole mess of firmament, 'cuz I'm sick of running out of it when we need it.".

Like a lot of enduring mythic texts, the Old Testament defies easy interpretation as either truth or fiction, i.e. it is true myth, tall tales in a sense, ala John Henry if crossed with the historical fact of Joe Louis, Leadbelly, and Cassius Clay. You can argue its accuracy all you want, but the text is full of magical staffs and personifications of elemental forces that were probably never meant to be taken as concretized dogma (3) as there are huge gaps in logic that my Sunday school teacher never could answer for me. For example, who did the children of Adam and Eve go off and marry if there were yet no other people? And later the children of Noah. Did they mate with some prehuman life form, or in the case of Noah's progeny, mermaids? Or with each other, and if with each other, and this goes for the two of each kind of animal, how with such a small gene pool are we not all (and all the animals) deformed inbred monsters? I get no answer... but in the context of The Green Pastures I don't need one. We're not here to blindly obey some nonsensical text with a wildly inconsistent and petty God. We're not making literal interpretation ala Chuck Heston. We're here to understand what it all means. And what it all means is that even our extraterrestrial old school God of Wrath and Vengeance can learn new tricks, and be taught by his own creations, to recognize and value suffering as a tool for self-transformation. The no atheists in a foxhole or a hospice vibe includes God too. Once He winds us up and sets us off into the world, He has no control over our actions, just hopes you find Him again, even if He's hiding, like Irene Dunne with a broken leg at the end of Love Story.

 For first world white kids like myself, with no diseases or ailments or crippling accidents or arrests of any kind, we can really only know true suffering via mental illness, such as depression, or our own drug withdrawal or bad trip overdoses on psychedelics that turn out to be laced with strychnine or formaldehyde, or are just way stronger than we were prepared for. Failing that, it's my opinion suicide attempts are a last ditch effort to achieve the same grace, because if you survive, suddenly your once stifling woes are dialed back into focus. Here's a little mantra I wrote about it:

Suffering is the fire of God the blacksmith, melting down your frying pan soul to hammer it into a mighty sword. Best learn to love the sound of the hammer ringing, because He's never satisfied.

The dentist is not punched for his painful probe;
you pay him for the privilege. So it is that
the infant is forgiven his filthy diaper,
the old man his soiled bedsheets,
but not the vagrant, drunk, obscene, stumbling reminder
that no pursuit of pleasure escapes its counterbalance misery,
and so to vice versa.

If your crying is not from worry or the dread of dying
Allow it. Aummmmmm
If your crying is not from fear the manna's flow shall soon cease,
Aummmmmm
If your crying is not from thinking about tomorrow, worrying on
the punishment from father, the trouble you'll be in, the missed finals, the repetitions
already seen as tedious, before they're starting
um...

Where the twig meets the leaf is where the first frames of meshed mom morph.
Then it vibrates outward, the unspooling spiral of the seashell snail shape Aummmmmmm
shuffled downward onto plankton carpets, shamanic rattles caked in baby spittle,
white and shiny glistening like freshly hatched serpent.
Aummmm, shapes cut from glowing red lantern light revolved in orbit patterns as you lie down.
Aummmmmmmmm, the holy gleaming halo of your last first faint sunset Aummmm.
Each death, night, goodbye, adieu just an outward breath Aummmmmmm.
Mom, that titan, that tower, encircles us no more,
just the slow spinning stars of nontoxic plastic, above us,
out of reach, above the crib prison crypt.

The rattle dries into whiskey and drum sets, growing tall brings
girls of equal height, their breasts no longer big as beanbag chairs,
only the forgotten homework now
stirs a guilty shiver that giant crib mom absences's harrowing equal.

Inward..
Buzzing, the razor stops suddenly, the chair
either dentist of barber, you forgot which,
lurches downward.
The bib comes off.
We're unleashed,
to where, with such a naked neck?

And so we sense that the hangups that befoul our spiritual questing are all beaten and cleared away by the enormous suffering of the Jewish slaves and the black slaves, and the grotesque words, faces, jewelry and actions all speak to a great evolutionary quality, as the grotesque exaggerations of blackness, the dice game, the koochie dancers, the grim inhumanity and shallow interest in 'tricks' gives way to hard-won dignity as humanity collectively moves from a Pagan pantheon of animal gods and graven images (requiring human sacrifices) to the idea of a jealous God who demands fidelity, to a God of love and forgiveness. It's all there in Ingram's face as de Lawd, and also as Adam, and Hezrel, a name that appears nowhere else.


During my 'here comes the big 12/21/12!' big rapture moment (4)  I understood at last with diamond clarity that all the suffering in the world had only this one purpose, the shaking of the gold prospector's pan - to sift away the dross and mud so God might see what's left to shine, and all the baubles and wealth in the world won't buy you one step onto that golden stair, so don't be sure all that glitters in Plant's hair has two meanings. But in losing all that, in tossing possessions away, in enduring centuries of slavery with one's every pain-wracked step (5), one earns it. No expensive wine ever tasted half as sweet as plain water to a man dying of dehydration in the desert. And to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, God made men into desert wanderers, that they might know this awesome vintage. Because I'm too pampered to want to wander and die in the desert just for a taste of this golden water nectar, I became a psychedelic surgeon. But when I accidentally sew my ego into the soul via incorrect sutures and stay awake in the dark night of the soul despair, then I got Leadbelly, and Lightnin' Hopkins, and the Pastures, to raise me clear above it (by going below it) via transcendental alchemical process. It remindeth me the desert's always waiting, somewhere wrapped in foil in a forgotten college freezer, the 'good work' always ready to be picked up right where you left it. Aummm.


A final word: 
Ingram also played the devil's son-in-law in Cabin in the Sky, another all-black film that posits the negro culture as being more extreme in its polarity than whites (i.e. a black man is either a decent, God-fearing Christian or a debauched craps-shooting, razor-wielding pimp) gets far less critical dross, but I think is far more racist (7). Here Ingram is de Lawd and we never see the devil. And he played the genie in Thief of Baghdad, in short he's very good at playing larger than life mythic archetypes that far transcend the generic role of the 'bearer of the burden of blackness.' He genuinely seems to be asking, in that beautifully gentle but forceful purr of a voice, "Have you been baptized?" ("Yes, Lord" the choir responds) Have you been redeemed? ("Yes lord"), etc. He's a complex god because though he judges his creation his main request is that he honor him on Sunday, obey the commandments, and not go "fussin' and fightin' and bearin' false witness." He brings in the three Jewish angels in long white beards, and declares "It so happens I love your family, and I delights to honor them." The angels mention their people are in bondage down in Egypt. "I know they is. Who do you think put them there?" The Angels look dismayed "Oh, that's okay, I'm a take 'em out again." The Angels smile - but again there's the nagging suspicion that God is a bit of an insecure egotist. A good parent understands his children are bound to disobey on occasion, that it's essential to good growth of independent thought (as an academic advisor I see the damage done by over-protective parents who work double time to prevent this independent thought in their children).


During my last big awakening I became a ball of light unmoored from my body and 3D space time. I realized I was always either revolving closer to the godhead or farther away - but there was no such thing as true motionlessness, and to merge into the godhead obliterated all separateness, and can be dangerous - like moths aren't meant to survive hitting the bulb they orbit. In this case it was a ground zero of infancy - the sun being mother's breast, her love, her giant presence, for when a baby, your mother is a gigantic icon, more then five times your size. You worship her and need look no farther for true sustenance and comfort and if you hold a good orbit you're okay, but drift too far from her amniotic light and it's total darkness. She becomes just another star as you drift (as seen in Enter the Void). And if you're not working back towards that holy light, the devil's got you in his long reach gravity, convincing you to curse, get drunk, and get more stuff because God doesn't exist anyway. True or not makes no difference: I feel this comforting gravity of the lord when watching Green Pastures. And that is enough. If there is a God, the miseries He creates here on Earth are to aid us in finding a streak of true faith and true mercy, true humility, the nonjudgmental love that unites all dualities back into a healthy radiant whole. Do I bow mighty low? I do.

Until the drugs wear off.
------

NOTES:
For New Testament Action, see Acidemic's 2011 Great Acid Cinema JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977)
1. See G.S. Morris's great, even-handed analysis: Thank God for Uncle Tom. Race and Religion Collide in The Green Pastures (Bright Lights, Jan. 2008)
2. I don't know what I'm talking about here, shhhh!
3. Imagine if Aesop's Fables were taken as truth, with vintners making sure their vines are always low enough for foxes to reach, lest the grapes turn sour, etc.)
4. fall 2012 if you're keeping score, check the posts.
5. Giving away all your possessions and $$ gives you a rush of total freedom, if it didn't cults wouldn't exist. Add to that the idea that a vegan diet is both very holy and right and yet makes you highly suggestible and passive, and drudgery and ceaseless toil give you clarity (i.e. when standing for 24 hours straight, lying down is a sublime ecstasy) then cults have a great rationale for all their exploitive behavior.
6. STP - or DOM - is a Berkeley chemist masterpiece, it's a sports car that comes with no brakes, and no way to de-accelerate, the gas tank just has to run itself out. I didn't know til Erowid that what I'd taken (DOM) was the same as what my doppelganger avatar Dave in Psych-Out (Dean Stockwell) is drinking and passing out sips. See: Great Acid Cinema: PSYCH-OUT (1968)
7. see one of my very first posts on this site: CABIN IN THE SKY: Co-Dependence and the Lord. (7/07)

BabaDOOK! Jennifer Kent's Psychotropic Fairy Tale comes to Blu-ray



Most soap operas are trite, cliche'd and overwrought but doesn't mean we should dismiss Douglas Sirk; costume dramas are often barrenly obsequious but that doesn't mean we should dismiss Jane Campion; fairy tale monster under the bed tropes are often overly whimsical and hackneyed but we can't dismiss The Babadook. A Sheila, a quick Sheila, can take the Gorey-Addams-Grimm signifiers overused by Tim Burton and go deep into nightmare parable, where men (and boys like Burton) dare not go. She can reach down for the unpopped black brass kernel of the genuine Jungian nightmare of 'the return of the repressed' and make pop-books scary again. Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent's The Babadook (2014) is out on DVD and Blu-ray this week, a Shining-Repulsion (1) collapse of the consensual real, as a mom and son come to fear each other and collectively engage a poltergeist-ish manifestation and if--with its magician's hat and bony fingers--the title monster can come off a little This Way Kruger Comes Depp-ensian Dr. Caligari Cat in the Hat high on mercurochrome on-the-nose, it still has more than enough originality and genuine menace to make it closer to Kubrick than Disney. The pop-up book Amelia (Essie Davis) finds on the doorstep starts out as some whimsical blueprint for a future Disney attraction but soon evolves into a genuine, disturbing threat, with drawings of Amelia herself, possessed, stabbing her child to death like James Mason almost does in Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life. (1956). The Babadook said Abraham kill me a son, and/or turn the page and pull the tab to see the knife go snicker-snap. A little of both be here. 


At the core of the archetypal mysterious ghost intruder archetype present in Kent's gutsily straightforward Jungian fairy tale horror lurks the unassimilated animus, who waits until you're almost asleep, or trying to spend a little me-time before thumping on doors or rattling chains, hammering away at your nerves as you try to repress your inner rage, until it breaks off and comes back in poltergeist form and your sense of reality shifts and the border between dreams and reality collapses. 

And Kent gets--probably better than any filmmaker yet--how nightmarishly gigantic adult caregivers seem when in the eyes small apprehensive children. I had forgotten it myself, but Kent brings it all back. Even Kubrick never quite dared deal with that monstrously large element. The one time Jack Torrance seemed bigger than normal he was looming over a model of the maze. But Kent shows how children see themselves as normal size and adults as giants. As her mood gets blacker, Amelia gradually seems to grow, our perspective changes and she's shot from low angles, and her anger at her seven year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) morphs her (sans CGI or make-up--just great acting) into some dark evil thing. 

When I was very young I used to have nightmares about my mom creeping into my room like a vampire to drink my blood, I can still remember how she moved in those nightmares, like she was simultaneously swimming in slow motion and moving too fast to see.  When I was scared in the dead of night I'd run into wake her so she could stand guard while I went to the bathroom.  This one time though, she sat up slowly and straight like a vampire rising from a coffin and moaned really low... and it was like my nightmare was coming true. I knelt in submission, buried my head in my hands and started crying and screaming, "I'm your son! I'm your son!!" We joked about it for years, but at the time I knew true fear. 

Is there anything worse a very young boy can imagine than his mom, his one true protector, turning evil on him? It's easy to forget about that deep fear once you get past the breakwaters of adolescence; the passage of mom from benevolent giantess to a sweet if nagging allowance-payer is a one-way street and we're glad to forget it. We modulate our perceptions so that we presume we've always seen from the same height, but a Babadook can remind us, as good horror movies do, of all the terror we grew so hard to forget. 

As I wrote about The Shining, cabin fever is a very hard thing to study, as just showing up to study it rapidly dissipates it. One is either killed like Scatman Crothers or sucked up into the madness, as with the semi-sympathetic father whose poor brain oscillates between giggling sadism and paternal sympathy for Marilyn Burns in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Those kind of characters are so rare in horror that when they show up we take notice. Like Frederic March becoming Mr. Hyde halfway through the terrorized Miriam Hopkins' plea for help, Amelia in The Babadook or Ray's ogres in Bigger than Life and In A Lonely Place exhume that fear our source of comfort will turn on us. Having very little (adult) experience reading children's books I can't be too scared of the Babadook book in theory. But I have relied on The Thing (1951) for most of my life to save me in times of trouble, and if I put it on during one of my regular dark nights of the soul and saw it had changed, that Captain Hendry was now a sadist in league with Dr. Carrington, and no way to ever go back to the old one, I would be utterly lost, that yawning terror of my mom sitting up in bed and moaning like some beanstalk vampire giant in the dead of night would come roaring back. 

But the Babadook terror rolls in both directions: The vulnerability and trust involved with familial love hinges on acceptance of uncanny extremes, for a mother must love even the most loathsome of creatures--the beast, the frog, the rat, the touched and wayward Richard--giving them, at the very least, a kiss, an embrace, a bottle and a place to sleep it off in, in order slowly grow them into a princeIf the mother can't provide this, the child snaps and begins to darken into something worse, trying to create for others the terror he feels as a result of his mom's ambivalence. And the mom, via the uncuttable psycho-umbilical root that connects them even past death, that root no machete or pill can sever, comes tumbling down the well after him, barking at him not to put her in the root cellar. 

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Coraline
(SPOILERS) But while, for example, the horrors of cloistered, sexually dysmorphic animus shadow-projectors, like Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (or Mrs. Bates in Psycho), ended their isolation with their murders and sins exposed, pinned to the patriarchy-enforced consensual reality cork board like still-twitching wasp wings (and old Jack Torrance never quite made it out of his maze), the mom in Baba passes through the Repulsion needle and out of the Overlook cabin fever, past even Ring 2's child services and suspicious neighbors, into the safe "hero" clippings of the Taxi Driver "hero" fantasia. Farther in fact than any horror character before, she gets all demons safely integrated rather than merely repressed or succumbed to; she learns that madness, once harnessed, becomes genius. If you're not willing to let go of all self constructs, from surface persona right down to your twitching core, you will not not re-merge with undifferentiated consciousness. Amelia's strength as a mom lies not in Ford tough Magdalene invulnerable cloaking cloyness as we might expect, but raw Aussie gumption and the power that comes when you finally get down so low, as the saying goes, you can touch off from the bottom and swim up faster. John Ford had the Depression, war, the harshness of the era, and drink. Spielberg though, had only his childhood, traumatized by schoolyard bully anti-Semitism, but he was saved by the power of fantasy and Ford's westerns. I've got a history with drugs, alcoholism, recovery, decadence, years of undiagnosed depression, spiritual enlightenments and disillusionments, W.C. Fields, Camille Paglia, and Howard Hawks. We all got something to draw on, is my point, the childhood trauma informs the choice of comfort. My mom as a vampire translated to a lifetime love of Dracula.


