(NOTE: TWIN PEAKS SPOILERS)

Thanksgiving has come and gone, other holidays roll around and everyone with parents still alive slide into their special roles as composites of past versions of themselves to not alarm their elders who remember them a certain way, and it's the one chance for differing political views to find themselves handcuffed to tradition and turkey like a seasonal DEFIANT ONES electoral college, and self-righteous drunk sophomore English majors trying to show racist uncles BLACK MIRROR, season two episode 3 ("The Waldo Moment") and uncles thinking it's a load of British tosh instead settle on football, or CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR. But it's the HATEFUL EIGHT will lead the way; a common foe shall bond these disparate sides anew: the moms and wives nagging to go home or go to bed just when you and your racist uncle or communiss nephew are just starting to feel the buzz of familial love you've been drinking towards all night. Hang all those reproachful female glowers as you both clink your ice and toast each other's burning health.

TWIN PEAKS though, has found an even better route... the common bond of mystical forestry. Take only footprints (casts) and leave only pictures... don't tell me of what, let Cooper look on my behalf, for his eyes are trained for horror.


On this we can agree: money buys booze which buys at least numbness and occasional ecstasy. And it's in the valley between those two states of mind that TWIN PEAKS does its misty mountain creeping. Especially once one folds in FIRE WALK WITH ME, because for all your family's flaws, unless they sexually abused you or otherwise warped your growing up, they're damn good parents. If you're formed into an adult with a somewhat concrete sense of reality vs. fantasy then they did a decent job. Of course there's no way for YOU to know if you are a single cohesive whole, until you meditate or trip really hard, or get a massive fever, and see just how easily your whole sense of self and reality can shrink to naught or widen to the universal with little more than a slight bump to your neurochemistry. When you come back to normal from a serious trip, or your fever breaks, or your meds are adjusted, then you feel like a restarted hard drive, and what programs open and how the drive structures itself --its basic startup OS--that's the parental gift. If you come back into a feeling of well-adjusted parameters of self, a good moderate balance between emotional extremes, then you owe your parents or caregivers big time because from age 1-5 they paid attention and did you right, made you feel adored and then forced you kicking and screaming if needed, to go to kindergarten and (in the old days) to endure what seems like dozens of painful booster shots. Like LSD or pneumonia, Twin Peaks shows us this by bumping the neurochemistry of a 'normal' Pacific Northwestern small town, the usually subconscious demons and darkness can come bobbing up to the surface like a ship's hull in stormy seas. Incest--that of Laura Palmer by her possessed father Leland--structures the core of the warping reality of Twin Peaks the way that of Jack and presumably his father (not necessarily in physical reality) structures The Shining. 



My theories here expand on those of Roger Ager in his Shining analysis, a genuinely disturbing interpretation in the vein of ROOM 237 but far darker and more inescapable, a kind of mad mixture of Oedipal detective deconstruction and blood-chilling fate--like watching the election results in real time, or realizing the circumstantial evidence your spouse is cheating has become too great to ignore. As with the best theorists (as opposed to the dry 'respectable' ones), Ager doesn't give a shit if he sounds like a crackpot, because he's not--it's not like we can do anything to help Danny, or Laura for that matter, they're fictional characters, he knows this, and even finding indications of this incest theme within the making-of documentary and diegetic art on walls only recently visible with the arrival of HD-he never succumbs to 'think of the children' hysteria--just warps back around with perfect logic until paranoia starts to steep in one's mind. For Ager all the ghost stuff is cover memories and excuses for this most odious of abuses, covered by Shelly Duvall's denial. While I agree to a small point I'd say you lose me when insisting these ghosts can't be both real and figments of a warped cover memory repressed imagination. I mean, even basic physics proves adequately to even the laymen that the perception of matter as solid is a hallucination, as is the perception that we are not constantly spinning on a giant orb whizzing inexorably through space.

UNTIMELY RIPS:

The disturbing implication of course is that we're all somebody's bad dream cover memory. TWIN PEAKS certainly catches that spinning orb and rolls with it. That's the Cooper/Buddhist way, joyful participation in the sorrow of the sexy 50s universe pleasant dream that oscillates regularly into nightmare and back again. THE SHINING on the other hand is almost swallowed whole by that dream's devouring demon maw. There's no Cooper there, no cops (aside from emergency radio monitors seen in one brief scene), nothing to help keep the one source of sane goodness--Shelly Duvall--from total breakdown. There's no sexual desire anywhere in the film, no connection whatever between husband and wife. The only desire is for alcohol, and other venues of escape (including murder). The common conspiracy theories about the reptilian sexual predator Illuminati CIA Monarch 7 programmers in our midst (see: Make up your Mind Control) tend towards young women, but other branches of the theory say members use their own children in sacrificial ceremonies and sex magick rites, not necessarily just for some kind of perverse enjoyment but to intentionally create split personalities they can then use to their own ends (as assassin amnesiacs, etc.) and to create a massive amount of negative energy which sixth generational reptilian overlords love to drink.

These deeds are so horrible, in fact, that they literally tear open a hole in the space-time continuum.

Consider the implication in a lot of these stories (THE INNOCENTS and THE HAUNTING in particular) that deep cover memory repression of dark events provides the current that activates the dark ghost 'residual energy' captured in the crystals in the stones of walls and bedrock, so that traumatic moments in the past keep repeating, or that free-floating demonic spirits--formless and powerless usually, like inactive ions or dried-up flies--are suddenly jolted into some kind of existence, be it from past dark crimes or--in the case of poltergeists--boys or girls hitting puberty. Whatever it takes to release a huge amount of psychic disturbance in a short time, as long as it shocks the inert magnetic anomaly some choose to call Satan into our dimensional spectrum - is their reason. (1)

In other words, incest or similarly abominable crimes are like a wave generator that gets the boat of consciousness bobbing, allowing the usually unseen barnacles on the lower hull to rise above sea level. In other words, it really is some kind of dark magic, incest is a psychic wormhole generator. We need our dad to protect us from demons, we long to sleep in our parents' bed where monsters are afraid to come bother us. But then, of all things, if the incest is real and the parents are the monsters, that's so horribly unfair and cruel it's too horrible even for horror films.

And the craziest part is that the incest doesn't even need to be 'real' - the primal scene witnessed at the right age finds a dark projected reflection in the water of the child's subconscious (a fear they'll do me next), near his/her fear of being spanked etc (at least in my day, and Freud's), creating the nucleus hollow jouissance core around which will be spun the tennis ball threads of healthy adult sexuality. Covered up as it is with lime green felt, the hollow core is still there, giving the ball its bounce. Usually it's never even seen.

The cocoon of reason brings death's head moths.

And surrealism, of course. The primal scene and repressed infantile sexuality are the interior decorators of the subconscious. And if the filmmaker is a good surrealist--like Bunuel or Lynch--they decorate the mise-en-scene with seemingly incongruous details that point to truths too deep and subconscious to approach directly, as with dreams they are the mirror to the Medusa. Gazing directly at the primal horror of our own primal birth, the gaudy horrors of the human reproductive life cycle, will drive even a Lovecraftian mad.

It is happening... again

This lurid stuff is supposed to be in the subconscious, a bad dream, interpreted as in the sidpa bardo by entwined lovers as fires in the cold empty darkness - get too close and you get stuck on the flypaper womb and become destined for incarnation. As a child you are far closer the previous life than adulthood, so unable to process or resist. This is only part of why sexual desire in young children is focused into their parents, but why the parents and adults in general must never be. Otherwise the young developing brain warps like a plant growing in on itself or a feedback squall. Dissonant and destructive. Reality itself becomes like a dream, a time and space-melt occurs, the usually progressive phases jam up on each other like a bunch of kids jammed in the middle of a twisty water slide. Multiple selves spring up to accommodate, the singular slide becomes as a hydra, each branches away in extremes erupts.

Usually a kind of yin-yang dividing line between the adult conscious mind (structuring 3-D space/time reality and correct decoding of social signifiers), and the unconscious mind (dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, mythic correlation, the ability to become immersed in a book or movie narrative) becomes a complicated post-war map where boundaries are susceptible to constant invasion far beyond our usual 'waking up into or out of a dream' while either falling asleep at your desk or having a lucid flash in a bad dream and trying to wake up out of it, clicking your ruby slippers together like Dorothy trapped in reform school after drowning Mrs. Gulch. If Dorothy was molested, then the wicked witch would be unstoppable, and the Wizard would have Dorothy's face beaming back, and all the scarecrows and lions would be left to their own devices while she hides forever in the poppy fields, and later kills the tin man and hides inside his armor. The first thing she'd do when back in Kansas is become a tornado chaser, then later when that didn't work, move to Kansas City to become an opium addict prostitute who--when she looks in the mirror--sees the dead wicked witch of the east looking back. It's fate, baby. If you can't even look in your own backyard without a tinge of terror and shame, then you'll be very distressed to know there's no place like home because even at home you are still no place.

Thats why Lynch is such a genius and why we can see through the bullshit tropes of the other Twin Peaks creative voices and why even if you were a TWIN PEAKS fan in 1991 you were horrified by the 'cop-out' answer to who killed Laura Palmer in 1992, because it brought in the supernatural in such a way as to almost seem like cheating (the 'it was all a dream' twist that leaves any respecting horror fan feeling cheated and angry).

There were other annoying things, all involving the fame of the show itself, and its subsequent burden of becoming the show we all told our friends about rather than the show it wanted to be. 1991 was a very special time to have just moved back east from Seattle; thanks to the show, the whole Pacific NW fantasia had come to mainstream America, riding my rearview like a plague, bringing gourmet coffee, Nirvana, Starbucks, and flannel depression. SILENCE OF THE LAMBS came out around the same time as season two and took the whole moody serial killer thing to a whole other level; the sudden appearance of Cooper's ex-partner, psycho super-genius Wyndham Earle late seemed a rather hamfisted case of the original imitating its imitators. Dumb shit like the one-eyed crazy wife Nadine thinking she's back in high school exhibiting superhuman strength after an amnesia conk; the puppy-eyed David Schwimmer-esque agoraphobe with the special diary; James--the bland leather jacketed, dumb-as-a-post pretty boy with the dyed-black hair--embroiled in a femme fatale's rich husband killing scheme like goddamned John Garfield; the love affair and pregnancy between the dangerously incompetent buffoon cop and the baby-voice nitwit receptionist at the sheriff's office; Josie Packard's old Hong Kong pimp flying in to raise hell over a perceived double cross; Ghostwood Estates, Joan Chen, the boring ass fuck - "less oppressive shadow" of Peggy Lipton,  the poor man's Patrick Swayze; idiot James blaming himself for everything that goes wrong... There's so little of that resonant Lynch surrealism because the traumatic disruption of the primal scene isn't there, the underlying dread of a real, dark, reality-altering secret isn't there to vivify the symbology.

Instead, dead husbands are now alive for no real reason; the furor surrounding a noted anonymous travel writer / food critic A.M. Wendt (what a chortle to be had over all the painfully trite mistaken identities!) seemed like some middle-aged hack who'd been banging out scripts since the Lucy Show days might think of as having "that Twin Peaks kinda kooky," like "that Barton Fink feeling," the sort they glean from a cheat sheet faxed over by their agent.

As the series petered out there were sill spots of brilliance: Lynch's guest spot came with his incomparable homage to the Weenie King in THE PALM BEACH STORY ("you have a nice clear voice like a bell!"); Wyndham Earle evoking the great Brember Willis in two James Whale movies--as the kindly woodland hermit in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and crazy cackling Saul Femm in Whale's 1932 OLD DARK HOUSE--in his befriending and torture of still-alive Leo; David Warner himself importing genuine menace, class and surprise as Josie Packard's old pimp, surprising everyone by re-bonding with Dan O'Herlihy, the man he tried to kill, and Piper Laure; David Duchovny as the cross-dressing FBI buddy of Cooper's (their easy by-play exhibiting truly wondrous Hawksian male professionalism), but Earle's elaborate games with the pretty girls of the show--their naive excitement over a "Miss Twin Peaks" contest (I think they'd had a group Vanity Fair cover by that point) deadens their collective mystique the way our love for Nick Drake deadens when we hear first hear "Pink Moon" in a car commercial. When Lynch directs an episode you can tell right off as the surreal touches stack up and line up like an eclipse of uncanny frisson; when other hands take the controls, we just get the equivalent of fan fiction.


I'm not blaming anyone in particular. If anything it's the public that are to be blamed, myself included.  The whole TWIN PEAKS craze had broke out in full over the summer before -we were TWIN PEAKS obsessed but there were only seven episodes and now we had a long wait for more. And while more were being made, you could feel the pressure to not lose track of whatever they felt had led to the success. Lynch is a deep practitioner of transcendental meditation so that kind of pre-set acclaim can destabilize a 'right-sized' creative ego. A humble man with inner stillness is like a polite and gifted child who sings sweetly and musically and keeps quiet when asked because it know it's not in charge, but the man with no self-distance or humility lets the acclaim he's receiving puff out his ego control slide so it just never shuts up, shrill and incessant and laughing at its own jokes, a strutting marionette rather than a worthy king, he hears the praise and it just puffs him further out
I know Lynch wasn't the only creative force involved with the show, but Mark Frost never really registers except as an all-around TV series guy--harnessing Lynch's surrealist imagery and use of music to a series-ready narrative chapter structure (normally a weakness with Lynch, who often has to backtrack out of narrative and pacing holes and dead ends with Moebius loops and dissociative character dissolution).

The problem was of course too many cooks. We could feel Lynch's unholy touch when he took control and directed episodes--they're infinitely more intriguing, darker, stranger, than the rest, more resonant. What's immediately apparent is the difference between true surrealism as above (reflecting the primal scene and subconscious incestuous dread) and 'quirky' - i.e. surrealism light. Whereas in Kubrick and Lynch (and Bunuel), the incongruous elements point towards dark subconscious desires, in the hack episodes the elements point only to older sitcom and soap plots. The bottom line being each director (aside from Lynch) on the series added their own flavor, and some were clearly hired guns with lots of different, mediocre TV dramas under their belts, who looked at the other episodes and rather than 'getting' the dark subtexts just thought "they haven't done an amnesia bit yet" or "what about a mistaken identity food critic bit? That always works!" They're like the dad who crashes his son's game of war and decides he can shoot around corners and make bullets go backwards. Half the kids leave but the son is trapped and then--so proud of himself--the dad boasts he's such a good dad for 'entering his son's imaginary world.'

But in trying too hard to be 'different' in that by-then mass-marketed Twin Peaks-style, these episodes only accentuate how bad formulaic weirdness is vs. what's at the deep deep core of true weirdness, which is something no sane parent wants any part of.... the primal scene --as inescapable and under the surface, as immediate and foregone an eventuality as sudden cannibalism. We don't lunge at our children and devour them at dinner, and we don't molest them -- it's a no brainer -- on such things society is formed, and the titans like Cronus are banished to the depths of the Earth for doing both and so the sun finally comes out. Whether or not the Illuminati demand corruption of the innocent for their magicks or if it's just the collective subconscious burbling up through the cracks of regressive post-suggestion hypnosis, I for one cannot say, but I can say, this being the age of "After Freud," that it doesn't necessarily matter --if the primal scene / repressed libidinal projection of Satan worshipping child molesters didn't exist it would by very virtue of its being forbidden be dreamt about anyway and seen by schizophrenics and visionaries as all too-real.

So as I say this holiday season, or next time you look in a mirror and wince or see yourself in your parents remember that they too see themselves in you and that's not always a blast for them. You're not as perfect as you think. The very fact that you think you are is testament to the quality of their parenting. Bad parents never instill that because they never create the right conditions, they don't go for the long game. They spoil you rotten one week and ignore you the next, so that you live and die by their smile even after your old enough to move out. Remember how you screamed and cried when mom first dropped you off at school, feeling as if she stuck the knife in and twisted, sending you off to your death instead of kindergarten. You'd have been so happy if mom relented, if she heeded your cries and took you home.

You'd be happy for a few more hours but then fucked forever. More of than not, thank heavens, mom knows this. Just as we must stop sleeping in our parent's bed, and we must go out and play with other children, mom must shoo us from the room. If not done soon enough, Norman Bates is the result.

 So what happens if, instead of the Norman Bates result, we have the Laura Palmer? What if instead of enduring this trauma during the Elektra complex phase of a girl's life she in a sense takes the mothers' place in the primal bed? It's an infantile wish she doesn't even understand the implications of, and she shouldn't have to. If the dad comes to her when she's deep asleep it might not even register as more than a disturbing dream just way more vivid than most. Even if he's a typical good dad, the dream might still be there, but coded, vivid enough that a hypnotist with an agenda can coax it into reality via regression hypnosis and maybe it will even be 'remembered' as real if the hypnotist digs deeper than the actual reality and unearths the subconscious instead, like she's trying to excavate the back yard to put in a pool but accidentally cuts into a water pipe or sewer main. It's a simple mistake in digging, but the result destroys the father's life and ruins the backyard forever.

No family is innocent of incest if the subconscious is taken as real. The result is an inversion, the conscious--the social life, school, normal boyfriends, family dinners--are made dream-like, nightmarish. If she's pretty and charming like Laura Palmer her dreamlike disconnect can enrapture and confuse a whole community. But do they know the real her? Maybe she can haunt the dreams of all the scuzzy border drug runners when she's in her bad girl mood swing, but do they know the real her either? Either way, when she dies it's like a triple reverse axle of depth of field, her body is marooned in the river of the real, a decomposing home to crabs and muddy water, and her mystique is even more assured. Her effect on the community increases, she lives on now in their dreams. She's the madonna of their personal nativity, the siren of their collective ocean, and the demon whore of their private nightmare delirum tremens. The only thing she doesn't see in the mirror is herself. But that's just Bob.



'Member, "Bob"? Like so many of the show's initial fans I threw my hands up in aggravation when the whole "Bob the ghost escaped" thing played out, almost like an "it was all a dream" cop-out that makes viewers mad and disillusioned they ever got sucked into such nonsense. For me it wasn't just the idea that "The owls are not what they seem" coming up as a "Wow" signal --mighty damned twee, even for 1991--or Bob or anything, it was the half-assed nonsense with the travel writer coming to Twin Peaks so everybody be on your best behavior and give me some petty cash for new table clothzzz and the save the otters campaign and the Civil War re-enactment and Billy Zane, and all the other second season throw-ins that seemed too 'quirky' in that same batch of freelance TV scriptwriter shiite I'd left Seattle to escape, where the writers don't know much about surrealism, or meditation, or even psychology, or Freud or the Pacific Northwest, but they did write on WINGS for three seasons,  and that show about the doctor in Alaska, so know something about what 'works' for the mass moron audience of yesterday.



If we can't remember back to our own childhood conception of sex, the weird miasma of magic and misunderstanding by which we imagined our coming out of our mother but carrying our father's features, we're maybe lucky. I envisioned a soundwave-based process wherein my mothers'"stomach" received a radio signal from my father's brain.

It's perhaps the duty of parents to put up with the child's constant curiosity about these big issues, their being drawn to the sound of the primal scene going on upstairs, the Oedipal 'mom is being hurt; thing.' If we learn the truth too early, let it be from other kids so it comes masked in plausible deniability. I remember being told about by kids who'd seen X-rated magazines in the parents bedrooms, and calling them liars. Hearing it from other kids first we get a grace period for it all to settle in the brain as fiction prior to fact (we're grossed out --that's where we pee from!), so the monstrosity of these acts can slowly fade under the safe buffer of possible fiction. Hearing it from our parents we can't deny it. We're like a middle-aged smoker getting waiting for the results of his first chest cat-scan - sure we heard it was bad for you from our friends, and sure smoking killed our relatives, but as long as the doctor's cat scan hasn't come, we can bluff our cough and grey pallor in the mirror.. While waiting for the X-ray results or the Cat-Scan, we're ashen with genuine fear.
---



All fans of horror must deal with the feeling Freud doesn't mention, but Lacan does, that the primal scene also carries a current of jealousy and if prolonged over time ("Bob's been coming to me at night since I was seven") the cover memories become part of the maturing identity ("Laura was like two different people"), which could never grow if stunted by the traumatic realization that this bestial act is how in fact we came to be. If it comes too soon upon the heels of our birth, the very same horror that created us now destroys us, like Lot's wife turning around to look at the explosion too close to the blast radius, only instead of becoming a pillar of salt we're merely bereft of any sense of security or safety, with no idea of what is a dream and what is reality because we don't trust the person who should be waking us up when we're screaming. That's why Lynch is such a rare great filmmaker for he can tap into that zone - there's no need to distinguish a dream from reality. He KNOWS there is no difference, because meditation and vision have given him the strength to not flinch from the blinding light and scalding sunshine. He can hear colors and see sounds! At the very least, he's found the ultimate 'door in the floor' to his own subconscious mind. Therein be monsters that can come up to grab you (Bob to Leland; Leland to Laura) like a maniac from the backseat suddenly grabbing the wheel while you're going 80 on the highway.

It's in Lynch that this dark incestuous table cloth flip comes to life via surrealist touches--collective cover memories woven together from 50s teenager pop culture funneled-- worlds darker and farther beyond most dime store horror freak show nonsense.

Today you can see the myriad half-assed attempts at being shocking that confuse vivid torture porn and kinky abductions and brutal serial killer artists with that kind of edge --or worse, don't bother to mine the actual Freud below, but take the surreal touches as their own reality, leaving a diluted sense of prefab emptiness -like expecting an oven to arrive but instead getting a meat thermometer and a pie recipe. Lynch's edge is so deeply etched that the surface can be portrayed as a very tranquil stream with just a tiny eddy in the current, the music from Angelo Badalamenti just as layered -- the pretty emotional sweep atop, the lower ominous bass drone below.

If it happens for real it's like a fish riding a dark 'devouring father' pederast Cronus bicycle through the mirror, splintering its budding superego reflection into a thousand persona splinters; may as well be plastic and mounted on the wall, and occasionally turning to face the camera and singing "Take me to the River." We spent thousands on marketing and mass audiences really responded to that song, while showing women subjected to brutal rapes is okay for the church, a female orgasm is demonic, as behind me, watching a film on Syfy a Predator rips the spine out of a dude, but the dude can't even say shit!  The most basic and obvious taboos are so far afield they're blind to them - but Lynch isn't. That's the surrealist difference and you can sense it even with your eyes closed, maybe even especially.


Audrey used to be favorite TP crush, but that was 25 years ago. I have changed, gone from her approx. age to old enough to be her father; seeing the show now Audrey seems impossibly young and coy--cherry stem knot or no---she's out of her depth at One-Eyed Jacks, but we admire her for going, as we admire Cooper's fortitude in the way he can gingerly refuse her advances without losing her friendship; we also note with relief the healthy disregard and wary respect whoremonger Benjamin has for her. She wants to follow in dad's businesses but lacks his conniving amorality --but rather than a confederate or opposition or burden, Ben is scared of her. He might try to ignore her as much as possible but at her age, isn't that his job? Compared to the incestuous closeness of the adults around Laura, he's a saint in his avoidance. This also gives her room to practice the art of feminine manipulation, working on the manager of Horne's department store (above) to get a job at the perfume counter, the 'gateway to Jacks' - but once there is subject to a near miss of incest (that would have horrified Ben more than her--even--the way Leland is first horrified when seeing his daughter as 'the other girl' in the trailer park in Fire Walk with Me.) 

That's OK though, that nothing happens between them is a pointer towards how daddy-daughter relations can have respect and tension without all the physical closeness craved so unrealistically, even frenziedly, by say Natalie Wood in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE. If a daughter still wants to climb all over her dad's lap by the time she's 17, something is wrong. She should hate him, or think he's square. This is the natural order. Ben has his own peccadilloes to worry about - Audrey comes and goes as she pleases. Her mom is a clueless depressive, her brother mentally handicapped and both are seldom onscreen. She may feel unsupervised but with the run of the hotel (and its secret passage system) she's unusually protected and empowered. it's only when stepping outside its walls, as into the red velvet womb lining of One-Eyed Jacks, that she becomes endangered. We admire her because her motivations are noble --her desire to help Dale more than just desire to earn his gratitude but a recognition of his goodness, a goodness in short supply in her redwood-walled hotel world.



Note above the masks echoing the Illuminati masquerade party in Eyes Wide Shut. If you know you're conspiracy theory you know the whole one eye shut signifier is Illuminati code, pointing to the Eye of Horus (as in the top of the dollar bill pyramid - watch it next time you're tripping and see if you can catch it winking --magic's everywhere, bro).

Of all the younger characters, Audrey us the closest to Cooper in her mixture of poetic depth and genuine altruism. With her weird scene ending jukebox dances at the diner she indicates she doesn't need drugs or sleazy drug dealing pimp types to be really high, to keep a foot in the fantasmatic.

Ben Horne makes the universal Illuminati "Eye of Horus" sign

Alternately, Laura Palmer degraded herself with the two nastiest characters in the series, the fat, gross drug dealing bartender slob Paul Renault --who we realize was involved in the sick sex and drug parties given in the cabin in the woods with his fellow drug wholesaler, the Shelly-beating Leo. Conspiracy theorist will point out the compulsion towards degradation in Monarch-victims and incest survivors, but one can't forget too the all-consuming jones that comes with regular use of bad drugs like cocaine and heroin. I've seen impossibly gorgeous models throw themselves at sleazy dirt bags at parties just because the latter has brought all the coke and the models are either already out or desperately want some. It's quite shocking and upsetting. I'm too cheap, and decent, is what --a noble Cooper/Audrey type, I am! But hey, if you have a lot of cocaine and whatever else you can always sleep with girls that are normally way outside your league. All you have to do is have enough coke to always have enough coke, i.e. to have far more than you personally use, and be patient enough to nurse their jones into full on addiction and then you cut off the supply--but make it clear (but on the DL) you have plenty but aren't passing it out anymore, and are now leaving to go home-- and see who asks for a ride. You didn't hear it from me, I'd never stoop so low myself, and I've stooped low enough in my days. But I've been to those parties sober, and seen the externals of that whole process and man is it demoralizing.



Not doing them or having wild orgies himself (by all accounts) he invests these scenes with his subconscious fantasy, what Todd McGowan (in his book The Impossible David Lynch) calls the fantasmatic level. According to McGowan, Lynch's films occur on two levels at once, the fantasy conscious idealized small town social constructs (picket fences, log trucks, diners, poodle skirts) and the fantasmatic (dark red or blue velvet on the walls, kinky sex, drugs, road houses, slow dancing). Cooper is a variation of Kyle's Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, an Orpheus descending into the Underworld to find lost souls (Palmer's body like the ear in the field), just as Bob ascends from the fantasmatic dimension to the fantasmatic dimension of the real, i.e. One-Eyed Jacks and the cabin and the nebulous stretch of woods between Canada and the USA on the 49th Parallel, i.e. Canada  ("border towns bring out the worst in people" as Charles Heston says in Touch of Evil).

The most amazing and least talked of aspect of the show is the way dreams and mystical visions are never doubted as evidence of at least clues, not even by the pissy FBI coroner played by Mel Ferrer --

Agents: Cooper goes deep--to the Black Lodge--from his position in the above, a representative of the US and the FBI, a paladin essentially from heaven; Bob - goes up, from his position as a representative of the Dancing Dwarf. essentially from Hell with Bob for all his fierceness, as imprisoned and subject to some lower order dictated even to the Dwarf

One shot Cyrus; one stabbed Bernardo ---

I mention all this to posit gratitude for parents born, dead, even indifferent, because if you're not a split personality coke whore schizo at your soul death's door it's not for your lack of trying. They may have done dumb things, or ignored you or fought or burdened you with their problems, but if your primal scene crypto-Elektra complexes were grown out of, relegated to the subconscious basement of childhood--then you're lucky, because so much work and energy and care has to go right for you to come out normal --at least six or seven years of solid attention, the right brand of attention, and then the ability to lessen that attention and--if necessary--to boot you out the nest, hoping you fly and not crash to the forest floor. Consider the case of Audrey--a brunette maneater just beginning to stretch her claws, frustrated but safe to do so within the confines of her spacious hotel house--and her father Ben Horne, reprobate but no molester (he'd certainly not go through with it at One-Eyed Jacks if he knew it was his daughter behind the mask, no matter how lovely her long lithe legs)--and Laura and Leland Palmer, each with an ineffectual in-denial wife, split personalities begetting repressed memories recalled as dreams (ala ROSEMARY'S BABY or EYES WIDE SHUT) but one has a dad positing himself as all good and pure and the other is an unrepentant hedonistic capitalist, but which is the better man?


And as for the series itself, Season two especially warns us of the danger of moving too far afield from primal scene anxieties and the other subconscious elements (the misconstruing of what constitutes sex, the mysteries of one's own conception and inheritance of one's father's features) and instead reflecting already reflected signifiers, the sort found in nearly every small town soap drama--food critics, conspiracy, jailbird husband stalkers, cross-eyed imbecile cops, every male wearing the same terrible curly haired black toupee, amnesia, hospital pillow snuffing, femme fatales seducing cross-eyed pretty boys into offing their husbands, shady gambling dens and brothels, disguises, seductions, identical cousins investigating a murder from a different town, beauty contests and other lame attempts to become--not what initially already won America's heart and captured its imagination--but everything it thinks you already are, and there's a huge difference.

If in doubt, consider the slasher movie, still loping around dying drive-ins prior to Twin Peaks'1990 debut, vs. the game-changing (and Twin Peaks-reflecting) Silence of the Lambs in 1991. The insidious dark father Lecter (a perfect dark shadow animus) and the crusading single FBI agent gathering weird clues by 'descending' to visit with him. From Silence came Se7en and countless dark Vancouver-shot psycho mood pieces, which indirectly led to the X-Files. Badalamenti's memorable music led to loungecore and trip-hop, and the Black Lodge.... is still there, alive in Salvia culture and Ancient Aliens, and the dusky Pacific NW old growth romance vibe is in Twilight. And you were there, Tiny Dancer, Tim Scarecrow. And your crutches and sobriety fell like glitter from a Wigstock head trip makeover down down into the abyss of the materiality second wind, the rich co-opting our fabulousness to sell each other art and perfume, couture...


Critics fawn over Dennis Hopper in BLUE VELVET (1986) but on revisiting both, Ray Wise as Leland blows Dennis Hopper out of the water as far as insanity - for that matter so does Dana Ashbrook as Bobby, because his eyes show real madness, just as Lynch's visions are mad, vs. the way people between the lines and inside the box think in terms of the surface, i.e. put a giant waiter talking in cryptic code up in there or have a shrink with 3D sunglasses and an obsession with Hawaii, hey far out - but Lynch goes deep into the moment - you never know where another is going to land - blood on the donuts, squeaky chairs, now that I too am insane, I can smell the real deal vs. the trying to be crazy version, and for all his coiled angst - Hopper's sobriety gets in the way - he's a man pounding cracks in a wall- farther than De Niro did as RAGING BULL (1980) - but doesn't break through any wall. The crazy of Dana Ashbrook and Ray Wise on the other hand is mind-boggling -the latter's layered in its madness it's marred only by his insistence on singing which might be the writers' idea but I always suspect actors of asking directors to let them have a scene where they can sing; they do it a lot in actor indulgent TV shows like later seasons of most anything when the original creators begin to run out of ideas.

I remember this image from the local Seattle paper when I lived there, needless to say they were very dismissive, how dare a non-Pacific NW native attempt to depict their lifestyle and love of gourmet coffee?

