Allergy season comes upon us, the deft poisoning of the senses that comes from the double threat of congestion and allergy medication-caused depression that used to lay me low in the time before SSRIs and OTC Claritin. Now it doesn't even matter - for some of us - spring is time to be an indoor child, wheezing in the dark with comic books and old movies while the tanned kids cavort in the pollen. I, who spent a week writing about what was wrong with Shape of Water, now find myself up against it. Only in the 70s, on Amazon Prime, can true solace be found.


Thanks to Prime's inexhaustible trove of forgotten gems from time amoral, we can go back to groovy 70s monster movie childhood, before the rise of VHS, spandex-and-butcher knife SOV hair metal despair - which the younger generation finds nostalgic but I find wearying. The truth is back there, in the 70s. On Prime. And I'm bringing a small coterie of students with me. Will you be foolish enough to be one of them? Amazon Prime has given us all the fertile muck one might ever wish to trudge through. 

It doesn't even matter that 95%of them are forgotten for a reason. 

my bible at nine

If you're wondering why it's important the films in this list are from the 70s, I'll tell you. It's not just for the groovy clothes, the perfect blend of post-60s free love open pre-AID sexual openness, but for the laid-back rustic mise en scene that was the style before the dawn of New Wave neon. It was the era when there were lots of flannel and campfires, sparkling streams, Native American guides, and grizzlies. But not only are we pre-CGI but films in theaters had a mystical cachet they lack today. Why? It's there in the campfire, my friend. Horror movies didn't have to show as much as make you think you saw --I don't mean ooh gore is bad - I mean remembering and relaying the story of the film to the neighborhood was part of the folktale myth part. You wanted to see that shit, you had to go probably to the inner city, or go to the drive-in and wait around until late-late-late for the third movie on the marquee. That was a badge of honor to have seen it, it made your re-telling of the plot itself a ghost story. It made the imagery sing like a spooky hawk over the bonfire.

Part of moseying down here in the basement bins of  time is to find the influences of the influence. each so influential we tend to forget them. If we look deeper amidst the eddies and levies of the Prime, we find all the crazes the 70s had that mainstream time has forgotten, especially Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster and The Abominable Snowman. The 1974 film Legend of Boggy Creek was the Blair Witch of its day - spawning a whole subgenre, as well as the documentary Mysterious Monsters which obsessed us kids and played independently for years at matinees I could never quite get my mom to take me to see (despite its G rating; Boggy too was a G). And I had the paperback edition (upper left). Its success led to a slew of bigfoot-themed movies--re-enactment documentaries that flooded drive-ins and matinees- eclipsed only by Jaws and the move from the forest to all things aquatic.

Another big part of the early 70s monster landscape people have forgotten: Willard (1971) about a loner and his rat army, a huge his thanks to an iconic moment from the constantly playing TV commercial involved young Bruce Davison running down a tenement stairwell away from an angry Earnest Borgnine, yelling "Tear him UP!" to his rats. It was a catch phrase for us kids for years. There was a sequel BEN and a horde of imitations, which--depending on how you look at it, might well include Carrie and The Exorcist (the anguished loner kid with weird murderous friend or skill) as well as the more obvious titles like Kiss of the Tarantula and Frogs. Then in 1973, eclipsed by The Exorcist as far as 'bad influence monster friend spurning loner to destruction" motifs.

So now you have it, along these two tangents we have enough to build this massive ten. Dig in.

Summer means barbecues and blah blah but also giant outdoor screens, roadshow Cinerama out under the bugs and picnic favors; and for the indoor kids, lots of intense air-conditioned journeys into beloved classics via the miracle that saved us all, HD widescreen TV and Blu-ray remastering from the 70mm negatives of classic Hitchcock and Kubrick. And man, with their entire oeuvres now transferred onto Blu-ray--even old Barry Lyndon-- life is good. Real good. But what about the movies themselves? You've seen 'em all before, a thousand times, does all that popping color and definition make a difference worthy of double, triple, quadruple dipping?

Oh, Johnny-Oh. Of course it does.


NORTH BY NORTHWEST, REAR WINDOW, and VERTIGO always held up even on full-screen (though I always had my doubts about the latter), but now with the full brilliant intensity of VistaVision (which was 'taller' rather than super wide in 70mm) captured on Blu-ray (maybe not as well as the new highly touted 4D or whatever -but still mind-blowing in its clarity), the precarious angles and dangling off roofs, the plunging hills of San Francisco, the detail in all the little apartment backyard windows, and the presidential noses all make sense in a whole new way-- we can imagine the plummet straight down through Midge's window in VERTIGO (above) on I-Max 3D and feeling the bottom drop out in our spines, too, looking down at the street or the rocks below Mount Rushmore in NORTH all the better picturing original audiences going "whoa" and closing their eyes when beholding these staggering drop offs on a three story 70mm VistaVision screen (but not getting motion sick from too much quick camera movement and rapid cuts- hence the relative 'glacial' or 'stately' quality.


I always loved North by Northwest, but some other big screen gems in the Hitch cannon---Vertigo and To Catch a Thief in particular--used to bore me senseless. With analog video's faded colors, the giant 70mm frame cropped mercilessly, the long shots of San Francisco and the French Riviera seemed far away and dull, like something that might be shown by a grandparent in an endless slideshow, or in some 7th grade geography class taught by a public school alcoholic who knew we'd rather snooze through travelogues than feel the squeak of his chalk and nasal voice vibrating in our aching braces.

No matter. Seeing To Catch a Thief for the first time on Blu-ray, via my big HD 'deep black' home screen via a quality HD TV of decent size (like my beloved 60mm Sony Bravia), digitally restored from a vivid VistaVision 70mm negative, was literally a revelation, as in a transformative religious experience.

To Catch a Thief - stills via DVDBeaver and 1000 Frames of Hitchcock

To Catch a Thief on VHS was a bore; on DVD it was okay; but on this remastered Blu-ray, man, it is one of the 'essential' vacation duplication movies in my roster. I watch it every winter on my 60-inch Sony Bravia and every summer on my 60-inch Sonia Bravia, and I feel like I'm there, having taken a running dive through my 60-inch Sony Bravia into the sunny waters of a magical France where everyone speaks English and I can roll with a sunbaked Cary Grant in that crazy gray sweater and red cravat combination as he gingerly avoids Grace Kelly's smoldering weirdly child-like perversity, as well as that annoying little scamp Brigitte Auber (1). (We all know the one he should have hooked up with is Grace's badass mother [Jessie Rose Landis], but who's counting?)

The ending with all the stuffy period costumes gets a bit draggy even so, Endless lords and ladies all gussied up like you keep hoping for Cary's old gang to stop catering and dress like revolting peasants and guillotine the lot. But the slow leisurely pace is far less grating on a big beautiful Blu-ray where the colors of every flower pops and makes a personal connection so deep you can smell the roses, and taste Grace Kelly's expensive lipstick. Though the big party seems like a drag, it really gives you the remembrance of what it's like to cater an event like that. The endless standing around, waiting to go home, or for Cary's hair-raising rooftop chase, which is now worth the wait --all bathed in intoxicating greens, making full use of VistaVision's harrowing downward plunges.


Speaking of GraceKelly, I used to have with Hitch's color 50s canon: Rear Window (1954).  I used to wince at the notion that this elderly anemic hobbled little gray-haired apple-haired gray-cheeked 'decent' all-American squaresville schmuck Jimmy Stewart as one LB Jeffries, kept trying to talk super rich doing hottie Grace Kelly out of dating him, ranting about the rough and tumble life a globe-trotting photographer that she'd have to tag along with him on his journeys, as if wives accompanied soldiers into battle, like they were handcuffed togther. I felt like Grace Kelly was really slumming, dealing with old gramps here, when in other movies she was picking the far more worthy Cary Grant (or me!). Why on earth would she be courting this geriatric homebody artiste-type and why would he be insane to try to talk her out of it?

I would watch these scenes frequently for I had it on the same tape that had Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), Naturally, I'd compare them, and imagine what Bill Fields--who was willing to marry the loaded Mrs. Hemoglobin (an uglied up Margaret Dumont) in order to put a nest under his little niece Gloria Jean--would think. Sir, you impugn this lady's austere character!

But time makes fools of us all, and I ended up feeling semi-trapped too in a similar relationship, from 2003-07 and so see it a different way. I 'grew' into understanding LB Jeffrey's reticence and now, on the big screen, or via high quality Blu-ray Sony Bravia or whatever, I can get the effect of uncanny sexual fear generated by Grace's heedless adoration and that it's totally intentional.

any similarity to Raymond Burr is purely subliminal

 Hitch frames her as a vampire appearing out of the darkness, sixty feet tall, over a shadowed, crippled, shriveled, semi-asleep (symbolically neutered) and somewhat fear-frozen Jimmy Stewart. Her sheer proximity on a 70mm super-tall movie screen, face right up in extreme close-up, like a gigantic devouring vampire giantess beaming down lovingly but hungrily at a child she's about to drain, and us in the audience, and I can relate - a feeling like being tickled or looking down from a very high structure (!)

Mrs. Hemoglobin, you look pretty as a June 'hic' bride.

The best he can do to dissuade her is to rant about elephants and dusty African safaris, as if every wife had to accompany every travel photographer on every sojourn, having no other purpose or interest (in reality, it's clearly the reverse - he dreads being trotted out to the opera and being bored at glib advertising parties, charity ball (I know, from experience.)

If you're confused about why Italy continually undoes the soundness of the Euro, Elio Petri's PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT, a nihilistic anti-capitalist Brechtian satire from 1973, can surely clarify for you toute suite. Short answer: too many commies. They got a funny idea about money.

The plot hinges on the concept of identity theft as having the power to crash whole neural networks, as a neurotic bank teller Total (Flavio Bucci - the blind pianist in Suspiria) who becomes obsessed with stealing the signifiers of a rich, corrupt butcher's (Ugo Tognazzi) ID -his hat, knife, car, even mistress-- Total steals it all. Launching himself on an absurdist Harpo-cum-Karl Marxist freak-out, Total starts by quitting his bank teller job by daring to burn a lire note in his boss's office ("that's sacrilege!" the boss exclaims). Total justifies his crazy crime spree by not stealing any cash: "I'm a Mandrakian Marxist," he says "I only steal what I need." Daria Nicolodi is Anita, the butcher's mistress, who at first welcomes Total as a sexually intriguing diversion, then pins hope as a possible escape aid, but she's too smart to believe there's anywhere to run that wouldn't just be here. Salvo Randone plays Total's shell-shocked dad, who's in total denial of his son's proclivities (by refusing to believe his son's a thief, he's able to enjoy the caviar guilt-free).

Rome: Open City - where a cop on duty outside the store laments he's in uniform, so can't loot any bread for himself - he  has ethics

The title is a satiric riff on old anarchist slogan, a common enough refrain in European genre movies of the late 60s, when commie ideology was snuck into movie dialogue by leftist filmmakers like Fernando di Leo and Giuliu Questi.

But why!? Why let Marx muddle their post-war reconstruction and keep them a wealth-redistribution obsessed economy nigh these 70 years? Stealing in time of necessity has long been a no-brainer to the Italians (i.e. the 'bread riots' of the 1940s - as seen in Rome: Open City for example - left ) and not feel a twinge of guilt. Italian and French pop culture long celebrates master thieves like Diabolik and crime--if done on an upward angle (rob from the richer)--was depicted as a kind financial vigilanteism (while even today if you visit to Rome people will tell you to keep your money and passport in a concealed money belt at all times). ). You might call that kind of behavior a lot of things: a kind of laissez-faire communism, for example --but it makes sense to not starve while rich people stuff themselves on sweets the other side of the shop window - the kind of thing one finds in Dickens and Griffith one doesn't find in Rome. Eventually, even the noble father in Bicycle Thief does it, after frittering away his remaining money on a meal (after passing up numerous free ones), and the wife spends the rest on a psychic to find out how long they'll be poor. Thus looting the bakery is both immoral and the highest kind of sanity for a people so locked into provincial pride and thinking due to Catholic guilt trips they can't see tomorrow for the nose on their face (i.e. the bakery won't open tomorrow or any day as they can't afford more flour due to not having any $$).

Property is No Longer a Theft is a child of that mindset, in more ways than one. It's on Blu-ray from Arrow, and looks and sounds great, but--if you don't believe in money and have a Prime subscription, you can pretend your stealing it as its streaming free. Just don't wonder if Arrow suddenly doesn't have any money for new restorations. It's your fault.


What drew me to it initially (aside from being enthralled by Petri's earlier masterpiece A Quiet Place in the Country) was a recommendation from horror film historian Tim Lucas who pointed out its near-giallo greatness, and indeed he's right - there may not be a crazed killer on the loose, but Total does threaten people with a knife; Ennio Morricone delivers one of his most surreal scores; Deep Red cinematographer Luigi Kuveller twists the frame with portentous shadows and expressionist angles (lots of doors within doors), and longtime Argento collaborator Daria Nicolodi (1) looms tall and ungainly sexy as Anita, the mistress --when she lets loose a deep throaty laugh during one of her Brechtian fourth wall addresses, you might get an instant chill as you recognize its masculine depths from so many Argento classics (it's the same laugh from Phenomena, when daring Jennifer Connelly to call her insects, or the mocking, snarling demoness at the climax of Suspiria). Since Bucci looks more than a little like Dario Argento himself (with a Dog-eared dash of a young Pacino) it would be easy to see this as a kind of deranged reflection of the Argento-Nicolodi collaborative canon (1), with the Butcher representing typical 'red telephone' Italian filmmaking at the time, and Argento like the mad genius who steers Daria free.

This all helps keep its odd mix of police corruption satire (the insurance-cops-rich-thief ring or wealth transference) from getting too mired in either didactic dissertation (In standard Brechtian practice, characters break the narrative flow to speak directly to the camera / audience) or Polanski-style young man-older-man-woman triangle power trip. Weird characters pop up to keep you guessing: the droop-eyed chief of detective (Orazio Orlando) who seems like he's either fishing for a bribe or trying to trap the butcher into a confession with a sense of conspiratorial camaraderie ("If you're not afraid of having it stolen," he notes, during the insurance tally, "you can't enjoy your wealth"); a cross-dressing master thief Albertone (Mario Scaccia) teaches Total the trade (and Total only taxes his weak, albeit big-as-all-outdoors queer heart with his irrational Ledger Joker-x-Harpo Marxist nonsense) and there's a dyke-ish fence played in a kind Lotte Lenya's Contessa Magda in Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone-style resonant post-glam played by Cecillia Pollizi.

Not to mention Diabolik in a blink-and-miss cameo:

Lynch's recent Trump comments outraged many, then outraged the others when he specified, but I dig it, it's all right there in TWIN PEAKS THE RETURN, an understanding that we can't just impeach our dark Cronus devouring fathers into the void... for long. They invariably return. At any rate, it all provides an excellent excuse to delve back in to what is either a big meaningless (but beautifully soundscaped) atmospheric exercise in frustration, or a masterpiece with maybe one too many close-ups of aging, craggy faces. Who am I, craggy faced surrealist of the sweltering Brooklyn attic, to judge?

I don't know man.... It seemed like Lynch was turning the whole thing into, well Inland Empire, which I still haven't been able to finish.

The second time I knew what to expect, and I started backwards.
Watching the episodes 'on demand' in reverse order proved the right move
for one does not face their enemy, but the wind is with him.

Speaking of,t rying to write about this - I accidentally published this a few days or weeks ago, funny, it's still dead linking around the web  - as I accidentally published too early Twin Peaks rant years back in this blog - and since one never quite 'un'-publishes it, one is tempted to--as Lynch would do--think outside the box, go for the deep fish.

Is that the reason?

Hey, did you read this last thing I did on the original season for: The Primal Scenesters

One wonders - no one knows - that by benefit of being a true artist--and even his moderate detractors won't argue Lynch is--we trust Lynch thinks 'but what does it mean?" even less than we do.  For in doing so he would taint the result with preconceptions. True art like Lynch's continually evolves as its beholder does - each decade it means something different, maybe even antithetical to its last meaning.

The only reason this is possible is that--in its druggy Ativan slowness--it's meaninglessness forms the higher meaning.

Which means it means nothing.

Which is good, because knowing the meaning is to roll one's eyes, not necessarily over Lynch himself, but his gushing fans always willing to interpret everything as genius:

"When you get there, you’ll already be there.” One of the most haunting lines of television, ever - Aliza Ma - Film Comment

Or--also rightly--sexist, the last of the old school sexist unabashed genius straight what male surrealists, he gets away with a kind of old man surrounding himself with young girls offering him pens, cigarettes, cocktails, donuts, and--'ahem'-- coffee as needed. I kept hoping the young FBI agent Tammy (Lynch's recording ingenue Chrysta Bell--this decade's Julee Cruse  or Rebeka del Rio if you will) would occasionally say something other than perfunctory dialogue of the sort a personal assistant might cover. Instead her job seems mainly to be looking kind of amazed at the level of weirdness involved in a 'Blue Rose case' but hot, walking with a delicious wiggle, and keeping her neck giraffe model long.

The bad girls are beaten up or murdered.

Naturally a few feminist critics have mentioned this, with some sadness. For example, Ally Hirschlag points out that "even when they’re not being murdered or abused, the ladies of Twin Peaks: The Return are thinly written." Indeed, the series does a great disservice to its female characters, placing them more or less as either alternating exasperated wife / adoring sex partner (Naomi Watts as Dougie's wife) or insane victims of past molestations or explosions (such as Audrey - who does a pretty good job of being bi-polar or even slightly schizophrenic (a result of the explosion at the end of season 2?): Only a few scattered souls like the Log Lady and Nadine seem beyond it all.


On the other hand, by virtue of them all being original cast members, Lynch has probably more middle-aged broads in this cast than in all the other shows on Showtime combined. Even if most are all deranged harridans, some are starry-eyed saints, like the log lady (even the ones who were middle-aged in the original). Bechdel-ishly speaking, it's a genuinely odd thing to see so many middle-aged women in one show - and ones that have not had work done --their eye bag miracle saggy eye remover giving them all the feeling certain details of their faces have been conspicuously erased.. This is the problem with '25 years later' with the same actors is not everyone ages like fine wine - like Cary Grant or Clark Gable - some look like moldy time-ravaged goblins, their craggy faces no longer able to support the uniform sea of curly black toupees the cast wore in the first seasons. It's just odd that there's so many, so sudden. We forget, there's a reason actors are pretty people --looking at age--remembering the beauty of these broads just 25 years earlier--is dispiriting. Even murder couldn't save Laura Palmer from time's merciless savagery.
Then there's Grace Zabriskie as Laura's mom, now turned alcoholic and deranged (hurrah! She's my favorite!)

PORTRAIT OF MRS. PALMER (by EK)

ADDICTION IS THE COLOR OF STATIC

That's what really lingers, or my takeaway, is the drugs - I could really relate to the totally batshit insane alcoholism of Grace Zabriskie, now spending most of her time drinkign. At a bar we see her bite the throat out of a giant malignant trucker, much to all our delight, except for the bargain basement video effects as she peels off her mask to expose-- what? TV static and a giant forked tongue? The rest of the time she freaks out liquor stores because of moved-around Slim Jims, or knocks 'em back at home in front of the TV - some of my favorite, most eerie scenes. There's not nearly enough TVs on in most movies and shows, making home life always seem barren and too quiet. But Lynch knows TVs are a part of the landscape and that--as only a few do too--Nicholas Roeg, Alex Cox--he makes weird TV shows to run weird counterpoint to the action.

Not to say they're not done as randomly as possible - to divulge new meanings where none or different or the same may have been before. If the meaning is 'on the nose' it's trite. There can be no meaning, no objective. Only in meaningless does the truth unfold as it isn't.

Any objective = merely evitcejbo in a mirror. Through the looking glass--in dreams--you'll find him there, the devouring Cronus father, the 'owner' of all the women, He who must be killed through unanimous son decision.

The horror of the Oedipus complex becomes as some holy deliverance when compared to the paralysis, the deep primordial dread, represented by Cronus, the devouring monster father, eating the gods and the world like a Babeless Bunyan eating rats in a sinking ship lost at sea that ran out of food and drink weeks ago. Next the sails, the mast, finally his boot, the foot that was in the boot... finally his own hideous cannibal mouth - tooth by tooth, 'til all that's left is a void within the void.

Just one smile, Coop? Even a cold one?

Lynch is at that age and level when there is no one who can really 'edit' his work for him -- it's too weird, and he doesn't explain it, which is all very well BUT if there's no 'there' there, how would he know? We're taking a lot on faith, such as the 'Frank / Bob/ whatever' of Bob-possessed Cooper being menacing. Consider the scene at left, with the girl who he just learned betrayed him (through yet another magical shortcut). I mean look deep at that face, it's got kind of a half-melted oven-bronzed female Buddha neutered quality to it (not helped by that wig of pulled back long black hair like he lifted the wig out of an old western prop box and merely clipped off the sewed-on tribal headband), whatever weird work giving him an effeminate edge. That babe in his arms is dynamite, all leggy and pale and, now, well, hey-- I've met Kyle McLachlan in person and he's a little fella - one of those stars that seems to come from some alternate reality of wee folk. And that girl with him is colossal, she could trounce him if she put in half a mind, and she has a gun - she could shoot him when he walks in. Instead it's like Red Riding Hood getting eaten by Grandma - and not even the grandma with the wolf in her, just plain old grandma- though of course that's what we're supposed to believe. That there's a wolf therein.

I don't know. I don't blame poor McLachlan, it's not his fault he got old - it's just we spend a great many hours with this dislikable cipher, and an equal amount with a bafflingly out-of-touch 'other Cooper' - a double named Dougie - who though he spends only 25 years in 'the Lodge' is still even more clueless in surreal Vegas than the real Coop was originally. It's exacerbating being with either one, for the same reason - there is no 'there' there - and BEING THERE at least had a guy THERE who could form a sentence. This is more BEING NOT THERE. Evil Cooper never smiles or laughs or enjoys himself, which would have made his character so much more menacing. Compare to the unhinged wild man randiness of Ray Wise in the original - and shudder!

In other words, there's not much there, to either 'part' of Cooper - nor any of that wild giggling mania we saw at the S2 cliffhanger, or the way there was in the deep tissue insanity conjured up by the great--and who I feel was the stealth gravitational center of the first one and a half seasons--Ray Wise. Bob doesn't even get amped when he beats a girl's head in with his fists, or nothin! When Leland Palmer killed Laura and then her cousin he howled in a mix of sadistic glee and fatherly anguish, all swirled together in a fifth dimensional reptilian Tequila shot. Whooo!

The big tease of the show is that we spend the whole season hoping to see these halves unite - for the evil Bob to go back as he promised, or was promised, but he keeps bouncing back with the help of his homeless old derelict poet contingents or assassins who neglect to put a ring on his finger. We figure we'll get real Cooper back but we don't - aside from maybe 20 minutes towards the end, for he goes to bed screwing with Diane, waking up as someone else - a slightly more cold, dead Cooper - one who finally is just a little bit terrifying. The there we were led to hope for is--it seems--long gone. Does a sadist run this universe?

