Who'd of thought that real life dinosaurs of JURASSIC WORLD (2015) would one day become so banal that the DNA designers would invent the NEW Indominus Rex - only from InGen. The park needs a hyper-unnatural super predator to, as the counter-feminist park executive Claire (Bryce Dallas-Howard) puts it, "up the wow factor." This baby has it all: bazooka shell-resistant teflon exteriors, cup holders, optional child restraints, heat sensor camouflage, 'raptor's agility, Rex's bite, 'Ted Bundy amok in a sleeping sorority'-instincts, and no social conditioning whatsoever. "You can't have predator features without the accompanying aggression" notes its Dr. Frankenstein, resident gene splicer Dr. Wu (BD Wong) once the thing busts loose, which of course it does. Somehow, the movie implies, the carnage wrought upon all these extras and CGI monsters is our fault, because we're so easily jaded. That old wow factor has sunk mighty low since 1993, when the first CGI Jurassic Park dinosaurs appeared and blew us all away.


Naturally, we want this Indominus to get loose. There wouldn't be a film without it. And having the pterodactyls and pteranodons attack the fleeing, fanny pack-bedecked tourists en mass is a lovely Roger Corman-esque touch. And the tourists may be somewhat jaded, but this is a big budget movie, so these CGI monsters aren't just video game-style chroma keyed-up overlays ala the Asylum Syfy channel monsters, but detailed creatures with perfect amounts of shade and sun glinting, And we love that, no matter how many folks get eaten due to past accidents, the monsters keep being created and the park keeps hiring bumbling morons with slippery shoes to take care of them. On this island at least, human natural selection still has a fighting chance. 

That's right, once again it's the people that aren't properly shaded and shadowed: Claire (Bryce Dallas-Howard), the uptight caricature of female executive control freak bitchiness ("it's all about control with you people," comments Chris Pratt. She runs some aspect or other of park operations, somehow expects men and monsters alike to snap to when she pouts and stamps her high heeled foot; and is the type of person who uses "we" when talking about the company's wishes "we'd like you to visit the tiger cage on your way out"); her sister (Judy Greer) is the same way, sending her children off to the park to visit Auntie Claire so she can divorce their dad. Naturally they'll get lost in the hot zone somehow and naturally Claire will have to, in a sense, come crawling back to the one man who can find them, hunky raptor whisperer Owen (Chris Pratt). Do I even need to mention that they went on one date awhile back and didn't get along because she brought an itinerary and her "diet wouldn't allow tequila. "Animals raised in isolation aren't almost the most sociable," he says but she's not sympathetic, presuming everything he has to say is sexist hippie drivel. The alleged human villain this time is a military defense contractor (Vincent D'Onofrio) who wants to train raptors to hunt in the Middle East but at least he tries to be friendly; she's the real villain, if you ask me. Owen notes 'these are animals' and what he has with them is 'a relationship.' He's the only one to call the killer dinosaur hybrid a "she" instead of an "it." You get the drill. He's the only employee of the park with any balls, foresight, intelligence, knowledge of predator pack mentality, or coordination. She calls the dinosaurs 'assets' and dismisses Owen's knowledge and compassion as sexist hippie drivel. 


Thank god for Chris Pratt, then, savior of three-dimensional humanity. Lord knows Hollywood's been needing a rugged, noble, but down to earth tough guy that men and women can like who for once is not Australian and therefore proof American masculinity is not an oxymoron. He's the ultimate hybrid animal himself, able to play a range worthy of a real human: part quasi-sincere slacker/stoner comedy bro/ part hyper-competent SEAL / Ranger romantic lead, Pratt's able to convey naturalism without crunchiness, charm without narcissism, guts without indifference, and cool without shallowness, sensitivity without mawkishness, and self-awareness without condescension, in ways hitherto unknown to our homegrown big budget mega-stars. And he's already proven his ability to take orders from a cute redhead without losing face in Zero Dark Thirty. Do I need to mention that when Claire comes to his trailer to ask for help, he's outside by the river fixing his badass vintage Triumph motorcycle in a T-shirt and jeans, and she's wearing heels and an unflattering 90s business skirt slacks combo and Garbo Prince Valiant hair?

Pout at the devil: Claire assures Owen she's more than capable of leading the expedition via hurt eyes and a cinched blouse

The rest of the cast of course is just another rack of digestible tourists and 'one quirk-apiece' staff somehow even more aggravating then the self-righteous animal activists played by Vince Vaughn and Alessandro Novo in the past films, or the sickening "life will find a way" sentimentality of Attenborough (who looks scarily like a shorter version of my dad) and Sam Neill. I always cringe the way spontaneous hermaphrodite reproduction is something both men 'own' through getting strangely pious and sentimental over it --"life found a way..." -- it's downright creepy that we're supposed to bask in some kind of baby crib familial glow at these words, while John Williams' uber-trite 'sweeping'"Jurassic theme" presumes will cry and salute at the same time.


At least here in the JURASSIC WORLD the pro-life sermonizing is all leveled at the boo-hiss military guy (fat in ill-fitting khakis with big gold watch  and BD Wong's dispassionate mad scientist splicer and it's more along the lines of animal rights rather than gooey eyes looking down at the 4H Fair chicks. It's not just their cliche litanies and lack of any real (as in not cliche'd 'stock') genuine character detail that casts a sickly pall, it's the lack of any non-cliche'd quality or detail in anyone. In the second film, Jeff Goldblum had a black daughter, for example, a detail that seemed pandering at the time but has proven trenchant (three of my white friends have adopted black babies and it's become more of a familiar, and oddly moving, sight). In III, Neill and ex-girlfriend Laura Dern are still friends even though she's married (to a different guy) with a kid. But here in the fourth film, it's at a new zenith of trite, as the casting director, costume dept, make-up, script, and actor all gives us way too much muchness. So it's not enough that the imbecilic glazed-eyed security guard doesn't notice the one dinosaur he's supposed to watch has slipped away from him, he's cramming a sandwich into his face right at the moment the visitors point it out and even then doesn't stop eating. That's just one example, but the most offensive is the younger nephew of Claire, who has that face where a year ago it was cherubic and now it's time to kick him out the door so stops hanging out with mom instead of playing with boys his own age; he professes to love dinosaurs but he's a color between-the-lines coward terrified of bending a rule, even in the company of his 'cool' older brother, whose smoky eyes (new from Coverboy mascara?) keep playing tag with gaggles of conveniently cute and similarly parentless girls, to whom, rather than try to play along and pick up a girl himself OR get shy and blush, the younger kid acts like Bambi watching his mom flirt with the hunters. In other words, they have to constantly remind themselves they'll always be brothers, they're more like step siblings from long-divorced parents who now only ever meet at weddings.


I'm not asking for the two brothers in LONG DAY's JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, but it's not that fucking hard to write good brotherly dialogue, or even let them improvise a bit. Corman would just have them maybe rehearse and go see movies together or something, so they could improv decent dialogue (what about, say, talking about how cool the last ride was while the next one is getting started?). But that's the problem with 'big' movies like this, the director is rarely even in the same room or even square mile, unions forbid touching dialogue written long ago by teams of hacks better at talking their way into conversations than actually listening to what real people say. A good writer (or even producer) knows the more specific you are with lived-in detail, the more universal the appeal; generalities such as they say here cross country and age lines only in how much they bore audiences into a stupor.

Maybe it just bothers me because that ex-cherub kids looks like my childhood friend from the same approx. age, Alan, who turned me onto guns and WWII. I kept imagining what a kick ass movie if the two brothers had a cool deadpan rapport - going into character as it were, like Vincent and Jules, albeit with whatever films they liked or something other than this 'on the nose' crapola. J.J. Abrams or Joss Whedon would have done it, or Quentin, just letting the kids improvise might have done it. I know kids aren't allowed to play with cap guns anymore, but they can't be this square... man. Just can't be.... but when they finally overcome their terror and feel exhilaration through zapping an attacking raptor as it tries to climb in the back of their SWAT vehicle, the kid's first exclamation is "I can't wait to tell mom!" What is he gonna run in and tell her after he smokes his first joint... when he's 45?



Maybe their arrested maturity can be explained by the way mom Judy Greer calls them on the phone constantly, nagging them for not calling her the minute they got off the plane, the minute they got to the park, etc., asking if they're having fun while trying to guilt trip them at the same time with her unflattering pouty spoiled brat frown (above) presumed to translate across the phone lines to kill any shred of childhood mischief, i.e. she wants them to have fun in that oppressive sort of way where no matter what level of fun they do have, it's not enough and/or too much. If they enjoy the park without her, they're bad children, if they don't, well why not? They must not be trying, in order to piss her off.

Other examples of this too-muchness swamping bit characters in million dollar bilge: the nerdy comic banter of two of the tech heads working the control room (he's got a big collection of plastic dinosaurs on his desk, which is such a poorly thought-out stupid detail, like having a picture of your secretary on your desk at work); the schmuck handler who falls into the 'raptor cage also has that dumb glassy-eyed "aww gee boss" slack-jawed look where you imagine him sweeping up a 7-11 and doing even that wrong. The guy running the hamster balls can't just say "they're all present and accounted for," he has to add "it's my job." Vincent D'Onofrio as the military tech assessor wears a big gold watch and short sleeves with fat hairy arms and says shit like "if only we'd had these things at Tora Bora." The Asian geneticist drink green tea in a clear glass cup and wears a Bruce Lee style black sweater, and so forth, and naturally the first person eaten is of Latino persuasion. Wouldn't want to break some reason unbreakable tradition, even as you try to up the wow factor.

Latinos: first in the field, first to be eaten.

But as feminist critics have noted, the bitchy stereotyping of old Claire here is the worst of all: the most dated and cookie cutter trite 'bitchy exec' in the history of Jurassic Park series, and even of movies in general. Void of anything remotely like survival instincts, when flying dinosaurs are carrying women and children off to their deaths all around her she figures the time is right to stand up on top of a jeep and shout for the boys' attention. While her and Own are hiding from the Indominus she shouts at the top of her lungs to see if the kids can hear. "The kids are still alive, but you and I will not be if you keep shouting like that," he has to tell her this, twice, in a harsh whisper. She ignores it, too caught in that zone Camille Paglia writes about in Sexual Personae, the presumption that somehow wild animal nature can be brought to heel simply by making a sour face at the man trying to tell her it can't. And if the man tells her stomping her feet and calling him sexist won't help, that she needs to be quiet to survive, then he's being a misogynist. Naturally she does the opposite of what he says, and then when she winds up in jeopardy he must risk his life to save her while she waves her arms and screams "Do something!!"


It's all worth it though because in the end, doused in sweat and down to her strappy tee (above), she assumes the pose of Julia Adams in Creature from the Black Lagoon or a cave girl from either When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth or One Million BC that sexy curvy prone pose that helped launch the hormones of a generation of 12 year-old boys (and some girls) on TV back in the 70s.


There's other good things though, too, in the comical punchlines and counter bites of the dinosaur attacks, all very indebted to Spielberg and Joe Dante. And Pratt practically does save the film as well as the day : "Your boyfriend's a badass." says the older brother. One can't deny that, what with his driving a motorcycle into battle, his raptor squad racing around him; but actually being her boyfriend seems just too dangerous, maybe worse in the long term than being torn to shreds by a pterodactyl (I'm amazed I can still spell that word, it's been at least 40 years) She's cool in a crisis sure (swings a fire extinguisher can upside a pterodactyl's head), but she's gonna be needin' a lot of crises to stay cool. Her idea of guardianship: drive the kids to the dinosaur attack zone, then lock them in the back of a windowless truck, later don't even let them watch the take-down from a remote feed, which at that point is like one of those things where the Vietnam vet kid comes home from the killing fields and mom still expects him to be in bed before Carson. One need only look at that buzzkill frown Judy Greer and/or the director mistake for genuine emotion to know that her treatment of the boys is really the worst kind of maternal manipulation, the type that breeds Normans rather than Owens. That they can even recognize Pratt's badassery is testament to their resilience, not hers. If kids of these two redheaded Tyrannosaurus Reginas ever screw up bad enough they get sent to military school then maybe they got a fighting chance; if not, they'll never fight again, except with the cleaning lady when she accidentally starches their socks.





One could make the excuse that this is how hot young women executive movies really always are but to them I say watch Anne Heche in VOLCANO (1997)! You could say women in fields of expertise who seem utterly clueless are common in film if not real life, but before you do, look upon Heche in VOLCANO! Her dialogue is so full of quick-thinking expertise in her field and decisive commands, all so expertly, beautifully, naturally delivered, that we realize inept, ditzy, bitchy, uptight or dumb professional women characters are more the weakness of lazy screenwriters who make no attempt to understand what the field they're writing about is really like, and rather than doing some actual research, just write neurotic female experts who don't know either.

Part of the fault, naturally, falls with the actress. A lifetime of being beautiful has left her accustomed to getting praise and promotion just by biting her lip and wearing short skirts, leaving her with no real idea of what life is like off the silver platter. Naturally she confuses seriousness for buzzkill scowling. That's how it looks on the outside, so that must be all it is.

I see the these actresses, look upon Anne Heche in VOLCANO! And take goddamned notes.


If you've already seen it and thought 'meh' due to some of its more groan-inducing Crash-esque post-King healing incidents and, especially, the dimwit clingy daughter played Gaby Hoffmann, then I say look again, and ignore everything but the Heche.

She's so good she had to be taken down by a hostile media after some mental aberrations and substance issues that would have been forgiven with a wink were she a man. Not that she's not regularly working, but she should be as honored and pervasive as Robert Downey Jr. is today. It's just the man is scared of her. And you can see why when you watch VOLCANO.

If the time frame between JURASSIC WORLD and VOLCANO is too great for you, consider it against the 'other' volcano movie if 1997, DANTE'S PEAK. They came out at the same time, though DANTE'S beat it to theaters by two months, and it's hack shiite, while VOLCANO which kind of pancaked on release due to the same reason OBSERVE AND REPORT pancaked because of PAUL BLART. And like the latter, DANTE'S is shiite and VOLCANO endures.

A quick thinking big canvas disaster movie that tears through the real Los Angeles, in practically real time, VOLCANO has enough well researched cliche-free back and forth between city department heads that it touches the rattatat genius of Paddy Chayefsky or 70s films that know the subject they're exploring inside and out; the writers and actors have spent time in the company of firemen and relief coordinators, they know the way experts and officials have to become quick thinking order-givers, promoted by their ability to stay cool in a crisis and mobilize team heads and be constantly inputting and computing results rather than freaking out while the fireballs fly. It's a script rich with mature people and overlapping dialogue flowing in real time, rather than the DANTE's majestic adventure sweep, where every emotion we're to feel is broadly choreographed, VOLCANO's got that 'just another fucked day in NYC' kind of blue collar guy professionalism (transplanted to LA). The bits of character business feel real, ala (the original) TAKING OF PELHAM 123 and DOG DAY AFTERNOON rather than the broad strokes of the DANTE's 'types.'

There's only one or two weak points in VOLCANO and alas, they're what most people remember: 1) An absurd (but effective) bit of Rodney King commentary as a cop tries to arrest a guy for being black while downtown LA is erupting around him, then they work together to halt the flow, etc. 2) Jones' simpering little brat daughter who drags herself along in the car while he juggles the madness at ground zero. Neither has bupkis to do with Heche's character, the city's national geologist spokesperson, mature, gutsy, innovatively written and acted, she's sexy and in the moment, loose and joyous and above all, competent.

DANTE'S PEAK however, has no idea what competence really is, and relies on its quaint isolated setting to avoid having to find out. It's far worse even than JURASSIC WORLD as far as lazily etched characters. As if they're afraid Pierce Brosnan's shaky geologist widower and local mayor Linda Hamilton (right) wont't shine bejeweled enough unless surrounded by evil toadlike greedheads and/or nerds. Two attractive smart people in a world tossed with ugly idiot characters copied off TWISTER's math test, they meet and smolder and their quiet scenes together are the best part of the film, but almost immediately their almost-kiss is interrupted by volcanic shizzz.  Meanwhile the burly bear guy in charge cautions the town about evacuation as it hurts tourism (I forget if there's some big event, the tulip festival or something on which the town depends for tourists, schedule to go on in a few days, there usually is); the tweaker little shrimp tech has his one 'quirk' a limp bid at Tarantino chatter as he won't shut up about gourmet coffee and on and on. Their banter is so hack it actually reverses character development rather than enhances it. This vulcanologist team make the storm chaster posse in Twister (upon whom they're clearly styled) seem like the goddamned Wild Bunch.

While VOLCANO provides an unavoidable, sudden calamity that feels like it's bringing out the best in people over an approx. 48 hour period, all the events in DANTE'S hinge on greed and stupidity (in everyone but Brosnan and Hamilton) over a poorly etched out week of research, as if the mayoral greed of JAWS has been watered down and spread around to poison all the children on Harry Lime's hospital list. The town leaders won't evacuate despite the ominous portents, as if they can argue fiscal deadlines with a volcano; Hamilton's kids put her and Brosnan in danger by driving themselves up the mountain to get grandma while the ash from the eruption rains down on the road, the grandma puts them all in danger by being too stubborn to at least drive down the mountain to their house. Rather than in-the-moment quick thinking of the type we see in VOLCANO, the adventure in PEAK hinges on the kind of stupidity chains by which emotional thinking, what I call 'proximal responsibility' trumps basic human survival.

I can't tell you if this shit ever happens in real life. I'm sure it does, but it's lazy writing that relies on idiocy of stock types to avoid having to do some research (by, say finding out personal stories of what the survivors did and who died in the St. Helen's eruption and why, or visiting a real vulcanologist team and actually listening to the rhythm and substance of their dialogue).

It's attempts to add CRASH racist LA morals or no, VOLCANO is the opposite, extremely well written and researched and, I'm guessing, rehearsed. It certainly should have put Anne Heche in the same A-list company of Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock if she wasn't already, but she got ground up in the hot button issues with Ellen and started being erratic. Hollywood gossip was on her like white on rice. It was the time when people just didn't come out very often, so we all had a hard time digesting her straight girl romance SIX DAYS AND SEVEN NIGHTS.
 

That's part of it, but I also feel the mainstream press is far warier of recognizing scary assertive talent in women - they like their stars to be either stunning beauties with very few lines of dialogue or else moms and/or daughters first, professionals second. They only recognize great acting if it occurs in "great" pictures of Oscar calibre (i.e. Streep's in it). If they're going to be professional career women they must be frigid bitches just waiting for the right middle-aged hero to gentle them down real nice with the right halter, or at least stay home with her kids while she's out solving the case. But this is not at all the m.o. of our cool professional Anne Heche, the geologist du jour. Thinking of her friend Rachel who just got sucked into the flaming bowels of the earth under the La Brea tar pits earlier that morning, she looks at all the erupting lava and chaos in downtown LA-- the horror and devastation--eyes wide, she says, "Rachel would have loved this!"

Fuck yeah!

I almost fell out of my chair with joy when I finally re-watched this movie last week and heard that line. Why is it that Heche is the only one cool enough to say that kind of shit? Is it any wonder male Hollywood was threatened? There hadn't been a character this resilient and ahead of the curve, beyond the banal reality created for women by writers too busy crafting grand spectacle disaster to pay attention to how actual women behave --instead just shunting them home to watch kids and make angry phone calls demanding husband return because he has "responsibilities here too. We need you here, too, David!" or else just tagging along and filling in exposition gaps, rolling their eyes like the volcano is somehow dad's fault, because he stayed out playing poker and now this natural disaster is his excuse not to come home.

Not Heche, she ain't that type. Stunned but invigorated after her near death experience in the subway tunnels below the street, she hangs around in the thick of the eruption all morning, day, and night, not whining for Tommy Lee Jones' attention like his idiot daughter does, but doing her job, improvising, finding the path of the lava by watching a ball liberated from a looted toy store window, making calculations, etc. and barking them out super fast to Jones, who doesn't question them or give her shit cuz she's a woman and he's got the biggest ranch in Texas and his pappy etc, but merely reacts and mobilizes without a second thought; there's no spare time to second guess whether her advice is just that of a girl standing in front of a man and asking him to evacuate the city blocks between La Brea and the Pacific ocean. Together they're able to convey, her understanding of the lava and his understanding of the city, combining into one fluid machine where urgent calamity is responded to lighting fast in ways their opposite numbers in DANTE'S never could... they were too busy trying to dig themselves out of stupid predicaments created by idiot grandmothers of idiot children.

But more than just being smart, capable, and able to think on her feet logically rather than getting bogged down in the tar of 'emotional conviction,' Heche is playing one of the few heroic female characters allowed to genuinely love being in the thick of danger. Usually enjoying calamity is the sole domain of villains, "sluts" femme fatales or if experts and professionals in their fields, then they're incompetent, as in their jubilance gets people killed or seems otherwise monstrous (as in she needs a man to shout: "Damnit it Kate, those aren't statistics, they're people! With families!") In other words, Heche is not the type to think shouting "Somebody DO something!" in a moment of extreme crisis qualifies as being a capable manager (or like Jones' idiot daughter, let emotional prioritizing commence a whole chain of doomed rescuers as she pursues an idiot infant into the blast zone, and dad has to go after her and risk his life as well).

But that last one has little to do with Heche, though it's cool that she's the one who rescues them more or less, and though Jones has all the earmarks of the Dad of Great Adventure (i.e. his daughter is staying with him while the ex-wife is on vacation but he keeps blowing off their days together) there's little of the annoying tics of the type, since the good aspects of Tommy Lee's character (he's able to stay cool and process loads of information during a natural disaster--and after all, it is his job) are also the bad (he can't ever just relax and let someone else take over even for an hour or two). We generally loathe micro-managerial bosses but we know Jones is cool because his staff tease him about it and he just rolls with it. As with his back-and-forth with Heche, dialogue with the staff (including second-in-command Don Cheadle) is all believable, the jokes and banter and character etching are deftly woven into the action and exposition, rather than the 'here's three pages of character banter and now three pages of exposition and now three pages of disaster management' lameness of DANTE'S PEAK, a film that can't chew gum and walk at the same time.


At the time I saw them I loved DANTE'S more, mainly due to the heat so effortlessly generated between mayor Linda Hamilton and coiffed vulcanologist Pierce Brosnan--I loved his Bond, and loved her Sarah Connor and it was the late 90s. In PEAK she made me want to date a mother of two and move to a cool house in the shadow of gorgeous Colorado mountain. VOLCANO seemed much too busy, too full of business (then again, I was probably drunk when I rented it as the second film of the night back before widescreen). At the time I didn't get it. Now I don't get how I didn't get it then, or how I let a few Rodney King hand-holding "we are the children" moments rush me to snide dismissal. But it's DANTE that now seems coy and willfully naive; Brosnan especially seems much too handsome and composed to be believable as a roving geologist; look at him up there, not a single fleck of ash in that hair, and baby that ain't snow outside. Hamilton's mayor meanwhile is strong and sweet her main assertive skill seems to be in managing to pacify the diverse townsfolk with her maternal sweetness and to blindly follow and believe everything Brosnan says, his immaculate TV looks carrying a kind of absolute law she's been waiting all these years to follow.