In its terrifying over the top way, it's up there with the greats, like the last act in the original Texas Chainsaw, or the type that needs no markers of quality or realism but gets to the true terrifying core - offset by the Suspiria cherry reds and deep ocean blues of the Roadhouse stage where Julee Cruise plays regularly--and if nothing else we gain hope that it narrows the suspect list considerably to have so many of them assembled there while the murder goes on, but when will they even find out there was one since she was supposed to have left town that same night? My god, right when we were ready to give up - and most of all seeing the giant onstage indicates the essential tawdriness of the 'other place' - the way our imagination of the 'space' of the stage mirrors it and leads to a kind of double negative positive that pulses with power while remaining trapped in almost 2D stasis.

Alas - while Fire Walk with Me and the second season second murder both reverberate with a pulsing surreal horror, there are still some 12 episodes or so in which to kill time after the killer is caught. Cooper's almost out the door and in walks a DEA Fed and a Mountie, railroading Cooper on behalf of Jean Reno who's angry about his dead brother Jacques. You can hear the entire nation groan in the feeling they're being taken for a ride. If that wasn't bad enough, comes the quirks. If The Shining didn't have any murders, what would it be? A tree falling in the woods? Would you answer it?  Even if it was her... hot and damaged Del Rey that was the tree and she was falling... falling.... in love? And she was out of meds? And it was the rainy season?


You would? Damn are you stupid, A.M. Wendt... indeed! Zooey's mother Mary Jo Deschanel (as Donna's mother Eileen Hayward) could tell you that, even as she passes down good genes and a love of quirkiness that would define her era... this fall on THE NEW GIRL, only on NBC.

She as ten when mom was shooting the Twins, and you can kind of tell!

The holidays is a time for joy, giving, family, religious or cultural iconography, cold, boredom, old people smells, excited new dogs, alcoholism, despair, sunshine, candy caning, and-- saving every cold, old dying soul from the terror of time--there's Myrna Loy. She's the ultimate salve for a wounded bloody and so very bowed end to the year, century, mankind, era. She was in THE THIN MAN, Myrna Loy, and FU MANCHU. That heavenly vixen so able to embody exotic blends of counterespionage agents, sexy sadists, loving witty and wry detective wives, good-natured prostitutes always willing to testify against the mob if it means saving an innocent whatever, and vamps with secret hearts of gold. Button-nose cute, too, with a twinkle in the eye so pronounced it's like looking into an ice-packed highball on a country club veranda as the sun sets...

TCM digs it, so Fridays they're pulling out the stops, it's Loy Fridays all month, and Acidemic has culled from its totterirng archives to tell you which ones might well be missed (post-code gender straitjacket re-donning) and must be watched, taped, adored, applied.


MGM's contribution to racist sensationalism, this great punchy little film plays like a massive headrush serial, with elaborate exotica sets: opium dens, expressionistic corridors, eerie operating rooms, lightning, crocodiles, spiked crushing walls, ear-drum bell torture, mind control and above and best of all, Myrna Loy as Fah Lo Suee, the sadistic-kinky daughter of the exonerated Fu Manchu (Karloff). As if that wasn't enough, one of the 'good guys' is Karen Morely, who insists she come along on the expedition to rescue ancient Chinese artifacts (the sword of Genghis Kahn) from the Chinese (i.e. Fu), who'll use them to stir a revolt to "kill the white man, and take his women!"
(for more: Free Fu and Fah Lo).

I haven't written much about it in the past, but I love this, for if he never made another film, this would make me a big Maurice Chevalier fan. A musical perfect even for those who dislike the genre and Jeanette MacDonald's trilling operetta singing. Here she's pretty sexy as is sister Loy, but not in a winky way - it's knowing and wry without being tawdry (and my favorite spoken song lyric, "you're not wasted away, you're just wasted." Amen. Myrna--playing a sex-starved sister trapped by her moral father at the family estate where no man is under 60, is alas mostly cut out due to being too sexy even for 1932. Every time I see it I long to crawl inside the screen and hurl myself into her welcoming boudoir. France, monsieur, ah France. The quest to find the footage of her singing her verse of "Mimi" while in lingerie in her boudoir is one of the great undertakings of the 21st century. All we have is the above still for now, but one day a pre-release print will be unearthed and the sky will crack open.

Long unseen due to a rights dispute with author Antoine de Saint Exupéry's estate, Night Flight (1933) might not give Loy more than a scene or two but turns out to be quite the dreamy-poetic meditation, full of great cool midnight moments all its own. Unfolding over one long night in the early days of night flying over the Andes down in Argentina, a very dangerous and historic period in post-WWI aviation--when planes were still open cockpit single propellors unable to get over the peaks, so they have to kind of wind their way through on instruments and one strong wind can blow them off course and straight out to sea or into the face of a mountain--it has curious poetic-noir fairy tale qualities-- a film spent in the pajamas, if you will, occurring in a land where most everyone else is sound asleep, recalling They Shoot Horses Don't They? and, sadly nothing else. So there's Clark Gable--isolated in his pilot seat--a radio operator in the cockpit down below him passing up notes up on weather and direction and the sublime moment he clears the fog and emerges into a clear night sky. A full moon above, he loosens up on the wheel, leans back in his seat, tunes in Buenos Aires tango music on his headphones, and looks up at the dreamy moon and stars like they're a girl he's about to kiss for the first time. His smile is so wide and the moment is precious and so pure you understand the appeal of risking one's life in a rickety biplane just to deliver mail. But that's no guarantee he or any other pilot in this film is going to survive the night. Of course, if anyone dies it won't be dopey William Gargan. All I can do when I hear him is remember how he goes on and on about how great "Babs" is (Mary Astor) while she's off shagging Clark Gable in Red Dust! And now he's got the divine Myrna Loy waiting at home, and he leaves her for a week to ten days without so much as a radio. Meanwhile another isolated wife played by Helen Hayes is talking to Clark Gable over a late supper, but he's not there, is he? Her maudlin insanity is worrying to the maid and any viewer averse to overly theatrical acting.  (See: Andes Hard)

I must preface this recommendation by saying I'm personally no fan of the inescapable soap peddler George Brent. A holdover from the pre-Gable kind of pursed-lip romantic acting which seems today as gooey as a molasses spill, so that he's the bumbling American tourist (allegedly) who knocks the sublimely urbane counterspionage super spy Fraulein Doktor off her heels is a kraw-sticker in this otherwise enjoyable addition to the many pre-code movies made about either Fraulein Doktor or Mata Hari or some fictional combination, ala X-27 (Dietrich's DISHONORED). Why? Maybe it's the weirdly condescending trill in his voice, the way he talks to every girl like she's six and just skinned her knee, or his stupid face that kind of leans out with his nose like a self-satisfied anteater, or his wholesale buying into terrible romantic lines. He was made for woo, and his behavior here would today be hopefully labeled as stalking.

Good old Ib Melchoir, not exactly the most engaging sci-fi story teller, less pulp than we'd like, but reliable with tons of rocketry, patriarchs in uniform with stern countenances pointing at images of space onscreen and making split second decisions, late inning rat monsters, robots, or mutants, and a certain quantity of Weird Tales twists to put it all over. A man who knew how to stretch a low MGM budget to make it look like a medium MGM budget, which equals a huge budget in a tax shelter country, and TIME TRAVELERS is comic book colorful if naught else. Lapses into egghead longwinded analysis (i.e. DC rather than Marvel) lot of straight edge males refusing to fire on mutants since killing is wrong even with a limited food supply and no room for ugly people in the gene pool blah blah, and robots. But stick with it--it's the early 60s so there are some hotties lolling topless in the artificial sun spa and pleasant miasma of LOST HORIZONS-meets-MOLE PEOPLE disaffect.


By the time you wake up from dozing off (a Melchoir specialty), a nice 'awake to the problem of overpopulation and/or getting wise to the genetic con job that is reproduction and life' kind of epiphany may well have erupted in your absence, addressing what was still considered a serious problem here on Earth bak in the 60s-70s--overpopulation. Somehow, though our population has more than doubled since then, we're not allowed to worry about it anymore.


Whatever your stance, this offers the same kind of mellow mix of awe and sleepiness you might feel during Walter Pidgeon's walking tour of the Krell wonders in FORBIDDEN PLANET.  As for If you're wondering why it looks so damned good, better than brand new, note that the great Czech ex-pat Vilmos Zsigmond did the cinematography (he'd go on to be a key player in the gritty-but-cozy look of 70s movies like Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS) and the Prime image glows better than new.


A very hungover and irascible John Agar leads an international space crew who land on Uranus or wherever, and there's a stop motion animation one-eyed rat monster in a cave, and a bunch of ghostly hot but strangely bland Swedish women (aliens using the astronaut's memories to lure them, ala half the sci fi movies ever made). The giant all seeing alien eye factors in (above), and alas Uranus looks like the thawed Danish tundra, giving their space exploration a kind of dispiriting vibe like we're six and being bored during a birthday party visit to a matinee showing some  No matter how much it puts you to sleep like a longwinded grandpa's hazy memory of seeing Sputnik on TV, keep it on until the end for the astro lounge credits - it's the star-swingin'-est theme song ever baby, set to groovy planet space scenes, like Tracy Morgan as Astronaut Jones tip. If your AA sponsor permits you, mix yourself a martini and let its dreamy lounge vibe provide the coup de gras for a little Melchoir nap (he co-scripted). As the noted Teleport City's Keith puts it:

"Journey to the 7th Planet isn’t very good. It moves at a snail’s pace toward a predictable conclusion. The characters are pretty dull. The special effects are pretty awful, on the rare occasion that they make themselves known. And yet, as you can guess, there is something strangely compelling about the movie. It’s like an album you put on in the background."

As I've written in the past, DEATH LAID AN EGG-maker Elio Petri's career seems to run on its own parallel track to evolution of Italian cinema, predicting major trends and then moving on from them right when the rest of his country catches on. So here he beats Antonioni's inestimably influential BLOW-UP by a full year, bringing us the pop art explosion then just starting to get its groove on, harnessing it to satire of the TV generation that's so broad it makes William Holden's pompous final NETWORK monologue, the "This is real life, Diana. I have real feelings!" speech seem like the height of abstract subtlety, let alone the glum teenage hype of THE HUNGER GAMES. By now you know that the film posits an inevitable future where people are hunted on the streets for TV ratings and population control; those who survive are national media stars. One of them is Marcello Mastroianni, in black turtleneck, cropped (badly dyed) blonde hair, and horrible swollen purple bags under his eyes, he looks like goddamned mid-70s Metal Machine Music-era Lou Reed if Lou was dumb enough to take his shades off, which of course he wasn't. Without Marcello's trademark dark glasses, the full brunt of the previous year's dolce vita-ing is felt like the sucker punch of being stuck with the check after your dinner party is crashed by half of Rome.


Here he's the latest star in an international hit TV show where contestants are drawn at random to stalk and kill one another. He's being stalked by hottie Ursula Andress. Death where is thy sting, so you'd think, but it's never fast enough. Instead, well, if you've ever made movies yourself you've probably done the 'chase thing' - where it's just you and a buddy working on it, so you film them running away, occasionally looking backwards in fear, and then you switch-- and they film you chasing them down the same street or path (or vice versa), well there's a lot of that in here, with breaks for the inevitable falling in love and escaping or so forth, with he wise to her trick of luring him to a kill zone surrounded by camera, etc.

Meanwhile it irks that Marcello's supposedly a big star but so bad with money he's constantly having his furnishings repossessed, including his girlfriend's comic book collection ("the classics" she says), and Ursula's supposed to be a great hunter but always letting him outsmart her; and we get the feeling the writer's doing high-fives with his Marxist-sexist buddies at Cahiers du Cinema in his mind while writing that one - Zap! Pow! For Americans, though, especially in this era with our reality TV president-elect, this grim pop art future is a bit like watching your father drunkenly hitting on your girlfriend at Thanksgiving. Great art though, if you like that post-mo pop style (mannequin arms and blinking eyes).

Edgar G. Ulmer--a seasoned hand at pre-Hitler UFA in the high-end Expressionism business--was all set to be Universal horror's F.W. Murnau, but Laemmle wasn't having him as the alienator of his niece's affections so he got booted out after one great film (THE BLACK CAT). But unlike many ousted ex-pats, however, Ulmer never stopped working, taking the niece with him and decamping to the other side of the railroad tracks, working with budgets so low his work is studied today in film schools as masterpieces of economy. Most of the running time of DETOUR for example doesn't even have a set- just fog, rear projection and a convertible. And here, all of a sudden, in this wild wooly indie, he makes great use of a futuristic Dallas World's Fair exhibit--all geometric geodesic angles and offsets--to conjure a post-apocalyptic world crashed by a jet pilot after he's the first man to break the sound barrier. The exhibit is long forgotten, but it makes a great Expressionist backdrop for an old hand like Edgar G-.--the painted backdrops and exaggerated set dressing, creating a highly stylized dream theater 2-D vibe (so emblematic of German Expressionism ala CALIGARI, FAUST, etc.) where the action seems to occur well outside the boundaries of space and time.


Here for example the art direction is accomplished and creative and the way budget limits are circumscribed with such art is so notable it might well be shown at film schools as exemplary use of found sets. The plot involves a pilot's sound barrier acceleration experiment launching him far into the future in a world gone mutant and/or sterile and either way underground - a dying world run by a few old character actors and housing a few babes dying for a real man's --ahem--virulent fertility. A suspicious security agent buzzkill (with such blatant and hysteric fearmongering one could imagine him working for Fox News) by the gigantic and ever-irritating Red Morgan. The script is by a decorated WW2 photographer Arthur C. Pierce and stars Robert Clarke (HIDEOUS SUN DEMON) as the stranded flier. Put them together and get Arthur C. Clarke who wrote 2001. Not that that was intentional, I'm almost sure-- 2001 was some years away. Daughter Arianne Ulmer is sone of the girls in search of the kind right stuff a time traveling pilot can offer

This Michael Crichton adaptation got a bad rap when it came out for a slew of reasons: it was overbudget, it was racist, it had a terrible ape suit, it was laughably acted, there were no CGI dinosaurs. JURASSIC PARK had just come out a couple years earlier and so Crichton was now associated with this cutting edge technology, so CONGO's old school ape suits and stagey red clay gigantic sets didn't cut it in the new post-T. Rex era. But now the smoke has cleared and we can re-examine the film free of all pre-set disregard. Turns out, I like CONGO for all those same reasons, as it reminds me of all those terrible old H. Rider Haggard-or-Edgar-Rice-Burroughs adaptation safaris into lost civilization adventures from the 60s-70s, the ones slung together with paperclips and terrarium lizard blow-ups by Irwin Allen and Dino Di Laurentiis: blown-up images of iguanas with fins glued to their backs fighting or lashing their tongues out at middle-aged lumpen former A-listers pretending to leap over great precipices and burbling science fair volcanoes or big foam-rubber pteranodons zipping by overhead on steel cables and rubber plesiosaurs erupting out of the water around Nazi submarines (as in 1974's LAND THAT TIME FORGOT), all supplemented by various babes in fur bikinis and/or nimwit sidekicks.


In case you can't tell, I got no problem with the red clay, timely volcanoes, ape suits, the corny translation device watch the good ape wears, or his sappy bromance between 2nd tier-Swayze Dylan Walsh sending his specialist (?) Laura Linney into the Congo to find him giant diamonds for his satellite space laser, running into apes and toppling Congolese juntas en route. Savvy and cool without either relying on bitchy or sexy manipulative tropes to get men jumping through her hoops. Her knowing wry professionalism more than makes up for the hammy accent of Tim Curry in the requisite 'doomed greedhead' role. The mysterious white apes are all uniquely different from one another with complex strategies, and there are moments when they're battling the automated machine gun sentries and laser fences that you think at last FORBIDDEN PLANET, ALIENS, and PLANET OF THE APES are all swirling together like we always knew they would someday. And there are no goddamned kids in the cast, just a doe-eyed 'good ape' with a translation device watch. You heard me!


Bronson Canyon! If one of those Larry Blamire films was made during the era of Martin, Lewis, Joe Besser-era Stooges, YOU BET YOUR LIFE-era Groucho Marx -- it would look and sound and smell just like INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES, a film that's gotten a bad rap over the years but can stand proudly between Corman's CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA and THREE STOOGES GO TO MARS any day, if it wanted to --the former in wry beatnik laissez-faire (and Corman corp. members working behind the scenes: Jonathan Haze (writing) and Bruno VeSota (directing). The framework involves two goldbricking privates (Robert Ball, Frankie Ray)--a kind of hipster, less slapstuck Martin and Lewis, cooler, less sadistic Three Stooges, and more sexually aggressive, less infantile Costello and Abbot. In point of fact, the pair seem to--intentionally or no--evoke Edward G. Robinson and George E. Stone in LITTLE CEASAR, and Peter Lorre and George E. Stone in FACE BEHIND THE MASK, as Ray's acting style seems as if he's constantly listing to port or starboard of Robinson or Lorre impersonations. They plays AWOL privates who spot a landed saucer piloted by two buxom babes and staffed with carrot monsters who run and dance and twirl their fringe tops. They don't know whether to agree to mate with them, report them to their Groucho Marx-ist superior officer, or just keep their big yaps shut. To prove their truthiness, they need evidence, and/or to stop a nefarious plot to take over the world. I'm too busy bulging my eyes out and shouting "Whhhaaaa?" to notice.

But I do like that there's some whooping, dancing hipster Native Americans (you'll want to study and learn their crazy dance), and the idiot guy does a pretty astute Curly; the babes are my favorite kind--gigantic and buxom, dwarfing both men--and they're arc transcribes more than the usual dearth of character (good, bad, etc.); the giant carrot aliens skip and dance around and have a blast and there's all sorts of absurdist self-aware Brechtian movements, the Eddie accidentally picking up a rock and throwing it like it's styrofoam which of course it is, but only supposed to be light to the aliens (the way he tries to pass it off is priceless). So nice to get two schmucks who at the very least no what to do when a giant space broad takes them onto her lapIf like me you've studiously avoided this film due to reliable critical consensus, then you'll want to track down those critics and give them a hearty bitch slap. . You could have seen it so many times by now you'd have it memorized! And then you'd be better off than you are. Until CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA lolls back inland onto Prime-al shore, this is the B-side to BUCKET OFF BLOOD you'll want on your late night LSD recuperation "what the fuck - did he just say that?" roster.

It might be the brothers' funniest, wryest most succinct thesis yet, triangulating some kind of common free zone between their pet themes. Through a bizarre chain of events, an up-and-coming cowboy actor manages to rescue a dunderheaded star (George Clooney), from a cabal of Jewish communists thanks to his unspoken fraternal rapport with studio head Josh Brolin who--in a rare moment of flummox--shares that he's got $150K in a suitcase. There's also Scarlett Johansen, rocking her Long Island accent as an Esther Williams-meets-Jean Harlow type; Channing Tatum's Gene Kelly-cum-reverse-curtain-Nuryev, various broad comedic bits ranging from shrill and misguided (Tilda Swinton's identical twin gossip hounds) to letter perfect sublime (Jonah Hill as the studio's dedicated legal example of 'personhood'); look fast for alarmingly perfect caricatures of John Ford, George Cukor, etc.

Throughout the brothers seem ever wavering between indulging their musical number itch (lengthy, artsy approximations of everything from Busby Berkeley-cum-Fantasia surrealism, Gene Kelly sailor suit gay rhumbas), doused in an elaborate range of water symbolism, from the Scarlett water ballet to the Russian submarine escape, the sailor suit and hat, etc., that all doesn't always add up to anything more than a wave lapping up against a discarded satchel of money, but if you're a Godard fan who digs all the signifier-melting incongruities in PASSION or CONTEMPT will love seeing the silhouette of Josh Brolin's suit against the Golgotha crucifixions, or the contrast of an assistant director checking the lunch choices of the extras on the cross. Not all of it makes sense or holds together on close reflection but it's a movie that's going places we've not seen a Coen go since BARTON FINK.

Brought Gulliver-low through Lilliputian micro-managerial fascism on the one side and kamikaze cabinet-casting by a rabid right on the other, America--by which I mean me, the ghost of Woody Guthrie, and maybe you--are in serious trouble, maybe. To the left I say don't take it on me if I seem too slack for your food co-op committee; and to the right I say at least do dystopia right, as in public executions, televised death games for condemned prisoners, and cross-country road rage races with points awarded for pedestrians killed. Roger Corman can help you with that. And DEATH RACE 2050 is here - on Netflix, and perfect for an angry beer-and-rage-soaked wochenende. 

I confess, reader, I been blocked. I been brought low by horrific panic in all my usual sources of solace (even Facebook) I couldn't read another step, either from work or the news, or the terrifying cascade of perceived injustice not to mention my own aging face in the black mirror, but then DEATH RACE 2050 came and saved me. For not only does it satirize the Idiocracy of the Post-Trump America so trenchantly it feels pulled from tomorrow's headlines, it does so without making me get so angry I start to shake. It's overall jovial tone is its own tool fro coping. I came to it in despair, and afterwards I was ready to rejoin the race, the nation, the madness with sails newly ripped by fertile breezes.

After all, when the world drowns in its own tears, we'd be fools not to jump in after it, like Ahab with a harpoon in hand.

In case you don't know, the original DEATH RACE 2000 (1975) was a huge hit for Roger Corman, with the terrific hook of a dystopian future where a national cross-country race includes drives raking up points by running over pedestrians. The celebrity maniac drivers included a young Sylvester Stallone as Joe Peturbo, David Carradine as Frankenstein (the hero), Mary Woronov as a cowgirl bull rider, and Roberta Collins as the Nazi-ed up Matilda the Hun. Directed by Paul Bartel, who left this world too soon or could have been another, slightly darker John Waters, It's a gem that's held up over the years remarkably well. Not only was I inspired to re-watch it after 2050, but its hilarious sequel DEATHSPORT, the Shout DVD of which includes a great Allan Arkush commentary track.

None of these have much in common with the Jason Statham remake and its sequels, on which Corman had no part, and which I tried to watch but are too dark, literally and figuratively. In the words of Tony Camonte's secretary, I like a show with jokes. Either way, the Bartel 1975 version is so good it shouldn't be sullied with comparison to anything except this new one, which stands up very well.

This version/update, produced by Roger  and Julie Corman and directed by G.J. Echternkamp, brings in Oculus Rift-stlyle headset and projection technology added to a grim and very plausible future in which 95% of the population are unemployed but don't care because their headset goggle things make their surroundings BLACK MIRROR bright (an artificiality that perfectly fits the film's copious use of green screen) Everyone lives in a state of besotted numbness, waking up only to clamor for blood at the big race. Malcolm McDowell is the fey president, a cross between Donald Trump (hair jokes), and a straight Elton John (he sits at his office flanked by broads feeding him grapes ala his stretch as CALIGULA and his CLOCKWORK ORANGE prison bible vision. He's the big name star here, of course, but his performance is kind of broad and too familiar to past dictators he's played, and brother he's played his share. Not that he's bad, at all. He's Malcolm. But the rest of the cast, holy shit!


First props in the great over-acting school of classic drive-in fare goes to foam-at-the-mouth Burt Grinstead, channeling the spirit of Dick Rude in REPO MAN as a closeted 'perfect male' and Anessa Ramsey as the fundamentalist Christian maniac Tammy ("All hail Saint Elvis Presley!").  She  plays her deranged cult leader like a true force of crazy nature she'd be right at home in FASTER PUSSSYCAT, KILL KILL, as would Yancy Butler as the leader of the resistance. Folake Olowofoyeku as an African American woman driver who pedals her vaporwave single while racing across redneck stretches of this post-Trump wasteland of a nation by day, and by night quietly confessing her dad is a history chair at Columbia; another car is driven by an AI computer (who promptly has an identity crisis) with the navigator a Ballard-CRASH style hedonist (Shanna Olsen); there's also sweet Marci Miller as Frankenstein's right hand woman, and as Frankenstein himself is played by New Zealand male Manu Bennett. Shizz yeah, as April Wolfe points out "Roger Corman's 'Death Race 2050' is the only movie that matters in 2017" - she's right.


If you doubt it's got everything this year will need, just note, closely, the fine print on yonder device (above right) while bearing in mind the director's previously best-known feature was HARD CANDY over a decade ago--where he copped out at the big ball break. Here he's makin' up for it, with a film so sloppy-cool it doesn't even give you a chance to really identify what said device is. This decade has no time for close-ups. Marci Miller just whips it out and puts it in after the projection of rebel leader Yancy Butler berates her in the shower for not killing Frankenstein yet "as a symbol" (and Miller answers in song so Frankenstein in the next room doesn't hear her talking). It's pile-ups of cool details like that which put DEATH RACE 2050 up there in the big leagues of the emerging realms of low-budget green-screen hipster sci fi genre pastiche, ala JOHN DIES AT THE END, BOUNTY KILLER, KUNG FURY and IRON SKY. Don't even try to question why it's so true, just enjoy the CGI and the illusion that you are somehow 'real' by contrast to it. Wait, what? Fuck it. Floor it. Flee it. Let it go.

The way things are going, man, who knows... so I wanted to present the entirety of links and posts thus far in a handy page rather than just the usual link sidebar (many of which disappeared in the great blogger.com code break of 2016). So Behold, a decade plus of 'sporadically brilliant babble.' (Please Note - this is currently incomplete, workin' on it, as the sane goes. so check back!)

BEST OF 2015
BEST OF 2014
BEST OF 2013
Best EK Writing of 2011


10/16: 13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies on the Amazon Prime
10/16: Taste the Blood of Dracula's Prime: 12 Psychotronic Vampire Films on Amazon Prime



THE CLASSICS


PSYCHO-Poetics: HITCHCOCK
Notes from the Class and Alcoholic Struggle of a THIN MAN Marathon (1/1/16)
Blocked by the Belle: BELLE DU JOUR
An Acidemic Godard Reader
Vandal in the Wind: OVER THE EDGE

HOWARD HAWKS:
Forgotten Men with Steam
(as always bold signifies a personal favorite)
Psychedelic Canon:

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1933)
ALTERED STATES (1980)
AMER (2009)
ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO (1969)
ANTICHRIST (2009)
APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)
BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970)
BIG CUBE, THE (1969)
BLACK SWAN, THE (2009)
BLOW-UP (1966)
BLUE SUNSHINE (1978)
BROTHER SUN, SISTER MOON (1972)
CALIGULA (1979)
CIAO! MANHATTAN (1972)
CULT OF THE DAMNED (1969)
DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993)
DAWN PATROL (1938)
DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE (2012)
ENTER THE VOID (2009)
EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)
FANTASIA (1940)
FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)
FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41 (1972)
FIELD IN ENGLAND (2012)
FLATLINERS (1991)
FOUNTAIN, THE (2006)
GIMME SHELTER (1970)
GO ASK ALICE (1973)
GODFATHER 2 (1974)
GREAT ZIEGELD, THE (1936)
GREEN PASTURES, THE (1938)
HAMLET (1990)
HEAD (1968)
INCEPTION (2010)
INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933)
JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977)
JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012)
L'BRAQUE (1985)
LIMITLESS (2011)
MAGIC TRIP (2011)
MATANGO ("Attack of the Mushroom People"- 1963)
MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS (2010)
MOBY DICK (1956)
MONTEREY POP (1968)
MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)
MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE? (2010)
NAKED LUNCH (1991)
NATURAL BORN KILLERS (1994)
NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (1941)
NIGHT FLIGHT (1933)
NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)
OREGONIAN, THE (2011)
OVER THE EDGE (1979)
PEOPLE NEXT DOOR, THE (1970)
PERFORMANCE (1968)
POSSESSION (1981)
PSYCH-OUT (1968)
REVOLUTION (1968)
ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)
SANDPIPER, THE (1965)
SATURN 3 (1980)
SCORE (1974)
SHINING, THE (1980)
SKIDOO (1968)
SHOOTING, THE (1966)
SONG REMAINS THE SAME, THE (1976)
SWIMMER, THE (1968)
TREE OF LIFE (2011)
TRIP, THE (1967)
TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)
TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971)
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
WALL, THE (1982)
WIZARD OF OZ (1939)
WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT (1965)
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1964)
WILD IN THE STREETS (1968)
WONDERWALL (1968)
X- THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963)
YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968)

SHORTS:
BLACK and TAN FANTASY (Duke Ellington - 1929)
SNOW WHITE (1933 - Betty Boop short)
SOFT SELF-PORTRAIT OF SALVADOR DALI (1970)
SUNSHINE MAKERS, THE (1935)
WAIKIKI WABBIT (Bugs Bunny -1943)

SPECIALS:
Bad Acid's Greatest: 70s Paranoid Feminism Edition
Acid Cinema Special Edition: The VIETNAM Experience
Why don't we just Go Ask Alice? 
Alice 2.2 - The Looking Glass Dolls
---









CinemArchetypes

1. The Trickster
2. The Anima
3. The Animus
4. The Hanged Man
5. The Human Sacrifice
6. The Nymph / Cougar
7. The Shadow
8. The Dark Father
9. The Devouring Mother
10. The Wild Man
11. The Wild-Wise Woman
12. The Sage / Senex
13. The Skeevy Boyfriend
14. The Nymph / Cougar
15. The Animal Familiar
16. Automaton / Ariel
17. The Devil
18. The Aesthete 
19. The Holy Madman
20. The 3 Sisters
21. The Ego
22. The Outlaw Pair
23. The Wild Child
24. Death
25. The Fisher King
26. The Stoner
27. Androgyne / Alien
+ The Red Queen

PRE-CODE GOLD
---
ACE OF ACES (1933)
BEHIND THE MASK (1932)
BLESSED EVENT (1932)
BLUE ANGEL, THE (1930)
DAWN PATROL (1930)
DESIGN FOR LIVING (1933)
EAGLE AND THE HAWK (1933)
FOUR FRIGHTENED PEOPLE (1934)
LAST FLIGHT, THE (1931)
MOUTHPIECE, THE (1932)
RAIN (1932)
RICHEST GIRL IN THE WORLD (1934)
SECRET BRIDE, THE (1934)
SKYSCRAPER SOULS (1933)
STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE (1933)
THREE ON A MATCH (1932)
TROUBLE IN PARADISE (1932)

BELOVED:

FOG, THE (1980)
GHOSTS OF MARS (2000)
JAMAICA INN (1939)
I LOVE YOU AGAIN (1940)
MOBY DICK (1956)
NIGHT FLIGHT (1933)
ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939)
RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1934)
SATAN MET A LADY (1936)
SPIDER BABY (1968)
THE THIN MAN (and sequels)
TREASURE ISLAND (1934)

OLD DARK HOUSES
BEFORE DAWN (1933)
THE GORILLA (1939)
WHITE COCKATOO, THE (1935)
BULLDOG JACK (1933)
INTRUDER, THE (1933)
SECRET OF THE BLUE ROOM (1933)
SHADOW OF DOUBT (1935)
SUPERNATURAL (1933)
TOMORROW AT SEVEN (1933),
WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT (1935)

"Men are very fragile. They get crushed down if you assert yourself in any way." notes our love-junky Wiccan Elaine (Samantha Robinson), voiceovering in her vintage convertible down Highway 101 from San Francisco, flanked by gorgeous redwoods and crashing surf. We see her stubbing out cigarettes in the car ashtray. God, it's been so long since I saw anyone do that. This girl, we realize, has it going on - but what is 'on' and 'it' that she has? Her new apartment is popping with magical candy color, and herb jars aplenty. Interior decorator Trish (Laura Waddell) was told to paint it with the "colors from the fourth Tarot deck." They go to the 'Victorian tea room' where men are not allowed, and a lady faire harpist plays. "Giving men sex is a way of unlocking their love potential," counsels Elaine, shortly before eyeballing Trish's husband, Richard (Robert Seeley) with her painted lid magic stare.