Twin Peaks: The Return is set in the time of waiting. (...) As has become Lynch’s trademark over the intervening years, long takes and pregnant silence, really all manner of visual and aural static, escalate to near-unbearable intensity on account of a viewer’s excessive interestedness. Nothing becomes something before one’s eyes, and ears, only to recede once more into the doubtful terrain of moot detailing. (....) we endure a feeling of emptiness in repletion, or the opposite: detail signifying lack. Silence doesn’t exist except in relation to stimulation, and Lynch befuddles typically exclusive regimes of formal austerity and sensuous aestheticism by a kind of catalytic juxtaposition that is not, it seems important to insist, not dialectical. (Metaphysical Detectives - Sonder Manchester)

"....despite its many surface departures from the original Twin Peaks, is actually, if you think about it, a perfectly seamless continuation of the deeper themes Lynch was originally exploring. Compulsion. Obsession. Existential dread. Nostalgia. The ever-thwarted desire for things to work out and the ineffability of good and evil, which can be entirely human, or perhaps something trans-human and totally un-killable. For me, the most harrowing moment wasn’t the Return to Sparkwood and 21, or the shrieking Laura in a drug-addled date with death—it was the moment in the final segment of “Part XVII” where Can-Do, Super-Positive Cooper’s face faltered for just a minute as though he’d seen into an abyss of infinite sorrow and realized no one was going to save anyone, and that image of his face was superimposed over the rest of the scene as it unfolded. " -Amy Glynn, Paste

It's July --perfect time to cozy up in the AC with a seemingly limitless stream of cool Hong Kong fantasy cinema from the late 70s-early 80s streaming free on Amazon Prime. Thanks to the popularity of Star Wars and its HK vairants like Zu, Warriors of Magic Mountain, this period was rife with wild weird wuxia films dozens of steps more fantastic and unhinged than the usual kung fu plots and storylines (all those intergenerational wars between marital artists ever vying to be number one in the martial arts world). But these were a solid step away and/or above, with sweeping romance, monsters, myths, dangerous challenges, pursuits of ancient magical weapons and kung fu skills, etc. Way more fun. And above all - there are women in them. Not just accessories or damsels needing rescuing, fair princesses and dutiful moms, but warrior women - snake girls, expert in the handling and throwing of deadly serpents, or spiders, and even clans of martial arts nuns, the Er Mei, often led by a deadly ruthless leader with a strict 'no men' policy. These women are all granted respect, and the guys have no trouble fighting with them out of some misplaced chivalry.

from Bat Without Wings (Battle Wizard, top)

In general the classical wuxia output of this period, especially the work of director Chu Yuan, displays loads of atmosphere in vast ornate, gorgeous sets in which indoors and outdoors cease to be relative terms, as restaurants lead out to cliffs and small pond oases lie like ledges halfway down steep drop-offs. The films I mention here have a few things in common, recurring characters, directors, fight coordinators and above all atmosphere, strong female characters and roots in Chinese mythology. Chu Yuan's stress of atmospherics and focus on the novels of Gu Long, thus the Jungian resonance and horror atmospherics, the approach of Bava level-lighting on ornate mist-enshrouded sets to the point it's like Black Sabbath spilled over onto a Chinatown train set. Since the Shaws clearly reused, expanding and adjusting, their beautiful sets ceaselessly, each film is able to generate ornate vast sets of perfect beauty and just wiz through them as characters pursue clues and each other all around mystical landscapes.

To my eyes it makes a huge difference. In largely outdoor photography of many productions (as in King Hu film like Dragon Inn) the imagery often comes across as washed out and drab on DVD while the indoor studio bound world of the Shaws gives the impression of a vast perfectly modulated miniature world full of lush waterfalls, cliffs, mist, cherry and plum blossoms, and ever-setting suns, where huge beautiful restaurants stand ever ready to become scenes of crazy group fighting, or secret passages lead to huge beautiful caves filled with glistening skulls, coffins and spiderwebs and where the forests at night are dappled with cornflake snow amidst the cherry and plum blossoms. The effect is like an alternate reality dreamscape - a vast roofed ancient China-themed miniature golf course-style paradise. In other words, my kinda escape from summer heat. So blast the AC and move your chair so the vent is blowing right on your face, and get ready for weirdness, Hong Kong-style.

The arrival this month of Criterion's Dietrich-Von Sternberg Blu-ray boxed set (all six of their pre-code Paramount collaborations) answers an unspoken prayer I made a few years ago. I envisioned a different cover to the box, and some different extras, and MOROCCO looking slightly less faded, but only a Herbert Marshall-style ingrate squawks when prayers get answered. God--it seems--really is on speaking terms with everybody. BUT - what it really needed, or I would have loved to see, was an extra via Gaylyn Studlar. Let this humble post at least fire a salvo towards redressing that wrong.

THE MASOCHISTIC SPECTATOR / DEATH DRIVE:

The excellent liner notes and extras explore all sorts of great elements, both thematic and texural, except for a glaring omission. There is no exploration of the very obvious masochistic subtext running through these films like a hot river. The extras are guilty of shamefully ignoring the work of progressive film theorists like Steven Shaviro and--especially--Gaylyn Studlar. Her book In the Realm of Pleasure (left) deconstructs the Dietrich Sternberg films' kinky symbolism via a theory of the cinematic spectatorial gaze as inherently masochistic. This is a theory far different from, say, that of the sadistic gaze postulated by feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey. It's Mulvey's theory that has been not only utilized but rigidly enforced in feminist film studies the last few years, to the point the masochistic gaze is almost heresy. In fact, feminist film theory has been under such brutal siege by the Mulveyan male gazers that--like ISIS in ancient Babylon--all the great old edifices are in danger of being torn down. Even Mulvey herself is like, whoa, chill, it's just a talking point, a theory, not some buzzkill holy writ. (I paraphrase).

Studlar's book, alas, is rare enough that even the more open-minded academics don't often know about it. But they should, for--read along with revisiting the Dietrich-Von Sternberg collection,  is like opening a magic window into these films that makes them glow and resonate far beyond the--admittedly true and enticing--consensus of the historians, critics and academes on hand in the chosen melange of extras. Was Criterion scared it was too academic, or too kinky? Or were they worried Camille Paglia wouldn't be roused from her blood slumber in time to rescue them from third wave feminist reactionary clawing?

As it is, I heard Studlar's name mentioned only once in the extras. Homay King's excellent extra accompanying Shanghai Express mentions her concept of the 'heterocosm' i.e. an enclosed dream world outside space and time in which the film exists (i.e. it's not the 'China' of reality, but a kind of dream repository centered around the mystique of the 'Other').

Rather than just try and sum up the deep points Studlar makes in The Realm of Pleasure, I'll suggest you watch the films first then I'll point you back towards some of my previous posts exploring cinematic masochism, the voyeur as masochist - subject to having no control of the events in his experience, and how that relates to infancy and fear of abandonment by the mother and the embrace of death as pleasure being the ultimate act of pure control, of conquering death and moving past the pain-pleasure rim of the wheel right to the center. Yeah, man!



If you know Marlene’s history you know she liked to sleep with a lot of different people, and broke the hearts of adoring males (and females) all the time when they realized they would never “own” her totally had to learn to share (which her husband well knew, as he archived all her various love letters for her), and that’s where masochism and sublimation comes in. Imagine being JVS and you’re basically living at Marlene’s estate, painting a picture out on the lawn and here comes Gary Cooper’s car and you know that you wont be sleeping with Marlene all weekend, and will just have to wait til she gets bored of Cooper, who is taller and younger than you, etc. Do you throw your canvas to the ground and have a fit? Get a gun and run around the estate like the thuggish gamekeeper in Rules of the Game? Neither one will get you anywhere but in jail or laughed at. The artist Von Sternberg on the other hand lives for that moment, that flush of Oedipal rage and shame, harnessing its power, converting the emotional energy via artistic sublimation, Sternberg’s painting merely becomes darker and more twisted… better, in short. (full - 2009 - Bright Lights)

Welcome to violence, wrapped up in the flesh of woman, a deep raspy voice grabs us right from the get-go with this terrifying forward, the soundwaves of his voice on the tape measured out for us in some macabre dance of manly depth. He mentions dancers in a go-go club and the music explodes. Three uninhibited dancers enflame male lust, while grooving out to wailing garage band grind on a tiny stage in darkened room. A crew of bloated middle-aged male faces crowd around in the audience, puffy with drink and desire, the kind of mugs not even a mother could love, frenzied with cigars and darkness, shouting: 'Go baby go! Go! Go!" The girls wail and rock in their bikini ensembles (no stripping), the music builds, the shouts intensify. Everything builds until it all explodes into sunshine with a maniacal laugh and the title credits come rolling up as the dance continues into a sunny race down the open American highway; the girls are out of that darkened cesspool, speeding forward into the wasteland (the open planes of the American Southwest - in this instance the areas in and around the Mojave Desert). Each woman is in her own little souped-up roadster, leap-frogging each other and blasting their way freer and freer. The theme by some garage outfit called the Bostweeds roars under them like a souped up engine: "Pussycat is living reckless / pussycat is riding high / if you think you can tame her / well, just you try!"

Already we're in love, we'd never dream of trying to tame any of them, or this film - all we can do is hang on. It's Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! a 1965 drive-in aimed by Russ Meyer, the master of movies featuring big-breasted, sexually voracious, tough-talking women burning through men with uninhibited carnality, and, hitherto this film, 'nudie cuties' and southern-fried gothics (like Mudhoney, and Lorna) made in pursuit of the long green accorded trash hits like Poor White Trash that had been playing the tail end of drive-ins for decades, and, also in 1965, Motor Psycho (a kind of The Searchers, but with bikers instead of Apaches). Pussycat was something else altogether-- there was no precedent for it, no antecedent. Cinema had never seen women like the three wild go-go dancing, off-road dragging thrill-seeking maniacs, nor would it, sadly, ever again, a few random female characters aside).

The threesome are now the stuff of grindhouse legend: Varla (the terrifying Tura Satana), the tough butch sadistic leader, in the black Porsche, who shouts her lines in a haughty monotone; Rosie (Haji), her right hand underling/lover, who speaks in a low-key Chico Marx accent; and the wild card/joker, Billie (Lori Williams), the curvy fun-loving sexually carnivorous blonde who tags along with this due for the wild kicks they provide. (Hell, we would too).  Wild stuff happens wherever they go. And besides, if Billie's antics get her into trouble with--say--go-go patrons stalking her, she can rely on Varla to beat the shit out of them.


There is never any mention of they're being in any gang. They have no matching jackets or tattoos, not even weapons; Varla doesn't even bust out her knife until the climax (Rosa carries it for her, like a nurse.) There is no posing or growling or trying to act tough for these three girls - they're the real deal. We learn this pretty early on, when--and some might say he deserved it for hitting her when she was already letting him walk away--she breaks a young All American boy Tommy's (Ray Barlow) entitled little neck.  For thrilled first time viewers we're in brand new territory. We have no idea what's going to happen, all we know is, any man who crosses them better watch out.

Susan Bernard worries she might be hogging all the oxygen.

The girls' destination is a Mohave flatland, replete with tire markers for boundaries, that car nuts like themselves use for racing and timing trials; truck tires are laid out as boundaries for a race track loop. It's the kind of place that is usually deserted for miles and miles in all directions and, well, if you've never been way out alone in the middle of a desert before, then you know how eerie and ominous it gets, how long you can go without seeing another living soul, and yet how far you can see in all directions. It feels dangerous; if a bunch of rapey bikers showed up, you'd have to rely on their kindness or your courage. It's an eerie feeling, how quickly the law and order of the country can be left far behind, and horrible crimes could occur on you and your friends right there in the open, for hours and hours, and no one would know - and even if you tried to escape, there's nowhere to hide, and even if you get in your car and drive away, they have miles and miles in which to catch up and run you off the road. We see this 'sudden lawlessness brought on by the assurance of distance in films by Peckinpah (Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia), Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West), George Miller (Mad Max, the Road Warrior), Wes Craven (The Hills Have Eyes), among others. There's a deeply troubled understanding that, even in a country with laws and police, if you go too far off road, into the wasteland, either to homestead or just to run some timing trials, you have to be ready to defend yourself, and you should never be dumb enough to let yourself be led to far away from your trailer or homestead leaving your children and/or hot wife unprotected so a bunch of guys on bikes (or horses) can just ride up and run riot while you're off chasing a decoy. And unless you're going to kill them yourself there's not a damned thing you can do about it all.

"you don't have to believe it --just act it."

Into this wasteland, LA's own Mojave, came the hot rods. Teenagers were souping up dad's hand-me down Studebakers and drag racing out there, taking advantage of there not being a cop for miles to drive like maniacs. It's a distinctly American, distinctly mid-60s, pre-summer of love / post-big studio system phenomenon, when southern California car culture was all the rage (ala American Graffiti) and drive-ins the perfect place to see violence, sex, and speed and submarine races while getting it on in the back seat. Don't forget too that the mid-60s marked the time when the bikini--long a staple of French beaches--finally gained acceptance in the States. It was new-ish, so just having the word 'bikini' in your title, could guarantee box office interest. This was coupling up with teenager mobility and customized hot rods, as seen in AIP pics from the same era, like Velvet Vampire with its flashy yellow dune buggy, or climactic car chase scenes in Dr. Goldfoot, Bikini Beach, etc. It was also the dawn of the transistor radio, so not only would we now the voluptuous young bodies in all their splendor on the beaches, but they could bring their garage band radio stations and dance the frug or whatever and hula hoop until the sun went down. Old duffers like Buster Keaton scrambled for fishing-related excuses to get out there and discreetly ogle.

Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) - Bonehead dates a Mermaid

But over away from the relative safety of AIP's beach movies and The Horror of Party Beach, was the adults-only tail end drive-in entree. A nice-looking All-American boy, a "safety-first Clyde"  and his groovy obedient chick come roaring up to where the girls are., 'the best measured strip of land around' for timing trials ("It felt fast.... real fast!" - what a tool). Were headed for trouble from the moment Tommy gets out and stretches a little too patriarchally before them, as if to say, I'm the only man here so naturally I'll be in charge starting now." His girlfriend Linda (Susan Bernard) comes out when Varla notes of his bomb "you could time that heap with an hourglass" ("did someone mention my figure," she says all cute. Then adds "shall I set up shop here, Tommy?" and already you can't wait to see him get roughed up). Soon squabbling and chicken runs will give way to something darker.

They race, he wipes out when Varla cuts a corner just to chicky run him out of control with a sadistic laugh. Humiliated, he comes running up after parking far away, like he's just been violated. Linda screams as if he's already dead.  Tommy's tiny enough the towering Satana could break him with her bare hands. So she does. It's still morning, presumably. Later, at the local gas station, they spot a a giant hulk of young man and his crippled father peeling away in a pick-up; the leering attendant mentions the pile of loot they're sitting on... Billie meanwhile is bowled clear away by the sex appeal of the hulk. They realize now where they'll be heading to unload the body and maybe even create a few more.

With each trip to the well, my cup to fill, I come away with no admiration for what may well be the Big Sleep of 60s drive-in exploitation - a favorite that makes me feel just a little cooler every time I watch it, no matter how many times that is. I know I'm not alone in cherishing this film, one my all-time favorite movies. I love it so much I almost hate to talk about it even here. Luminaries of the trash arts like John Waters (who first turned me onto it through his book Shock Value), and feminist film critics like B. Ruby Rich alike, recognize its genius and can convey it more cogently perhaps. I can only vouch from my dozens of viewings that, as Waters says, "it ages like fine wine." Even now, elements are coming out in that bouquet. From the sound mixing to the framing, the gutsy brawling saxophone of club jazz combo score -- always somewhere between a tough TV cop show and a strip club, and editing, everything is surprisingly professional and opened up -- there's no canned audio dubs; as in John Waters, there's nothing primitive in its execution. Sure they shout all their lines when outdoors, to make sure they're heard - but they never sound muffled and sloppy, like they would in, say, an Al Adamson movie, or all canned and overdubbed, like in a Doris Wishman (or combo, like HG Lewis) and -oh! oh! What delicious lines! Jackie Moran's gonzo script roars by like half beatnik version  of Ben Hecht and half punch-drunk George Axelrod. You can feel and hear the air between the actors and the cars, the voices, that blowsy wailing saxophone it's Hollywood studio level professional. The acting may be flat, mostly (only Haji and Stuart Lancaster seem born for this weird style of dialogue, almost like Samuel Jackson was born for Tarantino's), but the dialogue is hilarious so it works perfectly.

Haji as the right hand woman / lover of the tough gang deb leader Varla, is someone I never really paid much attention to her before, being too enthralled by the statuesque curves of Lori Williams, and the evil of Tura Satana. But then, Marx Brothers fans like myself don't really appreciate Chico Marx, either --he's not as anarchic as Harpo or as intellectual as Groucho -- but as he holds it all together, his presence makes them 'the brothers', the way Haji makes it a girl gang even with just three people. It's Haji's Rosie who defines what they are and aren't, who never seems too be hamming, but deadpan cool - and always in that weird accent. She sticks with Varla, but she's also very aware of the danger they're in, that this time she may have gone too far. She's not as freaked out as Billie, but she's also clearly got some kind of moral conscience. And she makes the best use of any line she's thrown. While Tura and Lori both shout their lines like they're yelling over a lawn mower. Haji purrs, low, almost halfway to herself, comments like "his car's okay.... only the color needs changing.. ..like maybe yellow?" and my favorite line of all, when Linda offers them a soft drink. "Soft drink, she asks?" notes Rosie, incredulously, "we don't a-like nothing soft --Everything we touch is hard."


But while Rosie is to be fathomed for her middle child subtlety, Varla is one of the most amazing and badass characters in all of exploitation cinema, a force to be reckoned with. Tura Satana's a giant, beautiful in a weird almost alien way - half-Japanese yet towering, pale skin dark hair fierce eyes, flattish face, a sneer that seems to melt into the fourth dimension. We wouldn't see a smile that scary again until the alien smiles down a Harry Dean Stanton in the Nostromo docking bay. Yet Tura is never not all woman, even belting out hammy jujitsu moves or swinging her head around in a crazy kamikaze driving style - it's clear early on she'll go to any lengths to get her fierce kicks. We never learn why she's such a crazy bitch, but who cares? She doesn't seem to have got that way by suffering past male abuse, but just by being a true Woman, stripped of all phony decency.


Then there's Lori Williams' Rosie, who gets all the best lines and looks the sexiest in her white go-go buts and hip-hugging white shorts. Her lust after 'the Vegetable' the brain damaged body builder who the old man (Stuart Lancaster) uses like, as he puts it, "a piece of mutton", is truly hilarious ("I don't know what you're training for, but as far as I'm concerned, you're ready." What Williams lacks in subtlety she more than makes up for in giddy oomph. When she's getting drunk at lunch with Stuart Lancaster (as 'the Old Man') she sounds like she really is drinking (there ain't iced tea in that Cutty Sark bottle), noting it's "it's been known to be passin' out time." With Varla out back seducing Kirk to get the loot location and Varla jealously spying, and the Vegetable taking Stuart up to his room for a nap, it's time for Linda to make a dash for it, but this is still the desert, and walking anywhere on foot without a day-long head start, you just wont outrun a jeep, especially if driven by a pro like Varla.


For those who aren't familiar with it (and it can become hard to track down since the Meyer estate keeps the rights notoriously close to the vest) Pussycat is slightly easier to find than the rest of his films (aside from the studio-made Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) though they're sold on the Russ Meyer website, the DVDs aren't the best - they look like merely remastered from old tapes rather than source prints. So why someone like Arrow doesn't do a deal with them is a lingering mystery. I hear there's been a Blu-ray thing in the works for years now, but who knows why it's taking forever? (Apparently the original negatives are long lost and video masters are all that are left, which is too horrible to contemplate).


The film's been compared in more ways than one to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and indeed there's a kind of bent similarity but it's one with a feminist throttle all the way open, for the buzzing isn't Leatherface's chainsaw but Varla's wheels driving a car against 'the Vegetable' smashing him against the wall until he's a crinkled mess. They'll have to send him away "from a lot of things" and we imagine suddenly that Carmen Sternwood would be a great candidate for this gang, to take Billie's place, as would Claudia Jennings from Truck Stop Women (1974). Well, we can't have everything, unless we want to make a movie ourselves. I'm not trying to put any ideas into anyone's heads, but it seems to me a badass girl gang crashing a lot of different genres would be just the thing. A lot of folks have tried and they end up being the usual overwrought nonsense with one too many well-scrubbed thugs locking girls in trunks, strippers with sun-damaged silicone lugging bags of cash in and out of hotel lobbies, sunglassed douchebags smirking into rearview mirrors, abusive backstory, flashy meaningless over-editing, in other words missing the whole point. The only film of late I can see even coming close is the 2010 low budget Aussie pic, El Monstro Del Mar (which is kind of like the Faster Pussycats vs. the Sea Monster).


BEFORE AND AFTER (THE MEYER CANON):

Faster is so good it's natural to want to explore more Meyer films. Alas, while the quality of the filmmaking is always superb, the films aren't well restored -- the negatives may have been lost over time, with Meyer's iconoclastic insistence on handling all the video recording and distribution leading to a current state of stasis as far as Blu-rays, restoration, etc. Even so, there's no film quite as perfect as Pussycat in the Meyer canon. Changes in distributor demand led Russ from black-and-white to color for the rest of his films. Off-road mayhem changes to bedroom farce, and his earlier backwoods lustful Erskine on the Half-shell insanity tempered down into historical epics (Blacksnake) and generally insane softcore farmer's daughter style rutting (Up!, Beneath the Valley of the UltraVixens)

These days I have a whole new appreciation for Haji's Rosie, The co-star of Motor Psycho, her gorgeous breasts ever hanging out of a torn blouse as she bounces around in Rocco's truck through the desert on their quest for vengeance.

Even his vehicular homicide film from the same year (1965) wasn't in the same league as Faster - by keeping the bad guys men, it becomes a 'roughie,' part of a short rape/revenge trend in mid-60s exploitation. Now it's notable mainly for a chance to see Haji in a more prominent role, as an aid to bereaved vengeance seeking vet played by Alex Rocco (!) Motor Psycho chronicles a trio of rapey male bikers who happen across a lot of gorgeous ladies lolling around in revealing outfits, guarded only by their furious middle-aged husbands. After they gang has left enough destruction in their wake, Haji and veterinarian and Alex Rocco take revenge, but for my money it's too little too late. Plus, there's a very uncomfortable feeling afoot, with a deep encouraging of the Mulveyan male sadistic gaze as well as the Studlar masochistic spectator position, as our eyes all but molest these gorgeous women, and then must watch in horror as the bikers act on our eye's desires, almost like they're our own monster of the Id (from Forbidden Planet). Very Clockwork Orange in that respect - as all our libidinal leering comes back to haunt us. We'd never get that uncomfortable today, when Hollywood films sexual assaults in such a way as to leave us feeling personally violated, traumatized, but never uncomfortably complicit through our own ogling desires

we may not approve of their methods- Motor Psycho

From thenceforth the style changed. Drive-ins no longer wanted black-and-white, so- Meyer moved into color and relaxing censorship let him drift ever closer into hardcore. One film of his I do have, SuperVixens (1975) has scenes like the one with mail order bride Uschi Digard running around the farm naked but for feathers in her hair and waving ears of Indian corn outstretched as if auditioning for some X-rated margarine box cover, while Stuart Lancaster naked but for a chicken over his groin runs in an intersecting direction - breaking up a montage of them screwing in all sorts of farm locations, enough material if the shots were dragged out as long as they'd be in lesser hands, to make some shaggy farmer's wife story as Uschi doesn't get enough from Stu (I'd love to read his thoughts on all this - he's a fine, grounded actor whose gravitas imbues the second half of Faster Pussycat with such relief pitcher oomph, and who also appears in nearly every other Meyer film, as well as other sexploiters like Mantis in Lace --for a balding old dude with a cigarette voice, he gets around). Everywhere he goes 'Super'-sized glamazons throw themselves at him and he seldom wants to reciprocate, either trying to fight them off and arousing the ire of their kinky boyfriends (who like to watch, like John LaZar) or angering the farmer or hotelier into chasing thim with a shotgun. Violence explodes from the wild cartoon fury of nymphomaniacal Super Lorna (who takes an axe to her man's car in a jealous rage and then is later killed in the bathtub by Charles Napier as the investigating cop after she taunts him for not getting it up). This becomes the norm for Meyer, when death is just a joke that leaves a bad taste in the mouth, an extension of sexual frenzy wherein everyone loses- all the girls in Motor Psycho wind up dead or traumatized. And even in Meyer's big budget Beneath the Valley of the Dolls two women get a pistol shoved in their mouths for being lesbians. You can call that homophobic, or misogynist (I do), but more than that, it's misandric, viewing men as a bunch of easily bested slobs chasing cleavage over any cliff handy and resorting to violence like a temper tantrum.