Admittedly, the children's book / nursery rhythm gimmick, while creepy, is also overly familiar: from Edward Gorey (left) and Charles Addams-ish drawings -to everything Tim Burton ever made. But they're all usually tempered with some degree of levity. "Good fright, pleasant screams," as the creepy narrator of The Inner Sanctum radio show used to say. When the death threat implied is tempered with 'just kidding' bad pun, one misses the macabre tone of unedited nursery rhymes or Grimm's Fairy Tales, which offer little sugar and lots of coldly regarded suffering. I was amused by Gorey as a child but now I look at his stuff and think he's way too disturbing for my adult sensitivity. Maybe it's that as children we know where death is, we were just there not so long ago, and so death can't suddenly surprise us. For very young children the big fear is never death, but of being separated from one's mother (i.e. an unpleasant moment without her is far scarier than eternity with her). But adults have been away from death long enough that they no longer recognize its reflection in the mirror, and so when it shows up out of the blue, we freak out. And so Babadook's children's book gimmick would be just cliche if not for its blunt unremitting threat --moving slowly and gingerly from playfully macabre to outright hostile, threatening, malicious, obscene even as it never strays from the psychosexual Lynchian ostrich nasal lampshade imperiled dog Joe Campbell crucible, to become like a 'next stage in a woman's life" sequel to Twilight, Maleficent, Frozen, and Snow White and the Huntsman.




Shout's Blu-ray includes Kent's short, Monster, a 16mm black and white short that's basically an early draft of the Babadook. And of course trailers, interview full of nice tidbits that really stretch out. The Blu-ray brings excellent tactile depth to the powder blues and grays of the walls, a color scheme that I'll confess is not my favorite, but it works to suggest color is draining out of this bizarre family. "I'll make you a bet, the more you deny, the bigger I get!" It's pretty Freudian, especially when the pop-ups begin. And the score emphasizes and distorts Amelia's disintegrating mentality; in one great scene Amelia looks for her son and you hear his calling her, muffled and echoed, hard to pinpoint. We're never sure if it's just a hallucination. While the kid is being terrorized, she's downstairs and the cuts back and forth exhibit a profound grasp of the way the repressed emotions and sexual frustrations of a widowed parent can spontaneously generate autonomous external threats, as in Dr. Morphius' monster "from the Id" in Forbidden Planet or (single mom) Jessica Tandy's Birds.


Kent and Babadook is what Jane Campion and The Piano used to be, a female furie from down under come to wade through chthonic swamps of menstrual blood and societal taboo, dragging her son, daughter, piano, canoe, and civilization behind her, corrolling even the power of demons back under the blankets and earth and long female hair. In Kent we maybe have a female Polanski-esque Nicholas Ray to shake the "Yellow Wallpaper" madness and horror back to its primal core, the childhood fear that one day you'll wake up and your parents will be gone, leaving only their demons, their madness, addictions and dysmorphia to babysit. You can't run. You can't hide. You can only watch TV like your life depends upon it, and drink your demon under the table, night after night. Make him fear you. Unconditional love: no monster can survive it. 

NOTES:

Ferociously Her Iron Age Irish Bog Mummy Telekinetic Druid Sorceress Alcoholic Hottie Self: THE ETERNAL













Ireland - birthplace, perhaps, of western horror and alcoholism. When they got there "it was raining, or was about to rain, or had just rained" intones the wandering lassie narrator.  And they got bogs, moors, and hellfire haired hotties predisposed to take a nip, and tannin in the peat to preserve the sunken shrouded shamanesses across the sodden centuries, and they got Bram. Some speculate Stoker contracted a horrifying venereal disease while in a Victorian brothel and it perhaps left him equating sex and death with personifications of archetypal malice. I'm one of the 'some.' His pain is Ireland's soggy birthright. Stoker's "Jewel of the Seven Stars," so good I've never even finished reading it, is Michael Almereyda's uncredited source material for The Eternal (1998), a similarly fascinating and rich in horror film reference follow-up his hip downtown NYC vampire movie Nadja (1994). This time Almereyda only starts in NYC, then he's off to Ireland and while there's none of Stoker's phrenological descriptiveness, there are unique and oblique references to horror movie classics stretching from silent Expressionism to Ulmer's Black Cat to Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and even Luis Fulci's Manhattan Baby, all done up in a Days of Wine and Roses / Nights of Abel Ferrara patina, which is better.

Jared Harris and Alison Elliott star as two hard drinking, fun-loving, but not entirely bad parents in the NYC 90s named Jim and Nora: "They'd been thrown out of pubs all over the world" notes the wandering Irish girl narrator who looks on from aways off down the moor. "Good thing we're not alcoholics" Harris says. Nora's doctor notes her head problems aren't going to get better until she stops drinking altogether. He says they will when they're over at her ancestral homestead, which she fled, under a cloud, before meeting Jim. "You're going to Ireland to dry out?" The doctor replies, bewildered. But everyone there is either declining a drink with a nervous twitch, accepting one with a sidelong glance or lurching merrily from its effect, which may include super 8mm flashbacks of women old and young along the lines of their sorceress matriarchal line, a line that stretches down into the Iron Age peat moss, before there was even silver nitrate stock to burn it out. 
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From top: Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, The Eternal, Tomb, Eternal
It was adapted once by Hammer in 1971 as Blood from the Mummy's Tomb. Super sexy in pale skin and black velvet choker, Valerie Leon is the main and maybe only reason to see it. Visiting all the exhuming archeologists one by one to kill them for...? I forget, Leon gets to play three types: archeologist's timid daughter, homicidal swinging mod with telekinetic skills, and ruthless Egyptian queen. But then by the time the ritual is complete, the movie's over: the bad guy's Egyptian relic collection comes unceremoniously tumbling down around them. But hey, not to flaunt a male gaze, but when I see a pale brunette in a black velvet choker offing duffers, well Amazon feels my 'Buy with One click' faster than a styrofoam ankh can bounce off the floor of a cheap Hammer set. But either way, The Eternal is the Irish mummy movie to beat and sadly last Almereyda's last horror feature--he's been making mostly arty documentaries since. 


1996 had already seen one trippy European bog mummy film, this with a male (but punked out) shaman with some still active 'flybane' mushrooms in his pocket and his reincarnation a rabid nymphomaniacal communist with one spoon in her lover's brain (See Szamanka AKA Shamaness: See The Ancient She-Shaman and Her Shrooming Exhumer). But the frothing in the mouth Panic Theater stylizations of Zulawski are hard to sink into as a genre horror film and the rote 'innocent girl possessed by an executed, entombed or defiled soul for its methodic revenge' thing of Hammer a hard rut to get out of. Almereyda mixes the two just right, enough druggie acumen to make it decent company next to Jarmusch and Ferrara, and enough wry nods to the classics to fit next to Freund and Lewton.  I don't have to read a Wiki to know Almereyda is a true blue classic horror film lover, for The Eternal pulses with the found value rhythms of Ulmer and the murk of the moody Browning. Even the deadpan macabre wit of Whale flows through in a steady bucket trickle. If you know these names, Almeyreda's Eternal is the film for you, Johnny-O. Ignore the bad RT and imdb scores. What do they know about the ancient gems, severed hands, or Iron Age moral compromises? 
Here's what happened: 1998 Michael Almeyreda, having had a minor critical hit in 1994 with Nadja (see my post earlier in the month), a black and white downtown NYC vampire film with lots of Portishead and cigarettes, took the winnings and bet it all on a color Irish mummy film with lots of Cat Power and whiskey. It  didn't find the art house crowd it might have if he kept the black and white. Instead it went for the easy money and wound up in the cut-out bin looking more or less like everything else therein--at least from the cover. I mean look at that thing (above)! It looks like some direct-to-video Japanese softcore ghost story or hack exorcist rip with a Waken walk-on ala The Prophecy IV instead of a druggie downtown-stylized old dark house ode to pre-code Universal and 70s Euro horrors. Well, I whipped up some real nice cover options:

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i.e. "The Eternal Thirst" - the old booze comic Max and I did in the 80s

Here's the record collection, the wee lass, and Harris:


Story involves hard-drinking couple staggering around NYC, taking the Cyclone in flashy Christopher Doyle style color wash slow mo set gorgeously to Cat Power's "Rockets." They're going to Ireland to dry out and visit the ancestral homestead, which husband Jared Harris (the late Lane from Mad Men) hasn't seen; she hasn't been back since she left unexpectedly shortly after her mom died and she was... well, I shan't spoil it. Debits for the ginger, their son. But he keeps his ugly haircut to the rear most of the time, which is just another thing Almereyda gets right -- these parents are cool, in the old school tradition, in that they don't freak out and/or treat their kid like some precious egg in a relay race. They're partiers, and they love to horse around with the kid, but the kid doesn't stop them from getting sloshed at the pub. And Harris is no Dustin Hoffman "pacifist" pussy and he does a great Christopher Walken impression. First thing he does to prove his mettle when the Straw Doggie skulking townie ex-boyfriend shows up is punch him, picking a fight by the juke box more or less unprovoked. It's a great scene not least because they've stopped in there 'for a quick one' after swearing off drinking, and soon its hours later - they're tanked - and the son is falling asleep at the bar from stone boredom. Yikes! Call child services except, god bless it, this is Ireland. They just get ejected from the pub and our narrator girl notes "They'd been kicked out of bars all over the world" notes the narrator, with some veiled admiration.


HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. What counts in the meantime is the groovy scenery and how Walken's residing uncle patriarch has a great homicidal record collection (well not great, they make fun of the Irish Tom Jones, Joe Dolan but dance funkily to "She was a Good-Lookin' Woman") Meanwhile the girl with the disaffected expression who occasionally interjects some plot points "your mother was a witch as well," and has a kind of worldly calm. It's all right there - in the beginning she's a bit like the girl in Don't Look Now (1973) and for awhile she's like the girl in Who Saw Her Die? (1972).


One of the unique subtexts at work here is an undercurrent of pro-drunken anger - as still sick and suffering alcoholic Nora regularly has drinks taken out of her hands by Jim who says "none for us, we're quitting" and makes a big show of enjoying life without it. That kind of balderdash makes me want to retch. And I should know. The way the drinks pass her wide eyes by, or the way she works hard to seem deadpan when getting offered some Scotch down in the basement once Jim's upstairs with the kid, it's the kind of stuff only drunks like myself would feel keenly. How nice that there's whole films and wings of Irish literature just for us! No matter how adept his Walken impression, or grace around the dance floor, Jim's refusing drinks on Nora's behalf stings like a slap, especially when he turns out to be sneaking sips on the side from a flask. Only Eugene O'Neill really ever wrote scenes that captured the way the alcoholic mind hears every offered drink, every vulnerable liquor bottle, as a siren call, and every 'no thanks' on our hero or heroine's behalf like a gut punch they're not allowed to wince from. And only Hawks and Huston ever understood it well enough to capture it; only Hawks and Huston understood how cigarettes and drinks are the currency of cool loyalty, how they buy the world into focus, and out of it. Of course, Almereyda doesn't have time to stretch out and show Nora's detox, no mariachi band playing the Death Song to steady her nerves like in Rio Bravo; or to be denied a desperately needed drink just for 'singing lousy' in Key Largo. No time; the sub-plot just dries out. Plus, "Why be serious? that's for people in sad countries like Poland or Africa" notes the girl narrator. And anyway, the mummy catches on fire and bursts through the window and gets zapped by electric current just like James Arness in Hawks' original The Thing and add the cigarettes (Harris is constantly lighting them and sticking them in his wife's mouth; the young girl does the same for the old woman, keeping one for herself-- a wee lass smokin'! Save your sermons, o nanny statesmen --this is Ireland!) and drinks (and drink awareness) and that's Hawks enough. We don't need resolution. We need another round.


Other wry references: Jim offhandedly quotes Six Million Dollar Man while building a fire; crazy old bat Lois Smith's hair makes her resemble the crazy old Baroness Graps in Mario Bava's Kill Baby Kill(1966), which Eternal resembles for its inter-generational war of the matriarchal sorceresses plot, and the transmigration of souls motif which also ties in with Nadja and its influences like Daughters of Darkness-ness with the dreamy beachside ending.


There's other evidence of Almereyda's artistry and laid back genius with subliminal nodding, as in the way he evokes the idea of a pharaoh's crypt by lighting the cavernous marble foyer with the kind of candle light that evokes a big archeological dig; or the subtle way the cold washrag around Nora's forehead after one of her spells mirrors the head-wrap worn by Niamh; or how Almereyda uses super 8mm movie footage to nod to home movies for the flashbacks to Niamh's romantic tragedy (she let her love for a no-good man weaken her magick power) and the death of Nora's mother, (Sinead Dolan). It could have been a corny touch but Almereyda has been exploring the use of different media within film structures for awhile, as in Hamlet's pretentious conscience-of-the-king-catching video art pieces and overwhelmed Blockbuster trips; the Fisher Price Pixelvision in Nadja, and the old lady (Lois Smith), the dead mom of Nora; the undead mummy shamaness; and the girl narrator provide a multi-generational matriarchal chain around which the little ginger, the local lads, and Jim are the only men and always seem a hare's breath away from being killed in a Barleycorn sacrifice. "It was the Iron Age, you had to a do lot of nasty things to get by," Walken says in reference to Nora's question about whether Niamh, her bog mummy ancestor, is good or evil. "She was ferociously herself." Jim meanwhile jokes around when it turns out the mattress is stuffed with dead snakes and potato-shaped stones: "The ancient druids used Mr. Potato Head as part of their rituals" he tells his owl-eyed ginger. But is the ginger really his? Straw Dogs skulking in the windows with their deux ex machina timely shots may have wild scenarios ala 'Her Majesty's Coachmen' in Lady Eve. Then again, do they? HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME. These shards of Jimmy Dolan albums aren't going to just telekinetically slice into townsfolk's necks themselves! And as for sobriety... Fuck sobriety, no one comes to Ireland to dry out and besides good Scotch functions as snake bite remedy. This is the dawning of the Iron Age of Aquarius, sweet ladies, goodnight. Saint Patrick can say as he likes, we always keep serpents handy!

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Goodnight, ladies, goodnight sweet ladies...

If I were a guest TCM Programmer 2 - THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE, GET CRAZY, FACE BEHIND THE MASK



My last virtual TCM schedule was such an excess they said add another - and I never say no to a menage-a-trois, I just run home to call my sponsor. Or hide in the movies, and no movie hides you better than the three-plus hour opening film chosen here. Which Criterion should release on DVD, but they don't. They haven't. And it's not nor are the other two on DVD at least in North America, not even DVR, and yet all are essential! Let us not forget these brothers in the shadows of the shadows. Alongside my 2012 entry, advocating John Huston's FREUD (1962), Howard Hawks' CEILING ZERO (1936), and two films that have since come out on DVD-R, COBRA WOMAN and DISHONORED.  here she is, my Friday Night Guest Programmer fantasy. May they all come soon, so i can turn over and find a new delusion.


THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE
1973 - dir. Jean Eustache

I haven't seen it since it screened at Lincoln Center back in 1999, but even at 31/2 hours and in grainy black and white it stuck in the hearts, minds, and nostrils of a theater full of foul bourgeoisie; it was pretty great, hilarious, touching, and helped break me up with my then-wife by convincing her I wanted a menage a trois with my hot blonde friend from AA, even though I didn't (just wanted to sip the JVS well of masochistic sexual tension) And so denied it, and made her think she was crazy and didn't even hook up with said AA girl after my wife left (the first time). You think I should have gone for it? It's pointless to regret it now! But I will praise this film to high heaven for its effect on my marriage- it delivered me from still waters. And not just because it made me feel all artsy (since I was covering it on my first-ever critic job) before I even knew who the bourgeois were, but because my first long-term post-marital affair was with a beautiful married Frenchwoman who'd come by my place after work for cinq a sept and bring me bonbons and coffees. As for the film itself, it was 13 years ago I saw it but I know I laughed at least once and only had to move three times to different sections of the theater to get away from bourgeois eaters with their clickety dentures, cheeses, and whispering nannies (this was right before the dawn of cell phones, thank god). Luckily the packed Walter Reade was almost empty by the time the film was over. Even cheese-eating bouregoisie have to get up and read their New York Times on the way 3 train in the morning. But not me. I took the 6, to the C, to the G!

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Maybe it's so relatively unknown here because Eustache (left) killed himself shortly after completing it, and his only other credits were some slaughterhouse documentaries, so we don't have a pop culture icon face to go with him like we do for Truffaut or Godard, nor a vast oeuvre like we have for Rohmer, but he belongs in their ranks, for this film encompasses in spots all three of their styles: Rohmer's real time naturalistic three-way, Godard's May 68 brick-throwing and 'pop-bang-wiz!' And Truffaut's Jean Pierre Leaud, impossibly young despite Gauloises. And like all three: obsessed with sex, impotence, class-consciousness, and the kind egocentric humanism only the French can make work.

Leaud stars as Alexandre, a Parisian slacker who's still trading on his high profile in the riots of May 68, and keeping an "open" relationship with live-in girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont). A sexy nurse comes along named Veronika (Francois Lebrun),  even more liberated than either of them. The three of them later try to make it as a menage a trois, but mostly they talk, drink, smoke, look good and play endless records on a cheap turntable on the floor, and 215 minutes of running time goes by faster than any five minutes of Last Year at Marienbad. Isabelle Weingarten is Alex's bemused ex, and Jacques Renard Alexandre's his male chum. The English subtitles were the dirtiest things I'd ever seen... up to that time.


FACE BEHIND THE MASK
1941 - Dir Robert Florey

(POSTSCRIPT: This is showing on TCM - June 20, 2015 -1 AM -EST)

Here’s a classic rarity that used to be shown a lot on UHF TV in the 1970s. If you love weird classic film then you too probably remember the first time you saw and heard Peter Lorre as a kid, it's like he reached across time and the TV with that velvet Siamese purr and starts whispering in your ear with the immediacy of your own wild kid dreams. Rarely did this great actor have a chance to star totally in a film – even as Mr. Moto he had to share to bulk of the screen time with bumbling comic relief, smugglers, and straight-arrow couples meeting cute, so to speak. But for director Robert (BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS, MURDER IN THE RUE MORGUE) Florey and a budget of about eight bucks, Lorre gives it his all. Every scene no matter how paltry the set or set-up has a moody jet black pathos that as a kid really resonated with me, and still does.

It’s the classic rise and fall crime story, but the twist is that Lorre starts out just an idealist immigrant excited to seek his fortune through hard work in his new home, New York City. A great early scene is where Lorre's naive friendliness wins over an Irish cop, his immigrant joy as infectious as a dose of Capra concentrate. Instead, his first night in a hotel, he’s horribly burned in a fire and has to wear a thin mask over his face, otherwise he scares and horrifies everyone on the street. The make-up of the mask is ingenious, with Lorre’s face seeming just a little latex stretched over his skin, bunched up at the sides and Lorre's acting so good that in its inexpressiveness his face still says volumes. The deep philosophical and reflexive aspects of this situation seem unlost on either director or actor, who throw away almost everything extraneous, and deliver agonizingly humanistic pathos (with a great turn by George E. Stone as the Ratzo Rizzo type who befriends the shunned pre-mask Lorre). Even with blind girl Evelyn Keyes' love offering a doomed shot at redemption, it's never corny or mawkish (leaving even that Capra concentrate in the dust). Instead, Florey and Lorre take the same low budget of a Sam Katzman or William Beaudine Monogram and turns it into raw poetry, a cross between Sam Fuller punch-and-pathos pulp, Edgar Ulmer dimestore fatalism, and Nicholas Ray underdog dissolution, with Lorre dressed all in black with his hooded eyes, while with the sunny cheerful Keyes he's like Frankenstein by the lake with the girl, or a Bauhaus Weimar Caligari in the suburbs.

And it’s the best Lorre movie. Ever. He makes the most of it. Thanks to his velvety feline vocal delivery and his own weird real life looks keeping him from ever ‘getting the girl’ in films, no matter how many he’s in, Lorre’s scarred ugliness in MASK seems like the next logical extension. Like with Fuller and Ray it's a cinema of polar extremes, the warm moments have value because we know they're doomed, we know the despair of rejection and the joy of finding a friend, someone just as down as you are, but not out. As a kid I saw this movie a dozen times and loved it and yet feared it because it’s kind of a downer, as was another frequent local TV horror movie feature, THE BRUTE MAN, starring real life acromegaly sufferer way cooler because Rondo, God love him, was never much of an actor. It was where I first saw Lorre, as a young child when we got up so early for Saturday cartoons we'd see the second half of the late-late horror movies on local TV. There he was, this little guy with a weird face, tied to an airplane in the middle of the desert, ruefully welcoming the end. It's one of my most vivid and mysterious childhood memories. It's the perfect kid movie because it's all about the importance of being good to the little guy, the ugly kid, the lost immigrant, and raining comeuppance on those who are mean to you.  It's just not something kids would ever see today, anymore, alas, in the age of cable and Netflix. Their loss, just as MASK's digital unavailability is ours.


1983 - Dir Allan Arkush 

One of the greatest crimes of the digital era is the total unavailability of this midnight cult show classic, set during one long crazy New Years Eve at a kind of Fillmore, in a kind of 'everyone shows up to pay their respects to this imperiled classic venue' kind of setting. Allen Garfield is a kind of Bill Graham named Max Wolf, who's ailing and needs a fix of success. Lou Reed is a mercurial recluse rock god who's apartment evokes Dylan's "Bringing it all Back Home" record cover. He sings his "Baby Sister" over the credits, to a transfixed few after driving in a cab all night jamming out and uttering cryptic nonsense.

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There's a Muddy Waters-ish blues legend named King Blues (Bill Henderson) who delivers one of the best badass eulogies in the history of funerals and later sings "Mannish Boy" a theme that echoes through the set lists of subsequent performers, like Mick Jagger-Bowie-Jim Morrison lizard king-ish icon Reggie Wanker, played so brilliantly by Malcolm McDowell you want to follow him into the Caligula dawn of drug-fueled moments of transcendental pagan abandon, the wild fury of the mosh pit, and onwards. There's a great Piggy Op-ish animal (Lee Ving) who urges people (including Paul Bartel) to dive off the balcony; a scabby punk rock poetess ala Patti Smith amidst a Runaways style scab band (above); a flooded bathroom with a shark swimming around it; a giant hypodermic; Daniel Stern pausing to inhale some smoke from a $1 hookah hit-sellin' Rastafarian in one of the stalls; a Satanic pimp alien coke dealer shows up when anyone says the magic word; magical LSD winds up in the water cooler; there's a crowd-surfing refrigerator; acid rock hippy freaks and twitchy punks grooving side by side; an uptight fire inspector, and that's just the tip of Malcolm's talking penis. "It's the beginning / of a new age" he notes - and as acid flashback sensory signals turn our saliva electric tangy, we believe him.  Now for gods' sake, solve the dumb licensing issues or whatever's holding this back and let it loose. Ding Dong! The wicked keg is dead!

Gravediggers of 1933: THE INTRUDER, SECRET OF THE BLUE ROOM, BEFORE DAWN, TOMORROW AT SEVEN, SUPERNATURAL


As I've written in the past, 1933 was a magical year for movies, and America: it saw the election of FDR, the repeal of prohibition, and 'ahem' the rise of Hitler into power (that last part, not so magical but the war effort did lift us out of the Great Depression). At any rate -- change was afoot, probably akin to our modern years of Obama, legalization of marijuana, and gay marriage. Or worse, or better. And I myself turn to old dark house movies every May or so, because they understand hay fever, the way allergies imitate the first signs of a cold and make the bright sunny day with the calla lillies in bloom again seem a jeweled scorpion, glistening shiny chitinous flowers on the outside and stinging venom within; and by contrast murky AC darkness an opium den refuge of creaking doors, whistling wind and hands coming out from secret panels behind oblivious heiresses. Maybe it's that May is on the opposite end of the year from Halloween, and as such I can see it clear across the circle. Here's five from '33, with my ratings for both film itself and, since it varies so crazily in quality, transfers.

THE INTRUDER 
1933 - Dir Albert Ray
** (Retromedia DVD- *1/2)

This weird Allied Pictures cheapie is one of those largely forgotten shipwreck flicks so big in the silent and early sound era, providing as they did an excuse for nude bathing, reversion to savagery, (inexpensive) beach location films and ye olde gorilla suit. The castaways always include one rich lady unaccustomed to 'roughing it,' a sea dog who does the roughing, a virgin and a party girl who become buddies (ala Mary Anne and Ginger) and a comic relief drunk. Here there's also stolen diamonds, and a murder aboard ship shortly before she goes down. The killer is.... right in this boat. Mischa Auer saves the day as a Ben Gunn type who's been stranded there so long he's started talking to the skeletons in his hut, but he's not a monster... His gorilla buddy keeps an eye on things, but from a distance, so his howls keep the girls on edge. Just because he's a crazed castaway with a thick beard is no reason to portray him as a monster on the poster! He doesn't even do his gorilla impression like in My Man Godfrey. Just beats up a skeleton when the communication gap proves too much.

Of the cast, Auer is the only familiar face (to me) but that can be a good thing: The good girl, Lila Lee, seemed like the taller, gawkier older sister to Gloria Swanson; Gwen Lee is a Mae West/Pat Kelton-ish gold digger who gets all the best double entendre lines. Monte Blue (who got his start with D.W. Griffith) is the nominal hero; William P. Davidson the numb nuts copper; perennial lush Arthur Housman can barely feign interest in how his girl (or is it his sister?) is being wooed by the square-jawed hero --I think! It's hard to tell who's who when all the heads are cut off either by inept camera work or frame cropping.

Director Ray does deliver one masterful scene: the morning after the shipwreck, when the lifeboat survivors all wake up and--silently without others noticing--begin to take stock of where they are, remembering what happened, (or coming out of a boozy black-out) and either forging silent eye-alliances, passing notes about some cache of diamonds, or getting scared, quietly. I learned more of the plot in that one silent stretch than in all the malarkey fore and aft.



I like that the girls sleep in the cave on the beach during the night (the men around the fire) and they wake up to find skeletons of past castaways sitting right near them. And there's a lurid, sexual almost HBO-level roughie vibe when the killer forces the two girls deeper into the woods at gunpoint, and it's wild man Mischa's gorilla and his skeleton crew to the rescue. Or at least... Mischa stands off to the side, waiting for Ray to give him some direction, while the good and bad guys slug it, and on his tiny island with his old age and his wisdom, cries "Mary!" (that's his skeleton's name). And I like how Housman--who's been slowly and on the sly morphing from tipsy to hungover to competent and alert--like three different people, but all without being grandstanding about it-- is so thrilled to be back in the presence of booze after they're rescued by a French steamer; he brings the whole tray, whiskey, seltzer bottle, ice, and all, to the inquest.  Prohibition, thou art repealed. Hell, it was probably why they were all on that boat to begin with. The old international waters thing (three miles out?) led to lots and lots of party boats... and bootleggers hiding behind old ghost legends to keep snooping kids away from their stills...

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Mischa and Mary (left)
Retromedia's Forgotten Terrors DVD is shit but hey! Hey! It's a genuine effort to pack in some films you'd never find in a million years on your own, including Tangled Destinies and The 1931 Phantom! They don't look so good but then again, they're at least made available on disc. (P.S. It's also on on youtube)

SUPERNATURAL
1933 - Dir. Victor Halperin
*** (DVDR- ???)

"Life does continue after death," notes Dr. Carl Houston, the psychologist friend (H.B. Warner) of bereaved heiress Carole Lombard. He wants to experiment on the corpse of soon-to-be-executed murderess/free spirit artist Ruth Rogen (Vivienne Osborne), a kind of prototype for Catherine Trammell or Michelle Pfeiffer in White Oleander. Her dead brother is used as bait by bogus medium Paul Bavian (Alan Dinehart), an expert at delivering the old glowing death mask /blackmail/lost loved one's voice giving banking instructions via a long horn floating in the air flimflam. His drunken landlady (Beryl Mercer) knows all his tricks but forgot the age old adage for any would-be blackmailer: never threaten to expose a creep right to his face without an exit strategy! But while the seance at Paul's pad seems to go as planned, Lombard stops at Houston's office for a second opinion, right as he's doing life after death electrical experiments on the body of executed murderess and Carole winds up possessed--in one of those 'small world' turns of coincidence--by the very same murderess who swore revenge on Bavian for turning her in.

If the plot sounds familiar, it's because Boris Karloff played versions of the same scenario about a million times all through the late 30s and 40s, indicating America was obsessed with the electric chair and radio, and soul transference (in that order). Sharp eyed fans will note some of the walls from White Zombie reformatted for Paul's seance parlor, with a great touch: the above ground subway runs right past his apartment window, adding just the right amount of tawdriness. The final third of the movie takes place over one long night as the possessed Lombard seduces Paul, ever fighting to refrain from strangling him (for the nonce) while bringing him out on her yacht (easy body disposal) as boyfriend Randolph Scott put-puts to the rescue. Pre-code points for when Paul cups Lombard's breast while they get down to business on the divan, and the general air of sleazy heat between them when they sneak into Ruth Rogen's studio apartment like Marcello and Anouk in the beginning of La Dolce Vita, to fool around in front of her creepy life-size self portrait. I froze the projector and did two paintings off the moment they embrace (acrylic on canvas -2003), to capture a kind of post-modern ghost refraction -ion-ionn.... And Lombard shows her true chops by morphing from killer Rogen and grieving heiress with sensuous conviction.


Minus points for sight of a big dog perennially chained in the psychic's house; I'd have liked to see him getting a nice walk or some affection. Instead the dog conveniently disappears, never to be seen again. I don't have the Universal Vault DVR yet, because I have a pretty solid burn from an old airing, but it's only a matter of time before it too dissolves, warps... wanes.

SECRET OF THE BLUE ROOM
1933 - Dir Kurt Neumann
** / (DVR - ****)

With its use of Swan Lake over the opening credits (as in Dracula and Murders in the Rue Morgue) you'd think this was going to be a real pre-code Universal horror treat: Lionel Atwill stars as the father of Gloria Stuart, celebrating her birthday in a big cozy castle while the whistling wind howls outside in the night, and three of her suitors are the only other guests (kind of like Lucy Westenra's). The creepiest part is that dad Atwill doesn't mind having these three fools fight over her, sleep over, for who knows how long, etc. as his only houseguests. Instead of ordering them out, Atwill tells her "Give us all a nice birthday kiss." Yeeesh, incest she wrote!

