The great Sergio came off an entry in the burgeoning cannibal genre (Slaves of the Cannibal God) before making this film for New World, which, in fandom circles, has gotten a bad rap, but that was surely due to bad VHS reproduction (it's a film clearly meant for widescreen); now, on the gorgeous new presentation print, its Victorian era 'aquatic research post'-steampunk Jules Verne-y sets impress and the endless supply of weird monsters (with big pointy teeth) amaze. The cast includes Joseph Cotten (safely in bed where he can't harm anyone, all these ailing old stars lucked out with so many wheelchair and bedridden parts), Barbara Bach (in lots of wet clothes) and Martino's go-to hero, Claudio Cassinelli.

It all begins with a great sequence at a remote beach visited by a Victorian era treasure seeker and his worried young wife, led along by then-perennially scruffy Cameron Mitchell. One look at that gorgeous natural cave formations with the oceans of fog machine fog rushing through the flood lights as ominous atonal synth mashes thudded in warning, and I knew I was hooked like a marlin. The story then moves forward to a prison ship lifeboat helmed by a ship's doctor and a Dirty Dozen style crew of cutthroats. The monsters attack their boat, some make it ashore, and in comes Barbara Bach and her husband, the island's mysterious plantation owner--played by that other Martino mainstay, Richard Johnson. But it's Cassinelli who follows Bach through the day-for-night jungle where he sees her wading into the muck to feed green drugs to a bunch of smitten fish monsters. Dude one sip of that stuff, movie-watching wise, and I'm high as hell.



Martino uses the same stars and--presumably--locale as his also-recommended fun romp The Great Alligator (also recommended, see: Great Monsters of the 70s). Filmed clearly in gorgeous Bronson caverns, Sardinian shores and studio lagoons, it's a quiet gem that is finally getting its due: even Joseph Cotten seems to be awake and Bach's round-eyed ethereality has never been more vivid. We all remember those hormone-awakening poster of her in the pond, the monsters creeping up on her beautiful legs; we figured no movie could live up to that kinky promise, and we turned out to be wrong.

There's a job that genre films need to do, and doing any more than what's expected can either lead to lionization and classic status (ala The Terminator) or the abyss of pretentiousness from which only solid genre pros like can pull a film out of. And like Corman films there's something rare, women. New World has many strong woman characters, playing more than victims and models --they play scientists, journalists, CIA analysts. Pretty women with guts and intelligence are all over New World movies in ways they just aren't elsewhere. Exemplified by Barbara Steele and Mary Woronov, they fill the sails of these films with strong oomph. I'm talkin' about get-up-and-go.

Frye and Wolfe bury the hatchet with some boozin' (that finger Wolfe is waving stands for 'one' as in "I'll have one drink with you and that's it!")

And, well, even if--as a movie--Up from the Depths is terrible, like, say, Corman's own Creature from the Haunted Sea or one of those Asylum films on Syfy during Shark Week, it's still a lark. Longtime Corman scriptwriter Charles B. Griffith directs with a nice leisurely hand, figuring that if he follows the JAWS chalk marks while keeping an eye out for island charm, he'll coast by with a film that barely does a thing. Virgil Frye (yes, that Virgil Frye) does a pretty good Nick Nolte meets Tom Waits impression as the drunkard Tom Waits-ish charter boat captain. Timothy Bottoms is beach boy recruiter - hanging out at the hotel bar to lure over would be fishermen, and treasure divers, promising a wild adventure. Hell, I like that the one tourist guy kind of knows it's a scam, his wife certainly won't let him forget it, but it's affordable, it's a charter boat rental and dive with a lot of pirate ghost story and bottle-passing along the way - i.e. I'd like to charter that boat and drink with Frye and Bottoms while fishing and diving, even knowing the treasure bit was crap. Meanwhile to counterbalance their collective macho cool, balding beanpole Kedric Wolfe overacts as the owner and manager of a a new resort, so determined he'll be a success he all but throws people to the monster rather than admit one exists. But he's way less fun than Hal Holbrook in Jaws. By 1979 that character was a full-fledged archetype, and nearly every movie that followed had to have a guy with a lot of money invested in his beach community or property determined to keep tourists coming in no matter how dire the warnings. In his way, he's necessary for these films to be effective as, without his greed, everyone would know to stay out of the water and that would be the end of the movie. He's important to the food chain!


That's where Susanne Reed comes in - she's the enterprising freelance writer/photographer hired for the publicity (or am I mixing her up with Claudio Cassinelli in the very similar Great Alligator?). Naturally she and beach bum Bottoms hit it off, while Wolfe freaks out more and more, reacting to salty dog Frye like he's the plague. Naturally the intrepid good guys hunt the creature, and eventually there's a contest to kill it, and what follows is a hilariously savage detour into a comedic riff on the early Jaws bit where all the outsiders besiege Amity to shark hunt cuzza Mrs. Kintner's $3000 reward. Griffith gets that we don't ask much from these films, and that we don't much care about consistency of narrative approach. We just want, to paraphrase a Corman film from 1967, to get loaded. The vignettes of various savages, rednecks and so forth all preparing for fish hunting does my old Irish heart a treat.

Of course, it's not very "good" (a stunning 2.8 on imdb), and the ending is a total wash (we don't even see the final battle -there hasn't been a more 'whoops we ran out of $$' rush to cut to the credits since Cat Women of the Moon) but fans of the New World style will forgive it, for sight gag Shop of Horrors touches abound in every termite-chewed corner. This is the New World edition of Corman's Creature from the Haunted Sea. And if that's not a recommendation, I don't know what is.


And Hey! Guess what else is on Prime? Creature from the Haunted Sea, (above, in original superior black-and-white) with which Depths would make a most excellent double bill. The quality of that isn't great but this looks so clear and lovely you can all but feel the ocean rocking you to sleep.

On my recent New World kick (thanks to so much of it being on Prime), I went too far, and saw the savage self-parodying weirdness of Dante's and Arkush's Hollywood Boulevard, (not on Prime but I have an old copy) which though funny, also veered uncomfortably to the kind of parody where if you enjoy New World movies, this movie thinks you are an idiot. That they're shitty wastes of time thrown together to package breasts and blood. Well, I don't think that's necessarily fair, boys! Or it wasn't, until drive-ins died away and Jim Wynorski and Fred Olen Ray took over like those scuzzy looking runaways the mob guy brings over along with the video camera at the 1980 New Year's party in Boogie Nights. Those silicone breasts looked so fake that--even as a 14 year-old hormonal boy-- it was enough to make you wish they'd just put them away.

There's still sex and violence in the old drive-in era (70s) New World, but it's subtle, its folded in with wry wit and deadpan nonchalance, with crazy stunts, social urgency and yes, libsploitation.

If you doubt, here's seven films, all but two of them looking great in remastered HD prints streaming free on Prime. They're not Gone with the Wind, but they're better than a lot of major studio big budgeted balderdash out there, and most of all they don't take themselves too seriously nor too lightly. Funny yes, but not campy --that's the deadpan Corman way that makes them never get old. These films are (mostly) from the pre-Jaws / Star Wars era, the time when the drive-in was aimed at adults. They might be driving around in fur-covered vans, but they were still (relatively) mature. Kids today equate maturity with being boring and safe, which is the opposite of what it is. But they will understand the superiority of actual car crashes vs. CGI. when they hear the satisfying crunch of metal; and they will recognize that once upon a time a woman could be the aggressor in sex without it being a symptom of something; that sex wasn't always 'problematic,' and anyway it was just a movie; even it was problematic, it was fun and yes, maybe it was problematic.

Sergio Martino's 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK--filmed in 1983, a post-nuclear Manhattan serves as ground zero for a stealthy battle between mutants, ape men acrobats, robots, and a Catholic-style death cult presided over by a whip-snapping hottie all in leather (Anna Kanakis). The 2019 RENT broadcast on FOX, meanwhile, shows NYC in the early-90s as a fantasia of his squalor, where everyone knows your name and the landlord actually apologizes for trying to get you to pay rent... ever.

top to bottom: 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK; RENT  (on Fox, 2019)

Which is the bigger fantasy depends on perspective.

At the time 2019 was made, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) was a big influence on Italian sci-fi. It itself was influenced by  THE WARRIORS (1978). We kids rented them and imagined NYC must be one dangerous place to be.  Then came CONAN, THE ROAD WARRIOR, helping us learn to drive, and hear da lamentations of der women. We could rent all four them all in one night, swirl them together with all the care of an LSD-soaked spider. If we were 13-15 year-olds, we could make super-8mm versions (ours had titles like SIMBA, SLAYER; ATOMIC NINJA and JOE NIGHTMARE DESCENDS.) If we were Italian filmmakers, we could make films with key words like "Warriors" and "Escape" and "New York" (or its boroughs) sewn into their titles.