Heche on the other hand, makes that ash dusting work. Her character is the spokesperson for her department and she handles the press conferences with ease and poise and oomph --no bitchiness or stomach butterflies or Kathy/Lucy-like "waaahs" of exasperation. I can only imagine how great she would have been in the Bryce Dallas Howard role of JURASSIC WORLD, especially if she could have some character and wardrobe input. It would have been cool to see her get it on with Chris Pratt, that would have been innovative like the platonic post-relationship friendship in JP III and the mixed-race family ofJP II. She might have even pulled it off without someone having to use the word "cougar. And her being older and more self-assured would make more sense as an executive. Is it my fault for liking Brosnan as Bond back in the 90s that characters like Heche's in VOLCANO are long gone, and feminism is in such shit straits now?

Of course not, but it does show that big budget scripts aren't necessarily worth their money, and actress legacies (as in Howard's famous power player father) don't often bring much to the table beyond being merely a good, expensively-educated actress. My guess? They haven't suffered. Even after all the bodies are hauled away Howard just seem tired from being up all night and having to run in heels, and when she cries in the arms of her sister it's only from exhaustion and relief. At the end of VOLCANO, on the other hand, Heche is exhilarated. That's my kind of crisis-handling bitch.

If only it was America's.
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 Over the years I've written a lot about old Godard, and a few have written for Acidemic on him as well. Read then this curated complete collection, and weep with hilarious wonder!

You may have forgotten February was Women in Horror Month, but not me. Even if I barely get in on it at the last minute, or even halfway thru March. Or even here in May? Wait, June now? Whatever, I've ben alternating between two Hells - Pollen and bad AC, the kind of AC just cool enough to not do anything about (as in buy a new one, pay for a repairman) but not good enough to keep me fully cool. I could tell you allergy season has hit me more than passing strange this year, but you and your little violins mock me pre-emptively so while I suffer in my crippling lack of delirium,. get ready for the 12-part series of horror women badass double features heading to this blog this summer and most of all get ready for runaway tangents that double back like the sun's snake rim, devouring itself... hey, the rim sun eclipse shizz reminds me..


She turned 22, graduated Pratt and will be starting her Pittsburgh job (with V-Drome) as global content creator in Sept. Samara, honey. I never said this before, but we're all so proud. Sure, you're a fictional character, but honey, so was Damien Hirst. And I just know that somewhere, in some groovy alternate reality conjured by our conjoined imagination, you are there with me, filling my head with bizarre and disturbing imagery no ordinary movie's gentle reverie can allay. Not even Audition. Nothing can equal what I see from you. Wishing you well... well... stay (in the) well...

Samara's first scream-lit TV sitcom

 Poor mummy.... Universal never seemed to care much about old Kharis. Left out of a lot of the all-star House of... movies that sealed the 40s like a tomb, old "Kharis" had to chase Abbot and Costello all by himself and pad his barely-an-hour running times with flashbacks (been there, bro). Now of course there's that Brendan Fraser series, but who cares? And who loves the 40s Mummy sequels at all? By the last in the series, 1944's Curse of the Mummy, the answer was in: no one. Maybe that's why the termites got in to the final entry, accessing some pulpy core of dream poetry that evokes in its nocturnal contrasts of warmth (ala the opening scene in Tante Berthe's homey little tavern) and darkness (the ruined abbey), Val Lewton's Seventh Victim. The acting isn't great except Lon Chaney gives a master class in how to act a role with just your eyes and a few physical gestures as the mummy; Peter Coe gives a weirdly silken vacuousness to his incantations as the requisite fez wearing high priest of the ancient faith and best of all, Viriginia Christine as the Princess Ananka handles the difficulty of a very nebulous half-dual role, as a mix of mummified princess and her reincarnation Amina, a current time period archeological assistant from the previous film in the series, The Mummy's Ghost. In that film, the mummy carries Amina into the swamp but rather than be rescued last minute (ala Hammer's 1959 remake), she's 'turned' by Kharis and begins to age into a mummy herself, which seems rather unfair - why reincarnate if you're not going to get the benefit of youth? The film solves this dilemma by being so boring it's hard to make it to the end without drifting off to sleep, or going back to your reading. 


This time first see Christine's Ananka it's as if she's coming out of a mould, face almost like a half-formed clay sculpture come to life (ala Harryhausen) climbing out the newly drained Louisiana swamp, caked in dirt but clearly loving feel the touch of the sun like a flower rising from the soil. Occurring right in the middle of the day apparently (though supposedly 'quitting time', there's a bit of a dazed walk-of-shame vibe to this resurrection, the sun high in the sky beaming down at her via Ra-like sun rays. We've all been there, right? Pulling ourselves off the floor after what seems like a 25 year black-out, weaving home warmed by the sun, still in our gown or suit from the night before, walking through the working men commuters like a phantom. And wait, weren't we in the New England bog last night? How did we wake up down in Louisiana, 25 years later? And why are the workmen saying it's time to quit for the day and go home when the blazing sun is still high in the noonday sky?


Then begins her odyssey of somnambulistic drifting. Cajun Joe, who just left his bulldozer back where she came out of the mud, now spots her while walking home (he must have got lost - again it makes no sense as he should be home by now, considering how clean she is), and takes her to Tante Berthe, and no sooner as Berthe put the amnesiac hottie (with the very modern Bettie Page bangs) to bed and showed her some kindness, then the mummy bursts in and kills her, like some jealous stalker slow mo one-armed strangler ex-husband. Ananka runs off into the swamps again, and the killing and stalking goes on. Each time the mummy gets near she goes into a trance and repeats his name but when he tries to grab her she screams and runs away. Women, am I right?


On the surface, there doesn't seem to be much thought put into Curse at all, yet it manages to use its limitations and stupidity to craft uncanny dream-logic, not great by any means, but in the same twilight realm of logic at times as, say, Carnival of Souls, or Dementia. It's unusual to see people basically killed for being good samaritans, something that makes us feel the murders more than usual for these sorts of films (ala Lewton's Leopard Man from the previous year). The first female victim, Berthe is loved by everyone in her corner of the bayou, so when she's killed for trying to protect Ananka, that really kicks in a sense of tragedy to this saga, with the Egyptian conspirators giving off an air of domestic terrorism. Why command Kharis to kill indiscriminately if not for some ancient cult zealotry and impersonal hatred against first world capitalism and Christian decency?

What gives the film it its real alchemical magic though, are the weirdly modern bangs, posh accent, confidence and cat woman litheness of Virginia Christine. She's got a very weird role to play, needing to patch a whole wealth of inconsistencies. A local in the bayou notes "it's been-a 25 years since a mummy drag a girl in the swamp" but what girl? The last film was only made the year before where she was just a reincarnation a girl named Amina and played by a different actress. This time we're compelled to gaze deep onto those modern bangs and wonder: is Amina/Ananka the reincarnated mummy expert or a mummy herself? What made her aging problem reverse this time?

There is no real answer so we're better off trusting that it 'feels right' and anyway, Christine is great at splitting the difference ("its like I was two different people, two different worlds.") While trying to decide if she's Princess Ananka or the contemporary Amina (preserved for 25 years via the New England-Louisiana bog stream), she says  Bearing out the split subject aspect is the similarly hair-colored and style of Kay Linnaker as the drainage project foreman's understanding assistant. 100% 20th century, she's the 'lucky' girl who winds up with Moore. While Ananka reverts to bandaged death as soon as her head hits the sarcophagus pillow. Why she changes rapidly ages back into mummy bandages at the end is never explained, but by then, like a psychoanalyst session, the hour is up.

That concept of doubling fits Christine's fashion-forward bangs and use of a night dress as swamp wear. I don't generally like those Betty Page bangs --  you have to be damn hot, willowy and with the right mix of bad girl, demure kitten, and assertive intellect to pull them off --not to mention the right dress, and just as her character is neither here nor there as far as soul-body-mind-incarnation-century cohesion, her dress is neither nightgown nor formal evening dress, but a sublime hybrid; she could either be lost on her way home after an all-night party or sleepwalking. Christine pulls both options off at once, and looks damned great being carried around by Lon. I love her... in this incarnation.. Naturally the more I see this film the more I have to forget, amnesia being the B-movie lovers' friend. Is that why 'forgettable' and 'dreamlike' go so hand in hand,

It comes every year with the same half-kidding therapeutic post-macho cachet that James Bond week used to carry in the late 90s. We never have to worry what's on--no matter where we are- what to have as background, what will chill us out before going off to a date, or put us in the mood while canoodling at the Ramada, or cooling our stressed brain and body after work or a workout or a beat-down, or a fascist rally, or a night on the town, whatever we disenfranchised Straight White Men aged 20-50 need to recover from. (I mention that demographic because most of the commercials during shark week feature 20-something white males with beard stubble or a dog and khakis, like the hilarious Independence Day-Twizzlers tie-in, or the smug endomorph talking about how car buying was always supposed to be). We may be on the way down, forced or eager to watch as our massively dominance is stripped down by fractions, but we're still number one on the top ten most-dangerous, biggest bite-radius countdown! Heil yeah, boyy, we're worse than lionfish, or sargassum. Say, anyone still listen to Kid Rock? I've noticed ZZ Top have sashayed their way out of the valley of oblivion (between the 'new charts' and the 'retro-cool' lurks the valley). That Blake Lively is a real honey and supposedly rocks it in THE SHALLOWS at a theater in a mall in a town near you!

Do you have a time to fill out a small response card based on your reaction to my previous paragraph? Don't try to escape me, dear reader, for millions of years of evolution have made my fins react with lightning speed to the tiniest glimmer of consumer attention. Aus Kommen der Hai Woche!




Shark week: Now that we all have giant HD TVs of the sort our ancestors only dreamed about, the deep blues like a 3D aquarium, Shark Week is the best next thing to being there, on some gorgeous remote Australian beach, pink sand and waves lapping from clear aquamarine slowly into deep indigo and purple--wait, purple? Where is all the red coming from to mix with the.... Oh right, your leg's missing. Shark week! And with at least two channels (DISC and NGEO) running two different sets of shark-related programming, I like to pretend my TV is a window into the pool behind my James Bond villain lair; the camera man in the water with the sharks was dropped in there through a secret door because the one thing SPECTRE will not tolerate is failure!

Shark week: It has such a great name one loves to say it, to think it, to feel it to see it, to reflect of the surface so all shoals can sea flit. Shark Week. It used to be just a hodge podge of dull oceanographer's tagging and mapping trans-oceanic migrations to see what motivated sharks to attack humans and move to shallow water, that and AIR JAWS, which was three or four great "strikes" of a whale sized Great White breaching up and clomping down on a stack of fish flavored tires suspended from the air, over and over, which is bound to be aggravating for the shark - and certainly was for us the viewers, for it was shown nonstop. But the whole week has been getting better every year, with shit aimed so close to me and my people (the stoned white people of a certain age group) that it's like Discovery been reading our mail, or hiring our buddies to fill the need, and every year shit gets wilder. Ever year there's more cool shit aimed so precisely at my demographic that I feel like I'm getting high with the people who made them. Now Eli Roth hosts shark talk shows, Andy Samberg does weird trickster post-modern count-downs, SHARK CITY chronicles the daily food chain in and around a sunken freighter and--my favorite so far--SHARKS OF THE SHADOWLAND, and its trio of badass New Zealand government conservationist divers, subjecting themselves to the ceaseless group attacks by weird-looking sharks called sevengills, all in the name of battling sea weed plagues, like finally it's a real danger and something's at stake other than the usual marine biology-cloaked quest for footage. New Zealand, where official government conservation teams are two cool Kiwis with dreads and a cute girl with a North American accent. I love these guys!!


Knowing at least one government is chill and keeping it pristine really cheers me up, because I've been suffering from too much excess empathy for our imprisoned creatures and the natural world as trashed as I am, writing lots of stuff that I can't seem to finish. I just keep making longer, and longer and always it winds back around to my personal issues, the various dead ends of middle age and the realization of being everything that's holding the world back from utopia, The Great White... Straight... American... Male. Being the worst. I'm the Ahab of the future Waterworld, the broken consul passing out under the Yellowstone Super Volcano, I only know of one place that hasn't heard of my kind of empathy-plagued freak, the deep ocean, where the Great White and the Bull shark still think they're King frickin' Apex Kong. Time to fuck 'em up, with cameras and research and tags, like we're the grey aliens this time leaving implants and making excuses for messing with out minds.



SHARK WEEK. I hate summer in general -- to disgusting in the city, too buggy in the country. I'm 50% Swedish, so I've never loved summer except for the air conditioning and occasional body surfing. But I do like to 'visit' via the transdimensional consciousness that is HD TV these days. TCM often fritters away the after school slots of the week with saccharine musicals from the post-code era, so white and bland you can feel the PBSD (Post-Boredom Stress Disorder) of a generation of captive Sullivans and children dragged to these drecks by churchmarms who just love that couple of nonthreatening squeaky kids puttin' on a show musicalzzzz, the type so white and fascist innocent they make Judy and Mickey putting on a show seem like CABARET.


So if you're a gloomy Swede with a dark sense of humor you need something else, to cool down from der werkaus. Too tired to surf you find something with some bite that's not going to trojan horse in bad vibes (like the news), something so you can detox and soak up a kind of sense memory vacation. This one magic week, you can flip to at least two different channels in the Discovery package and BOOM - you're out of the city, out on the ocean, swimming with the big boys and don't have to smell any chum or brine or get sea sick or bored and feeling trapped -- waiting for your drunk friends to be ready to head back, finally - when you're climbing out of your skin.

Take a trick I learned from JK Huysmans--if you fool the sense of smell then the other senses fall in line to sustain any illusion. So what I do is put a dab of cocoanut suntan lotion under my nose, sit where I can catch some rays of sun through the window, and put on the show, seeing the HD water and giant creatues swimming therein, you might suddenly feel the ocean beneath you or around you, that bobbing and drag forward and back of the waves, as you lay back on the couch and let yourself drift into a nap, the sharks are there, for your protection, eating anyone who tries to remind you you're not Australian, and it's trash night... and dishes... and commercials showing us starving kids in Africa one minute and factory farming atrocities the next, not getting the realization that the two cancel each other out - you can't save both. That's what we need the sharks for, chum! Oops, see I went there again, urban socialist environmental angst boiling over, all this excess projected empathy for the suffering - I can't get the suffering of "Sophia in the shoe"out of my brain, useless empathy suffocating me, the exhaust fumes of my futile rage weakening the senses of my zen coordination, so once again it's time to paddle back and back against the tide, to the Shallows, to the Blue Sea, to the Shark Week.. the next red you see won't be anger.... because if they're showing endangered shark eco-atrocities one one channel, the other one's gotta have Eli Roth showing shark attack re-enactments and the thought of anything eating us back cools my rage like a blast of Swedish night.

Blake Lively, coaxing my demographic into the theater to see THE SHALLOWS.

I'll confess, it's not the horror in Florida a few weeks ago, the Pride Parade this past Sunday, or the passing of the great collective of chameleonic trickster personae, artistic incarnations, and unobtrusive music genius known as David Bowie that has compelled me to re-open my CinemArchetype files once more. They could have been considered complete. Certainly the basic core archetypes have all been accounted for, aside from the obvious ones (i.e. the hero, the terrorist, rabbit, the frickin' idiot) but Jung's access to pop culture was limited by the times. If he'd have seen Ziggy Stardust he'd have a whole treatise by now. No, the reason I print this now is that I'm confused and overwhelmed by the heat, unable to finish things that hit closer to home.

So the query is, are aliens all one gender, or beyond gender, or have cross-dressers and fabulous gay culture icons conscripted the alien look to help us contextualize their gender flexibility within our known parameters? Insecure men don't beat up aliens to prove their Earth heredity, and we don't fire aliens from school jobs. We wouldn't believe they were aliens even if they told us (just like you could be totally fey in the 70s and no one would guess you were actually 'one of them' - just expresssive, artistic, which was encouraged back when I was a kid, thank god). Oh well, we gained some things in some places, lost some in other. Ask not what color the elephant is in the room, for he's electric pink. And if you can't handle it, honey, go back to Janice!










Though it seems to prize image and sound over substance, to become some half-awake reverie set to some great T. Rex, Stooges, Eno covers and glamsy originals, and offers one of the rare, stunning performances by the always uneven Ewan McGregor as an Iggy Pop, it's the gorgeous eyes and face of Davies that lingers in even the straightest dude's locket memory. In fabulous outfits like the one above, Davies plays a kind of a Bowie/Jobriath-style glam alien meteor who fakes his own assassination, but why? As a performance art thing? To dodge the notoriously stringent British taxman? Because fans were making life wearisome? Showing up once in awhile at the druggier glam shows, (shadowed under Bowie MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH-style hats) to pout that there's still a music scene without him, only a terribly unconvincing Christian Bale (clip-on costume earring and make-up presumably lifted from his mum's drawer) as a bisexual rock journalist seems to notice him here and there. Oh Bale, you're such a square rock journalist you might as well be written by Cameron Crowe!

My problem with Todd Haynes has always been his devotion to a kind of sickly housewife 50s color scheme, which I personally abhor (maybe it's from being very bored as a kid at the homes of various grandparents), and his weakness for Eisenstein fetish editing that collapses any kind of narrative cohesiveness or drive (if it wasn't for the songs to anchor them Haynes would leave time behind altogether - and while that kind of stuff is fun to edit, it's often frustrating to watch, especially if you're not enthralled by a certain era of suburban decor), and his 'one step out of the closet looking in' dourness. His gay odysseys are like a less flashy or raunchy or druggy version of Greg Araki's, which means nothing to anyone unless they've endured an Araki movie all the way to the end (which only dutiful second stringer critics like myself have ever done, unless the PR lady at the press screening isn't watching the Exit).

See also HEDWIG and THE ANGRY INCH - god knows I did, at the Jane Theater and on the screen. Alas... I still cry to "The Origin of Love." I'm oily human - it was the 90s man. Damn right that was me at Wigstock 98. You wanna choose up sides?


He's an artificially transplanted alien who can turn people homicidal with a glance, and he has a woman's sex organs, sort of, and he's, well I can't spoil it.

I'm fascinated by the life imitates art trajectory, fearless really, of self-inflicted burn victim Richard Lynch... who doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze during a strong acid trip - and so appears all the time covered in a thick gel and hideously scarred, and nearly always playing roles (that I've seen) that have him dying in fire, or having something to do with fire. I mean I would never be able to get within a mile of match if I were him, that's gutsy. I don't buy him as a cult leader either here, as the smolder-glanced hybrid alien, nor in the cult he convinces to burn themselves up together in BAD DREAMS, but I'm in awe of him anyway. A living example that some of those old LSD wives tales could be true, it's exhibit A in why, as I think, LSD should be strictly monitored by the government with agent 'guides' being consigned to sell it and provide a kind of communal garden / arts and crafts room which to monitor like a chill out tent -kindergarten teacher- therapist - shaman - counsellor. Lord knows I'm qualified and would love that as a job. Instead you got people like Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern in THE TRIP.

New World released this, another example of Larry Cohen's unique ability to steal shots on busy city streets, full of unusual casting (Andy Kaufman, probably the only guy brave enough to march with the cops in the St. Patrick's Day parade in full dress uniform while Cohen and company film guerrilla style) and good tough acting with characters who all look like people instead of actors, tough NY people and types - and mixing his high concept weirdness and social messages alongside it - straddling a zone between Cronenberg body horror and Scorsese urban grit poetry, with streaks of humanism and wit all his own.

As Imdb notes: "A serious auto accident prevented Breckinridge from getting a longed-for sex-change operation in Mexico." Is his last name, "Breckinridge" linked to Myra? It is, apparently... and makes sense - they certainly ran in the same decadent glitterati circles. And then we can follow these threads outward into the universe..

"Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love." - Paglia, 521

Just why do we associate greys with dudes, when they're quite clearly beyond such things as gender? Reagan famously told Spielberg: "you don't know how close to the truth this really is," after a White House screening. One thing I'm reasonably sure didn't really happen was the musical communication, because fuck that hack John Williams --he would think UFOs communicate with bassoons. Then again, Spielberg is a filmmaker and needs visualization and audio for such things, while everyone knows communication with greys is always telepathic. You've probably picked up their signal in your sleep or via the galactic cell phones that drifted into our damper climates millennia ago, the psilocybe cubensis mushroom, or via Salvia Divinorum, DMT, or dying, or a bad flu, or psychic ability - your brain has to be clear enough you can recognize the external-internal voice in your head - and the way you feel a connection with them is very yin/yang - like their female energy courses through you as if speaking through your anima or unconscious ego, or perhaps it's reversed for women. They are facets of our constitution, like Voldemort's soul within Harry Potter (Deathly Hallows 2 is on behind me) .



Not every gender-morpher made this list: mere cross dressing, androgyny, or sexual re-assignment can't do it--not alien enough, as they're generally one or the other in final point, men wanting to be women or vice versa, and those in between either neutered altogether or a piecemeal composite still lacking that 'alien' aspect, i.e. the less not adding to something more than both, but Tilda Swinton has it and rocks it, the female non-musical version of the David Bowie alien archetype in the film that put director Sally Potter and star Tilda Swinton on the map as 'the' androgyne to beat; here she believably alters from a young nobleman blessed with immortality by Queen Elizabeth, to changing in dress, gender, class and demeanor while navigating a wild heavily costumed and surreal ever-evolving England, speaking directly to camera often to forget a solid link that transcends any notion of objectification or subject-as-spectacle, she transcends farther than normal Freudian sexual theory allows, to see how going from male to female is not a castration but a remembrance and encompassing, like wood rejoining fire and air rather than disintegration.




Lin really shines in the chance to play a role where she starts out as a guy but in her supernatural fighting ability leads to a softening of the skin and feminization of self, a side effect of mastering a rare martial arts manual that demands auto-castration, which I've heard mention in a few other films --as eunuchs were once a ruling class of immortal warriors - or something can know both the yin and yang, male and female power centers. But s/he keeps her maid lover but falls in love with Jet Li (and has them sleep together later while she's off killing his brothers). Why, Jet? Because he makes her laugh with his philosophical simplicity and deep love of alcohol (naturally I relate), preferring wine, in a beautifully done scene, to the follies of man and his continual struggle for power and rule; Lin's sacrificed his/her wang to have ultimate power while Li's sacrificed all interest in the world (or is trying to) in favor of a continual buzz and settlement on Ox Mountain (if he ever gets there). It's really beautifully played between them, as Jet Li has such an innocent semi-bewildered look in his eyes, like he's imagining a cheery childhood moment at all times. Plus, he's such an amazing martial artist that his/her martial arts skill is mind-boggling no matter if he's 'wearing a wire,' so it's not like he's just some boomerang slacker trying to drink his way out of getting a job like some people I have known, Erich. Together they're a flutter of robes like two butterflies right before she kills them with his/her choice weapon: sewing needles

I'll confess, it's not the horror in Florida a few weeks ago, the Pride Parade this past Sunday, or the passing of the great collective of chameleonic trickster personae, artistic incarnations, and unobtrusive music genius known as David Bowie that has compelled me to re-open my CinemArchetype files once more. They could have been considered complete. Certainly the basic core archetypes have all been accounted for, aside from the obvious ones (i.e. the hero, the terrorist, rabbit, the frickin' idiot) but Jung's access to pop culture was limited by the times. If he'd have seen Ziggy Stardust he'd have a whole treatise by now. No, the reason I print this now is that I'm confused and overwhelmed by the heat, unable to finish things that hit closer to home. So many omitted - Grace Jones (cuz I can't find the ideal Steven Shaviro quote), Lady Bracknell, Chris Tucker in 5th Element... Peter Pan, etc. For the sake of coherence... just aliens, and magical beings.