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The one with the best chance at Stuart's hand, the clear winner alas, an older foreigner played with by Paul Lukas (in one of his flattest performances); the one with no chance at all is the abashed adenoidal pup who grew up with her (Onslow Stevens); the middle guy: William Janney, considers himself a mystery writer. He bunks with Lukas, even though there's like 80 rooms in the castle and no one else stays there but servants. What the hell? These strange details are way more fascinating than the titular mystery, which involves each suitor sleeping in the cursed blue room, one by one, to prove their courage. Stevens goes first, and in the morning... he's gone!

If Stuart and Atwill weren't so imbued with classic horror moxy this would be the smallest, saddest mystery film ever. the cast is utterly void of character details or anything else to talk about beyond the titular secret. There's no other guests, and no other women characters aside from a maid. Thank heaven Edward Arnold shows up halfway through as the local detective; he alone seems to have a life beyond this half-baked mystery story. The ubiquitous Robert Barrat (Babs' pimp dad in Baby Face the same year, extending the pimp dad motif) is the butler who keeps signaling at the window in a red herring bit borrowed wholesale from Hound of the Baskervilles.

Despite these quibbles, it will still be catnip to Universal pre-code horror fans like me after they've already re-run the gamut (Frankenstein, Old Dark House, Black Cat, Raven, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dracula, Invisible Man, etc.) and crave more, like a junky. Seems a bit like Laemmle was scraping the old dark script barrel though, and Neumann's direction is slow and pointless - always quick to cut away from any legitimate horror moment. At one point we literally have like a full minute of just Arnold and his cops in a bedroom looking at their watches. It's a remake of Geheimnis des blauen Zimmers from the year before, so blame the Germans! Soon enough, they'd deserve it. The Universal vault DVR looks great though. So soak it up, junky...

BEFORE DAWN
1933 - Dir Irving Pichel
**3/4 (TCM airings - ***)

Seances were all the upper crust rage in the early 30s (the way Ouija was in the 70s) and while most of the mediums turned out to be phonies, there was a general consensus that ESP was scientifically proven and real mediums did exist, as in Charlie Chan on Treasure Island. Here the true psychic is mellow gamin Dorothy Wilson, who makes up in a naturalistic low key sincerity what she lacks in dramatic range. Her trances tell her nearly everything but even when evidence comes fast and furious the cops don't believe her and consider it a favor not busting her as a phony just because her ruthless swindler of a father (Dudley Digges) refuses to refund three bucks to bunco squad undercover man Stu Erwin. Old Stu takes a shine to Wilson, though, and call me crazy (I dislike Erwin on principle) but the two have a cutely abashed chemistry, with Erwin's cop authority helping to offset his patented aww-shucks everyman awkwardness. He might not have been able to stand the strain of Peggy Hopkins Joyce or Sari Maritza in International House, and he might make Jackie Oakie seem like Arthur Kennedy as far as assertive manliness, but he's at least adequate for the task of breaking down a wall and slugging it out on steep stairs with the murderer.

The plot is the old Bat Whispers bit with hidden loot in an old spooky mansion and assorted seekers posing as heirs or one another and all that. Here an old dying gangster tells the Viennese Dr. Cornelius where he hid his stolen million in the old lady's house. Soon the old lady is menaced by a floating death mask and draggy second floor footsteps. Her old maid/widow/sister/whatever (the pair have even more of a lesbian vibe ala Cries and [or BatWhispers) winds up tighter than a clam about what she may or may not know so that she won't be next.

I love Irving Pichel as an actor--that otherworldly deep voice really sends me--but his direction here (and in the 1935 She) lacks momentum and mood. The bland lighting is a long way from the stark expressionist intensity of the Bat Whispers, for example, but Warner Oland is magnificent as Dr. Cornelius. With owl spectacles, and eyes alight with thoughts of "walking off the loot," he's like a goblin king, intoxicated with mischief as he tries a wild array of approaches to getting the money out of the old lady to the point we can't tell if he's evil or just a shrink playing a guy able to confess he's evil in order to get the money from the old lady and give it up to the authorities. His advanced level head games remind me in of my own strategies in my daily job, i.e. if you want to make your patients (or students) open up to you, act crazier than they are; I saw it all the time at Bellevue! We know Oland's a great, fun actor, but this is a whole new side of him. And who would imagine old Daddy Digges could suddenly turn so grave and evil, even bullying, to his daughter? It's a spooky sudden transformation from a flim-flammer with a cute daughter in tow (ala Fields in Poppy) to an obsessed monster (ala Mason in Bigger than Life), letting us know Digges had a range larger than his usual alcoholic colonialist trader (or traitor). With better lighting and/or a stronger comic hero, Dawn might have been a classic but at at least there's a great dark secret passage climactic stretch down super cool secret stairs to a giant round abyss! Don't quite before the miracle! 3

TOMORROW AT SEVEN
1933 - Dir Ray Enright
***(Alpha DVR - *)

Just when you thought blurry old Alpha couldn't get worse in their handling of these old independent clunkers, they switch to the kind of DVR greymarket format, with blurry color Xerox labels and tracking streaks on the bottom of the blurry image. On the other hand, at least they still put out, making them the old whore of the hoary old dark house houses.

More important is that for all its blur, Tomorrow at Seven is worth the trouble: Director Enright surprises with some very modern camera moves, especially in the killer POV opening murder, and the banter between two bumbling Chicago detectives (Frank McHugh and Allen Jenkins) starts out great, with a long slang-filled pre-code discourse ("he remembers the guy's a stew, see?") on how they got some tips on mysterious villain 'The Black Ace' by cutting out lines of "gold dust" (coke) for the nostrils of some initially clammed up twist. When the threatened rich old duffer Thornton Drake (Henry Stephenson) can't understand a word of it. McHugh tells Jenkins "These guys don't understand these technical terms." Drake's the one threatened with death 'tomorrow at seven.' So they all take his private plane down to his Louisiana mansion to escape the Black Ace. But of course they're playing right into his hands!

There's also some surreal rear projection: on the train where Vivienne Osborne (the maniac killer in Supernatural - above) meets Chester Morris, the rear-projected track seems way too large resulting in fine Brechtian abstraction); and the plane crash has bizarre touches (as I recall); but Jenkins and McHugh must have been hitting the gold dust en route because their comedic sense gets broader and dumber with each passing page of the script. When they're reading the identity of the Ace all slow out of the dead man's pocket, of course the lights go out before they can finish and when they come back on, of course there's no letter but they're so dumb, of course they start reading anyway... yikes. Oh well, we didn't come down this way expecting originality, but to savor the mood. And that ya got from the ensemble cast: Charles "Ming" Middleton as a mysterious coroner; Virginia Howell a creepy mute housekeeper (she keeps giving the gold dust twins the sign language finger) and a hulking, menacing black butler-henchman; Gus Robinson, in his only credited role (he was one of the dancers in King Kong right before doing this). So give up waiting for a better version, and just make sure to watch it on the crappiest, smallest TV you can find - so you can pretend it's four AM and 1975 and you're pulling it down out of the ether on your UHF rabbit ears... and are a gold dusted stew.



Harpo Out of Hell: MIAMI BLUES

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There's a time to play Monopoly and a time to kick over the board and throw the play money in the air like we're motherfuckin' Scarface. Miami Blues (1990) is for that time. Those of us who love charismatic maniacs, especially when they're safely contained in the confines distance, time, or the screen, love this movie. Hopelessly sane writers and artists, we need the semi-benevolent destructive playfulness that can only be found in certain rare 'awakened' megalomaniacs, to spark our pens to life. Such a sparker is Junior (Alec Baldwin) in Blues. He is the expression of our id-unleashing dreams. It stands proud as a herald for the maniac renaissance of the early 90s: Mr. Blonde, Mickey and Mallory Knox, Wendy Kroy, Hannibal Lecter, Tommy in Goodfellas, Harvey in Bad Lieutenant, Lisa in Girl, Interrupted... And Junior. 

That manic early 90s phase is long gone now, but for awhile cinema was a bonfire full of toothsome chestnuts.

Directed by that shaggy dog beachcomber director George Armitage, Blues is a violent Marx Bros opus writ large in the deadpan Elmore Leonard Miami. Allegedly about hangdog cop Hank Moseley (Fred Willard) loping after Junior for a bullshit manslaughter charge, it's really more about... well, maybe less than the sum of its parts. But what parts! Jennifer Jason Leigh as a dimwitted prostitute Junior plays house with, lots and lots of freeform random crimes of utmost ballsiness, and maximum vengeance against cops who eat his pork chops. Junior may be insane but he has ethics: robbing crack dealers with a plastic Uzi, mugging pickpockets for the wallets they stole, knocking over bookies, and--in the best sequences--all while playing cop with Mosely's stolen badge. There's no rhyme or reason to Junior's actions, but everything is logical because he acts on our expectations. If we see a robbery in progress we naturally assume he'll try to stop it, so he does even if all he has to hand a jar of spaghetti sauce. If Pedro seems a little too cocky with his shotgun at the pawn shop, it's natural Junior will shoot him as soon as his back is turned, etc.  Why? Like the scorpion drowning atop his frog raft, it his nature.

There's no other way to really contextualize the anarchy at work here, unless we can glean the Marx Brothers connection within Junior's initial alias, Herman Gottlieb. A way more obscure reference than, say, Zombie's Firefly family, Gottlieb is the name Sig Ruman's ever-fuming, Mrs. Claypool-flattering Baroni-signer in MGM's Night at the Opera (1935), I know this for it is a film I saw so many times as a kid that its textures and rhythms cloak me still in a kind of cinephile temple garment. And it's that connection holds the secret to the madness of Baldwin's maniacal character. His genius lies in that same crazy Marx-Lugosi "life is but a dream" row-row yer way straight out the Truman Show bubble direction. Forever caught in an old world (pre-WW2) bourgeois slow burn harrumph as Groucho dances verbal circles around him and Harpo sets his shoes on fire, it's only natural that old Mr. Gottlieb would eventually get his wallet lifted and identity stolen by a light-fingered Harpo out of hell, for how can we measure the high crusting curves of madness without a straight edge with no sense of self awareness to impede its accuracy?

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The real Herman Gottlieb (Sig Ruman) center, and top right
And sometimes it doesn't work anyway. As we all know, if the unleashed id is too self-serving or sadistic, the unleashed 'it's all a dream anyway so unleash your primal desires and/or try to fly' aspect leads merely to lurid horror movies (Killer's Moon, Devil's Rejects) and if it's too post-modern leads to a headache-based longing for narrative immersion (Daisies, Weekend); but if it's juuuust right? You got the Marx Brothers, Bela Lugosi, Timothy Carey Jr., and... then.... it gets foggy. Who else is left? Then the answer come a-back: Alec Baldwin. He's left and let-a me tell you, boss, now you got something. Left handed moths ate the painting but he's gonna eat you, you Southie son of a bitch. And now that Blues is on Blu-ray it's not just a chance to remember how goddamned charismatic and hirsute old Alec was then, it's a sign that true anarchic Harpo Marx madness shall not perish from the screen...

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HERE'S TO DEAR OLD BALDWIN:

Most guys as good looking as Alec are, let's face it, dull as chalk - and many still are just as dull even after age does a Jake LaMotta on their kisser. Occupied with making sure their hair is werewolf perfect and their best angle camera-ward for so long they forget to accrue depth, no emotion on their face lest wrinkles appear, they come across often as drugged narcissist automatons drained of all wit and regular guy who-gives-a-fuckitude, empty aquariums filled with air dank with the kind of self-righteous petulance they're convinced is the height of butch charisma. With his Irish-American twinkle alight in his eyes, though, and whatever the age, Baldwin comes off as real, even when he's acting the part of a charming actor who knows he's fake. We know guys like him, and he's a cipher without being a bore. He's charming without being cocky, crazy without being aggravating. Better actors can't say that, nor worse ones. He has the glint of real madness in his eyes, the kind you can't fake or buy, the kind that's too playful to be destructive, too cool to get hung up on phony sentiment.

A lot of us kids who grew up with the Marx Brothers and the Lugosi collection (and then completed our teenage years as snotty poseurs with Repo Man) were left in the cold at the end of the 80s. In the pre-Tarantino-verse of 1990, Blues stood alone. We fans had a dupe of it on tape of course, and have long grown used to the blurry pastel streaks of the decor and sky, the fuzzy short hair cuts of both Junior and Susie reduced to a blurry halo. With the new Shout Blu-ray its all sharp and clear, with a nice lovely sparkle to the sea and sky and deep 3-D blacks to every sun-dappled shadow. The 80s pastels are no longer as wearisome and the transfer is so sharp you can smell the salt and suntan oil. Extras include interviews with Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who both admit really enjoying themselves with the project and characters and each other, and it shows.

The film had its detractors at the time, one of the only things I ever read in 'The Daily Orange' - Syracuse University's student-run newspaper, was a scathing review of Miami Blues, which declared it emblematic of a rise in nonsensical nihilism. The writer was clearly a pretentious twit and there were many up there. Their minds hardened with dogmatic readings of western dialectical philosophy, studied solely to appease their stern conservative father, there were a lot of such idiots up there and they all got BMWs as graduation presents, and today they're probably going to see the remake of Far From the Maddening Crowd at some UWS theater with their mink-bestrewn wives.

In other words, a bourgeois white elephant filmgoer will not approve of Miami Blues, which seems like an open invitation to the underclasses to rise up and boot them from their homes like Bane in Dark Knight Rises. But Bane was a drag. We loved The Joker, because like Junior, he keeps his grip on the termite megalomania of early childhood, and so has no urge to burn out the white elephant hoi poloi except via silver screen termite effigy. All that rage we used to excise via the now outgrown release mechanism of temper tantrums building up and up through early adolescence, it was just waiting for a miracle like Bela Lugosi in The Raven or Harpo Marx in Night at the Opera to release it. Out comes in gushing waves of joy, an air pocket of tyrannical childhood, the good with the bad all buried now rising like an oil gusher, lifting us up off the surface of our becalmed flat stoned moviegoing consciousness in a most pleasing way.

One wild man performance is worth three movies worth of 'importance' or 'meaning.'


We see Junior's kind of kinetic free-form insanity so seldom, especially in today's nanny state clime, that when it comes along in the form of a Baldwin it's like a precious little match in the Hans Christian Anderson blizzard of safe sanctified sanity, riding the glint of madness that takes that fluttery match and lights up the sky for just long enough we see the vastness of heaven. And then the match is out, the sky is dark, the house lights come back up, the veil of paralyzing self-consciousness descends once more like a clingy Psycho shower curtain, and not even Fred Willard can be held accountable for what we do to try and get the fire back. We wind up in rehab, or as deranged loners, buried deep in our bomb shelters, watching our Night of the Opera -The Thing  - My Man Godfrey - tape over and over til the tracking button can do no more...

PRINCETON BLUES:

And if you know you're in a dream, and beyond all fear, why wouldn't you go a little nuts? The way Baldwin's crazy act with the badge goes down, it's actually true that he's a dead ringer for an old friend of mine (through another friend) from the Princeton Blues Traveler days, Percheur (not his real name), a crazy Bill Brasky type of larger than life maniac who was a living legend amongst the local mix of debauched upper dregs at the 80s hippie-music-Princeton Record Exchange / Hoagie Haven / stealing badges to crash the Princeton reunions / pre-fame Blues Traveler / I told (you already) Althea gave me her last double purple barrel - contingent.