Taken chronologically, deep in hindsight, you can feel how their influences were once influenced themselves: THE WARRIORS came out of a late-70s yen for 'Brooklyn street gang movies' (with Vinnie Barbarino and the Fonz immensely popular, their catch phrases known even by parents ("Ayyyyy,""What? Wheah?"). Erupting probably as a hybridization of the waning late 60s biker gang subgenre (via THE WILD ANGELS) and the urban revenge film of the early 70s, (via DEATH WISH, TAXI DRIVER), the street gang archetype became more and more became a fantasy of belonging, and of freedom from responsibility, on one side and deep paranoia on the other. A film called THE WANDERERS came out the same year as WARRIORS but the gang violence that greeted several showings of the latter was the kind of publicity you couldn't buy, and justified the feeling that NYC was no place for doo-wop nostalgia, but a place so crime-ridden and filthy they should stop arresting thugs and just make the city itself the prison. That was an idea bandied around cocktail parties before ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) even came out, and that was publicity you couldn't buy too.

Meanwhile, in the Outback, or the open road, the gangs still roamed on wheels, but now the apocalypse had come and the cops were gone, as were gas stations. SEARCHERS-style space western elements circled back, like that crafty Comanche buck Scar after leading the men off on a posse.

The apocalypse wasn't in full effect in the first MAD MAX but in America we couldn't tell, having never seen the Outback and so not realizing this already was a real place, a vast interior where the nearest cop might well be an hour away, and no cell phone to reach him. Turn off the pumps and the cop paychecks and the roving gangs simply took over. After the sequel you didn't even need show a mushroom cloud in the prologue. Just show us dirt-covered vehicles manned by dudes in crazy punk rock eyeliner and we knew the score. Then, just take away the dune buggy and put them on horses, dude! We're all the way back to CONAN --instead of Humongous looking for fuel there's Thulsa Doom looking for steel, and instead of your dog getting killed by a crossbow bolt your girl is killed by a poison snake-arrow and so on (but those imitations are the next, and final installment of this 'Drive-in on Prime' series.

If you're too old or young to think of this golden era of influences facing each other (but they're one) with nostalgic reverence, your love for these hack imitations will vary. But... at the very least, I have painstakingly looked at all the options on Prime screaming to find you only the very best... looking. These five are streams taken from Blu-rays or anamorphic DVDs and not VHS tapes found in some PAL bomb shelter... The number of films like that are too numerous to count, and we can't go back to full screen VHS quality, not anymore.... we just couldn't live.


PS- I never saw any of these when they came out back then. Foolish pride as a young teenage cineaste, loyal to the originals, distrustful of Italians, lack of the balls to drive to the seedier theaters and drive-ins (being too young to buy an rated-R ticket), led me to miss them. There was no nostalgia for the 80s in the 80s - we wanted back into the 40s, before we were even born, and fight in WW2). Had I known of their quality, seen them in a theater where their artful widescreen compositions could have made more sense, I would surely have loved them. So I love them now, to set the balance aright. Widescreen TV and anamorphic HD, you make the old new, the past present and the future as grungy as a bombed-out basement.

The Bronx in 1990 is, as envisioned by an Italian in 1982, a war zone. As the haves hustle around like normal downtown, the have-nots shoot it out with cops and each other over their little piece of ground, their "turf." All is in a kind of uneasy balance between gang-run quadrants, and the cops monitoring the outskirts, but then Ann (Stefania Girolami), a rich heiress (to the "Manhattan Corporation") escapes her bodyguards to find out what life is like outside of 24/7 micro-managing. Now the suits and the cops, armed with flame throwers, come in to find her. She's creating quite a ruckus, shacked up with the Che-esque pretty boy gang leader named Trash (Mark Gregory). If you've seen 1995's Escape From LA, it's more or less the same plot, with the sympathies reversed. (The Plissken is played by Vic Morrow here - and named Hammer!) Fred Williamson is Trash's opposite number in the uptown gang, and lives like a pimp/king. Hammer tries to trick them into fighting by killing their members and leaving gang signs on the bodies, but they're both too sly.

(miss you, Joe Walsh)

If you lived in Manhattan in that era, you know, in real life, there were parts--dwindling like Savannah watering holes in summer--that were still like this.  Turn the wrong corner downtown and you could wind up in a pimp-and-crack-whore war zone. Then you'd go to find it again to show your friends, and it would be gone. Suddenly, circa 1991-92, you'd start to see people being forced to pour out their beers at every corner.  The strip around the West Village where tricked-out cars would slowly drive, showing off and scoping drugs and booty, was closed to all traffic. It was all over. If we'd have seen 1990: The Bronx Warriors maybe we'd have known to fight back. The mix of The Warriors / Escape from NY iconography and anti-corporate nihilism seems to smell Giuliani in the breeze like some cheap knock-off cologne.



One of the leading lights of the neighborhood (with a great walk, like a Harryhausen cyclops), Trash is really a memorable character: tall and muscular but lithe with a great walk, like a Harryhausen cyclops (I imagine horrified spit takes from Miss J. at a ANTM catwalk tutorial.) No doubt cast for a passing resemblance to both Warriors' Michael Beck and Kotter's Vinnie Barbarino, and maybe the wandering wolf-boy from the 1977-78 TV series Lucan., his lithe youthful beauty contrasts with growly Bronx-accented voice he's been dubbed in (Italian film fans will recognize the dubbing guy right off - he does all the 'gruff' Bud Spencer parts). It's a great combination, this deep manly voice and this pretty face, because it's not an unrealistic pairing at all. Go to Coney Island over summer and you'll know what I mean: you see some ethereal young girl wafting down the beach in her red bathing suit and flowing black hair, flawless skin and youthful innocence, and she suddenly turn and yells up the beach to her "ma" so loud and abrasive with such a thick middle age booming accent, it chills you with sociological frisson.

A special word about Fred Williamson as the Ogre: doing his own dubbing and dazzling us with wild smiles and raw flashy charisma, he seems to be savoring his own sexiness as much as we are. The man moves and acts like a king. Sometimes his easy going attitude suggests he thinks a little too good for the film he's in, but he makes that work by being larger than life - he proves he's too good for it, proves it to himself. He stops worrying about trying to prove it to us through some burlesque of manliness, and then a marvelous thing happens, he relaxes and becomes delightful, like a black Cary Grant. He also has a cool right hand woman, the Witch (Betty Dessy), who rocks Krueger/Wolverine claws and snaps a whip. Together with Trash and Ann, they bop their way through the sewers to round up the gangs and fight the man, leading to tons of wild stunts of people on fire, people falling from holes in second story windows or down into sewers. The flame throwers explode real good and Castellari's camera frolics in the ruins with lots of great comic book panel-style compositions, strikingly posed shots and swooping crane movements going up and down between exposed floors from the outside of a blasted out building. You can tell he's having a good time, the crane shots duck and swoop without ever losing focus on the action, it's all way better than one would think it needs to be, at times it's almost Hawksian.


Castellari used a lot of real bikers (supposedly Hell's Angels) as extras, giving the shots of Trash and Ann zipping around in front of a vast parade of bikers under an overpass extra oomph (top). As a kind of catch-all indication of the crazy colorful-dressed gangs. Of the scattered gangs, the best is a bunch of Bob Fosse style fey dancers in steel bowler hats and metal rod canes. Their leader (Carla Brait, below) let's Trash pass because she's kind of turned on by his tight jeans. And I'm a fan of the gruff bond that forms between Trash and the Ogre. When it couldn't get any better? The Ogre and his mob throw Ann a birthday party with a big NYC skyline cake!


Walter Rizzati's score is a bunch rockin' synths, drums and a thudding electric bass, with appropriate moody washes. Man what a crime that those kind of old school electric bass lines are so gone from movies. Give me a badass electric bass over an orchestra anyday. Morricone whipped together his first truly great score with just whistling, an electric guitar, a clanging on a horseshoe and people chant-whispering "we can fight! As cool as Clint may be, if Leone had money for a typical orchestral score, it would just be another western. Think about it, and the next time your sad-eyed oboe player hits you up for a part in your score, say "sorry dude, it's all bass, drums, and electric guitars going TWANNGGGG!

Mark Gregory as Trash - center - walking to the left, straight as a streetpole

Numerous and horrific, indeed, are the woes that can result when one is dosed with way too much LSD without knowing it, in the wrong company, at the wrong time, and to the wrong music. This is the takeaway moral of Gaspar Noé's latest masterpiece, CLIMAX (2019), the story of a dance troupe undone by an unknown dissident's spiking their post-rehearsal sangria with a massive amount of liquid acid. And what a rehearsal it is! Noé' shows he knows how to film dance properly (as opposed to the hyper-cutting of Guadagino's Suspiria [1]) and it's a great start. This mix of French and English-speaking dancers are staggeringly talented, and hot. And hey, by the time the shit kicks in they're already on their third or so glass, their laughter and conversations getting progressively more deranged until it's far too late to even stop drinking. The best they can do is try and hide the choreographer's young kid, locking him in storage so no one can accidentally rip him apart or put him in the oven thinking he's a turkey (his screams to be let out joining the general cacophony underneath the endless propulsive beat). There's not even time to hide the sharp objects! And then, as the misery grows, a kind of lynch mob mass hysteria takes over. Those who haven't drunk anything are suspect and persecuted, sometimes horrifically. Old grievances flare up, and forbidden taboos--incest, etc.--are no longer able to stay submerged. This is the nightmare of anyone who's ever done way too much acid and tried to find their coat and their friends at a crowded party, forced to listen to Dave Matthews and Jamiroquai while you try to find your coat, shoes, friends, drink, a space to stand and get your head together, and been unable to so much as dispel a single invisible cop or paisley air-pattern. Or worse, the party is at your house; your own room is overrun with strangers, stepping all over your shit and rummaging through your stuff like it's a yard sale. You try to order them to leave but all that comes out of your mouth is gobbledigook. They laugh, then ask you where's the drugs, Erich! They want some, but you're like no way man, you're not ready. Your widening pupils should be enough to send them running. But they just get creepier, pleading, needier... their skin like the thinnest of bags holding gallons of racing red blood.
Sound terrifying? Don't worry, you've got me as your guide this time. And I'm better than Bruce Dern ever was in Roger Corman's 1967 opus, The Trip. Hell, this whole blog is designed as a kind of guide, waiting for just this moment!  Play the mix below and never hear surf music again (-Jimi Hendrix). When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro (- Hunter S. Thompson). So get yourself 'experienced' and follow me... follow me down (- Jim Morrison).