Then the Ennio Morricone stings come wandering in, slyly, shyly, and this Wicker Mannered Kenneth Anger x Anton La Vey x Pedro Almodovar with a lovingly stilted acting style perfectly suited to the sense of ancient ceremony, culled through a kind of high camp soapy-Sirkianism to make a distilled beverage of strange potency. In other words, like the mind of a person being forced to watch that Taylor-Burton-Milk Train stoppage terrible hat monstrosity BOOM! while being slowly encased in a psychotropic pancake syrup that hardens to frozen in-the-belly-of-the-dragon amber, you cannot help but succumb to the film's cohesive unified weirdness, its adept deconstruction and Pagan rearrangement of the kind of pre-Quixote romantic blueprint for mythologizing reality girls, smitten with Disney and afternoon soap operas, make in a Brechtian dissolution of cohesive, eerily familiar beauty. Is that even a sentence? As Jimmy Stewart says in BELL BOOK AND CANDLE, who's to say what magic is?

What LOVE WITCH is, certainly, us the announcement of a major female filmmaking talent, or at the very least the female Ed Wood we've all been sorely craving. A CalArts grad wunderkind named Anna Biller, like Ed she's a true sextuple threat (she wrote, produced, directed, did the art design and costumes and composed several of the renaissance songs). Thematically, a fond ode to the early-70s 'suburban housewife joins witch coven' micro-genre, WITCH captures just the right kind of highly-stylized qua-feminist fairy tale revision / Satan's School for Gifted Youngsters' annual solstice pageant primitivism to keep it from being either campy or realistic, magic is allowed to be--as in ROSEMARY'S BABY--comfortably ensconced in the middle ground of 'becoming' and 'will' rather than mystical spells and levitation. As Morricone slinks around the piano and patches her remaining disparate pastiche elements into a coherent whole. Biller ointments up and flies herself up as point guard to this whole new flock of filmmakers, I've written lovingly about most of them, who use the 60s-70s 'Euro-artsleaze' genre as a palette from which to paint uncanny vistas, and in some cases--such as hers--even doing some 8th-wave gender re-appropriation.

A definite feminist statement is the WITCH that I now defend. Yet I defy any male not to be turned on by segments of this film and then to realize moments later just how thoroughly they've been tricked, dragged kicking and screaming to an Ikea of fantasy land fairy princesses, unicorns, and tea parties. Brilliant, this fantasia of a small witch-infested Northern California town also includes a burlesque house (1) and of course the ever-popular female obsession: seducing guys who belong to other girls, then losing interest once they've had them under their spell and they start crying and obsessively screaming her name, driving them to suicide or heart failure. When grown-up girls still want to be Maleficent or need to use magic herbs (like the powerful psychoactive jimsonweed AKA Datura root - which makes a rare 'appearance') to seduce their men, then woe to those men, for this herb makes comprehensible the very speech of witches, which as Banquo speaks of in MACBETH, "the insane root that takes the reason prisoner." And indeed, the bail money to get reason back is death.

The story of three or so conquests in the disturbed life of a dangerously powerful and intoxicatingly sexy 'love witch' - Elaine lets us know in the opening that she's leaving Frisco "after a nervous breakdown" - which she discusses matter-of-factly in a highly mannered theatrical voiceover with conflicting flashbacks in a way that connects the events to a host of female-driven films from the late 60s-70s, from PLAY IT AS IT LAYS to CIAO! MANHATTAN (1972) and even LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH. Echoes even of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (smoking calmly in the other room while her latest lover screams off camera), MESSIAH OF EVIL (especially when Robinson deepens and draws it her vocals on lines "The day Jerry left me is the day I died" she sounds eerily like Marianna Hill), and of course STEPFORD WIVES (in reverse). Rather than go down a Goodbar rabbit hole of sex and madness, as one might expect--especially if a man was directing-- there's sense of Elaine's almost supernatural ability to wreak pastorales and witchy fantasy from a simple colorful town.. Her ability to, in a sense, turn men into sobbing wretches "Just like a woman," Elaine notes. Then adds "I should have known; he's a Pisces."

As a Pisces I should resent that. But maybe she's right. After all, pre-existing hotness + love magic exerts a powerful toll on its target. If you've ever been seduced and abandoned yourself by a creature so lovely and damaged she hung around just long enough to wreck your home and work you over so well you're instantly addicted to her worse than any heroin and how easily death might result.

Biller's candy-colored solstice of love magick also explores and takes relatively seriously the world of the Wiccans (presumably) and probably explains the way young teens tend to get pretty warped when they happen to live in a town hosting the Renaissance Faire, and how Elaine's cracked determination to live life as a fairy tale seems to create first love so intense it blows men right out of their shoes, without consciously intending any malice. Magic, horses, princes, Tarot cards, strange sex rituals, it's all dangerous stuff, Elaine. It's not what little girls are made of! But hey, what's wrong with living mythically?

Is magic just the adult version of tea sets and stuffed animals and dogeared Disney disc? or "moonbeams and fairy tales / are all she ever thinks about." - Hendrix

In pointed shoe fact, this is Disneyland run amok in a kind of clockwork counter to what the sweaty dying dad experiences during his princess tryst in ESCAPE FROM TOMORRROW. Elaine has chosen to live in a world of horseback riding, mock marriages held in full 'witchy / renaissance' acoutrements; quaint 'girls-only' tea houses replete with beautiful "Victoriana" trappings (ala other female artists who use Victorian fairy tale motifs to tell blood and thunder tales to make a Bronte shudder--like Rasputina, Josephie Foster, and Dame Darcy), a 'safe space' for women-only, with girls in long blonde hair playing the harp or--at the burlesque house--twins dancing in unison with feather fans--it all coheres into a narrative that takes seriously (relatively) Elaine's drive to live life as a fairy tale, and to use magic to snare her Prince Charming. The acting is deliberately stilted enough to make us every fully immerse in the narrative, which adds to the feeling of Tarot card predestination, as if this movie has been one long strange ceremony of feminine rebirth through the seduction and symbolic castration of various Saturnalia king sacrifices.


Despite the weird disjointedness, rarely has so cohesive a vision emerged seemingly full-grown from the head of Athena so to speak. that Biller seems to exert the same kind of creative alchemy that usually takes a couple, like Argento and wife Daria Nicolodi in SUSPRIA and INFERNO, or Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani in AMER and STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS. In that sense its closest neighbor, as far as giving it a kind of priceless fairy tale moral apple corer, is Linda Hassani's DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT, a film that begs rediscovery in the age of the kind of 'Sunday School Instructional Video from Hell' innocence that this new band of female auteurs is wreaking. Written and directed (and art directed) by a single female in a very visually precise Kenneth Anger-level mystic purpose, clinging to it way past the point of Brechtian dysfunction. The film itself announces in its own Wood-Wiseau weirdness there is a difference in male and female auteurship, and the polarity should be celebrated, even unto cutting out your male lover's heart and eating it. Or just looking at a painting of that action and holding the bloody knife in a rapture fit to unnerve Catherine Deneuve in REPULSION. Perhaps that's enough--I could have benefitted from an actual excised boy heart held up to Artemis in grand sacrificial tribute, but then again, I am a boy.

The main value here is that Biller can make a mark deep in the soft collective unconscious tissue that binds us along our collective Islets of Langerhans. Sofia Coppola came close a few times and might actually nail it at last with her upcoming remake of THE BEGUILED; Asia Argento was one of the first to try, with SCARLET DIVA in 2000, but you could tell it was a struggle, as if wading through the basement sludge of the male gaze like a harried plumber; Anna Lily Amirpour bit its finger off in the delightful A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT; Helene Cattet did the amazing AMER (2); Catherine Hardwicke did it in the first TWILIGHT, which was so good the terrified money men promptly turned the franchise over to male directors, none of whom matched the druggy electric drag of her original. Xan Cassavettes' ever-so-slinky KISS OF THE DAMNED is another where the men are arm candy Renfields in a matriarchal world held together by beauty, wealth, and discretion. They're all highly recommended as examples of women appropriating the genre in ways parallel to male-driven explorations of similar lines. Bitches may be strong in films by Tarantino, Rodriguez; Russo and Ashby of DANGER 5, etc., but are all susceptible to the male drive to action and violence. None would ever dare to, for example, show their starlet casually noticing a blood spot, inserting a tampon, and then later taking it out and adding it to a bottle of her own urine + a few wild grown herbs and placed on a man's grave, so a "part of her can stay with him forever."

If they did, truly kings of Saturnalia would they be.


Even more so than the all-female lepidopterist un-fantasia of Peter Strickland's DUKE OF BURGUNDY, an example of 'faerie bower cinema,' wherein chthonic overgrowth ensnares all chances for narrative phallic linearity, leading to a kind of feminine revere/stasis, mirroring the way sexual desire can hold a person almost in a state of paralysis, tapping into the state of powerless awe we as tiny children felt towards mom and her visiting lady friends, when we had them all to ourselves--and compared to us they were as giants--lavishing us with attention and expecting no corresponding action (we don't need to do anything sitting there in the dark -- Garbo's giant face loves us no matter what). We get some of that at burlesque clubs (where the male acts are all symbolically neutered - baggy pants comics or androgynes like Joel Grey in CABARET - thus posing no threat to our seat of pre-Oedipal spectral omnipotence). While when brought into actual play, sadomasochism and/or stripping often becomes merely tawdry. 

Not tawdry

I only refer to all that to contrast Biller's style, which exits the bower to pursue more the soapy backdoor histrionics of 'suburban swinger-turned-to-crime' films by mavericks like Russ Meyer, Radley Metzger, Arthur Marks, and Joe Sarno... These are male directors who love strong, proud empowered, sexually voracious females and who don't mind setting their stuff on fire wherever they're standing, turning any suburban backyard barbecue into a wild orgy of close-ups: batted eyes, licked lips, hemlines and sizzling symbolism. Her approach to female romantic obsession seems at first like, as one shocked listener declares, "Stepford wifey." But by turning the tables from normal third-wave feminism and acknowledging men are "like little boys" and granting them their craziest fantasies, a girl can gain enormous power and control over them, even to to the point where her absence can drive him to suicide. Considering the frequency of the reverse --the man as tomcat the woman, like Yvonne Furneaux in LA DOLCE VITA, tearing herself apart at home waiting for Marcello's call. That's a man's fantasy, the clinging woman issuing suicide threats through phone line apron string hydra tentacles. Here we see not stalking by these men but an acute melancholia -- her magic unlocks their "love potential" and the floodgates, once opened, cannot be closed til the whole lake's empty and his Piscean fishes flopping in tiny puddles of booze and old photos.
---

Male or female, fans of revival DVD labels like Synapse, Mondo Macabro, and Blue Underground know well the genre Biller is exploring. In particular, the post-Ira Levin (STEPFORD WIVES, ROSEMARY'S BABY) female empowerment through cult ritual magic sub-genre of the late 60s-early 70s feminist horror boom (see Bad Acid's Greatest: 70s Paranoid Feminism Edition). A huge staple of the late 60s-early 70s, ranging from American 'woman's lib'-meets-cult magic tracts like Romero's 1972 SEASON OF THE WITCH, 1976's THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA, and to French fairy bowers like DONT DELIVER US FROM EVIL and THE GIRL SLAVES OF MORGANA LE FAY (1971), LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL, and of course the works of Jess Franco and Jean Rollin. Biller evokes them all while never losing her own voice, one so strong I trusted it wasn't 'abdicating power' when the older coven male shows up like a leering dirty old Pan.

Anna Biller - thou art a badass

I was scoping photos of her for this post, and found an interesting response to a Coffee Coffee review of Biller's previous film, the lower budgeted scrappy VIVA.  Coffee's writer Peter suggested viewers be better served by BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS or Franco's VENUS IN FURS), presuming the intent on Biller's part was a kind of high comic camp, a satire of late 60s decadence:

Sexploitation films were based on real things, like sexuality between men and women. I would never be interested in critiquing them wholesale, because I don't find them stupid or inferior (you might). They are more for me like fascinating fragments of culture, all the more alluring because of their low status in today's culture. 

So again, you are making many assumptions. Those assumptions come from our need today to look back on history and laugh at it. They also come from a discomfort with the exploitation form because of guilt at male enjoyment of it. I am not critiquing those films, but I am critiquing cultural stereotypes. There is a big difference. 

The intention with VIVA was to make my own version of those films, to rewrite history as it were and place myself and my voice (as a female and an individual) within it. So in that sense it's pure fetishism, and comes much more from the place the original films came from (the desire to make a sexy film using fantasy and displacement). The confusion about my intentions may come from the fact that we have not seen many sexual fantasy films made by women, except by female directors who are working in entirely more "serious" forms.

Damn right, sister! Dig the way she defends her choices and calls Mr. Coffee semi-out on an ideological gender-based point, but does so sans knee-jerk third-wave malice? Her pride in wanting to make a "sexy film using fantasy and displacement" is a truly honorable ideal. Her response is free of browbeating. Such a combination is rare as buried treasure.

LOVE WITCH should satisfy VIVA critics as it's clearly a kind CITIZEN 9 FROM OUTER KANE breakthrough, its playful 'talent show from Summers' Isle' light/dark macabre counter-Christian pageantry mixes with genuinely erotic content in ways we don't really see in modern film; the closest we get is perhaps Shakespeare with his habit of fractal-dialing little bands of intentionally amateur-like players and diegetic songs deep within the main narrative. Shakespeare recognizes feminine erotic magic as a timeless (or lunar cycle-based) parallel to the 'normal world' of linearity and men. Biller enhances that, exploring the way becoming a man's every wish and surprising him with allure beyond what he can stand leaves him a sobbing wreck, and might leave her in the other room smoking a cigarette, listening to  his anguished infantile castrated bathtub sobs with the dispassion of Camille Keaton rocking in her chair downstairs (5). The closest I can imagine to one of her amazing psychedelic seductions is the opening swath of DUNWICH HORROR with smoov Dean Stockwell using that weird Corman prop from THE TERROR and TOMB OF LIGEA to hypnotize Sandra Dee.

Once upon a distant English future, or stretch of its past long buried in the bog and/or under small beach pebbles of Stonehenge-y time, savages in maskies roamed the English countryside, raping and killing indiscriminately, all recruited into this action by a giant stone head that floated gamely o'er ye mossy banks and occasionally spat them out more guns and ammo and booming instruction that sounded a bit off, connecting 'penis' and 'gun' and shooting life and death and all that like something scrawled by a drunken 9th grade Columbiner after he's assigned Jung's "Man and his Symbols," dropped acid with his burnout brother, and watched Wizard of Oz while ruminating about how no girl liked him at school.

That must be it. John Boorman has taken acid with his mates and watched Wizard of Oz while listening to the soundtrack to Marat/Sade. And that is how the 'henge was stoned.

So one of the killers, Zed (Sean Connery), sneaks aboard the floating head, kills its man behind the curtain (with his painted twirly 'Painting for Surreal' Groucho mustache) and winds up in the presence of a group of intellectually advanced immortals, surrounded by an invisible force field and living off the land in a perfect encounter group breathing exercise group mind mime troupe sense of order. Darned only in taffeta robes so clearly demarked 'Eloi' as to affront any rambling Bevin Boys' morlock club cocktail coterie's cognizance of couth, these fey libertines don't quite know what to make of our young thug from the other side of the bubble. His own mind's been wiped in advance so they can't scan him and find out what happened to the Groucho behind the floating head. Some of the girls, especially in the scientist ladies, particularly lovely Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) react with hostility demanding him executed immediately; and May (Sara Kestleman), who's definitely turned on with much less resistance, and also wants to probe his mind and find out what happened to the man behind the curtain, who was out and about in the world beyond the wall, arranging the pop control and now is reborn as evinced by the new womb growing inside the wall. Which is weird, as there are no children around --thank 'Oz for small favors.


The 60s was all about psychedelic openings (to free love and eastern philosophy and renewed interest in the far-out writings of "Crazy-Cat" Carl Jung) but this opening became as a giant mouth of macho hungry ghost gimme gimme, one of hairy chested Burt Reynolds guffawing. Nonetheless, self-awareness led to a form of macho beyond Freud's "one direction" sense of phallic symbolism. Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces man, it led to Iron John by Robert Bly and the men's movement.

To Freud, a gun was a phallic symbol, i.e. for ze penis, but Jung's break with Freud was that the penis was also a gun, i.e. neither was the be-all, that the idea of "the phallus" wasn't necessarily tied to some infantile anxiety formed at the first sight of mom's "missing" genitals, but that the phallus itself was a pure signifier, en par with the circle or zero. He couldn't know then that this binary of 1 and O was the basis for all DNA coding, fractal-like but he dreamt it and knew the collective unconscious bore it out with Excalibur, with the spear that pierced Christ's side, etc. A new, less ashamed kind of self-aware sexist macho psychedelia was emerging, only this version was Sean Connery in an orange diaper leaping like a macho Athena from the stone head of mighty Zardoz. 

From top: Zardoz, Monty Python, Wizard of Oz, Zardoz, Tron

As far as loopy but pungent satires on the vanity at the heart of masculine identity.  It's one fuck-all fractured crystal light show that--had anyone been listening to it at the time, instead snickering--may have woken us up to the value of death as the only key to life.


But at the time, which was 1974 to...  now (or later), we weren't necessarily ready to have our yarbles handed to us by the --we just saw Sean Connery with his black ponytail and traffic cone orange diaper riding a horse and a big stone head flying around and rolled our eyes in embarrassment. And then he's the only fertile still-erect male in an isolated society of enlightened immortals, his big red bulges gazed upon lustily by the gorgeous-eyes of Charlotte Rampling. Her and the others stand around in multi-colored robes in weird configurations that evoke one of those planets on Star Trek that's all Ancient Greece-y so old character actors can recite Aeschylus. Tacky, man. For some of us, the ponytail itself was enough to bid us exeunt.

But Boorman is the great chronicler of castration anxiety and it's perhaps that anxiety that kept us (okay, me) away so long. I only finished watching as it happened to be on TCM while I was in another room and half-listening, half writing something else, and gradually its savvy to the genetic con job called reproduction drew me in. Emasculated in jumpers, "them panties", or even (below) wedding dresses, Boorman's oeuvre never shies from (figurative) crotch shots (as in Walker's final punch to the gangster's crotch while that awesome crazy black singer with the light show rails on behind the curtain in Boorman's Point Blank [1967]). In facing the dread of castration anxiety so astutely, his films have Freudian breakthroughs right there on the screen. Burt gets a chance to shoot arrows at rednecks, and Richard Burton gets to throw Linda Blair against a wall and start to strangle her while half-molesting her at the same time. Running from the problem just gives it more juice--you got to clamp down hard and don't let go, like a pit bull.



Taken as an infantilizing hybrid of anal phase fixations, Connery's macho hairy chest and that orange outfit finally doesn't tap into the kind of revulsion most children feel for their own diapers by the age of three. Grown into middle-age, his infantile garb and attitude is as bemusing for us as it is for the immortals within the sanctuary. Personally, a vast regimen of SSRIs have removed 95% of my sex drive and I couldn't be happier about it. Maybe that's why now I understand how the UK's weird macho fey switcheroo makes boys into men by first making them women. Connery's Zed is somehow now all the more masculine for being so feminized, so objectified. Hustling the food in and out at the long banquet tables where the 'adults' discuss his fate (whether they should ice him or let him live), he's like puppy, his sexual heat is the equivalent of soft black velvet painting sad eyes.

As a side note, I used to love to watch nature documentaries as a kid. All the death was just fascinating, but now the endless stream of fear, hunger, death and birth that is the ecosystem of the ocean--my poor krill--now makes me feel like I am waking up to the fact Earth is a prison it takes thousands of lifetimes to escape--if ever. With ever gulp some whale is devouring enough little lives to populate a country. But it doesn't end, for gobs of krill come alive in little eggs again, just to be eaten by something that will itself be eaten. ZARDOZ makes me wonder: Has our slow poisoning of the seas been something the sea itself--the collective consciousness of all marine life along the food chain-- wished upon itself, the way the Immortals wish Sean Connery's big long gun upon them? We have to get past that tacky sci-fi cliche of the fertile man with hot space bitches standing in line for his seed, and then we get the true man-behind-the-curtain of that seed itself.  Man is here, screams this potty pisser lost in a eloi/morlock cocktail. Man is now! Guns are good. Guns bring death, and death is the liberator that will free the blighted earth from a doubling from its current 8 to 16 billion of our toxic viral footprint.


KING OF SATURNALIA
One of the chortle-inducing factors that throw people attempting to fathom ZARDOZ is its storyline, so straight up men's magazine fantasia as to imply instant camp. It's been used in everything from Ulmer's Beyond the Time Barrier, to Queen of Outer Space, Cat-Women of the Moon, Missile to the Moon, and of course Invasion of the Star Creatures. Here in this future the 'eternals' are all polymorphously perverse, way past such tired schticks as reproduction, death, or presumably genital-based ejaculatory orgasm. Never aging or reproducing. Perfect population control. The only drop is is when one disagrees with the many unified mind and then he is sent to some kind of eternal wedding/Princeton Reunion pavilion out by the stables, with other members of the clan, forced to endure old age (and the same old Caretaker-style records) for all eternity rather than reincarnate and halt their aging at the proper 'late 20s/early 30s' time like the rest. These rebellious immortals, labeled renegades, are sometimes guilty of nothing more than bad vibes (which unnerve their 'group mind), so their punishment is, in addition to not being able die or be young again, the relentless slow dancing.

To this pavilion comes Zed like an angel of deliverance with sweet death - which for those who've lived a century or more in this small 20 acre or so place, all around a lake - lovely land really, with an old castle commons that has what looks like bunch of inflated condoms (an effect I'm sure is intentional), it's time to go. In this way he's like the link between Conan the Barbaria (compare his sneaking onto the head and killing all aboard as if by habit to Conan and his friends' attacks on Seth's temple and orgy cave) and Alex in  Clockwork Orange, whose brute savagery is initially controlled by a brutalizing form of aversion therapy (which mirrors our revulsion/attraction towards the violence ourselves, our being 'unable to look away' as it were) and then by an undoing of that same therapy, to leave him better prepared to kill and ravage his way to a fruitful cure, a union with the Earth as it used to be, when savagery saved us all from tough decisions, morals, trash night, and guilty consciences.

It's a big Kubrick-satire bid, this Zardoz, fracturing itself along fault lines that bridge Clockwork Orange to Barbarella. It's an announcement to the world that he, Boorman, can be as much a macho priapic/cold misanthropic, less geometrically precise but still bonkers to the point of mind expansion and Dark Heart of Conradian consciousness as Kubrick. Can he? Maybe not, but you can tell he 'gets' it - he gets the deep shit Kubrick's digging up, and basically Boorman just acquires a similar shovel and starts looking on his own tract. He finds some shit all right. Deep, deep, deep shit. And he doesn't need a Terry Southern to apply black humor (ala Dr. Strangelove), he just gets it by taking acid while gazing at Men's Adventure magazine covers and laughing hysterically at all the phallic symbolism.

We're all hooligans in the nursery

Despite such savvy about the 'viral' nature of overpopulation and the paradoxical nature of symbolic castration, labeling ZARDOZ a masterpiece is bound to cause concern to those who trust your masterpiece-labeling. But this horse of a different colr can see to the giant chewing gum eye in the center of the overpopulation Tootsie Pop, and though '74 was a bit late to catch the acidheaded 'enhanced' midnight movie crowd, and though Boorman's pokey entry was yet too trippy/pretentious for the pop dystopia pre-Star Wars crowd (Logan's Run, Omega Man), hey, Zardoz endures, man. It's found a crowd with me, at last --it only took me ten tries, over the years. Waiting... for the key moment--I finally made it to the livin' end--not even noticing Sean's ill-advised dyed-black chest hairs and douche pony tail. I just had to be in the other room for the first half, listening. Absorbing my way inward, like a louche amoeba.
What I noticed most this time was the spirited fey death drive of John Alderton (future star of Wodehouse Playhouse) as Friend (who takes a shine to Zed and winds up ostracized to the Pavilion as a result of bad vibes) and the limpid mouth and layered freckles of the immortal's lead scientist May (Sara Kestleman - left), whose sexual interest in Zed is regarded with some suspicion (and veiled jealousy) by Charlotte Rampling's bitchy fellow scientist, Consuella, who promptly pronounces banishment to May and death to Zed when she catches them frolicking under May's magic sheet. I finally knew I loved Zardoz during this under-the-sheet seduction/analysis. Kestleman's freckles and big eyes and mouth alive with lysergic breath work under the colored sheet - using the confines of the sheet to subdue Zed - probing his mind for buried secrets imparted to him by the crystal, ahem, ball, to bring death like a savior. Just the way Boorman and Kestleman imbue a simple sheet with magical sci-fi energy, makes me swoon. Being immortal, we find out, is a drag. May's loyal ladies line up to get laid by old Sean, and in exchange give him via his (male) Alexa-type voiced crystal computer ring, all their combined knowledge so he'll know how to destroy the thing that binds them to their lives with no chance for true, real death.

And lo and behold, I really relate to a lot of the crazy split-subjectives and all the mass mind meditation and heavy breathing. I mean I really REALLY relate. (Imagine me saying that last part while rolling over you, pulling at your collar). The Immortals' whole vibe is one of those 70s theater encounter groups, or any tight-knit acting class or troupe that does little weird everyone vocalizing and waving their arms in unison outcasting or accepting one of their number into the group mind, the way EST paved the way for a billion offshoot 'encounter groups' for people afraid of being touched or opened up to get to their own heart of it all.
And for all its juvenile wish fulfillment, the one rooster in a big henhouse fantasy SHOULDN'T BE DERIDED as it stems from a very real archaic programming that nowadays is expressed only by Mormons, sheiks and walruses. To be the virile heterosexual male alpha specimen in some cool utopian colony - all the women young and nubile and easily put under the sway of your fresh pheromones-- all competition sidelined, no virile male for miles... ah, what a dream. For lonesome men on the prowl, hunting in pairs as young male lions often do in between the time the alpha male kicks them out of 'his' pride and the time they take over another's, this fantasy sustains them. We don't act on it - we know it's stupid to try and become a pimp or Mormon; it's a fantasy, a way to placate our archaic male drive. But we suppress it completely at our peril. Zardoz expresses it, while at the same time undoing it, and that's maybe the thing that keeps audiences away. Our secret memories of those old sci-fi tales and Heavy Metal comics mustn't be exposed to the air and sniffed over by super intelligent women who could kill us with a wink.

Dig this groovy statement by the iRing (their male version of Siri or Alexa) when discussing Zed's propensity for laying around in his cage, dreaming, a hobby which the Immortals find to be a huge waste of time: "Sleep was necessary for man when his waking and unconscious lives were separated," and that plus their longevity is a clear explanation for their enormous power, their mental faculty which gives them more or less the ability to age each other through group mind telepathy and live in a life of perfect order and balance.

This utopia is the dream of every loving group of 'awakened' individuals. If they have achieved 'total consciousness" meditation takes the place of sleep and almost every other need. "Second Level" as the Immortals call it seems to be a communal shared alpha state where bad vibes can lead to your arrest and aging of up to five years.

I've told you about those glorious stretches of time I've experienced when unconscious and conscious lined up perfectly, as if in sublime eclipse and I could see everything clearly with my eyes closed or open, all was illuminated and inseparable. Of course, too much of that leads straight to the psych-ward unless you're so charismatic you're covered head-to-toe in protective cult underlings who make sure your every step is strewn with roses... and if that happens just try and keep your ego from running amok and becoming 'that' type of cult leader, the male lion who boots the young men out of the tribe so he can marry all the young hotties. Boom, his clarity is gone. Either way, no eclipse lasts forever, not in these short life spans, surrounded on all sides by petty droogies and dimwit doctors. Such openness of mind relies on a complete suspension of all judgment, fear, and avoidance. This leaves you very vulnerable to oncoming traffic.



Let us return to the subject at hand, if you dare, castration - or fear thereof. Successfully completed reproduction, from the 'gleam' in your father's eye to your firs sharp inhale, spanked by a hand almost as big as you are, kick-started into the world like a wonky television-- it's one looong castration. The schlong goes in, bur it don't come out; if you have any yarbles they're long gone.

Emasculation and neutering affect our British macho man at every turn, from the lase
r coming right at Bond's crotch in 'ahem' Goldfinger to Clockwork's Aubrey Morris clasping hard down on Alex's niblik back at the house where he's spatchka-accruing to be right as dodgers for this after.



As Leland says Mesa of the Lost Women, this is my order: be nice unto all ages and sans sexual advances. The problem facing most guys is that when they're most desirable is when they're less likely to realize it, but also that--thanks to media--they confuse being attracted with being attractive, and the first problem invades the second, so that hearing a girl you like doesn't like you like that makes you think you're misreading signals. In other words, your ego is such a bitch it uses your own insecurity to turn you into a persistent douchebag.

There's the person who says no to his drive to go cavort with the younger girls, and the guy willing to ridiculous to his wife and every other girl his own age; he'll see them sulking on the sidelines, glaring from behind strollers, as he walks with a girl young enough to be his daughter if he'd had kids at 20. Who does that old dude want to be with, a sulky old cow berating and belittling his every word, or some starry-eyed waif who thinks he's charming and sexy, even if it's only because she has an unresolved Elektra complex? The Leighs and the Loaches trundle home, not forgetting to pick up bread and the Guardian--reading in bed to the knots that they keep in a jar by the door - whore is it foe, all while Kubrick and Boorman stay up 'til all hours dropping acid with these precocious hot geniuses and contemplating, not their aging selves in the ceiling mirror--not their crags and sags and graying hair,--but their eternal faces--neither old nor young, neither virile nor withered, neither growing nor shrinking, nor strutting nor cringing, but the eternal face, as frozen as the angry godhead in Zardoz as blank and meaningless as the Godhead in you know what (I shan't spoil it if you haven't seen it.) The house began to pitch and such was rich so bitchy he snitchy ding god godnd/fvstofrewu

When the going gets too weird, Zed eats a single leaf from Mama Mcree's psychedelic flower. And that one thing leads to another by a kind of parenthetical association that would be lost on American viewers the way it was me if I hadn't just seen High-Rise. But since I had, I felt awareness of some kind of weird British shared secret, the sort where psychedelic mind expansion, socialized education, and the BBC merge together to help the male psyche shatter, so that the phallus becomes the devouring vagina dentata instead of just being devoured by it, and this is truly the union. For your casual bullet had picked its immortal's brain pan destination before you were even born, my son.







IMMORTALITY IS FOR CHUMPS

The first thing the old man realizes--the old codger played by Peter Ustinov in Logan's Run or the old Bowman looking at himself in the mirror in 2001 and seeing a young astronaut staring back--is that all the young kids are reflections of himself-- two segments of a long, single organism--the head and tail of an ouroboros serpent, closer to each other than they are the middle. There's no escape from the void of devouring, and no one shares that certainty more than the old man entering the maw of the unborn child who just left it. Once inside its scaly tunnels, the 'I AM' part of the surviving soul realizes that even death itself is just a chimera, a tunnel on the endless looping track. Familiarity with acid's perspective allows this 'we are one thing, split into infinity to get a better look at itself' as almost a side effect to the experience of 'frisson.' We get to see how different it would all go down were we unfastened from the signifier-signified chain of structural indemnity and allowed to float free and easy in the zero gravity of Mad Hatter tea party disruption, where word association no longer has any relevance as a game or trick or strategy. 