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That Percheur he a some boy all right.
I thought they were just making Percheur up until I finally met him at a big outdoor keg party somewhere in the wilds of the Jersey Devil country. He spied some other dude he kind of didn't like from the other end of the throng, and then, with a crazy drunk falling motion flung his half full Bud tall boy high into the air and fell to his knees. If you've ever thrown a half-full tall boy straight up in the air like a mortar you know it's not easy to get either distance or accuracy and this was an pinwheel over handed wind up swing, upon releasing it he fell backwards and hid behind a car, as the bottle soared up way high and landed with pinpoint accuracy on the guy's head - he must have been 50 yards away at least, a good 30 people and tables between them.

Percheur (not his real name) didn't do this to impress anyone. He didn't even know anyone was watching (and I was the only one). I pretended not to notice and refrained from looking at him as the guy he hit, a huge motherfucker in a frat jersey, started running right toward the car behind which Percheur hid, and then he took off into the scrub brush. Percheur spent the rest of the party on the run, coming back to the keg periodically like a renewable kick the can. To this day it's the single most amazing throw I've ever seen -- he never even aimed or even looked at the guy directly before throwing it. Even when fighting or being chased he never seemed like it was anything but a friendly scrap with a old buddy. That's the kind of love wherein you can fight and still be Zen. I preach this now, in my other life.

But that story is nothing, Max shrugged it off as lesser Percheur. Last Max heard of him was 20 years ago when--inspired by Miami Blues--he stole a fireman's badge and was pulling over cars on the road to fuck with them and/or steal their drugs. And they called him from then on Princeton Blues.
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Soon after of course the neighborhood was smotten by Blues Traveller's success, and while they were on tour, the rest of the crowd would be smoking god knows what, watching pre-code WB gangster movies on TCM, which I respected. I still have the tape they made me of Two Seconds, Picture Snatcher and Beast of the City. (TCM was rare back then, most cable companies didn't have it). And like pre-code WB film, Miami Blues man flies free while we.... oops it fell. As we all did. But that's the arc of a gangster. It ends and its time for teeth to be returned from whence they came. Walter Brennan in Red River asking for them back 'come grub' after losing them in a poker game to Chief Yowlachie, now called 2Jaw Quo.  Detective Gummo, your teeth had never ground so free as they did in this man's hand; he carried them above the clouds, and he carried them atop the spirit frog he could not refrain from biting. Bite him back.

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"come chow, you get

She Even Breaks: Edie Sedgwick in CIAO! MANHATTAN

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It's probably a sign of your mental health whether you find Warhol superstar /debauched debutante extraordinaire Edie Sedgwick's continued toplessness in Ciao! Manhattan (1972) sexy or just tragic. If sexy then you're either a swine or just so enamored of the Edie mythos that you'd follow her off a cliff. And I who have followed three different gorgeous drug-damaged [anorexic] rich New England free spirits off cliffs know what I'm talking about. But if you've taken those cliff falls and they have made you sore, damaged, and wise in ways you wish you weren't, then you might see Ciao! Manhattan and wonder if her destruction is somehow your fault, a side-effect of your rubbernecking hot mess lemming diving icon-worship. And the next phase after that is the film does nothing for you at all, except encourage you to pray for the still sick and suffering outside the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But Edie, Princess long dead, cannot hear those prayers. We can only save ourselves... the trouble... of enduring Ciao! Manhattan.

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But we can't avoid it, can we? So come back with me then... a ways. Know that I too, like Edie, am a descendant of a daughter of the American Revolution, the Puritan stock. Though not as land-rich (1), we are perhaps just as insane and prone to addiction and depression. I came to the Edie myth via the Velvet Underground, which I came to via Lou Reed, who alone on MTV seemed cool, so I fell under his sway. In college (I only later learned Reed and I had the same birthday and I was going to his same college), I quickly found psychedelics, crazy shiksas with Ritalin prescriptions, alcohol, and anorexic lost girls whose hot mess sadness I swayed before like a hypnotized cobra. I was in with the in-crowd because my Velvet Underground and Nico expertise (and Lou Reed T-shirt) made me 'Factory-ready', though in truth I knew nothing about Edie. That picture on the cover of the Plimpton book (below left) intrigued me as a kid, but I thought she was an androgynous kid in military school watching a Fourth of July fireworks display.

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And these sad girls I followed off cliffs eventually dropped me cold for any boy with cocaine, no matter the brutalizing they received in the tail end, when the powder ran out. And every last one of them had a thing for Edie Sedgwick. They had Edie books, that black and white striped shirt (below), the poster/s and the enthusiasm for getting loaded. There was yet no internet so any scrap of information about her had to come through print. And there just wasn't anything except paperback copies of Plimpton's book, if you could find it, which was less a glorification of druggie artsy excess and more a Grey Gardens monument to fallen pilgrim aristocracy. As someone from her old pre-decadent circle, Plimpton's book had the same kind of higher ground shock many of us have when watching someone we knew as relatively normal disappear down the druggie rabbit hole... in other words, not the roundhouse kick of advocative justification found in Burroughs, Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson.

Alas, only one semi-mainstream movie, a botched mess to run alongside the book with the same name, really holds Edie in motion (as opposed to Warhol's film portraits and glorified home movies--then unavailable). Turns out it's a dreary, ennui-soaked mix of old weird footage from some 1967 unfinished black and white film without any synced sound, coupled to a foggy color framing of a dumb long-haired cut hick named Butch (Wesley Hayes) taking a job as Edie's keeper (at this point she's living in an Arabian tent in the bottom of an empty swimming pool). And it's his dopey narration of genuinely intelligent observances that try to structure the film.

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Butch
You might wish, like he does, that you could do something genuine to help our shattered hot mess Edie, but she doesn't even seem to notice whether or not you're in the room. She only notices the camera, and in the past footage--the black and white stuff--only notices drugs, stealing a cocaine stash before getting lost in a speed freak robot-mechanized version of NYC, palling around with one-time Hendrix flame Pat Hartley while trying to find Dr. Robert for B-12 shots all while some mysterious David Lynch-ish millionaire named Mr. Verdecchio tries to find her through the long arm of post-modern 'later filmed' foggy drab color stutter stock. It's like we in the audience aren't there at all, and the feeling is, well, demoralizing. Maybe she gets a Strickfadden sparkle-circumscribed glimmer of us, gawking at her from a future vantage point window opening in the space-time continuum during electroshock, but then we're just static... again, and she's back in her room full of (cracked) vanity mirrors.

It would all still be art by virtue of its Warholian association, and all the songs written about her (Dylan's "Just like a Woman,""Like a Rolling Stone," VU's "Femme Fatale" and more later by artists who didn't know her personally) if not for Butch's cornfed voiceover and big curly shock of hair, pale skin and slack jaw makes one think he snuck across the broken down Isle of White festival fences, one too many times. Know what I mean, Mr. Verdecchio? At least he's got respect for leather interiors, unlike most kids todayzz.z.

Anyway, that Butch gets my goat. A fine sophisticated pathologically narcissistic pilgrim stock royalty speed freak burnout ex-model is too good for him. He's clearly a signifier that this film, for all its toplessness, is meant for an older gay male audience, So we amble back to a question: why Butch? The cut rentboy rube from the sticks, as naive and dopey as traffic will allow, is a favorite subject for aging gay filmmakers. They like to watch these guys traipse around in their towels  post-shower after a long day indulging in Fire Island volleyball and windsurfing, or doing odd jobs around the condo. It's a very reciprocal relationship, even if you're straight. Said filmmaker (or designer) shoots sly glances while hunched over their brunch table Times and in the evening over cosmos and cocaine, and you get a free place to crash, right on the beach. I hope that's why we're subjected to Wesley Hayes' super pale naked chest and dopey voice as he walks around in tight shorts and a dazed hick expression, so charismatically challenged from a straight perspective he makes you wonder why Joe Dellesandro wasn't playing the part. Was he so unreliable by then? Or could he just not, by then, play a rube, having shot too much, in both senses of the word?

As an Edieophile (Edie-ott?) by association, and (no matter how trunkenshtoned I got) relentless in my gallantry when it came to protecting incapacitated hotties from leering gropers, watching Butch take charge of Little Miss Can't Be Right in these color pool scenes makes me feel like I was leaving my only slightly damaged Bentley with Jethro Bodine for the summer. No offense against Wesley Hayes, the actor who played Butch - I'm sure he's smarter than his character and that's part of the problem - if he was a lot smarter he could have brought out a crafty Jeeter Lester savvy, like Butch starts robbing Edie on the side, just as she robbed Paul America in the earlier footage (aiding justice, partner). And if Butch was dumber, then his scenes would feel more natural, like a good actor would play the hick as trying to come off more sophisticated than he is, instead of vice versa. Instead he's right in between... The only long hair with any smarts is the previous Edie-wrangler, who steers him to the job on his way out of town, smart enough, perhaps, to get out before a certain someone gives him hep-C, unless she already has, or buries him in a chimp coffin.

Butch occasionally manages some sharp shirtless jean short observations as he tries to appease Edie's mom Isabel Jewell (who sharp eyed viewers may remember from Lewton's Seventh Victim); but he does nothing to help his charge who natters on and on down the druggie tangent trail while lurching around topless in her emptied swimming pool terrarium, though he tries. The only time she gets out of the pool is when Butch drives her to the doctor, played by Roger Vadim like a vulture hoping to nab another hottie-in-distress for his trophy case before giving her some much needed electroshock...

In short, Edie's like the sad ghost of her former self. Knowing what we know about eating disorders (and knowing she was kicked out of two boarding schools for being anorexic) makes it hard to revel in her alien beauty in the Alphaville-esque city wandering scenes, and/or the Warhol factory and YMCA pool party footage. She died mere weeks after her color footage was shot, and you can feel it. Hers is not the knowing sadness, the glimmer of a gorgeous new type of maturer beauty that we find in Marilyn's footage in the unfinished Something's Got to Give. Edie doesn't even to fathom where she is, and watching her is like watching a psychic interacting with ghosts, half in this world and half in the past, but was there... ever even another half? Andy Warhol supplied some of that other half, but he supplied it with a vacuum. And who knows how many times the Andy she interacted with was only Andy's double, and Andy's relationship with Edie itself a double, a bizarro mirror to the gay artist-female muse/proxy/twins bond between Waldo Lydecker and Laura... or Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond, by which I mean, their relationship was composed of celluloid, light, and shadow... and without a projector, it was just a spool. Swoop swoop, oh baby rock rock.

In the end, maybe, we all get the Joe Gillis we deserve, some half-in-the-pool-face-down floater of a biographer, who only in death finds his poetic voice, and then uses it only to describe us, who killed him, like a hack Baudrillard drowning in a nepenthes stamen.

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NOTES:
1. Two drunk brothers in the 1700s took care of that, they sold everything to spend on whiskey and women; if women could have owned property then, maybe I would be rich as she was.

Chop Wood, Carry Sponsors: MAD MEN Finale


This weekend's TV was momentous with AMC's crown jewel ending at the beginning of the glorious Free to Be You and Me 1970s. Don Draper finally hit bottom and was in the right place at the right time to surrender, couched in the loving heart of the American 12-Step share. After sneering through the consciousness-raising retreat center, ambling after the niece of his fake wife, the closest thing to a mother or lover he has left, and finally driving her away. Realizing she's a mother like his own, i.e. fleeing her unborn child like its a needy style-cramping vampire. He's along for the ride but it turns out he's the one who's finally able to rise up and hug a shlemiel in a group therapy session. And that freed him. Dude, it happens.

So it was good omen that led immediately to what he had been looking for (unbeknownst to him or us), the perfect Coca-Cola commercial, one that would define the decade itself. A seamless interweaving of the mainstream popular plastic packaging, post-Aquarius encounter group openness, commercialization and open collar freedom, it offered a freedom beyond the boy's club sexo-alcoholic escapism of the Don Draper sixties. It offered a freedom that understood: no one escapes oneself for long, and the minute you stop trying, start moving towards yourself in others, then joy comes dropping down like a cartoon anvil. Hugging the shlemiel (Evan Wood) is the first truly free thing Don's ever done, to release seven seasons worth of accumulated stress, of the Don Draper mask, the alpha male swagger, collapsing like a globally warmed iceberg and just hugging it out with a guy his total polar opposite, a weak-chinned balding charismatically challenged schlub, the kind I used to be always mean to, fearing if I was nice they'd hang around and try to poach foxes, embarrassing themselves, chasing off foxes and cramp my style by association. Learning to recognize myself in them, to love even them unconditionally, was the biggest surrender I ever had to make, for I was not so different in the end, and part of me always knew it and hated to be reminded. It's a case of genius casting that he's so forgettable even when talking about how forgettable he is. As an actor though, it's truly extraordinary; there's no maudlin sentiment or whining for attention -- it's not a breakdown but a breakthrough, crying and laughing at the same time.


And just when you thought things were getting kind of wholesome, pure, believing the Aquarius line, it comes in fully with "I'd like to teach the world to sing" extended length commercial, played in full. Watching, transfixed, still moved, I could remember hearing that song everywhere in the 70s as a kid and when I was getting sober in 1998, hanging out in AA, bawling to the "Thank You" video by Alanna Morissette, which was on constantly in the last days of music video-playing MTV. When I could literally hear and feel the iceberg in my soul finally melting enough that it just split and cracked open and dissolved, right in the midst of an AA meeting on a late Friday afternoon, triggered by my self-imposed humiliation over walking in late with squeaky shoes, toxins and sweat, laughter and tears and rose-tinted waves of gratitude all pouring forth like the incoming warm ocean. And the guy qualifying was just some old bitter ex-GI, ranting about how his true self is a crotchety old bastard. But he broke me.

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The Nordic Aliens bring their universal message

And to this last episode's credit there were no little montage vignettes woven in during the Coca-Cola commercial, no carousel pics of Betts and Don at the dance, or forward to Roger's third wedding, or Don getting the Clio for the ad. It's not even clear for sure if he came back to McCann and pitched his revelation, or ever went back at all, and someone else pitched it. And that's the genius, for in committing to meditation all that stuff ceases to matter --it's a new day, beyond duality.

And to me, my interpretation, he did pitch it, he pitched the ad. It's his career capstone. Because if he did, then the entire show from beginning to end makes a post-modern socio-historical Guy Debord meets Alcoholics Anonymous kind of sick sense. And it's so glorious to see how the show really understands these kinds of breakthroughs, as of course no actor is worth a damn unless they've already worked through a lot of the same issues. And moments like these remind us that being able to act deeply emotional 'true' stuff hinges on such unrelenting self-honesty. And that's how fiction ends up being truer than truth. How Don is as a fiction is truer than any real person can be.

TV - THE ONCE SHARED LANGUAGE 

And most unique to the 70s too, we were all--the entire nation--into that song. We all knew and know all the words, not that there's many. Because irony didn't exist in the popular media; we were too open-hearted and there were too few channels to separate us, no other devices on which to watch things. In the 70s we all had to endure each other's programming and the kids never got first draft choice if my dad was around, but we were always in the same room, seeing the same things. It left us all with a cross-generational water cooler currency woefully missing from today's everybody on their own screen post-nuclear familial structure. That's how that Coke commercial crossed the generations, it bonded the entirety of the nation in its moment.