Sofia Boutella (center above), the lush sinuous Algerian dancer/actress (she was the latest incarnation of The Mummy and a cute alien in Star Trek: Beyond, etc.) stars, or is the most recognizable and sympathetic of the gathered dancers, though we only follow her about 1/3 or so of the time as we regularly check in on the various fates of various poor damned souls. I'm not even sure what happens to her character, Selva, by the end, but she is certainly lovely and can certainly dance. She's the coolest, along with some willowy brunette I swooned for (top, middle) and when they dance together we're pretty into it. So is this horny, pawing sexually ravenous bisexual white guy David (Romain Guillermic), who winds up badly beaten up by the brother of a girl he likes, etc. Other noticeable memorable characters include 'Daddy' (Kiddy Smile), the DJ responsible for keeping the beat so relentless and propulsive, driving these characters ever onward like he's a reincarnation of the evil shoemaker played by Robert Helpmann in The Red Shoes except he's the one totally sweet character in the film, and he never loses his giddy glow. I wanted to list some of the atrocities that result, but one is better off not knowing beforehand, nor the actor's amount of neurochemical 'preparation' for their roles. Their ferocity is so convincing and the flow from organized normalcy to insane madness so organic that--being dancers all--even in their wracked state their bodies never cease moving and twisting to the throbbing incessant music, blurring the lines between this as an 'acid test' tragedy horror film and a kind of extended 90 minute dance performance. Even so, with  those lines so blurred it seems impossible this isn't cinema verité from some weird circle of Hell, capturing a very real experience with some magic invisible camera, the floating soul eye from Noé's 2009 masterpiece,Enter the Void meets an impromptu Panic Theater happening down at Aronofsky's Chilean basement, or something. Since we barely see anything of the outdoors, or any 'sane' perspective after a certain period in the film, we lose contact with the real world as much as the actors, leaving us lost in the same weird cabin fever collective break.

As for hallucinations, we don't see trails or distorted imagery but the sound mixing takes us there. When I saw it at the Alamo, I could feel the drugs kicking in just through the way the sound subtly changed from the usual mix to a kind of woozy 4-dimensional binaural sound sphere, voices seeming to slowly flow from the front of the room to the back, to deepen and widen. As the screams and madness increase the incessant throbbing beat seems to incorporate them and in the sound mix you can hear every detail, all growing louder and quieter as the camera follows Boutella or some other dilated-eyed peace-seeker to the next room, or down the hall, looking for some kind of oasis from the needy gathering, the music and screaming fading or building according to proximity, but also whooshing in the mix as if our inner ASMR headspace is constantly readjusting itself as blood flows through the inner ear. When the music shorts out the effect is like being suddenly thrown out of bed onto a busy winter street, a feeling of sudden nakedness and vulnerability that has them scrambling for a battery operated boombox, to keep the beat alive --at the very least, it structures, and leavens out, their never-ceasing flow of unbearable existential nowness.

With LSD's appearance in recent festival favorites like Mandy, Good Time, (subtextually at least) Mother- and Rick and Morty,-, our current 'cool' media landscape is connecting to older LSD-era films like 1969's The Big Cube, The Trip, and other films reviewed on this site in the "Great Acid Cinema" series (see the Lysergic Canon collection in the sidebar to the right, bro). In other words, what I was hoping for when I started this site back in 2003, out in the desert like Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West, has come to pass. So this site is finally au currant, but be careful what you wish for with such a dangerous substance. The overall mission of this blog has always been to help situate these experiences, however surreal and nightmarish, in a less-demonized or ridiculed context, academically, to incorporate the expanded consciousness of the psychedelic experience into mainstream academic parlance. Too often these experiences have been depicted in fashions either condemning and prudish (Go Ask Alice), too literal (the transformation into an actual ape in Altered States), self-important (Fear and Loathing..) or naive (Revolution). Trying to chronicle the psychedelic experience, filmmakers have the knee-jerk habit of running back from the lip of the void like nervous seagulls in the surf. Few filmmakers outside Europe are able to include a validation of the genuine mystical experience offered by the psychedelic solution, and to do so without getting naive and Aquarian, self-important. overly academic, or any other easy way out. These filmmakers choose the right exit, to claw through their fleshy disguises and emerge as glistening butterflies from out their ravaged pupae! There's no guide to stand in for reality (ala Charles Haid in Altered States, or Willem Dafoe in Antichrist) But in film, dude, not in the real. Thinking about it is doing it is enough; only a fool has to follow the voice over the edge. The rest of us can feel the splat of the concrete without ever even opening the window.


Gaspar Noé's film is, however, is a movie, so people can follow that voice over the edge all they want. That's what movies are for, to go the deep and genuinely disturbing places (4) on our behalf. Picking up where Aronofsky's Mother! left off,  bringing it all back home to Zulawski, Von Trier, and Bunuel,  capture, in a vivid gut-punch sense, the quickness with which sanity can be shed like a loose garment. That thousands of years of socialization can be stripped away with a few eyedropper-loads slipped into a punch bowl hints that the natural state of man may well be a kind of group madness, a collective insanity, where uninhibited carnality and sudden, brutal violence, incest, auto-abortive violence and self-immolation all occur naturally in a desperate bid to escape the terrifying totality of the unpartitioned self. As in very few films made outside France (naturalmente), we're exploring a very hard to find area of the psychedelic experience, the second and third stages of Stanislav Grof's Prenatal Birth Model, the feeling being trapped in the canal, the sadomasochistic horror of raw experience. The falling from blissful amniotic union with the mother to the trauma, kicking and screaming, of raw unencumbered consciousness, where pain and pleasure are intertwined in the yawning chasm of unfiltered, unpartitioned 'experience' of pre-egoic consciousness.

Why only in France? Directors like American Abel Ferrara, the Polish Zulawski, Spanish Bunuel, and the Argentine Noé often wind up there, maybe because that's where they're 'understood'? As one of the dancers says before the shit goes down, (I paraphrase) only in Paris (and maybe Belgium) do they respect the true artist. And baby, the only one able to accurately hurl a mirrored dagger into the illusion-loving eye of today's world is the artist so batshit crazy they're all but booted out of their native lands, spiritually-speaking. America, simply, has no thousands of years of socialization to shed, so when we strip off our socialized paradigm, all that remains is a frozen-stiff Nicholson.


As tests in the day proved, the difference between Jesus, a tripper and a schizophrenic is that, usually, the tripper is in that state intentionally, to seek wisdom, and they know, eventually, even if time has ceased to function, they will be 'down' hopefully none the worse for wear. Jesus need not come down for the burden of the ego, the need for the split of the great I AM into duality and judgmental divisions, space, time, etc. has been sacrificed, along with all possessions, attachments, concerns. The schizophrenic must rely on drugs not to be in this state. For the schizophrenic, the ride never ends, there is only the salve of temporary deliverance.  ("The mystic swims where the schizophrenic drowns").

PS - In case madness or a Climax situation happens with you, play the Spotify list below. The JC intro stuff may be skipped if it's too late to understand English. The rest will lift, the rest will anchor. Play it in order, for analog flow like an old school Erich mix. Don't worry. Salvation shall lift thee when thou art lost, God as the current construct of you understands God shall find thee when thou art low. The bottom is the only place to 'touch off' from. What did God make Hell for in the first place? It is the heat that lets you rise like heavenly smoke. So switch up!