 So the query is, are aliens all one gender, or beyond gender, or have cross-dressers and fabulous gay culture icons conscripted the alien look to help us contextualize their gender flexibility within our known parameters? Insecure men don't beat up aliens to prove their Earth heredity, and we don't fire aliens from school jobs. We wouldn't believe they were aliens even if they told us (just like you could be totally fey in the 70s and no one would guess you were actually 'one of them' - just expresssive, artistic, which was encouraged back when I was a kid, thank god). Oh well, we gained some things in some places, lost some in other. Ask not what color the elephant is in the room, for he's electric pink. And if you can't handle it, honey, go back to Janice!










Though it seems to prize image and sound over substance, to become some half-awake reverie set to some great T. Rex, Stooges, Eno covers and glamsy originals, and offers one of the rare, stunning performances by the always uneven Ewan McGregor as an Iggy Pop, it's the gorgeous eyes and face of Davies that lingers in even the straightest dude's locket memory. In fabulous outfits like the one above, Davies plays a kind of a Bowie/Jobriath-style glam alien meteor who fakes his own assassination, but why? As a performance art thing? To dodge the notoriously stringent British taxman? Because fans were making life wearisome? Showing up once in awhile at the druggier glam shows, (shadowed under Bowie MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH-style hats) to pout that there's still a music scene without him, only a terribly unconvincing Christian Bale (clip-on costume earring and make-up presumably lifted from his mum's drawer) as a bisexual rock journalist seems to notice him here and there. Oh Bale, you're such a square rock journalist you might as well be written by Cameron Crowe!

My problem with Todd Haynes has always been his devotion to a kind of sickly housewife 50s color scheme, which I personally abhor (maybe it's from being very bored as a kid at the homes of various grandparents), and his weakness for Eisenstein fetish editing that collapses any kind of narrative cohesiveness or drive (if it wasn't for the songs to anchor them Haynes would leave time behind altogether - and while that kind of stuff is fun to edit, it's often frustrating to watch, especially if you're not enthralled by a certain era of suburban decor), and his 'one step out of the closet looking in' dourness. His gay odysseys are like a less flashy or raunchy or druggy version of Greg Araki's, which means nothing to anyone unless they've endured an Araki movie all the way to the end (which only dutiful second stringer critics like myself have ever done, unless the PR lady at the press screening isn't watching the Exit).

See also HEDWIG and THE ANGRY INCH - god knows I did, at the Jane Theater and on the screen. Alas... I still cry to "The Origin of Love." I'm oily human - it was the 90s man. Damn right that was me at Wigstock 98. You wanna choose up sides?


He's an artificially transplanted alien who can turn people homicidal with a glance, and he has a woman's sex organs, sort of, and he's, well I can't spoil it.

I'm fascinated by the life imitates art trajectory, fearless really, of self-inflicted burn victim Richard Lynch... who doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze during a strong acid trip - and so appears all the time covered in a thick gel and hideously scarred, and nearly always playing roles (that I've seen) that have him dying in fire, or having something to do with fire. I mean I would never be able to get within a mile of match if I were him, that's gutsy. I don't buy him as a cult leader either here, as the smolder-glanced hybrid alien, nor in the cult he convinces to burn themselves up together in BAD DREAMS, but I'm in awe of him anyway. A living example that some of those old LSD wives tales could be true, it's exhibit A in why, as I think, LSD should be strictly monitored by the government with agent 'guides' being consigned to sell it and provide a kind of communal garden / arts and crafts room which to monitor like a chill out tent -kindergarten teacher- therapist - shaman - counsellor. Lord knows I'm qualified and would love that as a job. Instead you got people like Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern in THE TRIP.

New World released this, another example of Larry Cohen's unique ability to steal shots on busy city streets, full of unusual casting (Andy Kaufman, probably the only guy brave enough to march with the cops in the St. Patrick's Day parade in full dress uniform while Cohen and company film guerrilla style) and good tough acting with characters who all look like people instead of actors, tough NY people and types - and mixing his high concept weirdness and social messages alongside it - straddling a zone between Cronenberg body horror and Scorsese urban grit poetry, with streaks of humanism and wit all his own.

As Imdb notes: "A serious auto accident prevented Breckinridge from getting a longed-for sex-change operation in Mexico." Is his last name, "Breckinridge" linked to Myra? It is, apparently... and makes sense - they certainly ran in the same decadent glitterati circles. And then we can follow these threads outward into the universe..

"Charisma is the radiance produced by the interaction of male and female elements in a gifted personality. The charismatic woman has a masculine force and severity. The charismatic man has an entrancing female beauty. Both are hot and cold, glowing with presexual self-love." - Paglia, 521

Just why do we associate greys with dudes, when they're quite clearly beyond such things as gender? Reagan famously told Spielberg: "you don't know how close to the truth this really is," after a White House screening. One thing I'm reasonably sure didn't really happen was the musical communication, because fuck that hack John Williams --he would think UFOs communicate with bassoons. Then again, Spielberg is a filmmaker and needs visualization and audio for such things, while everyone knows communication with greys is always telepathic. You've probably picked up their signal in your sleep or via the galactic cell phones that drifted into our damper climates millennia ago, the psilocybe cubensis mushroom, or via Salvia Divinorum, DMT, or dying, or a bad flu, or psychic ability - your brain has to be clear enough you can recognize the external-internal voice in your head - and the way you feel a connection with them is very yin/yang - like their female energy courses through you as if speaking through your anima or unconscious ego, or perhaps it's reversed for women. They are facets of our constitution, like Voldemort's soul within Harry Potter (Deathly Hallows 2 is on behind me) .



Not every gender-morpher made this list: mere cross dressing, androgyny, or sexual re-assignment can't do it--not alien enough, as they're generally one or the other in final point, men wanting to be women or vice versa, and those in between either neutered altogether or a piecemeal composite still lacking that 'alien' aspect, i.e. the less not adding to something more than both, but Tilda Swinton has it and rocks it, the female non-musical version of the David Bowie alien archetype in the film that put director Sally Potter and star Tilda Swinton on the map as 'the' androgyne to beat; here she believably alters from a young nobleman blessed with immortality by Queen Elizabeth, to changing in dress, gender, class and demeanor while navigating a wild heavily costumed and surreal ever-evolving England, speaking directly to camera often to forget a solid link that transcends any notion of objectification or subject-as-spectacle, she transcends farther than normal Freudian sexual theory allows, to see how going from male to female is not a castration but a remembrance and encompassing, like wood rejoining fire and air rather than disintegration.




Lin really shines in the chance to play a role where she starts out as a guy but in her supernatural fighting ability leads to a softening of the skin and feminization of self, a side effect of mastering a rare martial arts manual that demands auto-castration, which I've heard mention in a few other films --as eunuchs were once a ruling class of immortal warriors - or something can know both the yin and yang, male and female power centers. But s/he keeps her maid lover but falls in love with Jet Li (and has them sleep together later while she's off killing his brothers). Why, Jet? Because he makes her laugh with his philosophical simplicity and deep love of alcohol (naturally I relate), preferring wine, in a beautifully done scene, to the follies of man and his continual struggle for power and rule; Lin's sacrificed his/her wang to have ultimate power while Li's sacrificed all interest in the world (or is trying to) in favor of a continual buzz and settlement on Ox Mountain (if he ever gets there). It's really beautifully played between them, as Jet Li has such an innocent semi-bewildered look in his eyes, like he's imagining a cheery childhood moment at all times. Plus, he's such an amazing martial artist that his/her martial arts skill is mind-boggling no matter if he's 'wearing a wire,' so it's not like he's just some boomerang slacker trying to drink his way out of getting a job like some people I have known, Erich. Together they're a flutter of robes like two butterflies right before she kills them with his/her choice weapon: sewing needles

While directed by Stanley Donen, this troubled production originally belonged to award winning Kubrick/Star Wars production designer John Barry; it was his story back in 1978, British bad boy novelist Martin Amiss turned it into a script, all this beautiful production design was in place but then--as the story goes-- Kirk's titanic male ego and a difficult-to-control robot threw Barry for a loop and after a few days of floundering, Kirk basically launched a one-man mutiny until Donen stepped in. Unfortunately as a result of too many cooks, Saturn 3 doesn't really pull far enough in any direction to make much of an impression, but it's really not that bad, especially on the slick Shout Blu-ray. I won't go so far as to say it's great, but if anyone had the right to mish-mash the style, look and sound of 2001, Star Wars and Alien with the pre-Lucas sci fi of Kubrick, Charles Heston dystopia films and emergency botanical ark ships (all the rage in the 70s, i.e. Silent Running), it's Barry, who was production designer and Star Wars and Clockwork Orange, among others.


And the idea of getting Martin Amiss to write the script was a good one, time has declared. In 1980 the 'slow fall from the top of the mountain' by the Great White Male, boozy and self-righteous and self-loathing in equal measure, greeting his immanent "flush" with a fuck you to the world - holla - was a little old-fashioned in 1980 (unless it was "literally" an adaptation of a classic novel and given Merchant-Ivory gloss, ala Huston's Under the Volcano). Now that most English Departments in the USA at least are focused in on correcting the balance of old straight white guys to everyone else in "the canon," it's easy to forget just how many damn writers there are chronicling their Great White Male's slow softening, so many midlife crisis affairs, even today living life ensconced in the Ivory tower, their mid-life crisis invariably consists of bedding one of their students rather than getting a motorcycle.

This passing of the male middle aged nudist license plate, and Amiss' space drugs and kinky sex seem to be simmering just out of reach on cutting room floors of the nervous censor and second-guessing producer's minds of SATURN 3, luckily there's a whole site devoted to the strange saga of this film, Gregory Moss's indispensable Something is Wrong on Saturn 3. Better even than the film itself That's the heavy trip underwriting the Great White Male in Decline novel, and it's certainly very Martin Amiss-esque, the subtext roiling underneath the couple vs. deranged robot motif, all the rage in the pre-Star Wars environmental issue sci-fi verse. This subtext makes it one of the last 'adult' themed sci fi films. Like Cheever, or Fitzgerald, Amiss' novels are full of drugged debauchery and fearless examinations of the disintegrating straight white male alcoholic psyche as his past catches up with him and dying alone... except maybe...except in Amiss, maybe, this girl who had a crush on him as a child now grown to legal age... a last life ditch life preserver in a Jon Krakauer-level storm. And in reality, an illusion, a mirage, even if she's real.
And if Roman Polanski had directed it, Saturn 3 might be considered a classic, he would contextualize the triangle much better: the 'young psycho' who joins an isolated couple (younger woman, older man) for head games in some enclosed isolated space where the younger interloper stirs the older man into displays of virility and dominance which the girl can find alternately childish, frightening, pathetic, or sexy, or all of the above depending on the type and her mood-moment to moment: Knife in the Water, Cul de Sac, and others in that vein, like: Purple Noon, Dead Calm and the vast empty "this empty planet ain't big enough for the 'three of us' triangles of Last Woman on Earth; The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and more, I'm sure.

"This is literature, baby"

I think Kirk wanted this role because it let him harpoon his own priapic Adonis image, as his frequent co-star (they had great chemistry) Burt Lancaster did in 1968's The Swimmer. It seemed only fair, and competitive, perhaps. Burt being shirtless all the way through (and shoeless),  Kirk would have to one up him, and this role let him throttle a young upstart while totally naked. Since Lancaster overplays his hand by getting too traditional and possessive with his young blonde tag-a-long Julie (Janet Landgard), Kirk starts the film already hooked up (for three years) with Farrah, saving us all a lot of unpleasant angst over his antiquated smoov style. It's creepy enough watching him and Farrah shower together; in this early scene we see them, facing opposite directions --she, talking in an indoor voice, one lover to another, he, mugging ridiculously and shouting in her face, perhaps imagining the foley of the water would be louder. Between their mismatched style--her acting for the 70s small screen, he acting like he's doing a Disney voiceover, and the disconnect of interloper Harvey Keitel dubbed with the voice of a different actor, and Hector, who speaks in all three of their recorded voices, there's a sense that only Kirk's character, Adam, is actually 'alive' in the sense of being whom he is, and that this fucked up future is partly his fault for living this privileged bachelor w/sexy young thing isolation while all his same-age friends exclude them from bridge parties and their own children gradually turn into robots.

The SWIMMER, living the American dream, Kafka-style.

No one wants to end up like Lancaster's Mr. Merrill, hammering at his locked screen door or Max von Sydow, whimpering that Barbara Hershey is his only link to the outside world in Hannah and her Sisters, that's chump stuff. You have to act like you're fine even if the walls close in. Kirk's Adam sure doesn't give a shit about the outside world even without her, but he also knows it's inevitable she'll leave, and if she stays around it will be even worse. In space, no one can hear you scream, but neither can they see you cry and snivel, so snivel away. Pain can be endured better without the humiliation of some girl trying to snap you out of it because she thinks you're faking, or "being ridiculous" as one girl sneered at me when I was in a K-hole, lying on the ground in the at a Califone show. Do you want her to remember you as a man, or a whining little bitch who won't believe your in a pit, dug by malicious elves made of white noise static? When you're alone on a moon, you can simper and clutch the old photographs in peace, and enjoy every last self-indulgent choking gust of sob in peace. You can be naked, just for one day...

In the Gloaming (NIAGARA)

But on Saturn 3, the term "day" is meaningless.

And then, once no one's around to care one way or the other, you stop performing your little dance and the crushing anxiety dies instantly. Man, were you ever tired of having to hold back your gasses and suck in your gut all the the time, trying to act frisky and carefree when all you wanted to do is sit in a rocking chair and listen to "In the Gloaming" like Joseph Cotten in Niagara.

Maybe that exhibitionist brio can help explain the years 1992-3 when among other things Keitel himself was full-frontal naked in not one but TWO different art house hits, THE PIANO and BAD LIEUTENANT. Can it be that working with Kirk on this film planted some kind of priapic seed that bore nudist fruit when he he was finally old enough to have his own mid-life crisis?

The decision to create this beautifully modeled robot chassis - the ribs made of metal plates and muscle and tendon as pressurinzed tubing - with such a dumb little BoBo the owl meets a hermit crab eye stalks speaks to a genuine castration complex, for all his height and strength, this monster got no game, and no Cialis. His inherited obsession. Of course he remedies that later, Texas-style!

What's vexing is that beyond the character, Kirk Douglas the actor seems to be suffering from the vainglory of being both short/Napoleonic complex-ridden (which made him such a good villain in noirs like Out of the Past and The Killers) and old/"inadequate," in character and reality, a frustrated alpha male aging into the soft zone, making up for these "areas" perhaps by running around with his robe open at the waist, and being found in bed with Alex as often as possible. Amiss' vast knowledge of mid-life crises male vanity must have expanded tenfold when observing a titanic ego like Douglas': “When actors get old they get obsessed about wanting to be nude," Amiss noted in an interview, "and Kirk wanted to be naked.”

Even without all his posturing, Alex prefers "the Major" and there's no doubt that Benson is a grade-A nutcase (but you know how hot crazy people are in bed). He hasn't seen them actually fooling around, or heard Alex's frustrations with the Major's inadequacies in all his areas, so that quote about being inadequate... in every area, is just him just reacting to his own deranged mental images, seeing Adam as an impotent Cronus, devouring the young girl he desires rather than returning her to he sea (of boys her own age).

It's interesting to note that in the arc of the story, we follow not Kirk's Major Adam but the untrustworthy Benson (Harvey Keitel) an unstable pilot just denied his space license kills the original pilot for some unknown reason (deranged competitive foreshadowing?) and takes his place and then heads off to visit "the Major," Adam (Kirk Douglas), and Alex (Farrah Fawcett), a kind of May-December hippie couple (w/ cute dog) who are seldom out of their bathrobes. In charge of finding some means of growing enough food off world to feed the dying Earth, the couple are frolicking like a certain two cowboys on Brokeback Mountain. Benson is there like a hatchet man, the Randy Quaid, if you will, to tell Adam to stop pretending he's still carefree and casual to his young chippee and instead get some goddamn sharable results with his hydroponic setup.

To this end Benson is there to allegedly be setting up this swanky new robot named Hector. On his firs night he offers Alex a 'blue' and pre-emptively blows his chances with her by saying "you have a lovely body. May I use it?" as if she's just a kind of overside Kleenex. Yuck. Naturally the answer is no - but we remember how poorly he took the 'no' to his pilot license. "That's penally unsocial on Earth," to "use each other's bodies for pleasure." Noting the old Major is "obsolete, and frightened of the new ways." he refers to sexual permissiveness as 'hospitality' and mentions he eats dogs on Earth.

Despite his crass and psychotic manner, Keitel is impossibly gorgeous here, especially in his reptilian green space suit, and his new voice, compliments British actor Ray Dotrice! You'd think it would be off putting but that's why it works for Benson to make us uneasy around him in ways we wouldn't be it it was that endearing Mean Streets goombah-speak.

As the days/nights progress (there's no difference), Benson builds his only friend, a robot who soon turns on him when it absorbs his psychotic obsession with Alex. Benson keeps barging in on the happy couple in bed, showing off all the machine's new developments like a kid who never gives his parents a chance to have some uninterrupted mating time. He shows off Hector's brain thermos (stacked like Pringles in an electrified saline solution) and between their deductive power and Harold's steel-ribbed physique (modeled after the awesome if not entirely human sketches of Da Vinci), Benson has made a gorgeous intimidating monster, as good a use for all that sexual frustration as any. Was it Kirk who demanded the top be off, so to speak, the imposing thread member lobbed off at the head?

If you think this picture above is hot, just stare at her eyes and teeth for a few minutes and imagine  being a ten year-old and this is your very first ever poster (indeed it was one of 'THE' first ever posters,  certainly the first ever sold rolled up and available at the 7-11 counter where we got  comic books and tried to see the Playboy cover behind the brown partition. Staring staring at it for hours while half asleep in the early AM, still half-dreaming, super impressionable and easily terrified the way kids are.  Note the way the smile becomes desperate, pained, demonic, mocking, evil,  the eyes wide with terror and pain as if she's experiencing that terrible agony at the dentist when your jaw muscles start to ache from having to bare your full row of teeth,  open for so long at the dentist, now alternate that with that she's a devouring demon  (in the semi-dark her eyes and teeth seemed to glow, as if under a black light)

I'm running out of breath (30 years of smoking), but the film has a lot of good shit going: the Elmer Bernstein score hovers over the weird, 'half-assed attempt to be Kubrickian instead of what it is'-style opener - like a kid eager to be as cool as Richard Strauss without ripping off Also Spracht Zarathustra outright, so tempering his timpani bombast with ominous little Jerry Goldsmith Alien pipes and (his own) thunderous string rumblings while the equivalent of an Imperial cruiser travels (silently ala 2001- no engine roar) over the top of the screen towards the infinity point,  Bernstein, the man behind the music for both CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON is always way better than the material calls for, but never overdoes it. The set design and costumes are all awesome, a fusion of insect arthropod designs with astronaut suits like some cross between 2001, Star Wars, Microcosmos and Tales of Hoffman (below).

Another one of the cooler ideas at work is that Harvey has a jack in the back of his neck to connect to the brains to download his muscle and nervous system memory into Harold - connecting them and lifting and lowering his arms, etc. What he can't know, of course, is that his obsession with Alex is leaking over into Harold too, and thus a mighty Caliban is forming from the earth and ether. We realize why sanity was so important for this mission.

The problems too are many. Though he's in a dashing vaguely reptilian flight outfit and insect mask, his impassive features and dubbed voice wailing in voice over monotone about the older vs newer model man, there's no real conceivable threat from either the robot or Benson against naive Alex here, so nothing is at stake. The robot has no means of reproducing ala Demon Seed. So the real threat is just to the masculine vanity of Adam. His need to prove male omnipotency (in every area) was already considered the height of harpoonable offenses back in the 1980s; sensitive astronauts were too busy staring down their younger selves in the bathroom mirror of time to worry about, watching 2001 over and over.

Diabolik's pad; External view (deep in the caverns)

I'm partial to SATURN 3 because whenever I get the chance to sleep really really late I dream about a cavernous refuge just like Alex and Adam's groovy pad/greenhouse set-up. A deep basement bunker that's part Dr. NO's secret lair and part the bomb shelter in TERMINATOR 3 (and probably SILENT RUNNING which I haven't seen - as I don't want to imagine being stuck on a ship alone with Bruce Dern). It might seem weird that the villain's secret lair in a Bond movie, or a bomb shelter hewn from rock deep underground is my happy place, but I'm a Pisces, and need lots of alone time to not feel too self-absorbed when socializing, which is a very hard balance to make. But I think it's tied into relapsing, as there's barrels of whiskey down there, and always W.C. Fields tapes (and harkens back to basements of my youth); even the moldy smell is reassuring. For me, it's the ultimate escape (long as there's air conditioning and an elevator) as there's no long such a dichotomy as night and day, no time when one should be asleep or awake, no curfew or bed time or wake up time, just drunk time and oblivion. Drinking any other way is really just a tease.

So the whole SATURN 3 fantasia really resonates, especially being certain you, your girl and your dog are the only biological organisms things around. With its miles of multicolored neon tubing and build-in rock, oxygen producing plant life, the Saturn 3 hideout rocks an aesthetic that's like how I used to remember Space Port and Spencer's Gifts as a child in the 70s when the Montgomeryville (PA) mall first opened, and everything was new and strange and wondrous, lots of neon and gadgetry - the Sharper Image, projector TVs, Pong. It was like an adult amusement park, like how we imagined our own adulthood would be, all the things we could one day buy. SATURN 3's hydroponic pleasure palace reminds me of that, with samples of HR Giger biomorphic architecture (the hallways 'ribbed' with a spinal cord ceiling), the Death Star shiny black walls, colorful tubes galore, the Dr. No-style hewn rock walls incorporated into the arboreal dell. The set is beautifully elaborately lit, with a winding tunnel and mixture of greenery, rock, and primary color tubing; the feel is strangely both austere and gaudy. Defiantly depicted as a whirlwind of reactionary assertions of masculine identity, a final bird-flip from the crumbling Trans-Am and cowboy hat macho, the Burt Reynolds mustache and rug being slow being peeled off to show a bald screaming baby 80s.

In general though, what makes so many men like myself imagine as a kind of veritable 'happy place' a place deep deep underground (or underwater), with vats of whiskey, weed, movies and one or less (younger and therefor more impressionable and less judgmental) women, some bros dropping in and out to drink and watch old movies with, etc. is a chance to escape not just from nagging wives and mothers-in-law, work, and the IRS, but to avoid aging and/or dying, failures in family and all the things which maturity and linear development along the familial curve all but ensures wear a man down like an icicle sharpened on a grindstone. For one buddy's dad, it was always Das Boot, watched alone in the corner of his study with a big snifter of cognac; we turned him onto the John Huston Moby Dick, which we had duped from a rental by filming the screen with his video camera. For Howard Hughes, of course, as we all know, it was Ice Station Zebra. I understood the appeal of the frozen north and the submarine, but I'd never want to be stuck down there with Earnest Borgnine hamming it up as a Russian double agent? But you get the similarity - submarines are pretty "deep deep down" (i.e. the underground lair in Danger: Diabolik. It's the repository of all the aging male's dreams, the happy safe zone of sleep outside space and time and consequence.