TV was a shared language in the 70s but it was the EST and therapy groups and encounter sessions that brought us closest. Even if your parents didn't go, some couple they knew did, and the message of openness and being 'perfect in the now' crossed from that couple to your parents and outwards in a loving pink energy ripple effect. Parents knew how to treat us, to not hold on tight or try to align us to their thinking, not to live through us or rathe their worth as humans on what daycare we tested into. They were them and we were us and all were okay. This kind of encounter group wildfire helped prep me for later yoga classes, acid, and eventually AA. Don's encounter group scene's tremendous cathartic power comes from that same wildfire, the time when yoga and meditation were brand new to the west. There was no arguing with the resulting slow burn awakening as the news of inner peace's availability spread (like that 70s Faberge Organics shampoo spot:"tell two friends / and they'll tell two friends / and so on / and so on").
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It's the same with Don's mountain retreat moment, as we say in AA, "your own best thinking got you here" - which has about two dozen dual meanings. To be able to commit to a meditation class without smirking, or judging, being able to take instruction from a young hippie kid in the lotus position, to get the message rather than let your ego--like a jealous rival--convince you to hang back and judge the messenger, to sneer at such naked emotional simplicity rather than leave that jealous ego in the dust, to shiver in the naked heat of the sun rather than run back to the iceberg re-freezing warmth of the bar. But looking at the entirety of his seemingly haphazard journey west, we see how every little incident led to this moment, from the invite to the Veteran's fundraiser to giving some snotty thief his car, all step by step, like a careful opponent making sure all his enemy's (i.e. ego's) avenues of escape are blocked before springing the iceberg break coup de grace. If he had his car he would have quit before the miracle (as we say in AA), if the guy speaking had been attractive, or young, or old, or somehow different enough to be either desirable or a threat it wouldn't have worked, if that mopey bitch in that first encounter group hadn't cross-talked about being abandoned by her mom, then his ride wouldn't have bailed, and so forth.

Don was hugging the shlemiel not because he heard, as we say in the rooms, his own story, or recognized the dawning of the commercialization of the Age of Aquarius. But because he saw beyond himself, and knew this person was him, and was Jesus, and the dying Betts, and his children, and whore mother, and brother he drove to suicide, all wrapped into one flag-draped coffin of a rainbow child. But Do is an ad man to his core, and even there in the crucible of surrender, lurks the next gold ring. For him they are inseparable but that's the thing you go into the wilderness of Self but if you don't bring back a present, a souvenir we can use here in the communal house, you just wasted our time telling us about it. We're conditioned to accept that from popular culture, so maybe it doesn't even get our French theory noses in a twist when right after the credits comes a car commercial with Jon Hamm voiceover. The average critic writing about the show doesn't mention that, doesn't see it in the context of the show itself. But any acidhead huckster would note, that's SYNERGY too!



It's because I'm a Pisces and a child of the 70s that I can both scoff at astrology and yet know it's true, and it's because I have seen the land beyond duality that I know duality is beautiful as long as you know it's fiction. And I know that fiction is far truer than reality in depicting reality, and I've hallucinated enough to know never to believe my own eyes or ears so when skeptics say they need such evidence to be convinced of flying saucers I snort derisively. I feel waves of selfless gratitude and secretly mock those I deem less humble and I get that irony and yet prefer to laugh at myself rather than try and change it. And I know I can cry and feel bad about pollution all I want, but that never helps things. I can donate $ or volunteer without losing the joy or sense everything's okay. I know I should meditate and feel joy and love and put it out there to those who need it, not who's hot or deserves it, to effect change. Not for nothing Jesus washed the feet of the lepers, not the supermodels. Don's phone call to Peggy clearly indicates he's planning a suicide, and the ego is so entrenched it needs a bomb threat to leave the building. But that's how it is. You gotta get low to get high. But fuck that, bro. I knew even in my awakening of spirit that I'd have to be nice to ugly idiots to keep the buzz alive, and instead I ran and ran. By the time I stopped it was ready it was the 90s, and too damn late. Now there was the internet, and SSRIs. My hair was not on fire so I was no longer willing to dive into the well.

I'd like at this juncture to thank those who got me here. God, my sponsor, my therapist, the makers of Effexor, Wellbutrin, Neurontin, Robert Duvall in The Apostle, and Helen Slater (left), this wizened broad (aptly, her first role was in 1984 as Supergirl!) eyes tired but serene with the gaze of one who's come through the inferno to the light of forgiveness and unconditional love and who brings Don to the point of his. She reminded me of the cool people who kept me coming back to AA in the very very beginning, the ones who barely said a word other than 't'sup?' after the more overt and smiling welcome committees scared me off time and time again. Slater's wizened woman says and does the same things these t'sup people did to keep me coming back and give me the final gentle push through the breakthrough door (see: CinemArchetype 11 - The Wild Wise Woman) rather than trying to drag me through like a stubborn mule.  She comes to him not as a future conquest, or yet another mother on the run from her child (his favorite brand) but as merely a gentle guide who knows, as so many did for me, that anything more than almost nothing was too much. There's a moment before the shlemiel takes the talking chair where she looks and smiles over at Don as if inviting him up but doesn't coax, sensing his inner ice already beginning to break and not wanting to push him. And when he stands up walks over to him she just gives the faintest of smiles, not the 'I made this happen' thing, but the joy of the truly enlightened upon seeing the course of dharma in action and gratitude that they've been blessed with being awake enough to pick up on dharma's plans like it's some kind of subatomic benevolent Dr. Mabuse. That's her gift and as the lighting cues ever so perceptively shift, we realize with her help the episode's stealthily gone from inviting us to sneer along with Don at all the new age claptrap to weeping at being once lost and now found, in the same moving way Clark Gable did in Strange Cargo! Or Billy Bob Thornton in The Apostle!

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Helen Slater, showing she always had a way with reticent buds (Supergirl, 1984)
And that's how it happens, to we who have had the terror of death's visit and the post-ghost Scrooge satori, who've walked in late to an AA meeting with super squeaky shoes, and went--in a final cracked dam buckling we can actually hear in our soul. I felt like my older brother ego finally passed the joystick after banging around the same game level for 30 years, and my inner little brother picked it up and effortlessly opened six new levels, including the exit. Freedom. Ugly or old, fat or anorexic who cares, bro? You're a child of God. I love all things scrooge satori merry xmas you old building and loan. I love you all as I used to think I loved myself, but only a sick sadist would treat someone he professed to love so harshly as I treated me. "Self-seeking will slip away" is one of the AA Promises that does come true, it's the 'slipping away' part that intrigued me when I'd read them up on the wall, as if it wasn't something done consciously, it just happened on its own, like baby teeth falling out. When the egoic whipping boy construct of self is gone, the collapse of the persona illusion of difference falls soon after. What remains? Only Love.

It's what makes a Subaru a Subaru.

So we mustn't think of these events we've seen in Mad Men as fake, or either cynical (the 'Coke Meditations') or sincere.  Having lost both my parents recently and neither one of them much for protracted death scenes (my mom lied to everyone until right up to the last minute, so we wouldn't worry or try to come visit). I also was moved by January Jones' own melting frostiness. She showed in her one telephone scene that her frosty stiffness over the previous seasons was not just because she was a bad actor (and --especially with her wooden acting in X-Men--we wondered). But it all pays off for this one beautiful scene on the phone, the one final moment of these two emblems of the 60s, each accustomed to the social order elevating them by virtue of charismatic superiority, each clinging to the tenets and terms of their social personae until they finally in this moment break and they can surrender to their real feelings (a mirror to the telephone making intimacy possible too in the conclusion of the Peggy arc). But it doesn't matter at all- it still counts, the phone; these moments of redemption are what makes all the bullshit not just necessary but worth enduring. The longer the climb the better the sledding, and what other reason for reaching the top is there than to sled? Behold a white horse. And the man that snorted it was Death. But first, Coke added life, and was the real thing. And he rode it.

Until the fuckin' 80s, man. Don't get me started...


What's Eating You: FOOD OF THE GODS, EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, JAWS OF SATAN, FROGS


Bert I. Gordon, one of the few schlockmeisters whose career spanned both the 1950s 'big bug movie' craze (Beginning of the End, Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs. the Spider) and the 1970s Jaws eco-horror phase, comes to Shout trailing clouds of toxic bughouse glory in two new Blu-rays this week. Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977) are now deep black spanking HD new and they may just save your life --in event of giant pest invasion you at least know what not to do. Flanked with a B-sides equal to their terrible majesty (Frogs for Food, and Jaws of Death (1981) for Ants) they come to us in deep lovely HD blacks and sparkling color where was all greyish brown streaks. When all else fails, we can admire how pink the natural light is beaming through the willows and fields of murmuring hemlock. For Shout treats these tawdry gems with the same reverence Criterion affords Kurosawa - those shadows in which normal size snakes and large ants hide are so super deep they're darker than the starkest midday shadows, and the colors and finery-- oh oh my children.

At the same time, Shout preserves the subtle grain of real film stock and doesn't eliminate it in favor of some waxy, 3-D, so these still look like 70s movies, like panelling. We of a certain age and disposition need these movies, for they deliver a kind of deeper vertigo-inducing version of nostalgia, a post-childhood dread Pavlovian trigger. All others beware: the HD now makes the contrasting footage of rear projection and overlays and special effects mattes very glaring; the splices and outlines between the humans and the monster and--the Gordon trademark--the transparency of the over or undersize being as he or it or they scurry or strut, they're all now so glaring as to be almost meta. Second, seeing any animal--even lower life forms like snakes and rats--killed, stunned, betrayed, abashed or regular bashed... is abhorrent today, partially because of movies like these (see my rant on Day of the Animals), the 70s natural horror kick, which taught us to care about nature. Hence I've given each film an unofficial PETA rating.



FOOD OF THE GODS
(1976) - Dir. Bert I. Gordon
**1/2 / PETA: *

Food has one of those weird casts that makes you wonder if the great Bert I. Gordon's obsession with giant little things and little giant things is the result of a vision disorder like strabismus that makes it impossible to tell how big or small something is vs. proximity (i.e. are children really small, or just far away?). How else can one explain casting the ever-squinting, frizzy blonde capped toothed ex-child evangelist Marjoe Gortner, as an NFL quarterback? Why, he's no bigger than a silent snap-pass prayer, but there he is, practicing on a frosty field (or is pollution? Freeze frame!) going off for R&R to a remote woodsy island, just the boys, to hunt horse on deerback or deer on horseback with two teammate buddies, one played by the ever-dependable Jon Cypher and the other soon-offed by giant transparent wasps that look first like toys bouncing on a string and then like superimposed cartoons of wasps, and then--finally attaining opaqueness-- big rubber wasps carefully entwined in the zippers of his backpack. Marjoe will not let that stand; and the film is off and running as old Gortner climbs into the self-righteous power trip seat favored by so many self-appointed leaders in crisis situations, wherefrom he's soon battling a giant rooster, more wasps, Ida Lupino as the farmer's wife and an angry Ralph Meeker in a black raincoat as the rote capitalist pig, here to get a look at the white stuff coming out of the ground like bubblin' crude... the titular food. It works pretty well, but without a rooster the size of a UPS truck there's nothing to keep the rats away and don't forget the wasps, and the caterpillars biting Lupino's hand. Ah, I see her now, gamely moving these big blood-doused rubber worms around in her hand around to try and get them to seem like they're wiggling on their own; hear how her moan of horror seems to encompass the entirety of her fall off the A-list into and into old age, an almost delirium tremens style moan of low key horror. So howl, Ida! You have found in your pain the consolation of its expression, it is only this that the pain was ever for...

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Teeth that could blind Erik Estrada

As Meeker's secretary, there's horror regular Pamela Franklin, disguising her British accent and real-life pregnancy (I'm guessing) by never getting out of her white leather trench coat (above), even indoors. She was such a little hottie in The Legend of Hell House, just three years earlier, holding her own against seasoned pros like Roddy McDowall. Here she just tries not to act circles around ole Marjoe and to add what little pizazz might be added to lines of 70s corner-cutting bluntness like "I'd like... for you to make love to me," as the rats close in. The much better-preserved Belinda Balaski, on the other hand, pretends to be pregnant, and young husband Tom Stovall worries about her as the rats start closing in faster than a zombie horde or a drunken Cornish lynch mob.

But then, endless shots of rats getting shot with pink paint in the face and body begins to weary the soul. I left the film feeling kind of sickened, the way I used to after feeding Mina (my pet black king snake) a live mouse... every week, another death... the blood on my hands accumulating... I had forgotten all about that existential nausea until this film ended. Mauling Gordon's well-crafted miniature hippie vans and farm shacks with such aplomb, those rats deserved better; maybe they weren't killed or permanently hurt (though a few sure look that way) but they seem to get a surprised, betrayed look in their eye when shot. As I wrote about Day of the Animals, part of the appeal of these movies tends to be in how the abstraction of the animal attacks (padding on bit arms, animal trainers doubling for actors) gives the feeling the animals are just rough housing, good-naturedly, and if the animals know it's all in fun, so do we. Watching that all-in-fun look vanish in an instant in the startled rat eyes in Food of the Gods drains the joy de vivre tout suite.

 That said, many of the overlays between miniatures, rats, and people still have a kind of chilling immediacy, and the giant chicken and rat heads that menace the cast, the giant caterpillar monsters that claw up poor Ida Lupino's game hand, and the hilarious climactic 'flood' when Marjoe blasts open the 'dam' all make this bad film shine like pure crap gold, the kind we wouldn't see again until Sharknado. It's that good.

FROGS
(1972) - Dir George McGowan
*** / PETA - **

I always thought Frogs rather overrated, but that was on the small screen, colors drab and faded by time and low res cathode rays, all its lovely nature reduced to green and brown blurs offset by a sickly yellow for interiors and he tedious red white and blue of Ray Milland's birthday party schemata. Now on Blu-ray the confidence director McGowan displays in its Deleuzian hat trick (i.e. we see a person reacting, cut to nature, back to person's reaction, almost like the footage itself is attacking them) is justified as the footage is beautiful, creepy, and in a way laconic. The interior mansion shots that used to oppress my childhood with their faded Colonial drabness now glow with a sun dappled pink that gives the whole film a 'twilight of mankind' kind of champagne cheeriness. Sam Elliott without his mustache is the ostensible star here as a laconic nature photographer out in the edge of the Florida's Eden State Park, snapping away when his canoe gets rammed by rich Brick-esque prodigal son (Adam Roarke) and his sexy sister Karen (Joan Van Ark), trying out their new outboard motor during a break between fulfilling wheelchair bound patriarch (and pollutant enthusiast) Ray Milland's regimented birthday expectations. All seems ripe for a hook-up for ole Sam, but the mansion is also besieged by normal-sized frogs, croaking away at night, driving them all crazy. Old Sam Elliot is invited home to change into dry clothes and the stage is set, in short, for much picking off one by one via various (normal size) lizards, snakes, and arachnids. Elliot's not as purty as Melanie Daniels, but he does all right.

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Another plus: so the constant frog song can ring we're treated to the absence of composer Les Baxter's usual loungey helicoptering. Eerie silences cast a strange reverie-style mood over the proceedings. I'm especially grateful that Milland's wheelchair bound patriarch is more than a one-dimensional capitalist monster (as opposed to, say, Meeker in Gods). Instead, he's almost Ahab-like in his determination to carry through with the tradition of his birthday, irregardless of how many family members he's losing to the local alligators, frogs, snakes, and spiders.  There's even a shade of Col. Rutledge from The Big Sleep in his Marlowe-Sean Regan-resque bond between surly Milland and taciturn Elliott, each recognizing a capable outdoorsy plain-spoken capable hombre like himself in the other. Meanwhile, they go for a racial subtext, as the black maid and butler bond with the youngest son's black girlfriend and though, true to cliche, they're the first to insist on leaving to the mainland, they all go with dignity, common sense and concern rather than cowardice.