NOTES:
1. By which I mean, as in the terrible CHICAGO, SUSPIRIA succumbs to the irresistible urge to constantly crosscut to parallel actions, viewers, close-ups, varying angles, etc. so that it's impossible to enjoy dance in its ideal form, the type for example Gene Kelly, Stanley Donnen, Berkely, Powell, Fosse and Vincent Minnelli. In other words, for dance you hang back and let the dancers do the work in a medium shot, so the whole body, head to toe, is visible in extended single takes. You don't constantly crosscut to parallel actions, the eyes of those watching, close-ups, dutch angles, different camera placements, etc. That smacks of covering up due to either filmmaker flop sweat or lackluster choreography.
4. As opposed to faux-disturbing, i.e. Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Michael Hanecke, where the urge to shock comes with no genuine soul or originality, any true crazy behind it. There's no love, no genuine vision, that the shocks serve. It's all just to provoke a feeling of shock, to take us back to the first time we saw R-rated movies as a kid, before we were insufferably jaded. 
5. It's happened to me, a few times, mainly via some joints going around in a circle via some dirtbag who then when it's finished, announces it was laced with PCP. Burn! Now just try to drive home in time for dinner with the folks!

Hey sweetie, let a man 'splain it for you: the 70s were a great time for feminist horror, though the word back then was "women's lib." It was all about being liberated, one way or the other: Sex, pills, books, grass, and the occult were the tools; the movies went one of two ways, either she's crazy or everyone else is evil.  In films like Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971), The Sentinel (1977) and Stepford Wives (1975) it's them. And in post-Repulsion character studies like 1975's Symptoms, she was usually an isolated antisocial mess, living in perverse mortal terror of her own sexuality. But it turns out there's a third way: the woman is crazy and 'liberated' - truly a product of her moment, far outside the reaches of conventional nuclear family values, and the people around her genuinely love her and are, more or less, normal, or at any rate, pleasantly debauched, as in Matt Climber's 1976 near-cult semi-classic, The Witch who Came from the Sea. Judging by how she kills her lovers, it's not hard to guess why this film has never become a big cult classic. But now, on Prime in HD and looking good, albeit slightly faded, there's no reason not to batten down the hatches, zip up to and delve into primal Freudian/Jungian chthonic murk so thick and rich it must be good for you to get this squeamish. Would you die for love?


I'll confess: my squeamishness when it comes to females being sexually abused sometimes gets the better of me and I'll avoid a movie for decades based on the description. I was staving off seeing this for awhile due to dreading scenes of childhood sexual abuse and imagining any retribution being done by a mousy victim rather than an actual human. I've been long drawn to Witch's poster of a defenestrating Kali Venus, rising on the foam of the castrated lovers (symbolized by a severed head - one can't get too graphic on a poster), but the film I imagined based on what I read was a full screen washed-out depressing affair of joyless trauma and misguided vengeance, looking and feeling claustrophobic on a bad video dupe. Well, I finally had the nerve to see Witch who Came From The Sea last weekend after coming home from Gaspar Noe's Climax at the Alamo (for it hath emboldened me with the 'right' mood). Turns out it's way better and more complex than I envisioned. It rules!

Millie Perkins stars as Molly "The Mermaid," a single barmaid at a seaside dive on the beach of Santa Monica, "The Boathouse," owned and operated by the pleasantly grizzled Long John (Lonny Chapman). She's not just great babysitter to her two adoring nephews, beloved of clientele and employees, but she has the ability to 'get' good-looking men as if fishing them out of the television. Aside from headaches as her brain struggles to keep the lid on her buried incest childhood by cloaking it in all sorts of nautical imagery and oceanic sound effects, she's perfect. Maybe she's mad as a hatter, and has a weird thing for good-looking men on TV, as if they can see her from the screen, and are propositioning her. Maybe she keeps talking about her lost-at-sea captain father as some kind of omnipotent hero despite her more grounded sister who assures her kids he was a monster. But she's not 'victim' crazy, not a cringing trauma victim or a twitchy mess. She's crazy in a way that encompass sanity within itself. When a bubbly blonde actress (Roberta Collins) at the bar bemoans not being liberated, which is now a requirement for TV she glances over at Molly in her patchwork denim and declares she could be in commercials: "You look liberated." The older barmaid Doris (Peggy Furey) adds that "Molly is a saint, a goddamned American saint." Later when her nervous welfare-collecting sister Cathy (Vanessa Brown) shows up to try and convince them of the truth, "you think she's just about perfect," she says to Long John. "Yeah," he snaps back, "why not?"

We agree, thanks to Millie Perkins' dynamic, confident portrayal we love her as much as the staff and her nephews do. Anything she does is all right with us. She's a goddamned saint.


That's what makes it so tragic. Molly is a liberated saint, yes, but she has no grasp on reality, and it's not the social world's fault, it's the fault of the family dynamic that would let her vile father rule the roost in such a horrifying way (we never see if she has a mother). It's a mix of latent, incest trauma-induced schizophrenia, wherein she sees people on TV talking to her, and her childhood is--understandably--warped and blurred in a salty sea spray of nautical mythology, punctuated by deeply unsettling visions. She has a habit of being drawn to people on it or connected with television, only to then kill them or is she merely fantasizing. She presumes the latter but lately, who knows. If she hears someone is dead she announces she won't believe "if it's true or not until it's on television." As if TV isn't lying to her constantly, the men on it leering out at her, calling her forward. Her dichotomy seems to be a relaxed ease in the anonymous oceanic of the bar, and the bed of salty pirate Long John, a grizzled old reprobate who accepts Molly as she is, no strings. ("Molly is the captain of her own ship.") The bed seems to be in the bar itself, and as such it becomes a very weird uniquely 70s cool spot, with panelling and aquariums and mermaid and nautical bric-a-brac, including those painted mirrored wall tiles that are often associated with orange shag and faux rock walls.

"Her father was a god; they cut off his balls and threw them into the sea."

The ocean plays a huge part, though the film never gets out on a boat, we see the ocean outside the window, and hear it deep in the sound mix, the town where they live seems largely deserted, so shops like Jack Dracula's tattoo parlor loom with an almost Lemora-style surrealism. The flashbacks are all given a surreal, sometimes darkly comic, patina, with comically distorted or ocean sound effects as if her brain is working overtime to contextualize the most primal and odious of endured horrors in terms of oceanic myth. The sea itself becomes her father, a timeless chthonic wellspring, an ultimate signifier connecting this film to everything from Treasure Island (hence the name Long John) to Moby Dick (the local tattoo artist's long tattooed face evokes Queequeg). The soundtrack is a brilliant melange of background sound (the ocean's waves are never out of earshot) and ironic electronic counterpoint: when the melody of a sea shanty she's half-singing while going in the bathroom, the two football players tied up, is suddenly picked up and finished by the ominous soundtrack as she comes back with a razor, its the kind of darkly comic interjection that would make John Williams probably shit himself with fear ("do you shave with straight razors, or is this all going to be agonizingly slow?"). When Molly learns of Venus, born in the sea, according to one of her pursuing men, ex-movie star Billy Batt (Rick Jason - above) she says with child-like sincerity, "You're lying to me." It's a brilliant line, she could be kidding in a cocktail party way, or it could be an indication her concepts of reality, myth and TV are hopelessly blurred together. And in fact, it's both - this is the age of liberation and free-thinking - where the structure of reality is far looser than it used to be.


And as in any ocean, there are storms: when all other boundaries fail her, her oceanic visions become terrifying pictures of being tied to the mast of a free-floating raft, surrounded by dismembered male bodies, as if remembering some primal prehistoric siren past (only without a hypnotist Chester Morris pulling the strings). The split between her castrating angel of death, turned on by sadism and dismemberment, both as projection revenge against her father and tricks maybe taught by him (we never really know - or hear his voice), and her sweet aunt / fun carefree cool barmaid type is as vivid as the difference between TV and reality. "Let's get lost at sea, Molly m'lass" is what we learn her father used to say, "and we got lost at sea so many... many times." The ocean surge mirroring the rise and fall of the bedsprings - its base horror itself part Greek myth (Elektra) and part Sumerian or druid sacrificial cult, the young boy castrated and his loins thrown into the sea to ensure a good harvest of fish (or wheat if on the fields).

Long John seems somehow to be spared, to share a bed. Maybe due to his easygoing attitude, age, that he's not on TV, and his ability to be contextualized into her nautical miasma (he's a "pirate"). He certainly never reigns in her sexual adventurousness or belittles or infantilizes her. He says he's too old and experienced to get jealous, he says, and we believe him. But you know he loves her, and is willing to take her at face value, as much as he can. He's no fool though, and when he asks her when she lost her virginity and she can't remember that far back, starts stalling and getting a headache he realizes immediately and to some horror the truth; the script and film don't need to underline the moment. He gets it, and his whole demeanor changes, and so we get it too, without ever needing it heard aloud. It's a brilliantly modulated bit of acting by them both. These are smart, interesting people, with unique bonds.


THE MYSTIC ORACLE:

One thing that most horror movies, or any movies, lack is the presence of TVs. They're hard to film due to streaking, so often they're just left off, but it really spells the difference between a believable reality and this kind of utopia where people just sit around in empty kitchens waiting for their cue. Here, though we can clearly see the TV image is superimposed to avoid telltale streaking, that actually works to give the images an extra eerie frisson.  TV is a constant extrasensory, imposed presence: in her childhood memories a very creepy black-and-white clown makes all sorts of weird swimming gestures towards her, beckoning to her/us in a way that's genuinely unsettling. Watching, I had the distinct feeling some terrifying being from my own childhood dreams had found me and was beckoning me from across time and media. Other genius moments tap into LSD experiences (every hippy's schizophrenic sampler), as figures talking to the camera on TV seem to be addressing us/Molly directly. No sooner has she seduced Alexander McPeak (Stafford Morgan) after seeing him in a shaving commercial ("Don't bruise the lady,") she's receiving bizarre directives directly from his TV commercials, telling her where and how to take that razor across his jugular vein.