So in a game of word-association, the word 'chair' doesn't provoke "sit" but "aced" as in "I aced the lane through the chair" (or "I chased the plane through the air" in Imbecilic) / and 'milk' doesn't provoke "cow" but a terrified scream of "gloves!" (1)/ as in an archaic memory of touching the fleshy warm udder of a cow once with bare hands at the 4H Fair) and "sky" doesn't provoke "blue" but "Skirl" etc.

Half the time, they're not even real words, but two or three words Frankensteined together in a kind of accelerated overlapping wave collision between free association, bad pun, and scrabble befuddlement. When given full controls of the voice, the subconscious can be terribly glib and--to a sober man--incoherent. To an incoherent idiot, however, cogent as the Dane is wrong. 

If you can breech that structuralist surf, I'd say Zardoz is a film that's the story of a male psyche having a split dialogue with itself and its own adult sci-fi pulp roots--the kind of 'adult sci-fi' that's long gone but was all the 70s science fiction you could ever see, prior to Star Wars and Spielberg. Of course its a dialogue that has no ending. It goes on in the hearts of bull dykes struggling in the heavy mantle layers of some giddy fake-Earth ending to some mid-70s episode of Charlie's Angels (the girl football team episode). (3)

Why and why not are inevitably going to be so linked as to be indistinguishable. Are you going to buy the next world a cup of coffee, or are you going to act sulky, alone, like a little bitch, until you're so old that it's considered obscene just for you to even hit on people your own age? A 990 year old in a 20 year old body we call a vampire, but a hit from the side -- end of knee -- end of career. We call that the 80s. Are you 'winning' or are you awake? There can't be both. Humility or cock swagger are a fine duality, but -- humble cock swagger? Now you're 'unified' and don't it feel kinda strange?

NOTES:
1. Of course that's a reference to Crispin Glover in Wild at Heart!
2.We've already talked about this when I attacked the copout movies Hard Candy and Teeth. 
3. I apologize that this ramble ends with a discussion of dyke presence in a girl football team episode of Chalrie's Angels episode 41 (season 2), "Angels in the Backfield" but it seemed trenchant at the time, to merge a discussion of men evolving into a male/female whole soul into a female-starring detective series from the 70s chronicling the struggles of a female football team and one of those rare, rudimentary appearances of lesbians. I stilck by it, even now, out of the hospital, and presumably all better. 

Val Lewton -- a man whose oeuvre of quite poetic B-movie horrors we knew even in the 80s of Central Jersey suburbia. If his movies were merely subtle and shadowy noir-horror ('noirror'), mere wisps of smoke through the threader, how come even my Journey-crankin' gearhead brother liked Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie too? I taped them back-to-back when they came on WORs Creature Double Feature and we watched them nearly every night one long ago summer, the fan on next to the window, drowning out the crickets,  and the harp and frond shadows whistling all around the dark verandas, or growls in eerie WMCA basement pools. Being 16 and an avid reader on old movie books from the local library, I was expecting too much at first, maybe, but the fifth time around even my brother was on board. We 'got' these two classics. They didn't shout and telegraph their emotions, they talked in low, conspiratorial voices, and operated on a level of subtlety that drew us in, leaving us suddenly realizing, as does the lovelorn birthday girl in LEOPARD MAN, that it's gotten dark and we're locked in with some strange deadly force. They chilled the blood but they were also deeply life-affirming --they cooled us along with the fan, neither one ever crossing the line between either 'genuine supernatural' or 'vivid imagination / demons of the mind" --in the process they tapped into a deep dream-like level of involvement - where most horror was like a crazy derelict shouting at us over shrill orchestration, Lewton's movies lured us close, with seductive calming whispers, and then suddenly we realize we're trapped, they have claws deep in our souls. Maybe that was part of their appeal --the low, quiet talking was part of the wartime experience. Loose lips sink ships! The guy on the park bench reading the paper might be a Nazi spy!


It being the war, when it came to horror the thinking at the big studios was that if one must make horror, make it hilarious, so that America might laugh at its Euro-thrashing boogeyman fears. Boris Karloff was on Broadway with Arsenic and Old Lace, and 1942's underrated Boogeyman will Get You at Columbia; Lugosi was chasing the Dead End Kids around moldy Monogram passageways; but at RKO, on the B-lot with Lewton and Tourneur, a new way to exorcise the horror of war was manifesting, a style the both looked forward to film noir and backwards to classic literature and ancient myth, and with a minimalist leave-it-to-your-imagination approach to monsters. The latter was something that we young Famous Monsters of Filmland devotees were initially turned off by, but then later-- when confronted with too many bad monster suits--we finally realized how seeing is never the same as believing; dark black shadow, is itself scarier than any monster hiding within it.

That shadowy minimalism in combination with the quiet whispering and the mostly-indoors filming, and the supernatural--unconscious--power-of-suggestion-genuine supernatural transformation aspects-- give these films a dreamy quality hard to find anywhere else--it makes them seem very personal. Everyone in the world could be wearing I walked with a Zombie T-shirts and we'd still think we were the only one who resonated with its weird dream poetry. It was just some small precious thing that spoke only to us in a 'psssst' sort of conspiratorial whisper, like some girl you meet at four AM outside on a stoop and have an hour-long conversation with in low voice to not wake the neighbor while you share a cigarette (and then you realize she was never even there - just a dream, your anima projected onto the smoke). I'm always amazed when I hear other people say they love these films, for I presume they're my discovery alone, and so perhaps do they.


That's why we fans--especially those who love both film noir and art films as well as horror pics, feel protective of them. I don't like all Lewton's later movies as well as the first four; I think it was a mistake to separate him and Tourneur after the third film, a mistake to start dealing with children (as in Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher), and a mistake to lose narrative steam by getting hung up on polemics on 'authority in tight spaces evoking madness '(GHOST SHIP, ISLE OF THE DEAD). All the tri-corner hats and clattering hooves and smiling coachmen (BEDLAM, BODY SNATCHER), make me feel like I'm being dragged through Colonial Williamsburg as a bored, thirsty kid with aching feet (an experience which left me with a lifetime aversion to period pieces and the smell of horses). For Lewton was clearly losing interest in horror per se, and whereas before he brought the classics to contemporary horror, now he was just bringing B-budgets to period piece classics, sliding in a lot of death and sadism in the margins and hoping the suits wouldn't give him shit about the more 'literary', less supernatural stretches Tourneur had been gone long enough that there was no longer real shadowy noir poetry to Lewton films by the end, just 'literature' which meant frickin' horses, children's diseases, and oil lamps

The later Lewton would have no doubt done an actual Jane Eyre instead of I Walked with a Zombie, for example. If only the executives in their infinite wisdom didn't give him such easy literary titles as Body Snatcher and Bedlam! Better they got weirder and more prosaic like The Thorned Glove of the Time Traveler or I was a Voodoo Vampire. 

All of which is a tortuously long preface to the discovery of two 'sort of' Lewton films made by RKO's other B-units but using many of the same people, same actors, crew, sets, props and ghostly mythopoetic flavors and signifiers from the first four films (all from 1942-1943) in the Lewton RKO series. When I've run the Lewton circuit and got to have more, and am eyeing the Bedlam, Body Snatcher last gasp with grim countenance, I'll turn to these instead.  By comparison, over on RKO's A-lot, Orson Welles' Journey into Fear (1943) is a more enjoyable Welles film (with its 'Mercury' title fonts and expressionist angles and Welles himself ) than one he actually directed, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). 

With Welles running riot in one area, and Lewton and Tourneur quietly making B-list perfection in the other, RKO in 1942-3 must have been quite a place; there was also, in 1942-3, Tom Conway as the Falcon in a string of popular B-pics, and some of RKO's own attempts to jump on the wake-of-Arsenic bandwagon. So it's natural I guess that there was plenty of cross-over both in front of and behind the camera, with--in some lovely instances--crossover in sets, writers, and tone.

So here are two I have found and folded into my Lewton box, if you get my meaning. None of this will mean much to people not in love with the breezy interiority of I Walked with a Zombie. Or--as that snotty Helen says in Cat People--I'm afraid of all this is dull for Irina.

It won't be for you though, will it? Shhhhhh.

From its crashing waves close-ups and swirling romantic piano music score, right down to the title font, the resemblance of Falcon and the Co-Eds to the opening of I Walked with a Zombie is uncanny; I only noticed it though as I recently saw them both--quite by accident-- back-to-back (1).
In addition to cast, font and mood, the figure of a gloomy fragile-doomed poet hangs over both this film and Lewton's fourth, The Seventh Victim. All three of them are from 1943, and two were written by Ardel Wray, a mysterious poetic figure who seems clearly to have modeled these fragile doomed poets on himself, possibly exorcising some doomed poet at odds with the RKO B-movie system.

In both instances, a poet is hanging around and wafting in his (spatious) apartment, clearly nursing a fabulous dreamy crush on some girl who's really a shimmering reflection of his own dream anima. In sum, he's a classic puer aeternus lost soul who Maria von Franz would probably reduce to tears within a single paragraph. Hearing the poetry of the dead man in Co-Eds (he was a teacher at the all-girls school, one of the pupils lured the Falcon to their remote upstate school to prove it wasn't suicide) we think instantly of Jason (Erford Gage) and his book of poems in Victim, the original draft that Dr. Judd accepts from him on their way to the Satanic mass, or thereabouts. Reconstructing the personality from mute evidence: "A man who perhaps demanded too much from people and to live in books to get it, who spent most of his time alone,.... who took refuge in his new imagination, how easily a man like that could be dominated by others." and "he lived such a narrow empty life that it finally suffocated him." Brought in by the girls to prove the poet died of foul play not suicide (but the dean is terrified of a scandal), Tom Lawrence (AKA the Falcon, AKA Dr. Judd AKA Tom Conway) nimbly prowls around the grounds, romances or confounds the endless string of suspects, and employs three singing moppets to shadow suspects. I hate kids but these are damned cool ladies, these 'Ugh Sisters.'

Throughout Co-Eds, a dreamy psychic student named Margueritte, with a dead composer father similar in temprament to the dead poet but more famous, keeps having premonitions of death and voices whisper to her in the wind to kill herself --the ghostly sound mixing in these portions--the way the whispers blend with the wind--is amazing go-crazy stuff, and for a supposedly grounded mystery, handled with tact and open-mindedness towards the supernatural mirroring that of Lewton, in who's films the real and the vividly imagined were never distinct (i.e. Irina is a cat, and a frigid hysteric).


Tom Conway seems to have been quite busy amidst the RKO B-lots, for in addition to starring as The Falcon he appears in both Cat and Seventh Victim as Dr. Judd; and he's also the surly plantation owner in Zombie to as a verbally sadistic (if not petty) plantation owner determined to take the stars out of sweet and serene nurse Frances Drake's eyes; there's a doomed poet type there too, his younger brother, a drunk nursing an undying crush on his brother's sinful wife, now a zombie.

Like Lewton, Conway was born in Russia (St. Petersburg) to a wealthy family that fled the Bolsheviks. Conway when he was 13, bringing with them with barely any of their vast fortune. It makes a perfect sort of entry point into the Lewton world (Lewton's family left earlier, but to Germany, so then they fled Hitler). Looking at Cat People now I realize that it is not really my favorite Lewton film anymore - it lost some esteem when I lost my own virginity (and stayed human). But whether the curse is real or not, I'm a HUGE fan of Conway's lascivious Dr. Judd. I'll grant you he doesn't really buy into her story and he should, because he's already losing his chance to get her on the rebound, but then it's too late; one certainly can't hold it against him if he turns up the following year after supposedly being torn up, to go around pimping Jean Parker and pissing off more poets in The Seventh Victim. 

Cuzza the war. With women doing so many of the jobs usually taken by men it's imperative to remember while war's mean and women suffer at the hands of soldiers and blah blah but once the smoke clears, especially if if you have non-invaded secure border homefront its a great time for feminist advances. With a good percent of the able-bodied men wiped out, let's say, the surviving sixes can get nines like never before. That's part of the noir fantasia we so love in The Big Sleep for example, all the hot available lady cab drivers, librarians, book store managers, etc. We think 'oh how novel!" now, but these films reflect a very real facet of life at home during the height of the war (just as the noir era--men returning home, armed, to find some louche mule kicking in their stall - Bang! Bang! Noir is born).


Astute viewers will also notice the school's main stairwell (built for Welles' AMBERSONS and used regularly by the B-unit, including the school in the beginning of SEVENTH VICTIM, which could well be the same school in CO-EDS if they got a mellower dean) with the stained glass behind it; evidentally thrifty Lewton and his art director found much good pickens in the wake of Welle's dollar-intensive bomb.

Jean Brooks, one of my least favorite actresses from this or any period but she was in three Falcon movies with Conway, and two back-to-back with Lewton. In other words no 1943 RKO B-picture unit was safe from her buzzkill presence. Look at her above there, at left - those frown lines from hell --seeming to be pimping out lovely but trapped Rita Corday to a concerned but horny Lawrence. Hell, you know me, I love most all women but Jean Brooks makes me furious. Was she around to make Shelly Winters and Bette Davis seem beautiful by comparison? Every time someone calls Brooks beautiful I imagine the lines were written long before she was cast. I just do not get why she's in these films --she's short, boxy, and dour. She's safely long dead from smoking and alcoholism and had no kids, so I don't expect any hate mail on this call. If you disagree, fine. But your glasses are dirty and your hearing is bad, for her voice is not as music.


For example: her sudden evil arrival onto the scene of the drama class that the Falcon is crashing is torturous - up to then we've had lyrical a capella three part jive harmony from the Ugh sisters, a giggling but spot on recitation of Romeo's soliloquy and so forth - Brooks wades into the scene like Margaret Hamilton at the Oompa Loompa-munchkin reunion bash, snarling viciously at the girl who, at any rate has the words memorized because she's reciting them with a wink in her voice, she's going to fail her. or telling the Ugh sisters they can be in the talent show until "they're grown up," when they're harmonies are super-dope, then viciously balling out a girl for not wanting to wield a sword after she has a premonition of death and 100% of her premonitions have come true. Brooks is the anti-anima, the shrew the Falcon, who usually cuts through crap like butter, is obligated to pretend is attractive, like if Shelly Winters trundled into the idyllic A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946 - below right) girl's residence hall to grab David Niven away from Kim Hunter.


I mention that film for two reasons: 1) the idyllic scene of an all-girls school/dorm engaged in uninhibited Shakespeare practice and other angelic behavior; and 2) Hunter was Brooks' little sister in SEVENTH VICTIM. Though Brooks in that film is decked out in one of the worst Bettie Page-banged black wigs in cinema history, Hunter is forced to constantly call her beautiful, which makes me wonder if my glasses are dirty. It's not just physical beauty I refer to either (in some angles Brooks' trademark "B-list Joan Bennett"-ness works for her) but the way Brooks come across in persona and acting. All flat notes and bitchy attitude, she comes on so unpleasantly it's as if she seeks to mock the script's constant referral to her charisma and ability to "light up a room." I have to fast forward not to want to clock her one and then fucking Tom Conway's Dr. Judd/Tom Lawrence falls for her? Prescribe her some SSRIs and leave her to heaven, Dr. Judd. Leave her to heaven, Tom. I'm sure Heaven will be thrilled.

I might be harping on this point so let me macroscope outwards, for in total, CO-EDS is a damn good picture, the missing link RKO crossroads between Lewton's horror unti, the Falcon mystery series, and--in wartime cozy spirit--the Powell-Pressburger movies (notably MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH, and CANTERBURY TALE) it explores the girl school milieu in a perfect idyllic space of 'not a girl / not yet a woman' femininity. Lawrence never seems tempted by all these colorful young starlets throwing themselves into his lap, but at the same time he never belittles them -- even the Ug Sisters are given respect, as in his engaging in a kind of casual spywork game with them. Even if it gets pretty stupid with the arrival of the Donovan and Bates, the bumbling cops who seem to have a kind of universal jurisdiction, and the ability to investigate murders without any hint of there even being one, etc. it's still a fine mix of ghostly/supernatural, mystery and wartime home front all-girls idyll.

Deconstructing the horror scene in the war involves the horror ban of the early 40-41s (a classic example of Hollywood not understanding the weird seeming contradictions that abound in viewer psychology) because audiences didn't 'need' more horror. Lewton proved that wrong, they needed the right kind of horror, something way more primordial and elusive than bombs and refugee camps. They also needed to be able to laugh at their fears, so horror comedy became a huge parallel to the rest, with Bob Hope in CAT AND THE CANARY (1939) and GHOST BREAKERS (1940) and, sort of BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU (1942), YOU'LL FIND OUT (1940) and the stunning success of ARSENIC, which kept Karloff out of films for almost a year (and the worst crime, not letting him come be in the film, so we're stuck with Raymond Massey). RKO finally loaded itself into the canon for ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY in 1945, providing a belated sort-of sequel spoof to I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, using the same fictional zombie-island of San Sebastian, bringing in Bela Lugosi as the zombie maker (thus linking it with WHITE ZOMBIE of 1932) and uncrating a pair of Abbot-and-Costello-esque comics (2) to run around screaming at Darby Jones (above- the skeletal tall black man who plays the main scare zombie in Lewton's film)


In addition to Darby there's a great, chilling use of the calypso singer Sir Galahad. His welcome song to the tourists, about how San Sebastian is a tropical paradise, gradually darkens and slows after most of the passengers have disembarked and left the docks, and all that's left are our two chumps, ripe for the zombifying. Rather than sing about paradise of the island, as Sir Galahad strolls behind them, the lyrics slyly shift convey how they should have stayed on the boat because the natives live in fear and eyes are on them already. But of course the boys are imbeciles, and don't think it could apply to them (Sir Galahad's songs are always direct addresses, which is what makes him uncanny - as in his slow ghostly walk across the empty veranda towards Frances Drake after brother David has passed out, leaving her alone, singing about all the stuff she will shortly learn the hard way, in WALKED). Though a comedy, these moments gives it the Lewton vibe. Also, it's entirely studio-bound (which you know I love). The front of the club where the boys go find zombies could easily be the same club in LEOPARD MAN or the same city storefronts once they return to NYC, seen in SEVENTH VICTIM.


As for the boys, they're fairly forgettable. The one guy screams like a hysterical baby the moment anything goes wrong, even while sneaking up on a voodoo ceremony which makes the panic of Mantan Moreland in KING OF THE ZOMBIES seem like square-jawed heroism. Unfortunately Darby Jones is wearing doofus ping-pong ball half eyes of the sort so ridiculous we wouldn't see them in style again for zombies until SUGAR HILL. But Bela is having a grand time stretching his muscles in real sets after loping in the dark after Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall for so long. The lighting is good and if it's not quite GHOST-BREAKERS it's not quite BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA either. Best of all, there's no Jean Brooks! So enjoy what ye can, landlubbers, for the war can't last forever. And you know what that means, scream like a baby all you want, it won't play once Johnny comes marching home, brooking no umbrage from 4F cuckolds who've had it too good for too damn long. Bray all you want, there's no need to keep your voice down in a shellshocked world of peace in pieces.

NOTES:
1. I thought I was the first to make the Ardel Wray connection, only to find Time Out London's Film Guide had beaten me to it, them crafty Brits.
2. Strangely aside from Hold that Ghost in 1941, Abbot and Costello stayed away from horror until well after the war (... meet Frankenstein came out 1948), preferring westerns, period pieces, and sports spoofs.

True story - I was staying with my buddy Alan at his grandparents' cottage in Cape May for the summer of '85 and they dropped us off to see LIFEFORCE, by which I mean, to see THE GOONIES which was playing in the adjacent theater of this old Cape May dual-plex out there - gone by now I'm sure, we had to buy tickets for that as we lacked ID and LIFEFORCE was R (we had to sneak across the theater). One of the last movies I saw in such a way, i.e. sober, a child, rather than a stoner college student. Anyway, we couldn't have known then that the film was the shorter American cut, it seemed put together by a sugar-addled Armenian with no regard for pacing or logic, never stopping to see if anyone was along for the ride. We agreed the babe was hot, but the rest was ridiculous. I forgot all about it. With the advent of widescreen HD however, especially now that the longer British cut is more widely available, it works. It still seems rushed for all that, it's now most engaging - a little funnier and better every time I see it. As with other 'Ten Reasons' films like DREAMCATCHER and THE LEGACY it might not hold up to logic's cold light but I'd watch it a fourth or fifth time over sober, logical better-made inquiries any old time. Ed Wood meets Ridley Scott? Yes. Anytime.



I should preface that, even for its longer cut, LIFEFORCE has issues: terrible painted body stockings over what looks like half-inflated sex dolls are used on some of his zombie/vampire undead, they look worse even than some of the animated corpses in Hopper's next film, TEXAS CHAINSAW 2. And the intro is pretty slow, though the VO about the "Minerva Engine" and its constant acceleration creating gravity deflects our attention into thinking, especially with the thunderous Mancini score, that this is going to be an old-school space adventure rather than.... what it is. I wish the score was more analog synth, not that Mancini's a mere Goldsmith wannabe, his score is full bodied and bold as love and way better than anything we might hear from John Williams (dig those groovy gongs).


For these alluring sirens things to work the girl has to be mad hot, not in the way where you can tell a woman or a gay man cast her, or the script was written almost mocking the star they thought they'd get (like Jean Brooks or Joan Crawford), but in a straight male way --we don't like hair all done up and frizzed out, that's a gay man/woman thing, that's just one example. When I see anima type characters, like say the weary-looking Liz Taylor in DOCTOR FAUSTUS, or Angelina Jolie in THE TOURIST knowing the overly-made-up, fussed-over extent to which they're trying to pass as irresistible then yes, it bothers me. But Natashsa Henstridge in SPECIES or Matilda May here, impossibly young, perfectly formed, as if from heaven's mint, then it all works and I mention all this not to seem sexist or ageist but because whether we're 17-18 (as I must have been) or 80 we know we'd damn our souls to hell and jump off a cliff or whatnot if Henstridge in SPECIES or May here asked us to. We'd have no choice. When Scott shouts in her face during the climactic soul drain, "WHAT ARE THESE FEELINGS?!" it's gut-bustingly funny, but also so clearly Jungian it's sick, bro: "I am the feminine in your mind, Carlsen" she answers. Indeed, she's what every straight man's anima looks like (one of its guises anyway --it can also appear an evil crone). Her (unaugmented) allure is so all-consuming to us as well, we totally get it. A lot of time she has no real acting to do but a wolfish smile and eyes that dilate and occasionally widen as if throwing a lot of invisible carnal force in these male's directions.

2. Ancient Alien Hypothesis explaining the Periodic Reality of Vampirism via Halley's Comet

With a spaceship like a giant polyp (or the hydra thing in NOSFERATU), and explanation that vampires are ancient aliens who basically ride around in the wake / gravitational drag of Halley's comet. The 1986 (scheduled) arrival of Halley's comet (which passes by Earth every 75-76 years) was prefigured by some mild doomsaying and sparks of sci-fi imagination (not unlike '2012' more recently) and also explored the in another personal favorite, 1984's NIGHT OF THE COMET. One or seven steps ahead of our current internet paranoia dot-connectors (myself included). Dan O'Bannon's (the co-creator of ALIEN) adaptation of British mystic Colin Wilson's novel is so adept at connecting ancient vampire lore with pre-Halley pass excitement, Jungian archetypal psychology, ancient alien theory and Bob Lazar's Area 51 statements (how we're a soul farm, and aliens want to make sure no extra-planetary force damages their harvest's 'containers'), and even Cronenberg-Romero-style outbreaking (the emptied containers come back and have an hour or so to try and 'fill up' again or they exploded in a shower of dust, ditto their own victims, etc. Thus....


3. Addiction 
The same year LIFEFORCE came out, 1985, saw Dan O'Bannon's RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (by then I had just started drinking and smoking weed-- what a year!), and as opposed to Romero's slower, less hilarious DAY OF - (also '85), there's a sense of real junkie madness in O'Bannon's zombies in both films. His are the only ones who talk, and who eat only brains, and moan for "more brains!" But what stands out is their crazed desperation, the agony that only brains can allay. This finds reflection in the reanimated shells of LIFEFORCE. That terrifying sense of junky withdrawal agony and its prolonged, gathering intensity is something I've recently directly experienced (what a year!) and can vouch for O'Bannon's zombies doing better than anyone, in both films.



4. Michael Gothard as Dr. Bukovsky
One of the few scientists in Britain's space building who gets the full May treatment but survives, he's left a shivering wreck, from a love and desire greater than any he's ever known. Having to explain that he can't help the investigation as he's too worn out from almost hooking up would be either laughable or idiotic in lesser hands, but Gothard, with his great deep actorly voice is masterful. Too bad he barely got to speak as the Germanic assassin in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY! Most of his other credits seem to be in long-forgotten BBC shows and direct-to-video OOP stuff. Sic temper brutus, Gothard, you're so good here you deserve better! Got to love his reactions to all the veiled disses from the other guys along the lines of so "you were overpowered by a cute young naked woman who'd just come out of a long coma?" And he's like "yes." You also have to like how his groovy space center is in, like, the heart of London, and guarded at night only by a few bumbling security guards, when compared with, say Area 51 and the military fuss we'd make over a similar alien body find.

5. The Col. Caine / Quatermass Connection
With his dope sounding name offset by his halo of blonde curls, Peter Firth (EQUUS) is in rare form as the 'what you haven't heard of me?' Col. Caine, the big MI6 or Special Service guy called in on these spook details. Once the space girl busts loose and the body count's too big to cover up, Caine's the man they send for, and we're treated to his spirited cut-the-shit solve-the-problem attitude with the scientist survivors.

Note: don't watch EQUUS (1977) the same night as LIFEFORCE, or ever.

Throughout there are cutaways to reaction shots so absurdly mismatched you can tell they were shot half tongue-in-cheek (I imagine Hooper just shooting the actor standing in the scene shouting at them MOS, "now you're scared, some bright light is shining, cover your eyes! Look! You're scared again! Oh no!" and them trying not to laugh and presuming most of it will go to the wrap party gag reel if anywhere, and then Hooper and the editors just going 'fuck it, let's use it.' Maybe these were taken out of the original American release to make it less funny? At any rate, I'm glad they're back.
7.a. Ellen, EXTREME masochist: The dead serious tone with the sexual nature "This woman is a masochist!," Railsback shouts. "An extreme masochist! She wants me to hurt her!" How he knows this if his space girlfriend isn't inside her is a mystery (or I forget). Maybe it's the David Bowie poster on wall, the harlequin decor like it's her junior college one-bedroom, bespeaking the nature of the nursing profession in the world of socialized medicine in the UK, where staff have very little time to mature. Railsback's abuse of this poor lady, all but 50 Shades of Graying, molesting her right there in her dorm room while Aubrey Morris, Stewart and Firth look on, is a true highlight of the genre.  Then he screams in her face, "Are you IN THERE???" - I've seen this movie a dozen times and I'm always in hysterics at that. Not to mention pretty soon he's pumping Patrick Stewart the same way.


7.b. Railsback's make-out sesh with Patrick Stewart, in whom the Space girl is hiding (?) so Caine and Railsback drug him so she can't escape. Wait, so she isn't bound to any one body (?) it doesn't necessarily make sense but who cares? Think of this scene as forerunner to when he channels Jean Grey's romantic goodbye to Cyclops in XMEN 2 and you realize old Patrick Stewart is the go-to sci-fi channeler of psychic babes!


8. Careening Momentum - with no adamant denial and military bullshit obstructing things (the way Qaatermass and the Pit had to contend with the dogmatic skepticism and paranoia of Col. Breen), no one challenges each others' authority or intelligence; the film posits a very cool boy's club network of brains and quick thinkers, from the astrophysicists flying American astronaut Railsback over to London the minute his capsule touches down in Texas, his partnering up with Caine, the way Gothard's Bukovsky carries the first chunk of the film once we're back on Earth, before Railsback and Firth take over, the first name basis with the boys in Britain, the crew of Aubrey Morris (govt), Railsback (astronautic / witness / the Mina Harker of the crew) and Caine as they jet around in the helicopter makes for some highly amusing and very British business. we're spared all the laggy elements, needing to convince the PM, etc. --yet the pace is never too choppy and forced. I like for example that all of London goes to shit in the time it takes Caine and company to chopper over to the looney bin and back. In other words, like only a handful of other films in its genre, there's a sense that events progress with or without our heroes witnessing it, and faster than they can really control or halt with any effectiveness.

9. Great roster of Brit hams and droll under-actors: Aubrey Morris (yessss?)! Patrick Stewart! (Arrrgh!) Frank Finlay ("here.. I .... go") --all sublime. The amount of first-rate British male acting muscle here is pretty substantial and I love little bits all over this movie, like Col. Caine's asking of normal questions we might, and the pained but polite answers of Gothard's Bukovsky and death-studying doctor Kulada (Frank Finlay), or the way Aubrey Morris' govt. man just rolls with the weirdness, looking up to these taller actors with a kind of puppyish adoration, trusting their thespian chops to get him out of any bad script scrape and just covering his mouth with a hanky when he starts to 'break' (as in burst out laughing).

A rose by any other name would still carry deep post-Giger fallopian resonance

10.The odd mix of super low budget with big budget sequences.  
All the money must have been spent out in space, the effects are all cool if it's a bit slow (and the British-style space suits evoking Kubrick more than Ridley Scott) so that by the time we get to the climax of all the dead hanging around outside London's Carfax Abbey or St. Paulie Girl Cathedral or wherever, London is represented by basically just one big alleyway of writhing extras, all crowded together to seem like all London's going up in smoke- again we get a QUATERMASS AND THE PIT evocation for that film too tore down a small section of London outdoor space to evoke the whole, and in the end, it's tough to tell which side won. The ship, full of captured souls like a trunk full of groceries, heads off to deep space once more, until the next time Halley runs past, which should be in a mere 41 years!! If I'm still alive, I hope they make a sequel, or if I'm not, that they 'wake' me up!

Amazon Prime just keeps getting better and weirder. Recently a whole plethora of great Japanese and Italian titles have come tumbling forth (just ask.... the Axis). So many it will take many posts to even detail a sliver. So let's start on the Italian side. There's giallo and sometimes Gothic, too many peplums (i.e. biceps and sandals) to count, sex, western, and cop buddy comedies, about a hundred ramshackle adventures of a big slovenly Italian named Bud Spencer and his blonde two-fisted compatriot Terence Fisher; weird Raiders of the Lost Ark action-western-sci-fi imitations, Road Warrior imitations, giallos, Eurocrime (polizetti), spy spoofs, peplum (Hercules, Maciste, Samson, etc.) spaghetti westerns, juvenile comedies, all in such vast array it's like wandering into some never-ending videophile fantasia. It might remind you of the first time you wandered into a mom and pop video rental horror section and thought you'd entered an alternate reality. So forget about Netflix and its 'originals' - Prime is in the midst of its golden age!.

That said, the golden age soon gets ennui-ridden. The best of the Italian genre imports are usually well known, while the dregs are dregs for a reason. Shot quick, cheap and crazy - the best way to consider Italian genre films are as halfway markers between the drive-in and the TV show, for Italian TV of the era was very sparse - barely two channels and two movies a week at the most. So going to the movies was what one did almost every night (I learned this watching EUROCRIME - also on Prime --see below). Many of the titles on Prime have, I'm fairly sure, never been on video in the states, and are probably transferred (incorrectly) from PAL. The widescreen look irregularly thin, or else comes cropped, with colors turned to muddy streaks. Some are in Italian don't have subtitles; some have subtitles burnt-in but are the English dub version. Some are so obscure they have to Amazon reviews at all.