Their leaving signifies when the film really comes into its own, sort of like the climax of Orca or Jaws--now it's just the white man and the all devouring natural world, at each other's throats with no witnesses, sides, or seconds. Just like the old days. Not for nothing is the clan's name Crockett, this is the coonskin cap's revenge. There's no raccoons, but a snapping turtle devours a defenseless Lynn Borden; Sam Elliott bashes the surface of the water with an oar; and Adam Roarke swims out to his boat after something chews off the line, and the gators close in. And then... well, the rest of the time we can savor the gorgeous willow trees, sun-streaked fog and misty trees, the dialogue like "pollution control on the paper mill will cost us millions," dropped into normal conversation rather than underlined in thick script marker, and the incongruous mixture of wildlife that would only be caught dead down in Florida (like the New Mexican gecko), while we wonder how in hell they're going to pull off death by normal size frogs, and where that dog came from just in time for the very end. Dogs never do get a break in horror, the frogs get the best of everything. Milland really needs a different record to play other than lame marching band music to convey his eternal defiance of nature, but that old devil AIP composer Les Baxter will have his pomp. 


EMPIRE OF THE ANTS
(1977) Dir Bert I. Gordon
***1/2 / PETA - N/A

Shore-swept toxic sludge has a curious effect on local ant-life, their pheromones are discussed in a foreshadowing prologue as "a mind-bending substance that forces obedience." What does that have to do a slumming Joan Collins--trying not to break a nail as she rooks time share commitments out of a boatload of retired and/or attractive freeloaders, except that her pheremones don't seem to be working, so she berates and bitches in a brutal stereotype of the 'lady boss' who's hot but thinks she's even hotter. "You are terrific in the sack and that almost justifies the salary that I have to pay you," to the charter boat captain (Edward Power): "I'm paying damn good money to rent this boat!" I'll defend the Joan Collins oversexed bitch in the boardroom capitalist to the end--she's one of the decade's most defining sexual icons-- but it would help if the writers had some notion how to make her sound convincing. This on-the-nose stridency and jackhammer subtlety just makes her seem like she's in over her head - her sell is so hard it betrays the fact that it has never worked, and that she yells at herself in the mirror because she can't make her diamonds cry. Not that I'm complaining. Joan rules! The paltry 3.8 score it gets on imdb.com might be enough to put casual viewers off their toxic feed but I'm betting that would go up to at least a 4.2 once detractors get a load of how vividly this old queen has cleaned her antennae for Blu-ray, even if the dark shadows the drones used to hide in are now less dark, thus exposing the two contrasting film stocks, it's still the Plan Nine of giant ant movies. In sum, it is beyond perfect.

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I'm glad old Bert didn't suss out the subtextual links between Collins' queen bitch and the queen ant, each trying to control the world around them, one through overacting, the other through pheremones. You can always depend on Gordon to keep things at a very primitivist level as far as adult behavior. In omitting all subtlety and nuance he creates a grand framework for our own projections. Ideally this comes too from the nostalgia effect, the dutiful attempt to create a cross section of America, so older stars and younger B-listers can intermingle and get a chance at a scene. There's never enough time to rehearse, so the actors all seem like they're genuinely meeting each other for the first time, and are touchy about the realization their agent has really failed to convey the requirements of the job. So it's natural that no one is nice to each other in the beginning, people hit on each other unsuccessfully and without a single entendre. So there's the frumpy middle aged office drone (Jaqueline Scott) who got fired after blah blah years for Mr. Blah, she hits on the captain; a girl played by the inestimable Brooke Palance wishes her lame husband (Robert Pine) wasn't such as a self-obsessed date-rapey coward; cute Coreen (Pamela Shoop) hits on the sulky pretty boy Joe (John David Carson) immediately after Pine tries to date rape her. And through it all Collins bellows through a bullhorn about where tennis courts will be and serves them more meals than in all of Troll 2. But the film wastes no time: the first casualties are swiftly followed by the giant ants storming the boat, which then has to explode to be saved and then, well the fire keeps the ants away, but well, then, it starts to rain. And then, well... dinner is really and truly served.

With all this gloriousness on display, it's a surprise that Gordon is so awkward and taciturn as an audio commentary guy, it's like pulling teeth getting anecdotes out of him for the extras on Ants and Gods, and when they do come they tend to be utterly banal, and often wrong, like saying Welles used Randolph Hearst's real name in Citizen Kane; or talking about going down to Panama to shoot footage of these special kinds of fire ants, but it looks like normal nature show B-roll and anyway every ant in the film is jammed up in ant farm, crawling against the glass (as above). Not that I mind; in fact I like the big fake ant heads here better even than the ones in Them! which never strike me as more than big carnival floats. Gordon's ant heads, with their jet black little eyes and hairy heads and jagged antlers have a real grim dirty menace about them that's lowdown, dirty, and almost convincing.

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JAWS OF SATAN 
(1981) Dir Bob Claver
*** / PETA = **

Who'd of thought the second best worst film of the whole lot would turn out to be the most unknown, a bona fide gem of badness. Like other Jaws-Exorcist ripoff hybrids (The Car, Killdozer), the title (AKA King Cobra - but Jaws of Satan is far more on-the-nose as to its cross-pollinated rip-off sources, even more specific would be Jaws of the Omen. As you can guess, a snake is possessed. Expository dialogue lets us know that faith-deprived priest Fritz Weaver has descended from a bunch of druid-burners, at a party. Introducing most of the coming cast, the local mystic lady says "considering your family history, father, I sure would like to have a look at that coffee cup" perhaps little aware that the then-current rage for coffee filtration renders divination fruitless. Shhh, the devil is coming, because a snake in a in a cage on a train isn't that scary on its own, so this snake has telekinetic powers. He can even bite people just by striking an 'invisible' terrarium (the director in his infinite wisdom can't be bothered getting a clear glass to separate actor and snake). Satan then stops the train at the town where his old druid-burner descendant nemesis is currently incarnated in Weaver's sulky form. Unlike other actors who channel their anger at their agent and biological clock into their performance (such as Lupino and Meeker in Food of the Gods), Weaver refuses to to perform any other emotion than self-contempt and weariness. "You know god, he can be quite a trip too" -this to a nerdy kid who's clearly never gotten high in his life. Weaver's even less convinced then the kid. What good is it being a materialist priest? He's wasting his own time, i.e. glug glug glug.

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Meanwhile, the Satan snake has motivated the local serpent population to action: rattlesnake deaths mount, smaller cobras show up; an ancient text is read to Weaver by his credulous monsignor (Norman Lloyd, stealing the film) and soon he's chased around the local graveyard by the King Cobra in the dead of the afternoon, while all while normal late afternoon California life goes on oblivious, and he's eventually forced to fight the King Cobra from an open grave while it tries to get at him through the gate. Oh hahen doth Weaver seem awake at last, and the sequence is so badass creepy it feels kind of natural, like it could happen to anyone. King cobras really do chase their prey like that, so I'm told. The other star of the film, the Chief Brody role, is Gretchen Corbett (the spooky girl running around the graveyard in Let's Scare Jessica to Death) as the town's only doctor. Recognizing the big bite on the dead psychic's face is not indigenous, she calls in a good-looking young herpetologist (Jon Korkes) from the big city, but the gross coroner has already burned the body (you know he's vile because he eats chicken in the morgue). A satanic cobra loose in town could kill the buzz for the new dog track. It's going to be "the biggest thing that ever happened in this state." A very young Christina Applegate gets the film's only other spooky moment, wandering around the yard on a dark Lewton-esque night.

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The Blu-ray of course looks much better than this grainy pic
Then there's great crisp details so ludicrous as to defy all explanation: the supposedly independent doctor lady heroine needs the handsome snake handler guy to ride to the rescue when a rattlesnake crawls into bed with her (she could easily throw a sheet over it) and then he needs to use five different snake-wrangling devices and a gun pretending to struggle with it, for like six minutes, all so they can sleep together. Bro, if like once you have a loop around its neck and the loop's attached to a pole, and you still have to really fight to keep it from biting anyone--and then, wait... wait... finally blow it's head off, all to wrangle a snake that even Ray Milland in a wheelchair could kill or incapacitate without looking up from his red white and blue birthday cake, then well, some might say you're bad at your job. On the other hand, what bad 70s amok nature horror really needs is more guys like him, for they are the expositors... the catch-all expert who walks around unfamiliar with small-town ways, or vice versa.

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Applegate, Christina
So the dog race track grand opening is the kind that Aaron Spelling might stage: a jazz band and about ten extras mill around a sussed up high school track field. Naturally we expect a snake amok in the stadium, people fleeing and trampling children, Satan motivating the greyhounds to attack the band, but all that happens is Christina gets bit in the janitor's closet. I don't even think we see a single dog. Meanwhile, Weaver, converted by his graveyard scare like a born-again Scrooge, tunes heavenly antennae to yonder caverns for the foretold showdown, shoulding "SayyyyTANNnn!" over and over with the fierce conviction of a kid who knows his Lacrosse buddies are snickering in the doorway. In other words, aside from some real dead snakes and a distasteful episode involving a sleazy would-be rapist biker terrorizing Corbett there's nothing to dampen the overall mood of joyful disregard as the film travels the pre-set pathways of its namesake/s. And after the flames of righteousness have burned the reels away, all that's left is the wire that held the snake hood erect, like a thin little curse finger aimed right at those on imdb who gave this a 3.6. They might be right, but right only gets you so far... Jaws of Satan goes all the way.

Hauntologic Roxy: ANTICHRIST (1974), TIMES SQUARE (1980)

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I consider myself pretty familiar with the myriad weaves and offshoots of the EXORCIST-ripped corners of the 70s Italian cinema tapestry, but THE ANTICHRIST (1974) slipped past me... until now. That's not entirely true, father. I lied it turns out for when I was watching it last week, during its memorable Satanic induction ceremony I had a flash of past life remembrance so foul and monstrous it tore loose a swath of my soul. And I remembered in that grisly instance a Times Square grindhouse whose cursed name brings a knowing shudder to those who've been there.... Roxy.






We walked in cold, three teenagers determined to check one of these places out, seeking lurid thrills and regarding as most still do that 42nd St. and Broadway the extent of NYC, as if it was all a mix of tourist trap and continual vice and corruption freak show, its dangers apparent but we protected in our naive suburban sense of invulnerability and masks of jaded disaffection. But after navigating treacherous halls we entered a world that filched the jade right off our masks, punctured our naive armor and left us paralyzed, a hot hellish box of a theater the screen pulsing with a lurid Satanic ceremony already in progress, replete with naked woman and real goat, the sound crackling insanely with screams and chants, and the people off screen as horrific as those on, creating a scene of indescribable sleaziness where screen devils and offscreen junkie criminal dregs were all part of a weird twisted whole.

But what I remember most is the smell, so troubling it's even memorialized in Bill Landis' and Michelle Clifford's indispensable NYC grindhouse history Sleazoid Express, who dub the place "one of the Deuce's grungiest, most pungent smelling, and most dangerous adult houses... People smoked everything openly in the audience, from nauseating Kools to cheap psychotic crack, those scary angel dust smokers puffing along with the weedheads." (285)

I had forgotten about the full horror of the moment, but it came back to me reading Landis and Clifford's book - their description of the Roxy was so on point I knew instantly that was the one I had been to back in '85.
"To walk into one of Roxy's mini-theaters meant walking into any number of crazy scenes or violent outbursts.[...] You never knew what movie you were walking into. You'd have to stand there for a few minutes to figure it out.
"If you stood long enough though, people would start to surround you, thinking you were looking for a possible sex partner or just stupid and asking to be robbed. So it was wise to take one of the ass numbing seats anyway if you weren't sure, then figure it out. But before you sat down, you'd have to flick a lighter at the seat to make sure there was no weird mess on it." (285)
It wasn't just the ones smoking at the time, of course, but the stale uncirculated air that kept every last stale 'wet' joint (1) alive in layers of stale 'cigar urinal' despair, the insanity in the trapped air circulating in lieu of air conditioning. I was there in 1985, my first and only visit to a Times Square grindhouse, and it turns out to be one of the scariest. That same year I went--on a dare with my thrill-seeking PA buddies--it had been converted from adult to a multi-leveled fourplex that showed exploitation double bills on video projectors (though they don't tell you it's video when you buy your ticket). But even after that transformation, as Landis and Clifford note, the Roxy "remained void of fresh air, retaining both its BO aroma and super-sleazy vibe..."

It took me decades of smoking, drinking, and bellowing like a great inelegant walrus to expunge its malodorous aftertaste from my delicate le nez âme, but even without the smell, the unwashed derelicts, the sleazy vibe, the stale "wet" and the million other fucked up and foul smelling druggy smokes both from that day and all the days before turning already dangerous unshowered homeless scumbags into mouth frothing gibbering shit-where-they-stand psychopaths... even with all that...  Man, to enter a theater so skeevy to see a girl rimming a goat at a Satanic altar. The minute we spent there debating our next move seemed outside space and time, the horror of the smell and the cramped unfamiliarity of the boxy theater short-circuiting our brain's natural fight of flight objectivity. I was still only 17, and sober, straight-edge a virgin to weed, booze, and all other things, except--barely--sex. So this scene affected me in ways I'd have been immune to just a year later, numbed by whiskeys galore, weed, shrooms, and despair.

Now on DVD, in the safety of my triple bolt apartment, I can appreciate Ippolita's (Carla Gravina) induction ceremony with the goat is in an alternate dimension, running concurrently - and it's to director Sergio Martino's skill (and Gravina's) at narrative that it's always clear that the damned and devout can always be two places at once--that her murderous debasements are not just a dream nor is she a passive victim under mind control cover memories ala Rosemary). We don't really judge her for giving in -- we might do the same in her shoes. It fits my argument that when you're too prohibitive and micro-managing on your kids (never allowing them a locked bedroom to masturbate in, etc.) you give the first person to come along who broadens their horizons (or gives them an orgasm) more power over them than you'll ever have, and when your kids realize they've been mislead, it's too late. Take it from one of the ruiners, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Smith of Anytown USA!

Simultaneously back at the Roxy, back before I ruined anyone, nor was myself yet ruined,  my fellow faux-jaded suburbanite teens and I turned immediately to leave this godawful shoebox of the damned to find a different screen. The Roxy had numerous nonstop running little shoebox cinema double features playing on video projection, with stairs stretching between condemned buildings and along the exteriors of the outside, kind of like a haunted house ride where instead of papier mache ghouls there's derelict muggers crouched in corners ready to stick you with a hep-C encrusted needles. The second cinema was better, we caught the end of RUBY (we learned what it was only because they listed it in the end credits "Ruby" - a habit of exploitation movies in those days which made sense since theaters like this never had showtimes, you just went in whenever, to see whatever) Followed by some super Bruce Lee-imitator movie (Bruce Li, or Leh, or Lei). In here, at least, there was air conditioning, and it froze our souls but at least numbed the smell. The dubbing was atrocious.

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If I had to do it all over again, well, who the hell knows, We should have suffered through the stench, for ANTICHRIST (AKA THE TEMPTER) is a great great gonzo film. Set in the real life Rome, and to tie in other trend-cresting films, the lead girl, Carla Gravina, has Rosemary's Baby short red hair, though it gives her a very manly countenance, as she's not so pixie-like. But it doesn't matter, because as Ippolita she's the whole show and it's easily the most deranged, inspiring raw performance of the entirety of the 70s Italian EXORCIST rip micro genre.