"he's stark naked, everywhere, looking at me."

It's a weird trick to pull off - Molly is a tragic figure who we don't have to 'protect' or 'fix'.  There's no evil or malice in anything she does. ("Does it help that I didn't hate any of them?" she eventually says, "except that first little bastard," whose mother sang on television... And he sang with her!"). And that's why for me, the film really takes off, with a script that looks at the whole mythopoetic pie, from the raw ingredients to the final delicious slice, ocean-to-table, as it were, from ocean depths to the facile screen of the omnipotent television with its Apollonian figures ever in need of gelding by a dark agent of the chthonic. It's a perfect role for the right actress, and Millie Perkins is just that actress. Maybe she had a hand in creating it (she was married to Thom at the time and played the senator's daughter in his AIP hit Wild in the Streets). Fans will remember her Anne Frank (in 1959's Diary of Ann Frank) and her enigmatic resilience as the 'woman' in Monte Hellman's The Shooting (1966), so we know she's very comfortable playing strong women despite her petite size. Her Molly the Mermaid is not a wuss, or one of those rote timid types that become punching bags for every bully and sadist in a 20 mile radius before finally getting down to revenging. She behaves in a way that is indicative of the kind of loose free vibe of the decade the film is from. Though she's clearly "a mess," she's falling apart from a place of strength so beyond most modern female characters that even a mess she's more together than they are.

What was the 80s and why was it such a golden age for weird sci-fi and head trips? Was it thanks to the dawn of MTV and Night Flight to amuse stoned kids back from the punk shows on weekends? Repo Man, Return of the Living Dead, and Night of the Creeps in theaters; Liquid Sky and Street Trash were at (shhh) inner-city theaters; and the time wherein the drive-in and the video rental place co-existed comfortably? It was films like Conan, the Terminator, and Robocop making big money. Art house wonders like Brazil and Blue Velvet occupying hallowed places in the press. It was a time of great anti-drug hysteria, and so--just as imbibing booze had become a symbol of American freedom and defiance against  knee-jerk oppression in the 20s, so now that same patriotism was to be found in getting high in the 80s. Today weed is mostly legal and so innocuous - in the words of WC Fields, it's so common it's unnoticed. But back then, getting high and going to the midnight movie or going to a punk show and/or driving around 'til the parents fell asleep then sneaking in to watch Night Flight and old movies was simply what we did. And as a result, thrive-nation of the strange. We're a decade away from the grunge 90s ecstasy-and-blue recovery roller coaster of the Prozac 90s. Let us have our dollar of fame, Hollywood - it shan't come again.

Seeing this look so good it's like a revelation (it's been avail on - The story of an alien saucer the size of a George Foreman grill parked on the roof above the balcony apartment of trendy new wave nihilists Margaret (Anne Carlisle) and her drug-dealing lesbian roommate Adrian, played by Paula E. (Alice in Alice Sweet Alice) Shepherd. They're both letter perfect, as is Susan Doukas as Sylvia, mother of Jimmy (also Carlisle) a strung-out sneering male model struggling to pay for a high-end cocaine addiction.

There's oodles of great stuff but the ultimate in 'scenes' has got to be Anna Carlisle going down on the male version of herself while a bunch of fashionistas hanging out (while using her gorgeous roof balcony apartment for a photo shoot) start a kind of rapey group mockery thing jeering in a very punk aggro manner that would be scary if it were straight people. Luckily, as Walter Sobchak might put it, there's nothing to worry about --they're nihilists. What makes it work ultimately is Margaret's zonked renouncement of sex in favor of drugs and mind expansion. The aliens zap the life essence out of people in the moment of orgasm and--until Anna complains--leaves their corpses behind. (The scene where Adrian starts an impromptu smack-shivery poetry slam while  playing the corpses's head like a conga--is one of the key highlights of this entire list). Meanwhile Jimmy's mom, who lives across the street from Anna, has a hilarious lunch with sneezy, withdrawing son (now that the image is so lustrous, the sun streaming down makes the lighting so beautiful and uniquely NYC I got a 90s sympathy strung out chill). All in all, this is the female east coast parallel to REPO MAN. Was it an influence on Alex Cox? Surely his dreck track record afterwards lets you know some kind of lightning must have struck. Either way, a film to be revisited, again and again - especially now - it probably never looked this good even in its initial NYC run.



The problem with this film was that it kind of expected itself a shoe-in for cult status, and that's not how cults are made. Cult films are born of legitimately weird outsider types trying to make a Citizen Kane, not Kane trying trying to deliberately make a weird outsider film. BUT just because the motives are baffling and the weird hybrid Captain Midnight-brain surgeon-mad scientist-Formula 5 racer-rock band frontman thing is just a little Too Much Johnson to doesn't mean the cast, effects crew, and moments in the script, aren't worthy of Sub-Genius-style lionization. Let the lamp affix its beam, even if one can't simply whip up a franchise out of thin air (Lucas, never forget, used carefully imported mythic ingredients, plumbing Joseph Campbell as well as Alex Raymond); the only emperor is the emperor of ice cream ("No matter where you go / there you are" became an instant.... whatever you'd call it, debatable point?)
And there's the cast: Peter Weller and Ellen Barkin have never been more beautiful (the way Ellen Barkin opens her mouth for a kiss is so carnal and raw it collapses time and space as we know it), and it's clear they vibe on each other real well. Jeff Goldblum is saddled with a ridiculous cowboy get-up that almost tanks the film right there - too quirky for quirky's sake, but he's great and so is John Lithgow as Big Booty or Dr. Lizardo (top), and on and on it goes with way too much fan club stuff ("I'm Buckaroo club Genus chapter!" like anyone watching was old enough to remember Captain Midnight decoder rings)- did they really expect such fan clubs would start? One thing too - this is one dense film - packed with mythos and character running which way and that. You can see it over and over agin and are still noticing little details. Around the tenth viewing, it starts to really work except for, it never quite does. Great end theme though. Too bad there wasn't ten sequels! Weller - you are or were a gawd!

A chamber piece that plays like some off-off family sitcom from an alternate reality. No moment of the typical saccharine early-60s-late-80s sitcom is missed, from the doofus grandpa (here he needs force feeding with a giant syringe), delousing a half-dog half-human 'pet' (then using the huge chiggers picked off for a target game), the boss who comes over for dinner while dad sucks up for an overdue promotion; the cute daughter getting ready to go out on a date, etc. and food which seems to all come out of big tubes. It's very tube-oriented, this weird world that all seems subterranean (we never see an outdoors), the family live in a big round chamber that connects to a vast system of tunnels and tubes, cleaned out chimney sweep style by men covered in pipe cleaner tubules (it's the kind of TV show that might be on between old movies in Brazil if they got American TV). Still Juliette Lewis (above, center) is doing her Lolita-fetching thing in due earnest here, coming onto every man she meets while getting ready for her boyfriend's awful new wave band (which she sings for?) and clearing the way for her iconic stretch of films from the early 90s.


I confess, I was only able to finish Meet the Hollowheads over several 20 minute viewings, as it's too weird to endure for longer than 20 minutes at a pop, especially in such bad quality (it's about akin to what you'd find on youtube, duped from some old first run VHS scored at a close-out) --was there ever even a negative or was it all just an old failed cable pilot? Either way--if you like the kind of 'family sticks together'-ness of Animal House Vacation movies, the friendly day-glo oddity of Pee-Wee's Playhouse and post-industrial ennui and alienation of Eraserhead, then just watch it from far enough away you don't get any on you. It's all worth it for the wacky climax which finds the boss running amok, the kids coming home wasted (after hacking into a forbidden drug tube) and Lewis brought home by two Hardy-esque cops (one played by a pre-screech Bobcat!), the wasted son almost giving the whole show away by acting like the bruised near-dead boss is a monster. Good shift to you!


With a weird cult-ready veneer that's quintessential 80s, this sci-fi/cult/horror/comedy checks a lot of bases, but does 'em all right (the heroine survives the comet night apocalypse because she was shacked up in the El Rey theater's projection room in a sleeping bag with cult douche Michael Bowen, for god's sake - and rather than work her usher job she eats Twizzlers and rules the Galaga high score in the lobby). Writer/director Robert Thom was one of those almost-iconic auteurs who made too few films to have a following, aside from weirdos like me who love both this and his Sole Survivor (also 1984, though much less widely known and now, alas OOP) - I saw Night on the big screen in the suburbs during its initial release--by myself, while skipping a high school--so you you know I'm the right guy for it. If you love Mary Woronov and any movie where the teenage heroine warns a guy trying to kill her that she's "been trained" and doesn't want to hurt him (and means it, and does) then you'll love this film which now looks better than ever thanks to a great Shout Factory dusting and color-depth-asizing). The dazzlingly-haired Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney) star as the cool sisters--capably rescuing children and mowing down punk mall cops thanks to their CIA op father teaching them home defense before departing for Nicaragua. Woronov's fellow Eating Raoul star, Robert Beltran is a truck driver who answers the girls' survivor call (they set up base at the local LA radio station). Woronov heads an underground lab looking for a cure to the slow decay that hits those who survived the initial mystery dusting of the comet, tying this all into the following year's Day of the Dead. God, zombies were so much cooler back then.