But then, the sub is torpedoed by the shrill alarm clock or the wife waking up to trudge downstairs and give you an angry sleepy stare- resentful you'd do anything fun without her, though she turns all fun to stone with her touch. The ship is sinking even lower, so quick! Desert Island discs! The ship going down fast; your library is too damned vast. Grab what you can.What do you grab?

I doubt anyone would grab SATURN 3 in that situation but they should, because it's a movie about grabbing those same discs, so it's meta. Besides, none of us have or likely will experience that opportunity to actually be marooned on the desert island, so we don't know what we'll be in the mood to watch when we're there. When I was leaving my wife for a younger woman, shhhh, 13 years ago, I grabbed together a decent notebook full of essential movies and we drove the hell out of there, my Alex and I. Luckily my wife cooled down and didn't set fire to the rest as she promised. That's as close as I came. The girl I was with found it impossible to pay attention to any of the cool films I tried to show her, only POISON IVY. She loved that, as I love it. And I loved Tom Skerritt in in, as the dad who falls off the wagon (love that convert morning vodka pull) after being seduced by a young prime-of-her-hotness Drew Barrymore while wife Cheryl Ladd slowly dies of some respiratory illness up in her silken boudoir and 'plain' daughter Sara Gilbert begins to realize her hottie friend is blowing up her spot. That'll teach you to try and make friends, Sara Gilbert!


That's why the idea of Benson/Hector blowing up Kirk's spot works in SATURN 3, because it gets that the 70s mustache is coming off with or without our aid; it works because, frankly, it's learned not to trust people just because we're lonely and they're hot, it works because it too knows that beneath its confused whirlwind of defiant macho sensitivity structures, the unfulfilled desires for what it can't have (chosen especially for their rarity) lurks absolutely nothing. The aesthetic of every straight white male's man cave even if he is self-aware enough to laugh sardonically at his own absurdity, reflects this grim gallows' void lurking in the heart of sexual gratification, of 'sleeping around'. In that sense, SATURN 3 is not just a pre-ALIEN pre-STAR WARS science fiction in the SILENT RUNNING x WESTWORLD vein but a male version of BARBARELLA, It's a tale of a time when before he had to be a man with a career and a wife, a man was free to roam the galaxy in his private mobile sanctum, wall-to-wall carpeted van and kickass hydrophonc speakers, 8-track player blasting rockin' tunes, getting high as a kite, and tooling around exploring the vast emptiness around their home planet township. Barbarella's own ship resembles this - with crazy colors, some bizarre shape halfway between a lipstick and a triple dildo, and inside pink wall to wall carpet and  a big mirror screen. Sooo sexy, without guilt or slut shaming either, those two things invented by shrewish wives and their priests around your kitchen table while you're gone three days or weeks at a time and come in reeking of perfume, sex, and alcohol/cigarettes/pot... fuck those sober idiots! I'm not peein' in no damned cup, mom!

Well, of course she won, as far as I know. Yet even today the uninhibited great white male in decline has a fighting chance for a WILD BUNCH blaze of glory, as long as he grabs that chance with both barrels, by the horns, and with a finger saying fuck all y'all to the world.

So that's the deal, as long as it's with the fishes, a man can then sleep around all he wants sans guilt sans eyes. Sand and crustaceans consumed the rest. If you dare let go of even blaming the robot, blaming the girl, and instead blaming EVERYBODY, then every week can be shark week, and stiffness will never be a problem again (thanks to Rigor Mortis, the new craze all the older folks used back in the day and still do today where there is only night).

From R-L: Daughter (Anima), Magus (non du pere), Robot, young interloper

From L-to-R: (Daughter-age) Lover, reprobate (ex-magus / 'primal father'), young interloper, Robot

Simmer awhile with the comparison maybe of 1953's Forbidden Planet with Saturn 3 and the archetypal resonance is clear. The anima was a nubile daughter in the 50s, coming of age in the arms of a young man who didn't have time to sit around on porches and take walks in the Sicilian Hills; he had to go to war, so courtship was over a weekend, because his combat pension should go to someone and if it will help her stay out of the brothel, or whatever--but the 50s was losing its patina fast - in the crafty eyes of Wilder and his leering Fred MacMurray executives, 'banging' cocktail waitresses and secretaries and every unmarried woman expected to be a slut for any man who left a $100 tip or promised a raise. Their angry wives at home were busy too though, starting women's lib and raring to shove their sexuality right down their husbands' throats, which I applaud, naturally,.

Inside every red riding hood is a grandmother-wearing old wolf and vice versa... the anima and magus/sage on their island, alone together, Pai Mai and Beatrix Kiddo on the hilltops. The magus need never be jealous of her leaving him, never crave the insurance he doesn't die alone by the radiator (not sure why, but there's always a radiator), unless he can, in a sense, merge with the young man who takes his symbolic place (who comes at first against the patriarch's wishes, i.e. he 'intrudes'). In other words, the magus is not just himself, not just her father or the figure who worries of dying alone by the radiator, but the ultimate signifier - pointing to naught else but the mirror, not to see him for he is not even reflected, so merged is he with the infinite, but so you can see you. Or whatever -As in Mozart's The Magic Flute (where he's called Sarastro - bellow left) and Shakespeare's The Tempest (Prospero).

The young man earns his right to take his place only after a trial by fire (namely to test courage and resolve) and showing all good qualities for the patriarch; but if he passes he allows the magus to abdicate his role as ultimate signifier. This enables him to chill out with his parenting. That's the trick -his daughter's wedding is a symbolic death of his own split self and let go of his duty to represent the ultimate siginifier, he can merge full with his anima and be the indulgent grandfather instead of the stern authority who sets the bed time (i.e. John Wayne after the climactic fight in Red River - watch him closely and you see the change, the way his whole body and mood lightens from passing the load). This is how he is able to not have to actually die to be free of his anxiety about his "little girl's" welfare without him. Unless he's devoured by his own primordial freaks of the Id before he has time to have a heart attack chasing his grandchild through the tomato plants, he dissolves again; from the Fisher King and now....reborn as the cleansing fire in Harry's eyes. There wasn't enough time, Michael. But then there never is.

We can consider in Forbidden Planet how Morbius' daughter Alta is just at the 'ripe' age right when Nielsen arrives, as if summoned by his Krell-boosted will ala Prospero's storm heralding spell in the Tempest, his dire warnings and protestations being merely part of the rite of passage. In SATURN 3's Adam encouraging Alex to go down to visit Earth without him even before the obsessive young nutjob arrives with his robot. Adam is facing his own realization that one shouldn't let one's younger paramour see you get too old, lest they lose their glowing image of their father/benefactor/mentor as a cool character instead of an old pantaloon-and-slippers grandfather-type, soft and "inadequate in every area" sulking in the motel room, making models of old model T cars and smoking furiously to "In the Gloaming" while Marilyn dances with the young bucks outside in a provocative pink dress listening to "Kiss" while the Falls roar below.


Comparing the Saturn 3 and Forbidden Planet too is very revealing  too in contrast about the effect two decades of shifting cultural mores on sci fi fantasy, which--more than any other genre--is very intellectual and very immature at the same time. As in Shakespeare's Tempest, Saturn 3 offers an array of ages, maturity levels, social classes, of high and low comedy, poetry, tragedy, and terror. All three tales- Shakespeare's and the two sci fi pictures, offer an older man reverie of an island paradise of self --just the ego, a devoted anima (Ariel / Altair / Alex), and a dark primordial vast unconscious of which the magus has developed at least partial mastery (fairies / a planetary space complex / the Krell) not knowing they've opened the door to dark elements deeper than their conscious mind could even see (Caliban / Hector / Monster from the Id). Just as with Adam and Alex's little love bunker under the moon's surface, the Krell wonders are all Morbius' alone to explore- he doesn't even bring Altair down there - it's a giant massive man cave / den all to himself, alive and ever-humming and ready to erect whatever's needed from the ether. 

The age difference between Saturn 3 lovers Kirk and Farrah is 32 years; the age difference between Forbidden Planet's daughter Anne Francis and father Walter Pigeon - 33 years.  In CONCLUSION:  Sorry if this is all over the place. I'm getting senile. I've always had a soft spot for this film as I was still in the throes of my Charlie's Angels fever when it came out (though not quite as vivid as it had been a few years earlier) my scrapbook laden with photos torn from magazines, the Farrah poster still on my wall (her teeth terrifying me in the dead of night --they reflected the moon very well and gave her a voracious succubus look). This movie's not great by any stretch, but it doesn't deserve the sneers heaped on it, most of them by people just looking to kick an old man when he's down. See, I'm a fan of Kirk especially in his 40s film noir easy going bad guy routine with Mitchum in Out of the Past, with Stanwyck in The Strange Loves of Mrs. Ivers, and with Lancaster and Gardener in The Killers. But his work here in Saturn 3 is the worst performance ever, by anyone, yet it's brilliant. An aging hopelessly insecure short guy complex-stricken superstar coasting past the 60 yard line, vainly trying to seem jubilant and airy like his spritely maiden Alex, he comes off instead as delusional and disturbing. You can see the wild panic in his eyes, the way his mouth contorts in grins as phony as a three dollar bill. I can see why less perceptive critics just thought the acting was bad for the whole film, considering the small cast, and didn't dare dig deeper than the surface in an attempt to find something good (i.e. comparing it to Star Wars and Alien rather than to Silent Running and Soylent Green). All that said, it ends rather on point-- the trick to it is, as Jake Gideon does in All that Jazz, to kick over the board right before you're set to lose the game . The tragedy of the May-December thing is that there is really no honorable way out. You can have kids I guess, but that's kind of expensive, time-consuming, and grandiose (we see the end game of that in Notes on a Scandal), just continuing the lie. You can encourage her to leave, to go see the world and do new things (alone - you're too tired to mess with that dull tourist nonsense) but she won't, not without you. She doesn't want to go, she says, so much as "have already been." (one of Saturn 3's throwaway great lines).  I can assure you Kirk does a fine job, his viciousness towards Alex, and his final ah screw it, I blame everyone and fuck all y'all final declaration of fuck it is every great white paunchy two-legged Ahab's dream adieu. Sure it's a weird ending, a bit of a downer, but it's real - at the end Alex is on a ship heading back to earth, it looks like a first class cabin - replete with cocktails and full views of the approaching Earth. Mission accomplished. Kind of. Man, I'm not judging Kirk here, or myself, or any other schmuck who took the red pill, so to speak, as long as they're artists, actors, writers or characters. Just fascinated as these kind of things were still kind of shocking even in the 70s. I'm not attempting to justify it, but rather to consider the decade that bore it to the 50s, the more repressed, conservative time. Say what you will about Morbius alone on Altair 4 with his nubile virgin daughter Altaira (or Alta, to her friends), sequestered as the pair me be, as nubile yet confident as she is, there's no indication Alta's visited at night by some Krell energy incubus Caliban conjured from the most repressed and primordial depths of Morbius's subconscious Krell-brain-boosted mind. That shows us three things: 1) a willingness to please the censors (it was MGM, after all, that appeaser of Catholics, that naif, that irresponsible mind control programmer); 2) an almost idyllic faith in fatherly nobility which is admirable especially in today's film market where incestuous creep fathers (ala Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) are the only substitute to deadbeat weekend schmucks (even if its only on some weird abstracted dream level), or bland Greg Kinnear replacements. and 3) that with his boring paternal sense of measured scientific curiosity (4), Morbius has mastered the 'no of the father' Lacan writes of, in that he has relinquished the adolescent insistence on enjoyment, on pursuit of desire rather than knowledge. I've let myself ramble this far to indicate that, masculine identity crisis or no, Kirk is a MAN and his vanity issues are clearly related to being a man when erections weren't guaranteed at $17 a pill, and were therefore priceless. For I know as only lucky few others that unless the man is allowed his midlife crisis--the younger woman, the sports car, the offworld bachelor pad greenhouse, the weed/weightlifting weirdness of Lester Birnim--he can't realize that these things don't work anymore than throwing a picture of a pitcher of water onto a raging fire. Try telling this to the guy looking at the picture of water on the wall while he's burned at the stake, though, and he won't listen. Scotty on the ledge, he might fool someone somewhere into thinking he's still got his vim and vigor, some young thing who'll call him Mr. Smearcase and bat her eyelashes, but he can't fool himself and so it's all worthless. But at least he can finally realize it doesn't much matter how old he is or how boring he rambles, nobody cares, in space nobody can here you wheeze your last. There's joy in that once the despair wears off. Manly self assurance only comes when it's no longer relevant. Stripped of its hot rod and babes training wheels and ready for its OK Corral showdown, it's allowed first one last kiss-off, pushing the Farrah away and flipping off the world. Whether it was all a show to confuse the 'bot or no, it worked, didn't it? They all got free. Who's watering the plants while you're gone though, no one can say, or wants to. It's not your problem anymore, you free-ass mother.

NOTES
1. Something is Wrong on Saturn 3.
2. The 'boring' part is key, as part of the surrender to the symbolic castration of the social order (symbolized here perhaps by the jack in the back of Harvey's head) is the ability to let go of any need for approval, of being an entertainer, the father as embodier of the order is the "ultimate signifier" - and in making the law so Disney education film boring he asserts its truth.
3.... uh..
4. Wherein Kirk takes over on a ailing swashbuckler pic at Cinecatta when director Eddie G. Robinson takes ill. Robinson reads the pic is doing well so climbs out of bed to go take credit for it, spurred by his Lady Macbeth of a wife - the back-stabbing and egoic insecurity of Hollywood, in other words, trails BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL characters (kind of) across the pond. 

It's summer time man, and if you're a Nordic in genes and temperament it's not your favorite season (that would be autumn) so that means lots of time staying home (academia!) and watching old horror movies, for that special chill. And horror means women, and if you love dark long flowing hair then you want brunette beauties up in there. Sure blondes are great. But your (Swedish) mom is blonde, and you can't abide seeing a girl who looks like your mom when she was 29 and you were three years old, struggling to get her attention and then she comes at you like a wurdalak to drink your blood. You kneel at the base of her bed screaming and crying in terror, and she finally wakes fully up and you realize she was just moaning from having to deal with your nonsense.


Whenever I feel a close sisterly affinity with an actress I check when and where she was born - sure enough, like me Lili Taylor is a Pisces born in 1967 Illinois. And she's a born mirrorer - meaning she can reflect, distort, match and amplify other people when in close one on one encounters, but we start to lose ourselves the larger the group - we can't reflect everyone after all - and so we begin to vanish. Give us time alone with cool chick like Catherine Zeta Jones, though, and it's like an awesome sexy feedback machine.

An Aires born 1969 in Wales, Jones has a twin sign reflector skill herself - she's never been outshone in any film - always able to at least match her co-star/s, as if a radiance reflector herself. Put two reflectors together like Jones and Taylor in the first chunk of Haunting- and there's instant lesbian heat that overwhelms Taylor (in the mousy caretaker role) which delights Jones, who's fascinated by Taylor's instant crush on her, but quickly moves on once the rest of the guests arrive. Most hilariously is the way, for example, Taylor echoes the ominous words of the uptight housekeeper ("we lock the gates after dark") while giving Jones a sly grin. If only it was just the two of them, running through the house in all its giddy overdressed splendor (funhouse rooms with mirrors and revolving floors, etc), secret panels, living griffins, imprisoned souls, et al. it would be a total classic. But then comes the boys--Liam Neeson and Owen Wilson--in career lows apiece, as if realizing the film's already been stolen by these two raven-haired demonesses, they decide to just wreck it with their smarmy banality.

Jones toys with Owen, bemusedly, partially to get under Taylor's skin, partially out of habit, but always good-naturedly (girls who want guys to stop hitting on them without losing them as friends should study her deflector skill), and eventually Owen drops the "my smile is so disarming" confident smugness and starts to accept his position as a little brother figure. Neeson on the other hand is totally at sea, his grasp off how to act in green screen CGI Whoville is as off as it was in the same year's PHANTOM MENACE.

For example there's the dialogue, clunky, in their initial meeting- Jones bragging about her Prada Milan boots and so forth but she delivers the lines with a cheeky delight in the place "this is so twisted, Susan Foster Kane meets the Addams Family," And the evil-eyed housekeeper delivering the lines "No one will come here / in the dark" about her strict habit of leaving after dinner, but this time Taylor stands next to her, echoing the creepy words and giving an enigmatic semi-feigned macabre delight - it's dialogue that could have sunk to the floor in weaker hands (certainty the housekeepers cast more for severity than chutzpah), but between Taylor's cool/warm Piscean deadpan and Jones' dusky Welsh relish for red, it works - they know how to match the dark twisted tone of the place.

The men by comparison are just dumb and smarmy. When she's talking about Three AM making her feel like a genius, she's bringing about a general discussion of thoughts and inspiration, while all --- can do is rant about the infomercials he watches. ("That's why god created barbiturates, honey" she tells him). But god also created the VCR, dumbass. Watch goddamn WC Fields and learn how to drink like a man; but the script and acting is fascinating as you get the idea these people really are meeting for the first time and all trying to impress each other, lying and inflating their egos (he tries to win her over by patronizingly third person talking to Liam, "I see a little Jackie Susann in Theo" - i.e. he only has comparison with TV and movies, offering none of his own experience by contrast, and it's very patronizing, and she gives him a "sarcastic chuckle."


All Liam can do on contrast is feeble exposition ("a sleep study - that's why we're here.") No shit.

As I've written, I prefer this film to the original Haunting - I know its' heresy but I'm sorry - Russ Tamblyn's little Bronx gremlin face and one-track greed dialogue is wearying and Julie Harris' spinster shit was old as far back as East of Eden. Compare her act in the Haunting to say, Deborah Kerr's 'unhinged Poppins' in The Innocents and you're reminded that while some Brit actresses lend oomph, warmth and gusto to even their spinster roles, others just drain the life out of everything but their own androgynous Emily Dickinson on Lithium depth, mistaking bland tedium as something that--being true to the character--will wow an audience rather than make them want to punch a hole in the wall.


Also check Taylor in THE ADDICTION (1991) my favorite of hers and of Abel Ferrara's- with perfect fusion between her off-the-cuff whispery thrilled aliveness, Ferrara's druggy downtown cool, and screenwriter Nicholas St. John's doctoral thesis in philosophy while on heroin stream-of-consciousness and the Village at the height of its rock sticker-layered post-punk decadence even as NYU was working like methadone. I was living on 15th and 7th and used to walk past all these spots, hungover or drunk out of my mind, and lemmie tell ya, it was really like that - all the black tailgate partying on the weekends, and so froth - Rastas sellin' ganja (maybe), used record and clothing stores every half-step, awesome. All gone now... god damn it all.

As I was last night preparing to edit this I was flipping from TCM--THE LAST DETAIL with dimwit sailor Randy Quaid having premature issues with undead prostitute Carol Kane--to EPIX with a paunchy cowboy hatted Quaid in THE WRAITH (1986) noting "let's clean up this mess and get the hell out of here!" That kind of random coincidental irony is one of the reasons I flip indiscriminately in the first place so I had to share. But I always land eventually, here or there, and in the summer, my most reviled season, I stick to easy watching classics I've seen a zillion times, where the highest levels of government are represented not by big ominous war rooms glowing in the spacious Shepperton Studio darkness or unforgiving naval boards ready to throw away the key on first offense because it happened to be the admiral's wife's pet charity he robbed from--that's all too depressing, but two old character actors dressed like generals walking along a barren conference table in front of a big chart--or, if budget allows, a photo of the Washington Monument that's supposed to be a window, that is relaxation itself.

Take character actor Morris Ankrum, in an officer's uniform: put him in a scene like that and let the magic flow. Give him another higher up, head of the Navy or something, and get them bickering back and forth, as a scientist and his girlfriend or research assistant, each trying and failing and re-trying to whip a purse out of sow's ear scene, going from exploding "why don't you do something!?" to paternal reassurances, "we in the military know what we're doing, son, but you need to keep reminding us," and back around again, like a whirlwind - condescending disbelief-exasperation-apology-paternal consolation-American jingoism-squawking failure-condescending disbelief, around and around again in eccentric circles of blame-outrage-apology-pep talk seldom seen outside Eugene O'Neill plays.


Nothing is more reassuring to my fevered brain than THE GIANT CLAW which has this pair, to fold themselves in with the stock footage of planes and radar stations, and exposition about all that's going going on outside the door on all levels of government and military procedure throughout the world. No matter what atomic spitball they care to throw, in the end it's Jeff Morrow, Mara Corday, and the two old generals piloting the "B-22" which is so obviously a model you can see some kid's glue thumbprints, and the finished gloss gone slightly dull from over handling, the final decals peeling on the side or turning yellow, as if Katzman borrowed it from his son along with a turkey marionette given a comically menacing head with googly eyes that's the monster. You can't make this shit up.


Of course it helps to have grown up with it being constantly on the air, but glad am I to be able to return to it, when needed, like days you come back from the doctor after waiting for the results of your first chest X-ray after 33 years of smoking. You need to see a monster you can sneer at and safely destroy with some atomic spitballs, something maybe you loved to laugh at as a child, when it was always on local TV alongside gems like Plan Nine From Outer Space, the Creeping Terror, and Invasion of the Saucer Men. If you follow this blog you know summer is not the time my Swedish blood is alive with artsy insight (that's fall) but feebly clinging to icicle familiarity in cinema like a snowman pining puddleward, missing every departed drop. Not that I'd ever drink water.

To enjoy a film endlessly over and over, through the years it must have--as Hawks famously said--a few good ones and no bad ones. And every year I find new bad ones in some old favorites and new good ones in others. The Big Sleep for example never falters, but take To Have and Have Not (1944). For a guy supposedly as sharp as old Bogart's Harry, to let a shady American tourist run up 16 days of rent on his boat with no deposit, $825 all together, that seems pretty stupid. It's enough where I'm stressed out so that I need to lower my angsty blood pressure --how can such a cool customer be so dumb? He's probably not helping his finances by "carrying" Eddie (Walter Brennan) the requisite Faulkner manchild or alcoholic, whose dead bee rants and sickly sweat glaze bespeak a terrible smell of alcohol seeping through unwashed pores that must hang fetid over the boat, drawing massive flies, when the ocean wind isn't blowing. I can chalk the moronic behavior of the Free French up to sly Warner Bros. satire on the Maginot Line and the French army's infamously inept high command (as seen Paths of Glory), the way half a dozen of conspicuous freedom fighters inconspicuously trundle upstairs in a busy hotel to beseech Bogart to help them, crowding into his room like there's no one else but him with a boat in all of Martinique) - or that this idiot manchild version of Victor Lazlo is eager to surrender at the first sign of trouble (getting shot as a result) and this is the guy they want to use to "get a guy off of Devil's Island." 

If not for the great dialogue and every second Bacall is onscreen in the most assured, startling debuts in all of cinema, and any other form, since the dawn of time, would it even be remembered today? What if Ann Sheridan or someone played her part, the way she almost did Ilsa Lund in Casablanca? Instead the first time I saw this film was back before the internet could chew it up for me, to me it was just another of my then hero Hawks' films, and so I got to soak up Bacall and her match 'fresh' and the result I was knocked out, kicking the air and howling like that wolf in "Bacall to Arms."