Uschi Digard in SUPER VIXENS - the Mail order Milk Maid Fantasy cranked to cartoonish extremes enough to make Jayne Mansfield blush; (but we see the problem with color film vs. black and white as far as preservation - it's all muddy, especially without the negatives to strike a restored print from for  a good DVD or Blu-ray

Our hero is very rude not to indulge the weird come-ons of Super Cherry while her boyfriend (John Lazar) watches excitedly from the driver's seat.

It's violence but the wrong kind, not the badass liberated gangland karate of Varla, but a kind of extension of pent up sexual madness -- it's not 'constructive' as a machination for kicks as is the violence is in Faster Pussycat. We don't 'feel' the violence in Pussycat. We're not meant to share Linda's frustrated terror at the macabre luncheon ("she's a sick girl, pops"), or Tommy's  humiliation after the race around the track. We're meant to view this pair of clean-cut normies with a kind of savage's eye; their small world has been enlarged, their sense of middle class entitlement blown clear and loose, by this experience. We're not rooting for them and it's liberating. We wouldn't be in a similar position until Alberto Di Iglesia's Perdita Durango (Aka Dance with the Devil), a film a highly recommend


TOO FAST FOR SEX

One of the unusual aspects too of  Faster -- there is no sex in it whatsoever, yet there's implied lesbian pair bonding and -- in the house of the three men, some implied rape/abductions done by the Vegetable with the Old Man as instigator/spectator (revenge for a past slight done - when he crippled himself rescuing a girl off the tracks, who didn't even stop to see if he was all right but just caught the next train). According to interview, Haji didn't even know she was playing a lesbian until the shoot was almost over, but that's okay- this is 1965, after all, that they don't wear it on their sleeve is quite realistic for its time. We wouldn't really think of it if not for Billie's pronouncement that 'I can turn myself on a dozen different ways while you only got one channel, and your channel is busy tuning in outside," adding "you really should be AM and FM... you one channel chicks are a drag." There's a moment where Varla tells Billie, "Rosie and I are going to take a walk..." and somehow we imagine there might have been a softcore lesbian moment if this was 1969 instead of 65, or if Meyer had time, and the girls were down. But who cares in the end? There's no time for such stillness.

Written and directed by Mark Atkin, it's one of two films on SyFy that imagine the inevitable WATERWORLD future after global warming had put our whole planet underwater; the few humans hold on via floating villages and sharks getting very good at leaping up through the air and biting of people's heads as they stand on the shaky floating platforms. Unfortunately, other than these delights, the EMPIRE depicted here isn't very nice, as it's run brutally by a ruthless thug played by John Savage who keeps demanding huger tributes of.... I'm guessing fish oil? From the villagers, who keep clamoring for more fresh water.

The pussy attitude of the villagers reminds me of the very clear difference between a well-armed populace like America's red states vs. the average Kramer-esque idealized 'small town' mentality. Wild roaming bandits would have a devil of a time in certain regions of the Southwest for example but could really raise the ruckus if the cops were gone from Connecticut, for example. Anyway, we get it - these guys who work for Saxon are bad - you don't have to rub it in with tired scenes culled from other movies depicting abuses of power--the flogging 'round the wheel of woe, the demanding twice the usual tribute in half the time, etc.--it's not why we come to shark movies! We want clear blue water, attractive people in bathing suits - and bloody bites upon the unsuspecting bather. Is that too much to ask?

Of course there's a girl (Ashley De Lange) named Willow with a mysterious stone who can control the sharks so we get a lot of the old 'make the sharks kill this woman or I'll destroy your village' thing - you have ten seconds!-kind of thing. As a concept it's not well thought out, but suspense grinds on with these countdowns while Willoq stares blankly at the water going "I can't" over and over and Saxon--right in her face--goes "you must! you must!" until one's attention turns to one's drink or the newspaper, if those still exist in your satellite world

Eventually a boatload of capable good guys show up --they're a nice mix of age, gender and race with weathered tans that look like they actually do live on the water (and as for the requisite hottie blonde- how nice that there's peroxide in the future) and things perk up, but their attack on Savage's compound fails, and soon they're all being fed to the sharks again while Savage counts down from ten. "I can't! I can't!" It's all very grim and--what is ze word, Dr. Jones? Hackneyed? Tired? Like being dragged to one too many sadistic gladiator movies by a man who you're beginning to suspect isn't really your uncle.

Pros: the pirate ship manned by the well-named Mason Scrimm (Jonathan Pienar) is coolly outfitted with human bone railings, which goes a long way, as does the nifty catapult; also, re: Willow's hair - good to know there's still peroxide in the future. The scenery--clearly the oceans around South Africa---is de-lovely.

Shot the year previous to EMPIRE, it nonetheless works as the happy ever after sequel to that film's dour patriarchal outlaw grimness (and Mark Atkins wrote and directed both). Here the Bechdel test in full effect (with three doctors played by women!) it's a huge progress as this advanced functioning society is totally matriarchal and operating without the need for money or barter for goods and services. So while you can imagine either one coming first, this one was screened after EMPIRE last weekend, so I saw it as the Hillary future - and so might you!


In the pic above--center-- is Lindsay Sullivan as the no-nonsense leader, Dr. Roy Shaw (!); over the course of an almost real time afternoon she coordinates a) the launch window for both a HARP blast down into the magma under the shark zone, and b) the rocket that will launch co2 scrubbers into the upper atmosphere and refreeze the caps. Christa Vissar stars as Dr. Caroline Munroe (!) who a) works on launching the HARP device and then fucking up the ampullae of Lorenzini of the lead alpha shark -- all of it coordinated via her boat's CB radio. There's lots of white knuckle suspense too as her colleague Dr. Shayne Nichols (Stephanie Baran) parasails a few leagues ahead of the badass alpha sharks to move a target dingy for the HARP (a very well done scene, with her riding of the wind to leap as sharks jump up at her superbly done; and then when the boat sails right into an oncoming tidal wave, hoping to roll over it before it reaches megalithic heights.)

Another female highlight comes earlier: Angie Teodoro Dick as the wild neopagan shamaness with the spear (top image) leader of the rogue New Orleans voodoo style outpost who deals with the advancing shark issue by a kind of savage Stomp performance on the floating docks as they draw the sharks in to stab them with their mighty lances. Their growling and chanting and thumping goes on about three minutes too long, but the initial bad vibe created by their eventual senseless shark slaughter is interesting in context, as is the dimly lesbian look she shares with the incredulous Shaw.

All in all it's a noted step up from most Asylum productions, with some craft, focus, and money clearly invested - somebody really put it in the mix and tried to one of these films look good. It understands the being serious doesn't mean not being witty - and above all, the sunny and clear water vibe really works and the feminist stance is invigorating without being didactic. After all, if both sides of the divide can't cheer at the sight of a badass lady jumpstarting a Co2 scrubber rocket by jabbing two insulated leads into the electro-magnetic ampullae of a hyper alpha mutant shark, then we deserve extinction.


An unscrupulous big game hunting property owner tries to clear out his hick trailer park (they're all squatters) by flooding it from the nearby river. In comes a shark... not just any shark either. As the crafty lead Rob (Thomas Ian Nicholas) notes "this shark has issues... electrical ones."

spends the movie looking for his self-reliant girlfriend Jolene (Lulu Jovovich) and together they work to rally the scrappy indigents.

Pros: Some good dopey humor and strong female characters: they may be slightly trashy but they're smart and courageous. Though she has only a minor role, Tara Reid is a joy as a trash collecting trader who barely notices the trailer park's been flooded "One man's tragedy is another man's treasure," she notes before trying to sell the local scamp his watch back. When asked if she's seen his girl she notes "I aint seen a soul since thing's got biblical." Her accent sounds kind of like TANK GIRL's Lori Petty. Her laugh's fake as hell but she's clearly having fun in her new role as the SyFy channel's go-to shark celeb, though I still place my heart with Cassie Scerbo in SHARKNADO, even though the site of Reid throwing pink flamingos at the passing shark then charing it with a chainsaw is pretty pleasant.
For the male comic relief there's lanky AMC star Clint James as Rufus the Cowboy. He just about steals the show - his climactic slow-motion ride on his horse (named Dookie) right into the mouth of the shark is a big highlight, as are his surviving cries for how the shark ate his Dookie... like the ginchy score he plays it just straight enough it's actually funny rather than tiresome. There's also Hollywood McFinley as Cleon, evoking Tracy Morgan trying to swallow Dolemite. They all react differently to their homes being flooded, but more or less they've seen worse, and from their rooftops and makeshift boats they do battle with the landlord's thugs who zip around the flooded park on jet skis! And as the thug number one -- David Callaway is like a combination Julian in TRAILER PARK BOYS and - Jason Momoa. No one asked for that, but we're glad to have it just the same. I also like that the water is sufficiently gross on the surface that a shark can easily hide in the detritus. It looks, I mean, like water does when it floods a rural region - the surface is black or muddy and all sorts of shit be floating - but with the unusual ambience of trailer roofs + trees and bad guys on jet skis whizzing around, angering the resourceful locals

What I also like about this one is that keeps it simple -one shark - one day in the life - real time practically as events unfold; and the score is just right for the situation, playing things up just slightly awry, dedpan straight but in on the joke (big orchestral swells when one good old boy finds another alive), and hell, the sight of the bad guys running around between the trees in their hunting gear on their camouflage netting-covered jet-skis is so damned American it makes me want to drink Mountain Dew in slow motion.

Cons: The sight of full beer kegs getting drained (not drunk, just drained into the water) for use as flotation devices  -- what a tragic waste.

But hey, "This is for my big brown Dookie," says Rufus.
And you believe him.

Allisyn Ashley Arm as Molly

you won't find it down there, Columbus

Helmed a woman writer/director who fills the larder with interesting characters - including a cool family helmed by a fun grandma, and book nerd Daria type sister named Molly (Allisyn Ashley Arm) who wont put her book down (at least it's not an iPhone) to appreciate the fine river scenery. With her hipster layering and hipster hair and folk bling she reminds me of about four different girls I knew in the 90s and 00s and maybe you know them, too. There's an 'all in a day' real time kind of vibe as we follow the river down to the docks where the brother and his newfound girl run into the doofus boyfriend as well as relatively cool parents (the mom with her weathered look). This being the Ozarks, there's a salty survivalist who's ready for the shark incursion with a giant spear gun mounted in the back of his pick-up, and assorted firearms. By the end of the river-long chase, Molly will be an arms proficient badass.

Pros: there's a cool/hot MILF at the river party I wish to have seen more of. I think someone saves her little baby. Tons of varied female characters to go with the usual bimbo snacks (this beach party seems to be largely girls, which is totally cool with me). The score has some of those classic Jerry Goldsmith Alien woodwind quarter notes. Keep 'em comin'!

Cons: her boyfriend who follows her down there on vacation, is a tool. But hey, he dies.


There's a new singles health and fitness resort on a gorgeous Puerto Rican island - "Bodies by Reese: Singles Fitness Resort" - Reese (Eric Etarbi, lower left) with his hirsute tanned chest and blazing white open shirt, bossing around a crew of gorgeous young employees as they prepare to open, not realizing that the clear blue water is high in arsenic and a toxic chemical-spewing giant shark swims in it, and it spits toxins that turn people into crazy 28 Days Later -istyle homicidal maniacs (they talk though - and do some pretty good maniac babble). Soon the dwindling number of attractive college kids are all stranded and trying to send a boat out for help, dealing with the mounting zombie menace plus the shark issue is a lot to process, so they better think fast.

Pros: This one relies heavily on the gorgeous scenery and people - all of whom are - as per the needs of the health spa--young, gorgeous, toned or otherwise in peak physical health and fertility. The comedy tries not to overflow the banks of horror and 'MTV Singles' satire and the eco-awareness tragedy is all the more biting for being so downplayed. The place looks like paradise on earth, so the idea that the water is toxic and no fish survive only an arsenic-infused toxic shark, a situation well summed up by one of them: "All those years of polluting the ocean has finally come back to bite us, literally!" There's a pretty funny wipe-out off a four-wheeler along the shore, with a couple getting believably swept out in the crashing tide.

Big plus: Your mileage may vary but for me the pinnacle hottie in all these films is Kabby Borders (what a name!) as Eden (top in above row, lower left), who wears a fetching navy blue bikini with pink and aquamarine trim that matches her sandy blonde hair, sparkly blue eyes and dim trace of freckles and nary a trace of the busted weather-beaten look of so many broads in these films who can't seem to go gentle into their late thirties. All the girls here are young and hot but naturally so--they radiate health! Sie sind heimiche! -and even the boys are unobjectionable relative to... you know, its ilk. And best of all, if you're old and experienced, you have no wish to join them. Kale salad and sexual obsession  - you can keep it! I'll just loll in the surfy rhythms and keep myself preserved for furtive generations.

Pros: The director generously gives us long shots that catch Eden's whole gorgeous physique in that suit (as opposed to either leering or cropping or relying on tired Amicus-style close-ups.) I could watch her test the sea water for arsenic all the live long day. Though there's no conspicuous feminist strides, Angie O'Neill's script regularly surprises: one girl doesn't understand the word 'vapid'but it's not the one you'd think. The girls all talk mainly about getting laid but it's for Eden to get over her ex (who then shows up, unaware she's there--he's trying to get over her) and in the end she still pushes him away to take it slow! He agrees! The shocks keep coming! "Take a hike in the rainforest and take some samples of whatever..." One of the hotties is a bookworm but doesn't wear glasses, etc.  Eric Etabari is pretty hilarious as Reese, trying to play down the emergency as just bad vibes, especially after one of the girls gets rabid from the toxic sludge and tries to bite him. Until it gets wet, the hair on Eden's go-to chatty compadre, Audra (Christina Masterson) is long and lustrous, sparkling in the glittery sun. As she sits with Eden, their white teeth blazing and hair rolling and shining--as the surf rolls in --we may begin to finally, on some pleasant level, feel relaxed and attuned to a higher power. Then of course, shit hits the fan, but slowly, over real-time tracking shots from the infirmary down along the balcony to the beach, and the ocean, as staff worried walking conferences and guests hoping each other will be okay overlap. And then, of course, all hell breaks loose. Lots of gaping and struggling to get out of the water and slow motion moments of processing grief and overwhelmed staff freaking out.

Cons: The ugly ass shark itself is great, lunging and snapping like a muthuh - but the toxic sludge spew is ridiculously bad CGI. A real low - it's not even shaded (there's only one sort of flat food coloring green). The bickering between Eden and her ex gets old almost as quick as it would in real life -- as if O'Neill is exploring the relationship side of 'toxic' as well as the literal (shark) side.

 Meta-Bonus Round: When I first saw it, the commercial breaks were pretty well times, do there were some nice jump cuts the munching sharks to mouth-watering close-ups of Burger King double whoppers (I think it was Whoppers).

The sole reasons to see this are the bangin' PR scenery and the presence of two babes in scientific research positions -- Nikki Howard's willowy raven-haired Dr. Angie Yost, and her oceanographic aquarium scientist chum Lindsay Snyder. Mainly, it's Howard who puts it over, by managing to do just enough acting to be believable without being tiresome. And of course, she looks very professional in a lab coat over red tank top, with shark tooth necklace and long raven hair. She's smart, and if a trifle judgmental ("Way to go, World!" she says sarcastically pulling plastic out of a shark's gut during a collegiate demo), yet accessible in her imperfection (she identifies Cerberus as having only two-heads.

Pros? Since there's five heads to our shark this time, there's lots of young people and/or tourists and/or fishermen in the beautiful blue waters of Puerto Rico all lining up in rows of five while looking out from the lip of the boat - which is very obliging. You don't want to get only four in one go, and leave one head sulky. Ah well, at least the film has the temerity to spend most of the film out in the clear gorgeous blue waters, with Howard looking especially smart.

Cons: Though the two main 'final dudes' never stop wearing their baseball backwards, like a pair of real douchebag tools, the bad guy aquarium owner is worse. He tries to sound tough as he does his song and dance about how it's okay to put his team in danger since if they don't capture a five-headed shark alive for the aquarium then everyone's losing their job. On and on his rants go, fishtailing out into apologies once the team starts getting eaten. His high little voice makes Bruce Dern sound like Orson Welles. I eventually had to FF to get past his scenes, figuring I'd check back in after he's eaten, but he keeps hanging around until almost the bitter end.

Ah well, at least the other boys (with the cap issue) don't otherwise irk, but slide conveniently in their slots (the weathered manly slightly salty and dissolute ex-boyfriend charter captain, the cute scruffy tech nerd) and let the girls work the emotional high wire, as nature intented. And if anyone's lucky enough to marry Dr. Angie, it's with the caveat they'll have to eat vegan. Our jealousy trails off to a dull splash.
Meanwhile, the only clear danger present might be carpal tunnel on the CGI programmer, but one suspects even he did not work too hard. Ah well, line 'em up!

A simple counting of the row of obliging meals ahead lets you know this is a still from 5-Headed Shark Attack.  If these sequels keep mounting they're gonna need a wider boat.

During a recent TCM  random catch of the last hour of STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE for the first time in a few years (I'd been turned off last time around by Leigh's mannered hamminess), I was thrown by the power of one performance I'd never really appreciated in full before, Kim Hunter's Stella. Namely it was the scene after the famous "Stella!" moment. Blanche (Vivien Leigh) finds her sister in bed the next morning after Stanley's slunk off to work; playing down her morning post-coital afterglow in ways Leigh's own similarly-Rhett-ravished Scarlett would have overdone with kittenish sighs and dreamy girly smiles in 1939's GONE WITH THE WIND. Blanche is horrified that Stella has forgiven him his brutal outburst and radio smashing of the night before, but for Stella it's just another well-laid morning - sex with an abusive husband when he's feeling deeply ashamed after an outburst is--according to Camille Paglia's research--why so many wives stay with their brutes. High on endorphins from the sting of punches and slaps, they're deeply receptive--nerves enflamed and sensitive--to desire. It's just biology. It goes deep - in all senses.  Next time you see this scene, note the kittenish way Blanche says she was "sort of thrilled" by the way Stanley broke all the lightbulbs on their honeymoon, or the sly fallopian resonance she brings to the line: "only one tube was smashed." Counterbalancing Leigh's southern faded-belle histrionics, Hunter doesn't miss any of the little resonant mythic notes in Williams' dialogue, but--in courtesy to Leigh's strident yammering--lets it seem on the surface as if she's missed them all. Leigh's Blanche is horrified that Stella has forgiven him, that Stanley's rage has been so completely absorbed by Stella's sexual body. Yet we never feel--as we sometimes do when we hear of women going back to their abusive husbands--that she's a pushover. She's in control; we could see in her, after all, the night before - a possessed pagan fertility god-channeling on those stairs the night before, so turned on by Stanley's bestial excess energy her conscious self all but blacks out as if in a voodoo ceremony. She's even able to put Blanche gently into context: "Don't you think your superior attitude's a little out of place?"


Sure, I knew she'd won an Oscar for it, but it's so ingeniously under-the-radar- so truly "supporting" even as it take a dozen viewings to see how she's overflown those borders. As a kid, seeing it I was usually busy rolling my eyes at Leigh's drag queen Scarlett O'Hara impersonator (Blanche is really Scarlett after she becomes a full blown alcoholic - she was already on the way in Gone with the Wind, though--as Rhett points out--she's pretty good about hiding it), or (in later views) drooling in awe at the rippling back muscles of Brando's Kowalski under Harry Stradling's glistening cinematography (now perfectly transferred into the digital age so every sweaty sinew shines like a limestone stalactite under centuries of constant slow cavern drip). But Kim's who really hung me this latest time. As I watched her straddle between Stanley's savage magnetism and Blanche's delusional Southern Gothic narcissist swoon, I found myself thinking back to her in other roles, and realized, almost despite myself, she'd become a kind of positive ideal for me --not the elusive anima but the obtainable girl - a heart-on-her-sleeve romantic of the sort shy guys love, for they tend to play the courtship game very badly, to show their cards right away and tell us they like us far too soon, so that dating them becomes stress-free; we can skip all the tedious date small talk, not even bother pretending we enjoy rock climbing or bungee jumping --go right to the colored lights portion, sex and laying around in a post-coital cocoon all day, drinking whiskey and ginger ale on the rocks, watching the James Bond marathon on TNT or listening to Columbia era Sinatra until the wee wee hours.

There were only ever a few such actresses who could convey all that with the shy open courage of Kim Hunter --nowadays there are none. Heather Graham had it for awhile and wound up subjected to the casting equivalent of Dogville.  Now there are are only hotties who lazy directors think can pass as 'plain' by putting them in a pair of glasses and a nerdy sweater, and girls who are strictly comic relief. In the forties we had Frances Dee in I Walk with a Zombie (watch it sometime and note the way she unreservedly invades Tom Conway's personal space, or blurts out "I love Fort Holland"). And we have Kim Hunter in everything - women who--in keeping with the tenor of wartime and, later, noir, talked softly, so as not to arouse some sleeping Axis neighbor. These girlswore their hair in smart naturally colored curls so as not to get tangled in whatever factory or WAC job they were doing. Their beauty was subservient not to men or childbirth but to their own desires and smarts; they didn't work inordinately towards looking good (1) but just saw what she could do to look pleasant with minimal effort and did it. A man could fall in love with one easily, but he'd had have to be looking close, for a while; she wasn't out there turning heads and exploding milk bottles as she passed by on the street. A man in love with her wouldn't have to be jealous every time she went out, like he would with, say, Marilyn Monroe on his arm, or wincing like he would with Shelly Winters. Girls like Kim Hunter were never bigger than life-size, and felt no need to stand out from the shadows. And so, in their way, provided the right shoulder to lean on - not a pushover but not weak, sympathetic to a man's woes but not dumb enough to fall for a hustler nor maudlin enough to indulge any wussy tantrum of despair. Soldiers saw the type all the time in field hospitals, opiates giving their nurse's white a special halo-like glow, against the their frail mortality's darkening mist they were as angels.

Hunter, in short, is that rarest of actresses --not a narcissist, and instead embodies this quiet, centered grace. She could project an identifiable decency (yet a cool decency, not a square Tom Hanks-style decency) that made her a fixed point of gravity, anchoring all the rotations in a film's constellation like a combination planet Earth and warm-handed juggler. Thus we believe in A Matter of Life and Death that someone could fall in love with her over the radio, simply because she's 'life' and they're 'leaving her.' You believe that love would stick even in person, without any question of a catfish rejection; and you believe the local doctor with a mild crush on her wouldn't bat an eye in transferring his affection purely to being just a friend when she brings home this newly adopted stray. In 7th Victim she can even gently spurn the pathetic advances of a frail 'poet', refuse the milk at a diner, and impress a Mephistophelean ladykiller shrink while refusing his advances all in the same hour.

And you believe too that, even as an ape, she can call Charlton Heston ugly to his face and not have him take offense.
In short, she's electric yet the current is never painful; she's nurturing yet alluring, homey but not homely, a prime example of the center of the Goldilocks zone of hotness and--above all--steady and supportive yet nobody's pushover. Don't patronize her like a child, or try and make any practiced romantic overtures (she'll let you know she's interested - you won't be able to miss it).


Maybe it's really a film about Oscar Jaffe going violently into the good night, raging against the dying of the light as Kazan's Actor's Studio kitchen sink Freudian realism jackboots over Jaffe's overly mannered style of Southern Gothic theater (I keep thinking of Blanche's youth as being excactly like that of Lilly Garland [Mildred Plotka] in TWENTIETH CENTURY, 'ding-a-ling'ing into the chalk line), the exhilarating immediacy of Brando's Stanley, who comes home from work covered in sweat and machine oil, still loud and coiled vs. the fading southern belle airs of Vivien Leigh, robbed of Tara, patriarchal support structure (no Rhett or Kennedy to patiently swoop in and pay the carpetbagger taxes and so forth). Without such a support structure, Blanche falls apart. The well of kind strangers dries up. Though some lewd understanding seems to exist between them, Brando and Leigh grind up against each other like opposing centuries, where one's schizophrenia is another's inheritance of the earth.  Brando's terrifying working class sanity is the new way forward in American acting (and very Marxist for all that, shhhh), operating on the same electric ripple that Clark Gable made in RED DUST in 1932, blowing all the soft-handed 'juvenile' leads (like Gene Raymond) clear back into the category of easily out-gunned naive rivals, the type who bring their hot wives down to savage countries where native drums and monsoons enflame the blood to the point their husband's run away to their separate room in fear of combustion, leaving the way open for men already burning.