Maybe it's the languid sexually uninhibited postures, the dreamy pace, the tastefully provocative furs and armor; maybe it's the muted cinematographic palette of purples and yellows, or the rumbling timpani and Wagnerian brass of Carlo Maria Cordio's score; maybe it's the long flowing wigs on the young, lovely actors, or their flawless faces conveying just the right level of blankness, but goddamned it there's something about this terrible movie that really gets me. There's little nudity or sex in it, which helps, paradoxically to make it sexy. More overt sexual versions of this tale, like Deathstalker, or Sorceress for example, may miss this special erotic haziness. Look at the above, for example: is that supposed to be a cave wall or a frumpy tent tarp behind our plate-chested hero? Look at his splayed posture! Look at who he is, the Derek's Tarzan himself, Miles O'Keefe!

He plays Ator, a young warrior type raised by farmers after escaping a 'first born male son' purge by an evil warlord (a not uncommon procedure in these films). Though surely worlds more awake than he was as the Ape Man, O'Keefe is still a sleepy presence. But here it works! He lacks the ability to play his role any other way than deadpan straight (there's not a shred of self-awareness in performance, god bless him). Rumor is, D'Amato was routinely frustrated with his star's continued listlessness. But you won't be. Even as you want to shout to him from beyond the pale: "Miles! You're playing Ator, a naive young warrior whose bride/sister is abducted by a band of roving spider-worshipping brigands! You must rescue her! G'head! Git!" And all he does is mill around in a clearing.


Inevitably, he does start moving, and soon hooks up with an enterprising young Amazon named Roon (Sabrina Siani- above) after she wins him in combat over breeding rights. She's not in the same league as Sandahl Bergman, fighting skill-wise, but she does all right, carrying more than an equal share of battling derring-do once they team up, and I'm a fan of her big blonde wig. You can call their many fights with guards, boors, slavers, etc. amateurish but why bother? They're not using stunt doubles, and they're probably tired, and D'Amato doesn't know where to put the camera. I don't find any of that a problem, since it reminds me of my own filmed (super-8mm) Conan-inspired battles made around this same time. We used all the same unconvincing tricks (their swings miss by a mile; their stabs are just behind the person) which is maybe why I love this movie so much -- it's so damned innocent. D'Amato spares us gore and torture, sleazy sex close-ups, and all the other things associated with trying for an R-rating. That's maybe why I find it so relaxing. Compared to Game of Thrones it's like Lawrence frickin'Welk. There's no trauma, no investment, it's got that sublime terribleness all over itself. I've already seen it three times since discovering it last January!


But that doesn't explain the appeal, it's not what's so drowsily sexy about Ator. I think it has to do with O'Keefe's habit of resting his goblet on his genitals (he always seems to have one), splaying his legs out, when sitting, as if trying to get some air flow to his balls or presuming a fluffer is going to be down there rummaging amidst the luxuriant pelts of his furry loincloth momentarily (as in the above) so he can rouse to easy rider action. In your average 80s sex comedy that pose would be icky, but there's a difference between acting like you're hoping that happens, like a smirky frat boy, and acting like it's already happened so much in your life it's carried over into your regular posture, i.e. it's just unconscious habit -you're not expecting or hoping for anything. In other words, our Ator/O'Keefe seems like a very laid guy. Maybe that's why he's so listless?

Like many truly sexy films, though, Ator is seldom overtly sexual (i.e. think of Bunuel or Cronenberg), and when it is it's strangely frank - maybe that's another reason - it's sexuality is more akin to the kind of thing I used to fantasize about as a seven year-old, all tied up in power and submission: the Amazons choose one of their sisterhood to mate with Ator since he looks healthy, and so he's locked up in a hut and the victor comes in to claim him like a prize stud (but without any soft focus or jazz) and there's also the alluring witch who seduces him while Roon spies from a hole in the roof and sends his pet bear through a crack in the rocks to run a Toto-style cockblock. Again, the sex never happens, but is interrupted and again Ator is put in a powerless position, he's being used for sex and seed in each instance. Weirder still, Ator plans to marry his own sister (even before knowing he was adopted) and their early scenes together pulse with a yearning primal, never falling over the side of trite or breast-zooming camp. Michele Soavi was an uncredited co-writer and I'm guessing he maybe helped keep the more puerile ideas at bay.


Other highlights:  Ator fighting his own shadow (surprisingly well-done) and there's a hilarious finale that seems like 20 minutes flashing his shield's solar reflection onto a giant spider monster hidden in the recesses of a cave/temple. Then he goes up to battles it, the real size arms poking feebly, and one suddenly has all new respect for Bert I. Gordon and his use of miniatures and rotoscoping in films like Empire of the Ants and Food of the Gods. Man, you can feel the tiredness of the effects guys in the shadows waving those big legs, they are about to fall over from exhaustion.

If you can't tell by now, this is one of the best films of Joe D'Amato's long career, because it's smart enough to do its thing and move on rather than get all haphazard and depressing. It works a weird languid artistic spell that more than makes up for its countless inadequacies, and isn't that, in the end, what great bad filmmaking is? Maybe the zombie-like lagging of O'Keefe compelled the usually slipshod Joe to smell the roses? Either way, we get to smell them. And they smell like patchouli, hash, sage and bodies - the smell of Dead tour, the smell that LSD-added senses 'see' as the maroon bewitched core of life itself, the sizzling of a tailgate grill cracking open kundalini serpent eggs in the back our neck as we walk the rows looking for that miracle ticket.



The usurping, wild-eyed sorcerer Traigon (Roberto Ballesteros) needs to sacrifice his firstborn child but his hot young wife (Silvia Manríquez) has twin girls and won't tell him which one came out when. A wild-haired good wizard, Krona (Martin La Salle) strides forth to zap Traigon into a 20 year-long period of oblivion, alas, too late to save the mom from Traigon's sword. As is the custom, Krona leaves the babies with farmers so they don't attract despotic attention. He drops back in twenty years later, alas, too late to save the farmers from Traigon's soldier's sword. The twins have gestated into beautiful Playboy playmates (natural breasts, most excellent) Lynette and Leigh Harris and they vow revenge! A hearty, if unusually short, red-bearded Viking named Baldar (Bruno Rey), his curly-haired romantic-lead rascal buddy Erlick (Roberto Nelson), and a ridiculous horny satyr, vow to help the twins get revenge against the revived, reviled Traigon, who still needs that first born! Traigon's right hand woman, Delissa (Ana de Sade) promises the second-born twin to her pet monkey monster, and the monkey uses druggy fruits to disorient the gang and abduct the right one. Hair-raising escapes, magical spells, fights, gods fighting in the sky while zapping the battlers below with lightning, remote orgasms (the girls are linked psychically), and undead warriors culled from their crypts ensue.



To call back to my long-winded out-on-a-limb opening introduction, there are copious drug references here: the idea that a fruit spore cloud - created by throwing rare fruits on the ground by the good guy's campsite, will reduce them to laughing idiots, allowing their shady dealers (the apes) to carry the girls away with no resistance - dude, I've been to those parties. And the later drugging and hypnotizing of the first born of the twins and Erlick so they'll get it on during a big pre-sacrificial sex magick ceremony to appease one's reptilian overlord? That's so Illuminati-Monarch7!  (1)

It was director Jack Hill's final film (alas, and woe to us!), this was made for Corman's New World down in Mexico as part of a multi-picture deal. Its production values are a little higher and the extras and supporting cast a little sexier than we're used to in a New World film of the time (no day-for-night or other lame tricks), and Amazon's streaming source is pretty solid, presented HD and with deep, blazing reds (see below) and blacks. My only issue is that, perhaps to enhance the night scenes and presumably, and bring out that red, the color correction effort gives a lot of the actors an orange-sunburnt tint. I didn't get this issue on the Scorpion Blu-ray (see my review here), where the blacks are jet deep. But hey, it beats having to get up and plunk the Blu-ray in the machine.


Sorceress's release year (1982) was a high point for A-list sci-fi and horror/adventure, and amidst that year's B-list, Hill could have rocked out for at least a few more classics or even moved up to the big leagues. Today enough Hill fans are in high enough places that he could get a film funded in five minutes if he wanted. Hell, Tarantino alone could hook him up! Do it, Jack! Do it!

British model-turned-capable actress Suki Waterhouse has become indie cinema's de-facto Mad-Max-on-a-budget psychedelic-sampling wasteland wanderer, all thanks to two very similar post-apocalyptic desert-set films from this and last year, each with a hip pedigree and each with a lot of interesting touches that seem to stem from some writer's mind-blowing trip to Burning Man (back when it was the rad, cooler cousin to the Rainbow Gathering), wherein a certain someone took some great quality LSD and found themselves by losing themselves, envisioning in their enhanced dehydration a whole movie based on the freaks and the metal around them and the way, sooner or later, it all devolves back down to sex, drugs and 90s trip-hop.