But even eliminating the titles that fall victim to these issues there are still dozens of titles the average American viewer has never heard of or seen that look lovely and beg a visit from the curious traveler. So I've assembled one such dozen, as if donuts - there's around three or four of each genre -- three westerns, three giallos, three weird horror films, one Polizetti, one peplum and one sci-fi action. The juvenile comedies and Bud Spencer/Terence Hill joints I leave to God or whatever devil will have them.

NOTA: Each post details the story as much as can be revealed without undoing the precious WTF? element so key to Italian cinema. The musical scores are so key for Italian cinema, for they use ironic counterpoint, groovy jazz, and layered humor so deftly they put our 'telegraph' composers like John Williams and Howard Shore to deserved shame. I've assembled Spotify playlist with most of the film's scores embedded at end. I don't recommend listening to it while reading this post, I INSIST on it. You belong to us, Faustine! If you don't have Prime or Spotify, well, when some of these a trackable elsewhere I'm sure. Bon fortuna, Jack!

A parallel program to the Argento-Bava-Soavi school, this unofficial sequel to Argento's SUSPIRIA (and semi-sequel six in the catch-all DEMONS series), Cozzi rings in the third mother, or maybe the first, with a face and hands that are all grotesque pustules, who begins to take over the minds and events of all working on the horror film about her. Screenwriter Marc (Urbano Barberini) conjures up a treatment for a horror film about an evil witch named Lavania. His wife, Anne (Florence Guérin) is keen to play her. A local psychic busts out her original copy of Suspiria de Profundis - mentioning that this unfinished Thomas de Quincey tale was based on fact (Argento is name-checked and there's even some familiar Goblin cues); the psychic cautions about changing the name for there really was a witch named Lavania who can come back from beyond if her name continues to be bandied about so lightly. Yikes. Meanwhile, without even knowing the story, Marc's wife--busy with their newborn baby--starts to demand to play the role, saying she "is" Lavania. But what about sexy Caroline Munro, luring Marc into the sack for the Lavania part, and Michele Soavi himself as the director! The quality of the stream is dependent on the source which is pretty good for full screen, probably direct to video entry which, in 1990 the drive-ins were  all but dead and Blockbuster was still a thriving industry. By then, too, the whole 'fiction intrudes on reality' self-reflexive angle is pretentious (it needs to like dormant for six years, until Scream, but the colors are nice - when she falls into dream worlds the windows glow bright yellows, blues, green, and reds. The end goes the sci-fi route ala THE MANITOU! Crazy pops!


If it's not Goblin level, Vince Tempera's 'shoot for bodacious; settle for bemusing' score is certainly better than Rick Wakeman's clueless melange in INFERNO. Still, it begs a question: why the hell the name of all that's unholy was this film's title changed to THE BLACK CAT? There is a cat it barely figures! This same year also saw the release Argento's own adaptation of Poe's story in TWO EVIL EYES, and then Fulci did a BLACK CAT in 1981. I know Italians love to wall people up, but their obsession with all covering the same text under the same name is pretty stupid, and explains why it took me so long to catch up to this. Considering it has the great Caroline Munroe (never wasting a chance to display her knockout gams) and doesn't have Marjoe Gortner, I'd say pounce it up. (English dub - in full screen but looks fine.)

The 80s marked a drive-in gold mine of sources for the Italians to cull from, cross-pollinating genres to match presumably both the current styles and the props on hand. We all loved RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, THE ROAD WARRIOR, BLADE RUNNER, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE WARRIORS, STAR WARS and CONAN, so why not swirl them all together, reconfiguring the previous decade's peplum, western and WW2 props, sets and wardrobe with some silver spraypaint and football pads and leather studs? A few little adjustments and you're ready to get blown up by Fred Williamson all over again. We super 8mm kid filmmakers repurposed our dad's suits, army surplus, and outgrown sporting equipment the same way, so my eyes perked right up seeing Rugger Deodato's 1983 masterpiece, RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS. I don't know what possessed me to start watching it, but once I did it was so good it almost made me miss my AA meeting. Christopher Connolly stars as a mercenary Mike, who-- along with his fellow badass Washington (Tony King)--open the film by abducting (rescuing?) some well-protected hombre in a sequestered beach mansion, the fee for which is $50,000, which they plan to spend wildly after they take their boat down to Trinidad. Meanwhile, Gioai Scola is an ancient symbology expert flown over from Machu Picchu to decode a strange rosetta stone-style relic uncovered by a team (led by a nicely laid-back George Hilton), raising a downed Russian sub from a rickety mid-ocean platform. They raise it all right, but also cause Atlantis, in its protective bubble, to rise as well, creating a tidal displacement that smashes the platform, knocks Washington and Mike's ship off course, freaks everyone out with weird clouds, and activates some trigger in the minds of certain members of the populace, letting them know it's time to put down their knitting, put on their crystal skull masks, get on their tricked-out bikes and jeeps and kill everyone in sight.  And that's all just the first reel!


Say what you will about the idiocy and incoherence, the action is nonstop in the grand mix of crazy stuntmen, jungle scenery; Michele Soavi is one of the luckless survivors. There's fights on top of speeding busses, dangling from helicopters and endless molotov cocktail tosses. Underlings run around on fire, still blazing machine guns, survivors are picked up along the way and die as well. All sorts of great little moments just keep coming, and there's even alcohol and cigarettes.

As with all the best cross-genre Italian films of the 70s-80s, there's the sense they wanted to do more than the budget allowed so the big climax feels kind of undercooked but so what? It's still a thrill a minute and if you love JC's GHOSTS OF MARS (2001) you should know this has a strangely similar plot, right down to the archaeologist chick, the big daddy Mars type Crystal skull-led planet-reclaiming marauders, and nonstop stuntmen flying in the air form big explosions. One imdb user review (Celluloid Rehab) calls RAIDERS, Assault on Drug Store 13 - letting you know genius Carpenter fans know the score.

Guido and Morizi de Angelis did the 80s synth score, done in the hilarious style of the time. The Amazon image is a little faded and blurry but is probably as good as it ever looked outside of whatever theater would have it. It's never been on DVD but people clearly have seen it and embraced its lovely badness. 3.. I still won't see Deodato's cannibal movies, but in this one I can report that no animals appear either harmed or at all, but man you can bet some stuntmen got a little scorched.

Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY (AKA MASK OF SATAN) made a huge impact in 1960, and never more so, clearly, than with the Barbara Steele-starring Gothics of Antonio Margherita, and this is--now that there's a good print available for streaming--his best, clearly. Full of skulking camera movements as devious players weave in and out secret passages, crypts, and tapestry-bedecked boudoirs, there's never a dull moment even when you don't know what the hell's going on. I started watching halfway through (as I like the Bazin-y amnesia effect), then watched the beginning, which made Steele's enigmatic character that much more ambiguous. I recommend this approach to all of life!

Curiously, Amazon's version actually has burnt-in English subtitles but is dubbed in English and sometimes the words onscreen and dubbed vary in weirdly abstract frisson kind of ways, as if being translated by a nervous diplomat. But Carlo Rusticelli's memorable score (with its eerie theremin, slow ominous bass notes and slow-moving orchestral swells) perfectly situates the onscreen Gothic events. A spoiled baron, Kurt (George Ardisson) poisons all those standing in the way to the title and lugs corpses down masterfully-lit secret passages in order to be with ethereal (and long-haired) strange Barbara Steele. But the wife (Halina Zalewska) he thought poisoned and entombed disappears; does she remember her mother was burnt at the stake by Kurt's father for a crime Kurt himself committed? There's also an outbreak of (offscreen) plague and a WICKER MAN-esque final moment to center it all as a classic of its genre. Above all, both the girls have super long hair and super pale skin, long bare arms and hair down to their waist, wafting in and out of eeerily-lit tombs and corridors -- it's everything you'd want in a movie called LONG HAIR OF DEATH. As a Barbara Steele vehicle it's second only to Bava's BLACK SUNDAY. The label on Prime is the usually unwatchable label Synergy, but seems to have been updated by some secret fan.

I try to avoid the movies that get too misogynist or cruel to animals (the suffocated kitten in SHOOT FIRST, DIE LATER) so have to applaud the genial bear of a pimp played by German Fassbinder regular Mario Adorf (LOLA) being nice to the junkyard cat in Fernando de Leo's propulsive minor masterwork, THE ITALIAN CONNECTION. Fingered by the local mob boss as the fall guy for their ripping off the New York family's heroin delivery, he finds himself hunted on all sides as two slick American hit men are sent over to make an example of him and rattle the cages of the Milano chapter. Woody Strode and Henry Silva are pretty badass as the New York 'tourists' shepherded through all the seedy pimp haunts by Luciana Paluzzi. She was the hottie SPECTRE agent who got Bond in bed and then chased him through the Nassau parade in THUNDERBALL, that movie's main villain, Largo, Adolfo Celli is also here as the Milan don. Considering he's just one lowly pimp, silencing Luca shouldn't pose such a problem but they don't bet on just what a hard-headed toughass he turns out be, or maybe the local mafia is only good at tormenting women. It's pretty thrilling watching Adorf, this bulky monster of ugly-sexiness, bash his way up the chain, all while being fairly nice and good-natured with his women, even making non-business friendships with girls he's helped out of bad situations, like the sexy Maoist who lets him crash over when he needs to, and whose walls denote the key difference between hippies in Rome and Paris vs. San Francisco, the unrepentant Maoism; jer walls are covered with slogans painted on posters and it all seems to exist mainly for the trailer or for Fernando's Marxist signature ideological interjections;

Highlights include a great long chase scene when he goes after the schmuck who runs down his wife and kid. He chases him from truck to street, to truck to pool to street again, climaxing with Luca using his head as a windshield battering ram to get at the culprit. Eurocrime movies modeled after THE FRENCH CONNECTION were required to have super long furious intense chase sequences, but there's nothing quite like this. There is some unsettling misogynist violence as when the mob roughs up Luca's live-in prostitute girlfriend (Femi Benussi), pinching her and smacking her around, etc. but at least Luca's wife and child are run over cleanly and not tortured. And there's no 'learning curve' by whihc Luca becomes more of a badass. He is one, he'd just rather hang out with his broads, and what's wrong with that if he treats them right? the saddest part is the tawdry club with its low basement roof - and not near enough cigarettes. A great pumping badass copshow funk score from Armando Trovajoli helps it all along, and of course, the requisite auto wrecking yard climax, replete with death by claw machine.

this is a real man - nice-a to animals

Also Recommended: SHOOT FIRST DIE LATER; THE BOSS and for an informative and fun (albeit burdened by a lurid section on misogyny) documentary, EUROCRIME: The Italian Cop and Gangster Films the Ruled the 70s




One look at the image above of sexy Claudia Gravy, wining up a game of swing-set pit-and-the- pendulum with a tied-up preacher's son (Lou Castel) and you know that this movie came out in 1970, i.e. shortly after the Manson murders made the world realize cute hippie chicks could be more sadistic and violent than even Russ Meyer dared hope. BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967) and BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) were still huge on the Italia 'spaghetti western' influence-horizon, guiding it towards all sorts of free-love women's lib and psychedelic influences even as the horses, six-shooters and stagecoaches were being replaces by rain coats, razors in black-gloved hands, and chases through auto graveyards.

Looking/acting like a rabid Michele Carey (Joey in EL DORADO), and Tiffany Bolling (in BONNIE'S KIDS), Claudia Gravy as outlaw moll Mary is the best part of MATALO--bringing a feral quality . one of those post-spaghetti tripper westerns mixing the 'home invasion' amok Manson girl framework with the peyote western ala EL TOPO (which came out the same year). Fans of Seijun Suzuki abstractions like BRANDED TO KILL, or existential 'between life and death is better than either life or death' meditations of Boorman (POINT BLANK), Aldrich (KISS ME DEADLY) will find much to love. These movies reflect a time when everyone went out to the cinema so regularly, and films circulated longer in fewer prints, so that brave directors could use the conventions of the genre like a palette with which to paint wild new visions, the way cubists might use our familiarity with a flower pot or Mingus might use Duke Ellington. Here if it doesn't really add up to much, Canavare's use of slow-mo puts us ably in the distorted minds of his crook trio or the dying-of-thirst boomerang guy they torture. Weird close-ups, freeze frames,a swing set in bad need of some WD-40, and a harp too close to a billowing curtain rod, wryly tweak the Sergio Leone style while Mario Milgardi's Hendrix-style electric guitar score (the second best part of MATALO) throws caution to the wind. We've exited Ennio Morricone wah-wah land and entered the post-Manson / Altamont LSD youth scene, where hippie chicks are no longer just peace-and-love, they're high on acid and will carve the baby right out of your womb while singing "Look at Your Game Girl."

Corrado Pani is Bart, who begins the film grinning as he's led off to be hung in a small town about to be overrun by Mexican bandits. With his flashing blue eyes and self-adoring grin he cocks his head like he thinks he's Steve McQueen-meets-Adam Roarke, and he almost is, espcially in the nice juxtaposition of his relaxed poking around town while all around him his rescuers slaughter everyone but a confused preacher. Antonio Salines is the sullen, lovesick wingman who looks like a mix of Will Forte and John Cazale, wearing--as seems to be the trademark of the gang--a terrible blonde wig, sulking and scowling, and beating on hapless Lou Castel, due to his lovelorn longing for Claudia Gravy (who's currently in bed with the eldest in the gang, Phil [Luis Davila]). You'll want to beat up Castel too, because Gravy is so fine and so homicidally sexy, and == with his giant forehead and lack of firearms--Castel is just begging to be murdered.  Needless to say there's a gun vs. boomerang  finale, luckily the bad guys don't mind standing still and waiting for each boomerang to weave its way back around, before shooting back.


Director Dallamano got his own directorship after garnering notice as cinematographer of the first two films in Leone's big-breaking "Man with No Name" trilogy. He knows his way around a gorgeously composed shot, that's for sure, and What might be a weird-ass misogynist sex murder giallo (with a ripping Ennio Morricone score) turns out to be something quite different in this bizarro murder mystery, as a series of cute girls at a local girl's prep school are murdered with a blade to the uterys, as nasty a misogynist MO as giallo has to offer.



Sexy Fabio Testi as Enrico, the sexy (married) man teacher, as the culprit (he can't admit he saw the first killing as he was with a sexy student on a 'romantic' boat ride). The cops peg him as the main culprit. Was he set up his pissy 'androgynous-sexy' teutonic wife (Karin Baal)? It could certainly be a kinky sex thing as misogyny seems rampant in this cloistered Catholic repressive hothouse, but Testi is way too laid for that, the fox in charge of the henhouse who coughs out feathers at every lecture. Why do girls' schools even hire hot male teachers? Seems like they're asking for trouble, but it sure is fun when it happens, unless you're on the receiving end of the killer's gynophobic knife as an indirect result. If it adds up to little more than a surprising twist, at least you won't likely guess who the killer is. The melancholic Morricone score sounds in parts like a cat fell asleep on a mellotron, and maybe that's what happened; Ennio did over 20 other scores that year alone. Whatever he was on at the time, I want some, as his every note is so recognizably iconic, so perfect, even when whole passages are little more than atonal screeches. Oy, would we even appreciate any of these old pictures without him to lead the way?  The image appears sourced from the recent Arrow Blu-ray (which I have, and is recommended).

Typically complex entry in the Edgar Wallace-Italian style tradition, with the daughter of a jewel thief mixed up in a complicated web of intrigue, jealousy, mistresses, a beach house, fisherman, ice slabs, and the witness to a shooting being a blind man who heard the clickety clack of high heels right before the shots. Kind of on the macho side we alternate between the giallo favorite son, George Hilton slapping around peeping tom sailor witness/suspects as he seeks out who killed his ex-girlfriend, and the homicide detective in the white raincoat and his suspiciously effeminate young sidekick. There's cross dressing afoot and we know an ice vendor is gay because he never stops sniffing a giant flower. The print Amazon streams off is clearly the recent Arrow remastering or something and it looks divine, darling - which is 60% of what makes a great Italian film - the other being Stelvo Cipriano's swanky score --the high female vocals cooing wordlessly along amidst the jazzy drums, pipes, and electric harpsichord; the fashions all in that peel-away Diana von Furstenberg-esque zone of Euro-rotic comfort and color.

AND HERE, THE SCORES ON SPOTIFY, to accompany your deep elbow bending:

SEE ALSO ON PRIME (Vedi anche su Primo):
10/16: 13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies on the Amazon Prime
10/16: Taste the Blood of Dracula's Prime: 12 Psychotronic Vampire Films on Amazon Prime
12/16: I never said it wasn't terrible: 10 Sci-Fi Curious worth streaming on Amazon Prime

This being their first month without dear Robert (who died March 6th), I extend special love and encouragement to the TCM. So here's my culling of ten films worth taping. When I was a youth all the best, weirdest stuff came on in the wee small hours; I would get up in the dead of night and slink downstairs without waking my parents, in order to tape them (via ye old VHS), just so I could pause during commercials (and because our timer didn't always work). TCM still keeps this art alive by showing odd stuff at odd hours, but lucky you - your DVR or TIVO need never miss a trick. And TCM still, knock on wood, daily, is still commercial-free. (PS - Avoid QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE, Weds. night - for it will make you so frustrated to consider its written by Charles Beaumont and Ben Hecht. I never thought I'd say this, but Zsa Zsa Gabor is the best part. She almost provides some centrifugal center around which the terrible dialogue and hokey line readings can keep within orbit of some kind of soul. But the rest of the time there's not much to do except note that the FORBIDDEN PLANET costume box must have been stored next to a window - for they are truly faded and tattered).



Melvyn Douglas dissolves before our eyes as a French officer put in charge of French Vietnam's most sweltering prison camp. Adolphe Menjou is the scheming major with designs on Douglas' new wife, Ann Harding; he probably sent Douglas off to the camp in the first place, hoping she'd stay behind so he can get his dirty little hobbit hands on her, as he's fond of doing in these sorts of triangle films, but who can prove it? Harding's dad says she shouldn't follow Douglas into this jungle hell, but if she does she already has the only thing that can save her there, the 'prestige' of being white. She must never slacken her grip or lose her superior breeding! Never! The natives are a mix of African-American extras, genuine Asians, and ugly white dudes in a lot of make-up, all depicted as little more than untamed animals in comparison with the staunch white man and his wife. As with all the Commonwealth-set pre-codes, the specter of miscegenation hangs throughout!

A product of the relatively rough-edged RKO-Pathe studio, PRESTIGE has strong expressionist touches and excellent tracking shots: fire dances, cockfights, guillotines, whips, chains, and general white-on-black brutality, it's like John Ford on bad acid and malaria. Simultaneously racist and anti-colonialist, PRESTIGE should be shown in every college class about Vietnam, as a horrific underbelly of colonialism. As the screwed-over 'hero,' Douglas starts out wanting to be nice, but gets a fever, sweats, collapses, shakes and turns sadistic, chaining up prisoners, guillotining rebel leaders while devolving into a hate-filled drunk. Harding is her usual lovely, wistful self. Her soft voice ever crackling with dignity and emotion, as befits her 'white prestige,' she does what she can, but they won't even let her hang curtains. And the ending is intense, lurid, and nihilistic. 
Melvyn Douglas stars as a bit of a rogue in a publishing concern that--and this would be considered verboten by the early code--is co-ed-owned and operated by a group of men and women who share duties and power equally, mixing business and pleasure and turning it all into a kind of cocktails and ritzy MAD MEN-style bestselling author-seducing moveable feast. The women don't have to choose between career and romance as it's all seamlessly interwoven, noted with some interest by their star acquisition, an Agatha Christie-type who's visiting New York to sign a contract. A blown radio tube leads to conversation about a missing chunk of cash meant to be a retainer for a different author, but the cash disappeared awhile ago and they've been avoiding dealing with it. Eventually the truth comes out but maybe sleeping dogs should lie, and maybe they still can, or did, but with whom?

One wonders, though, in the end, what the point of it all is. Did playwright J.B. Priestley need to subtextually validate why he stayed in the closet or chose not to public with his mistress? Either way it's all very mature. The idea of women being totally men's equal in every facet of their shared business is marvelously progressive, and the romantic roundelay of everyone married to the wrong person all comes to the fore pretty fast. Luckily the cast is up for the challenge and then there are numerous twists and the ending is a gotcha of the sort I normally don't approve of, but which works here as a kind of suggestion that killing yourself might just involve 'skipping' into alternate dimensions, gradually becoming immortal by living several variants of your own life all at the same time, and death just shrinking the number of available dimensional planes down farther and farther, until one's next lives have already begun so you can let the last one of the old ones go, i.e. quantum suicide. (My apologies to anyone who read my initial misdiagnosis this was THE NARROW CORNER, a totally different film - it's CORNER threw me).

Now more than ever, and you know why, we need to examine the pre-code films of Warren William. Expert as a cruel capitalist, he's got plenty of moxy and wit and though way more charismatic than a certain president, shares his mercenary capitalist spirit, the sort that has billions in assets and billions in debt at the same time and you wonder if he's a jagged knife in capitalism's heart or its resuscitating defibrillator. My old art dealer embezzler boss was like that (I found out I wasn't getting paid for my last month of work when I saw he'd made the front page of the NY Post), and another example is William Powell as Flo in THE GREAT ZIEGFELD. History is full of such men, but the movies often don't know how to portray them and so wind up on the either/or dichotomy, either a Daddy Warbucks or a Scrooge, an embezzling market crasher or a hardworking tentpole of American industry. But Williams' titans are always more than either a champ or a villain. And in playing we in the audience as easily as he plays boardrooms full of filthy investors, Warren William straddles that / between either and or and rides it like a ripsnortin' stallion. If it throws him in the end, well, the credits were coming anyway, so let the 'little people' have their day.

If, in films like SKYSCRAPER SOULS and THE MATCH KING, he falters on account of some woman screwing up his circuits, it's always late enough in the film that we've enjoyed at least a few uninterrupted reels of pure Williams' champagne-and-cocaine trouble-ducking, the way he charms and disarms a constant stream of alimony-hungry ex-wives, bank examiners, potential investors, mistresses, and CEOS, having a great time doing it all too, until some innocent hick girl, a ballet dancer, a loyal secretary, or the sister of a man he ruined in s semi-crooked deal, undoes him, and he sacrifices it all so she can ride into the sunset with some dimwit rube of acute moral integrityzzz.

I've covered my love of WW last year in Warren William: Titan o'Vitaphone, but this time I want to take a closer look at his 'series's - for he's played Philo Vance (once - rather lacklusterly) Perry Mason (four times - brilliantly), and The Lone Wolf (eight trillion, averagely).


The Lone Wolf is one of those Boston Blackie-style things ala TO CATCH A THIEF where a prominent but reformed jewel thief is regularly swept up in daring robberies he initially had nothing to do with but since he was seen in the same time zone, lazy detectives just assume they should round him up, forcing our antihero-hero to lead them to the real thief or killer. Eventually the lazy cops accuse him of murder and put out a warrant just so they can get him on the phone. They know if they just chase him around the bends long enough he'll unearth the culprits just so he can go back to his life of uninterrupted leisure unharried. A lot of times it all depends on his sidekick, who has to do most of the heavy lifting. Eric Blore's a peach of course, but I've never felt a palpable zim and zoom between William's Wolf and Blore's criminal manservant and at times, such as Blore's bored ex-criminal determination to break the law (speeding to escape rather than pulling over when chased by the cops, even though they're innocent and hasn't been a crime yet), and habit of nicking random goods and drawing heat down upon himself--he's down right irritating. Add the relentless ambling of the cops who have merely to see the Wolf walk down the street past a newsstand's jewel robbery headline to be sure he did it, and it all gets annoying fast. When he's tangling with Axis spies, snaking through B-budgeted hookah bars and leading the cops like he's the hounds in a fox hunt, William can sometimes resonate. Other times, it becomes harder to care who's got the button, or the stamp collection, or the diamond or the fake diamond.

But what I like most of all Williams' series are his four Perry Masons, because he gets the chance to play someone who actually belongs at the scene of a crime, and who isn't the first person suspected, but rather he's defending the guilty-seeming party; overall, he's positively giddy in these films; his encyclopedic grasp of the law granting him an almost holy ghost power. Some critics decry the Williams of this era, the WB post-code / pre-war zone, but to me this semi-shady version of Mason is a delight. In the long-running TV series, Raymond Burr starts out more like William's Mason, ever a legal precedent ahead of disbarment or incarceration as he sets up deliberate dodges to discredit witnesses before the cops know there's even been a crime committed. By the third or fourth season Burr's Mason had become more of a saint, but in the four Mason movies William made for Warners in the mid-to-late 30s, he's definitely at least 70% unmitigated rascal.

In his giddiest films, the spirit of William seems to affect the movies he's in so that the entire cast joins into a kind of specialized mania. The quips fly a bit faster, the dialogue becomes a tad racier and more sophisticated when he's around, and, if you can keep up with him, the fluidity of persona and shifting interpersonal relationship power ratios becomes its own kind of Shiva flame dance reward. With William, it's all about the hustle and charm, the act, the moment, the liquidity with which he eats his way through a scene. It's Williams's 'nitrous' phase as I call it, for it's like he exhales laughing gas or his contract dictates a nitrous tank is always just off camera. In his Perry Mason roles, for example, the movie around him is ever trying to find its footing, actors and actresses either get on board the train (Owlin Howlin and Virginia Bruce are stand-outs in this regard, and--most surprisingly--Porter Hall) or get left behind. If you're a big fan of the long-running TV series you won't cotton to William's flippancy in the role, but there's no denying his momentum. Some of the Spudsy Drake stuff can get a little dumb and shrill (he manages to start on some mail order weight lifting program and actually graduate with his 'tiger skin' by the end of what is supposed to be one long night, as if the school's whole semester went by from midnight to two AM).

Let's look see at the best two of the four:


In the CASE OF THE CURIOUS BRIDE, Williams' Mason is suddenly an amateur master chef, ever taking over kitchens to whip up some impromptu ten course meal; a bemused gourmand tags along in the form of the NYC coroner (Owlin Howlind) who thinks nothing of bringing the entire gang back to the morgue for a quick autopsy over after-crab coffee. The whole thing seems to devolve into a happy party, a moveable feast ala the writing of Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Robert Altman's NASHVILLE. From personal experience, I do love that feeling, of running into all your friends wherever you go, and just constantly eating and drinking from location to location, breakfast to brunch through to late night after-hours drinks. Here the feast moves from murder scene to morgue to DA's office and the inner circle includes a reporter who's name is 'Toots' (Thomas E. Jackson), so we can enjoy dialogue like Howlin (clearly having a ball being a William wingman) saying "help yourself, Toots." But generally here are actors and sets that would never be so giddy and Altman-ish without William as the inspiration.

Ever the center of attention, the more irritating moments involve the big climaxes, such as the need for a medical examination to be going on during the big climactic denouement in LEGS, or the night court fronting of Virginia Bruce in CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS (1936), with Della demanding a divorce mere hours after getting married because Mason gets  highjacked by a beautiful damsel-- after insisting he do no more criminal cases, which is a bad faith streak going around in the mystery sets at the time, as each sleuth or crime doctor needed a fiancee making him swear to stop doing the things we're watching the movie to see, and we're left to wonder do the writers think this just badly-dated misogynist subtext ('good' women want to tie you down and stop you from having fun), a nervous producer's idea on how to placate the censor, a censor demand/request, or the writer's sly ribbing of the censors and their memos on how maybe these crime movies could have less crime in them.

At some of these we balked. I still have a hard time watching the first few FALCON movies from RKO, with the bitchy fiancee determined to usher Tom Lawrence into a life of bond trading rather than crime solving (except clearly the writers know nothing about bond trading), and his pained evasion (especially considering the few weariness of George Sanders, which conveys the kind of isolated anguish of a closeted actor being pressured by the studio into marrying some bossy nag he barely knows).

One subtextual aspect of the Masons, and this holds true with the TV show too-- is how murder benefits the world. The set-up is to of course make a lot of suspects for Mason to sort through: more than one person may have tried to kill our victim that fateful night, or actually thought they did; the one who delivered the last blow is--upon being exposed to light--revealed as evil (or else Mason immediately changes his approach upon dismissal of the charges to defend the person he just convicted as a clear case of self defense). It's as if the poker or vase was a hot potato, so it's okay to smash a guy on the sconce if he falls and doesn't die, and then if the next person comes along, and while said guy is prostrate on the floor shoots him, then the last guy goes to jail BUT if he dies from the fall, then the first guy goes to jail. In addition to the suspect pool, this murder is also very cathartic, the victim's evil is excised from the social order. It's as if this person is a straw dog soaking up all the venal odium our era needs to shed, then being slaughtered by a collective urge within the texture of reality, after which Mason eventually focuses and solves (as in the opposite of dis-solves), like rain putting out the blazing wicker man pyre. Lawyers with a lot of oratory, confidence, and grinning wolf delight were Williams' specialty - and with Mason he crafts a lawyer whose high wire technicality-skimming leave us bedazzled, even while we're in no great hurry to nail the culprit.  If the murderer of our sins who must be punished is named Jesus, whom else is William's giddy Mason but the pompous pilot of the Steamship Satan!?

Could our current Alt-Right Hype-Bart macho backwash moment be the last gasp of a drowning buffalo? If so, it's a comfort that what is best in man, his ability to celebrate and pay tribute to strong women, should be remembered and absorbed by the nation's upstart young things. The mighty masterpieces of switchblades and eye liner from Russ Meyer, Jack Hill, Ed Wood, Corman, Del Tenney, Waters, Arthur Marks, Sarno, and the like will live on long past that buffalo's panicked squealing, ennobling a new breed of female filmmakers like Anne Biller (THE LOVE WITCH) and most recently to my bemused, even grandfatherly eye, precocious maniac Kansas Bowling, whose entry in the burgeoning prehistoric slasher-beach party genre, BC BUTCHER, was begun when she was a mere prat, i.e. 17. Shot on bright and lovely 16mm, it's been released through Troma, and available on Amazon Prime screaming und soon ze vorld. Or not. As with so many of her favorite films (she even like Herschel Gordon Lewis! Doris Wishman! Eww!) the BUTCHER ain't exactly CITIZEN KANE, or even ONE MILLION BC or even CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR. But who wants them? Where da art der?

The shirt, sez it all

Instead Bowling wisely jams in all the shit she wants, including anachronistic punk rock interludes, a THING THAT WOULDN'T DIE-style romance between hulking prehistoric monster BC (Dwayne Johnson) and the vengeful spirit of the fierce amazonian tribal leader's (Leilani Fideler) slain rival. It's a matriarchy with boys way way to the side. Only a few get any lines, and even then they come off as gay (Kaelin) or outside-time-and-space. Instead Bowling's rolled a perfect 'j' of A+ on the Bechdel Test herbal nonsense. At 52 minutes long, BUTCHER bravely dares you to dismiss it as too short for a feature, as little more than a home movie made by some bonkers hottie of the type you probably swooned after in high school - cuz she was cute and liked all the shit the nerdy boys liked, so you helped with the camera and editing, but now you're grown up, and you like big boy stuff. Sure you do. It's only because she walked away.