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Crippled as a child by a car accident (dad was driving, mom is dead) she's a 40 year-old virgin, on the cusp of becoming an old maid, and terrified her dad (Arthur Kennedy) is going to leave her for another woman (giallo regular Anita Strindberg). The niece of a priest (Mel Ferrer), she turns to God for guidance, but how's a priest going to her advise her on coping with sexual frustration, especially since he's played by the perennially browbeaten Arthur Kennedy? He's probably responsible for her torment in the first place, filling her mind from childhood with the evils of masturbation and the female orgasm as the devil's tool. With her Rosemary red short hair and manly countenance it fits perfectly that when she's possessed she sounds like a dirty old Italian man and seems for the first time comfortable in her own skin. Sounding like the arch villain in a spaghetti western, the way she sprawls out in her chair, rocking back and forth and smiling is truly disturbing to ex-drugglies like me because it's so familiar, the way one acts when something lifts us free and clear of our old insecurity and discomfort and depression so we feel alive and thrilled to luxuriate in our movements. She revels in her newfound freedom, i.e. her body's full-on abandonment and reception by the devil. In one of the cooler sequences, with her Satanic awakening giving her sudden gift of being able to walk, she goes to visit an old church and seduces a pretty German tourist boy - then kills him- leaving the body sprawled out in the catacombs (she also leaves a toad head and severed body in the communion wafter cache.

But then she comes out of it and is sprawled out only a few feet from her car -unable to walk again and needing help into her vehicle. Did she just imagine things? Again, it's to the credit of this full-blooded possession film that both answers seem to be occurring simultaneously. There's never a question that these happenings are real and vividly imagined.

What is it with the Italians and red hair, though? Especially in the horror films of the 70s-80s, they are utterly obsessed. Luckily, we get to see Gravina in her past life / current alternate reality / sabbath surrender in alabaster skin an a flowing blonde wig, and she looks plenty hot, which makes her that much sexier in the modern age, because the shameless gusto with which she pantomimes her rimming of a goat's devilish arse-hole (a scene originally--unless I'm delusional--was seen first in the silent 1921 opus, HAXAN) hand her susbequent penetration by Satan, is so bravely, fiercely acted that we feel every emotion, pleasure and joy of surrender as well as the sleazy countercurrent. As with the Roxy itself, if you want to be free of the burden of self-consciousness, one must prepare to let that conscious self be utterly debased.


I also dig that, as this film occurring in the hauntological 70s (ala Scarfolk), her shrink sees as established scientific fact that traumatic past life events (namely unnatural, violent deaths) can carry over into subsequent incarnations. Nowadays these kinds of films feel obligated to have at least one scientific dogma mouthpiece dismissing it all as a bunch of hocus pocus mumbo jumbo, but here it's simply not that big a deal that past life trauma carries over (2), with the shrink noting that the only risk in freeing the current self from past self trauma is that a possession can occur, especially if she's a Satanic witch - (and even the devil follows her, via flames ala AUDREY ROSE, which we forget now but was huge in 1977). Strange then that the shrink feels he can't approve of the Catholic exorcism that's eventually called forth. What the hell?

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Audrey Rose (1977)
Ah well, Kennedy is pretty funny as the impotent priest, and Father Mittner (George Coulouris) is way more badass than Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) as the pinch hitter in the EXORCIST original, and the cool climax, running all over Rome under multi-colored rain, including around the Coliseum, is truly haunting.

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But there's another Times Square - I almost wrote "it ain't your parents times square" -but that's the thing, it is. And your parents' childhood should never be more edgy and badass than their your own, but there it is... but also isn't For in TIMES SQUARE (1980), the two lead girls (13 year old and 16 year old actresses) easily keep their innocence somehow while living as mental hospital escapees amidst the squalor, floating above the cesspool like lighter than air street angels. It's perhaps their excised lesbian scenes that convey this immunity from pimps and scammers, though then again being so young it's not quite clear what could have been shown in that regard.

Dude, I got the last one of these DVDs before they went OOP too, based solely on a professor at Pratt's recommendation after I gave a lecture on what 42nd Street used to look like (before the kids I was speaking to were even born, I shudder to say), when squalor and vice were the order of the day... I showed them about 30 minutes of '42nd Street Forever' trailer compilation (replete with an old Jewish couple raving about some Andy Milligan debacle or other at the Lyric), and then, torn between ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and THE WARRIORS, I went with the latter- the kids loved it, and said those magic words, "after your lecture I was all worried it would be super gory and sadistic - I was expecting to be traumatized" - its like yeah, we all were seeing THE WARRIORS for the first time back in the day, having read about all the gang violence it caused in theaters. And the film traded on that scariness, so that we were scared for the gang themselves, bopping all the way back to Coney, which made those glorious fights so much more electric. The courage to face the gritty horror of the city somehow made you a part of the gritty horror rather than its victim. The ultimate in dour self reflections, the Baseball Furies pursue until you stop running. Turn and face your NYC Koch-era demons (threaten to shove a bat up their asses and turn them into popsicles), bust some heads maybe, and now you're a bopper, a Sleez Sister. Now you get to prowl around scaring the tourists, too.

But there's more connecting these two films than this one teacher's recommendation, the surrender to the Satanic power that comes from facing your own twisted reflection, and the stench of the accursed Roxy: Like Ippolita, Pamela (Trinie Alvarado) is the fucked up (several suicide attempts) only child daughter of a widowed father who's wealthy, important and influential; both Pamela and Ippolita find liberation and strength via what might be considered a bad influence friend, certainly a social outcast (Satan, Nicky [Robin Johnson])... and both need to figure out how to escape that friend when said friend's own issues come to the core (green vomit and sexist telekinetic possession, drunken tirades respectively). Both end with the daughter now returning to dad a better, wiser person and the devil going back to their due (a strong fledgling grrl fanbase, a Virgin Mary statue that acts as kind of single demon bulletin board or 'take one leave one penny tray at the cashier station).

And on a metatextual level, my own early experience at the Roxy, entering that one room with the druggy stench exactly at the heavy Satanic ceremony moment, perhaps inducted me, in an all-at-once kind of iboga flash transdimensional moment, to the core of grindhouse Deuce evil. Recognizing it decades later, in the coziness of my own home, on an HD TV, looking better probably than it did on that old analog Roxy roller video projector, considering that video brought down the grindhouses more effectively than Giuliani ever did, though he gets the credit, I felt a weird flash like one must remembering past lives or buried trauma under hypnosis, but from the HD safety of time and incense, safe--delivered. While in TIMES SQUARE, the original more low key lesbian friendship aspects were jettisoned to make a bigger statement with Nicky's big final concert on the roof after her on-air drunken breakdown seemingly added for rock catharsis. Also added: hot songs to pack a double album of relevant tracks in the producers' hopes of duplicating his SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER albums sales having its correlation to LaGuardia's mix of paternal concern, rock anarchy championing, and exploitative ambitions (3). Said producer also took advantage of star Robin Johnson, who got a lot of deserved cult praise for her role as Nicky, by singing her to a three year exclusive contract, and then failing to cast her in anything. "Johnson took a job as a bank teller whilst waiting for her RSO contract to expire, and by the time it did, there were no offers for work. Johnson did some minor film and TV roles, but by the late 1980s, she gave up on acting and got a job as a traffic reporter on a Los Angeles radio station."

I don't know what  I would have made of TIME SQUARE back in 1980. Nowadays I can't compare it to anything but LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THE FABULOUS STAINS which came out two years later, and was better distributed on video (and USA's Night Flight).

The problem with STAINS (see my early BL post The Frauds and the Fabulous) was that it was directed by a (male) music producer, the legendary Lou Adler; and written by Nancy Dowd, a macho lady (she wrote SLAP SHOT), but who used a drag pseudonym, as if hiding her gender rather than trumpeting it, and that it's marred by the spoiled bratty girlish character played by a super young Diane Lane, who promptly confuses her own message by shacking up with the more experienced punk on her tour played by Ray Winstone (who's backed by members of The Clash and The Sex Pistols). Even the imdb.com blurb is sexist and condescending:
"The media and disaffected teens mistake the acerbic rants of an obnoxious teenage punk rocker as a rallying cry for the women of America, launching her and her talentless group to national stardom."
Jeeze! "obnoxious... talentless" Well good thing at the height of the mass merchandizing overkill, Winstone takes the time to berate the gathered girls (all wearing red and New Wave make-up authorized by the band's monetizing manager) thus sending them all home to, presumably, get married and chain themselves to kitchens as is proper. I don't blame Ray Winstone for being pissed when Diane lane steals his song ("The Professionals"), lame as it is (and we hear it endlessly, a long dull dirge that goes nowhere... forever... over and over) but for a girl empowerment movie this gets awfully chiding, almost as offensive in its last minute patriarchal second-guess as KISSING JESSICA STEIN.

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Well, there's none of that crap in TIMES SQUARE, the uniform of this revolution is a trash bag and eyeliner thief mask to reflect the cast-off anonymity fostered on young girls by their heedless parents, who'd rather lock their daughters away in rehabs than listen to them (all this added after lesbian overtones taken out). The only drawback is that that rather than explore openly the secret gay subtext, it just handles the girls' soul mate status as a kind of Xena-Gabrielle chaste affection.

But the girls sleep in the same bed and its their loving friendship that holds the film together, there's not a single straight boy in the cast to come between them, nor one who has more than a superfluous role or is an authority figure-- unless local radio DJ and 'voice of Times Square' Johnny LaGuardia (Tim Curry) has some oblique move planned. Acting as their fairy godfather, he catches wind of the outcry launched by the mayoral aide dad of rich girl Pamela worried about the dangerous influence of wild punk rocker Nicky after the two escape the hospital, and he makes the girls local stars via his radio show acting as a kind pf post office letter exchange between worried dad and bonded girls who dub themselves the Sleez Sisters and start tagging the area, dropping TVs off roofs, and recording spontanous sounding, rather joyful declarative tracks live at the radio station ("Your Daughter is One") so well done it seems like they're kind of making them up on the spot when of course they were co-written in advance by people like Billy Mernit.

This aspect is of course a staple of the time, as seen in VANISHING POINT (1971) and... uh... at any rate, the exchanges between LaGuardia and Pamela's concerned, progressively humbler, father (Peter Coffield) are hilarious and sad, we respect both sides but there's some great hot wire angst between the two, with Curry's fearless goading and the father's progressive fury and desperation creating a situation that, especially in today's post-sleaze Times Square present, when an open container or lit cigarette is considered akin to a terrorist violation, is uniquely real and promising, that freedom of speech could somehow protect a DJ from reckless conspiracy towards endangerment of a minor laws, or something like that.

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But while patriarchy tries, it can't beat the all-consuming yet protective 'the zone takes care of its own' chaos of the Deuce. We all wish a braver cut existed as the lesbian romance between these two is cut sadly away, but that's actually interesting in a way as the whole film becomes less about sex or drugs (or even rock and roll) and more about how two fucked up loners can sometimes find each other and form a family that's more than the sum of their parts, brought together by chance while sharing a room while under psychiatric observation at a NYC hospital, then bond over poetry and the Pretenders, and escape together in a stolen ambulance (making it's closest companion, more than anything, KAMIKAZE GIRLS).


Whereas Nicky Marotta's initial declarative punk devotional to Pamela, "I'm a damn dog now" has a great arc (she starts kind of wobbly onstage with her new wave backing band, but ends up crushing it, I'd be pissed to if I was one of the Blondells and had to lug my amp up to the roof, risk arrest, tap into a a power source, and hook up a PA, hoping I don't get electrocuted, all so Nicky can sing half a song, apologize to her girlfriend, and dive into the crowd, leaving her saner Sleez compatriot to reconnect with her by now fairly cool mayoral aide father (we hope he no longer feels so harshly about Times square after this). But that's just part of the weird fairy tale aspect of this film, helping to lend it some of the elements that, say, the relentlessly depressing actuality of the film SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER lacked (4)

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What I especially like is that of all the 'evil' things we see the Sleez Sisters start doing, smoking (and both girls are very young let's not forget) isn't even considered a vice, and punk rock expression never considered anything but positive. Along with the genuine rebelliousness of the then-shelved OVER THE EDGE (1979) it marked a time when parents weren't considered anything but fallible and damaged kids were encouraged to find outlets wherever they could, even in squalor and destruction. There's a point, such as when Nicky gets obsessed with dropping TVs off of roofs, (or the gang starts blowing up cop cars in EDGE) that the saner minds like Pamela and Claude (or Keitel in MEAN STREETS, or Winona in GIRL INTERRUPTED) step back, get a little pale, and start thinking of exit strategies to get away from their crazy liberator friends, but that's natural. Some of us burn up rather than fade away, some of us singe ourselves by the flames, then make careers chronicling the lives of burners.

It's a great shame that Robin Johnson never had a huge career, she certainly deserved one along the lines of other what-would-now-be-considered dykes, like a throaty resonant mix of Patti Smith and Kristy McNichol, alternately utterly androgynous David Johansen-esque rock star (almost Jagger-esque), exotic faux 30s dyke, and scrappy street urchin. And as their champion, Tim Curry is sublime. A British actor here he perfectly captures the Brooklyn accent gone nasal and ultra calm and sexy that can only come from amphetamines... in other words, he sounds just like Lou Reed in the same approx. time, and as the "Voice of Times Square" his championing of the two girls isn't as cut and dry, in other words as the didactic this or that of the local newscaster's exploitation of Diane Lane in STAINS, that same selling out arc, which all seems to happen overnight in true Spin Doctors fashion. LaGuardia is too complicated to be either exploiter or underdog champion, to be a weird glommer. This is good stuff, regardless of the commercial compromise necessary for it to reach us. A favorite of Kathleen Hanna (whose sing-in-her-underwear sexy self-appropriation approach also harkens to Diane Lane's big moment in STAINS), TIMES SQUARE stood the test of time even as, in its way, it turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In imagining Times Square as a safe place to get lost in and sleep protected in giant condemned waterfront buildings, it made it so. The real estate is too precious for squats now, of course, but they still exist while legalities drag and architects argue, but the grit is gone, replaced by a stream of tourism so rapid and incessant I personally can no longer even go there without having a panic attack. But more importantly, gayness has gone out of the closet and editing room floor and into the streets. Even if the vile Roxy has been razed, the movies remain, free of stench and vice. Back in 1985, with Wings Hauser and his coat hanger stalking the Season Hubely cable, we never would have predicted this smokeless clarity and tolerance... Miracles, man, are all around. So what if we lost our map through the Bog of Stench? We still have the Goblin King. Is there life on Mars? No, Hoggle... but there will be Netflix.



NOTES:
1. 'Wet' being the NYC slang for the dried formaldehyde sprayed-on-cheap weed smoked by the truly deranged so well known in Bellevue where the users so often wind up, raving about demons following them with microphones, etc.
2. If you doubt this kind of thing is true, check out the book Life after Life and the TV showThe Ghost Inside my Child.
3. The end of the 70s marked a time when, as punk/new wave was going mainstream, the NYC godfathers like Johnny Thunders and Lou Reed were reaching wretched pinnacles of near-death dissociative speed/heroin junkie mania, where jaded fans, high on Lester Bangs' prose, crowded in to venues to goad their idols into ranting fitss before devolving into incoherence, ala Lou's Take No Prisoners LP
4. SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER ended, as I recall, with the gang deb being gang banged in some big car while Travolta sulks, and then later one of his annoying mob kills himself by jumping off a bridge, and so finally Tony decides to go try and sponge off his rich dance partner in Manhattan, still the paint can lugging scrub. Damn but I was disgusted by this movie... and I was only around thirteen and seeing it at the drive-in with my mom and brother - and man it was way too depressing and tawdry for a thirteen year old expecting GREASE style life-affirmation. And don't get me started about how, also at thirteen,  I got permanently scarred after stumbling the last half hour of LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR one afternoon on Movie Channel (which showed R-rated movies during the day), thinking it was ANNIE HALL. (See: Blades in the Apple)
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