Both films have a pretty majorly drugged-out rave interlude, where Suki Waterhouse and/or some other stalwart soul looks slowly around in slow motion to some really low end fuzzy bass, man--whew all deep deep deep down in the spinning world void man--lots of hair billowing in slow motion and colored lights flashing and a sense of unity with the night or the groove. Dig it. Max would never be able to stay Mad with all that weird kinetic abandon in the wind. On the other hand, without it these apocalyptic worlds can seem more Fyre Festival than Burning Man, albeit after the richer kids have finagled a ride out and only the scrabble survivors are left, rummaging through abandoned boxes of booze and Fyre T-shirts looking for any remaining stashes of booze, having long resorted to violence, so that only the druggie chemists have any remaining power.

Along the way each film offers low tracking shots of doped-out hipsters nodding off on busted outdoor couches, filth-encrusted wanderers stopping to either accept or offer single flowers to urchins, and zonked cult leaders doing their emcee trip, either DJ-ing or coordinating fights to the death in an empty pool. The hardscrabble civilization around them eventually ends up very dirty, and reduced to a Dead show parking lot barter system, with whomever holds the water rights being the band.

Both of these films were filmed at least partially along the Salton Sea, a notoriously depressed area of California once a makeshift beach town but since the sea dried up, turned to a last-ditch meth squat. That burned out spirit infects the films, but with the club pedigree and hot Suki gamboling around the vibe then becomes what?



In FUTURE WORLD (2018) the ever-weird James Franco serves as co-director and producer/star, giving himself the dirt bag bad guy villain role of "Warlord" (he wears godawful yellow-brown teeth). He gets a hold of the remote control for Ash (Waterhouse), a foxy, high-fashion killer android mix of Angelina Jolie in Cyborg 2, Pris in Blade Runner, Eva in The Machine, and SIRI (Warlord gives her commands by speaking into his remote). Once killer Ash is up and running, and dressed (in perfectly-fitted and stressed haute couture fatigues), Warlord shows Ash off by ordering her to, first snog with, then strangle, one of his drooling gang. It's kind of self-defeating (a warrior chief needs warriors - he doesn't exactly have an army), but Suki's contented focus as she chokes the life out of a snickering misogynist type is, of course, satisfying to all concerned.



While Warlord and his gang roam the wasteland on filthy dirt bikes, killing and bullying and throwing kids against girders, all without anyone even close to defending themselves very successfully against them (how his victims made it this far surpasseth understanding), far away at a desert oasis, all is a sunny paradise, just waiting to be despoiled. But like a gender-inverted fisher king, the dying queen (Lucy Liu) needs a far off grail-like drug, and her dangerously naive son, "the prince" (Jeffrey Wahlberg - Mark and Donnie's nephew) decides to ride his dirt bike off into the wasteland seeking "Drug World", a stop that's supposed to have a cure for mom's affliction, a place also called 'Paradise'. Once he ill-advisedly stops off at the Snoop Dogg-operated, shock-collar sex worker-staffed 'Love World' to ask directions (the writer clearly has remote-controlled women on his mind). The naive Prince is easily betrayed, tricked, suckered, beaten up by Ash, stretched over and over by the neck until he finally gives Warlord directions back to that cushy Oasis. Some prince he is! His first trip out and he seals the whole place's doom (in this reality, no well-organized outpost can stand up to six dirty dudes on motorbikes). Luckily for the story, Ash's mainframe wakes up her emotions. During pretty cool ride through the desert, Suki actually on a real bike, the camera keeping perfect time as the gang race through the wasteland, she switches sides, then the real action begins.

Like a lot of the film, it skips over the how and why involved. This is a film that assumes you've seen 'the canon' of both AI and post-apocalyptic sci-fi.

The scene stealer of the film is Milla Jovovich as the queen of 'Drug World'. She does the manic speed freak psycho nutter trip better than most I've seen and her big slap-down with Franco once Warlord and his boys catch up to Ash and Prince is pretty unforgettable. On the other hand, Milla's 'World' (above) seems to be blown-out old resort that probably once stood at the edge of the Salton Sea and is now just a concrete foundation with an empty pool, some window frames (most glass long gone) and some "rooms," operating as a kind of meth/heroin/MDMA lab (?) with all sorts of cures and remedies somehow churned out of a few test tubes in a lab so bare it would shame Ed Wood. There's an under-directed and lifeless cage match (in an empty pool) wherein a few denizens of the place stand silently around, forgetting they're supposed to be cheering or banging on pots. Hey Franco, I know y'all have seen Escape from New York and Beyond Thunderdome so don't even...



Needless to say, at times I was ready to write this FUTURE off as a waste of talent with a few shine-through performances and moments, but then, Ash finds love, not with the Prince but SPOILER - with another girl, Lei (Margarita Levieva) the lonely cool lesbian who patches her up after she's shot during her escape. Their love is the future worth fighting for. They even stop by Love World on their way back through 'town' to separate Snoop from his remote so the girls can kick the shit out of him (so be sure and watch to the end of the credits).

If the cliches and the ugliness of Franco's teeth are to be overcome it's going to be through these surprise couplings and the idea the robot and the prince can have a platonic pair-bond where sex doesn't enter into it (i.e. he's not sulky or heartbroken he doesn't score with Ash). The straight girl / gay boy soulmate friendship in cinema is by now so lionized and holy it is beyond reproach, but the straight boy / lesbian robot version? Finally, Sigrid, our time has come. (END SPOILER)

SUPER SUKI MOMENT: Near the 1 hour 18 min 30 sec mark, during the climactic chase, Suki dismounts a dirtbike as it spins to a halt in the sand, kind of corkscrewing herself into a vertical position via a reverse twirl. She does so with such ease of serpentine hip movements, keeping her neck and back fluid and long the whole way, it's like she's strutting the catwalk the whole way from the start of her skid on through to walking forward towards her quarry. In that moment I knew: this girl is so cool and graceful the camera barely knows how to capture it. Did the director even notice how damned cool she was? Or was he too busy trying to tell a 'story' as old as time, told a thousand times, and better? If he did, he'd have slow-mo-ed that dismount and threw some deep bass grind underneath it.

FORMATIVE BURNING MAN CONVEYANCE: Zipping around the outskirts on a noisy dirt bike, high on mushrooms, imagining being a marauding viking from the future coming in to pillage (shrooms also acting to short-circuit socially conditioned empathy and increase a sense of moral freedom)

 The other Suki of the wasteland opus is a follow-up from Anna Lily Amirpour after the cult success of her A Girl Walks Home Alone (2014): THE BAD BATCH (2017) evokes its own suite of post-societal sci-fi, a hybrid of Escape from NY and Mad Max 2. Returning one again to all the things that made Girl Walks Home Alone so unique, there are: genuinely trippy rave scenes; fingers in mouths (Amirpour's choice form of erotic contact); skateboards (her choice mode of transport); the way falling in love means sticking by someone even when they eat pieces of your body (Batch) or kill and drink your father's blood (Girl); and judiciously placed songs by the 80s band White Lines (here over the end credits). Suki Waterhouse is Arlen, a southern-accented girl in smiley face yellow shorts who finds herself exiled to a vast and semi-hostile desert that serves as a hybrid of Manhattan in Escape from New York (or LA) and Mexico in the era of Trump. Here, bad seeds, illegal immigrants, crooks, radicals, hippies, i.e. America's 'bad batch,' its problem children, anyone not willing to get with the neo-con paradigm, are kicked out. The desert seems to have enough sources of water to keep things going, there are copious drugs and free acid for some reason, and cannibals and free-roaming marauders, all more interested in foxy Arlen as a source of food rather than sex. There's also kindness, as in the wandering hermit played by an invisible Jim Carrey, who finds dying souls in the flats and totes them to 'Comfort' an oasis that serves as junkyard skate park open air market by day, druggy rave and cult recruitment center by night. Arlen goes from being kept alive only as so much livestock, slowly dismembered for irregular meals by a loose cadre of taciturn desert families, to escaping while lying on back of her skateboard (one leg and one arm already gone), to kidnapper of one of the cannibal's children, to an incumbent sister wife to 'the Dream' (Keanu Reeves) in a mansion with AC, a pool, cocktails, and endless drugs. We never learn where she got the artificial leg, or how it just happened to fit her. But she seems to do all right for herself in Comfort.

Outside Comfort there may not be enough food to go around, and only cannibalism is free, but somehow the drugs flow plentiful everywhere (the cannibals even shoot Arlen up to ease the pain before cutting off her limbs). Aside from the impregnation presumed by 'the Dream' (Keanu Reeves), no one seems too interested in sex, that is, unless they're totally high, as when Arlen wanders out into the desert on LSD, bumping into one of her cannibal assailants, Miami Man (Momoa) who's looking for his daughter. Even though she abducted her and shot his wife, he either doesn't know or figures it's fair since his family ate half her limbs. It doesn't make any sense, but hey - Arlen likes those muscles, leading to an ending that's straight-up Morocco, if you get the thirsty drift.