We need girls like Kansas, they elevate the nerds and incorporate the jocks --even the bullies (like Max in RUSHMORE with that thug Scottish tosser). The Joan of Arc savior of geek kind, Bowling's arrival on the scene is like a nascent Hill-Waters-Meyer version of John Connor, with the Terminator foe being the cookie cutter indie horror with its endless deluge of two-hander captivity dramas, torture-revenge cycles, and washed-out, wan HD video patinas. The rows of Prime streaming are choked with such things. Seek it not!

Look at her there, at left - a kind of Fiona Apple of the post-Psychotronica future, a groovy schlockmeister Joan of Arc. Blossoming natural charisma when harnessed to democratic creativity (instead of the deadening 'bubble' effect) tends to rally the troops, so your response is natural. Whole cliques and tribes rise up around such figures, leading to the question of why and when will Bowling act in her own films as, just like CITIZEN KANE is really as much about Orson as it is about Hearst, it's clear how her own charisma and cool has made a slight fan bubble around what is essentially a home movie almost lampooning her own mania for carnage. She turns the audience into somewhere between an adoring and slightly senile grandfather, and the French troops besieging 1429 Orléans we follow her into the flames, but then find her licking the walls and babbling about tiny monsters inside her skin or worse, giggling conspiratorially with her punkette peers and looking in your direction. Just be cool, man.

We see it a little bit in SUPER 8, when the boys get Elle Fanning to co-star in their sci-fi opus. Girls like Kansas are the balm of a wounded nerd soul. If they can avoid doing something stupid, liking trying to get romantic, they can ride in her crew to destiny. There's always the one, like that bassist in No Doubt, and the more they whine and try to grab the ingenue's camera gaze, the more unsightly they become. Then they just... fade... away. It's the rule. No boy should ever be so dumb - for in just asking her out he dooms the entire project. Either she says yes and now you and she alienates everyone else in the cast and crew or she says no and you sulk for the rest of the shoot, deliberately sabotage her sound mix, and otherwise darkening your once sunny resolve. These facts are inescapable, my young friend! Bowling must be free to roll. The Bowling breaks, cradles falling, all that. Joan would have lost all her powers if she started shagging some young buck in the ranks. Maybe she did anyway, but if so - she picked one who could keep his mouth shut.

If you have Prime, may I suggest you cradle BUTCHER betwixt the also-on-Prime QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS, CAVE GIRL, ADAM AND EVE MEET THE CANNIBALS, HUNDRA, etc. then it suddenly seems rather amazing. Contrast, she is surely 20/20.

As for other films by women, it would also make a good triple bill with THE LOVE WITCH and #HORROR.  Like them it's a film that bravely does what it wants, far outside the normal patriachal linear structure. For a 'prehistoric slasher film' BUCHER is not scary and, for a mostly-female cast, not sexy. It's not even very funny. In fact, it's probably somewhere between an annoying slumber party your younger sister is having upstairs, and if you fell asleep flipping back and forth between TEENAGE CAVEMAN and BEACH BLANKET BINGO after a night getting drunk outside the City Gardens All-Ages punk rock show. If that ain't your bag, Jimson, just move along. If your sister is bothering you, put on your headphones and play your stupid game.

Bowling - center - a worker among workers

TRIBAL SLEDDING: THE CITIZEN KANE CAVE

The issue revealed within BUTCHER that makes it valuable is the deep resemblance girls at a slumber party or Girl Scout camping trip have with prehistoric tribes. Packs of girlfriends going through puberty, endangered by sleazy hormonal boys hide in the shadows of the fronds like sabre tooth tigers; strength in numbers as a large order of cockblockers and final girls run routine patrols in search of stragglers keeps the group secure. The cockblocking DUFF, hated by the boys in the dead of night, but thanked the next afternoon when no one's pregnant. Despite the undercutting and man-stealing what we do see throughout BC is a kind of monkey-grooming tribal togetherness very hard to capture on film. Here the tribal fire is a kind of safety-in-numbers, but going off to be with Rex or even to look for the last girl who vanished, is to risk never coming back. In the thick woods, 20 yards away could be like a different planet. But a lot of female-helmed work seems to really overdo the victimization - as if these women were dropped into a hostile male-dominated world from out of the sky, utterly defenseless, open to attack. Nearly every movie made about some  girl involves an abusive male, father or other, as if all women warriors are molded for better or worse from the hands of men, rather than each other. Bowling's movie is way beyond that. A boy or two might play a part either as monster or object of desire tussled over between tribal girls, but in the end the men are little more than objects as seen by a 15-18 year-old girl with a pack of friends, they might stab each other in the back, but they make up as fast as they squabble.

The key difference is that, precocious or not, Bowling writes like a 16-17 year-old girl rather than beyond her years as some super genius Paul Thomas Anderson-Richard Kelly type or 19 year-old who writes like a 33 year-old, the kind where high literature seems to underwrite even the expletives, a howl of sacral chakra hunger, the airbrushed-ELO van-driving older brother cinema vs. Bowling's punk rock little sister cinema. And that's what BC is, make no mistake. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The things that would please BUTCHER's detractors (breasts, gore, scares, terrible jokes) would knock it back into just another topless dancer. So the average Troma-fan may heave trollish comment indignantly upon its imdb user comments just as higher-brow critics climbed over themselves with loathing for  #HORROR  and before that, TWILIGHT, or any other film that explores female psyche in its menstrual blood-drenched fury, to suggest a man isn't a woman's whole reason for existence, to show, as so few do, the interaction of women with women in ways other than competing over a man or talking about a man (re: The Bechdel Test). Despite its problems #HORROR is film I'll defend any time, its great EMA score, its chilly post-modernist art design, the privileged ennui and evil wild child pack mentality-- the whirlwind mini-lynching the kids regularly engage in as they turn en masse against each other in turn before passing the pariah badge onwards like a hot potato, it all reminds me of listening to "The Shoes of the Fisherman's Daughter are some Jive Ass Slippers" in sync with a light-sound machine while on Salvia Divinorum, and that's not easy to do. I'd rather see and hear that kind of organic madness, cohering and dissolving like salt pool eddies in an incoming or outgoing tide, rather than some white elephant 'story' any day. With Bowling it's the same as in #HORROR only different, with more love and less tech. Her characters are united against exterior threats, they might kill each other and step on each other's turn to pick the activity for 'evening theater' but they make up too. It's the kind of clique-based insecurity round-robin so intrinsic to adolescence, depending on the group leader even as they undermine her authority and steal her man' with lots of little fights and making up ebb and flow of the 'pack mind'. Phrases are repeated and expanded on as if everyone is making declarative statements for the first time, then going back over them as if to remind themselves of their character notes. Chief Neandra (Fideler) for example keeps reiterating she already killed "the beast" so there can't be a real external threat (a split second flashback shows super fast that she killed a stuffed animal).


We see some of this girl pack mentality in Biller's LOVE WITCH where Elaine tends to go for men who belong to other women, even that of her first new friend in town, or the vicious feeding frenzy of popularity hot potato chasing in #HORROR, but Bowling's script, and the charmingly amateur but naturalistic and sincere performances from the mostly all-female cast lend it a unique warmth, where the leader, Leilani, might be a little too chest-thumpingly insecure and needy, she also can check herself and make up with girls she wronged; she knows when to take credit for killing a monster before or after it's dead, but also doesn't run from the fight. She knows instinctively that the one way to beat a monster in a cave fight is to pick the fruit off his girlfriend's dead body. For his beloved is none other than the girl Leilana killed and partially devoured in the opening scene, gussied up in a weird Vorhees mom and son FRIDAY 13th PART 2-style operation. In other words, it's true love between hulking monster and vengeance-crazed corpse/ghost (laughing in black and white nightmare flashbacks in ways shockingly similar to the girl laughing at William Campbell from inside his wet canvas in BLOOD BATH).


When one of their tribe gets killed they can only look so far in these thick woods  -- the corpse could be mere feet away and there's just too many distractions. Characters kind of riff on their own insecurity like the tribe leader who's so possessive and needy of her man, unbearably fey Rex (Kato Kaelin) a seemingly mostly-gay weirdo more playful and giggly than sexy; or the anachronistic touches like Rodney 'the Mayor of the Sunset Strip' Bingenheimer and his friend Duck-Duck appearing on a rock in full 'modern' hipster clothes to introduce 'the Ugly Kids' a proto-punk band air-banding their latest hit on watermelons during the tribe's nightly story time, replete with slow mo jumps in the air like a Monkees music interlude. The costumes are all clearly cut from the fabric store by jagged scissors the way a mom might whip up a Halloween costume never meant to survive the night. And the group is regularly endangered by their tribal leader's adolescent insecurity.

The primitive milieu certainly serves the juvenilia, as does the Troma label. In other words, though I find Troma's puerile sense of humor generally nauseating, I do support its inlawful unalienable right to exist, I only lament the socker loom smell that comes from (in my mind) unlaid white guys making films so they can make girls take their tops off without it being weird, a sort of parenthetical misogyny and objectification barely held in check by the guiding hand of cool Lloyd Kaufman. A lot of that might be my own imagination, maybe mixing up Troma films with Fred Olen Ray's snarky half-assed silicone and Casio pre-programmed drum tracks. Video makes me depressed so how nice that a whole past era was shot on 16mm and 35mm film, when this shit had to be hunted down in the loathsome part of town, where underground nights would pack 'em in on weekend midnight shows to see stuff like John Waters' MULTIPLE MANIACS (recently out on a great Blu-ray from Criterion) or some Warhol or Richard Kern shock litany you literally couldn't see anywhere else. A young princess of the post-Psychotronic generation, Bowling shares that perfect Michael Weldon mix of punk rock and grindhouse influences so DIY and FU as to inspire generations to pick up cameras and guitars and start bands before they even know how to play or films before they know how to shoot.


Thus here we have colorful dialogue fusing classic caveman epics with modern feminism, so the girls have evening entertainment with Anaconda (Natasha Halevi  - with the best long hair I've seen in centuries) noting, "I've been waiting for two moons for my turn in the evening theater" and then wanting to play charades, and then Leilani cutting the game after one guess. Oh the nascent humanity! Is it the movie #HORROR so desperately wanted to be, in a way, the KIDS of darkness? No. It is what it is, and for that alone it deserves to stand next to LOVE WITCH, DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT, and AMER as mach 7 feminist retro-throwbacks to the days of AIP beach movies and Italian Eurosleaze imports making strange double features.

Bowling is way beyond that kind of thing, and that's why she's so important - she's the antidote, in a sense, to the self-important narcissism of Brit Marling's self-important 'intellectual' sci-fi films. There's no way Marling likes Hill-Meyer-Corman style primitivist drive-in fare. She's too busy cooing over SOLARIS and 2001. But us, the male rows of eye stalks, who escaped into the movies back in nursery school and have been on the run ever since, we're delighted. Shit, son, Bowling even likes shit I do not, such as the Troma films. I respect Lloyd Kaufman, he's a true original and like Charles Band has his own gonzo flavor, the kind of 'sub-Corman post-Corman' entrepreneurs who carved their own niche with creativity born of poverty-necessitated improvisation. But for those of us who actually were teens in the 80s, taking first girlfriends to see BREAKFAST CLUB at the local Bijou, ugh, etc. it's something we're not always anxious to revisit. Nostalgia tends to drop off a steep shelf with puberty. But the movies that recapture the giddy thrill of making movies, back in the era before affordable video cameras, when a reel or two of super 8mm film could be shut and 'edited in the can' by weekend nutcases like my friend Alan and I, then dubbed, mixed, gunshots scratched on, and ready to show the grandparents by the following Saturday, those will always be in tune with the moment, for they're not trying to 'take us away for 90 minutes' but rather show us how to actually escape altogether. Movies like BUTCHER are the missing rung in the ladder, where a girl and a big 16mm camera in her father's Topanga Canyon backyard can be the Joan of Arc torch that awakens you from your Topps gum-stick slumber and into the Steadicam harness. Hurrah for Bowling then, for insisting on using 16mm, for bravely making a teenager-by-teen movie (rather than a precocious look at adulthood from outside it), for reveling in her own punk rock can-do aesthetic. Bowling may have a ways to go but she's already herself, and that's something. May she now join Biller, Amirpour, Xan Cassavettes, and Helene Cattet, to stand with elders Jennifer Kent, Karyn Kusama, Roxanne Benjamin, a not only more female-helmed horror future but a true kind of female horror, where men are neither the focus nor the demographic... My male gaze stands ready for its reverse gender co-option, let the scissors fall through the center of my evening paper. The ancient past is now rewritten in Panic hair dye. It is in good hands. The hands it is in are smeared in fake blood and they are attached to a real girl. She might be named Kansas Bowling, but she's not trying to be coy or Lolita-ish or otherwise conforming to some masculine gaze or nerd ideal, but she actually loves this shit - she worked all summer to make sure it was shot on 16mm instead of video. Her love of the trash classics is palpable in every junky frame.  I love that I don't even like it. It's the end of the free period. The dawn of the non.


RELEVANT:
"It is the waving of her Heavenly Hair!' The Sanctiomonious Sci-Fi of Marvy Brit Marling
Let the Darionioni Nuovo Entrain your Dissonance: AMER (2009)
Bell, Book, and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH (2016)
Take out the Kids and Tuck in the Trash: #HORROR
Prepare for the Coming of the Hillary Matriarchy: DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT
Babes of Wrath: Dangerous Women of the New Depression vs. American Dogma
America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the New Val Lewton
CinemArchetype 23: The Wild Child
The Beautiful and the Darned: Avenging TWILIGHT

May, a magical month on TCM, rich with Clark Gable pre-codes, surreal anti-war parables (all the rage before Pearl Harbor) and war celebrations (for Memorial Day). As Richard Dix says in ACE OF ACES, it's a wonderful war and I'm having a grand time!

And if war and Gable didn't send you, TCM has stacked the month with giant monster movies (the perfect summer afternoon haze-inducers).


Long unseen due to a rights dispute with author Antoine de Saint Exupéry's estate, Night Flight (1933) turns out to be quite the dreamy-poetic and modern meditation, full of little captivating midnight moments in the lives of a few pilots, wives, and airport officials as they begin the dangerous operation of night flying over the Andes. After nearly dying in the downwind between two lonely peaks, pilot Robert Montgomery shares a smoke and discusses the feeling of some unseen but palpable enigmatic intelligence and watching the breathtaking footage, we can feel it. If you crashed down in these nowhere lands it might be weeks until you see another living soul, but you'd never feel alone. This film is kind of best seen while half asleep in pajamas, if you will, capturing a vibe of what it's like to be awake when everyone else around you is sound asleep. Clark Gable--isolated in his pilot seat--a radio operator down below him passing up notes up on weather and direction--clears the fog and emerges into a clear night sky. A full moon above, he loosens up on the wheel, leans back in his seat, tunes in a radio station of tango orchestra music on his operator's headphones, and looks up at the moon and stars like they're a girl he's about to kiss for the first time. His smile is so wide and the moment is precious and so pure you understand the appeal of risking one's life in a rickety biplane just to deliver mail. But that's no guarantee he or any other pilot in this film is going to survive the night. Just our luck if anyone dies it won't be dopey William Gargan. All I can do when I hear him is remember how he goes on and on about how great "Babs" is (Mary Astor) while she's off shagging Clark Gable in Red Dust (also on this month) . Here he's got the divine Myrna Loy, and he leaves her for a week to ten days without so much as a radio. Meanwhile Helen Hayes is talking to Clark Gable over a late supper, but he's not there, is he? Her maudlin insanity is worrying to the maid and any viewer averse to overly theatrical acting.  Don't let her stop you, though. Night Flying MUST go on. (Full Review)


A ne plus ultra-Brechtian howl against the machinery of both peace and war, this adaptation of Robert Sherwood's play takes place on the eve of some great new Great War, and reserves the bulk of its preachiness for one little guy mouthpiece (Burgess Meredith). What it has instead is a  drunken trippy courage. Like The Lady Vanishes if the train never left, it's set in around Alpine hotel with great views overlooking the peaks, but also near the airfield where bombers begin to take off to bomb some remote village, only to come back and be surprised by a retaliation. Stranded there during the escalation of events include nightly entertainment tour manager Clark Gable and his gaggle of singing/dancing beauties who quickly attract the lions' share of stationed and/or visiting officers. In grand American tradition, Gable wants to stay neutral, but then who should walk in but the opposite of Ingrid Bergman and Viktor Lazlo, Edward Arnold as a stout capon-lined arms merchant tycoon and Norma Shearer rocking an awful blonde wig and worse Greta Garbo impression as his arm candy. She won't even profess to be the same dame Gable "knew" in America, where and when she talked all normal. They eventually try and come together as the bombs begin to fall they sing a song that would make proud Solomon Guggenheim on the sinking Titanic. Whether even that is enough to pry that terrible accent from her lips you'll never guess. Worth seeing just to see Clark Gable busts loose in his big number, mocking both Fred Astaire and the whole concept of song and dance men in his hilarious "Puttin' on the Ritz." Makes a great double bill with DUCK SOUP. (Full)

Rolling through the ghostly corridors of a lonely girl's small town 70s American mind, via director A.D. Calvo, rides a retro-homage to the young girl-sunk-to-madness horror films of auld. SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL (2016) exudes such a confidently lyrical, intertextual, and retro-pastorale poetry over its nicely brief running time (78 minutes) that one can forgive it not really having anything new or coherent to say. It builds up and works and delivers its scares and moments of quiet beauty, with cinematography that masterfully evokes the 70s work of early Vilmos Zsigmond and two captivating performances by Erin Wilhelmi and Quinn Shepherd. SWEET is a 'Shudder Exclusive' and worth the $4.99 a month if that's what it takes, as Shudder is like a benchmark of cool horror -- it's curated, not just the dregs of some company's catalogue, and you can tell its lovingly curated by fans in the know by their selection. Not to be pluggy, but it's relevant to the casket hand - by which I mean the easy death of 'currency,' that is to say any movie made today can choose to look older, like a tween at Forever 21, so to speak. The idea 20 years ago that a film would want to deliberately evoke bygone eras of filmmaking was absurd, but I'm glad it's here. I dreamt of going back and pretending to discover 50s science fiction movies I'd secretly made in my basement, but now I'm glad I just let it happen without me. Glad to you hear??! The past is perhaps the one place we can still escape the washed out look of HD video, even if the past is shot on it. For old 35mm film stock now makes even yesterday's crap look better than today's zillion dollar opuses. Everything is topsy. If it will turvy again, well....we're still waiting.



Sent by her weary mother to work as a helper for a secretive (and wealthy) shut-in aunt in her big, eerie Victorian house (above), bookworm Adele (Wilhelmi) tries to reconnect but the bitchy aunt insists on merely leaving demanding notes slid under her door. Is she even her aunt or some creepy monster hiding itself in there? If you've seen any movie made in the 70s, you'll naturally be suspicious. The house is big and very still and lonesome and the Gothic gloom of Adele's situation begins to get to us almost immediately. But Adele, Bronte-esque as she is, bops along listening to lit FM pop songs on her possibly slightly anachronistic walkman. And... wait, who's that chick?


It's Beth (Quinn Shepherd), rocking a delectable 70s midriff at the local grocery store and holding an apple and the gaze of a shop clerk; later, in a gloomy bar, the two girls strike up a friendship and soon Beth is dropping by the Victorian  mansion and bad influencing Adele into all sorts of things, until it's too late to extract her persona from the vortex. Not that we want her to, but what's the deal? Don't think about it, just enjoy the eerie vibe Calvo generates using little more than deep shadow--such as the dark, empty nearly Edward Hopper-esque chasm space of the local watering hole.




The 'two opposite female personas melting into one another' artsy subgenre of the 60s-70s, the 'wild free spirit helps alienated young wallflower open' lesbian after-school 70s special episode; and the horror 'is this all a dream of Jane Eyre's crazy attic dweller post-Lewton Victorian Gothic' and the REPULSION-ish "distortedly loud ambient sound" genre--they're all here. Fans of 60s-70s feminine psyche horror mind-fuckery like LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH and BURNT OFFERINGS will love, as I did, mostly, the dallying through the graveyard with their brass rubbing materials, having long sapphic gazes, trying on Victorian attic clothes, and trying to get a peek at the agoraphobic invalid behind the door at the top of the stairs, or the child's corpse in the graveyard. Just because loving these films you'll also spot foreshadowing and predict future scares doesn't make them less enjoyable when they come, especially as Calvo makes no attempt to hide them or reference their sources. The erotic story of a beach tryst Beth tells Adele during their getaway is lifted wholesale from PERSONA (1966), which is then seen, briefly, very very briefly, on TV, and further checked via some 'was their lesbian tryst / psychic merge a dream or real?' facial merging. Things start to get really real when... well, I've said too much.

Beth in bed at the cabin (Note Pazuzu on night table at left)

All in all SWEET isn't necessarily a game-changer but it's beautifully filmed and does strike the kind of deep mythic chord even quoting directly--from split-female psyche films like Bergman's PERSONA (1966), GO ASK ALICE, Lynch's TWIN PEAKS and MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001), cracker factory girl bombs like REPULSION (1965), CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1968), LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1972), BURNT OFFERINGS (1976), the "A Drop of Water" segment from Bava's BLACK SABBATH (1963), and of course the 1970-72 lesbian vampire 'Carmilla-wave.' In fact if you're a classic horror fan who know these films, it's pretty fun spotting all the influences and references. If there's not a lot else going on other than the trope-checking and excellent cinematography by Ryan Parker, who cares? Just seeing any movie that uses JESSICA as a blueprint for itself (right down to the brass rubbings in the graveyard, the attic antique dress-up/down and the weird ghostly whispers of her name) has to be doing something right. While these references are really all it has under its sleeve, SWEET fits nicely next to recent work discussed elsewhere in this site, like AMER, THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY, HOUSE OF THE DEVIL and IT FOLLOWS, KISS OF THE DAMNED, THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS, and Ann Biller's THE LOVE WITCH. The emerging retro-modernists operate on the principle you've already seen the movies they love, and rather than remaking them or working around them, they incorporate their direct thematic tropes like colors on a palette or burglar tools to spring through the vents along the smaller, horror fronts that uses retro-analog stylistics to intensify the melancholy of half-remembered small town isolation and in the process avoids the grisly gore or grinding sex (for the most part) of lesser mortal films, to approach things from a more dreamy mixture of after-school special and women's lib horror with sapphic undertones.

The trying on old clothes in the Victorian attic with a possibly ageless vampire lesbian bit was, I thought, basically over in indie film since all that great Victorian stuff finally fell apart (it lasted much longer than our modern pre-fab shit, which is why there was so much of it still around in the 70s when it would surface in films like Let's Scare Jessica to Dea

You'd think was a cinematographer branching out into film, a kind of Terence Malick of horror, rather than vice versa due to the continued emphasis on gorgeous composition and fading light indoors lit by a single multi-colored lamp, or a rotting pomegranate on a table at night in a thunderstorm, all twisty and alive like a rotting old Dutch master's still-life.

 At any rate, it's further proof that if you're a horror fan, Shudder is a must. (I subscribed via Amazon since it was already connected through my Blu-ray player). Why? Because its selections isn't limited to new or old, familiar or odd, zero budget shorts or old silents; if a selection comes over from the festival circuit as a Shudder Exclusive you can bet it's worth your time, or really really terrible but never boring or bland. A good example is this nod to the 60s-70s horror films of yore, mixing elements and themes, tropes tried and true.


Those who recognize all the quotes should have no problem respecting all this as homage as, for the most part, Calvo quotes his sources like a man, a man who's not afraid of dipping his unmoored eye down into the split-feminine psyche (even the tale of the beach tryst lifted wholesale from PERSONA has an echo--in Godard's lifting Batailles'Story of the Eye for a similar part of WEEKEND). People can argue about men so often doing split-subject female movies but I think it's natural, and too bad more women don't do the same with men, other than Kathryn Bigelow, whose HURT LOCKER is still probably the most profound movie about the masculine psyche since Hawks. From a Jungian archetypal perspective, our creative soul is always the opposite gender from ourselves, and in dreams very seldom appears to us in the same guise twice; the subconscious ego/anima of every sane man is an insane woman or vice versa; the Jane Eyre attic Mrs. Rochester gets wilder and more dangerous the more 'mastery' he exhibits over the downstairs. A fully-integrated self, like Jane, gets her animus (Rochester) in orbit with his own anima (shit gets complicated when dealing with your unconscious ego's unconscious anima -- all demons are haunted by their inner angel dream master, and vice versa). Things may wobble but they inevitably balance in the end (or else just keep wobbling). The nature of the universe, gravitational pulls spinning everything madly around on both sub-atomic and macro-galaxial reality level, everything interlocked and reflected so that a single  coincidental blip can echo across all of space and history simultaneously (a young King Tut gets a headache four thousand ears ago because you suddenly had deja vu when a girl fell and dropped her kite string both yesterday and two years from now ago). As the enigmatic Beth, Shepherd is both alive/seductive and zombie-like her motives stay shadowy even as we feel ourselves, through Adele, falling in love with her. She not only lifts that sexy beach narrative in PERSONA but notes the Jane Eyre reference herself. She's hip about the archetypal madwoman in the attic refractions, for what it's worth. But what is it worth when a dream within a dream points out the dreaminess? It's worth something, just not money.



But it's the truly unnerving work by Wilhelmi that lingers in the mind--with a face that seems at times very old and others like a child, she has a cursory resemblance to Heather Graham, like the home-schooled little sister.We admire her relentless good cheer in the face of utter ambivalence from both mom and aunt and wonder how quickly we'd lapse into morose depression in similar circumstances (or maybe already have) so her ability to keep trying wins us over and then--when she gets slightly bonkers--we realize we're already in too deep to escape. We thought we were escaping anyway coming here.



The only drawbacks to my mind are 1) yet another in the decade's apparently inexhaustible joyless HBO-brand rutting smash-cuts to signify a kind of depressed ambivalence (you know the kind, a girl and guy meet for the first time and we smash cut to the girl's expressionless face as the dude mechanically ruts at her from behind like some spastic dog). and 2) the Lite FM 70s hits by the likes of Classic IV, Bread (cover), Lobo, and the unfortunately-named Starbuck ("Moonlight Feels Right") which feels kind of like a missed opportunity. Music is so integral to doing these retro films right, and one dreads to imagine similar music choices burdening the amazing analog synth scores of Disasterpiece (IT FOLLOWS), Tom Raybould (THE MACHINE), Dixon and Stein (STRANGER THINGS), Sinoa Caves (BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW), The Gifted (SOUTHBOUND) and so forth, and I get all weak in the knees. I think of the score here vs. what it could be and I get a wee sad. Joe Carrano' relies instead high overly familiar eerie string sustains and scales, bongos and rattles making one wonder if they weren't secretly culled from some 70s PD cue library. Sound mixing is sometimes totally trippy over small details, then trip over itself on big. The tinkling bell outside the aunt's room should have been a big shock (since she's dead), but it's buried under a cascade of other moments and the generic mess of piano mashes and stuttering drums and Beth whispering her name close into the mike, "Adele..." So we're not sure what we're supposed to be afraid of - it's all hitting at once, tumbling in on us. We expect a bunch of deformed circus performers to come out of the walls with knives in their teeth like in THE SENTINEL or FREAKS.

But those are the only real two complaints. All in all I'll forgive it a lack of point or logic as I appreciate the lack of torture porn, imprisonment, MISERY-style sadism, and progressive isolation (i.e abuse) or moping. And I do love the imagery; it's not like the theme of doubling and splitting of the feminine psyche doesn't beg for and incorporate well all subsequent thematic variations so one can't fault it for being familiar at the expense of coherence. Let's face it, clarity is a linear phallic male construct and it ain't artsy. It's not like we learn at the end of VERTIGO if Jimmy Stewart has been dead all this time from a great fall (we never see him rescued). It's not needed--it's the difference between a 'twist' like in THE SIXTH SENSE and 'art' like in POINT-BLANK --if you need an answer as to whether Walker is alive or dead then man you're a square! The narrative here is similarly ambiguous, the way the monster of the climactic basement scene stay in the shadows, out of focus, looking like some weird lizard rainforest shaman, it's never clearly defined, was it even there --does Calvo even know what's going on? Who complains is not artsy - and he who is artsy, um... man, listen, man. I don't mind, man, that even unto the last frame we're never quite sure--anymore than Adele is--what is real, and at the very end, one more final reference, CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944, below) bring the Val Lewton savvy full fore. Situation complete. I think? Wait, what? Is that her, I can't even tell? Or is it the same picture from LOST HIGHWAY?


Shudder being worth getting at $4.99 a month is affirmed. One wonders just where GIRL might have wound up without it. So often these films get either ignored at the festivals (by distributors who aren't quite sure how to market them), or bought up and then relegated to the shelves for years by groups like Lions Gate or IFC, when the person who bought the rights leaves the firm before he or she can figure out how best to monetize it. Or some brave executive demands it make sense or have a point before sinking advertising into it. Shudder is there to do a rare and important job, to actually pay attention to the quality of what they're getting rather than what they think they can promote. Not to say there ain't a shair fare of shiite, but Satan bless them, now and forever. In our loneliness and despair, the devil sent us a friend. Whether or not this Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl is real or just a homicidal amalgam of past images, reflections and hazy memories, riffs on photos both still and in motion, we'll take her.

America needs a hero again, c'mon back Rubber Ducky 10-4 and remember that song "Convoy" by ole Cash McCall. Sure, now that the trucker craze is decades gone and it just sounds like some grizzled old Marlboro man babbling into his receiver while a Curtis Mayfield instrumental plays behind him on the FM dial, but in 1975-6 we had a great big Convoy haulin' ass up the charts until it became the hood ornament on a full-on cross-country trucker fad. It was the kind of thing we all heard on the radio in our parents' car nonstop and either loved or ignored (we didn't really 'hate' things in the 70s). If we ever take moment from the daily din of 'Civil War Mach 2' perhaps we can all, regardless of the color of our state, listen to old McCall warn fellow drivers about the bears, and remember how, a mere 40-ish odd years ago, we all loved the same song, hated the same thing (the highway patrol), dreamt the same dreams, and drank the same beer while watching the same sunset, and then one last thing we did together: we avoided the 1978 movie version of McCall's song, Convoy when it finally came out. Because when a craze dies down in America, we become kind of ashamed and remorseful for letting ourselves get so carried away by the accoutrements of the open road. Our fuzzy dice hood ornament stayed but the CB and fuzzbusters quietly wound up in the closet, where for all I know they still are. Let me go check. BRB

Well, I don't know where they are, but if we're ever going to get ourselves together again we need to remember we once had them and not let alarmist hysteric news cycle warmongers and shadowy Russian puppets tear us asunder. The Rooskies and a billionaire Aussie are using our own patriotism, educational system, and freedom of speech against us, c'mon back! We're gonna need to use our CBs and that old trucker code to stop them, as they're listening in on our phones, man.

But yeah, the movie CONVOY, big brother get your ears on.

There was another big thing in the 70s, a kind of collective love for car radio songs, crazes to the point movie versions of goddamn songs were commissioned. But the more we pull a song to us the harder we push it away later, so the movie inevitably sucked and our bombed and today only a few of us remember they even existed. Take the more northern state-style 'softie' radio obsession that came upon as after McCall's song had died away, Debbie Boone's 1977 hit "You Light Up My Life." Whole families would pull over when "Light" came on the car radio, and cry in unison, mine included, when that damn song came on. A Light up my Life movie was immediately commissioned, producers ill-advisedly presuming America wouldn't be long sick of the emotional hit by the time the film came out later in the year.