Brando's Stanley, susceptible to violent outbursts, never pretends to be better than he is and has a steady job. He might occasionally get drunk and smash a radio and maybe sexually assault a crazy woman, but he'll probably be a fun, fiercely loving father when it's not poker night and he's losing. One can say his hunting down the 'truth' about Blanche's past is mean-spirited, but who can blame him, getting high-hatted in his own kingdom by some penniless hypocrite who alienates his own wife against him while drinking his booze? I'd be furious too, and I too would want to know the truth and not wind up with this vapid broad haunting my parlor every day while her husband and I are off at the plant. It's what any friend would do.

In the midst of this crisis of acting schools and class and alcohol, is the only one who can believably adapt to both the mint julep vapors and the cold beer shouting, Kim Hunter as Stella. She can have a blast at the bowling alley on Tuesdays and make it to the hoity toity jubilee on Saturday;  more earthy than Blanche, more mannered than Stanley; wild about Stanley's animal magnetism, a reflection of the awe she once had for the sophistication of older sister Blanche, used to helping her get tarted up for her ballroom coming-out parties, a kind of divine inheritance that changing circumstances or attractiveness levels, kept Stella from living with the same airy entitlement --except vicariously.

Everyone notes the "Stella! Stella!" scene when doing their Brando imitations, but it's really Kim's scene at least as much as Brando's if not more. Lit unflatteringly but sensually from below (left) as she descends the stairs, she makes no bones about hiding her vaguely plump mammalian herd animal features, the glow sweat and awry hair radiating a halfway reversion to heat-induced savagery, she still radiates such a scornful godlike power, it's as if under voodoo possession by some magisterial fertility goddess; the hungry way her hands explore his Adonis like muscular ripped back is so vivid we can feel his muscles through the screen.

This latest viewing I noticed other interesting termite touches, like the way Brando's "Stella!" shout becomes a musical refrain carried in the far-off music, some singer practicing out his window or selling flores por los muertos. Clearly Stella is right, considering she's a guest in a place paid for by the husband's job, it is out of place, and for all her airs, her snobbery betrays Blanche's provincialism, her lack of nobless oblige. For, as rich snob puts it at the local cantina in Mesa of Lost Women, "the ability to adapt oneself to any situation is the mark of the true sophisticate."

We see the result of clinging to the past and judging and trying to escape while being unable to leave - not living on the 'realistic level' - a common theme in Williams' work (as in Night of the Iguana), that the fantasy life cannot survive in the real world without creating a kind of insane destructive frisson. Consider Blanche in comparison with the Rev. Lawrence T. Shannon in Night of the Iguana
At the end of Iguana, Shannon winds up in the arms of the Stanley equivalent (Maxine - the rough earth mother) rather than taking the long swim (the only way left for remaining in the fantastic level). He's lucky that it's Ava Gardner, and the genders are reversed, because the reverse of his acceptance is the refusal of Blanche -she has taken the long swim; if you're a woman instead of a man, the long swim might be barred by arms less nurturing than Maxine's; if you don't stay voluntarily, they will force you to the realistic level and if you still resist, you'll wind up with a lobotomy (like Mrs. Venable wants to give Katherine in Suddenly Last Summer) permanently shattered, and though no one will force you to the realistic level, your dependence on the kindness of strangers will leave you fluttering in the wind once you no longer have access to a single new face.

That's why Hunter's Stella is such a reassuring character, contextualizing the monstrousness of Stanley into something human (she's the cub lolling in the arms of the king of beasts), and grounding her schizo sister as best she can. She's the 'acceptance' - what ideally Shannon will be like in a few days once he adjusts to the rhythms of hammock living and being shacked up with a horny Mexican broad pushing forty with two maraca-playing cabana boys at her beck and call. It's Hunter's resilience that is the ultimate moral in Streetcar, especially if you ignore the tacked-on ending when she runs upstairs vowing to leave Stanley forever (at least she doesn't think twice about leaving the baby in the carriage unattended outside in the street / courtyard before then - so all who pass may gaze upon it, confident that it won't be swiped - the whole of the neighborhood now the loving tarantula arms of the king of beasts).


If the love between Stella and Stanley is earthy and even lower than earth (the fiery furnace), the WW2 love between Hunter's June--a Bomber Command radio operator-- and RAF bombardier Peter D. Carter (David Niven) is literally airborne, high up in clouds, and fog so thick one might fall to the sea and not even get hurt, merely bounce to shore right into June's bike path, their chemistry the radio waves as strong as any ocean's, their magnetism drawing them together inevitably through the fog of war.

Their chemistry in that opening scene is terrific we believe this long distance/right before dying love is possible. They aren't really in the same scene at all, or even the same altitude, but they convincingly fall in love just the same, over the radio. We fall in love with them too, and we're for them 100% right from the get-go - almost desperate for them to be together, certain it can't be possibly happen and in that certainty, perhaps, able to cherish their spark like few others. His poetry-even-in-the-face-of-certain-death gallant sweetness (he dictates a cable to his mother), the way his British stiff upper lip doesn't crack even in the face of certain death and--when he asks if she's in love with anybody and she notes "I could love a man like you, David," she has tears in her eyes, we don't blame her. "I love you, June," he says. "You're life, and I'm leaving you." - And just like 'that' - they're in love. We see her choking up with tears even while--though we don't see them--we're sure there's dozens of other people in the room around her, dealing with the same issues with other pilots. "I was lucky to get you," he notes. He could have received any other operator monitoring the flight, or none of them. As it is, now they're both in love with a voice, each bathed in Cardiff's Technicolor fire - she in pink-lit womanly underground bunker Bomber Command light and he in the fires going on all around him in the Lancaster bomber, and together theirs is a love which they have only a minute to agree has been struck, and there's nothing to do but for him to say 'see you in a minute' to his dead 'sparks' and jump out of the side without a working parachute.


Well, through some miracle not easily explained by the 'is it all in his imagination?' angle, is this heaven, or some in between holding pattern -- he lives, and they wind up in each other's arms, on that beach. And they both know better than to abandon that love--made when just voices under heavy duress-- to the elements, to throw it back, as it were, into the sea. They both know it's what save him, even if they don't know why or how. This isn't one of those films, thank god, where things get awkward in person. It's not Catfish and Kim Hunter isn't some aloof anima figure like Dietrich nor some soapy martyr like Joan Crawford, but real solid 'girlfriend' material, the sort who won't throw love away on some silly point of honor, like their life/death status or their separate classes or nationalities, or that they barely know each other. She just met him but she's willing to die for him - and it seems perfectly natural. As I wrote in Men Who Are Frozen, in wartime there is no room for waffling and being coy. When love strikes, the victims don't wait to give it their whole selves, confessing their love in great spasms of each-breath-may-be-your-last intensity. Then they're off to the front, maybe to never return.  What could be more intimate that total commitment, intensified by the thought of impending immolation? This is love in wartime --there may not be a second date--for anyone, anywhere, ever--so there is no time for taking it slow. If it clicks, you hold on like a life preserver in a stormy sea. If you happen to stumble on a still walking preacher in a still-standing church, you take it as a sign to get married. Your regiment leaves at dawn, so you better not hesitate when you get your handful of hours in the honeymoon suite.

Hunter as Zora - PLANET OF THE MOTHERFUCKIN' APES!

I'd forgotten about all about conspiracies, Saturn, Satan and schizophrenia until I finally saw HEREDITARY, which brought it all cascading back, buckling the thin walls of sanity I'd set barely nailed up after exiting the paranoid conspiracy zone writing some of the posts linked below. Not that this amazing new horror movie is just conspiracy paranoia-tingling, no, no no! It's also a deep character study that takes its time to get going and, true to the name, rides the raft of inherited mental illness all the down the DNA river into the tributary to the sea of true madness. There's a recently deceased mother with "a lot of secrets" and a whole family tree of suicides and despair and then Toni Collette, the daughter, and also the scariest yet most sympathetic mother in a horror film since Essie Davis in The Babadook, coming to terms with things like her son not trusting her just because he once woke up one night to find himself and his sister covered with turpentine and mom standing over them while they slept with a book of matches in her hand. She was sleepwalking! He doesn't believe her, not even now. We don't see it, but it's a haunting slow burn image that ranks with those moments in Paranormal Activity as far as making all our unconscious eight-hour stretches in bed suddenly seem so unsafe we wonder how we ever managed to sleep at all. (If you've ever encountered a sleepwalker, then you know how terrifying it is, that flat dilated black pupil look in their eyes). This movie does what great horror movies do, it takes these nuggets of forgotten uncanny everyday living and slowly compiles them alongside enough sudden calamities and random bits of disturbing 'accident' that it's much more than a mere thrill ride, it's something that slowly builds until it turns by extension your life into a horror movie, like a virus. While you were distracted by one narrative, it snuck around behind you with another, and pushed you out of your safe viewing distance into something like terrified rapture.

The debut feature from young Ari Aster, the film successfully gets the whole "there is no difference between inherited paranoid schizophrenia, manic depression, and witchcraft" route (the kind mastered in Rosemary's Baby and duplicated almost nowhere else since... until now). Treading so close on our actual fears it crosses the line where imagination becomes insanity, like that normal-seeming friend confiding in you all sorts of paranoid-sounding statements, like someone is breaking in at night to move boxes around in her closet (am I the only one with weird friends like these?). This is the kind of film wherein a roster of DSM IV-spiked beliefs start to dovetail with the Old Testament, making us wonder if the ultimate conspiracy theory paranoid schizophrenic manifesto might be the Bible. Is it so hard to believe that, once the blinders on our perceptions are opened through chanting, stress, sleepiness, magical potions, or prolonged trauma conditioning (PTC), the witchcraft can begin in earnest. Maybe we can only fly when no one who doesn't believe we can is watching. Maybe if we can let go of our bodies we don't need a broomstick; when no one is around to listen, the sound a tree falling in the woods makes is like music in the eye of a screaming demon.


Here lie some links to past conspiracy writing should you be a glutton for madness, or need more ideas for similar mind-benders afterwards:

The Goat of Menses and the Fox in the Atheist Hole: THE WITCH
(March 2nd, 2016)

"So see the movie and understand at last why patriarchal science and religion are both such hardheaded dicks about the unknown and supernatural, and why Christian zealotry has never not been on the rise and why women are always considered a zone outside of western rational objectivity. Only in one or two other films have we seen beautiful women materialize out of the darkness of the woods or the gleam of the bathtub, as irresistible as a warm slug of whiskey in an unfriendly wilderness, our willpower long gone, we lower our lips towards their hearth and then suddenly these figures grab onto us as if with clawed tentacles and thorny paws. They are not hot and young at all, but decomposing and very old. You've been tricked, son of Adam! The distance of time between that first kiss, the wedding bells, funeral chimes, cold ground worms boring through rotten pine box walls collapses into a single Donald Sutherland death rattle.

This powerful motif, the 'young-old predatory woman' reflects the tradition of the sidpa bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the level of purgatory where you see and notice only undulating lovers like flames in an otherwise all-consuming darkness. If you let yourself be drawn too close to them you run the risk of finding yourself stuck like a fly in the frozen web of the woman's newly-fertilized embryo, like being sucked over a waterfall. Then devouring demon rock below shreds your current construct of self into a million pieces which sink or scatter in the rapid current below; only the core I AM remains trapped in that sticky embryonic web- and soon you've forgotten you were ever anywhere else-- the 'you' you believed yourself to be is shaved away like your hippie hair under the electric razor of a FULL METAL JACKET barber." (more)
(October- 2013)

Cinema's pagan devil culture can't quite capture the ephemeral chain of cause-and-effect karma ouroboros-boomeranging to the point just watching a film creates bad luck, but it can generate a feeling of unease through depiction of the most sophisticated or banal of circumstances if it but tweaks them with little uncanny ripples of fatalistic coincidence that benefit or harm as befits 'the bargain.' With Satan there's usually a gruesome payoff after the subject sells his soul for a drink, where he learns he's "always been the caretaker," and so forth. Ask not whom is sacrificed on the ancient altar, because if no one told you else it's going to be, then it's you. You're doing both the killing and the being killed. Two ends of a scroll slowly rolling towards each other, when they meet, your text has disappeared.

So is there free will in a Satanic model of reality? Maybe the one who has 'always been the caretaker' can play Christian the way a closeted gay guy can play straight i.e. stunting his own potential and becoming far less than he was meant to be, or he can let go of the handrails and let Satan's vacuum suction pull him towards the full realization of his unholy destiny. If your Christian family would rather have you as a stunted straight than a fully blossomed gay person then they are the cursed, not you. Thus the devil exists only in advocate position --where there is hypocrisy he brings truth; where there is repression he brings exultation.

If we apply that logic to the actual making of these films, wife Sharon Tate is doomed the moment husband Roman Polanski helps her get the part in EYE; Polanski is doomed to exile the moment he shoots a scene wherein a woman is drugged and date raped by Satan. It all connects, from the devil's murky fatalistic machinations within the story--recreating itself through helping Guy get the part in that play (as, fittingly enough, a cripple)--to the reality of its makers (Castle's kidney stones, etc). The devil's happy to crib off your paper, so to speak, to make reality out of the image you made of him. It's as if film was little more than a halfway point, the equivalent of a pie cooling on the windowsill before its opened up and devoured, except the windowsill is a mirror, and the pie sliced open is a young and lovely actress.

Maybe nyoets, for if there was a blueprint for mind control it would probably be geared to work towards reproducing--as close as possible--the iconography of normal subconscious dreaming, allowing the programmers to tap into the unconscious' control state with maximum ease, programming their automaton women, the "standard pleasure model" ala BLADE RUNNER, DR. GOLDFOOT, etc. (see CinemArchetype #16 - the Automaton) to fall in love with whatever billionaire diplomat is breezing through town for a weekend. These girls wouldn't even know they had microphones in their teeth to record any business secrets that might get spilled in pillow talk, or which could be used for blackmail. They wouldn't even remember being there.

I don't believe this was what CHITTY was trying to achieve (then again, Walt Disney was a 33-degree Mason) but it shows you that once you let this paranoid stuff into your mind, it mutates and transforms even dishwater dull children's movies into rabbit holes of horrifyingly vast circumference. (full)


Take it from me, the first time you run into 'The Lollipop Guild' (while astrally traveling the psychedeli-brick road) is enough to give even the gutsiest inner space cowboys the heebie jeebie nightmares. They're like those little weird demon guys in the bottom corners of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band which scared me as a four year-old (back when first hearing the full alien weirdness of Harrison's sitar on side B, was terrifying beyond any palpable physical threat). When in college I began to read the work of the pioneering psychonaut Terence McKenna on 'the machine elves' -- common mushroom and DMT hallucinations-- small, elvin beings that exist in alternate dimensions but are nonetheless real, dancing in lockstep unison the world into place like a curtain of slow motion soft shoe- both hilarious and terrifying, edifying and mortifying. When I saw them during my own travels in college (and after), they were even wearing plaid like the Guild!! They had garden hoes instead of lollipops and lacked that terrible gold hair, but otherwise - good lord. Good thing I'm a drinking man. 

In MANDY, Nicolas Cage proves his levels of fearless crazy have no bottom (or top, same thing), and Canada's Panos Cosmatos proves his debut film BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW was no psychedelically-distilled Ativan fluke or one-off experiment, for Mandy too is insane, "strange and eternal," druggy with slowed-down sound, psychedelic movement trails, pineal-buzzing drones, rock and roll violence, but the big difference in Cage, who goes so nuts he becomes a demon before our very eyes. As Red, a woodsman (aka lumberjack, for the chainsaw hath replaced yon axe), Cage starts out soft and intimate, but then gets mad, walks with his gut out, his butt lit, his eyes covered with shades instead of goggles when he uses his home forge, probably a good drinking buddy, guzzling his shower vodka in his underwear and pouring it over his open wounds, howling in a way that's new for the actor--not nasal and hysterical but deep, tragic and genuinely scary, riding a demonic ATV through the wild north woods in the dead of night, and fighting chainsaw duels, burning churches, doing every drug in sight, crushing skulls, losing his shit over a demon ripping his favorite shirt, saying wild shit like "a psychotic drowns where a mystic swims" and telling super-cool Bill Duke he needs his crossbow back because he's hunting "Jesus freaks" (spoilers why); oh he's tremendous!

And so is the Mandy, saturated with a pleasing palette of deep reds and blacks, and propelled by a bed of murky drones and synths both thumberling and quiscubescent (two words I just invented). Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson (Sicario) delivers the perfectly weird score, if it's not quite as instantly riveting and tripped out as Sinoa Caves' for Rainbow, it's more varied, moving from romantic minor key Eno-ish dalliances to thunder god forge burbling, eerie droning, and-- when old Red preps for war, joint or cigarette in mouth, goggles on, gut out--pulse-quickening synth cycles that sound like an old flying saucer getting kick-started deep in the woods with no one to hear it.


The plot finds us in--as the first chapter title explains 'the Shadow Mountains - 1983 A.D. That AD is a key right there, for this is a story that could be told in the wild west of 1883 or some Middle Ages Belgian schwarzwald (where it was films), aside from its one Piscean foot being in the world of Mandy's current fantasy novel, and her interest in the planet Jupiter. The Shadow Mountains are the kind of place so deep only truckers, loggers, drug manufacturers, and the assorted good and evil forces and businesses they engender, dwell. It's a kind of old growth paradise, especially shot through with hazy lavender and pink sunlight streams which bathe the life and pad of Red and his artist wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) in haunting lights - every frame of their existence is gorgeous. Happy as could be, they live as any of us would at the time, if we could--with great sound editing capturing their intimate whispers, talking about Galactus, Erik Estrada, Jupiter, the stars--real intimate talk, like the film, rooted in reality, the stars, and pop culture. With her glasses and crow's feet proudly un-Botoxed, her Bette Davis x Peter Lorre eyes staring right into him across the water (they live "out on Crystal Lake") and their backyard campfire, distant howls or human moans too abstract to investigate, Jóhannsson droning over them all Vangelis Blade Runner"Love Theme"-ish dreamy - it's a new kind of paradise, the nightmare nipping at their toes... we're deep in it with them, with Nic, staring at Mandy through the flames like she's the anima princess of his dreams.

She is, and the film follows her all the way into the mystic. With her mind alive to the infinite, taking weird Antichrist-style sojurns into the chthonic woods, via her dreams and the novel she's reading about serpents eyes and red skies, Mandy is perhaps open enough to the oceanic currents that she gets ensnared in the neural network of Manson/ Papa Jupiter (!)-ish cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roche) who takes it as divine right that he should have her as part of his flock (They are 'the Children of the New Dawn'). Ere long the horns of Abraxas summon a gang of evil demon bikers, somewhere between the Cenobites, the gang in Mad Max, and the radio active ash-blackened New Mexican derelicts in the new Twin Peaks. And well, that's when it gets really interesting, because one thinks they have this movie all figured out -- some variation on any of Nic's angry cult-busting, child or bride-rescuing/avenging adrenalin junkets, like Drive Angry--but the left turns start coming, we veer into the realm of deep myth - with his gone eyes Red walks 'the demon path' like Lone Wolf sans Baby Cart, violence overtaking him in a kind of supernatural shock like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs and/or Shauna Macdonald in The Descent as well as, of course Max von Sydow in Virgin Spring. The side that didn't want war always takes the first hit, but the sting of the slap wakes their fury, and nothing's scarier than a civilized human who suddenly has nothing left to lose. That sounds cliche'd, but it's only when the filmmaker forgets the archetypal roots, the forge, the legends and myth underwriting their own variation, forgets the moon and paints the finger, that it becomes hackwork (like a dozen Cages what shall be nameless).



As Cosmatos' fantastic feature debut 2010's  Beyond the Black Rainbow, mixed elements of classic Canadian sci-fi horror films (Scanners, Blue Sunshine), here the threads seem to be Valhalla Rising, The Virgin Spring (there's definitely a Norse mythology undertone at play) and that Canadian classic Heavy Metal, along with Ralph Bakshi, and The Wall (via animated dream sequences), but the same style and mood--a slow druggy deep woods where people seem to swim through the LSD atmosphere and a psychopath uses strong psychedelics as a means of control and reality-bending--and the same theme: the way under strong drugs, murder and torture, can come as easy and peace and love (depending on the dosage and your gullibility), and how the descent into dark archaic demonic madness is always just a drop on the tongue or in the eye... away; the monsters of the fantasy novel you're reading are right there, outside your window while you sleep. Elements right out of Mandy's current book: the Loc-nar-evoking Serpent's Eye jewel; the 'Horn of Abraxas that summons the Black Skulls; the "tainted blade of the pale night, straight from the abyssal lair," monstrous demons slavering while they talk in rumbly inhuman voices, their ATVs roaring like otherworldly beasts, their LEDs beaming like the eyes of dragons, they manifest from the woods like Mandy is the gatekeeper of reality, the dream of the dreamer, turned nightmare. Starlings smashed in sacks or set ablaze - all horrors doubling back along the Moebius ouroboros.

This archetypal warp seems to be, now that Cosmatos has made two films using it, a genuine new, and profound style. Deep immersion into a druggy slow motion bizarro world awash in deep ASMR whispery intimacy creates space for both the stars, the page, and the woods to merge into one; reality bending and warping match the perceptions of the totally tripped out, take it from me. I was there. For every peak, a valley... and some so dark it takes getting even darker to find the light again.

Saturated in dark red and blacks, with all sorts of deep dish manipulations of light and sound, Cosmatos creates a magical zone where idealism has crashed into the trees and Canadian and US indie horror and sci-fi films from the 70s all find their sequel, a zero sum flashpoint. Just as Tarantino turns to the Shaw Brothers, New World, and the Italians for his pastiche palette, Cosmatos turns to the wilds of Canada and NYC: Cronenberg, Lieberman, Barker, De Palma, Bakshi, Cohen, he turns to Frazetta and prog rock album covers, and most of all, to what Terence McKenna would call the 'heroic measure' of psychedelics for his inspiration. The wild fumes of 20x salvia divinorum and the LSD - ecstasy - amphetamine concoctions of trans-dimensional Berkeley chemists. The sort of stuff where you take it on Friday and by the following Wednesday your tuned-in wife's wild mystical artwork is still moving on the page, the wild willowing branches of the endless tree that becomes tentacles and tendrils reaching for the inner light. You make Gandalf seem like Gob Bluth. It might take a month to totally fade, but by then you've taken other things, kept the ball rolling...

Nic, powering up for battle (i.e. guzzling vodka in the bathroom and screaming).

These aren't your average hackwork stepped-on ecstasy capsules or weak-ass doses. These are special variants, super-charged by Berkley chemistry majors going down a way more psychedelic rabbit hole than your boring ass meth manufacturers. Many who went into the hole thanks to sampling their wild concoctions (like DOM, and Ethyl) wound up lost in the woods, spinning like Susan Strasberg suddenly able to hear again at the end of Psych-Out - 'til the right cult found them (Manson on the dark end, the Rainbow Family on the other; when I was doing DOM in the mid-90s, even Burning Man was still just an insular Wickery cult rather than a midlife crisis tourist spot). The few who rode the snake all the way and--resisting the temptation to stay egoless in the ecstasy of blind guru-worship, joining the flower people, or 'the Children of the New Dawn' and following a failed acid folkie into oblivion-- climbed out of even the ego trip of egolessness and became themselves again, only shinier -- the gunk of the moment's residue cleared away under the acid washing. In Rainbow, Cosmatos shows the previous decade's deep dish mid-60s LSD experiencers--seeking to use consciousness to make inroads into western medicine--had by the early 80s lapsed into babbling junkies; here we see how mystics and seers with their joyous followers in the 70s devolved into delusional hungry ghost cultist members, all too passive and fucked-up to question the ease with which some pitch-shifted pitch and an LSD-spiked light show won their soul over to a charismatic psychopath. That was what acid users often weren't prepared for. There was a reason the CIA used it in mind control experiments - it left an unsuspecting person's hard drive decrypted and wide open for hacking.  If drugs didn't open their mind enough to see that it was their own mind opening, on its own, then how could they not let some scammer take credit? I saw them all the time at Dead Shows in the 80s... only there in a more benevolent, large-scale way - music dissipating the Satanic darkness; but it wasn't hard to see the power that band had, the way so many people were willing to be subsumed in the larger ego --a nice way to live if you surrender fully, until you're exploited, which, how can you not be? Be it Led Zeppelin abusing willing doped-out groupies up in the Edgewater, or the SS charging into the Final Solution all amped up on Pervatin, or Manson's women singing at their own trial. Such worship of false gods is the ultimate in cheap highs.