But there was never a time when I hadn't seen The Giant Claw. I was laughing at that bird since before I could crawl. I was born into it, materializing into being just as its imagery would materialize onto local TV or the bird would materialize out of space or an alternate dimension or some deranged puppeteer's back alley. To enjoy the film without that inherited lack of good judgment you would need to have a special yen to see Mara Corday in a redeye passenger (propellor-driven) plane delivering an uncalled-for and condescending rant against jet pilot Jeff Morrow, with whom she was just canoodling, for showing her his giant space bird orbiting patten spiral drawing. If you ask why Corday is shouting and picking a fight with him when her own non-intergalactic bird theories don't add up at all, then you're probably not ready for this level of high concept science. Sherlock Holmes said that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however implausible, is the truth. Corday would below that Holmes is a fictional character and therefore his theories are worthless. But Women are idiots when they're supposed to be skeptics, especially women in these kinds of films.

I object to the use of the phrase "kinds of films" your honor, impugning the character of women in more impressive entries like Them! wherein the woman in the same role is an astute and open-minded biologist. One can no sooner lump the CLAW in with THEM as compare a frosty Bergman to a Long Beach train station. And in this case Corday is right, because the truth is ridiculous, for not only is the thing that's been attacking so many aircraft and buildings a space bird but it's invisibility to radar is to due its an anti-matter shield. This plus an early scene of Jeff buzzing the American Air Force Arctic Radar Station in one of his jets maybe explains her and the military's preliminary incredulity. Test pilot Morrow's an example of the wolf crier, endangering the whole tribe because his valuable wolf intel is in general never believed, thanks to his cred-destroying pranks. How many more lives!?

Make him a sergeant and give him the booze (THEM)

Owlin Howlin playfully singing and throwing a sheet over his head, presuming --as anyone would--that the giant ants outside his window are just delirium tremens (THEM)... you can always believe the reports of a man who doubts his own eyes over the man who presumes himself above hallucinations. Yet I love THE GIANT CLAW and only like THEM! I love all scenes on sleepy red eye 40s-50s passenger planes, for they are giant slumber party in the sky, succinctly delineating the appeal such films hold for me, a fusion of nostalgia and late night repetition that would be lost on anyone who's never slept all night in a bus or on a train and woken up in some fat middle-aged black lady's lap, the usual distance between you dissolved as you both snore away; she having felt her way through Amtrak dark at a 4 AM and in the empty aisle seat, a few minutes later and she's your mom, cuddled up together in perfect trust of the all night coach. When you wake and leave you don't even say goodbye, and never said hello, or learned her name, but she was your mom and you were five, for a few hours neither of you remember. And watching films at four or five in the morning is the same dreamy poetic freedom from 9-5 adult reality whether you're a child getting up early on a Saturday to watch cartoons and it was too early for them to start so instead some weird giant space bird movie, or a drunk poet still up high on his own verses, relaxing with the same movie years later, after the advent of the VCR, in order to recapture that same childhood frame of mind, when the border between self and screen did not exist.

Stock footage to cool the blood in sweltering summer (DEADLY MANTIS)

That said, the VHS dupe I made of TGC in the early 80s only started about halfway through (right as the big bird munches on a parachuting pilot) and now on DVD, in full, it's much too clear for such dearth of detail, forcing the poverty of the sets and mismatched emulsion damage of the stock footage to the fore and demanding I re-evaluate my hitherto unswerving loyalty. Considering about 1/4 of the film consists of military stock footage, with shots of running panicked populace seemingly lifted out of the Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and It Came from Beneath the Sea ("bigger" Katzman productions) dailies, I realize it was better when uniformly streaked and blurred, occasionally disrupted by color bursts of "Crazy Eddie" TV commercials or "Creature Double Feature" tags. Now I'm forced to reckon with the widescreen poverty of the film, every wire and thumbprint on the model planes meant to indicate real aircraft are visible. The effect is not as cozy as this film used to make me feel, I preferred not to see the sheen of sweat underwriting the faces of participants in what should be cold climates and focus on Morrow's hungover ease with termite lines and moments where he's barely in bed after that flight before the brass is once again summoning him, he needs to argue in favor of his sleeping - a tireder actor there's never been

Now of course there are millions of films that are better than The Giant Claw, and dozens of them even telling more or less the same story, from the Arctic de-thawing / hatching on down that ole map.  But those have Harryhausen or Willis O'Brien animation and/or Jack Arnold direction and/or decent budgets, relative to this one, which is less Tarantula (Arnold directed, creepy plot and eerie use of desert, no stock footage) and more along The Deadly Mantis axis - i.e. take all the public domain stock of radar installations and military test firings you can find, tap into this B-movie obsession of the late 50s with the North Pole and Canadian air defensive radar shields: "the Pine Tree" and "Dew line" -- tapping into some conception of 'the Cold War' coming from "up there" as Russia would go over the pole down past Canada to nuke us, so Canada functions as a kind of go-between and the cold North calls us like a magnet.

The Deadly Mantis, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the six-armed giant octopus in It from Beneath the Sea, and our friend the Giant Space bird all start off way up there, and The Thing, the best and smallest, stayed up there, the rest marauded their way downwards, killing eskimos, pilots, trawler crews, and Canadian lumberjacks as they go. There's generally three things that mark this plot: the scientists always has a hot assistant, who--depending on the crap level of the writer--either sneers at the monster theory, promotes it, uses her hotness to suss truths out of harassed survivors or falls for the military guy assigned to the case. The best work on perfecting the formula, while the worse, like that hack like Nathan Juran, shoehorn in corny sentiment like the stuttering radar men asking the hot scientist/assistant to d-d-dance before the inevitable shot of the monster leering through the window trying to get at her. (Mara Corday is spared this indignity, having already endured it in 1955's TARANTULA).


Perhaps it's worth looking again at THE DEADLY MANTIS (1957) but-- unlike CLAW which is unforgettable even if the "wrong" kind--  is the most anonymous film in the world, siphoning the gas tanks of every film that came before, suturing together such a framework of stock footage and stock tropes it could be about any of the radioactively-awoken giant monsters and star anyone (its cast criminally void of any charisma or impression-making ability) making it ideal to fall asleep to or come down from a K-hole-- or interested in learning about the use of radar to detect Russian planes and ICBMs during the Cold War. You could watching 100 times in a row and remember nothing about it whatsoever. THE GIANT CLAW,, with its big googly eyes and dopey vulture hair tufts its the best menace since they just decided to use a nondescript giant block as the monster (KRONOS). While Mantis is also the most sexist film ("we're taking you home young lady," notes the military guy after she's singlehandedly coordinated the requisite 'map of weird 'accident' by which to chronicle the trajectory). In its disregarding of all that (Morrow would be the last person to stop Corday from doing anything), Claw earns its wings, no matter how goofy (or because of how goofy it is) the effects.

Naturally a few years back when Sarah Palin mentioned she could see Russia from her house I understood at once why all these films were set up there, and at the same time I had to add her to the list of Northern threats ever-ready over our heads raining down montages of panicked citizenry, radio speakers, mobilizing infantry, maps with dotted lines running across various parallels between the US and the North Pole, cornflake snow hurled in through open portals as people exit and enter the impoverished radar offices "Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) able to contact any part of the globe in three minutes! Three Minutes only! Eskimos pointing at the sky (Nanook strikes!) in Mantis, where its forelegs get caught up in the fisherman's kayak drying racks (we see a lot of the film from the prospective of the mantis himself,

And in the case of le Claw, there's a great catch-all representation of a French lumberjack loner named Pierre (Louis Merrill), and his dog who find Corday and Morrow in the wilderness after they alone survive another attack (six planes pecked out from under him and Corday's still sneering in between kisses or kisses between Sculdy-ish sneering). Naturalmente, he is named Pierre and gives Morrow and Corday his homemade applejack while recounting the tale of the a giant predatory bird many have seen in the parts and all died when they did. And before they were attacked the shadow of its giant turkey wings passed over the house.  Fascinatingly, Morrow, who's encountered this giant bird about 20 times already, shouts "you only saw an eagle, Pierre!" Never could the space bird and the old flying witch of his superstition be the same thing. Never!

But again Morrow saves the reel, singlehandedly etching some warmth out of the proceedings by guzzling a second glass of the Pierre's homebrewed jack and ending or beginning every sentence with the name, Pierre. "This is great stuff, Pierre" or "that's a superstition, Pierre!" He becomes almost a kind of mascot, the constant use of his first name serving to keep him separate from the college educated Corday and Morrow. Eventually, though they all agree the thing only chases you if you run, Pierre runs, thinking he can perhaps, what, outrace a bird the size of a small apartment building? It's the kind of moronic lack of logic that a kid would not notice. It all fits, to make CLAW the classic -- you see... kids in the 70s don't need special effects -  our fertile minds filled in all the blanks.

"my gun is gone!"

Jack Arnold's TARANTULA (1955) by contrast is good enough that the missteps irk, and the blank spots nowhere near blank enough, except between Agar's eyes. There's three eaten cattle, mysteriously drained of all meat and the only clue is a huge puddle of strange milky liquid. "Quit worryin' about that white stuff and find out who killed my cattle!" exclaims the rancher but the country doctor (John Agar) and the sheriff (Arnold regular Nestor Pavia) are too dimwitted to either calm him, take a sample of the venom, or anything else.  It takes a whole second massacre to get it going. It has to happen twice before Agar even smells it. "Print this as a straight accident," he notes to his reporter friend.  Anyone who notes the sudden flourishing of acromegalia (a disease well known to classic horror fans for its most famous victim adorns our most esteemed award, the "Rondo") amongst handlers radioactive growth serums and doesn't see a connection is not the right person to trust as far as a barometer of public opinion. Eventually Agar wises up, "we gotta keep our minds open and our mouths shut."

But TARANTULA stays off my summer list in general because it's set in the desert, too hot, and I like military stock footage, and hate to see any animal in a cage, even gerbils, man. When I'm in my isolation chambers, my feet in tissue boxes and my nails long and yellowed, gibbering to myself and pressing rewind over and over though tapes are long gone, anything that reminds me too much of my own wounded bull querencia, middlemen and union minutiae bickerers crawling all over the once great Last American Alcoholic Playboy Auteur. For the concretization of my frontier's sad closing, I need a hero bigger than any giant hair arachnid... I need Hank Quinlan.




My no summer-set sagas in summer isn't a hard fast rule of course, For example I've seen Touch of Evil a hundred times whatever the season. Another repeater, Psycho, which came out two years later and seems almost a remake, alike as two sister craft - on some level. What unites it is the damned cool of Janet Leigh.

"That Mirador is mighty hard to find, branching off the main highway like it does," notes a cop giving Leigh directions. Leigh driving off to a motel... off the main highway, all alone... did Hitchcock see this and feel cheated that the Grandy boys (and girls) didn't cut her up in the shower instead of lugging her back to the Mexican side of the border?

Any similarity between Heston, a skull, or John Gavin (in PSYCHO)  is strictly clairvoyant

The main as in 'THE' murder that centers PSYCHO actually is the third act of TOUCH OF EVIL, the murder of Uncle Joe Grande by Quinlan, above a drugged unconscious Leigh's sleeping head. The PSYCHO murder was out of the blue, terrifyingly final, with an unseen killer. In TOUCH the killer is well known to us and we only begin to realize the extent of his drunk machinations when he starts closing drapes and so forth in the room while Uncle Joe is still alive, calling up Pete and having Grande hold the phone at gunpoint, to relay to the vice boys the dope on Leigh; in other words she's a victim here of a drugging / frame-up but the framer is then killed as Quinlan frames the framer, and as what's coming dawns on him, Grandy slowly seems to shrink, finding corners and Expressionist shadows as if trying get as far as the room will allow, but still mesmerized and trapped like a mouse in a terrarium with a hungry king snake.

But at its core, Welles shows his flaw, the same one that trips of his number one disciple, Peter Bogdanovich, insecurity masking itself as contempt for the he-man type, as in being forced to cast Charlton Heston as a Mexican cop with "practically cabinet status in the Mexican government" and making him a boob through and through, sexually panicked, trying desperately to avoid sleeping with new wife Janet Leigh while at the same time using her as an excuse for not focusing fully on his job, and/or trashing Rancho Grande like an amok bull instead of being alert to her yelling for him out the hotel window; of blaming everyone else for his sexual dysfunction and taking sincerity at face value. "Captain," he says of a shaking suspect about to get the third degree, "he swears on his mother's life," even though it turns out he did it. "I'm no cop now I'm a husband!" he shouts while trashing the bar. Yeah, Orson sly infers, but you're a terrible husband, and a lousy cop. You don't get to yell at Dennis Weaver for someone stealing your gun if you're dumb enough to leave it with your wife in a hotel room where she's too scared to frickin' use it and open fire on the Mexican gang bangers. "Who the hell does Quinlan think he is? Pinning a murder rap on my wife," he says but at least Quinlan keeps her entertained. Heston on the other hand constantly leaves her behind in the interest of protecting her (he can barely get her an ice cream) and if he's such a high-standing cabinet member why doesn't he find a nicer town for a honeymoon? Behavior this incompetent we wouldn't see again until Mel Gibson leaving his wife and kids to go protect them in the first MAD MAX.








It's junior varsity symbolism but it's fascinating the way Heston's Vargass appears, like a photo, in a corner of a mirror next to rows of faded toreador cigar cards, no doubt left like calling cards by Dietrich's old toreador 'visitors.' Quinlan lurching to his feet with one massive bull taxidermy above his head, ridiculously large, the barbs still hanging in him and ready for his final dangerous charge, like the ants crawling all over the scorpion at the start of THE WILD BUNCH. The spectacle of the bland literalization of 'the law' up against its unbearably odious other; bureaucracy vs. the monster."Vargas is one of those starry eyed idealists," notes Quinlan. "They're the one's making trouble in the world." Hank's famous intuition was right; the kid really did plant that bomb.

But Vargas, since he's so mercilessly rounded by Welles' black humor subtext, doesn't bother me. I can watch TOE any old time. Certain things on the other hand can keep a film out of my rotation of summer stock staples. My Hawks' repertoire doesn't include MONKEY BUSINESS, for example, purely because of Cary Grant's buzz-cut and Ginger Rogers' annoying overdoing it as a born-again teenage virgin. Mainly though it's the buzzcut. It hurts the back of my neck just to see it. What kind of guy associates a military grade crew cut with being young and feckless? So, I have to pass.





Morricone's score is almost a Tarantino homage to himself - with a theme mixing the tick tock watch chime motif from For a few Dollars More with the relentless low registered horn cacophony crescendos of a giallo and the loping bassoon notes of one of his action films; or earlier the thud-thud bass players. Each actor's speaking style seems intimately cared for. There are deft Hawks references and Anthony Mann, and above all the kind of careful diagramming of hostages and killers that makes good movies, like Rio Bravo, as far as logical structure ("We can't shoot you down in the street because you're holding our friend hostage in the jail"). In Fistful of Dollars (1966) there's that bit wherein the mean bastard whose been in a family war with the other decides to blow up their house and kill everyone - it's like why the hell didn't the other do that; it's one of those dumb games that show the disinterest Leone has with the logistics underneath the west. Why it is the way it is and why duels were even invented, in the hands of someone with western savvy the motivation is clear: lots of witnesses so you can't shoot an unarmed man, or someone not trying to shoot you first (so it's self defense). For example Rio Bravo and Red River are endlessly rewatchable, in part because Hawks knows the kind of prodding by which two gunfighters "paw at each other and see what they're up against." And he knows the way you need the guy you want to kill to be reaching for his gun before you can legally shoot him, hence the gunfighter code, and he doesn't get all "killing is wrong" Kramer revisionist. Leone doesn't really seem to understand either philosophy: the law and self defense and witnesses never enter into it and killing is never condemned except by labels like "The Bad" flashing onscreen. They're all doing it that way because that's the way it's done in movies, and Morricone's electric guitar makes any other gesture seem half-assed. But with Hawks everything is based on hostages, lines of fire, and having guys who are "real good" shots, who don't get all mushy over killing sex or seven guys in a five second gun battle, and telling the Chinaman he's got more fifty-dollar gold pieces coming his way, and if you have the boss in your gunsights it doesn't matter how many of them there are because he'll be the first person shot. We always know the rules in Hawks, so things always make sense, its the kind of logic that's so enticing it makes us loyal, wins us with ballsy courage, like Arthur getting his enemy to knight him mid-battle in EXCALIBUR, knowing with so many witnesses no other possible recourse is open to his former foe than future loyalty.





But cop violence and stand your ground etc has been making it real clear why you always need to wait for the owlhoot to draw first, as its self defense that way, if he's black. That's what trips up John Ford, racism. He examines his trip cord in some films, not others. What makes HATEFUL EIGHT so much more a repeater film is it undoes mot just the injustices of MANDINGO, which DJANGO partly healed, but it's actually in the process the most hopeful film about the future of the country since TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL. And in the process it's also the most sharp-eyed about the reality of violence, and the thin blue line of law, as a shot about a Bas Reeves-style bounty hunter (a murdering cavalry officer who joined the war to "kill white folks") and a future sheriff ex-"Ni--er killer of Baton Rogue" - ex Confederate officer who end up allied against the Jody Domingray Gang.



This is the kind of salvo towards peace through an understanding of the importance of violent men that makes it so tragic the cops boycotted this film because of their uptight union where to question the behavior of even a few bad apples is to condemn all fruit, therefore to eat a single orange we must endure spoiled and corrupted, wormy apples --and it ain't Texan. Texan is to arrange picnics and volleyball games between cops and their neighborhoods, or to make and deliver cookies to precincts on holidays, or whatever.

Bottom line, DJANGO doesn't make the summer rotation, it is too harsh - all that whipping and mauling and howls of abuse. What makes EIGHT work for endless reviewings is that no one has dominion over nobody and shot on 70mm film it's probably the most gorgeous looking film in some time, the dark shadows glowing a whole spectrum of deep yellows and purples of the sort I hadn't seen since the Criterion clean-up of the RED DESERT smog. I could spend eternity looking at those fields of Wyoming snow, the carriage thundering along to Morricone's ominous twang and sing-song metronome, the bright yellow lining of Samuel Jackson's cavalry jacket. the way little details are visible clear across the room- the offhand way Kurt Russell assures Daisy he'll stop her cold with a bullet if she tries to escape and then casually wipes some stew from her chin with his napkin, or pours her a slug at the bar. The whole idea of being holed up in this cozy joint during a raging blizzard is a fine inverse mirror to the art of holing up in the AC with your stack of movies during a heat wave. And mostly, I love that Quentin sets up the victims of the Domingray gang massacre in such vivid detail, and makes most of them black without anyone calling attention to it, a kind of color-blind casting that works well because we've already heard much about them, and never pictured them black, only dead--and racist (Minnie hates Mexicans), or the cold dispassionate way the gang are all shown first sweet talking their victims, getting them up on ladders, buying candy, speaking French, etc, then shooting them point blank, and looking down at their still twitching bodies and scared eyes without a word, only clinical killer abstraction. So that in the next chapter, when most are dead or dying, we're totally happy - and the unseen massacring of Major Warren and Sheriff Chris Mannix is forgiven as stakes of war. After all that was then, and this is the Now, and none of that happened at Minnie's Haberdashery, nor that field of snow painted in Bruce Dern's fragile mind.

Ya mind seein' pictures yet?

Nor ours. All are equal going onto Minnie's, and if Major Warren steals the show and Jackson floats in the blood to the top, that's not unusual in a Quentin film - Jackson's the De Niro to his Scorsese, he swims in QT's rich language like a golden pool. In DJANGO he had but a few vicious scenes. Here it's almost a payback. It's about eight hateful characters but Jackson is the one who takes command, that Goggins' Confederate falls under his sway against a common foe makes them a kind of nice mirror to another future black cop/bounty hunter and white crook/sheriff against a lawless horde film, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. See them on a double feature and hey, you'll never spend a better four hours indoors, in the AC, and the shadow of the Hawks, in the dead of night, cuddled next to whomever crawls into your row. Of course you may find there's not many places to go afterwards, Carpenter, Hawks, that new show STRANGER THINGS on Netflix, and then.... where?

Damn it, you know where, Pierre. That giant space bird egg ain't gonna lay itself! That would answer too many damn questions, Pierre. We still have... a long way... to go...  but hand... in motherfuggin' hand... we'll get 1982 back from the Shadowlands...

your loving conqueror, Ro-Man

Aug. 5 - Fay Wray day on TCM, a great day to be a man, standing in front of a TV, looking at the most gorgeous of all legs, struggling to escape a giant Kong paw, and knowing, in your heart of hearts, the ache the ape endures. And today tons of her best stuff is screening. Don't miss RICHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD, at 11:45 AM, that's 20 minutes from now!

She was married to the great chronicler of the "hurrah for the next who dies" parachute-less pilots of WW1, John Monk Saunders. She's old enough that even I met her, at a late 90s live accompaniment screening of LAZY LIGHTING (1927). And tomorrow is her birthday and TCM is dotty about August birthdays; and so here we are. It's all gonna fit together in about five minutes... and you too will never be "the same" again. So be the same now and get it out of your system.

Parallel track of reasoning #1: consider the climactic unmasking of THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) by Toto (Dorothy's dog) and imagine Toto didn't come to Oz, so no one pulled the curtain, which is what put the Wizard on the spot and got him to give out the free shit. What would have happened if Toto wasn't there to cut through the shit? Those four--brave and true as they were--never would have dared pull the curtain or even noticed it, on their own.

Think about it because it's relevant, man, and answer the damned question: Would that old man have ever come out from behind there, of his own accord, switched off his smoke and mirrors, and given Dorothy and her gimme-gimme hooligans their testimonials, medals and diplomas? Would he go all the way back to Squaresville, Kansas in a very dodgy looking balloon instead of being the all powerful Wizard forever behind his curtain, gettin' all the ladies and ruling the roost, as it were? Would their next challenge be to sign up the witch's monkeys into the Oz home guard, and making war against the Munchkins in order to enslave them as poppy harvesters? To hook the munchkins, and make them toil to make heroin from them for sale through the connections of the junky Lollipop Guild, down into Kansas and using the profits to expand the Emerald City and crush all resistance? Naturally, one has to consider that ordering a flying monkey attack squad to arrange a 'cycling accident' for Ms. Gulch, and dye her eyes to match her gown, y'all, red being her color.

Now second parallel track tangent (shortly to dovetail into Wray's birthday, don't worry): In Altman's SECRET HONOR (1984) we are presented with another man behind the curtain, old Dick Nixon--in one long monologue from an oval office surrounded by cameras and tapes and booze. Played by Phillip Baker Hall, we're presented with a Nixon confessing that he couldn't keep the facade, the green face, for the nation, and so let it turn around and bite him, pulling back his own curtain on Watergate so he could get out from under the shady power players of the Bohemian Grove. We find out that HE was Deep Throat, HE was the Toto, that is the "secret honor" of the title.

We hated Nixon for it--at the time--as we hate curtain pullers like Snowden--because he was not cute like Toto, and the one who peels back the curtain and compels us to realize the truth--that there is no easy fixes--is as reviled as one's Monday alarm clock. The truth is that there is never a single consensual reality graspable in any sense, good or bad. Diplomas and medals and testimonials fade and wind up in file cabinets or yard sales. Their value is purely subjective. They have little resale worth. You cannot use them as payment for your next angry fix.

Now that the poppies aren't free anymore, you're gonna need to steal.

Screening today is a movie that I thinks sums up the entirety of this truth of the problems of that curtain over cosmic existence, called THE RICHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD from 1934. It was just restored by the Library of Congress, or something. I forget, they introduced it on TCM and it's very special, not particularly great but memorable as far as its underlying spiritual message - the god behind the curtain.