We were. And to this day no one has ever seen You Light Up My Life.

But Convoy (1978) had more than a feelin', by which I mean Peckinpah directing, which meant slow-mo bar fights. It came out three years after the song had been forgotten. Emotion didn't enter into it, not the sappy kind anyway, only a comforting feeling of strength and solidarity with the truckers of the open road. It sat in our minds next to Burt Reynolds' middle finger and our ability to get truckers to honk real loud if we turned around and made a 'toot-toot' gesture as we passed them. The real appeal for us suburban kids, though, was the novelty of the CB radio and all its crazy code words: You could get on there and play talk radio DJ, and more importantly tip off the reverse going traffic if you spotted a 'bear in the woods' i.e. a speed trap waiting for traffic on the other side. The automotive store became a kind of secondary Spencer Gifts. We eyed the Playboy bunny mud flaps and bought novelty rearview ornaments to hang over our beds like dreamcatchers; we carried red bandanas in back pockets, and wore trucker caps with lewd slogans; Detroit's 70s muscle cars were gleaming in the driveways of older teenagers who'd give us rides if asked. We all wanted a Trans-Am or Firebird or Porsche. We'd sit in our sixth grade class wearing black driving gloves, just in case. Cooler parents got radar detectors for Christmas and whole families became willing outlaws on the highway. Sugarland Express (1974) and Vanishing Point (1971) tapped into the whole "bigger than one rebel individual" cause thing, with everyday disgruntled citizens joining in the rally, usually via a clued-in DJ. By the time Convoy rolled off the line it rode alongside High-Ballin' and Every Which Way But Loose in choking on the dust of Smokey, Handle with Care, Breaker Breaker, High-Ballin', White Line Fever.... the junkyard in the back of Amazon Prime streaming is laden with them. Convoy found the trend already receding in the rearview of prime time TV, which comedy car chase shows like BJ and the Bear, Dukes of Hazzard and TV movies like The Great Smokey Road Block and Flatbed Annie and Sweetie Pie scavenging the Nielsen cartilage.

I never really had more than a fleeting yen for the trucker life back, myself, as a grade schooler in the 70s and was horrified by that cropped afro look rocked by Ali McGraw in the Convoy commercials, not that there were many, but they played here and there during Saturday morning cartoons. The trucker craze was ending by then, and so the movie seemed like that straggler who shows up at your party after it's already over and you're in bed, but he's drunk and laughing at his own jokes and brought whiskey so you wake up and entertain him for five minutes, then chase him out warning him not to wake the neighbors but two hours later you wake up again and there he is... on your couch watching Mr. Green Jeans and smoking cigarettes, or worse, arrested out on the front lawn after neighbors had to call the cops. Typical.

Still, Pauline Kael defended it, and 38 odd years later, that was enough:

"Peckinpah uses the big rigs anthropomorphically, and while watching this picture, you recover the feelings you had as a child about the power and size and noise of trucks, and their bright, distinctive colors. Graeme Clifford's editing provides fast, hypnotic rhythms, and sequences with the trucks low in the frame and most of the image given over to skies with brilliant white clouds are poetic gestures, like passages in Dovzhenko. As a horny trucker, Kris Kristofferson lacks the common touch that might have given the movie some centrifugal force, though he's as majestic-looking as the big trucks. 

Hell, forget it. As Kristofferson might say, "Dovzhenko, my ass!" But I am a Pauline Kael disciple and thanks her odd associations and my man crush on Kristofferson, for better or worse, I have joined the Convoy. Wanna ride with the Duck, come on back? Then crank up your CB for maximum Bear in the Air awareness. Yeah. right.

Burt Young - the king of country

Kristofferson's handle is 'the Duck' and despite the name, he looks, talks and acts like real live trucker might, and is the only member of the main cast who does. Peckinpah clearly doesn't know much about the trucker red state mystique, so for casting didn't look farther than the NY Actor's Studio: Queens-born Burt Young (handle: "Love Machine") is about as cross-country trucjer as a Nathan's Famous egg cream. When he delivers lines like "Long highways sure grind the souls off us cowfolks," you wonder if it's supposed to be a joke --if it is, it's flat as six week-old soda. Couldn't Peckinpah find real country boys to ride these rigs instead of a bunch of NYC character actors? Other local boys include Brooklyn's own Franklin Ajaye (he played Maya Rudolph's Quincy Jones-esque dad in Bridesmaidsis) is Spider Mike; Ernest "Fatso Jetson" Borgnine is "Cottonmouth," the Ahab-esque traffic copper trying to get Duck, Machine and their Spider Mike to speed past him by talking trucker code on the CB in order to  then shake them all down fifty bucks each. This works so well old Cottonmouth shows up an hour later to shake down Spider Mike at a crowded diner right there in public, which is beyond idiotic, like getting away with stealing someone's wallet, then following him into a crowd and shooting him in broad daylight for not having more money in it.

In sum, Peckinpah ain't thinking things through. Is he even reading his own rewrites? Maybe he can't. Maybe it's the booze. Hell yeah, it's the booze. Sam likes a drinker two. And the truckers need a reason to be chased by the law of course, just as Burt Reynolds was chased by Jackie Gleeson for the shadiest of reasons in Smokey and the Bandit -(but Gleeson had such a grand time that the fat and sassy Southern sheriff became a comic foil for every subsequent picture ever made that has a fast car in it. The Fat Sheriff archetype even made his way into Bond films, a mere four years earlier. (1)

Life sure happens fast. The truckers all become outlaws automatically, never bothering to question any plot device that helps them finally escape that tedious truck stop fight shoot. Duck picks up this close-cropped perm-fro'd Ali McGraw on the way out and she becomes his chronicler with her fancy camera or something. She's still gorgeous but seeing her close cropped permed hair proves dispiriting. It's even more of a bummer than Rita Hayworth's blonde crop in Lady from Shanghai (1), a childish churlish directorial 'bad hair day' decision made Peckinpah seem blind to his own ego (did McGraw reject his sexual advance or sometthing?). As Vincent Canby wrote at the time, "To transform a naturally beautiful woman into a figure of such androgyny seems, at best, short-sighted; at worst, it's mean-spirited."

Don't mean to shit on this otherwise interesting flick, but considering the amount of shitting old Sam does throughout, it seems the thing to do. He does manage some great stretches of rapid editing of Peckinpah 1970s midwestern small town America, the faces of a multi-culti and generational cast -- a lot of whom look and feel like real people (ala Altman's Nashville). Where the average schmuck would just film a truck smashing through a celebrating crew of mourners at a motorized funeral, Peckinpah flips rapidly over a series of young and old faces all drinking and smoking in the proximity of flags and it sure as hell don't feel like no damned jeans commercial. Feels authentic - but without Easy Rider's redneck-demonizing or Altman's tacky mummery, or Smokey and the Bandit's lecherous bouncing.


Then again, it also lack Rider's revolutionary spirit, Nashville's moveable feast community,   made Smokey and the Bandit's star power and casting. In the latter, Jerry Reed, Burt Reynolds, and Sally Field brought out a special something in each other hard to duplicate without genuine affection: Reynolds might come off macho for the press, but he loves (and is not threatened by) strong women; and Jerry Reed well, he loves his hound dawg, Fred. All four of them looked authentic, like they could have driven straight up from Florida or Texas. The only authentic looking 'red state American' in Convoy on the other hand is Kristofferson and even he doesn't make sense --he's too cool to behave logically, too pointlessly iconoclastic to want to make money or to save himself from 20 years in the pen even if he could. So there gets to be a whole mess of issues Bobby "ain't so good at stringin' words together as you are" creates for his self through his stubborn insistence on not being this and not being that. He likes to drink "Everclear" and listen to "we don't smoke marijuana and we don't take LSD" like there's no hypocrisy there. Again--a joke? The alcoholic Peckinpah has no right to get anti-anti-establishment. That said, Duck's not afraid to have a few big rigs get together to smash open a police station where Spider Mike's been violated, rights-wise. Shit gets smashed up for real in these films and that's why they endure. If you see a cop car go flying off the interstate and through a billboard, better believe some stunt man did just that. And it just feels real good.

Alas, when not crashing cars, the Peckinpah signature over-editing and slow-mo fight thing does not always work: a haphazard brawl in a rest stop cafe isn't quite the same ode to violence as the opening or closing of The Wild Bunch. With all its slow motion and quick cuts it becomes abstract and unseemly: cutting back and forth to about eight different characters in various states of falling, rolling, punching, ducking or running - all in a very close quarters diner environment--it's a fight that would have blown our minds in the hands of a tight-editing Walter Hill (as in the bathroom fight in The Warriors) but Peckinpah infamously wasted weeks filming and it's clear that about 100 different takes are all used for one single movement to create a bewildering sense of time and relative space (a character might start falling off a stool at one end of the counter and land behind a table on the other, his eyes indicating he somehow has aged 20 years in frustration with his director in between the two angles). Then there's the big events and demonstrations as the convoy the Duck's leading gets longer and longer as his struggle goes viral through the CB network of little people and the people tired of getting pushed around; shitty cops like Borgnine come to the fore from all walks of 'yawn' life. One can argue that these rapid montages of images from these populist organizations is almost Sam's version of Nashville. It works at times, in others, it's just a lot of nowhere shorthand for 'everyday' America. I guess it's inspiring, but man, these trucks must be driving mighty slow. What about them poor pigs back of Love Machine's rig? What about their freedom? The sooner I can stop associating Burt Young's harsh face with actual pigs and the tang of sulphur and asphalt, the better. Son, dump them pigs loose upon the plain, and get thee to a ROCKY pinball machine, stat!


So why'd the trucker craze leave before Convoy could recoup? The 70s was a great time for fast turn-over fads -- they swept the nation and then were gone like phantoms, only to have feature films like this come out months after the craze had dwindled off, mainly because they just took damn long to finish thanks to their big budgets subjecting even the smallest decision to overthink and second-guessing. These came out after the TV movie knock-offs, which turned the tropes so many different ways we couldn't help but lose interest. I vividly remember watching some trucker adventure, I think it was Flatbed Annie and Sweetie-Pie on network TV with our babysitter back in 1979 and thinking dear god, why are we still caring about big rigs on the run from corrupt local law? I mean, on a pop culture terms, the Dukes of Hazzard had premiered the night before. BJ and the Bear was going strong into its second year. Enough was too damn much.

The result is like a rich giant little brother trailing after sleeker meaner trend setter B-movie older sibling, and then TV movies after that, leaving a big, sprawling gloriously trashy messes like Convoy in the middle of the road for the middle states to absorb through half-asleep drive-in eyes.

But if a year found big movies actually setting mega-trends the result was electric. Sharks in '75, for example. 1977 set a new benchmark, as we saw three major motion pictures all swirling around in our collective consciousness (and unconscious): The Spy Who Love Me (we dreamt of owning underwater cars) Smokey and the Bandit, and of course Star Wars, and to a lesser extent, Semi-Tough. This was a time before VHS, Cable and Betmax, when, for example, one never in a thousand years would hear cursing on television or see gore or nudity (unless it whisked by an artsy PBS-BBC show like I Clavdivs) anywhere but a theater or drive-in.  This gave the 'R' rated films a holy power to us kids who couldn't see them. If you watched something like Semi-Tough or Smokey today, and pay attention to the comedic rhythms, you hear the pause after each expletive, the way comedies pause for laughs after punchlines, so the audience could whoop in delight at the utterance of these verboten syllables. This makes them hang in the air in a weird way: For all his swagger, every expletive Reynolds utters in both films comes with quotation marks --there's a sense of 'oooh I'm saying something naughty!" in ways totally foreign to us today where 'shit' and 'goddamn' are so common as to be unnoticed even on prime time.

Another thing new to us was, of course, nature. Seeing the Drapers leave their picnic trash behind in Mad Men made my generation lurch back to life and remember the old family habit of throwing our McDonald's trash out the window as we drove home, until the crying Native American by the dirty highway got us to stop.  Another thing is just general animal rights awareness. I remember of course feeling kind of guilty at zoos with jungle cats in tiny concrete cages, prowling endlessly back and forth, but I never imagined it was wrong. Now I have to run to change the channel when ASPCA commercials come on. I'm sensitized to the point I see a cowboy tie up his horse by a bar in a western and I wonder, what about the horse? You gonna leave him out there in the wind with no water or food? These things bother me now. Convoys are all well and good, Love Machine, but what about those pigs left for days back of the rig? And when do you all stop for gas? And don't you got somewhere to be with those truckloads? Was the script wroted by a drunk illiterate six year-old? War his name Sam?


I mention this, as I have in the past, to preserve it for future generations who may see something like Smokey or Convoy and wonder what the fuck we in the 70s were thinking. In this case well, it was freedom and a crossover between the shit-kicking conservative and the blue state suburban swinger we can only dream of today. It's the money earned by car chase pictures from the Corman canon like 1975's White Line Fever giving way to good old boy Burt Reynolds and the invasion of country singers like Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, and Glenn Campbell into the mainstream Top 40. And the rise of the CB and the 'Fuzzbuster' into the mainstream Spencer Gift 70s lexicon. One thing follows the next because, and that's why I'm taking time to chronicle it all, pop culture was a much smaller tent. The three channels (not including local stations and PBS), made water cooler breeze-shooting much easier. But if you were watching Flatbed Annie (above) on a Saturday night, or as we thought of it then, Laverne and Shirley as Truckers, then you were stuck at home with a babysitter and the only alternative was The Love Boat. 

Animules from top: Clint and Clyde - Every Which Way But Loose; Jerry Reed and Fred - Smokey and the Bandit; BJ and the Bear (them pigs? couldn't find a good pic - they're all dead to me now)

It was--on a lot of levels--a kind of reverse class-envy, a grass-is-greener longing by middle class suburbia to live on the open road and be among the beer-guzzlin, speed-takin', Marlboro-smokin' common man who didn't take no shit about drinking and driving or smoking in elevators. Some of this of course survives today 00s Williamsburg hipster thing with PBR, ironic belt buckles, fuzzy dice rearview mirror ornaments, and big ass mustaches. But these are generally uber-fey poseurs with tinny little voices that bespeak their unfamiliarity with tobacco and shouting at neighbors. Real men have voices you can feel in your bones, the ground trembles in anticipation of their Frye boot heel.
Sure, they're all dead or dying of throat or lung cancer now, but you damn well gotta die of something. Who's to say smokers don't have an extra special first class seat in heaven, shortening their life spans so that Earth's natural resources don't need to buckle under the weight of one more greedy mouth? (2) Maybe that's not tomorrow's America, but it was damn well yesterdays. Depeneding

America's current identity crisis is not borne of ideology and belief I think but of fear and TV ratings. We need to find common ground again, as we once did with Burt Reynolds, CB radio / trucker crazes, speeding, drunken tavern brawls (the kind where stuntmen go flying through the front window in slow mo without spilling their beer, then everyone shakes hands, laughs off the bruises and goes fishing). Convoy is out on Blu-ray, where the picture is pretty --trucks shine real fine. So git it and fall in love with fossil fuels and fists. I would, but living in Soft Hands NY has made me so sensitive I can smell the asphalt tar tang and the weird bodily exhalation smell of gasoline and sulphur in the hot desert air just writing these gridlocking symbols of rootsy solidarity and it makes me quite ill. See, I'm no longer in touch enough to root for the Little Guy. I'm just ashen thinking 'bout his squealing cargo, those poor pigs. Damn I hate... fucking... awareness.  

NOTES:
1. J.W. Pepper in Live and Let Die (1971) and Man with the Golden Gun (1974)
2. This coming weekend I'll be one-year quit -- not being able to absorb any oxygen in your burnt lungs - that'll do 'er.
3. As in Rocky II made the following year (1979)

I never fought in a real war, but growing up we played war with cap guns or plastic Uzis and I had HO scale planes dogfighting over my bed; I don't have to tell you how bad things are today with their yellow or orange plastic--we need George C. Scott as Patton and Nazis for him to fight; instead we got Afghanistan civilian insurgents and Bard Pitt as General McMahon instead. Yeah, I'm watching the released-today-on-Netflix WAR MACHINE, the true story of the crazy gung-ho general brought in to 'fix' Afghanistan, not too long ago and who was taken down by a snide Rolling Stone reporter and his own reckless macho (he's not the same one as was taken down by an affair with his sexy biographer, that was someone else. Read a book!) Aside from a comical (and overused) bowlegged running style that lets Pitt show off his barrel-chested burliness (as if he's always about to fall forwardand give you twenty), Pitt's SLING BLADE Palette voice and pillow factory energy (he's almost as half-asleep as if reading the book on a plane). His earlier warriors in David Ayers' FURY and Tarantino's INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (above) had a few things other than his stiff Fearless Fosdick jutting chin, and/or scars --including an easy-going way with shooting unarmed prisoners that was most refreshing, the kind of thing a Tom Cruise or Leo would worry might alienate their international fan base) and in FURY he makes the equivalent of the namby-pamby character played by Jeremy Davies in SHAVING RYAN'S PRIVATES shoot an unarmed prisoner, thus saving future lives (as if Ayers wanted to fix him, like Hawks wanted to fix Gary Cooper's punkass HIGH NOON character via RIO BRAVO.
WAR MACHINE's General McMahon is a bit too obviously rendered by a liberal swineherd as a well-meaning warrior blind to the fact that America hasn't won a war since the 40s, and as if all the RS political pieces from the 60s-70s are coursing through its veins, burdens itself with all the usual suspect hearts-and-minded critiques. If I'm going down this road I'd much rather be in the company of someone who tries to capture the high of war as well, like Kathryn Bigelow or Clint Eastwood. It's pretty easy to throw Tilda Swinton in a German press briefing and have her deliver lines that convey the message the rest of the film's too distracted to convey. If it is supposed to be all based on a RS piece we'd have been much better off going with a more nuanced 'gonzo' journalist approach, i.e. focusing on the journalist''s personal experience situated within the events, their observations and the drugs they were on that may have distorted those observations, with background press and history folded into it. Here we start out with that but then wind up in situations no RS press could be, like the generals date with his rarely seen wife (Meg Tilly? Can it be?) or some 'typical' FUBAR moment of chaotic boots-on-the-ground implementation of the general's big strategy.  Rather than focus on the war room or his base of command with anything remotely close to the lived-in professional feel Bigelow or Eastwood brought, we have the impression only that the writer-director is familiar with a lot of Vietnam movies and maybe the jaundiced attitude of THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY and probably was unable to light a fire under Pitt's ass the way a more macho name like Tarantino or Ayers might.


When I saw that Pitt was going to play an older man with silver hair to--as stars often do--segue their advancing age within the mythic scope of their public persona, I was excited. Gone is the tiresome Pitt as the rear echelon for the Jolie traveling humanitarian circus, and now he can get back to being a wild man yet again, aging males rejoice! Alas, the Jolie Pitt might not be there but neither is the old wild Pitt. Well, that don't matter. INGLORIOUS is up on the Netflix stream too! It's always worth revisiting whenever the drums of war and remembrance sound. Also worth revisiting is my own humble (hah) writing on war movies I've seen, loved, tolerated, for I've always tried to honor both sides of myself, the kid with the dogfight in his bedroom sky and the stacks of SGT. ROCK comics in his closet, and the satiric dose-eyed sophomore heading off to see PLATOON with a headful of mushrooms like goddamned Lance going up the Kurtzy river.


"We've seen this PC young typist character before, in Saving Private Ryan (played by the ever-mugging Jeremy Davies), though there we also had the chronic complainer (Ed Burns), and the "Wardaddy" there wasn't a mighty Pitt but 'decent guy' Tom Hanks. Pitt had proved he could be wild and liberated even whilst a young scrap of a fella, back in Thelma and Louise, so that's never been in doubt, but even so, here we got some extra layers of toughness as borne out by his scarred and diesel oil-stained face. We see him get kind of cleaned up when a nice little breakfast served up by Pitt and a couple of frauleins is invaded by the rest of his motley tank corp, and we see Pitt forced into a weird no-win zone between solidarity with his rapey crew and an innate gentlemanly spirit. It's the most tiresome scene in the film, and I'll confess I FF-ed part of the way, but it's almost worth it for the brutal pay-off, which finally brings things to bear for our milquetoast. Eventually the lad even learns when to let a kraut fry to death and when to chop him in half. Hell yeah, Sgt. Rock loves this movie, wherever he is. (more)

"..Fuller's actual war experience makes his spirituality move far beyond religions or borders, or even life and death. When Sgt. Zack (Evans) watches his young war orphan guide Short Round (Spielberg used the name for Indy's sidekick in TEMPLE OF DOOM) turning a Buddhist prayer wheel or singing "Auld lang Syne" which is also the Korean national anthem, for example, you can feel Zack's respect for even this simple gestures, he knows they are so much more important than things like dog tags, burials and objectives and rank. Fuller's awareness of the power that little motions like this can have--butterfly wing tsunami-style--in the greater scheme of war. In a situation where every movement might be your last, everything is imbued with profound significance, and in this the American soldier of Zack's strange integrity begins to understand how the Asian Buddhist mentality works." 5/11 (cont)

TWIN PEAKS is happening again; Agent Cooper has returned in different places as different selves; DANGER 5 is no longer on Netflix, but THE LOVE WITCH is. Things from the past come back yet nothing from the moment leaves--the selection is so vast picking something is impossible. So we go back in time to when--if we wanted to see weird shit, sex or gore--we had to go the R-rated movie, or... in the 80s, we had to rent it, and were limited by what wasn't checked out, and by circumstance. Now we miss that simplicity, the narrowness of options. So we make movies that evoke those golden years. If you want to make a movie that looks and feels like it was made 20 years ago then you might be a retro-metatextual, but I won't judge you. I'd have to pick a version of me to do that anyway, and I'll leave that to the professionals serenely rooted in space and time. Just know STRANGER THINGS and IT FOLLOWS helped kickstart a batch of young or semi-young filmmakers seizing the opportune landscape to make a film they wanted to see back in the days of standing in front of shelves filled with empty clamshell boxes, the perfect 80s or late 70s rental to watch after trick-or-treating as a 12 year-old in the 70s - early 80s, the idealized film forms in your horror-lovin' mind. From the recently discussed SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL to as far back as GRINDHOUSE, a kind of borderline nostalgia future-past melancholy washes over things to free us all from the terrible burden of the overslick CGI present --wherein STAR WARS films look like video games and video games look like neo-realist crime dramas.

Neither feature film discussed below is specifically great (which is why I added a short at the end that is). In fact I'd love to sit them down with each other and have them grasp each others' faults and learn: for THE VOID, patience, tick-tocaklity and focus; BEYOND THE GATES action and surprise, the strength of convictions --willingness to crank it to eleven rather than constantly dialing back like a repressed schoolmarm resisting temptation.


The bashed-in brainchild of an art director and make-up artist in their directorial co-debut, VOID heralds a nice showcase for analog/latex effects as they depict a magical night at a closing-down hospital deep in the meth belt, wherein people start to give birth to or change into tentacled Lovecraftian behemoths. Aaron Poole stars as the shaky sheriff who lets you know how rattled he is when he shoots a patient in the head after bringing in a twitchy, wounded freak from the woods where he's running after being shot (?) The guys chasing him arrive, chased themselves by a cadre of cultists in white robes with black triangles on the hoods. Hell breaks loose literally, and about four different Clive Barker and John Carpenter movies come crashing together as the cult surrounding the cut-off hospital echoes an ASSAULT PRECINCT 13, the icky transformations evoke THE THING, the philosophy evokes the New England town beyond the shuttered bridge in IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, the church in Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS, the attics of Clive Barker's HELLRAISER, and Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND and the Solaris-from-Hell space ship in EVENT HORIZON, there's probably others.

That may sound great, I know it did to me. But this Gillespie and Kostanski clearly have a lot to learn about the rest of what makes a good film, like when to use dialogue and when not to, where to put the camera, and how to set up an ominous mood. They go for a Carpenter vibe but don't have the patience for Hawksian cool or the slow-building relentless dread that are amongst Carpenter's best auteur traits. Instead there are way too many balls in the air at once and screaming "c-c-calm down!" over and over doesn't count as plot development. And when it focuses on just one or two--a cult who are heavy into pyramids, to the point they spray paint black triangles on doors and wear hoods with pyramid shape viewing holes (which is a cool look but impractical)--a tweaker handcuffed to a bed, the film has a fightin' chance. But the more is less approach eludes them, as if all the elaborate monster tableaux are lined up offstage like a fashion show, and if they don't keep slithering out they'll get so congested the film will burst.


One strong element is--as one of the nurses--Kathleen Munroe (above right), a gorgeous blue-cat-eyed creature in the Famke Janssen x Franka Poetente mold who stole my wild Irish heart as a zombie equestrian in Romero's unjustly ignored SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (see my comparison of with PET SEMETERY + the RNC National Conveniton)  She's great and in her green scrubs reminds me of the cute nurses who gave me Ativan and Librium when I was flipping out in Feb. She exudes actorly grace and might have saved the movie had the writers allowed her to be a cool Hawksian heroine in the vein of Laurie Zimmer in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. But that would perhaps take cigarettes and balls and the film has neither. The script whisks her  down the rabbit hole early on, and our trusty rattled sheriff's attempt to rescue her as they hesitate at blood-and-weirdness splattered doors as if walking through an almost-finished haunted attraction, is way less riveting than the sight of Munroe in her scrubs just walking around doing medical shit. (They also shoehorn a kind of tired 'dead child' subplot - the lazy screenwriter's shorthand for 'character development' that Carpenter studiously avoids).


Another thing missing that would have helped here is a source drug: meth is name-checked but there's no evidence of it. The source of all this strangeness turns out to be bizarre rituals carried out in this lonesome meth lab cabin. But where is the meth, damn it? Seems to me the meth is the key to Lovecraftian horror evocation and these Gillespie and Kostanski would be better prepared to explore this aspect if they'd done meth --write what you know, bro. (sniffle) I bet that cult leader doctor could get his hands on some wonderful drugs. I would have loved to see all sorts of directions it could have gone - fostering the connection between drugs and this hell dimension, for example. The high of meth opening their pineal glands the way FROM BEYOND's tuning forks do or my own Salvia Divinorum + Robitussin + light-sound machine + Mingus "Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" journey to Balloon machine elf time-space mandible-weaving adventures.


Gillespie and Kostanski have interesting imagination, there's some superb sequences near the climax and it's inspiring that they demonstrate the chops to create their tentacled visions in real analog time but the problem is perhaps real life experience. The blurry frenzy of action in THE VOID has the air of fear and doubt, so they just throw it all on the screen at once and run. A huge tentacled thing erupting out of a dead man's stomach would be plenty on its own, but here it's got to go down with a flickering overhead light gone to strobe, crazy camera movements, cross-cuts to a screaming pregnant woman about to get a C-section with no anesthesia and a hysterical pre-med intern whining like a little bitch, and around ten people yelling at the top of their lungs as people shoot and swing axes at it. The camera seems half in the way of the action instead of chronicling it, like a nervous spectator with one eye on the door, making Carpenter's genius all the more remarkable and precious. He took his time to make sure we got properly creeped out by the slow evolution of the THE THING. It was creepy because it was legitimately fucked-up movie trying to pass as 'everything's cool' normal. At the end of, say, the intense autopsy arm-chomping scene, for example, there's a kind of a joke (the king crab head of the dead man) and Kurt's exclamation 'Jesus Fucking Christ." It's funny and all the more terrifying for keeping it 'real' like that. Carpenter knows horror takes time to react. It's like hooking up with someone for the first time: the catch-and-release involved in making out with someone the first time, the going in and coming back out, the teasing and languor of leaning in and teasing vs. tongue; if you just lunge at the person with tongue extended and don't give them a second to breathe, well, honey, it's called 'suffocation.'


That's the deal here, with so much going on, nothing ever has time to happen. ASSAULT gained suspense from the camaraderie between the cops and outlaws in the face of a common enemy and the cool Hawksian focus of Zimmer; the quiet omnipresence of the nonspeaking gang members. Instead of the eerie silence of the gangs we're forced to listen to the head bad guys' rambling overly theatrical 'stage-voiced' dissertation on the new flesh through what sounds like the PA system for way too many minutes. The bulk of the characters are all annoying as hell, between the screaming pre-med intern who panics and lets the pregnant woman almost die while she hams it up like a little brat and the two rough townies there's so much negative energy that well, I had to go back to ASSAULT afterwards and be reminded Hawksian cool exists.  Even Even SUICIDE SQUAD knows how to pace itself (that great bar interlude) and create some genuine rapport.

As for the score, a good deep droning retro-analog synth score (as in STRANGER THINGS or IT FOLLOWS) would have helped immeasurably. Another missed opportunity. There's four different composers used and none can hold a candle to Disasterpiece or Umberto. Next time, boys, instead of watching just emulating JC movies, watch the movies he emulates. Watch RIO BRAVO, EL DORADO and THE 1951 THING. Soak 'em up, buttercup. Don't make me tell you again. Give Kathleen Munroe some cigarettes and a match and let's see what we can see.

BEYOND THE GATES' musical score on the other hand is an effective melange of Goblin-esqe analog synths by the great up-and-comer retro-analog heavyweight Wojciech Golczewski. The film's chosen 80s milieu excuses its occasional sleaziness and a grasp of why analog synths are so great that seems to have eluded the four different source artists for THE VOID. Like that film, it's not set in the 80s so much as set within a universe clearly delineated by 80s horror films, specifically with GATE those old VHS rentals that used to come in big clamshells and cost just under a hundred bucks each (priced to rent, not buy). I never saw the commercials nor the game, but there was also a weird play-along video board game called NIGHTMARE which I'd never heard of it before this film--but it's clearly the inspiration. The story has a pair of semi-estranged brothers getting together years after the video rental store owner father vanished. The 'dead' video store is a great subject for a horror film (as in SOUTH PARK, where Stan's dad buys a Blockbuster for $1 and ends up holing them up in it during a snowstorm and getting all Jack Torrance), though it's seen only in the first reel and only to put the brothers in contact with the last thing dad was watching, the videotape in the 'video board game' (the title) hosted by Barbara Crampton in new wave hair and eye liner, easily stealing the show.


Unlike THE VOID this has a compulsive watchability due to taking time with its characters and always making us think some dreadful thing is waiting around the next corner. That said, the pair of brothers don't make too much sense. I can understand that they're opposites in style and temperament but they seem to share no memories in common and of all the time they must have spent in and around this video store they never mention a single film. Also, though one is kind of cool it's a bit odd that they're such pussies that they have to stop playing the game every two seconds, and when the game master mentions they need to find their father, the first thing they do is call their cop friend, like there's anything he can do about it. Fucking narcs, man. Would they call the cops if they found a stash of weed back in dad's office too?  Also, if any movie seemed to invite some SCREAM-style meta commentary it would be this one, dealing with two brothers working at a video store, where one would presume they've seen a few films. They haven't. Nary a single reference or reverie doth pass between them. Son, that's all my brother and I ever talk about. It's a way to connect, but there's no connection or even a shared joke, nor is there family resemblance and there's no real understanding why for some reason one brother seems to have inherited the house and store with the other a kind of stumble bum (Chase Williamson, so good in JOHN DIES AT THE END).