No, it's not Richard Lynch but I forgive you, my children.

Mandy's LSD-quaffing cult leader villain, Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roche) is reminiscent of Richard Lynch in God Told Me To as much as Manson, or anyone who feels that tug of connection from some passing eye contact flirt and suddenly finds their lives meaningless without that person in their life, only cult leaders feel that this is somehow their divine right and only true psychotics go all the way. Roche has some very chilling moments facing a mirror where he goes from deep shame to a kind of dead-eyed sociopathy that's truly chilling, as are some Mansoneque vocal cadences. Some of the best druggy effects in recent memory occur when Mandy wakes from her abduction to find a solid dose of acid going into her system via forced eye drop and then a sting from a weird -- soaked in bizarre honey-style psychedelics--gigantic hornet, placed against her jugular. It's so trippy that Laura Palmer's drugged out excursions with Leo and Jacques north of the border seem like Normal Rockwell paintings by comparison. Jeremiah's weird combination of seduction, initiation, brain-wash, flashing and insecure first date resume (playing his songs for her like an insecure weed dealer - hear it on Spotify - Amulet of the Weeping Maze!) as he trues to lure Mandy into the fold. His turning from semi-optimistic to darker than midnight is a riveting example of the way blind faith leads to atrocities, a psychopath allowing his flock entry into a dream state of us vs. them permission reminiscent not just of Manson but Naziism, in ways hard to shake off.

99% of all great horror/genre films remember people watch TV, and they keep their sets on all the time.

The few non-cultists met on the journey include the still badass Bill Duke as a trucker friend of Red's who reports word coming down from the big rigs, and the attuned-to-cosmic-purposes and wavelengths LSD manufacturer (Richard Brake), who sets Lizzy the tiger free in a scene that's so open-eyed and openly acted in and around a hint of slow motion as to attune one to a whole weird electric plane. With the addition of the 'Cheddar Goblin' on TV (If I learned anything from Terence and Phillip it's that Canadians love their Kraft Dinner), the tiger, grizzly hallucinations and Jupiter, deep into dark mountainous tunnels, the Pagan Nordic warrior vs. the onset of Christianity the original death cult, this dark fairy tale becomes part Mad Max in addition to Robert E. Howard, and every fairy tale wherein the remote isolation and woods absorb the screams and buzz of chainsaws, planets and skies change colors and size, and thus wild outlaws can run around pillaging and destroying in the lord's name without a soul to stop them, except one man, made insane with rage and loss, who might fashion a Norse God-style weapon, retrieve his crossbow from Bill Duke, and ride into battle, even he--mind reeling with blood loss and agony, can stop and stare mindlessly at a Cheddar Goblin commercial, repeating the slogan as if a mantra (2). Grief and suffering heat a man to a cherry red blade ready for an oil quench and a sharpness test. This is not what the blade does to this railroad spike; it's what this railroad spike does to this blade. But forged in the anguish of murderous Jesus freaks, that spike is going to be gutted.



Though filmed in the wilds of Belgium, presumably the black forest region where Hansel and Gretl were chased by Suspiria witches, it's clear this is a film with the wild depths of the Canadian provinces in its heart - dark forest lands that maps can't do justice to, as if our entire USA is engulfed in old growth and chilly salmon-stoked streams, wilderness where meth and LSD labs and wild ATV-riding nightmares run amok. We forget how vast empty country is, our minds pull towns closer together like a wormhole. But if you've ever driven across country, in the North, Highway 80 or 90, you've seen it - the vastness, the emptiness, like it's a whole separate dimension. That vastness coupled to the deep old growth forest vibe is what makes dark Nordic folktales spring to life when enough residents are high as hell or have done enough astral voyaging in their lives that they can shrug off massive doses of the 'good stuff' and laugh mercilessly at the penis of their insane captor. And yet are no different than people you probably know, that cool couple (4) who exist casually in that gulf between blue collar outdoors jobs and white collar education, who love all the things they do and are humble and just out for the same things the rest of us are. The self-imposed dream exile of the Jesus freaks and Black Skulls, these makers of dark myth, are the real losers.

That may be the highest auric ray inherent in the glow of Mandy, the idea that if the average person living their own rock and roll life, may feel smaller than the fucked up maniacs out there, maybe it's really the reverse. The 9-5 job-working couples eating dinner in front of the TV are more mythic than all the Jesus freaks combined. If we 'normals' can slow our roll down, bring our Iron John larger-than-lifeness to even the smallest detail instead of letting it just evaporate in a boozy haze, if we can live so minutely, so that just taking out the trash can reverberate with druggy slow-tempo grinding, the analog synth scores, giving our lives grand menace, until it's as if reality around us will crack from our seeing it do so, maybe the glowing green gem we somehow lost during the 90s via Bjork, Portishead, DJ Shadow, Moby and Massive A.- all that spinal fluid-draining MDMA heartbreak (3) will turn up at last, the warm amniotic fuzzy completion that lies even beyond duality and total union with the OMmmm.

Maybe, deep inside some shrieking hippie's gut pocket, it's still waiting --back there in 1983AD, when we were still reading paperbacks and watching arial TV, rocking to guitar solos, smoking crappy weed, and riding through deep forest canopy. Art was still made on paper and canvas and computers weren't real. If Red and Mandy could see us now, how much of our days are spent staring at screens, our real life slowly moving to the other side of the mirror, they'd run... to where? Maybe Canada, the remote parts, with the terrible cellular reception --on purpose. Or would they just stay where they are, until the clear-cutting got to them and they were bought out for a Pathmark super lot? Either way, the amazing wild energy of Nic Cage has transcended even his old craziness, always kind of half-assed around the edges, and hammy, as if he was fumbling around on a radio dial of insanity looking for his 'One True Signal' - something deeper and wilder than anyone ever before in film and never picking a station 'til he found it. Here he found it- here he's busted through all that at last - this is no longer a giddy Crispin Glover kind of crazy or a method free-style crazy, but a crazy from the masculine diaphragm, laughing and hollering and roaring in the face of dragons. We are delivered. The glory of the Iron John myth, from steel first softened via the nascent Men's Movement of the late 80s, hammered in the Forged and Fire of the anvil-ringing now, now cuts a hole in the fabric of false gods and gossipy phantasms. It will cut. It will kill. The serpent's eye is lifted from the abyssal lair, strange and eternal.

Dad, if only I ever got to see you working.


NOTES:
1. See SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (10/11/11)
2. The Cheddar Goblin commercial is very gross (he vomits mac and cheese on lucky kids' heads, but makes a great counterpoint to Red's horrible loss, and is made by the genius behind the beloved Too Many Cooks.
3. It took me ten years of mourning to accept that warm 'first night' rush would never come back. Craig got it all down so beautifully I cry to this
4. See also: The Devil's Candy (2015)

FURTHER:
The Acidemic Nic Cage Reader (Knowing, Kick-Ass, Drive Angry, Bad Lieutenant, Vampire's Kiss) 
Tales from the Benway Pharmacy (Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Machine)

Halloween is here! And out east things are autumnal like they never were last year - it feels like it actually is Halloween and I'm excited to... well, sit around and watch tons of horror films, because here in NYC there's too many screaming kids during the day and vomiting amateurs at night. But luckily Amazon's got our number. For horror films alone, Amazon Prime RULEZ.

Especially now that Filmstruck is going to be shut down (to either make bigger Xmases bonuses for their top execs or because they hate art, because art reminds them too much of how swinish and short-sighted they are), Amazon Prime is more essential than ever. Prime doesn't have Criterion or a lot of of older bigger studio films but they have some (like THE AWFUL TRUTH and WIZARD OF OZ) and if they don't have something now, they'll have it tomorrow. The other day I was reading about INITIATION OF SARAH, the CARRIE-inspired 1971 TV movie starring Kay Lenz. I was thinking hmmm - I'd like to check it out, but it wasn't on Prime and I don't dig watching films on youtube (too blurry). I debated options and then literally the next day there, viola! There it is in a brand new beautiful restoration on Prime, just for me, like Prime heard I was interested via some Siri interconnected listening device (or noting I did a search for it). More and more crazy great stuff keeps coming like that, every week more and more and more. Prime hears me! It hears us all! Praise Prime!

"bad weird, like Trenton" (from Return of the Living Dead)

As I always preface, though traipsing down Prime's vast alleyways can be addictive, beware! The amount of new independent shot-on-video horror film nowheresville nonsense is almost incomprehensible. If it was a video store, Amazon Prime's streaming horror collection alone would be the size of Trenton, and, like Trenton itself, mostly the wrong kind if scary. Trust your guide and don't make eye contact with anything shot on video unless you're actually in the film, or I tell you different. Stick with me, man, and hold on tight. Things is gonna get weird. But not bad weird, not like Trenton. Or misogynist, like Camden. Good weird, like Scarfolk.

(PS - As always, all images are screenshots taken from Prime for quality assurance.) Many Halloween favorites that are listed as seeable on Prime--City of the Dead, Horror Express, The Terror, Messiah of Evil--are actually in awful formats, taken from blurry video source material; others, like Seven Deaths in a Cat's Eye and Phenomena are from fine sources but the transfer is jumpy. The ones listed here are all bonny to the quick so fear not in that. Fear not... in that.


A weird hybrid of semi-documentary fairy tale co-wrriten by Angela Carter (author of the classic feminist fairy tale revision "The Bloody Chamber"), with the Little Red Riding Hood story being  meta-abstracted into a series stories being told to and by a kindly grandmother in a village, and a scourge of wolf attacks besetting a tiny village deep in a dark forest. The real Halloween selling point for my money isn't the wolf transformations, which go on far too long and are too literal in the end, for my book, but the huge dose of cozy Halloween-ready atmosphere to be had in the many forest scenes. Clearly a labor of love on a vast indoor set with gorgeous light streaking through the mist and giant gnarled tree roots grown around jagged rocks and other strange little impasses that make travel a matter of a kind of Jungian deep penetration into the unknown of the self every time. And the Amazon streaming quality is first rate, capturing a cozy amount of film grain in the image that makes it all feel alive on a movie screen midnight show full of strange little beings.

Cons: The curly-haired local boy who follows Red Riding Hood around is one step away is kind of skeevy - though I have an irrational loathing for big curly haired 'fro-style hair on men, he's not ingratiating. The Czech-ish lord who tries to seduce Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson). David Warner is the local priest, and Terence Stamp is the devil.


Very recently Prime has added a slew of Hammer films which should please fans, though the heavy hitters like Dracula and Frankenstein aren't around there's later more ribald and cleavage-obsessed classics with--for my money--too many drab English exterior shots. But that was the old days, with the right remastering, these outdoor shots can be beautiful and here they are --lots of old growth with thin rays of light streaming through the mist betwixt the old growth and tombs, and HD deep blacks in the crypt recesses. Here Peter Cushing is a very repressive Puritan-style church leader whose habit of burning girls suspected of witchcraft and vampirism rather than risk the king's displeasure by killing the real evil on the hill, Count Karnstein, who always has an eye out for the local lovelies to join his coven. Cushing's over-protectiveness towards his sexy twin daughters drives one to rebel and become a vampire. The other daughter is 'good' which means she obeys the patriarchy like a dope. Naturally she's the one almost burnt at the stake. Either way, it's got some good lurid Satanic atmosphere at and below the castle (some very impressive Gothic sets) and the twins are sexy in a fresh, American kind of way. So if there's a yen to get into the era when Hammer was taking advantage of looser censorship, here's the puppy.
(PS If you like this one check out Hammer's VAMPIRE CIRCUS, COUNTESS DRACULA and HANDS OF THE RIPPER, all also on Prime)

We're finally there, at the point in time wherein women have eclipsed men as their own worst enemy and the Apollonian phallus comes crashing into the sea like a blood-caked sandcastle to be replaced by a whole new protrusion, the blood-soaked erect tam-'ahem'-pon. Symbolizing birth, the shedding of the unfertilized eggs, the eclipse of the moon that recommences the menstrual cycle, it stand tall, proud. See it rise, Amphitrite! Kali! Asherah! The Paglian chthonic floods the coastal regions like a melting ice cap blood tide. Witches are in the theater via the SUSPIRIA remake by the guy (really?) who did Call Me by Your Name, and on Netflix is a show called THE CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA, something that by far was America's Halloween post-trick-or-treating binge of 2018. Earlier this year there was Hereditary. What else do you need, sister? To write your own story yourself? Boil the cauldron double bubble yr trouble. Men wouldn't be so naive as to let a girl write the story of a woman's magic triumph -we'd have nothing left to be but drowned.


Bedknobs and broomsticks may--it seems--be associated with witchcraft because they are items a young girl may safely 'employ' towards her first orgasm. And her first orgasm never really stops once it starts, like a fire that may destroy the patriarchy with a single moan.



All my film geek friends love the new SUSPIRIA --and the Erich-targeted Alamo Drafthouse ads on my Facebook never shut up about how much their own geek contingent adores it. For my sins, I saw it there. What a joint.  And I like that it's (Suspiria, I mean) totally boy-free: there's no romance, no sex, no pregnancy or walks of shame, not even a throw-away glance from a pretty eyelashed young houseboy like in the original - and I love that this new version switches from a co-ed ballet academy to an acclaimed modern dance troupe. But... on the other hand, the sense of real evil--the lurid yet nightmarish color and sense of menace--has been replaced by a kind of vaguely connected but deeply uncomfortable body horror. The threat now is all of the ligaments and joints and not the heart and neck, and even then, it's never clear why it's so unclear (the unclarity was crystal in the original). Now it's set in a realistic gray rundown 1977 Berlin that already feels nostalgia for the gold grey misery of the Wall (it's right outside the Hene Markos Dance Academy, replete with tasteful graffiti). In order to convey it's import it feels the needs to cram in a whole extra hour, making it perhaps the longest horror film since The Shining. The parts played by Udo Kier (at his most devastatingly handsome) and Rudolf Schündler in the original (they laid out the local Black Forest witch history in a single scene) are now combined into one old duffer (played by Tilda Swinton in good old man make-up but an unconvincing falsetto voice), who spends great gabs of moments reading the diagram-packed diary of a missing dance student patient (Chloë Grace Moretz, whose insane babbling in his apartment is an early highlight) and wasting time puttering back and forth across the Berlin wall to his country house while the idiosyncratic Thom Yorke 90s-style alt rock balladry moans in the background. There's lots of TVs on in lobbies and apartments and bars with news reports streaming as German terrorists try to free the Baader-Meinhof via a plane hijacking and so forth (this wishes it would make a good lengthy double feature with Uli Edel's 2008's Baader-Meinhof Complex.)  Sinthoms and subtextual rivulets that could have been more profound, like the link between the aetheric consumption of Suzy Bannion's youthful vigor by the evil unseen Helena Markos and the crunching up of a generation by the Nazis are like afterthoughts as this old duffer putter around and read diaries full of arcane markings that, perhaps, director Luca Guadignino presumes we'll one day be pausing and reviewing up close to unscramble archaic clues the way those David Lynch pronoiacs do on Twin Peaks. In my case, good sir, he presumes in error. Not that I don't love great swathes of it, or swaths, and maybe another viewing, at home, with my too-high expectations lowered, like the bar. But in the meantime, I'll take what I can get. And I can get it all.


While there was much to savor, I confess felt it was very suspect in being written and directed by a man, even though I knew--thanks to the pre-show videos at the Alamo--screenwriter David Kajganich spent some time watching old female European modern dance choreographers and their worldly artistic views and goals, in and around Europe, before and after the war. A lot of the movement and sociological underpinnings to the performances seem imported wholesale from those videos, which, frankly is great. It makes you want to see the dances in person, where those no editor playing with all the multiple camera angles and close-ups he has to work with, enjoying himself a little too much.

And yet, though the dancing seems legit, like they worked at it, and Dakota Johnson especially really gives it 100%, and the excellent sound design captures her every sexy breath and the whoosh of air from her movements, the director and editor seldom trust a single arcing movement, jump, or spin, to play out on its own without adding thirty crosscuts to random things like faces of those watching, memories of past events, other movements of other people in other areas, giving it all the kind of overwrought Ashby-gone-Roeg ADD. In other words it tries too hard craft associative meanings in the editing room, and as a result lets itself get all carried away by the magic of crosscuts until you kind of wish DW Griffith had never been born!


That's not to say there aren't moments where this rapid-fire cutting works when, for example, during rehearsal, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) touches the shoulder blades, arms, and legs of Dakota Johnson, injecting some matriarchal chthonic oomph, the force of which --while invisible to the eye--is felt via clever sound design (where we feel air currents in our lower chakras) and editing that shows clued-in dancers and instructors all throughout the building sensing--if you will--a stirring in the (dark) force.  But then we can't just have a dance without seeing the linked puppet agony it causes some other girl trapped below in the fuzzily circumscribed secret sanctum, and those dancer and instructor's faces, and on and on until it's like beating a dead horse that's somehow still breathing, on and on, in a way far more in tune with modern torture porn than classic Argento. For the original Suspiria murders were grand terrifying erotic and disturbing, but he kept the camera on the action, and didn't feel the need to crosscut to five other people in different parts of the building.


For another interesting double feature, this made me think most of all of the recent Atomic Blonde starring Charlize Theron busting some intense fighting skills. The point of that film may have been that Berlin is a fucking mess, or that James MacAvoy is a drink best served on a short leash, but it was also about how intoxicating she and Sofia Boutella look under red and blue lights, in loose-knit sweaters, kissing in a neon-drenched club bathroom foyer (left). And this Suspiria is really about how sexy Dakota is when her breathing is given a nice swooshing circular sound design and she's squirming around in modern jazz gyrations on a rehearsal space floor, even if her skin is as grey as the Berlin wall yet still doesn't match her wan fake red hair. When she moves you feel like she's conducting great swaths of air in and around herself in some shamanic ecstatic trance. When she's writhing around on the floor, her pales skin curving in all sorts of gyrating on the floor directions, her grey-white-peach accented skin making a gorgeous counterpoint to her gray gym clothes.

Her skin! Ladies and gentlemen.. her pale peach-gray skin! I can hear the blood rushing right behind its lustrous surface.


What it seems to lack, in the end, besides a better choice of hair color, is a female voice to all their female voices. The key thing that made Suspiria so indelible and rewatchable, that made Halloween and Psycho so iconic, was the presence of a female voice behind the scenes, to correct, perhaps, countless irritants as to what women would or wouldn't say and how they say it in the script and vibe. Daria Nicolodi, Debra Hill, Paula Pell, Alma Reville, Gale Ann Hurd all helped make the films they worked on the classics they are. We see what happens to Argento when Daria isn't there (in his later work), he just goes in for gory murders without much style or interest in the rest. Daria supplied him with a counterbalance. In the documentary accompanying the film (on my DVD), it's clear she brought the Jungian fairy tale weirdness, the dreamy Alice in Wonderland haunted quality to Suspiria and when she's gone from his work, it begins to fade away like a dream. In the remake we have to wait for the big climactic reveal which--upon closer examination--makes little sense. For all it's length, a lot seems left out, things we'd have rather seen than all this 90s mope rock Mennonite funeral wandering and old man notebook reading, precinct-bothering and wall-traversing.

That's not to say the sheer abundance of grand old German broads isn't a great thing, that the men who made this Suspiria don't love and appreciate strong women, but maybe that's the problem. A woman writer would know how and why women are both scared and scary, they'd go places a man wouldn't dare without a woman leading the way. Instead we see the coven carousing and swilling food and liquor at the local restaurant from afar as if small children left out by adult conversations yet unable to escape them as mom runs through her day of errands and visits with various gal pals. We don't get a load of female-empowered evil as an unknowable, strange otherworldly force, but as a kind of henhouse pyramid scheme, where young women sacrifice their youth so that their elders can act like five year-olds at a Kindersport Spielplatz geburtstag. In the original, the presence of evil was like an ice cold razor blade run down back of our neck. We could feel it. Every shard of rain in the opening scenes of Suzy's first night arrival in Germany cut deep. It was a fear that transcended misogyny or the body or any kind of normal Michael Myers brand of fear. It was the fear of a real abstract maternal threat. Here the pain is all dancing, twisting Red Shoes-kind of prolonged misery - so over the top and abstracted it becomes numbing. It's not evil. The rain doesn't sting. Thom Yorke does not howl and rattle metal sheets and whisper "witch!" in a pursed hiss through the echo chambre. There is nothing to fear, only to mourn. We mourn for fear.




On the other hand, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina now on Netflix, at least has the willingness to look under the dark rocks. The story of a young witch in a Salem-like town about to have the occult version of her blood-spattered bot-mitzvah, Sabrina builds up to her big signing of Satan's book during a deep woods midnight ceremony that involves--among other things--the sacrifice of a goat. The catch? Sabrina is only half a witch. Her mom was human. And she balks at the last minute, even though the goat's already been killed... and why? Because she has some pie-eyed faux-Wahlberg chump human boyfriend named, of fall things, Harvey Kinkel (grown-Disney kid Ross Lynch) and she doesn't want to have to give him up and go to a new school. Oy!

Women....

But, in a show that positions boys so far to the side they're as superfluous as wives in a war movie, we're put in a very unique place with the presence of this lump of proletariat Jungenfleisch, an interesting en verso of all the buzzkill fiancees in films like Gunga Din. The whole show seems to want this boy gone, only Sabrina clings to him. But the evil side of things is so seductive we can't help but be on Satan's side every step of the way.  We really don't need another show about a girl who turns her back on her own blossoming career/powers to support some half-written sensitive 'perfect' doormat of a comic book author stand-in. He doesn't even have a motorcycle! He spends his night in his bedroom drawing comic book characters. Hmmm - and this series is based on a comic book? Was the author's stand-in less of a chump in it? Wishful thinking for some dude afraid of working in the mines like his brewed-with-the-fighting-spirit older brothers? OR - are we supposed to like him?

There's an unwritten cardinal rule when writing female protagonists, something--alas--many showrunners and writers learn the hard way--no one likes the boyfriend. The only way we like him is if she meets him for the first time over the course of the show. If she starts out with a boyfriend we don't like him. This is always true, in life and in shows. Thus, this Harvey--while innocuous and sweet--is a burden, like the townie high school boyfriend who tries to hang on to a cute intelligent girl after she moves away to college, calling incessantly and coming up weekends, trying to pull her down from her limitless horizons into his same go-nowhere small town quicksand like a clinging vine, the chocolate diamond engagement ring (he went to Jared!) his last desperate tendril.

Either way, among things she will do other than sign the book is--as the series progresses--raise the Harvey's brother from the dead (just because her dear Harvey misses him) and slit a fellow witch's throat to do so. Why? Because she doesn't want Harvey to suffer so much. One thinks of Katniss running high and low like a nervous mom to protect her little Peeda in The Hunger Games. But while Lawrence invested Katniss with a kind of dour humorless resolve, Kiernan Shipka cocks her heads and purses her lips with a kind of false pride,  never doubting she's on the morally superior side.

It's a very wary weird line to tread, for this Sabrina is not always sympathetic and we're regularly put in the succulent position of the completely morally neutral observer, for unless we're prudes, what's not to celebrate in one of her rival's enjoying a luxurious orgy before her sacrifice at the hands of the Satanic coven for a horrifyingly literal combination thanksgiving and church sacramental wafer? Nada!