Miriam Hopkins is the rich one and she's single--she seems a little coded closet dyke-ish in today's more gaydar-attuned definition, preferring to play pool and wear pants and carouse rather than faint at the first sight of blood, etc. Nonetheless, being so rich, she wants to be free of all the mooching hangers-on and gigolo gold-digger contingents, to find a real love, one she knows isn't based on smooth-talking fortune hunters, so she switches places with her poor secretary Fay Wray, who's already engaged to the twit who plays Alfy in the Bulldog Drummond movies.

So at a NYC party Miriam meets handsome engineer Joel McRae, who thinks she's only the secretary to the richest girl in the world; but is Miriam happy with that, is she able let it go and tell him everything and say, Joel, you passed my test with flying colors let me buy you a nice vicuna coat? No, she all but cajoles and forces him onto Fay Wray, reminding him that he previously joked with her that girl's wealth wouldn't bother him as a husband, twisting his every word at first half-kidding around cuz they bond like pals since the pressure's off, but gradually forcing him into it, and Wray too, while Alfy looks on, aghast, for truly he can't compete with Joel McCrea. Who can?

Hopkins' savvy grandfather, or whatever, counsels her: hey give the guy a break; the test is too strenuous, pull the curtain for god's sake. Clearly McRae prefers scruffy Hopkins even as only a secretary but he's going along with it as a gag until he falls for Wray because Wray is super lovely and Hopkins is a little busted here -- which is to her credit; she's not afraid to let her chin double up a bit and everything hang out, to get ugly-drunk and pass out and all that. Meanwhile she's pushing old Joel more and more on Fay until they get engaged.

It's stagey and then over -- what is the god element? Of course Hopkins is God, Wray is the Devil. It's not enough for omnipotent hot rich crazy noble God to have our love, he wants to force us into the choice of Him, in filthy rags and no teeth, or decadent luxury and everything we could wish for all wrapped up in Wray's sensuous evening gown-sheathed legs. Who could resist the latter? Only a chump, but that chump's the one goin' to hell.

Watching, we get angry at God/Miriam for being so mutton-headed--as do her lawyers. The test is too great, they and we cry! The devil displays all the wealth and beauty while God is a street urchin, a mallet, a pox, a buddy, a bro, a plain jane. At 'The End' (or our death), the curtains are pulled back, credits roll, and the devil and God join hands and bow. It turns out the urchin, the sick and suffering alcoholic in and out of the rooms, the wonky ugly duckling, is the rich beauty with all the wealth in the kingdom of heaven. The devil's sensuous evening gown is revealed as moth-eaten and fraying --the body underneath turning to old age and dust; roaches climb out of her eye sockets. If you picked the Wray route, you know you done picked wrong, brother, and it's too late to change; eternity is a looooong time.

It can be hard to stick with this film at time since Hopkins is so intentionally dislikable, but so is God at times, at least in the Old Testament. At any rate, it's to their credit that the American Museum of the Moving Image or whomever restored this valuable artifact, not just for its brave dyke-coding of Hopkins' character, but for the subtextual spiritual message. Next time you're wondering "if God exists why is there so much suffering and war and evil in the world?" think of this movie and you have your answer - God is an insecure closeted neurotic who wants to be sure you'd love her even if he destroyed everything you hold dear, like a jealous wife smashing your bowling trophies, destroying every illusion you cling to in order to avoid her; if the only time your not an atheist is in a foxhole, she'll make sure the wars keep coming. If you want to pull the curtain and see her working all the smoke and shelling, all you have to do is stick out your tongue for the lysergic sacrament, wait 20 minutes for it to kick in, and then run like hell, cuz that bitch is CRAZY.

THE END.

Richest Girl in the World screens at 11:45 AM on TCM - August 4, 2016
See also: BLACK MOON (1933) at 1:30
Mystery of the Wax Museum at 5:15
King Kong at 10 PM
Most Dangerous Game at 3:15 AM

It's hard to say if Jack Hill 'gets' women. The grandfather of Pam Grier WIP (Women in Prison) films, he's never shied from lurid sex-sensationalism, but at the same time never belittled, demonized, or fully objectified women and almost always balances retribution, vengeance, and character growth/catharsis heavily over egregious insult. Sex is positive, empowering, and drug addiction's highs and lows vividly rendered, and art uber alles. So whether he's a feminist or counterrevolutionary chauvanist, he's one of the all-time great drive-in auteurs, and this has been the golden retrospective summer of the Hill: so many of his films were released on Blu-ray this spring-summer, we now the entirety of the Jack Hill oeuvre cleaned up in--mostly--HD sparkle, and fit to marvel at. And there's great Hill-Drenner commentary tracks galore. In case you don't know, Elijah Drenner makes a great interviewer with a palpable Hill appreciation that doesn't muddy over into pompousness, like Peter Bogdanovich's tracks for a lot of Hawks Blu-rays. I know Bogdanovich loves Hawks, and knew Hawks, but explaining 'little jokes' in them as if some pithy New Yorker cartoon to a bored 12 year-old, sucking the wind out of them in the process. Drenner conveys his love for the films without that kind of deflation, so that clicking over to them during the film it's like your kicking back watching it with them, rather than enduring a lecture at the end of a hard day in a classroom with overhead lighting.

The new best friend of the Hillian, Arrow has returned the full beauty of black and white film to Hill's late 60s opuses depicting man and cute girls engaged in industrious activity: PIT-STOP (racing), SPIDER BABY (carving), and BLOOD BATH (painting) and in bleached color but with vivid reds and greens, SWINGING CHEERLEADERS (pouting). The DVD company Scorpion put out SORCERESS from 1982, Hill's last film, and if you're Hawksian then you're also Carpenterian and thus Hilliard too, because if you add Carpenter and Hill together you get Hawks, more or less, and if ever a man was holding a bull by a tail, you're it.

Well, I'm too frazzled with excitement to clarify  so I'm gonna just lay it all out in the grand style of the canon forefathers, chronologically. And then when the smoke clears and the flying tiger bat god of SORCERESS disappears back from whence he came in the sky, we will know....

For the longest time this weird dysfunctional variation on time-worn Corman themes was confusedly mixed up with its original Eastern European cut, Operation Titian, the English version --partially mulled over by Coppola--but to no one's satisfaction, as Portrait in Terror, and then used again by Hill (and changed around with added footage by Rothman later for TV as Track of the Vampire). All in all with the Arrow Blood Bath four movie set we can unpack it all, and note a fine example of how Coppola may be a genius but when he worked for Corman all he knew how to do was spend money and leave a mess for Jack Hill to clean up because this movie may not make a lot of sense, but it rocks so hard, bro, like the other filmed-on-Venice, CA beatnik horror dream poems of the black and white era, Dementia (1955 ) and Night Tide (1961). Using the local carousels, strange buildings and cavernous boardwalk under zones with rolling tides like the sands of time, and the infinite with seaweed-wreathed mermaids washing up dead in the nets and then appearing in a basement jazz club, playing out the drag of the current on the bongos, or whatever.

 DVD Review: A+

If this was the first 60s skin flick 'roughie' you saw, you might think it was a pretty reputable and artsy genre, certainly Hill doesn't phone it in. A job he took for producer John Lamb, it's in low budget black and white but it still looks groovy. Even if it is about a skeevy rapist pornographer (played with no small amount of gusto by Nick Moriarty), it's never brutal or traumatizing. Under Hill's elegant style we're never quite sure if these girls (he meets them via personal ads or through the shoots he photographs for his various filthy magazines) are real or just the equivalent of a Penthouse Forum "true story". Either way, rather than being all Dragon Tattoo of Thrones it takes on the surreal impact of a post-sync sound dream art film (ala, say, Dementiaor Carnival of Souls) to help us distance it more into some kind of perverse erotic fiction rather than a brutalizing Videodrome "sharpening up." Eventually our pornographer gets what's coming to him more or less, and his elegant wife (the very sexy and alluring Adele Rein) up to this point so hopelessly bored and sex-deprived she winds up shooting heroin and making love to herself in the mirror (a very groovy scene) winds up finding a big gross orgy fit for any erotic wanderer (way less oppressive than the sterile dearth of imagination on hand in Eyes Wide Shut), even if she arrives with guy dressed as Dracula and rocking perhaps the most terrible Transylvanian accent in the history of time immoral. In his commentary Hill lets us know the actor's a helluva fella but seriously, it's almost as nauseating as the human salad bar or drunken shaving cream pool party. Even so, ever on the look-out for that beatnik artistic arrest (see Blood Bath, babe) Hill gets the night's reflection on the shaving cream coated surface of the pool after all the revelers have straggled off to bed and the ripples stop, and well, its texture reflects the lights like some kind of murky 3-D ant's eye view of a flat ice cream soda idling in a midnight bus boy bin. In short, it's dream poetry.

It's not in anamorphic but don't let that dissuade you, darling. Between the photography and the gorgeous Reine you're bound to find something you like, and if it gets boring you can listen to the lively commentary between Elijah Drenner and the man himself, Jack Hill, who explains Lamb's penchant for ripping off pornography mail order customers, as in his sex LPs (based on footage in the movie, it's clear Lamb's behind the mysterious Tortura album that used to be a tripping "favorite" in my old hippie house). A great presence on a lot of Hill commentaries, Drenner's adoirt at keeping the focus on the action onscreen and the pair have a fine rapport (as opposed to the kind of commentaries where they get off on long tangents and whole reels fly by with no connection). We learn Lamb shot the excellent underwater stuff with a camera he specifically designed as he was cuckoo for scuba, and big game hunting! What a man, a John Huston crossed with David F. Friedman and better than at least one.

The lovely Vicky Wren (Reine) in their ultra hip 60s LA pad (dig the Brady Bunch style stone wall)

Psychotronica DVD review: B (non-anamorphic great Hill/Drenner commentary)


Apparently this was filmed originally in 1964 but held up 'til '68 and subject to a rash of title changes, man, supposedly shot for $65,000. over 12 days, I mean shit, I'd pay that out of my own pocket just to have this film in existence, I love it so goddamn much, and I know I'm not alone. I bought it on Blu-ray from Arrow and it was worth it even if I already had three or four different versions, from a fuzzy VHS duped it back in 1989, up through the regular VHS in '93 or something and the first DVD in whenever which wasn't so hot, and then the Hill approved DVD that looked terrific in whenever and now the Blu-ray and each time it gets frickin' better looking and more and more a classic of the macabre to put all horror macabre comedies to shame, to rival with the best horror comedies of all time, maybe the best. I only hope one day we'll see such a lovely restoration upgrade on other as of yet only semi-upgraded rarities in the zone like Old Dark House (1932) and The Ghoul (1933). What else? (See my piece on it back in the day, with Blu-ray update yonder, though I ain't never yet been able to write about it to my full satisfaction. I'm always like that about films I love so much I can't distinguish them from me anymore. (full review)

Arrow DVD review: A+


The second best movie about racing after Two-Lane Blacktop, this has sporadically slurring Brian Donlevy as a shadowy race promoter who sees something special in surly drifter Rick (Richard Davalos), to the point he even bails him out after Rick wipes out into a store window during a street race. Donlevy gets him a job at a junkyard where Rick can build something fit to get smashed up in Donlevy's 'figure-8' race track, a combo real race and demolition derby as the track crosses itself in the middle, necessitating traffic driving right through each other and many times not making it all the way without a smashup. Damn cool idea, especially if you find NASCAR incredibly boring.

Like Hill's Spider Baby (which was filmed in 1964 but didn't get released til 1968) the year before, this came out at a time when black and white was dying at the drive-in (unless --like Night of the Living Dead, it offered something shocking and new enough that the b&w worked for it, the way found footage worked for Paranormal Activity) and its a shame too because now on this geee-yorgeous "director approved" remastered HD Blu-ray from Arrow, the full measure of what 35mm black and white film can do is revealed, putting it up there with Repulsion as far as capturing a late night surrealism that seems to shimmer holotropically. The dark of real night (for the most part) is beautiful, dark and deep (if you have a good HD TV or projector, especially).

As for the story, if you don't even like figure-8 eight racing there's a generic but effective bluesy rock score over montages of lovely little junkyard shots as tires are hauled in around and hoods and parts and bonding, the sort that any artsy filmmaker, edgy photographer, or Antonioni if people connected; the snotty Rick's character actually grows as he moves from combative and surly to the other drivers to being nice and joshing around, which is an an unusual character change within a montage sequence, a ballsy but effective strategy to consecrate a more fluid persona within both Sid Haig's wild man racer rival, Sid Haig's girl (Beverly Washburn, his sister in SPIDER BABY), who goes on a date with Rick, so Haig beats the shit out of him and trashes his car - he's a maniac! But when Rick doesn't rat him out to the cops our Haig realizes he's misjudged our boy and apologizes. Little does he know Rick is keenly aware of the proper temperature for revenge. Meanwhile another rival racer's mechanic girlfriend is played by the future Ellen Burstyn (above). Billed as Ellen McRae, she's a wow here with a dry low key persona that suits Hill's equilibrium to a Valvoline-splattered tee, you can tell she's going to go onto big things (The Exorcist was five years away). Their romantic clinches amongst the Imperial Sand Dunes are a master class in how to use day-for-night without it looking ridiculous.


I'd go so far as it to say it's more Hawksian than Hawks' own RED LINE 7000... fuck yeah I'd say that. And it may be Haig's finest hour. Mind you it never claims to be better than it is. But for fans of the Hill, it's manna.

Arrow Blu-Ray - A+ - Another great Hill-Drenner commentary, gorgeous restoration, da woiks
--
TO BE CONTINUED

...the cyclist falling off the damned high suspension bridge, flailing limbs so you know it's not a dummy -- the kind of thing CGI would handle now - but this is stuntman territory, out in Native American preservations and uninhabited swaths of Utah, away from prying Highway Safety eyes, so when for example we see a tiny flash of light off in the distance at the parade ground we know what's coming - it's a detail left to build on its own, trusted and indulged. When cowboys fall off their horses distracting the car from hitting children, they really do fall right by speeding tires. The car really does smash right through that house.


The scene where the car pulls hard turn speeding at the two cops cars in a game of chicks -starts rolling over on itself, rolls over the passing cars and smashes in the roofs killing everyone - say what you want (we never see the car land) but it sure really flips over... and all the quick cut shots of blood and fire are awesome if nothing else.



This was the era of cowboy character actors out in the west donning pentagram covered black robes and sacrificing folks like William Shatner (DEVIL'S RAIN) or Warren Oates (RIDE WITH THE DEVIL), or kids (BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN), making great use of the alien landscape's inherent otherworldly evil (and all it entails) to contrast with dark nighttime sacrifice interiors. This being Utah (but not Mormon country, visibly), a Navajo folk tale aspect becomes the closest thing to real religion. Catholic, Baptist, Mormon... nada, not a priest in sight. There is a quote from Anton La Vey in the beginning and a cross on the alcoholic's neck (he's the one who recognizes the devil's hand) and why not? He's probably in AA - though maybe not anymore.

This town itself with its rugged western faces, wide-eyed children (but not cute or saintly), is almost like the 70s needing to let go of all its dysfunction or embrace it all the way--there's ultimately no explanation why that weird car is showing up at all, here of all places. Theres no 'gotcha' moment, or man vs. machine John Henry moral, which is one of its strengths. The car is there because it's a gorgeous stunning vista-ridden area - and most of us who've been in that part of the country have only driven through on their way to the coast, going out of our way to--in my case, back in the early early 90s--get super high and drive through the alien terrain listening to Pink Floyd's "Meddle" album and going "wow... wow, man." It's all mostly a big national park. No one really lives in this one hearse town... it's a tourist scenic detour. If the devil was to drive through any part of the country wouldn't it be here? Isn't that good enough? Of course the rocks and terrain could have been allowed to manifest as demonic if given the right atonal avant-garde drone and static deep focus landscape at dawn shots (like 2001 or the beginning of THERE WILL BE BLOOD), but what you gonna do? They tried and it's almost there, and the rocks are still weird enough to give the whole thing an unusual, striking, almost Anthony Mann-style mise en scène.

But... is it art?

Watching this kind of existential modernist ripping noise, hearing this vision of Dante's Hell wedded to bourgeois book launchings ("The Season" --yeah, right), and routine romantic break-ups, like a clock stuck on repeat of the same second over and over, the last second of her life, and she's you, the you inside, and now she's ripped like the seam of time that connects the gladiator movies and the science fiction, both being shot by the same crew with the same actors deep inside adjoining Cinecittà sound stages. Yeah right - if I have to hear the dreary candy-colored inventory of Bardot's body parts in Les Mepris again I swear I shall scream!!

I refer of course to the bloody sexually perverse neo-giallo, a knife wound begun with Bava's ill-received Blood and Black Lace and finding box office influence fruit only after Antonioni's Blow-Up helped obliterate the distinction between high fashion, signification chain-disrupting ambiguity and kinky sex murder. Argento took it all to a giddy new extreme that felt genuinely dangerous and launched a whole new genre and suddenly he had 'a team' - a production organization centered around his two mentees, Lamberto Bava and Michele Soavi. The difference between these two disciples was like hacksaw and hawk, like comparing Ennio Morricone with Ermine N. Goborra, but they all worked on each other's things and years later, thanks to greater technological advances undreamed of in their era, we can appreciate their films as good as they could in their screening rooms, more or less, and savor every scream and color. Far better looking than films made today which rely on HD cameras which give everything a wan, washed out look, they pulse with restored giddy colors that intoxicate even when nothing's happening onscreen.

The diff again: Lamberto directs like a fifteen year-old burnout who won't admit he's deaf and blind,saved only by his stoner shop class graffiti touches as if passive-aggressively trying to prove to his father, Italian horror maestro Mario Bava that he should have been allowed to be a veterinarian or heavy metal bassist instead of a filmmaker. Soavi is a true artist who goes to the root source of Argento's work-- the subconscious--and picks the doors to the tiger still untried, while savvily referencing all the film masters that have come before, to find the zone where Antonioni meets Bunuel and Lynch dances in a papier mache Bosch Wicker Man mask to fool Godard into thinking it's a safe spot for deadpan absurdist dissertations, only to then escape his dry socialism and run amok in the fields of cinema fantastique like an amok dragon.  And there he finds the fissures in modern society and widens them to let the madness seep in like nitrous from an amok dentist.
The idea of being trapped in love's absence, a big empty hole in the ground where a coffin goes, only a fat dumb little brother or neighborhood dork for company, has never been so palpably felt as in Michele Soavi's great opus, DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, one of the best 80s horror comedies to ever come out in mid-90s. I remember when this came to NYC screens because I was freshly moved to midtown and remember reading about it and thinking yeesh, just what the world needs, yet another  Pulp Fiction / Living Dead first person shooter game with an Italian narcissist hipster pretty boy shooting zombies all day in slow-mo, probably with a shrine to Elvis by his black tie collection and terrible dubbing. But this was years before DVD, back when I dismissed Argento as misogynistic and felt that Italian movies had to be in Italian (for dubbing was a sign of xenophobia and subtitle illiteracy) and so forth.

What a fool I was! DVD has so many taught things to us... to me... multiple language tracks let us know the Italian language track often looks even less synced than the English; and the restoration and beautiful transfers of widescreen HD help us to better appreciate the jet black dry subtle cineaste termite wit of horror auteur Michele Soavi, and the rich textures and muted sunless palette of his mise en scene. 

Based on the Italian comic book, Soavi's masterpiece is a sensitive, droll, and dead-on jet black satire on death, desire, and adolescent obsession all wrapped up in horror comic trappings. A kind of hipster Alessio nel Paese delle Meraviglie, it's protagonist can stand proudly any decade next to Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey in Blue Velvet as far as fearless intrepid truth-seekers uncovering the rocks in his backyard to see what worms, pill bugs, and centipedes he can catch napping. (Not sure if kids still do that --in my day it was a major icky past time, now I imagine the bugs are all long gone) charging into any mystery or romance that grabs him, even if it takes him over the edge deep into his own psychosexual dysfunctional core. Presented in a kind a tumble down overflow of macabre black humor romantic episodes, the film speeds so merrily along from event to event it could easily have been fleshed out into a full season of its own TV show. The overarching theme is how hot young things stay loyal to their rotting cannibal corpse lovers even as they're eaten of beheaded (and vice versa). Young Rupert Everett is our Cemetery Man, the funeral groundskeeper, trapped in his two-car Italian town by cliffs broken bridges, a cemetery groundskeeper and a return of the repressed, with zombies weirdness way ahead of the deluge of Romero-rip offs thats mired the zombie market today. All told, while episodic and hard to pin down it's a sublimely dream-like odyssey into how death never dies and desire never was never born.



And as a sublime anima, playing many roles, returning again and again like Liz Taylor in Doctor Faustus (1967) or Isabelle Adjani in Possession, or like Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway, Anna Falchi dies and comes back in numerous guises, so gorgeous and sexy she could melt a giant 'thing' out of the Arctic all by herself, her own thermite bomb, and Soavi makes full use of how such hotness has an uncanny frisson, a mind-melting combination of shifting anima roles and the way in a young man's dreams a beautiful woman is always almost having sex with him, only for there to be some distraction or calling away before it starts or ends, leaving the man in a kind of exquisite frustration, loping after her as the backgrounds shift and envelop so that circumstance seems to use her allure as some horrifically just-out-of-reach carrot; her absence as the whip. So at first she's a grieving young widow, seen in the corner of his eye, who comes alone every day to the cemetery to mourn her much older, goofy-looking husband (his picture's on the tombstone, but it could easily be on a spaghetti sauce can), whose love-making skills is constantly mentioned like a dagger in our heart for reasons we refuse to fathom. Everett's Dellamorte is smitten of course; and soon they have some great death-evoking moments, kissing with full protection (their lips and full heads wrapped in burial shrouds), having sex on top of the husband's grave (prompting the old man to reach up through the soil and take a bite out of her), and little spirit ghosts fly around them while mating as disembodied souls seeking moments of conception the way hermit crabs seek the right empty shell. That poor Everett never seems to reach full 'completion' of the mating cycle adds to his and our frustration and sense of loss and makes her an ideal anima, especially when she keeps appearing, first as what he thinks is a zombie (so he shoots her in the head) next as a real zombie (making him realize he was wrong the first time --oops), and so forth. Agonizing? Yes. And anyone who's ever been sexually frustrated while pining with romantic longing while trapped in some summer job in their shitty suburban town will probably--as I did--whimper in sympathetic agony.

Like his same-initialed Donnie Darko, Dellamorte doesn't deign to separate fact from fantasy so why should we? Certainly the town's chief detective would never suspect him, and later even outright refuses, ass when he stumbles on the mayor's daughter's severed head keeping house with Dellamorte's dummkopf assistant. That episode, and  a hilarious bit between an undead biker and his young deb ("I shall be eaten by whomever I choose!") are folded in between the many guises of Falchi, and her tragic death/s and Dellamorte's visits with the cryptic and strangely tolerant local detective.

Cross-addicted

Falchi is so gorgeous that after she's dead - and she goes early on- you feel the ache for her, a real sense of loss perfectly summed up in DD's rote distraction performing his dead killing duty, so that when Falchi comes back all wreathed in vines he can no longer just shoot her and move on, and we don't even care if she rips him to shreds, just so....