You da man, Chase

My main issue though lies with the dour lack of any sort of pulse on behalf of the square brother (Graham Skipper - unpictured), a character so unlikeable it makes it impossible to tell why anyone would want anything to do with him (imagining being his girlfriend is a singularly nauseating experience). I wanted to smack the glasses off his head and make him do whiskey shots -instead he's supposed to be sober and in AA, though I'll tell you frankly, we'd kick him out for being a lightweight. What, did he have a shot too many one night and throw up? Good lord what a pussy.  It was heartening to see him finally get around to killing and stabbing with brotherly gusto with the cool but there needed to be more of a character change over the course of their shared trauma than going from withdrawn and stilted to less stilted. I would have loved to see him finally relent, have a shot or two and cut loose, like Nick Frost in THE WORLD'S END. Instead, what does he do? He pours his dad's liquor down the sink. I may be back to being sober, but my thought was kill him! KILL! In AA we hate hearing about people who commit that kind of drink wasting. Give it away to some needy friend off the wagon, like that tweaker at the local pub (go-to dirtbag Justin Welborn), who--incidentally--is right to want to deck you and steal your horny girlfriend (Bea Grant) who flew in just to be with you in your time of need, and who you reward by thinking of lame excuses not to fool around. Urgh. If ever a punk needed shots, either gun or whiskey... it's this annoying pisher. Sorry, no offense, Graham.

I wish these girls (from the NIGHTMARE-esque viral trailer actually were in the movie, they'd have made it a lot better

Still, much more so than THE VOID, GATES managed to hold my girl's attention all the way through, helped no end by Barbara Cramtpon as the master of the game. The highlight is just seeing her face in that 80s new-wave eyeliner look, just staring out at the brothers and one girl waiting for them to follow the rules and take the next turn. Does she hear them or not? It's kept deliciously ambiguous and never explained. Crampton looks terrific and seems to be having a pretty good time --more so than anyone else, in front of the camera anyway. Luckily, Brian Sowell's elegant low-budget video cinematography makes the most of GATES' suburban 70s track house milieu and purple/red/blue video game weird color scheme (like an Easter SUSPIRIA), Golczewski's groovy score keeps burbling, and Chase has a beer once in awhile, and lastly there's the important understanding that nothing brings a pair of brothers together quite like an all-out fight.

If you want to see something really funny after these self-serious retro yarns, check out DARK DUNGEONS a 40 minute adaptation of Jack Chick's infamous Christian tract denouncing role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons as well as books like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings gateways to Satanic/witchcraft cult-joining. Here two cute young freshmen girls are lured to the darkside during a LARP (Live Action Role Play) rush; Debbie (Alyssa Kay) turns out to be a natural spellcaster (with real magic?) rising under Mistress Frost's (Tracy Hyland) dark red room tutelage to a level 8 sorceress, while her budding bestie/possibly experimental lesbian crush Marcie (Anastassia Higham) hangs herself because she's left behind at level seven (she can't seem to take it seriously enough, she's a tourist). But the suicide, and being sent on a mission into the tunnels to other dimensions makes Debbie realize her soul is in jeopardy. Will God's love find her in time?


Shot on the cuff, DD has a great zero budget courage of its convictions gonzo spirit, a deadpan reverence for the Chick source material and a rich mostly-female and very cute cast and a great embrace Jesus ending. If you've even been out on a deep limb end and prayed the 'no atheists in a foxhole' lullaby then you'll relate. I don't know the extent to which the whole Christian pamphlet ending with the cathartic book and DD module-burning bonfire is meant satirically or not. If not, it's way more genius than I gave the Christians credit for. I'm glad I don't know for sure, it's funnier that way, and that the spiritual solution is at least treated with some modicum of decorum and real love. Jesus wouldn't be offended either way, methinks. The filmmaking team behind the crowdfunded (but which crowd? the hipsters or the Christians?) little miracle are perhaps the Ron and Suzy Ormond of their time! Know what else can now be found on Prime? the Ormonds' own MESA OF LOST WOMEN.  (On Amazon Prime):






PS: Let me also point you towards high recommendations for other scrappy retro-ish indies floating around the streaming sites and elsewhere at the "moment" whenever that is:

Pharmageddon: JOHN DIES AT THE END
Burnt Persona Jessica Dies Again: SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL
Badass Babes for a Bernie Nation: BOUNTY KILLER 
Heil, Bizarro World Independence Day Streampunk: IRON SKY 
Bell, Book and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH
Let the Darioni Nuovo entrain your Dissonance: AMER

If you have Netflix and three-ish hours on your hands, why not bow your cowboy mouth down below your skies-are-not-cloudy and ride along in the buggy with "the Cowboy" to a double-feature shivaree fit to bust a low-hangin' cumulonimbus: the Netflix-produced meta-crime-mentary CASTING JONBENET (2017) and Lynch's recently-upgraded post-affect-noir, MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)?  Cowgirl pageant darlings cast and into the coffin cradled; non-starter starlets on the Hollywood bungalow bed, dead --sometimes there's a buggy, all right.

Like that ALL ABOUT EVE chick bowing to herself in the mirrors while cradling Eve Harrington's theater guild award (left) in an infinite cascade of cinematic split-subject no hay banda hauntologic dead media mimesis reality vs. fantasmatic / feminine split psyche, this proposed double feature combo would scare the glasses right off that young kid in the morgue in PERSONA. If a real spooked identity crisis uneasiness happens while you're within this three-hour tour through the tumblin' tumbleweeds, just click your heels five times, and whisper the word "silencio" as you draw a functional pentagram with a sacrificial dagger upon the flesh floor. You may not know hear his rustlin', but the devil will come.. already came... and you're long, long dead, waking never from the dream of cinema. As the fella said, sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you. 


A Netflix original directed by young Australian fox auteur Kitty Green, CASTING JONBENET is a true story, on both levels, and even beyond. Rather than just recreate the infamous events, Green kept the interviews and auditions for the main parts of "Lifetime"-style movie about the infamous JonBenet Ramsey case. Using local actors recruited from the Ramsey family's Colorado hometown who knew the people involved, the story unfolds: the weirdly specific three-page suicide note written on the family's stationary, the discovery of JonBenet's body in an anteroom of the cellar; the unconvincing grief displayed by the mother--did she kill her daughter in a fit of rage? By all accounts, JonBenet was a brat at times, forced into the child pageant circuit by a failed beauty queen mom, etc. The mystery of her involvement is profoundly reproduced during montage of auditions re-enacting her initial phone call to the police: with a script in one hand, the phone in the other, the actresses carefully modulating the tremor or anxiety and desperation in her voice as they read from the script. Green trusts us to unpack the massive electric charge inherent in watching an actress auditioning by performing the mother's real life phone call, the mother's call herself being possibly a performance, one that didn't entirely convince the outraged nation she wasn't guilty or complicit in her daughter's death. The mission of the actress then is to not either be too convincing nor too false in her performance, and seeing more than one actress try it is to realize an even broader canvas, the mutability of the truth along a mythological axis. Even if we've never heard the actual Ramsey phone call we know the 'type,' and the child kidnapping/murder is a tabloid boilerplate fastened with adamantine bolts to the mediated public consciousness.

Kitty/ Kitty/ Kitty Green

Casual viewers may be confused by the layers, but the interviews with the auditioned actors and non-acting locals delves deep into issues such as how to play a someone who keeps their cards so close to the vest you yourself don't know what the cards are. So these actors don't know anymore than we do: was the father molesting her at night? Did mom know and is helping her cover it up; or is it that JonBenet's then-nine year-old older brother killed her, as older brothers occasionally try to do if jealous or neglected, and the parents are covering it up by making it look like a kidnapping so they don't lose their son too?

The cast interviewed is fairly evenly divided between suspecting the mother, father, and brother as either guilty or in collusion and NOT, as some thought initially, the mall Santa the mom tries to finger or the skeevy pederast John Mark Karr who confesses to the murder but who's proven to be nowhere near the scene (the actor cast in this role--Dixon White (below)--gives the creepiest most memorable performance in some time; hearing how he prepares, entering this guy's mindset is to realize the true fearlessness of method acting, to essentially access one's inner creepy pedophile sociopath just for an audition is something I'd never in a million years do, but this guy plunges in and the film buckles a little bit under his intense stare once he goes into character.)

Cagily, Green never shows any actual footage of the family or their testimonies and press conferences, that might drag the documentary too far over the line into the land of reality --allowing us to judge the actors more on basis of their ability to deliver impressions rather than intensity or--far more valuable--the complexity to allow for doubt -to be a good actor as a character who is not as good an actor. It becomes Brechtian in constantly bringing us back to the surface, only for the whodunnit aspect to lure our attention back to analytical mode, and again back into conjecture and the dawning of myth. Like Kabuki theater, the events become mutable and irrevocably abstract by heightening their artificiality. By the time we get to the weird, not entirely successful, all-in climax, we're left amazed that we ever had a concrete sense of reality at all, with so much acting and mask-wearing in our weird, kinky world, we realize we're on a sinking ship and the only thing keeping us afloat is a movie about hot air balloons. We cling to its sticky strings even knowing we shall not be lifted, because the mark it leaves in the end tells us something new about death. Scenes of the actress cast as JonBenet enduring endless make-up proddings, painful hair extension inserts and flowers and cowboy hat pinned to her scalp, in order to essentially play a dead girl in a coffin carry a morose but powerful charge that heightens the reality the only such double-artificiality can bring.

By contrast, the much-hyped NEON DEMON tried to deliver it with its obsession with models playing dead but it couldn't shake its overly familiar misogyny and dead-horse-beating message about the shallow vanity of the modeling industry. CASTING JONBENET, on the other hand, goes far deeper than cultural critique, which is why it belongs in the same double feature as another Netflix must, MULHOLLAND DRIVE.

Lynch's masterpiece was originally supposed to be a TV series, but the network passed on it, so the pilot was melded with new footage to 'close it' (there was a similar thing done with the pilot of TWIN PEAKS, for markets where it was shown theatrically - see here). If you can find this addition footage ending you can see a midnight call bring Cooper to the boiler room and a confrontation with Bob himself, here in a weird human form, hence killable --followed by a telling "25 Years Later" Black Lodge coda that's remarkably prescient to the new series, albeit unsatisfying as a whole. When this MULHOLLAND DRIVE came out we figured it would be more of the same, and it kind of is, to a point --Robert Forster's homicide detective gets only a single scene, as does (thankfully for I find him a most unsightly character), the dreamer in the Winkie's (his name I refuse to disclose) and the sleazy hitman guy also seems like he was to have a more involved arc. But, the deep end the film went down, with the tiny elderly tourists trickling from the monster's paper bag and so forth, brought the events full circle and tightened the noose so fast we were left breathless; no one was quite ready for the reflexive meltdown critique of Hollywood and the psyche of the actress, this ALL ABOUT ACID PERSONA meta-miracle. With each passing year it gets more relevant, daisy-younger. In the recent BBC Culture poll of the 100 greatest films of the new century, it comes in at #1. 

Even if you have the old DVD, it's worth seeing on Netflix for the HD restoration with glowing flesh colors and a much greater depth of field to the many surreal shots of nighttime LA. Lynch's LA ain't yer La-la Land; it's deeper --it's the LA of dreams where once you get off that plane, take your first script to hand, you're never quire sure what reality is, or if it's even still there. When someone says "Cut" while you're sitting in a restaurant do you automatically stop eating and look around for your director, only to slowly realize you really ARE just in a restaurant and whoever shouted it probably shuffling cards? This idea was explored more in-depth for Lynch's follow-up, INLAND EMPIRE.


Performance is always a reliable subtext for art cinema: it instantly layers the meaning--and the more you let the seams show, the artsier (not sloppier!) you're being. Instead of an actor playing a role you have an actor playing an actor playing a role and somehow all those quadruple negatives become a super positive, achieving a level of truth impossible even in the relatively artifice-free realm of mundane daily life. If you're in the hands of an post-Brechtian like Charlie Kaufman you may even have an actor playing an actor playing an actor playing another actor, so many layers that the actor himself winds up trapped inside them and it becomes just that two headed coin of narcissism and insecurity. Kaufman's sexually frustrated self-conscious prick schtick has been a stone drag ever since we all first tried to like ADAPTATION. But for regular Joes like David Lynch, performance has a more fixed singular function - and if there's sex to be had, it's had and not all this 'piece of shit at the center of the universe' moping. Lynch meditates - his ego is "right-sized." For him, the pretty young ingenue is essentially a split character, not an object for self-laceration or fear/desire, but an anima - beyond duality - the dual lipstick pair-bond narcissistic template addends an Apollonian ideal as old as western culture itself. ("No woman should have a memory," notes Lord Illingworth in An Ideal Husband. "Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness.")

We never see, for example, Laura Palmer doing charity work but we hear all the raves from the elderly lives she touched via Meals on Wheels, reading to the blind, etc. (and romance with doe-eyed 'good' biker, James) are the opposite of the bad girl self, whom follow the thread of her drug use, her running with the bad crowd (wild-eyed Bobby, Leo) and eventually the trauma that caused the split (her incestuous Bob-possessed father coming to her bed "since she was seven"). We can well imagine the Kaufman avatars being amongst the dysfunctional rubes simmering with desire for Laura on one side of that divide or other, trapped in the mind of a powerless infant unable to speak to a hot girl without spitting up on his bib, fuming with unspoken jealousy while she goes out on the porch to talk with some guy in a leather jacket who just pulled up in his Harley. Lynch's idea of these druggy parties at remote cabins has the surreal prepubescent nightmare current to them -- drugs and sex mixed in the mind of someone who's experienced neither, depicted in a hyper-surreal nightmare fashion, what McGowan calls Lynch's fantasmatic dimension. 

To study the making of films in Hollywood (and the world) and the on-set drama that goes on, is to be faced with tales of these jealous infants left behind; viewers/husbands/lovers fuming in the sidelines as their ideal gets it on in full nude scenes with some despicable monster she or he barely knows while eight gaffers heavy breathe behind the kliegs. In that torrid audition scene in Mason Adams' office (it made Watts a star) we have the makings of a master thesis on the proximity of acting and prostitution. As I wrote in 03: prostitution is itself "acting" as in to not just engage in sex for money but also (presumably) to seem to enjoy it. Indeed, a prostitute may actually enjoy herself during the contracted sexual act as long as she pretends it's pretend enjoyment (if she is seen to be too into it, he may expect his money back - who's servicing who?) Within her domain (the boudoir), the prostitute may be--more so than outside in the 'real' world-- completely "herself," - she may be experiencing that moment of complete subsumption into character which is at the heart of good acting. When "cut" rings out (or whatever the mutually agreed-upon safe word happens to be), she can resume the waking dream of societal expectations. (In DRIVE we have no inkling of Betty's capacity to get super quiet-erotic at the audition - does she?)



Of course that can lead to a kind of karmic celluloid looping (the actor who plays the same role onstage the same way, for a three-year Broadway run) that's escapable only if the script is deviated from, without warning, like Camilla's journey  in the beginning of MULHOLLAND DRIVE ("we don't stop here" - as if they've made the journey a thousand times - and they have, more or less beginning and ending the film with it). The crash that forces us to wonder if it's the hit taken out by Diane against Camilla, or if there's a more sinister reason besides the treacherous curves and idiot teens combination of the titular drive. The deviation that sends Camilla down the hill to Aunty Em's house can be read as both the deal with the devil/mob hit that her ex-lover-cum-rival Diane took out on her (she's taken out of the car at gunpoint but then whatever was planned is interrupted by the crazy kids/concussion) and her own deal / deliverance - escape into a new identity.

We think we want to find out who we really are, to chase down the clues, but we don't, really. For in finding out we also realize our entire life is merely a distraction, an elaborate puppet show for the kids, to distract them from their real surroundings ---the dirty trick their parents played on them, leaving them chained to time's abattoir assembly line like sacrifices to some sawmill Molloch, left with barely enough time to repeat the dirty trick on the next generation, and if we're artists, to maybe sew together some new puppets. The search for the meaning of the self always leads to the morgue; the trail of who post-accident Rita ends with their discovery of Diane Selwyn's dead body, a bit like Candice Hilligoss if she saw her own body being recovered from the river even in the Salt Lake Samara she fled to; or Jimmy the sax man in the surf at the shocking conclusion of Jess Franco's VENUS IN FURS.

Just as in Lynch the women are all the aspects of the same woman who is an aspect of a single psyche (the collective unconscious celluloid through Lynch's projector), so too the dark chthonic 'devouring father' is as aspect of that woman; if say, Betty/Diane is the unconscious ego the male conscious ego (i.e. Lynch's dream other) then the unconscious's ego in turn has an inner male, a dark force of conspicuous enjoyment, the terrible father (ala Mr. Big in LOST HIGHWAY, and Frank Booth in BLUE VELVET), the one who separates the child from his mother, and who 'enjoys' all the women and pleasures while the boys sulk and bide their time; in MULHOLLAND he's a very shadowy nebulous figure in a wheelchair behind thick glass (the locked door to the ulterior basement of the unconscious mind, i.e the basement's basement) who sends his own agents and provocateurs out into the workaday world to inflict his seemingly unknowable bidding (we're never permitted to learn why he is so insistent that Camilla Rhodes is "the girl.")
The mob, linked on some obscene fantasmatic level to the 'cowboy' (both a deep river 'big fish' childhood totem and Howard Hughes) of course have-long time Hollywood tentacles in the casting industry, ala THE GODFATHER's Tom getting godson Johnny Fontaine into Jack Woltz's FROM HERE TO ETERNITY-ish prestige pic (Theroux's frozen bank accounts the equivalent of finding Khartoum's severed head under your sheets). Camilla Rhodes (alternately Laura Ann Haring and Melissa George) connection with them remains a mystery. It almost seems like they're doing it more for the benefit of procuring the hit from Diane Selwyn, to drive her to a deal with the devil, i.e. just as god creates war for the foxhole's power to wrest prayer from atheists, so too the devil creates surplus enjoyment to wrest souls from grace. Or that famous line from Kafka's Before the Law: the gate was here solely for you, and now I'm going to close it.

One of the most sublime fusions of venue, screening time and film occurred for me seeing MD in a now long-gone family-owned cinema on 1st Ave UES, at the midnight showing opening weekend, the place was rundown but still clinging to the trappings of some long-since fallen into disrepair prefab maroon upgrade it got in the 80s. Operated by a large extended Indian family, the men in turbans and flowing saris mixed with jeans and sandals; the grandmother with her long braid of white hair ran the ticket booth; the children frolicking silently in the shadows around the snack bar, run by the mom, her long braid beaming black, the red dot in the center of hr forehead--gave the vibe an international vibe without going overboard. There was no Indian cooking smells or incense, just the usual popcorn but that was briefly overwhelmed by a stinking drunk homeless woman of enormous size who'd somehow gotten in and camped out a middle aisle seat. She was eventually loudly ejected by the older Indian lady no less, who  shooed her out with a broom, to our muted cheers in the approx. time of the Winkie's episode; later, right around the time they were climbing into Diane Selwyn's apartment, I went to bathroom, which was right around the dead of night and when the picture was starting to get super weird and somewhat boring enough to put me half asleep --it was a long mystical journey underneath the theater, past various detours, piles of old chairs, puddles, and closed-off partitions until I came to the men's bathroom that looked like it belonged to a much older theater a block away, and old Indian man I can only assume was the grandfather was sweeping up, but making no noise his aura blazing there in the dark like a whole different kind of lantern, yet he barely moved.

There was something quite reassuring about all this combined with the film; it made it seem like we were all sleeping over at their inn during some New Delhi storm; it made sense. I fell asleep halfway through the (around the time Naomi climbs in the window of the dead girl); and yet was somehow still following events; it became clearer actually, I even remarked to myself--the way one will when they realize they're asleep yet still self-aware--that through some weird force I was dreaming while watching- third eye-open and trained on the screen; it like watching a movie in 3D and finally realizing I was wearing the glasses backwards. The theater was one of the old type where the ceiling was low and the slope downwards small or almost nonexistent and the projector beam seemed to shoot right over head, the light making a visible beam in the air where a tall man would have blocked a lower portion of the screen; also we could hear the loud whirr of the projector in the quieter passages, or which there were a lot - considering the post-modern meta cinema qualities of the film, that all fit is so perfectly. I know I myself was falling asleep to that soothing projector whirr, the blue light it cast especially matching the Club Silencio and when Rita -- sings her a capella "Llorando" and the pair of lovers cry from her passion, I could hear sobbing too in our own theater, as if our natural defenses had been lowered by the comination of being sleepy at a midnight show, the hour and the quiet nature of the film and the whirr of the projector all lowering our big city defenses so we had no ability to shut out the torrent of emotion the song + the response of thse two women (after their steamy hook-up) engendered.

When we all were released after the film it felt like we'd all had a marvelous weird dream together - bonded; and outside was this weird warm mist. Everyone else on the NYC street was gone - the streets were dead empty - odd for NYC even on a weeknight no matter how late it was. And we all parted from each other hesitantly, almost like we would say goodbye to people we knew; we walked together as long as possible, barely speaking - the magic of the film following us home. As if to up the weirdness, I read a Voice piece (that I can't find) mentioning the magic of their own screening and--from the description--the same theater, maybe even the same showing.

I mention all this for a reason - to show the way meta can make the rest of the world - the world you're avoiding by seeing this film, the world you're escaping, come into deeper focus - so deep it resembles a dream and you realize reality is way more of an escape than we knew - we just weren't seeing it correctly. I later found an article (I think in The Voice) that described this same experience, the author was clearly at the same showing, but I can't find it.

any similarities to a TV screen strictly sublimacidental (my guess is a formative sexual-musical moment in Lynch's life occurred in front of a 50s-early 60s TV set, when some facsimile of this group came on Ed Sullivan or Bandstand or whatever

Lynch's films can engender the sort that sometimes requires a little boredom to appreciate, the stillness of images, the playing of expectations, works to put us into a state of active contemplation, the sort Lynch is familiar with, having a background in art, still photography, experimental shorts, etc. I've only ever encountered that kind of meta-aesthetic arrest a few times before, the most profound was in a room created by Bill Viola for a Guggenheim video/art exhibit and the most contemplative a rainy night showing of GOODBYE DRAGON INN (4)  at the Quad. After all, boredom isn't made by reality but by the limitations of language and iconography, the metonymic delimitation by which things cease to be complicated and are reduced to a few easily categorizable elements. Good metatexuality opens the real back up from its stifling layers of notation. The initial boredom is like the breakwater for the restless egoic conscience; finding nothing to engage it, it fumes and fusses like an infant, and gradually subsides to allow the subconscious to edge forward and help the onscreen image obtain an extra dream-like dimension. In other words, it's slow so we fall half-asleep, and the film we're half-watching and the half-asleep dream we're having click into a larger aesthetic horizon.

In seeing Naomi Watts get all sexy in her audition we realize the extent to which her whole wide-eyed newcomer schtick as Betty has been a pose - as if poured into a mold as old as Vaudeville (the "Gotta dance!" Gene Kelly in SINGING IN THE RAIN. Her ability to shift from wide-eyed newbie to sultry libertine made Naomi Watts a star (in the 'real' world); in the film she performs for a crowded room that includes cheery old wholesome seniors like Mason Adams, and an older soap star doing his best Clark Gable impression. Not expecting Watts/Betty to become so... open and sexual--we feel the intensity of her actually hooking up with  us - it's like she's seducing the whole room into a collective swoon. This is the miracle of Bertolt Brecht - the more the seams show the more endearing; if we can bring real acting power to bear in these artificial situations they wrest us free from the rut of narrative immersion.

This audition scene is hot enough to give wood to the dead, but it's also very odd-what is the difference between this kind of focused sexual heat, turned on and off in the moment, with an escalation of lines (and an imaginary knife), but performance veering very close to targeted seduction, she could very easily plunge down a rating into the seedy world of X-rated movies and then, who knows, bumming scabby cigarettes from gross scumbags before getting it on with them (presumably) in the back of a van in exchange for--presumably--money for crack and the promise to keep her eyes open for any new girls that might come staggering down from the Hills.

We can perhaps understand more about MULHOLLAND if viewed as a sequel to LOST HIGHWAY, the "hers", BLACK SWAN  / to LOST's "his", WRESTLER. LOST saw a man (Bill Pullman) literally split in two along his Moebius strip tape splice. The Barry Gifford murder mystery noir plot he's embroiled in finds him jailed for murdering his brunette wife--something he has no memory of doing but which is on tape--but then transforming into his younger alternate incarnation, Pete (Balthazar Getty). Betty similarly becomes Diane Selwyn, that hardbitten mediocre talent who brings her cute giriflriend on an audition and finds herself eclipsed. Soon the director has signed her lover, Camilla to a contract and she becomes a young mob ingenue (maybe one of their daughters or mistresses?) or devil's subject (she sold her soul for the part, and the mobsters and cowboy act as agents to fulfill her dreams before they claim her soul).

There's even a Midge, so speak, Diane's ex-lover (presumably?) moved out as a kind of Midge / Anne Hayworth type - the also-ran still in the peripherals making a weary to-do of coming by to get the last of her stuff - in effect positing Diane in the attraction change of the endless upwards spiraling triangle of desire, everyone chased by an old lover who still wants to be in the picture even as a friend or peripheral and the one who's recently thrown us over and we stalk or try to avoid or drink at; who we cry while masturbating to, and eventually put a hit on, sign a deal with the devil so to speak, the way Bill Pullman did with Robert Blake's devil man (below), who can be two places at once.


From a paranoid mind control Illuminati angle we can also connect the steamy audition Betty nails for a room full of people to the striptease Alice is forced to do at gunpoint for Mr. Eddy and his contingent in the LOST HIGHWAY flashback. The split subject then is explained through the elaborate mind control rituals, of which the connection between both HIGHWAY and DRIVE audition scenes connecting to conspiracy theories about Monarch 7 (1) or the collective subconscious and its tendency to arrange its repressed libidinal desires around pentagrams and black candles in some hidden room of one's parents' basement - with parents, grandparents, strange carnally-attuned neighbors with pointy glasses (like Nicki [Michele Hicks] below as the assistant to the casting director). Note the odd, knowing, carnal, paranoia-engendering gazes into camera below.

Ready to bring you "over the rainbow" (2)

The genius of the Illuminati/CIA/reptilian sex slave mind control basement ritual conspiracy theory is that it so suspiciously reflect/matches our primal unconscious dread/desire matrix, the basement as collective subconscious repository for every forbidden desire since the dawn of one's separation anxiety as an infant. In fact, this conspiracy theory in particular matches exactly parameters of the deeply buried subconscious incestuous impulse (as buried as Cronos under the bowels of the Earth). This might be intentional on the Illuminati's side of things, as it makes those under its power sound crazy when they try to report it (a kind of ur-gaslighting), and also creates split personality through the trauma; the idea being one is already a split personality as soon as they begin to repress base id impulses (locking in the basement the side of you who considers potty training and social mores to be an infringement on its ego-made rebellious incestuous polymorphously perverse freedom). This split of the self makes us effective assassins if exploited for such things, but also makes actors of us all, in more ways that we'll ever consciously know. Lynch knows, though. He's caught the big fishes.
------
Abstract thinking / super-ego / higher reasoning / artistic /: TRUTH OF (FILMED) EVENT
Laundry chute to basement--> creative function /  film (i.e. hearing down from the depths and translating to narrative for the upper floors
steps - transitional - performance/ duty / expression, from effort to finished film.
Waking Consciousness: (pay checks / paint brush cleaning  / disclaimers / jail-time)

Incestuous desire or childhood repressed fantasized sexuality depository (imagined spanking/ child is being beaten/ desire for neighbors, fellow classmates, friends, etc.)
Ulterior door/ barricade: Cover memory / split personality
crawlspace
By the above Lynchian hierarchy of consciousness we can pinpoint the problem with False Memory Syndrome - actual horrors endured are hidden below the sub basement level of merely repressed libidinal desires and fears, colored through lenses upon lenses warps upon warps etc.  The traumatic real event from the basement (Mrs. Bates' actual withered skeleton in the dress) reaches up like a hand through the sock pocket of repressed unconscious desires (the frock and wig and Norman's mind), the hand reaching up through the laundry chute to kill women who arouse him (there's no lock on any of the doors between the floors of the psychotic, schizophrenic, or--alas--bad tripper). The falseness of some recovered memories under hypnosis involves reverse-direction sock puppeteering that doesn't go far enough down, mistaking the sub/libidinal fantasy basement for the ulterior basement of actual truth. During the 80s Satanic panic it took the feds actually going down there and physically digging where all the bodies were supposed to be, under the foundation to where the ulterior rooms are, to realize there was nothing substantial there; the police were believing in empty sock puppets. 

For Lynch, a figure like the cowboy is a herald from one floor of consciousness to another, a sock puppet sent up from coming from the lower basement, the agent of his own dark undersoul; the conveyer of actions dictated by the unseen monsters of power (seen here in big dark empty rooms --with nervous supplicants speaking to them from behind clear glass walls, a metaphor for the divider between unconscious and conscious, the way ideas and decisions are passed across a slot in the wall from the depths of psyche into action or art). The levels of heavy power invested in these characters is impossible to understand until one translates their meaning across three spectrum - the meta outer spectrum (the blue-haired 'ultimate viewer / voyeur' at Club Silencio; the inner viewer (Camera POV) and innermost (character 'identification'); that a childhood icon (a popular plastic toy) like a cowboy to deliver these ultimatums is no accident: he's outmoded but recognizable, an ageless archetype as fitting in its proud anachronism as Sam Elliot in THE BIG LEBOWSKI. 





Similarly JONBENET the film operates with multiple layers - with the innermost core being the mystery of 'whodunnit' the unknown story that no one could successfully descramble and so has fostered endless speculation; the outer--the narrative recreation; and the outermost - the casting and personal interviews - the telling difference which separates this from fiction of MULHOLLAND DRIVE is that the truth has a habit of doubling back around on itself while fiction tends to just reverberate out into the wilderness, the difference between bloating in a bathtub and dissolving in the ocean. So here the actors auditioning for the roles turn out to be friends and neighbors of the Ramseys, each with their own piece of the mosaic as precious yet macabre as a handkerchief with some of Dillinger's blood. 

In Lynch's film, of course, there's no real blood, and all the handkerchief's have the same initials. The guy in the wheelchair is really one aspect of the same self that includes the cowboy, the mobsters, and both women; the fictive world of the film is as a universe exploded from the same ball of psyche. On the other hand, saying it's all one man's psyche, and the various archetypes within that psyche's unconscious, doesn't mean its cast of voices is smaller than the Ramsey case's 'real' people cast. Events are rooted in time, relationships of cause and effect mutable only in the varying vantage points from which they are witnessed and remembered or performed, as if some endlessly variable mythic template (the way, say Pagans perform the roles of sun and moon during solstice). The world soul and the individual psyche are linked in ways that are beyond limitless. The brain might look like a ball of gray oatmeal but it's bigger than all the oceans combined and, if you try and get too close, will take a broken shard of mirror and fuck you up real pretty. But in the end, you will understand the most important truth--that there was nothing to understand at all.


NOTES:
1. I'd rather not go down this lane, as I'm as susceptible to hot button outrage and paranoia as the next man, and reading this stuff disturbs me. The result of getting too far into it is clear via the ridiculousness of armed civilians crashing the Bohemian Grove or Pizza Gate. Regardless of if it's true or not I personally can't believe it, for my own peace of mind, but the very hot button of it all is what fascinates me, the way our paranoid collective subconscious so mirrors the reports of actual programming that one can only assume it's intentional - either they imitate our dreams or our dreams imitate them. 
2. Read the copious conspiracy theories Monarch 7 program's use of the Wizard of Oz as a hypnotic/programming tool (as seen in EYES WIDE SHUT)
4. Read my work-assigned synopsis/review here ("course description" at bottom)