And that's what makes this show great, aside from the sprawling, beautiful art direction and framing which takes full use of HD's ability to clarify darker color schemes, it's unafraid to go pretty frickin' dark in its deeds (one woman slits her own throat and is devoured by her coven during a Thanksgiving celebration, for example) while never putting on the dour self-important face of something like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. There's plenty of dark, darker than dark comedy: The witches here make no bones about being aligned with the devil and it's not condemned overtly as morally wrong (since the humans are even worse - hanging witches and not suffering them to live, and so forth). In sum, this isn't Tabitha and Dick York! These bitches got a hotline to Hell, and every once in awhile in the caverns below the town, Satan himself appears to suck the soul right out of an unlucky miner. Hell is literally a place under their feet and the honesty and directness of that, evidenced in the Satanic statue adorning the foyer of the Witch school, and the way Sabrina doesn't want to turn her back on evil, totally, since it's 'her heritage' is the film's great strength. The Comics Code Authority would shit themselves, and should, for what they did to EC.



As with the pro-occult'dying and heroin are cool'-subtext of Twilight, Sabrina's subversive delight in her dark prowess is almost invisible for being so pronounced. Maybe other viewers' opinions will differ but what we have is the typical story of a girl who could be such a badass except she keeps hanging around a drip of a boy instead of spreading her limitless wings. I can only hope the producers intended us to have a negative reaction towards him. (2) At my house over Halloween we were shouting at the screen "Sign the damn book already!" and "Dump that idiot!" For the powers of darkness seem formidable indeed here, and as with the paltry human company in Twilight, humanity is seen as rather anemic and dull. The idea that anyone would cherish it is pathetic. We already know what it's like not to sign Satan's book: life bubbles thick and sludgy, one 'blurp' at a time. The human side is so stalled out, not even getting the non-binary Lachlan Watson an Amelia Earhart-ish ghost ancestor save them from a unenviable torpor.


And most importantly, the evil witch adult cast is sublime: Michelle Gomez (above) as Satan's evil henchwoman (above) hangs back from the action in the guise of Sabrina's (human) school counsellor, to make sure Sabrina has enough rope to hang herself. BBC Dr. WHO fans of course know how awesome Gomez is at playing characters who inhabit her body rather than 'are' it --she was the female incarnation of Who's archetypal shadow, 'The Master' (and it's perhaps Gomez's brilliance in the role that led to the new Dr. Who himself being reconstituted as Jodi Whitaker)--and she's aces as the sexually alive deep-breathing agent of Satan on Earth. The Dark Lord is evidently keen to take the long way around to win Sabrina into signing the book, and it's this arc that constitutes the general thrust of the show. Gomez is such a kick, luxuriating in her own evil, that we root for her wild schemes every step of the way and find Sabrina's smirky hypocrisy and sense of busybody superiority more and more insufferable.

At the same time, we realize this is a topsy turvy realm where we can almost suspect some masonic secret message encoded in the tree bark, gearing us all towards a kind of Satanic fascist paganism. The rush of evil, in other words, transcends the screen, and just as Sabrina is being systematically corrupted and morally compromised, so are we being trained to see wrong as right, up as down, darkness as light, square as round... If Sabrina cannot survive corruption, what chance have we? And why indeed, would we want to? According to Suspiria's big climax, the best we can wish for, as human marooned outside the Satanic coven, is either total forgetfulness, or peaceful death. And maybe there's no difference. With evil there's at least dancing. 


. 

Speaking of Witches (respectfully, for they are always listening), visit 
Erich K's HEREDITARY Witchcraft Conspiracy DSM-IV Reader (Sept. 18, 2018)
Bell, Book, and Hallucinogenic Tampon (Feb 23, 2017)

While Filmstruck is still with us, let's chance upon the few small good things we have before they leave forever (to become expensive DVDs or unavailable). The recently also departed Nicolas Roeg is featured in one of their mini-title collections, and for the intrepid explorer there be his 1972 concert film, Glastonbury Fayre. If you've e'er loved a Roeg (Performance, Track 29) then don't miss it. And if e'er loved thee the psychedelic music festival movies of the late 60s-early 70s, and wondered if the movement e'er survived its American Altamont apocalypse, seek this film and say to yourself, ah there it is! The mystics did not burn out or fade away, they just snuck back to England and just didn't tell their boorish American cousins. Thus, here in Glastonbury 1971, while the wreckage of the Age of Aquarius was still being picked over by Manson biographers across the pond, the cool kids quietly gathered, by a big pyramid stage, correctly situated along the Stonehenge ley line for maximum magnetic current, at the solstice, between two hills...

Shot by Roeg as one of his mystical odysseys, the focus is less on the packaging the hits (there's only one, at the end, via Traffic, at night, the climax of the movie, with a whole mass of dancers in the crowd, reveling, each with enough space to swing their arms if they choose, Roeg's camera straining to find them in the swirl of night) and more on the mystical currents of the landscape, the joining of locals and visitors, the ease and beauty with which it all comes together. There's little of the Pennebaker's Monterey Pop habit of framing the painted-faces of lovely birds in fringed sashay (there's naught but a few), or the acid-drenched face clawers and drunken bikers of Maysles' Speedway. But we feel the solstice, the moon, and mystical movements of planets past the pyramid; these things the camera of Roeg senses and captures, the way the builders of nearby Stonhenge did. Hardly surprising from the man behind Walkabout and Performance, there's a truly mystical power at work here - and the camerawork itself seems tied to the force of love and magnetic waves in electric union.

Roeg films the throngs arriving from low angle gliding shots, the legs of the comers are long, as if he's a child looking up at some kind of ethereal parents, a time when parents were cool, unworried and free, but not dippy - less hedonists wallowing in Roman orgy and more some mass impromptu tribal coven, the druidic roots of Stonehenge breathing through them, the Green Man coming out of a long sleep, shaking off the Roman occupying sloth like a flaky outer crust, and communicating--through the grass and sky and vibrations in the air. Festival goers form shapes like moving temporary crop circles in some ephemeral alphabet that transcends any one meaning. Similarly, the film offers no words onscreen or introductions to let us know who any of the musicians are; there are no signs and markers we associate with concert festival films--no indication of drugs or overdoses, no backstage chatter, no overloaded bathrooms and crowded freeway helicopter shots. If the guy with the stars in his eyes (upper left) and the world in his beard is the promoter, his talk of getting a vision of his partner, pulling the car over, calling him and hearing "We have the farm" is delightful, his giddy shrooms-and-lovelight laugh, manic yet rooted. We don't need the backstory. The Green Man was at work, sifting the clouds and conjuring images in minds as needed to get this revelry underfoot, putting glowing embers in the minds of initially reluctant farmer neighbors, and this wild eyed bearded guy is in the circuit. He could tell. We see young dudes all draped on ominous framework metal bars erecting a giant pyramid stage, wondering how roadies manage to do their dangerous intense work while high out of their minds, or how that all works. But work it does, the Green Man acts as a reverse gremlin, causing guys to look again after initially passing an un-tightened screw.

It's a perfect festival - the right number of people (7,000-ish), the right weather (for England), the right acts (including lots of insane howling and warbling and babble), the right time (solstice), alll humming with love and the power of abandonment - like druidic voodoo. The acts range from  Fairport Convention, to performance art madness of Gong (?), Hawkwind and the northern soul of Terry Reid or whatever, nothing terribly sticks out, one band or pale fiddler from another- there are no stage introductions aside from some concern about the corn fields - but the big moments come in the sense of group dynamics at sunset right before Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come (I looked 'em up).

This is where it all gels:
The place gets eerie quiet as the sun sets between two hills; the pyramid stands shadowed. A small procession of ominous robed figures are silhouetted against the sky.
They light three crosses on the side of the hill. We think of Jesus, I guess, and the Romans again - but whatever, like those crop circles that form in the area, it transcends any one meaning.
It just is, and Roeg is the right man for the job. As with his Walkabout and Don't Look Now we're so subsumed by the land and sky it's as if we disappear, our illusory ego and locus of perceptual identity within the film unraveled back to basic elements - fire, air, earth... water.



As the solstice light disappears behind the hills and the pyramid stage lights up. It's the climax of Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising, the cumulative gut punch of understanding initiatory mysticism via the Golden Bough or Henry James'Varieites of Religious Experience. The profound feeling you had while breaking (lambs)bread, sweeping away of the sticks and seeds, in the Houses of the Holy gatefold in high school suddenly makes sense. Shrooming in the graveyard in 1987 I/We felt the pull of the earth and moon in balance, and I/We feel it now. The band starts: Arthur Brown emerges: a tall strange figure in evil KISS make-up (1), a fusion of the dream cabaret performance rock madness of Alice Cooper, the rooted bluesy grip and star of Zappa, soul of Captain Beefheart, modulated ominousness of Nick Cave, paradoxically zany steeliness and falsetto of Foxy Shazam.

Who the hell? How'd I miss this guy? (I think I mixed him up in my mind with Arthur Lee). I looked him up: A frequent opener and collaborator with Hawkwind, The Who, Hendrix, etc., he seems to be one of Britain's best-kept secrets. I could swear he wasn't there before, I read loads about Hendrix and remember nothing of him). Is he me from the future, who went back in the past to save Jimi Hendrix, but then forgot, and wound up here? Tall, crazy, beautiful in a masculine deep sense, alive with light and lightning. His Spotify roster is sparse and inelegant, but hey- somehow stayed pure, maybe be avoiding America's obscene corrupting love (to borrow a phrase from the great Nanno Jelkes). I'd never heard of him before, but there he is, somehow seeming to conduct his band and the moon and the crowd and the fire at the same time, ranting and holding wild weird notes. He's what I strived to be in a younger man's dreams and open mics: semi-pretentious/theatrical but genuinely eccentric and fierce.
---
It's so fitting then, on a personal level (what else do any of us know, Jedediah, except love on our terms?) that I saw Roeg's Glastonbury Fayre  the night before Thanksgiving, while packing to leave on the early morning train, wondering if it would be the last film I saw on Filmstruck, wondering why the Time-Warner bigwigs in charge of so much of our cinematic heritage hate artistic film, the art house crowd, and anything small enough to only draw a small profit or debit, as if they're just dying to mow down the last museum in town, to undo the historic monument housing protection, to make room for yet another skyscraper housing development or Target - advertised as so close to museums and parks, but then the parks go away for more aprtments. Ugh! Ommm! Center myself... bring it back... to me; accept the things I cannot change, let go let God; and above all, realize my own part in the problem - For when totally free, and given nice drugs, I take too many, drink too much and become a roaring mess... eventually. But the moon and stars judge me not - why should I?. Ommmm 
--
A moment I marked down in my first viewing: Brown is sitting on the side of the stage while the band jams on, takes a pull of some can (can't see the label) and burps --he clearly doesn't know the camera is watching -but he looks calmly over at the drummer and burps suddenly, at firsts unconsciously--as burps are--but as it's about to come he transforms it to the art, he burps fiercely, full of 'walrus through the ice'-roaring joy (5), but not conspicuously, loudly, boorishly, but a man whose warrior soul is calm and in the moment, turning even the smallest, usually unconscious gestures (unseen by the audience) into fierce warrior accents. He's not worrying about if he felt enough in his singing or the is high enough or how he looks, he's not trying to get higher or to recover from a hangover or all the other things that hung up America at the time. He's just in the zone.


Another stand-out is the also-better-known-in-Britain folk singer Melanie (below), whose teary, raspy voice and urgent guitar deliver a strong, moving, dynamic tune ("Peace Will Come") that seems to encompass everything within the beauty of the oceanic moment tempered with the foreknowledge of its inevitable passing; and yet, with that anticipation of loss that infects the joy of the moment comes another certainty tempering the sadness with joy: after the perfect oceanic union passes, our sadness will be tempered by the foreknowledge that such perfect moments--having come once--will come again. I love how it all quiets to a standstill when Melanie starts to play - the way everyone seems to be in the same sleeping bag, hushed and reverent, all 7,000 like a single being. Even the sacked-out under blankets nod their heads and smile. America's folk singers come off as a bit too preachy or corny (aiming for  pop appeal), but Melanie cuts through it all, her hair flying in her pretty face, howling beautifully; as with Arthur Brown, she made me an instant fan realizing all the wild shit American AOR and mythmaking quietly kept out of reach. She made me long for a second chance, to go to Britain in 1971, or just 71 AD, for that matter, to find the people that carried the psychedelic torch far past Altamont and Manson (and personal level American demons like mine), and may have it burning somewhere still. Melanie, playing back in time, too, seemed to understand my longing, the rasp in her voice cutting through the decades, assuring me as beautifully and strangely as these peaceful moments came before, they'll come again. Trying to stop them only increases the force with which they inevitably erupt into the collective consciousness.
--
I've enough of a continental mind that I've been to one or two literally magical weekend parties, the best of which was held one autumn solstice (c. 1991) at my cool rich hippie friend's Vermont cabin for a weekend of tripping and drinking Jaeger shots after blustery hikes. My ugly Americanism yielded willingly to the older alchemical ways of a huge bearded Brit with huge hair and a pungency of patchouli, a weird girlfriend, and--most vitally--a vial of pure delicious liquid LSD around his neck, dispensing drops into the eyes of the willing (everyone, me included). It was 'the good stuff,' pure gorgeous chemical perfection sending us all into wild dances that became -- due to surrender to the movements--elaborate ceremonial snowflake Pollack morphings I could never duplicate (or probably even notice) their magic in a 'down' state. I left him, and his posse, after coffee on Sunday, the steam from the cups like Monument Valley smoke signals across the vast expanse of the wooden coffee table, as the music of Dennis Wilson's "Pacific Ocean Blue" played on his expensive perfectly modulated stereo system. I would have stayed forever, but the friends I came with had work Monday. I drove back home (to suburban NJ) without a whimper, realizing--as was my kick at the time--that sacrificing great things in the name of love was tragically beautiful. Leaving the best time of your life for another week at the Ortho mailroom was just part of the game. I kept my holy aura for weeks til it faded. I even started going to yoga, which was hard to find in suburban NJ in 1990. In short, I kept the flame... for weeks... but.... hey...

And when the same solstice party was held again in the spring we were all excited - I went with such high expectations! Naturally, it turned on me and I had the terrible bad trip. I felt the sort of cursed emptiness, the 'unable to enjoy the party no matter how high and drunk I got' alcoholic depression Jack Kerouac describes so vividly in the second half of Big Sur. (6) The same people were there, same acid, same everything, but meh. Maybe I didn't bring enough whiskey, nor did I horde what I did bring. (For I was sure I wouldn't need it, so free would I feel). My bottle was all gone in minutes, and the stores all closed and far away and me too high to drive. The weather was vile. But more noticeably, no amount of whiskey, ecstasy, shrooms, acid, and hash brownies could alleviate that terrible want - the expectations of greatness dashed the moment. Instead of bringing the party down the hill to the Ortho mailroom, I'd brought the Ortho mailroom to the party. 

Isn't that what's happening to Filmstruck? The Mailroom --seeing the party as a distraction of its workers -- has squashed it due perhaps to not exceeding high expectations. 

Here goes my stress again - the rage against the --
Focus back to me, Erich - the Ommmmmm Let the I am become the Aum....change starts there.
--
The people here at Glastonbury are beyond wanting or expecting anything, as is--in most of his films (until the arrival of his beloved Theresa Russell)--Roeg himself.  We see some couples canoodling, but Roeg films them mainly for the the wine class shaped background behind their bobbing profiles. The men don't seem sex-starved or sex obsessed like they do in Psych-Out andThe Trip (though there they had to bow to the drive-in's licentious demands). The "I Need" of American hippiedom becomes the "I am" of meditation becomes "Aummm" as even that is transcended for the oceanic experience of pure selflessness. Aummmm.

With an attendance of only 7,000, it's easy to see Glastonbury as one of those rare parties where just the right amount of folks showed up, all able to move into an eerie group mind perfection and not step on each other's towels, and so--they move beyond. Roeg captures it all, or some of it. It's okay if he misses important stuff. He notices the way a simple rhythm brought in to the camp site by a travelin' group of friends on a drum gradually, casually, builds (but not ostentatiously) into a little scene happening aways in the middle ground. Roeg's camera (6) feels no need to pick up his tripod and get closer - he's no amateur - not about to chase the willow the wisp, as opposed to find the next one, rewarding the patient with a lens flare or bead rattle that comes to him. That's the beauty. That's the difference. Soon a bottomless freak is dancing on stage wailing and screaming, but to a slowly increasing beat, looking out into the crowd their not gawking or video-phoning but clapping along- the rhythm and the spirit overtaking them like a gentle liberation, naked people roll around in the mud in strange childlike joy--as if the adult hang-ups stem from mom stopping us from wallowing in the mud naked as children, and now- we're finally doing it, and there's no mom to shame us, and all hang-ups are liberated. We crosscut to the black priest visitor who notes he didn't feel awkward at all, or sense anything pornographic or wrong about it "I was amazed at myself," he says. But he could tell, the naked writhing here is beyond the second chakra and all original sin. The flutter of recorders joins in to duplicate a flock of hysterical geese sitting in with Ornette Coleman and it's no longer possible to tell who is in the band, a performer in the crowd, or just a reveler caught up in the moment. People cover a rolling naked man in mud, and you feel him surrender to the moment, in his eyes you get the sense he's barely believing he's letting this happen and that it's all okay, and it's surrender to the Green Man's caress. It's not the kind of crazed desperate, froth-at-the-mouth zonked nudity of that big lady in Gimme Shelter or the preachy agrarian bathing of Woodstock, but a genuinely altered druidic madness clashing performance, freak-out and druid voodoo trance (10) audience and then reuniting them into muddy mass. The Green Man stirs in the moss. This ground, this mud, is sanctified and rich with history - the same mud of the ancients. Some weird American gets onstage with a chicken on his shoulder to babble about freaks and animals or something, and it's  a sore thumb, America: this need to elaborate and personify and annoy when all that's needed is, by gum, the chicken. He's just doing what an American SWM does by instinct - take credit.

Upper left is "the Maharishi," but it's not the Maharishi of the Beatles, but a different one- who with his white suit and entourage seems like a kind of Jim Jones but whose borderline incomprehensible English rant fills us not with light and love but suspicion. He seems the most uptight in the bunch - needing to show he's got a limo, his way paved forward, dressed like he's about to rescue Scarface from the gallows with a heavy bribe and a last-minute reprieve. Maybe he's holy, who can tell from this distance. If he had anything to do with inspiring this festival, though, he's all right with me.

Shorn of the loud American throng, the ugly tourists, the consumerist mindset, the big swath of the pie, here are people who don't seem to be 'consuming' but being. Chickens are not killed but sung to. This is Burning Man before it became a scene, before seagulls on the charred remains of Police Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward). (3) This is Joni Mitchell's dream of getting back to the garden. And she's not there, and maybe that's why. It's British, it's a thing America (and maybe or maybe not Canada) would need to shucker loose from half its population to embrace. By the time we got there, it would be over, if it was lucky. When it comes to treading lightly, we're bad news. We bring liquor. We love it. We will destroy you with our boozy woozy love. The corn will be demolished.


And yet, maybe I'm just talking about me -I was part of that part that's left behind. I failed the America in the 60s class I took sophomore year. And why? Because my friends and I loved getting high and listening to the music of the 60s too much. We made a video for our final project but remember to list our sources. What we gave the teacher was just a video of our band playing "Purple Haze,""Evil Ways," and "Viola Lee Blues,: spiked with talking head inserts pondering "how the 60s will remember the 80s," (oh shit! I just noticed). And also, Dave's and my guitars were out of tune. And also... mainly we all just talked about how drugs don't make you stupid, and yet, we did not--I now realize--sound very smart... not at all.  It pains me to admit it now - to wonder about the shady character of drugs. If a drug is valuable when used correctly (as they seem to be here at Glastonbury) means any sensible American must immediately overuse them, for we seldom turn our back on the idea that if ten is great, taking twenty is twice as great.

But hey, you can't help being a middle class American white boy with enough alcoholism in your genes that you don't consider it a party unless you can't remember it. You blew it, Billy. Altamont is you (by which I mean me). That's why I found Fayre so reassuring. What's stressed here things that American filmmakers would shy away from: God, magic, pagan symbolism, the transpersonal energies that connect all things. It sees beyond this 'epic fail' Woodstock or bust bigger is better build a skull tower to the vaginal sky eye American urge. When you plummet to earth in pain, strapped to a gurney or shaking uncontrollably alone on your couch for days on end, these are the things that reassure one. Prayer aligns our thinking to higher powers, we may be little humans but with enough egoic surrender to the oceanic current, we can expand to planet-size.

That's why it makes holy sense that I'm seeing Glastonbury Fayre on now on the vanishing Filmstruck as part of the Nicolas Roeg package. How fitting. Bye Nicolas Roeg, RIP... RIP Filmstruck... bye bye. It's a hard world for little streaming services as Lillian Gish says in Night of the Hunter might say. Small profit margins are eradicated the way a giant bank-owned tractor eradicates a dustbowl Okie.

But hey, the art goes on and the past isn't going anywhere. No one is going to come take our DVDs away.... yet.  But we can't take 'em with us, after all. Why have the moon when we can have the stars?

The weirdest part: the inclusion a protestant minister holding a small service in a corner of the parking lot area, a sad-eyed gaggle of older folks (nurses, bakers) and some devoted youth, wearily but peacefully stand around him, which Roeg snarkily intercuts with ecstatic krishna dancing and chanting going on elsewhere in the festval. "The meaning of Christ is very simple isn't it?" notes the minister in his cloudiness / cut to the dancers basking in the sun./ back to the flatline priest: "If we want to live, we must die."


It's a cheap shot, which along with the cross burnings the night before seem to indicate some swirling dark current of Antichristian sediment stirring in the mind, which considering the eastern understanding of transcending duality, the rapture that lies beyond the separation of this and that, seems far too short-sighted a mind-set for anyone with any real enlightenment in their souls - and the promoters here are glowing like auric kliegs; and eventually the editor seems to relent a bit with the snarky crosscut; one can't rightly argue against the priest's prayer for "one whole community" even if it is waterlogged with  seminary tradition. Crosscut as you will, the man is there. He showed up, right into the lion's den, the fiery furnace, the dancing eastern weirdos being the flames. We--the hungover Americans (the ones, 'sigh' I came with, I apologize again for Jason's behavior)--just walked/staggered home, draped in our Glastonbury 71 bootleg shirts, declaring we did it. We "did" the festival scene. It's played. Time to curl up with a good book... on tape, and leave the --what is it called now--raves?--to other people's children. Stay hydrated, kids! Peace will come. As for us, Hendrix is dead, man. Altamont was a mess. It's done. "They" ruined any chance for real transformation. Not us, man We drink at home now with the TV on / and all the houselights left up bright, (9). We prefer our community now, perhaps rightly, through the safety of the screen. Click, and we're free again - lost in another wild dream. We only come up for air during the credits. And even now, we're forced off the Filmstruck reservation onto Hulu, Netflix, Prime, where episodes of our current binged series link up with a 'click to skip opening credits' link in the lower right corner. So... We do not come up, til the season is demolished.


But hey, that's later. Now, other things than us are going, one by one, a reverse ark, so... one more time. So glad you made it.

Just watch the end again of Glastonbury Fayre if nothing else, before midnight this Thursday... - all that hair shaking through the night, thousands of people bopping up and down to Traffic jamming "Gimme Some Lovin'", all as happy as larks, beautiful, free. Room to swing a cat, and all cats hip. Steve Winwood tall and majestic with cigarette...drummers and keyboardist rapt with the groove-beatific focused smiles; I'd forgotten about that feeling I'm so glad it lasted as long as it did, if not forever (my joints!) and not everywhere (Giuliani saw to that). Somewhere, though, somewhere too ancient to be totally silenced, I'd wager the Green Man is planning something, but I'll wager it's not so wondrous.Ask not who stands within the wicker man...next time, we're all burning.