So what? We can see those breasts again? They are the most gorgeous perfect breasts in all of Italian cinema, but it goes way deeper than that, man. Don't be so shallow! You know this blog is never so sophomoric, and neither is the film. So why is she so cool and haunting an anima figure, then, in fact why is she the definitive undead love interest for all time? It's more than beauty or her surprising gift for balancing dark dry deadpan drollery with a constantly shifting array of personae--from melancholy depth to necrophiliac ecstasy, from undead vindictive succubus to suicidal prostitute in the girl student apartments in town, etc-- Falchi genuinely seems like an array of different people, all cursed as they may be by the kind of impossible beauty that makes normalized relationships with men almost impossible.

Funny, profound, surrealistic, deeply sad and subversive, its weird cool touches, like Death appearing in broad daylight out of burned phone book ashes (the sort of thing Terry Gilliam's tried all his life to achieve with the same nonchalant virtuosity; or that Michel Gondry does with too much twee and not enough dark), are all done in a very clever analog style and kind of tossed off like riffs that always lead back to the graveyard, capturing that lonesome isolation we feel as teens living with our idiot little brother and clueless parents, all blind to the dead coming back everywhere. It's hard to believe this came out after CGI and Jurassic Park as it could easily be from the 70s or 80s, its knowing winks to Evil Dead 2,Clockwork Orange, Polanski's The Tenant, Zulawski's Possession meanwhile put it in that category of insider cinema packed with references made for no reason other than to termite-like bore through the walls to reach across nations to fans of outre cinema of all stripes and nationalities. The universal language!

Among the other things that marks the quality difference between Lamberto Bava and Soavi is the dubbing, the voices match perfectly and the soundtrack pumps. To compare this as just a third Demons film is like calling Raiders of the Lost Ark a sequel to Treasure of the Four Crowns (1). As with so many of its ilk, good or bad, La Setta draws liberally from the Italian devil movie pool of "influences" and influenced - i.e. Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, Exorcist, The Sentinel, the (real life) Manson murders, even Argento's own Phenomena and it even works as a sort of quasi-prequel to The Visitor. There's a Manson-esque desert canyon drifter who opens the film by freeloading a meal off a pair of traveling hippie families, and then sacrificing them all (kids included) to feed the need of a slowly gathering Satanic overthrow, but not before introducing himself via lyrics (spoken) from "Sympathy for the Devil" and assuring the blissfully unaware brood that the Stones' lyrics are profound and meant for "only a chosen few" as if angry one of the hippie dads would dare recognize his plagiarizing.


Forward ahead a bit and into Frankfurt (like Dellamorte this was filmed in Germany) and a killing or two and then we see old man Herbert Lom take to the road with his mysterious package (you'll never in a million years guess what's in it). Soon he's standing in the small town in the heart of Black Forest road and nearly hit by Miriam (Kelly Curtis --Jamie Lee's sister), a sweet guileless young elementary school teacher who ill-advisedly takes him and his strange package home to her cluttered little apartment, one of those little German townhouses split down the middle so she has an upstairs, basement access, and an attic but each floor is small and Soavi gets lots of cool shots bearing down the stairs at each floor like some guest taking the only seat left at party, giving it all some terrarium look, mirrored--hilariously--in the POV of her white rabbit. In grand late-80s style she's kooky and single with no husbandly prospects (her wedding couple snow globe lets you know she's wishing for one) and a nagging best friend who's trying to set her up on dates. For awhile it seems like she's following in the footsteps of Anita Skinner's character Dee-Dee in one of my favorite discoveries of the last few years, Sole Survivor (1983) in that she hooks up with a handsome young doctor who helps her unravel her strange case, and is a confident, able-bodied single working girl not about to let a cute young single doctor get away, even if he doesn't quite believe her crazy story... etc. And she has a strange pet (like the iguana of Sarah Connor).

At this point I'd say if you haven't seen it, stop reading and see it first. As it's got so many great WTF moments I don't want to spoil them for you. It's on youtube (for now) in a decent print (where I saw it) and so while we wait on a region 1 Blu-ray, maybe you can enjoy it now - it's manna,... for the chosen few.

Okay, whacked-out film, right? WRONG! It's grounded like a deep well, even the Satanic impregnation aspect has roots in ancient Greek myth: instead of bedding the devil (as in his previous film, 1989's THE CHURCH), we have an updating of Leda and the Swan, though instead of Zeus as a rapist swan, Curtis is impregnated by a Satanic (dig that malevolently intelligent black eye) pelican-ish creature at the bottom of a deep well underneath her house, but instead of sex it just pecks out the brain eating bug larvae nesting in her neck. If taken alongside the Leda myth it's suddenly as if we're realizing Satanism is just the ancient Greek pantheon gone hopelessly shady from the lack of sun (after hiding out from Christian zealots for centuries).


What makes all the weird bug-up-nose strangeness work of course is that--and this is especially true as far as the score is concerned--this shit is serious. Composer Pino Donaggio merges sustained vocoder, funky bass underwriting great Satanic chanting, and abstract drumming as if summoning some ancient evil Lovecraftian behemoth. Little details accrue alongside the dark comedy--the main evil cult member brings his face ripping tools, but won't let anyone touch them; the cult use of the reflected full moon in vanity mirrors to light facial surgery down by the creek. How or why a new (woman's) face would reanimate Herbert Lom. no sane person guess, the mundanity of the ceremony (if the placement in the flow of the river isn't aligned they'll be at it all night, notes the doctor), the rabbit's final declaration of Satanic mischief, it's all absolutely deadpan termite. Once the bug goes up into her brain we get an interior view, into her dreams, as if the bugs POV includes access to her third eye subconscious like a two way radio. Bits of Antonioni-style alienation affect include the doctor risking his job leading her down into the morgue corridors deep in the antique hospital basements, a long hallway, the come to a doorway - he mentions the guards and then tries to kiss her against the wall so a passerby would think they're just down there for privacy and oblivious to the world.

That kind of set-up cover moment occurs a lot in cinema, as if danger itself is the key to busting the first move, but this time there's no security guard and she rears back from his ill-timed attempt. In true termite fashion it's just another knowing deadpan inside toss-away joke. Earlier the doctor mentions he's allergic to Miriam's rabbit and jokes about it being the devil, kinda ("There's nothing wrong with my rabbit," / "That's what he wants you to think!") but it turns out he's right, since it knows how to work a TV remote, and later nibbles his fingers at a key moment causing him to fall down the well; and when he opens the seal on the coffin, under the lid, it's sealed, like a sardine can, and in poking it open the doctor gets squirted in the eye. Looking up into a mysterious pipe--and we get the water's journey from the well up through all the arcane old German Schwarzwald pipes to her sink in a style way prefiguring Fincher's in Panic Room--Miriam barely misses getting squirted in the same way when she turns away at the last possible second.


Meanwhile old Herbert Lom stays totally inscrutable - is he good or bad? We don't know for half the film--he could be either the Castavet in ROSEMARY or the Merrin in EXORCIST. But either way, we worry about Miriam's boundaries. Avoiding bringing Herbert Lom home is the first thing parents teach children, so she's definitely an orphan and definitely missed a lot of key survival tips most kids glean before they graduate the sixth grade. Mockeries of things like the Shroud of Turin (a dirty hanky on his face later kills people through suffocation)--and mirrors Lom being brought back to life when a sacrificial woman has hers ripped off in a truly bizarre ceremony that would make Joe D'Amato proud). A girl crucified, one frightened by a snake, more Soavi toying with our cinematic expectations in high Antonioni style, the kids wearing weird WICKER MAN-style pagan masks, a mysterious Asian lady in red trying to steal the dirty shroud hankie and Curtis fighting to keep it with all her might, though she can't possibly want it, all proving if nothing else that like Argento, Soavi has seen BLOW-UP a dozen times, if one can really be said to have seen it, or anything, really....

As in ROSEMARY'S BABY there's a weird disconnect as it turns out this apartment has whole vast chambers Miriam never dreamed were there. Characters have cool names like Moebius and Martin Romero ("Martin" being that lesser known--and recommended if you can find it--Romero vampire flick); it's the kind of oblique in-jokes that someone like Joe Dante or John Landis would need to underline, but Soavi just buries them under everything... not unlike the elaborate ironwork that's clearly (presumably) merely found basement pre-war janitorial relics, though who the fuck knows?


The Scharzwald atmosphere is sublime (is this where they did Suspiria too?) and Donaggio's moody score brings in everything Argento's films were totally lacking by then--laden as they were with Heavy Metal and ill-choosing prog guys like Rick Wakeman. Even Donaggio could be the wrong choice, totally missing the tone of some American movies he worked on (like Tourist Trap- which he scored as if some childhood carnival whimsy) but maybe his not knowing English was part of that.

Soavi: it's stole many a man's soul and faith, not face!

Meanwhile, what of Argento? He co-wrote this, one wonders if he was just spreading himself thin. He'd lost by '91 his most important collaborator, the Debra Hill to his Carpenter, the Gale Ann Hurd to his Cameron, wife Daria Nicolodi (and Asia's mother) and seemed to perk up only for the chases and hardcore misogynist killings and snoozed through the rest, like Joe D'Amato or some other all-gore hack-robate he'd apprenticed under.

It's 1991 when this came out and it's hard to believe -- since American horror movies had given up trying to be stylish and riffing on tropes and capturing that dusty gray sky, muted colors and strange textures (as opposed to Argento's preference for bold colors and slick modernism) and his wickedly subversive sense of deadpan humor. What makes it so very Soavi is the... whoa.. made myself dizzy.

Hope you guess his name

That's OK, by me anyway, as there's always THE CHURCH, which I don't absolutely love like these others, but it's certainly OK. And then there's DEMONS IV; Soavi had nothing to do with that - and went onto Italian TV shows with unpromising names like "Anti-Drug Squad"- easier to finance and finish, he says, and no distribution headaches, I'm sure, but they'll never STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS. This is the dawning of something all right, but it's not the age of anything but looking down the rabbit hole spiral into the infinite(ly recorded) past.... For the chosen few, this Stones at you. 

Curtis family (L->R) Tony, Jamie Lee, Kelly, Janet Leigh

Kelly and Jamie Lee at father's funeral, a fraction of a millennia later

the before and after.....

Very few stories are so Piscean in nature that their subtext can either be pro-or-anti nearly any social or cultural system, side or issue: INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS first appeared in the mid-50s, the height of red scares (and red propaganda), conformity (and fear of conformity), and atomic fear (and fear of pacifism), fear of fear, and fear of fear of fear itself. The story of an invading race of placid, docile space pods with the ability to replace their barbarous human hosts, SNATCHERS touched a nerve and entered straight into the popular mythos where it's been since. Even people who haven't seen either of the three versions know what it means to be a 'pod person' even if they've forgotten why . There have been four films based on the original novel, a book celebrating the original film with essays by its devoted fan-authors, and countless dissertations such as this one. But this one is the best, the rest are imitations and some don't even get the irony. Think of it... no pain, no fear, no irony... superior in every way... everything old is new again, and no one says anything about the Emperor's New Clothes, or anything really at all. It's not that we're afraid, but we're afraid of the people who told him he had clothes on, we're just afraid he'll catch a draft.

In BODY SNATCHERS the aliens come to us in the form of ourselves, exact duplicates, only without the intangible qualities of the "real." Like Prada knock-offs, they're alike in almost every way, but by not being "real" they are enemies. Allegedly, these aliens are here to “save us from ourselves” and thus presumably to save us money, both in therapy and expensive brand awareness costs, or perhaps to rescue the money itself, to deliver it from our evil clutches. In this sense they are definitely communists, as they speak of total equality among the workers, and by extension the end of advertising. The humans who catch wind of the conspiracy and resist the pod people are the ones with prestige, highly educated positions of authority (doctors, EPA agents, etc.) and money-- they seek to hold onto the upper middle class status they studied so hard in expensive schools to earn. To keep the Prada motif rolling, they are the ones who can afford expensive designer bags, and they react to the pods flooding the market with escalating violence. Their fear and fury, the very emotions which the pods speak of eradicating, increases exponentially as the number of human survivors dwindles, until all that's left is one hysterical man, a blazing fire sale of human desperation.
If we take what the pods say at face value, then what they are doing will ultimately benefit mankind. That spiritual seeker Abel Ferrara, director of the third BODY SNATCHER version discussed here, even went so far as to compare the pods to Zen Buddhists. (p. 150). So what's not to like? Why run into traffic just to avoid a nice, quieting mental haircut?

This Roscharch ink blot of a story has also been interpreted as anti-communist, anti-anti-communist, anti-establishment, and anti-nonconformist. Horror icon Stephen King sees it expressing the middle American fear of neighbors not cleaning up their lawns; French theorist Jean Baudrillard would no doubt love the story as emblematic of the implementation of the pop culture "simulacrum." Andy Warhol based his soup cans on the “pod principle.” The list goes on and on, myriad theoretical tentacles that slither in all directions from Finney's original story. Ultimately, what they reveal in their infinitude is the fluctuating nature of man’s position in relation to the social order, how the individual is continually subsumed and expelled from the collective body of his current cultural zeitgeist in a tide as regular and merciless as the ocean.

Einstein’s pod law of physics goes as thus: For every action there is a reaction, which duplicates the original action and then takes its place, only with less verve’. Imagine it in terms of food: Imagine there's a rumor that the new world order will be getting rid of steak in favor of more potatoes for the hungry; everyone would a potato, no matter how poor or alienated they are. The money for this would come from the budget for steak which now only the middle class and higher can afford, potatoes on the side, while the poor have no steak and no potato at all

Weird times, man. I've been laying low surfing around Amazon Prime like a deranged 'American Picker' of psychotronic oddities to collect and lay at your feet like so many dead mice. It's become even wilder and weirder out there then ever- all sorts of groovy stuff can be found under the plainest of rocks, while classics are unwatchable thanks to terrible transfer/uploads. Llike with psychedelics or that 'other' Amazon, the one in South America's swingin' rain forest, you need the right guide.

I'm that guide, man.  Quick! Turn left!

As I've written (in my 5 Films on Amazon Prime for a new TrumpMerica), there's a strong need to be picky in here, lest your aesthetic sensibilities be dampened, so stay close. Rule number one, if you go away on your own, avoid these danger signs, they signify fly-by-nite outfits who upload crappy blurry VHS dupes barely endurable even on a tiny cell phone:

AVOID Synergy Archive (silver/gold trim); Cinema Classics (pale blue w/palm tree background); Moving Picture Archive (blue velvet curtain backdrop); 'Digitally Remastered' (dark yellow letters on black) These three labels denote 2nd or 3rd generation dupes-sometimes even wrongly formatted image, often edited and mangled and otherwise dispiriting --far worse than not seeing the film at all.  Also, unless you're really crazy, AVOID anything recent - no matter how good the poster looks. Anyone can get their film uploaded to Prime these days and while I'm sure they're all special in their way (especially if you made it or star in it), if they're on video, HD or no, it's just not the same as film. When it comes to crap like this, my brothers, film is all. 


Now you know the secrets of successful slumming, so I'm giving you Dracula's living dead secret vault of international vampire titles, twelve in all, chosen just as much for the streaming image quality as for content- in no particular order. Keep your hands away from the actors' mouths and kick back your shoes into the fire.

PS - I'm not shilling for Prime or actually giving you a password. But especially as Netflix only seems to care about their original material these days and Hulu has terrible organization skills, for the weirdness hunter Prime is, dare I say it, the new Kim's Video. 

All Images below are Screenshots from Prime Itself to give you quality assurance.

Somewhere between the hick carny hustle of Steckler, the macabre jouissance of Wood, the amateur competence of Mikels, and the laissez faire shrug of William Beaudine, Al Adamson waits for thee. More often than not his stuff is terribly preserved and even when it looks good it still seems like you're watching a home movie by a kid who's been following a film crew around and stealing shots for his super 8mm opus while the real cast is at lunch. His set-ups are lazy; his sound mixing done by Charles Haltrey and the Deaf Eggs, but sometimes I'd swear there's something magical about it all when it clicks into place, as it does here, if you're in the right mood for accidental Brecht totemism and sick with fever and lack of sleep and love all the same movies and TV shows as every kid did in the early 70s, i.e. Satan movies in the theater we were too young to see, Universal horrors on local TV Saturday afternoons, and Addams Family reruns weekdays after school

Alexander D'Arcy (the 'music teacher' in The Awful Truth) is the aristocratic vampire who tries to figure out how best to dispose of a Squaresville US couple who just inherited the place. Naturally it will save him from having to move if he can, shall we say, 'have' them for cocktails? Paula Raymond is his loyal Bathory-ish wife; John Carradine is the butler... for some reason. As an escaped (werewolf) lunatic, Robert Dix (Richard Dix's boy) looks like he just murdered his way out of a George Axelrod movie. There's a "big" sacrifice to Saturn or some (day-for) night goddess out on the dunes, or something, at the climax. Whatever piece you slice off it, Adamson is serving a refreshingly dark and amoral aura here, like The Addams Family if they actually chained up women in the basement to torture and drain of blood, laughing all the way. If it wasn't made in 1971 I'd swear it was ahead of it's time for 1964.  László Kovács did the photography, which may explain why it looks good even while having Adamson's paw smudges all over it.

It's a PRC with a top shelf Universal cast --they must have had some weird deal to use the sets in the dead of night after Whale and Browning were through with them. So there are lots of great old stairwells and finely painted rock walls, oil lamps and cobblestone streets in that grand nebulous everywhere and nowhere Universal small 'vaguely Eastern European' village tradition, even some of the same craggy character actors (like perennial bürgermeister Lionel Belmore). So even if there's no Bela Lugosi or real vampire there's Lionel Atwill as a scientist who needs blood for his experiments and controls Robert Frazer through telekinesis, Dwight Frye petting bats, and Fay Wray screaming while homicide detective Melvyn Douglas pounds at the door! As Timothy Carey put it while strapping Linda Evans to the log splitter conveyer belt in Beach Blanket Bingo, I got a weakness for the classics, baby. If you do too, Vampire Bat is a fine place to weaken. Maude Eburne is the comic relief; murder-mystery barnstormer Frank Strayer directed.


If you too are rooster-level fascinated by the white chalk line between low budget high camp art (Warhol, Fassbinder, Waters) and the junk basement DIY drive-in filler (Steckler, Lewis, Mikels) then you know that somewhere between the outsider sub-Sirkian soap smut of Kuchar, the drag grotesquery of Smith, the magickal high butchness of Anger, the punk sneer of Jarman and the pulpy opportunism of Al Adamson, there lurks Andy Milligan, a pioneer of grindhouse local NYC DIY bathhouse gay art smut, back before Stonewall, when gay films were considered easy busts by vice squads with too much time on their hands. Maybe it's that sense that the cops might bust in and grab the works that makes Milligan's films seem so urgent and important. A modern sort of theater group-ish reworking of Dracula and House of Frankenstein, the Body was blown up from 16mm to 35mm for distribution, as was the style and the result is washed-out to the point that all the whites have gone quite turquoise from grief, and blacks turned electric grey--and everything in between either a primary color or the look of stressed finish, which fits well the Gothic austerity of the decaying British abbey where most of the action occurs. The story of a few days/nights in the life of a vampire couple--the "reverend" Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed), wife Susan (Jackie Scarvellis), their hunchback servant Spool (Berwick Kaler), and some thuggish underlings, There's lots of transfusions, betrayals (and in a surprising scene, an apology) and enough talk about needing the right royal blood to waken Illuminati conspiracy theorists from their twitchy slumber as they seek the right descendants to be forced into breeding new vampire heirs to their house (who once imprisoned set about trying to befriend Spool into helping them escape). Meanwhile circumstance is compelling them to move to America as the cops are closing in on their cemetery digs.

Humans

Nicolas Winding Refn is apparently a fan of Milligan's and worked to get this film released (on BFI Flipside at any rate) and so consider the grungy overexposed Dark Shadows at black box theater style of it all to be some kind of high art; the house in UK where it was filmed was supposedly the backdrop for the Stones' album insert--the gatefold image on which oodles of lids have been de-seeded over the decades, Beggar's Banquet. Funny too that there's a big banquet scene at the same table here, one filmed awash in tints and diaphanous cellophane cape filters, a barrage of cannibalism and fruit mashing, followed by some impassioned monologues twisted around around in a solar flare daze conjuring genuine madness like a super 8mm camera passed around at a real Satanic time travel bacchanal.. There's a nice score of woodwinds (library cues?) and occasionally a buzzing heartbeat undertone. With all that Vaseline on the lens and all those layered canopies of cellophane colors it's the kind of off-the-cuff expressionism still alive today in the work of Guy Maddin. It all works because whether intentional or not, those colors are alive and unique in kind a two-strip Technicolor kind of way that suits the 'reeling in the centuries' mood.

All in all pretty impressive considering Milligan was his own cinematographer, editor, wardrobe mistress (using aliases for each job no doubt to make the film seem more 'professional' - we've all done it). Maybe my expectations were just so low thanks to Weldon's damning praise but I admire it's lurching, strange edits and occasional lapses into a kind of Masterpiece Theater flourish. It works to create a mood where anything can happen, and I like the use of sudden cuts to the three witches/sisters/brides of the vampire (all in different color capes) emerging like a pack of silent hounds whenever a guy or girl is chosen for death (rather than slow draining). If you actually enjoy this film all the way through, maybe it's true what Weldon says, there's no hope for you. But since Amazon Prime also has Guru the Mad Monk, you can just keep rolling unto the dawn.

Or you can turn off the TV and go out in it... maybe there is hope yet. But there's so much more to see down here in the bargain crypt....of Dracula's Prime. And who knows when they'll disappear? By the time you read this they could all be gone... or worse...


By the time Vampyres came out the lesbian vampire cycle was beginning to wane, but it's still one of the best, less lyrical and lulling than Franco or Rollin maybe but more satisfying in total with good pacing and interesting offbeat characters, a moody dark green patina (lovely indoor candle lighting and outdoor twilight gloom) and a scenario any man could related to: being lured to the house of two hot girls after the pub closes (gorgeous blonde innocent Anulka Dziubinska and terrifyingly carnal Marianne Morris) getting drunk with them by the fire and then waking up drained and alone, or worse, dead. In short, an indispensable primer on the dangers of priapism no man (or lesbian) should be without.

The welcome and most unholy arrival of this year's big new horror classic, THE WITCH, onto Amazon Prime last week signaled the month (my favorite) of all unholy magic has arrived. Time for great hauntings and macabre classics streaming like a running flow of witches o'er town and dale come Hallow's eve or mizzenmast half-flap. Lucky then that--as I wrote re: their Vampiredeliction last week--while Netflix has shied away from the ratty old rarities and sideshow bargain basement found object art, Amazon Prime has more than picked up the slack. Every category of October horror now can hold its own special list. This one stretches from silent films from 1922 up until present day, linking Middle Ages gynocide to 70s ouija boards and forward to modern direct-to-DVD scrappy indie gems, made for the love of making them with nary a chance in hell of turning  a profit--if that's not trusting the dark arts, what is? If only Ed Wood could have lived long enough to see the wonders his legacy hath wrought! My two great-great-great-great-etc. Aunt Marys (Edwards and Easty) and all my other Salem ancestors (no joke - I have the documents) are avenged through thee Prime. Let the fall foliage crumble in lovely dark red and purples in the crispness of your knobby knuckled hand's caress! We shall collect them for a recliner to plant before our tombstone screen. Wake thy imps from their velvet cloth slumber, the charm's rewound again!