1. we've ascribed that black and white devil clown make-up forever to KISS, which is very American of us, but there you are, it's KISS even if you don't really like KISS) 
2. I can't judge man, for I too went this way, from that first glorious rush (they only today announced conclusive proof shrooms treat depression, man I could tell you the stories, that black and white Kansas misery finally opening up into OZ Cinerama) freshman year of college, to the shuddering bad trip misery of chasing hit after hit with whiskey after whiskey just trying to feel less like I was in self-conscious hell, never mind about good, while being pawed at by girlfriends and jonesers or, maybe,worse, left alone to be terrified by the TV showing Flatliners like a gateway pamphlet announcing to you, gently, that you died in an accident last week and still don't know
3. ref. The Wicker Man 
5. That was my power animal mantra during some intense shroom trips in 1987 -the warrior roar, the lone bull walrus breaking through the ice mantle in the Arctic sea, the only living thing for miles in all directions of snowy wasteland, but roaring - wild and proud and free - I am alive! Without fear or loneliness or panic, the warrior roar that makes life your bitch no matter what may come. 
6. The biggest nightmare a drunk can have is when the 'click' never comes (as per Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) no matter how drunk you get - you could be so sloshed you feel it coming up into your eyeballs but are still sober as a judge, and beyond miserable. It's remembering those experiences that help keep up drunks sober through the tempting times. 
9. "The Last Time I saw Richard" - Joni Mitchell (of course)

Funny that after decades of seeing her only hither or yon, I find Elina Löwensohn in two new movies (en français), which I happened to watch back to back, by daring auteurs that take wild surreal detours involving her as a semi-insane ruler of a remote location, watching over scenes of death and sex with a haughty glee and owning her masculine side, if you will, and ageless anima side, a psychopomp beyond gender for the next millennia. In THE WILD BOYS and LET THEIR CORPSES TAN--startling auteurial exercises that draw kinky sexual imagery from the darndest of places--we find this Romanian-American actress (just one year older than me, she's handling it way better) sure can swing a wild dick, if you'll pardon my French. Both from last year but just getting here now (via DVD and streaming rental, sigh), both films shot in super 16mm, both films ravishingly beautiful and auteur to the core.


What are the odds I'd see these movies back-to-back, not knowing Löwensohn was in either one, after not seeing hide nor hair of since her small role in The Forbidden Room (and before that, Nadja), where she looked, frankly, like a different person - she was still 'gamin'-esque in Room, but here she's surrendered even late inning Delpy/Huppert-style hotness in favor of a fat cigar and a laugh throaty enough to choke the communism out of Lionel Stander, wagging her sun-browned body around like a general bounding over piles of enemy corpses of the other side, breasts bared with the 'who cares?' haughtiness that marks European women as the superior to all other genders and continents. She's rocking punk rock bangs and a stare that could freeze the blood of a drowsy kitten basking in the sun. Those breasts are young and full-still, as if eternal. Shall you not try to swing the same?



Surreal and strange in ways that mixes Clockwork Orange-Captains Courageous bad boy rehab adventures into erotic gender-bent deconstructions like Batailles' Story of the Eye and Angela Carter's Passion of a New Eve, it's the hardy tale of of a youth rehabilitation program cure taken by five over-privileged punks after they brutalize their literature teacher. Trevor, a voodoo-like spirit of violent destruction that wears a glittery skull mask and likes to run around as a dog (!), overtook them during a masked drunken performance art piece (reciting the opening three witches scene of Macbeth) while wearing terrifying maskies. After a brutal period at sea, collared to the ship and regularly choked to within an inch of their lives at the salty captain's whim, the wild boys wind up on a  mysterious island with sexually active vegetation, the ever-present smell of oysters and a strange hormonal magic, including the ability to slowly turn boys into girls (their penises drop off and are swept away in the uncaring surf, suddenly no more relevant than land crabs). Trees and rocks become giant asses and mocking breasts.


Soon joining forces with a mysterious lady (formerly male) doctor (Löwensohn) they start sexually devouring and killing randy sailors, committing high seas mutiny, and surrendering to the intoxicating touch and taste of the local plant life. Touching Lord of the Flies meets The Pink Lagoon kind of castaway weirdness, our Les garçons sauvages is really off in a field by itself, chasing horny phallic dragonflies, drinking manna-jaculate from phallic tubers, screwing between leafy legs, sleeping deep in the shrubbery, evoking everything from Naked Lunch to Matango its hallucinatory amok Friday-Crusoe wandering (and even Valhalla Rising if you're keeping score), it may well and goodly be conjured.. (The great twist though is that these boys were played by girls to begin with, and the freedom accorded these already free French actresses allows them to swagger in ways that are good to see.)

What does it all mean? You know damned well what it means. Read Batailles and Angela Carter and learn something about just how precarious your own sexuality is, that words on a page can--by reading--reorganize the molecular structure of your private parts - you'll get aroused in places you didn't even know were there, and suddenly buried infant memories sweep up onto the rocks. Then you'll understand: When French women put on male drag look out, they swagger and wave their cocks around like they just strapped them on, and when they fall off, they behold their breasts like they just got their team colors. It's quite revealing when deconstructing the postures and posing of the Paris is Burning houses (with which it would make a wild double feature), all swivel-hipped sailors and grabby crotch-forward surrender --the way letting your unconscious anima/animus stretch out in drag brings all sorts of in-the-moment awareness and mojo. Shot in startling black and white with forays into surreal color, the spirit of experimental expressionism and psychosexual weirdness is alive and well with this new force of surreal grandeur Bertrand Mandico. Remember that name,  Bunuel, Jarman, Anger, my mamas, you can rest in peace at last (yes, Kenneth, I know you're still alive, but rest... there... there now).

Here's the list and if this intro is shorter than usual, just note that there's less and less to write about as far as unity of direction and theme in cinema as a whole, the line is so spread out thanks to streaming there's almost no way to get the whole picture. Titles proliferate faster than any one critic may see. The working professional (i.e. currently paid) critics get the screeners for the Oscar bids or go to press screenings, but for the rest of us, if we're no longer getting paid to see them, why would we even want to? Those of us with the right Hendrixian 'experience' prefer films that take the trappings of genre and twist them all up in to groovy, psychedelic tie-dye twists that then become a steep Eisentstein-Rosencrantz bridge deep into the heavy mystic. As Jim once sang, blowsy and belting: "tell all the people that you see: follow me.... follow me down!" OK Nation, world, let's goooo.

Saturated in a druggy wash of deep reds and dark blacks there's so much beauty in every composition of this sludge rock vengeance masterpiece as to deserve a painted mirror you might win on the Seaside Heights boardwalk back in 1983 when you're an impressionable 14 year-old. That's when this set, and deep in some magical forest deep in the Shadow Mountains of wherever: Cage is a lumberjack living in a very groovy pad with his artist wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). Happy as could be, they live as any of us might, eating dinner while agog in front of the TV, telling weird Erik Estrada knock-knock jokes, and rowing out to the center of the glassy lake out back --perfectly in tune and in trippy love, all captured in dreamy dissolves. Naturally a bunch of crazy acidhead Manson-esque Jesus freaks show up and... well... soon enough Nic has plenty of reason to go on a bizarro drug-fueled killing spree.



Throughout Cosmatos detours into sludgy canvasses of deep red and black, which if it's your favorite color combination as it is mine, you will love this sludgy film. In one of countless great choices, Cosmatos foregoes the usual heavy metal or hard rock classic soundtrack, aside from an unforgettable opening title set to "Starless and Bible Black" by King Crimson. The great, dearly departed Johan Johannson score lays a deep abstract Carpenter carpet underneath the wildness, occasionally going over the deep end as when Red (Cage) samples the jar of Black Rider grey jelly, a kind of super psycho-meth that hits him as instantly and crazily as any ever. As with Cosmatos' iconic debut Beyond the Black Rainbow, your familiarity with 70s-80s Canadian horror and sci-fi films, novels and heavy metal album covers, and mind-bending drugs isn't needed, but it sure helps. Add Cage at his wildest, and badass behavior from both him and Mandy in the face of pure evil and this movie leaps right over the... two moons?! This movie, I tell ya. The whole revenge of one simple man with chainsaw skills on a one-man druggie vendetta against Manson-esque Jesus freaks (and their demon allies) may not be terribly new, but what Cosmatos does is far more ballsy than just adding dour self-importance of social messaging, he brings in the supernatural in a way more holistic and connected than, say, Lynch does in Twin Peaks; The Return. And best of all, does the slow weird meaning-tentacled abstraction of strong psychedelic drugs better than any other working director today, x 2


There's an ingeniously simple, savage, disturbing premise to this wild satire that basically sends a cold shot of Drano-laced meth up the IV tube that's been keeping suburban tract home 2.5 children family bliss/stasis stabilized with cheap corn sugar glucose nigh these 70 odd years (since the dawn of the suburbs at the close of WW2). Tapping into a kind of unspoken universal American rage but reversing the flow (instead of protecting children from harm, etc.) Nicolas Cage is letter perfect as the weirdo dad, and Selma Blair is a whole extra book of revelations as the spin class nervous breakdown mom and it's always nice when Lance Henriksen shows up, giving everyone--even crazy Cage--a lesson in balls-out crazy lunge-for-the-jug style acting. Best is the real-time single 24-hour time frame of events, the way--as in  the roots of what's going on are never overtly spelled out (beginning with the super weird early and confusing evacuation of school). I haven't enjoyed a movie this much since, well, ever. Mr. Bill's unruly industrial clatter/whoosh score keeps everything rolling with seven layers of ominous adrenalin. Director Brian Taylor is the nutcase who gave us Crank and Crank 2: High-Voltage in case you're wondering how he got so good at lunatic real-time mayhem and blacker-than-the-anti-sun comedy. He and Nic Cage were made for each other, as they already proved in the 2012 guilty pleasure Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance!   I mean, just look at Cage in the pic there, have you ever seen a man crazier? He's right up there with Toni Collette in Hereditary as far as new high water mark level of nuts, which, in our Trumpian post-wasteland, I think more than sums up the tenor of the time.

Successfully goes where others have only tried, namely the whole "is there a difference between inherited bi-polar manic depression, and literal matriarchal conspiracies of witches?" There's room for both answers in all the best films on the subject, like Rosemary's Baby, and even the ones that are only partly successful (House of the Devil, The Witch, Lords of Salem). The subject--when examined right--treads so close to the line where acute perception--reality stripped of its facade--becomes paranoid schizophrenic insanity that it's very easy to forget which side of it you're on. Living with a person suffering from such a problem, always teetering over the edge, is truly unnerving. Thanks to a terrifyingly vivid performance by Toni Collette, the best mother in a horror film alternately terrifying and sympathetic, since Essie Davis in The Babadook, we get just how tragic and deep the rabbit hole vortex goes.


It's funny to read all the backlash from critics after being bombarded with high expectations comparing it to The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby (I think it's actually better than The Exorcist). The other backlash comes from people espousing how traumatized they are by seeing certain people of certain ages having certain bad things happen to them onscreen (no spoilers!).  The set-up for Hereditary's big early inning shock is so out of left field that we feel the way audiences must have felt the first time seeing Psycho.

The weird thing is that none of this stuff seems at all gratuitous or even sadistic - it's all leading to a certain place and every chill is earned. This is no 90 minute thrill ride but a solid legitimately rich character study that marks the crossroads between mental illness and its effects on families and the way paranoia about witchcraft and life after death can both exacerbate these effects, cause them as a kind of side effect, or just be the cover story devils have used since time immemorial. Is devil worship a system created out of our brain's compulsive need to find hidden systems and motivations that explain away the random events of nature and our tiny place in it? Or has a life of being manipulated by Satanic forces left us insane? When Mr. Rochester locks his wife in the attic is he trying to reign in her madness or has his patriarchal reigning made her mad? Rosemary's Baby explored these same questions but, as that film's dream sequence reminded us, there's a whole ocean left to explore, with enough unsounded depth to make a dozen such voyages as full of terrifying epiphany and 'take-away' madness as the first.

Best of all is the way Aster clearly gets what's wrong with modern horror films--the overly detailed horror make-ups and unearned shock music cues, and eliminates it all. Watching Halloween again for the first time in a few years I especially noticed that during the whole extended climax - the single note ominous repeating 'dun... dun.... dun..." during the closet upstairs sequence for example, is preceded by a whole downstairs thing with no music whatsoever! The silence is more terrifying than any movie could be, and I wondered how overbearing a modern orchestral score would have made that sequence, feeling all our fear for us like a micro-managing den mother. The climax of Hereditary is right up there and a reminder of the effectiveness of silence as well as music: Colin Stetson's score underlies this with weird eerie drones, sparingly... other horror film composers should take a mighty heed.

Thanks to the more orderly mind of long-time Welles' friend and biographer, director Peter Bogdanovich, and digital remastering, the last unfinished Welles film about the last day in the life of a Wellesian director working on his last, unfinished film is finally.... well, finished. What makes it even more meta is that Peter Bogdanovich plays such a key character in the film, as more or less himself, and he finished it, with John Huston filling in for Orson. Together they seem to be working through the angles of male friendship, biographer-subject, father-son, remora-shark, fan-hero, and apostle-Christ --which suits the unique nature of the finished product so well it seems like fate--like the ultimate metatextual Welles flourish, as if he knew the film couldn't be finished until long enough after he died that Bogdanovich could use digital means to clean-up the film stock and have the chutzpah to tackle such a mammoth project. It may be Bogdanovich's best film as well as one of Welles's, with film quality and sound are so good it's hard to imagine this wasn't all filmed a few months ago -it's actually better than new, even, since it's on film - and every frame is lovingly color-saturated or otherwise cleaned up to the point it all shines better than any new dime. As the Welles-like director, Huston is another great meta-choice, for he--like Welles--was a raconteur genius working outside/inside the system. And when he discusses having boxed with Hemingway etc we know we're getting a fair dose of himself (for Welles never boxed, obviously). And it's no easy feat to play a high-functioning alcoholic at a party surrounded by sycophants and needy technicians wondering what they're getting paid for and when they will be, over years and years when it's all set in one night. So fractured it's set to the rhythms of a crowded moveable feast party like few I've seen, sustaining itself at a glib raconteur height Altman only reached a few times in his whole oeuvre. Especially as Huston gets progressively drunker and more belligerent, it transcends narrative and dating in a way that makes similar films--8 1/2 for example, seem horribly mawkish and antiquated.

As in that film, we realize much of a director's life is spent being hounded by underlings--writers, make-up artists, personal assistants, young girl intern/eye candy/drink getters, and sycophants galore, all wanting to either get on or stay on his good side and/or payroll. Swirling in and around a 70th birthday party that involves screening the director's unfinished, very artsy and psychedelic late 60s hippie movie (the kind of thing neither Welles nor Huston would ever do, presumably) on the one hand, and the movie itself on the other (and for the end, a fatal intersection of the two), The Other Side is a relentless attention grabber, full of blink-and-miss clever edits, guns, mannequins, and retorts zippy enough that by the time you untangle their genius, three more have passed you by.

The film-within-the-film is harder to peg. Certainly it's definitive Welles--with deep focus Dali-esque compositions reminiscent of passages in Welles'Othello but--especially during the psychedelic stretch of film that finds the heroine in a deserted train station in the desert, then a rainy street at night, a psychedelic rock club bathroom, and subsequent getting it on in a car in the rain with no music but the sound of the wipers and the clack of her bead neckless against her breasts as she gyrated atop this beautiful but similarly mute boy. With all the brilliant, lovingly restored colors, the sequence, lasting well over 15 minutes, is a marvel all its own evoking, of all things, Amer's co-directors Helen Cattet and Bruno Forzani with its intelligently arranged sequence of open-ended surrealist imagery.ich in rich Suspiria colors. With its tail of a beautiful blank looking boy feebly following a Cher-like Native American woman--unsmiling and dead-eyed throughout--the dour mood of dream-like student film art-for-art's sake seems to be almost mocking Antonioni's Zabriskie Point, yet is so rife with Welles' signature expressionist style it kind of takes off anyway. We certainly can't blame Welles for wanting 'in' on this new type of Age of Aquarius expressionism, since he invented some of it.


Taken all in all, Wind is one of the biggest, best surprises of the decade. It fulfills the promise so many 'last films' never seem to do, ala Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again . Since Welles isn't around to second guess and overthink it into endless abstraction, it's a real gift to cinema that someone who 'gets' Welles and knew him and respected his notes almost slavishly, yet is a talent in his own right, was there to pick up the million pieces and finish what may be one of the best 70s movies of the 21st century. Though again, not unlike most of Welles' work, the overall effect seldom transcends its maker's larger-than-life male ego. The hall of mirrors climax of Lady from Shanghai is again the definitive Welles' image, albeit with him firing at himself firing at himself, self-love and epiphanic realization of that love's hollowness revolving in an endless reverse ouroboros. Doesn't matter, though - his gun never misses and his puking bite is never totally fatal. He even lets a few female characters make their comments. A bitchy lady critic (played with gusto by Susan Strasberg) get in some cruel barbs before someone punches her out. Auteurs will be boys, after all. Hey, speaking of boys...

Surreal and strange in ways that evoke erotic deconstructions like Batailles' Story of the Eye and Angela Carter's Passion of a New Eve, but in an homage to a kind of Haynes-Jarman rough trade queerness with a dash of Maddin and, and of course, Clockwork Orange,  this surreal fable concerns a gang of unruly violent boys (all played by girls in drag) forced into a Captains Courageous kind of youth rehabilitation program cure after they brutalize their literature teacher (once a voodoo-like spirit of violent destruction overtakes them during a masked drunken performance art version of the opening three witches scene of  Macbeth). After a brutal period at sea, collared to the ship and regularly choked to within an inch of their lives at the captain's whim, they wind up on a  mysterious island with sexually active vegetation, the ever-present smell of oysters ("the whole island is an oyster") that has strange hormonal magic, including the ability to make boys grow breasts, and watch as their penises fall off into the relentless surf. Drinking milky manna from phallic tubers and screwing flytrap style flower monsters, everything from Naked Lunch toMatango may well and goodly be conjured here, with the overall effect transcending anything so mundane as tawdriness, or morality.

And while they may be girls, these kids are still badasses, though, soon joining forces with a mysterious lady (formerly male) doctor (Elina Löwensohn [Nadja]), sexually devouring and killing randy sailors. Or something. Touching Lord of the Flies meets The Blue Lagoon kind of castaway weirdness, this is really off in a field by itself, chasing horny phallic dragonflies and volcano penises erupting into bubbling crevasses. What does it all mean? You know damned well: when surrealism sets sail, the wind that blows the ship forward is the gas bag exhalation of meaning dying in its conformist straitjacket back on shore. When French women put on male drag, they swagger and wave their cocks around like they just strapped them on, it's really something. Shot in startling black and white with forays into surreal 16mm color, this exercise in gender bending psychosexual surrealism is a breath of fresh island air, salty with sex, oysters, and horny vegetation, the sequences at sea are great too - not sure how they did it, but its some of the best stormy ocean, (non-CGI) floundering ship work I've seen in a long time. (in French with English subtitles)

A fresh new African American voice, pitched somewhere between Michel Gondry, the intellectual urban activist experimentalism of Spike Lee, and the savage workingman satire of Jody Hill, Boots Riley delivers a truly weird and engaging debut. Young odd job-seeking black slacker Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield) lives in his uncle's garage and is intending to pay rent as soon as he gets a job. He's got a cute girlfriend though, Detroit (Tessa Thompson)-- an artist/activist who works spinning a sign on the street, but who aims at something better, so Cassius better pull himself out of his slacker spiral before she moves on. Working largely on commission as a telemarketer, Cassius flounders at doing so, until he's counseled by a wise cubicle neighbor (Danny Glover) on finding his 'white boy voice' - which means he's soon dubbed by David Cross and making a killing through cold calls. Moving up the ladder to the top floor where he's soon selling arms and slave labor but making so much money he can't complain, even as he sells out his former co-workers, who contemplate moving into a kind of work camp arrangement where all bills are paid, needs are met, and you live where you work, eat and sleep all in the same place - though apparently it's slavery. You can't ever get out. From there it only gets weirder including a WTF moment so insane I can't spoil it (it wasn't spoiled for me, I won't do it for you). You're bound to laugh at least once, nervously, and come away with new  ways of asking the right questions so wrongly they don't even need an answer, Youngblood!

7. ZAMA Dir. Lucretia Martel

As serenely brutal and sexually hostile as an Ilsa film stretched to slow motion and sans Dyanne Thorne, Martel's adaption of a popular Argentine novel, concerns the title character, Zama (Daniel Jiminez Cacho), the sexually-frustrated magistrate of a sweltering Spanish outpost in South America in the late 1600s. Desperate to return to civilization and his family, but needing the approval of an almost entirely absent governor/treasurer, he spends his day hearing complaints that underly the horrifying systemic brutality and oppression of the enslaved caste of natives. Tortured by DSB-denial (he refuses to 'lower' himself with one of the eminently available local native girls), he spends his busy day being dragged as if by magnetic force towards the horny (albeit Spanish) wife of the treasurer, said treasurer being one of the few men whose good word might get him transferred out of that hell hole. Better go careful, Zama! Enterprising slaves are ever watching and listening at keyholes as she trots out heady bottles of rum, her bosom wobbling with desire or maybe the heat.

Meanwhile rumors of a rapist bandit sneaking into the village by day and abusing the women finally drives Zama to form a posse and head into the jungles after him. Borrowing elements of Herzog's kind of deep focus documentary-style canvas approach to the ambivalence of the jungle, and ladling on her own masterful ability to index an array of characters moving and parrying at cross-purposes inside a frame, Martel takes on gorgeous tracking shots through room after room of fascinating, heat-ravaged tableaux of "civilization" ever trying and failing to conquer the natural world and their own inner urges. Tarkovsky-esque--disoriented sound design amps the paranoia, thrusting us up against Zama's nose as he navigates clustered hallways where tall powdered wings wave like unsteady ship prows atop heat-drunk heads, native slaves stand around in silent opprobrium, the in-between caste does their chores, and by the time one's decoded the meaning of what's going on in there, the chance to do anything about it is long past. Brilliant, but withering, and without any of the maternal comfort offered by some Martel's previous films, it's a cold, salty dish as potent and pungent as a punch in the head with an soaked sock full of sea-slimed emeralds. (in Spanish with English subtitles)

Clearly a letter of love and gratitude to Cuaron's maid/nanny while growing up, a reverie of life in a big family in Mexico City circa 1971 actually functions together with Zama as an almost sequel (even the names are familiar, neither has any music --relying instead on a tapestry of diegetic sound--and Martel made a similar film to Roma in her feature debut, La Cienega) - showing the result of all that Spanish colonization in the 1600s. Here it is 180 or so years later, Native South Americans aren't enslaved anymore, but rather work as servants to the more European-blooded upper middle class or else scrabble around in the outskirt slum areas. The mostly silent maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is much loved by the children and the mom even though she seldom cleans up after the dog (it clearly needs to be walked more often), so there's piles of shit all over the driveway. She winds up pregnant (the boyfriend disappears as soon as he hears) and eventually finds a sort of peace in the arms of a household where the men run off and abandon and their women and children. Told mostly in long slow pans, the shots are amazing, particularly an extended sequence of the grandmother and maid trying to buy a crib at a furniture store while a full-blown bloodbath riot goes on outside (ala the car attack in his Children of Men), leading to her water breaking and an attempt to get to the hospital in the thick of tear gas and traffic and climaxing in a genius over-crowded public hospital (where the deadbeat husband happens to work as a doctor). It's topped later in an amazing glide shot that goes out into the deep deep water finding the kids nearly swept out to sea in rough tides, the camera following the action from far up the beach all the way out to the whirling depths without the slightest tremor in the camera, not even salt spray on the lens. It's beyond amazing. Every inch of the screen is used for masterful compositions, the incredible extended sequences, and invisible acting, make this one a real winner despite the 'have your cake and critique the power structure that made someone else bake it for you' subtext. (in Spanish with English subtitles)


Lots of angst and pain in this torturously awkward film that posits the terrors we all felt as children in the horrible 'body changes' portion of childhood (that we tend to block from our memories as if some brutal assault) come flooding back but amped to eleven thanks to the proliferation of smartphone technology insuring every awkward attempt at socialization shall be preserved and disseminated amidst a teen's peers faster than you can even regret what you just said. First-time feature director Bo Burnham (see his comedy specials on Netflix!) keeps the acne-ridden face of our frumpy heroine front and center, forcing us into a kind of aesthetic corner, a self-conscious nightmare prison. It all climaxes in a horrifyingly tense backseat seduction attempt. It's great and illuminating, but in the end all it perhaps does is remind us why we blocked those memories out. We're where a therapist might take us, to places we hoped we'd never have to go again, making us wonder if Bo's a sadist or just trying for a unique catharsis. It succeeds in both counts, but I never want to see it again.

Speaking of unaccountable dread, this WAR was so epic it gave me an anxiety attack and I had to stop watching (on Blu-ray) and go to bed, where I dreamt of it. The idea that a power could come along and beat all the superheroes in a massive fight was too much to bear in my sensitive state. And yet, as a proponent of population control I couldn't argue with the logic of the ruthless intergalactic monster played so well by the great Josh Brolin and thought I honestly wasn't sure if I would have switched sides were I there. On earth and in space, the wit and energy flow nonstop with the only dead spot being the operatic romance between Vision and Scarlet Witch (just writing that sentence I hear Juliette Binoche laughing derisively behind me). The rest of the time, the action and wit overlap in genius doses -- the superheroes all working as such a quick, focused team that it's jaw-dropping. The pick for most critics as the best Marvel this year was Black Panther, and while it was great and with a potent social message, I felt ---mmm, no wait, I loved that movie too but it got a little too 'real' and some of the banter seemed a tad too chipper. No, I think the best one was actually Ant Man and the Wasp. Call me crazy, but they're all winners. Unlike the dismal Eighth Grade, I can't wait to watch this again, albeit in bits and pieces, safely broken up by commercials on FX.




Adult Swim continues their descent into the void with this mind-bending claymation spectacular from the demented mind of Vernon Chatman (Wonder Showzen). Following a kind of Rod Serling-meets-the "in a world" movie trailer voiceover narrator, we go on a bizarre free associative trip into the looking glass with the result being like the entire run of The Twilight Zone all compressed into 15 minute windows, liberally dosed with weird sex, violence, and Cronenbergian new flesh appendage removal, the "yes -and" improv-style relentless compounding lunacy of it all has reduced me to rolling on the ground convulsing with laughter like I haven't done sober ever. There's no going back after this. It's so out there it makes pretenders to the throne of strange wilt and fold. Accept it.

Germany's big budget TV series revolves around the "first female police detective" in Weimar Berlin, a time between the two world wars, when Berlin, mired in economic depression, became an art, sex and crime mecca. Prostitution, homosexuality, drug addiction, pornography (silent era), and a decadent cross-dressing night club chanteuse master criminal white Russian equals the dusky TV series equivalent a great, page-turning massive paperback of sexy historical fiction. If i eventually kind of runs out of time without winding things up very satisfactorily, well that's life, meine liebling. Is history any different? I like that the male-female crime-solving team of an ex-prostitute/party girl (Liv Lisa Fries)- and drug-addicted police detective (Volker Bruch) gets by without any tired bowing down to any hooking up, and that the National Socialist party is only--at the very end--just starting make a brownshirt ruckus. Highlights are a planned assassination of a Treaty of Versailles-adhering politician, a train car full of gold being stolen back by the Communists, but there's plenty of sordid but fascinating characters and details along the way, even a great rollicking song ("Zu aush, Zu Staub") that acts as a kind of theme song for all the party-loving regulars at the club. It's all done with great style and atoosphere, complex, hearty performances, and excellence all around. Acidemically, it's great to see a girl whose love of champagne and dabbling in prostitution doesn't mar her self-esteem and lead to tired self-sacrifice like it would in the states even during pre-code times, and to find a genuinely complex (neither good nor all-the-way villain) in the portly red-faced corrupt cop Bruno (Peter Kurth) who shows Bruch the ropes. (in German with English subtitles)

It's a fairly ubiquitous tune today, but when this movie came out, it was brand new, written for this very film, GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935, and if you see it, as I recently did, shorn of the preceding hour of shrill comedy (scheming social climber bellboys and their manager, greedy for a percentage of their tips; White Russian impresarios wheedling money from a miserly matron; her seducible offspring finding love and scam artists), the two climactic Busby Berkeley-directed numbers bend reality all the better. The first is forgettable musically but eventually erupts in some dazzlingly precise trippy fractal choreography. The second, however, "Lullaby" transcends even that.

First, it's the blackness that grabs you, coming hot on the heels of the preceding number with its geometric infinity; the single white light illuminating a far-off face, like a distant single star; a shadowed young female face that seems to be slowly moving towards us like a flying saucer or moon in a starless sky; as she becomes clearer and larger, a cold chill comes down our spine. That cold look in her eyes is both compassionate and ambivalent, remorseless, witty, brazen but never tacky, haughty but not loud or shrewish; her glare right into the camera bespeaks a dazzling familiarity with strangers; her shadowed teeth give her a cadaverous lupine edge; her cheeks shadowed by coiled hair give her the vague association of a skull, or the contours of Manhattan. She calmly looks the world dead in the eye while singing, like she's tough talking a rival gang, the city itself standing behind her, ready. She knows that NYC has her back, that she is the city, what it's proudest of.
The song, presented in this island of death and dance in the center of it all, is no longer a jingle, but a dirge, suddenly shorn of its decades-long association with TV commercials for Times Square hotels, Thanksgiving's day parades, floats, shows, and tourist stops which make it seem less like a lullaby and more like a wake-up revelry to pep grandma into finding her purse. The lyrics suddenly make an eerie sense: this tune is meant as a real lullaby for the Broadway baby--soothing the still-giddy but pleasantly danced (and whatever else)-out party girl to sleep even if it's also a wake-up call for the rest of the city.

When a Broadway baby says good night
It's early in the morning
Manhattan babies don't sleep tight
Until the dawn

As much a symbol as the Statue of Liberty, The Empire State building or Grant's tomb, this all-night party girl is a metonym for the Capitol of the World during its dark climb out of the Depression, Roosevelt's lifting of prohibition carrying her aloft as suddenly booze's affordability allows the high-rollers to give bigger tips at the night clubs.


NYC never sleeps - and for the all-night girls the jackhammer and traffic jam bleeping is the sound of the comforting arms of blissful unconsciousness, the pleasure of a body that's gone through the exhilaration of dancing and drinking all night, now slinking into cold sheets, alone, free of pawing, there to stash whatever cash or jewelry one's acquired and admire the sparkle in the morning sun. Underwriting the melody's jubilance is this giddy ecstasy that comes from hearing the clang and bustle of the 9-5 crowd grind the gearshift of the giant NYC business world back into life, and letting the rush of trains, honking horns, and murmur of crowds and hawking paperboys lull you to sleep.

This is no fantasy though, you can tell the songwriters know of what they speak. I know it well myself --I lived the dance all-night walk of shame life in the city from 1991-1998, vividly. If you're going to be out dancing and drinking til the dawn every night of the week (except Sunday), there's only one city that can accommodate you without effort. This number lets the rest of America know that same thrill, even as it staggers out into ever wilder parties with ever more regimented lines of dancers, and rich faceless chumps in tuxedoes brandishing jewelry and top hats.

But what of this goddess? Whose face, laying down in bed (?) with cigarette in mouth, becomes the lower half of the island Manhattan? She's neither alive nor dead but many and none. Played by Wini Shaw, a nearly-star in the Warners musical pantheon, she's already halfway to being a psychopomp, halfway to being some killer from a film noir or horror film. With her beguiling, chilling stare right into camera we are forced to consider death in a whole new light - and to see the frivlous professional reveler as Orpheus and Persephone rolled into one. Hades as both the Underworld and its smitten ruler.

 This is not a death to run from, or towards. It's a stare with its own inexorable tractor beam pull - from the distance, like a tunnel at the end of the road in reverse; her face is the void, the city is the 'next step' that lurks beyond the illusory split between dreaming and waking. Her sultry but cold stare lingers long after the movie fades, the look that bores right into me every time I see it, no matter how long ago it was made or old I've become between viewings.


Maybe it's a dream, a warning, real or a metaphor - one look in her deep ambivalent eyes and you know the score. Life and death are the same - the city never sleeps. Here the grim reaper and baby new year share the same stairwell. She greets the milkman on his way out, pours some milk (!) for a kitten, just out there in the common hallway, looking up expectantly.  Like this errant kitty, she coasts along like a leaf in the wind, trusting that--in the city that never sleeps--there's always a mug somewhere.

Even in the film itself she is separate from the rest of the characters. There's no curtain raising or fourth wall jump-off point for this number like there are in so many others. The film doesn't find her - she just appears out of the darkness, a star in the distance coming closer with a steady, relentless momentum, staring us dead in the eye, the way a beautiful woman giving you a haughty beckoning stare across a room can muffle the party around you to a dry West Side Story school dance blur, beguile, excite and terrify you where you stand.




After her tragic fall, we see the poor kitten has no one to pour it some milk and the bed is unslept in - no one is maybe there to miss her.  She resumes her star status, back into the skyline - it's a very eerie ending to the number but with that eerie opening we're not surprised. This is a real Broadway Angel of Death - she's hardly fazed by her own demise. She becomes Ms. Death in a way that's unique to the city, which is the reason we all fall in love with it and her. She and NYC strip death of all the skull and bones posturing. She and NYC put death put on the spot, they make it stand up and stop slouching.

I certainly relate to this girl's odyssey. No NYC youth is complete without a period of walks of shame, NYC being so clearly where the phrase was invented. Where else can you even walk home from some new lover's bed on a regular basis but NYC? You get out at dawn, the smell of your lover or the dance club still all over you, with cigarettes fresh and warmly beguiling in the air, newsstands and awnings groaning open like the maws of giant friendly dragons; trucks, garbage men who should have finished up hours ago now rushing against the onslaught of rush hour. You dance home--or it feels like it though it comes off more as staggering, in torn stockings or borrowed sweatshirts. Maybe you hope your roommate is still there since you lost your keys. Well-laid and content, still high, the music you were dancing to throbbing in your blood still, the commuters going to work are still sleepy or freshly perked from their early AM jogs or coffees. Either way, it's nice to see them without being one yourself -  you're headed off to bed, and you remember being one of them and remember how badly you wanted to turn around and go back to bed, so you are kind of doing just that for them. Your destination is their fantasy. But there's no animosity between you - in face you and the commuters share a conspiratorial smile - each's presence takes the other out of themselves, for the gap in consciousness between the danced/laid reveler staggering or sauntering home to bed and the freshly woke commuter off to work, is so vast that there is no uncanny valley - no resentment any more than a dog might resent a goat.

Good night, babyGood night, the milkman's on his waySleep tight, babySleep tight, let's call it a day

1935 marked a Hollywood well into the code, but Perhaps it's because there's no dialogue, but it's also remarkably risque. Maybe they got to keep it as there's almost a moral (she dies), the way wanton harlots weren't yet barricaded from ye olde folks at home by steel shudders.
Thanks to the Grand Old Movie blog ("In the End, she Dies")

Still - the code may be in effect, but the "walk of shame" carries no stigma for this Broadway baby, anymore than any of us slumping home from our day job. The men she meets on her way upstairs glare not, neither do they scold, neither do they leer. This isn't Hicksville. This is NYC and everyone knows she works as hard for the money as they do. But the working man and the milkman's familiarity with her coming in at the crack of dawn bodes ill. One can't keep this up forever. All of us who've tried have fallen. The dancing and the partying whirl and whirl until she's accidentally thrown off a 30th floor balcony (2) or winds up in Bellevue, loaded with digitalis, screaming her head off.

On the other hand, when everyone around you is screaming too, you begin to realize at last just what 'hitting bottom' really means. It's so terrible it's kind of grand. Even after the splat, you're still dancing. Sleep tight, baby. The Milkman Cometh...


NOTES:
1. There's no brief of small town morality to guide our understanding of what's going on here - what the original purpose of an 'engagement ring' was for, or promissory notes of marriage being valid tools to sue for breach of promise, as in taking of virginity = $$. If you want to have sex before marriage, an engagement ring says at least you'll have something to pawn when it's time to pay the midwife. The ideal state was divorced or a widow and with the Great War slaughters, widowhood was not uncommon. 
2. For me, the balcony itself crashed (from 1997-9/11 our Thurs. haunt was Windows on the World on the top floor of Tower A.) 

There's ever so often I catch even a time out critic evincing he's not seen the movie he's capsulizing, as in the Time Out Britannia entry on LAST SUMMER (1969), which calls it "winsome," and notes 'typical lessons are learned"? Oopsy-daisy. Either he's one sick British puppy or he's hearing the title and painting a very different sort of beach idyll in his mind. Sure, there's lessons learned in Frank and Eleanor Perry's sneakily devastating adaptation of Evan Hunter's novel, but calling them typical is like calling Hitchcock's The Birds (which Hunter scripted), an 'ornithologist's bayside holiday.'

I don't blame that writer; he probably couldn't find a copy of the film when he was assigned it, as to my knowledge it's never been on DVD or tape, in fact I'm not even sure where Max got the copy I duped that we watched so religiously during one of our drunken LBI summers back in the early 90s.
I may not have a copy today for reference, but I can attest: there's nothing idyllic or remotely typical about Last Summer, unless Over the Edge and Don't Deliver us from Evil are to be filed next to Gidget and Beach Party. Can you imagine? That would be so awesome for a over-protective parent to rent by mistake, thinking Evil was the tale of two good Catholic BFFs and their summer journey of emotional maturity and talent show poetry recital, and Edge about a group of kid activists fighting to save their after-school arts program.


The tale of three (and then four) privileged youngsters left to their own devices on Fire Island (?) over the summer, Last Summer builds to its evil gradually, to the point where our own giddy love for Scorpio-Pisces mayhem is used against us. There's sexual assault, menage a trois cinema groping, evil-confessing, seagull sadism, and other typical--but far from the sort of typical coming-of-age beach summer movies you'd get from Disney or Rob Reiner-childhood nostalgia beach experiences, the kind kids grow up to either forget, or elaborate on once they join Skull and Bones when their 33rd degree Mason dads get them into Yale and out of all worries about legal consequences. The story of two blonde beach bum rich kids who meet and bond with a bad influence girl, who manages to keep them both turned on and that sex drive sublimated into evil decadence, and the fourth wheel downer who comes to stay, like an annoying kid brother.

I may have forgotten some of it, but the mood still haunts me. It stars Peter Norton and Richard Thomas (a long way from John Boy, not that, thank god, my parents ever watched that show) as a pair of beach-loafing buddies (no parents in sight) who find a wounded sea gull and Barbara Hershey all in the same day. What a break! Together the three generate what Max's mom once referred to me as, a "bad influence." As with Rohmer's Summer holiday idylls, sexual tension generates in real time over whole reels, until when it finally cracks open you feel weak in the knees. As with a more decadent European 'sexual idyll' swooner like Jean Rollin, a sense of impending doom, a naturalistic series of ambiguous omens, conspiratorial glances, and burst of random hostility amidst the hypnotic momentum, reminds us constantly that the ocean is a demonic bad influence friend itself; and unlike so many beach movies, it also rains some days. During a protracted, masterful sequence, the threesome stay indoors and wash each other's hair, smoke weed, and let the air of existential melancholy that a rainy afternoon on the beach can bring wash over them.


Max and I, during those LBI summers, had a few different girl partners in crime but our serial monogamous hetero chastity was ironclad. We were, in fact, musicians, and poets. And wasted. And too gallant to ever make predatory nuisances of ourselves. And also, far too used to shining off jonesers and wallies to let some buzzkill broad from down the way glom onto our game. At any rate, this movie was the perfect thing to watch on a rainy hungover Wednesday morning, drinking gin and Strawberry SlimFast while recovering from the previous night's long iguana of a night. The lagoon-side of the island gently lapping our brains into something like a parasympathetic rhythm, we loved this movie because we well knew the way the right girl could ignite all sorts of ballsy courage and decadent mischief in the right pair of unemployed but well-stocked bandmates. You could alienate all your (real) girl friends and most everyone else over a single weekend. And you'd just laugh evilly, a kind of Cruel Intentions' ghosts of Vicomte Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil possession you were too drunk to fight (or too sober to remember)

Taken together, the right threesome can melt the rest of the world clean away in a haze of cigarettes, highballs, the psychedelics always wearing off or about to kick in. In that lifestyle one is always either coasting on the fumes or anticipating the next refill, but one is never completely sober. When someone else enters into that unholy threesome, and they cannot party? Pity them, lord, for they shall be doomed to rot in hell for their sobriety! Thou shalt not suffer a buzzkill to crash your acid test. Pity them but not to the point of inviting them.

With its great naturalistic dialogue, the success of Last Summer lies largely with the tight small ensemble cast keeping the peripheral squares at bay. It starts innocently enough, trying to save a seagull with a fishhook caught in its mouth. Their shared empathy with the bird will gradually be inverted by the stunning ending, but for now, their good deed gives them a kind of holy trifecta aura that evokes among other similar triads, like the trio dancing the Madison in Godard'sBand of Outsiders (1964).



Just mentioning rabies (if the wounded gull bites one of them), Sandy says "oh rabies my ass." Today the boys' shared smirk over her using the word "ass" might seem odd, as if they're already plotting something at the mere mention of a body part, but in the context of its era, children using this word (or any 'bad' word) in public was the equivalent of what in the 80s would have been mentioning she had weed (the anti-drug hysteria of the time was so insane that lighting up became an act of political solidarity). (1) It ends, well, no spoilers, but lets just say it ain't the 60s anymore. This isn't a horror movie, or a ponderous piece of 'art' either, it's neither surrealistic or weighty, like Over the Edge it fools you by slowly winning you over to its protagonist's perspective which, considering their youth and the absence of strong parental guidance, is a dangerous place to be. If you grew up watching 'After School Specials' and 'safety films' on 16mm (while in class), then you were accustomed to the feel of Last Summer, but it's a cautionary tale without a narrator, or a moral, it trusts we don't need one. Like the girls doing their Baudelaire routine in Don't Deliver us from Evil, it's because of all the movies we've seen that look like it that we're not ready for what it is. Knowing that, its propensity to get under our skin and deliver a powerful dose of recognition. If you're like me, especially, you were or are highly susceptible to the 'bad influence' of any intelligent, gorgeous young woman who falls into your circle. Even just as a friend they give you a kind of high-octane cache that can cause latent Mean Girls-cliquey kind of giddy moral blindness.

The cast is all set up for menaga-a-trouble, Design for Living-style. As Peter, Richard Thomas's sadistic demonic eyebrow arches convey a real, deep propensity for evil that runs deliciously counter to his Waltons good boy warmth. But it's more than stunt casting. He conveys a real sense of nurturing and warmth and natural leadership without ever seeming older than he is. But it's a warmth made all the more dangerous by the eerily self-confident sociopathy lurking below. The sweeter he is, the more you feel there's a reverse action building. We watch the demonic glint wax and wane in his eyes like a sinister but enticing moon.

As the smirkier blonde beta male, Dan (Norton) on the other hand, keeps his guile exposed and ever a bit sophomoric. While Peter is the type of character who won't strike until he's got the girl all but naked in his bed already, Dan plays the numbers game, so used to rejection he's built up a tolerance, to the point he wouldn't know what to do if he got one.


Lighting the fire is the new girl Sandy (Hershey), ever eager to seem more mature than she is through expressive "language," relishing the combined attention of these two blonde troublemakers. The love she shows to them, mainly to Peter, while they both lay on her lap, for example, listening to sitar music and getting high, creates a seductive bubble; the sound mixing gamely captures her whispered sutble breatthing almost in ASMR cocoon we can feel. We're smitten; we're there; there's no lumpen Catherine Burns to drag our locus of identification kicking and screaming back to the loser's table.
Together their sublimated sexual energy is a force first of good (rescuing the gull from the hook) and then, through misuse, the sublimation wanes and the fermented passions bubbles up like oil seeps. Using a kind of loose cycle incorporation of tricks perhaps gleaned from Miriam Hopkins in Design for Living, she avoids breaking up their friendship by never picking one or the other ("no sex!" - though in this case pretty close, constantly) or risking her own ostracization by coming between them nor rejecting them, rather the cycle of move-busting runs from Peter to Sandy to Dan in a continuous loop that garners intense energy as it goes. Naturally it has to find an outlet, like Sandy luring a slightly older hispanic man via personal ad on a date, tricking him into his doom at the hands of some local racist toughs.

Everyone is excellent in their naughty conspiratorial whirlwind of sexual sublimation-amped mischief; but then Catherine Burns comes loping along the lonely beach, appointing herself the ugly duckling fourth wheel. It's only during that rainy afternoon after the three of them lost in pot and hair washing that they're ready to actually pay attention to her. With a single long monologue (that led to an Oscar-nomination), recounting the last hours of seeing her mom alive --at a cocktail party that's been raging at their house for days--Burns hypnotizes us and them so completely that by the time she's done you can smell the liquor on the adult's breath, the reek of sand, alcoholic pores, cologne, sexual heat, and ocean brine, the stale cigarettes, and--finally--a fatal misjudgment of impaired motor skills. And it's this tale (notably of mom's decadence rather than her own), set to the melancholy ominousness of the rain outside, that's just enough to get her just far into the threesome's evil club, that they don't know any other way to either shake her off or get her to loosen up and stop cramping their style than what they inevitably do. Because even though they thought, after their dope-enhanced empathy with her plight, that they might turn her bad like them she just wont quit her glum whininess. Like a draggy string pulling down a trio of seagulls, her refusal to either leave them alone or participate spurns the evil trio into their final desperate action.

if you're an alcoholic, the first thing you notice is the upper left Heineken

No matter how many jump cuts from the trio's galavanting around Fire Island, the slow simmer hypnotic Baudelaire-ian budding evil of Last Summer never jumps its languid beach rhythm to become some kind of lurid horror film. That's one of the reasons I love it, and maybe why it confuses Time Out critic so much -- it pulls off the seduction into irrevocable evil better than any other film that comes to mind, yet without ever jumping the groove of its languid beach rhythm: you can hear the waves--or if not, the faint sound of rain--in every scene. The ocean becomes like "Trevor" in The Wild Boys! a demonic possessor (the young and beautiful being highly desired by demonic reptilian 4th dimensional forces) and rather than point fingers, or spread feel bad trauma, it points out we hold onto the 'magic' of childhood at our own peril. As long as we're too small to do any real damage, nature's sociopathy flows unchecked; carry it over into adulthood, and we're going to jail. It all makes me wonder--as I wonder with other genuinely subversive films and TV shows--if that's the reason it's unavailable (there's not even a thumbnail of it on Amazon!). Rather than rant and fume against frat boys I am forced to examine past behavior that--at the time--seemed wholly justified and awesome--especially with a Cruel Intentions marquise in my corner urging me on--but which--of late, especially--hang in my conscience. A douche bag is a douche bag, regardless of mutual consent and vehemence of one's momentary delusion that it's ever "just" sex.

Wherever the licensing or a good copy is now hiding, no matter how much it looks 'winsome' on the surface, it's a film every young punk should see, for the "lessons learned" are vital. The film itself lulls us into a rhythm we're seduced by, so that when the slow erratic buzzkillery of Burns enters, we're almost privy to the wild demon (Trevor!) that rises in us to try and make her wake up and walk with the fire so we can back to our dirty little round robin thrills.

At the end there's still no adult in sight to shame them, but it's clear they don't even need one. These
are 'good' people, usually. But they drank "truth serum" together - they fell in love as one person, and lost their connection to the consequence-ridden world. As the poster says, this summer was "too beautiful to forget... and to painful to remember." Like the first sudden gust of evening hitting your sunburned skin after a day on the beach, a sickly early fall chill runs through all concerned. The leaves can't cover their bodies fast enough.



NOTES:
1.In the 60s and early 70s (I remember when the word 'suck' was first being used as a negative, i.e. 'you suck' - in fact I think I was in first grade with the girl who started it, referring to someone so immature they hadn't yet learned to drink without a straw), 'bad words' were genuinely bad. We'd whisper them under our breath to shock each other, and then only with people who wouldn't tell on us. If you doubt, just watch Burt Reynolds movies from the mid-70s and listen for the pause (for audiences gasps and hoots and howls) at the end of every four-letter word. Just saying "Shit!" would bring the house down (one of the reasons people fainted at the Exorcist)