PS  - as before each film is rated both for film quality (factoring personal preferences) and image quality (as in the clarity, restored crispness/color etc of Prime's streaming print --which is subject to change)



What makes this film work is its moody black and white photography and AIP talent roster, including Corman Poe screenwriters Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, who always instill 'classic' material with an edge of modern wit that does nothing to dispel the unease and terror. It's directed by Sidney Hayers, a TV director who's worked on The Avengers, and Baywatch, among others, but hey - it's all about the script and the actors, and these are top flight, even if there's nary a familiar face in the bunch: Janet Blair is the wife, Peter Wyngarde the brooding Rod Taylor-ish lead, Margeret Johnson the limping rival; Judith Stott an amazing and odd face as the charmed co-ed.

I've been shy about this film since I was afraid half of the running time would be spent with the husband condescendingly lecturing and belittling his wife about her black magic habits. He does, but she fights back with scathing wit and makes her conversion to logic something that's a result of her own self-doubt, rather than his stern paternal berating. Part and parcel to this left brain belittling the right thing is the whole code-enforced demoting of women from sexy independent thinkers to smiling slave drone Stepford wives. I love women! I think they're great / they're a solace to a world in a terrible state. What a nightmare to have no women in the world (Lou Reed). Or as BWB shows, it's a nightmare either way, but beautiful (Bing Crosby). Filmed in black and white, BURN has the arty photography of the British countryside, rocky beaches, and cloudy English skies of the British new wave, and stands up against the cream of Hollywood's post-Lewton / Tourneur ambiguous shadowy horrors.

October evenings in 2016--the usual chill of autumn warming the corpsey cockles of my hideous heart gone cold with heady heat. Has the Earth finally run dry of autumn leaf snap crackle and pop? Here in the East, a C-note of an October day barely resonates before summer muggin' flattens the coffers. In other words, this Halloween needs to get drastic. Luckily there's that first 7 days-free subscription to Shudder, which actually does curate and has pretty good taste --lots of 70s-80s Italian art-horror/giallos. Maybe it's age, but Lucio Fulci's 1981 Quella villa accanto al cimitero aka HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY has sure come along in my esteem. Maybe I'm finally mature enough to admit my prejudices against Italians and confront my childhood fear of a certain basement in our old Lansdale PA house in the 70s. (in particular the crawlspace). If you were ever afraid of the basement yourself, back in the time when each unaccompanied step was a huge endeavor, and when just going down there to get something for your mom while she was making dinner was so scary you'd race back up the stairs at the first tiny creak (even if you knew you made it)--then you owe it to yourself to revisit. Sure, there's a pretty fake bat involved, but we've all seen worse, and at least the wings flap and we wouldn't want Fulci to kill a real bat just for a movie like, say, old Ruggero.

Before diving in, a word of warning--even some of Fulci's fans aren't huge fans of this movie due to its many confusing anti-ellipses and stubborn adherence to paranoid  nightmare logic. Me, I like it better than most of his others in his undead series (City of the Living Dead, Zombi 2, The Beyond) as he keeps the focus so narrow--so localized and nightmarish, tapping the same vein of cabin fever time-bending paranoid 'always been the caretaker' interiority that make films like The Innocents, The Haunting, and The Shining (see Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror) so effective. Nothing evaporates the supernatural like the intrusion of cops and shrinks, fire arms, witnesses, panicky groups of holed-up survivors, reporters, etc.-- and nothing condenses it quite like communication failure between isolated, dysfunctional family members. In House it's the Boyle family --the father, Norman, is an academic researcher lugging wife and eight year-old son to New England for a six month stay to 'finish the project Eric (his mentor in grad school) started for the university' played by giallo mainstay Paolo Malco, Norman has a habit of staring conspiratorially at the camera as if its his Mr. Hyde wingman--especially when his emotionally drained and tantrum-prone wife Lucy (Catriona MacColl) is in his arms and can't see his face--meanwhile too people in town say he was up there a few years ago with his daughter--he denies it and doesn't have one, but the Malco stare suggests. Lastly there's Danny Torrance-style psychic son Bob (Giovanni Frezza--burdened by one of the lamest voice characterizations in Italian horror dubbing history). Bob's main communication is with the murdered girl, Mae Freudstein (Silvia Collatina) who urges him not to come--but what parent ever heeded a tow-headed third grader's babbling (and why isn't he in school?). There's also the ever-enigmatic and smoldering-eyed Ania Pieroni (the music student young witch in Inferno) as Anna the babysitter.

No Italian horror film ever just rips from one source, so though the Boyles have a passing resemblance to the Torrances, the presence of Anna evokes passing vapors from Gaslight (all through sultry stares --no words) though never enough of either one to settle and become 'predictable.' Like Argento, Fulci was coming to the horror genre from mysteries / giallo procedurals, where keeping audiences guessing who the killer was meant having everyone be slightly suspicious--everyone is hiding something--or so it seems. People keep mentioning the last time Norman was up there and he says they must be mistaken but he's that shifty-eyed Italian kind of giallo-brand ectomorph--thin enough that he can be mistaken for a woman in a long black raincoat (and vice versa) with eyes that make you suspect he's having an affair with or trying to kill nearly everyone he meets even while his actions and words are all regular scared family man; and the mom is emotionally unbalanced, refusing to take prescribed pills ("I read somewhere those pills can cause hallucinations") and losing shit; then taking them and feeling great; and then being attacked by a bat, and so forth; and there's the beautiful blue-eyed blonde boy with that terrible terrible voice and his dead friend Mae;

 but the graves run right under the living room floor. When asked about the grave in the hallway, dad dismisses it, "Lots of these old houses have tombs in them," he says "because the winter's cold here and the ground is too hard for digging." Do those Italians know that shit happens in New York too? 



Lurking on the threshold between Lovecraft and calculated absurdity of Bunuel in its deadpan execution, it requires a reckless willingness to let go of reason's handrails and fully embrace the primal anxieties of nightmare logic side-by-side with playfully enigmatic deadpan paranoia, evoking the wry termite wit of Michel Soavi's La Setta and Stagefright but with more genuine dread--the kind of attention to wringing maximum suspense from random things like a steak knife being used to turn a key in a rusty hinge, the camera pulling up close and the suspense rising with the intense chalkboard squeak of dry bold slowly turning while dad comes ever closer to slipping his grip and slashing open his wrist (or having the knife blade snap off and go ricocheting around the kitchen before lodging in someone's head. But then the door opens--Norman flashes the flashlight through the thick cobwebs and we wonder if Freudstein really does live down there or is some kind of a ghost.   And then--before Norman can look around--a bat attack. It's quite a sequence - practically real time from when Norman wakes Lucy up (the barbiturates lining up on her night table like little troupers) to the death throes of the bat - a complete wind up all around from waking up refreshed after a night of (presumably) Valium and sex, and winding up back to being the sobbing out-of-her-depth nervous breakdown



TICK-TOCKALITY and MOLASSES LIGHTNING

And then, as the basement keeps opening, the weird mix of nightmare logic and deadpan humor shifts to straight nightmare. No other film of Fulci's is so rife with childhood nightmare faithfulness, and so void of cold logical counterpoint. Italy's other great horror maestro of the period, Dario Argento, still turned to logical cops and psychologists for eventual explanation but in House Fulci forgets about cops and rationale as the time window is just too short. By the time the progressively more deranged and horrified recordings left by Norman's mentor reach the part about Freudstein keeping himself alive in the basement via a steady stream of replacement organs and limbs shorn from new tenants. Bob is already locked in the basement, with Freudstein--one of the most genuinely unnerving Italian walking corpses--shambling towards him. As with Carpenter's Halloween (its sequel was in drive-ins the same year as this) this has sort of melting clock tick-tock momentum, wherein time moves slower than real life while never actually being in slow motion - so moving across a room to open a locked door (ala Leopard Man) can seem to take forever the more you crosscut. For example if we see a Laurie Strode running from point A to B and then cut to Loomis walking down the street from house 1 to house 2, we wouldn't cut back to Lauruie now running past point C or D but still running past B where we left her --then when we cut back to Loomis he'd still be walking from house 2 to 3, back to Laurie running past D. It's an editing strategy that subverts our the narrative pacing expectations originally set up by DW Griffith who invented crosscutting as a narrative style in 1909's A Corner in Wheat to create that nightmare pacing feeling of running through three feet of sucking mud while some being slowly advances towards you. Usually crosscutting liberates us from time's tedious aspects while enhancing our desire for the two separate threads to finally meet (the pursued or endangered heroine and the cavalry riding - riding to her rescue), which flatters our paranoia (we sense our desire will be met at the conclusion of the sequence, due to associative tendency created through signifier expectation: show me an apple near a pointed black hat and I'll think its poisoned with sleeping sickness, show me a racing squad of cop cars crosscut next to an isolated young woman slowly opening her attic door, and I'll think the killer is up there -- etc. Few American auteurs dare screw with this formula the way Fulci (and Soavi had) until Demme with Silence of the Lambs (when it turns out Crawford and company are rushing an empty house and Buffalo Bill answers the door at Mrs. Bimmel's for Clarice, alone except for a standard issue side arm.

A similar rupture even occurs in the time-frame of Cemetery as well, between the two children on opposite sides of the life-death divide, separated by 60 or so years, where time is much more fluid in both directions, which we're not used to. This angle confuses some people in its ambiguity (especially the 'huh?' ending). But if you know Antonioni's BLOW-UP (1967) and the birth of LSD symbolic melt-down post-structuralism and the 70s movement towards ESP, telekinesis, past-life regression, Satanism, post-Manson cults, deprogramming, near death experiences (NDEs), Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape theory, and the way in which strange visions and dreams might well be some denizen of your house in the far future channeling your ghost (wherein you might be talking to your unborn great granddaughter and not even know it), then yes the ending makes perfect sense. If someone from the past can visit our present why not vice versa, who knows we might be from the future - a visi on they're having in the past from around a seance table.

Whether or not Fulci had seen The Leopard Man (1943) by then--with little Maria's blood coming in under the door as her mama rushes to unlock it--is incidental. He takes that one pivotal moment -- a key scene in nightmare horror no one who's seen it can forget, and drains it of all cultural, feminist Jungian-archetypal symbolism, and mixed emotions (our relish knowing mom deserves to have this death on her conscience)--then distills it down into pure fear, turning the whole second half of the film into one prolonged, torturous child locked on one side, parents frenzied on the other, like a crazy man who distills a gallon of vodka down to a pint of 190 proof Everclear just so he can then take an hour and a half to sip it straight with no chaser. He may be dizzy, nauseous and trembling by the end but by god is he drunk.

My problem with Fulci's other films in his undead category, such as The Beyond (also 1981) is that it's all over the place, spread out into hospitals and cops and corpses with pink Jello-pop acid waves and tarantulas, and seeing eye-dogs and half-headed zombie broads--all fine stuff but the broader the canvas the less effective the horror, to my mind. All the true classics involve structural collapses of the social order, patriarchal symbolic orders toppled by intrusions of the unassimilated real, in HOUSE the cast is kept down to a handful-- there's no cops nosing around, no red herring "pervert" suspects, and the supernatural element is kept on the DL --once people are killed they don't get up and walk again, or wink in and out of existence (as they do in City of the Living Dead), they just get hung up on the basement laundry line for Freudstein's use in his self-Frankenstein home repair.



Thus while many critics will say it doesn't make sense that people take so long to walk say from one room to another and no one does the smart thing like call the cops or leave but in dream logic it makes sense; dream logic isn't an excuse for lazy coherency, to just toss whatever crap together you want and call it dream-like. The structural geography of the dream landscape is just as organized and cohesive--each element corresponds to aspects of a psyche in turmoil, as in the CinemArchetype series, with Freudstein as the Primal father devouring his young like Cronus. Whereas something like, say, American Werewolf in London will rely on dream sequences to justify senseless but visually interesting 'trailer-ready' moments, such as a squad of werewolf Nazis (left over from Song Remains the Same) bursting into the family living room and machine gunning everyone. In doing so Landis betrays a faith in the permanence of conscious perception that pegs him as part of the provincial pop Spielberg-Lucas-Chris Columbus school of wide-eyed wonder. The kind of naivete that insists of gruesome latex transformation scenes, and issues like waking up from your rampage naked (your clothes having been shredded off), the kind of naivete that comes from having not taken mind-altering drugs, experienced drastic social upheaval or had mental illness issues (they're all the same thing, really). Take as opposition to that the more grey-shade psychic breakdowns from more literature-based European immigrants refracting the start of World War 2--the shadow of the wolf over Europe vs. the promise of the New World--in The Wolfman (1941) and the original Cat People (1942 - below). In the latter especially I recently made careful observation of the shadowy transformation scenes and noticed that in the transformation isn't rendered by effects but by black on black animation (if you look closely in the dark shadows in the corner of the pool room you can see an animated black ink splotch), her transformation back is shown from paw prints becoming not bare feet but high heels! The camera doesn't dwell on it, merely pans away, but the implication is truly marvelous in a true Camille Paglia-style fusion of the chthonic feminine and high fashion glamazon.


 But Fulci, a dream logic master, doesn't need dreams within the narrative to infuse things with weird imagery; rather the film's entire language is rooted in the figures and narratives of childhood nightmares, just as Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland are, and films that show reality from the point of view of a paranoid schizophrenic, wherein sensory perception merges with hallucination -so that, Dorothy finds everything in two-strip color, the farm hands all halfway between their archetypal dream selves, causing her to kill Mrs. Gulch by drowning her in the water trough, killing any older woman wearing red shoes and stealing them; Alice chasing real white rabbits around the woods, or leaving them to rot outside the ice box. Like The Innocents or The Shining, Cemetery is a study how one becomes the other, in understanding the importance of isolation for reality to bend - the way cops and psychiatry officials dispel it by trade and presence (the only outsiders are dispatched almost as soon as they enter, via axe or poker); a cop's whole training, and the court system, and doctors, is to clear away the cobwebs and separate fact from fiction, the very things that drive people into fits of cabin fever murderousness, the ghosts coming out when there's no one around to dispel them with the lamp of logic.

Therefore too comes the realization that a terrified kid locked in the basement, hammering at the door screaming and pleading while his mom pounds on the other side and the killer lurches slowly across the room--might run on and on, time melting down to stasis, the terror mounting like the swinging of a pendulum, or the slow ascent of a roller coaster. It doesn't matter in the end if the threat is actually real - it can still function along this line - in fact the two might need each other --the isolated paranoid schizophrenic and the supernatural Other like opposite polarities with a genuine demonic manifestation the lightning strike.










Another example of Fucli's open-ended death/Lazarus metaphors (ala Mike Hammer voom! vavoom!): Bob, the child, racing in terror - the camera running up behind him with the score roaring to life with crazy synth squiggles of twisted menace--he falls atop a grave, the ghost (?) of its occupant's child, Mae Freudstein (redheaded child of horror Silvia Collatina) lifts him off grabbing him by his arm, which stays folded like he's in a coffin; Mae turns out to have been chasing him in a game of tag. But now Bob has to run home for lunch; promises -as we all have--to race back out right after. Mae watches as he runs back towards the house before saying (with a robotic fatalism) "No Bob, don't go inside." but the score surges to life again and cuts off her last syllable.



We saw her in a flashback to her own period (Victorian, judging by the dress), earlier (and again later) saying the same thing, as if in a trance, after we've heard her say it to Bob, while he's in a trance, and sees her talking to him from the window of the old photo of the house they're moving to, so one imaginary friend in the early 1910s is having a conversation with a real boy in "present" time (1981), etc. The girls admonition in the graveyard --"you shouldn't have come, Bob" has a chilling unemotional frankness far beyond either scary emotion or kids trying to act.

It's not like Bob really has a choice; as a kid is never listened to. Even after he sees his babysitter's head bounce down the stairs he's unable to get this across to his disbelieving mother the type of parent who if you came to them covered in bruises would chide you for having such a morbid imagination when crying for attention. Of course from that horror then comes the comedy of the idiot Bob down in the basement alone shouting "Ann! Mommy says your not dead!" when the last time the door just swung shut down there and locked by itself and something killed her. This is just one of the ways Fulci builds terror in a viewer, the raw molasses slow illogic after all that high-toned paranoia reaches back to the fatalistic dread of kids who aren't heeded until it's too late. It's the big fear preyed on in all the best horror films, most recently in Let the Right One in and It Follows, of being a kid in danger and adults around either unwilling or unable to notice or give your fear the slightest heed. Not until the blood runs under the door will they believe you and even then will rather believe it's somehow a result of your own morbid imagination.


House opens up with a mini masterpiece of generating suspense - we pan  up from the gloomy house and there's a gorgeous young women getting dressed by a table where clearly she's been getting it on mere moments ago, talking to her off-camera boyfriend (who doesn't answer--and we never see him until we see him dead), they've clearly been using this dusty derelict old house for their romantic trysts - which signifies their love is: a) forbidden (probably both living with parents -so they're young), passionate (they'd have to ripe with sexual heat to get it on in such cobwebbed gloom), and doomed (no one knows they're there, of course, so won't be looking for them). Anyway, the boyfriend doesn't answer - she gets more panicked - looking around --you can guess the rest. It's so simple - but it works. There's no fancy surreal touches, just a monologue really by this beautiful blonde actress (Fulci regular Daniela Doria) as she orbits a copulation table in ever wider arcs, introducing us to the house in the process --which is caked in dust now but presumably won't be after the credits. While many Italian filmmakers add weird touches and tricks from Hitchcock etc., Fulci's trick is to cut right to it, like paring away Argento's operatic style to establish a sense of powerless unease in the viewer using very little in the way of backstory, plot, or other stalling tactics. Good writing can convey more mood and information in a glance or line than three pages of lame exposition and that's the case here--all the details add up so that after barely a few minutes of elapsed screen time, the house itself seems doomed - the basement especially is cavernous and foreboding - the kind of place you can imagine never visiting even if you bought the place - better to just leave it be, and you're not sure why--but we feel it, too, in our bones along with the setting wintry New England desolation. As a result what might be just another dull opening murder of a naughty young girl and/or boy leaves dread in the air like a radio key. From this we cut to New York City and Bob's first psychic link with Mae, whose warning him not to come before he even knows they're going.



Later: The real estate agent's corpse is dragged across the kitchen and down the stairs, leaving a wide streak of blood; the close-up of blood on the wooden floor is suddenly interrupted by a sponge coming into frame. We wonder for a half-sec if Dr. Freudstein is actually cleaning up after himself, but then see the floor's being cleaned by Anna, throwing down a big mop and bucket. But is she cleaning the blood or was the blood gone before she started cleaning or is she in league with Dr. Freudstein or is Lucy just hallucinating and by now shrugging it all off (or is it dead bat blood)? Lucy comes into the room in her robe, "What are you doing?" she asks. Anna gives her an enigmatic look that could mean a) what does it look like, genius? You people leave blood everywhere. and b) I'm going to fuck your husband. But instead: "I made coffee."



Lucy continues, oblivious: "What a shame you didn't come with us to the restaurant last night." This gets a knowing, vaguely contemptuous and cuckolding stare even closer and straight into camera that could be read many ways, as its no doubt meant to. Since a lot of these signifiers all come from mysteries Italian filmmakers are used to conveying the 'everyone's a suspect with the same approximate build, male and female' suspicions.  It even continues with the implication Anna is bringing a tray of coffee into Norman at this desk, but instead in the reverse shot after her muffled voice we realize it's Lucy and shortly after all that's forgotten when we see it's Lucy behind the tray  - and that whole aspect evaporates. Lucy ccomes out with groceries and we think we see Norman driving by in the car but can't tell - did Lucy drive the car and he stole it leaving her to walk hme with two bags of groceries through the woods, did he say he was going to NYC but really is haning around the library listening to disturbing tapes of his predecessor's rantings (accompanied by POV shots of Freudstein's 'workshop' replete enough gore to repel most anyone no matter how fake most of it looks.)

It would be unfair to make Fulci account for the lack of resolution in all this unspoken
'let's drive the wife insane' red herring implications anymore than in the  'almost affair' between Richard Harris and Monica Vitti In Antononi's Red Desert. There's no trope or cliche that sits still and allows us to situate ourself into what kind of movie this is, which again maddens the either/or types. They can argue that since nothing comes of it, plot-wise, one can argue it's just a waste of time that goes nowhere, Fulci fooling around with the bag of enigmatic stare tricks so beloved of Italian genre filmmakers and French film theorists.

But one can argue to the genius of that - for it generates a sense of paranoia and unease if you submit to it, that helps amp up the shocks to come as they seem further and further afield but in actuality are remarkably blunt and close to home, like tricking us into looking at a car driving from far away and then after our eyes have adjusted, stabbing us in the throat from behind with a scissors. Fulci critics wouldn't dare say Hitchcock wastes our time with the Melanie Daniels'-Mitch Brenner meet-cute romance in The Birds or Marion Crane's embezzlement in Psycho. Well, Fulci does the same thing within the confines of wordless stares! In all three the suspense and fright comes seemingly from left field - we're not given to expect birds or knives or monsters in the basement because the cinematic signs are all lining up for a different movie, one we've doubtless seen: in The Birds, the story of a spoiled city heiress finding love and meaning while hiding out in a small waterfront fishing community (in the vein of Anna Christie, The Purchase Price, He Was her Man) is sideswiped by the bird attacks, so that the birds fly in under our radar in a sense, as in Pyscho where there's no signs of what's coming in the shower as we believe we're seeing some sexy noir thriller where a woman steals from her employer to run away with her handsome lover.

Did Anna Pieroni inspire this iconic NG photo from 1985?

And besides, she has those gorgeous eyes, that haunting stare really is like the best part of Inferno -naturally Fulci would want one for his very own.

This is an index of past reviews and current updates, as the links so carefully curated are gone. May these stay forever. For handy reference, I've emboldened personal favorites I've seen at least three times of my own free will. That's no guarantee, except that it's gonna be cool and free of petty moral encumbrances. So if you're all partied out, either from the weekend or the 90s, and fixin' to kick it on the couch, dolin' out treats or whatever, and looking for good spooky movie recommendations, I'd say TCM's line-up is on point, mostly, especially DEVIL RIDES OUT at 8. Otherwise, a lot of these are very handy on Prime, Hulu, Netflix, etc.


Also - be sure and check out Amazon Prime's vast selection of... what do you call them? Ambience videos? Whatever that old Yule Log video used to be to Xmas, these are to Halloween--flickering pumpkins, ghostly trees, jack-o-lanterns in ghostly trees, etc. names like HALLOWEEN FUN AMBIENCE and PUMPKINS IN TREES by outfits called Chill Dude and Mooney Vision Recommended, for... I'm not sure what? Ambient Background to some ghastly macabre event? Some quiet nightmare? Count me in.

But first, the movies...


PREVIOUS YEARS' WEIRD HALLOWEEN RECOMMENDATION ROUND-UPS:

Post-Giallo Nightmare Logic
Deadpan Comic Horror Initiative
(Curated Lists of films on Netflix - 2015)

13 Suggestions for an Uncommon Halloween Viewing Experience
(Bright Lights Film Journal - Oct. 2014)

13 Obscure Horror Films to watch this Halloween
 (Slant 2013)

And my long running unclaimed series celebrating strong confident crazy women in horror...

ANGELS OF DEATH - 1
ANGELS OF DEATH - II: Great Women of Horror
ANGELD OF DEATH III: Badass Brunette Edition
ANGELS OF DEATH IV: Lynn Lowry Special Edition 
ANGELS OF DEATH V: Magic Slut Split/Subject Maenad Edition

ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK (1972)
BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA (1971)