Suki receives lysergic communion

Luckily, Suki again hits the task running: her uneducated southern yokel accent usually spot on, her terror, trippy wonder, and courage all vividly etched on her perfect features) she's the kind of model-turned-actress where you don't get the feeling--as you kind of do with the hot warlord wives in Mad Max: Fury Road--that they just flew in from Belize. She may be gorgeous but she also looks like she's there. 



Speak of 'there,' the award for Deepest Cover clearly goes to Jim Carrey as the saintly old mute hermit, his skin blackened to leather by the sun, wearing cardboard slit glasses to reduce the glare, shuffling slowly from one lone piece of shade to the next, never seeming to die of dehydration. Reeves, one of those few sterling actors who seem cumulatively saintly nowadays, gives us a rare side of himself too: slightly soft around the edges, big black mustache and tinted shades and robe putting him somewhere between Jason Molina in Boogie Nights and Juan Marcos. And throughout, while totally beat down, the flea market art direction is sublime: the dwellings really do look like junk, the dumps look truly toxic. Amirpour nails the way language vanishes in the haze with people bargaining human captive meat supplies for gasoline cans. And, after all that suffering, just seeing Arlen with a cool blue drink in her hand and a face enraptured by drugs, almost brings tears to one's eyes.

It's these scenes that seem--if I may retro-engineer their idea germination--to have sprouted in someone's mind while at Burning Man or some similar desert held psychedelic festival (or vision quest). I say this since their white sand flat desert wasteland settings and neon-Day-Glo drenched drug rave set pieces evoke said festival, the kinds of spectacles I know I myself have hallucinated similar Sodoms while having bad trips at festivals. But we can also see the trends of European-style art school intellect at work in the Amirpour rubric: a critique of American consumer society and the divide between the rich and the poor, young and pretty, hungry and fed, showered and filthy, old and withered. In this, she's not unlike a less inhuman Michael Haenecke, but by now the cannibalism as capitalism metaphor is mighty weary.


But as with FUTURE WORLD's 'big' desert dance party, the highlight is the editor's intensive use of delay-trail imagery for drug trips. Between these two films and MANDY,  the year of 2018 seems to have arrived at the place I used to dream of around the start of this site back in 2003, that one day psychedelics would be seamlessly integrated into film and therefore society, not demonized or glorified, but accepted as both a heightening of and escape from reality, a chance to unmoor from our stodgy structuralist signifier chains and see the world anew, all labels and reductivist shortcuts temporarily lifted, making us, in a sense, children (or schizophrenics) and all via emerging post-structuralist cinema. Alas, the devil's bargain of the poison path is that with the vision to change the world comes the torpor and derangement that keeps us from doing anything about it. The vision for a post-structuralist cinema becomes yet another psychedelic rave scene that goes nowhere but to the inevitable hangover and disorientation of the following day.

Even Armirpour's vivid depiction of rave-desert sky freedom is undercut in BATCH when Arlen is given a silly voiceover inner dialogue narration while wandering the starry desert high on a Comfort tab. "Wow, it's so big... is that what it always looks like?" Oy vey!

In fact, this creates in a way a kind of opposite reaction to any sense of proxy wonder in the viewer. Prior to it, we're kind of an Antonioni/Jess Franco amnesiac cinema headspace, signifiers are gone:  when a drifter materializes out of the horizon heat shimmer, we don't know what they want, if they're friend or foe, going to eat Arlen, help her, or ignore her. As I discuss in Amnesiac Cinema, this taps into the European language gap (which helps make the 'Tower of Babel' style countries and environments more susceptible to emerging trends in art) but American viewers aren't used to it, unless they're cool, as in broad-minded, psychedelically 'experienced' or globally inclined. As in the best parts of Amirpour's previous film, a blessed unknowingness overtakes us. But with the acid voiceover, however, we're suddenly situated in language's prison.



Then again, Waterhouse really brings the knowing sway - when she finds herself gyrating against the heaving muscles of Somoa, it all starts to make sense, if you're a girl. We'd give it all up to follow Suki into the desert, even with the limbs half ate, even if--as with that voiceover--she's still labeling and quantifying, in other words trying to put the ocean into bottles, which would be fine if her monologue was incoherent, like when someone tripping is having a deep thought then tries to share it, to speak aloud, and it comes out all garbled as one is no longer thinking 'in English' or any language, but in a trans-symbolic immediacy that's beyond coherent speech, more like the rants of the Mad Hatter or other Alice in Wonderland characters (see "Reeling and Writhing") So "is this what the night always looks like?" would be more like "is thight allo lookike?" would be "whath nook ikelays ike" and that's far more Freudian/poetic profound! I wearer swiz!



SUPER SUKI MOMENT:
Holding a gun to the belly of one of the pregnant sister wives in order to rescue Miami Man's daughter, all without changing her deadpan expression.

FORMATIVE BURNING MAN CONVEYANCE: Zipping around a big DJ set-up on a golf cart while zonked on martinis and LSD, winding up getting lost in the desert at night, driving around in circles, looking up at the stars.


--
In the end, what are we left with?? Perhaps just what we started with, what we wind up out on the desert flatlands under the wide awake stars, head full of acid, shrooms, MDMA, peyote, or ayahuasca with a slyly gorgeous Brit model. The first man and woman, the essentials - unmarred by sleazy raiders or cannibals. Though we may lose limbs to them, and even free will, there is no stopping the rush of being really high and/or gorgeous... at Burning Man, back when it still had the kind of Summerisle-ish cult edge that if you were tripping hard enough made you believe the man being burnt alive that night might well be you.

 Its blithe inconsistency of tone might all be a passive-aggressive attempt by Cabanne and Abbott to do as bad a job as possible to get out of a contract (it worked, this was the last film put out by 'Golden Gate' Pictures), but I like to think they just 'went for it' --that deadpan Mad magazine irreverence that crops up any time talented folks are given free reign to do whatever they want as long as comes in under budget and on time and is over 60 minutes long-- and they don't want to use that freedom to make 'art' (and so art is made almost by the not wanting of it).

"then came a sinister pair' (centered)

Maybe not, but this sort of thing, and fine paradoxical examples of Ed Woodian ouroboros dialogue go looping around in lopsided orbit: Van Ee assures a mysterious lady in green that there are no abnormal things going on in his house, "nor will there ever be." She replies "Nevertheless, the way you were described to me, and the way your place was described to me, I am certain that I am in the right place!" Then (SPOILER) later she turns out to be a man in drag (though the actress in the first scene is definitely not the same person). Bull says to Laura he was hoping she'd get murdered so he could solve it and redeem himself with the homicide bureau. He uses big words like "longitude" and "metabolism" then wonders what they mean. He calls Lilibeth "my melancholy baby," and "my wild Irish rose" while she bemoans his capacity to guzzle her coffee, and endures his constant mopey protestations the way women at workplaces were compelled to, until Anita Hill finally stood her ground (applause), dismissing his vows to ply her with furs and jewels and breakfast-in -bed: "I'd hate to hang by my neck until you got me those things..." Professor Leonide refuses to announce himself before coming in since "if I allowed myself to be announced I doubt I would be received anywhere" Van Ee lets us know Leonide (his cousin) helped pepper the house with secret panels when he was a "patient" there before the war. It was ostensibly so the guards could spy on the inmates, yet Leonide used one of the panels to escape and made his way to Europe and fame.  These panels serve no real purpose other than to allow Lugosi to be almost everywhere, though for no real reason other than Lugosi always has secret panels, they're practically synonymous. Lillibeth drops dead after trying to blindfold Laura (her big phobia!) while in a hypnotic trance. She is then is revived by Leonide only because he can see that Bull "truly loves... this girl." When Leonide meets brassy Jane Cornell, he says to Lee: "Delightful. I suggest you take good care... of her." When Van Ee tells him he'll be staying in the room right next to Laura, he adds "I know you'll like that." It turns out, Leonide has heard of her fear of being blindfolded, though, as if it's such a crippling phobia (blindfolding being such a daily thing), it's made it to all the psychiatric journals. (Or did he hear it while hiding in the secret passages?) And just what does Lilibeth know that she taunts "Miss Lavalle" with the man in the green mask ("I let him in! Maybe he's here right now, Miss Lavalle!")

There are no clear answers, nor relatives to this weird film. After enough bits of stage entrance and exeunt we hear a strange canned/echo-drenched French accented voice that sounds not unlike Mel Welles' after he's been eaten and absorbed in Corman's indespensible Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) calling the cast into the other room for the performance of the Green Mask by a hypnotized Laurette, who confesses her crimes while wearing a green blindfold. There's no real build-up or reason for it, as it's hardly a capital crime, nor one imagines, might be her death (the titular way). In that weird sense, the antecedents of this film include only a handful of Italian faux-giallo, two from Elio Petri (A Quiet Place in the Country, Death Laid an Egg) and Umberto Lenzi's anti-memorable Spasmo. 

But during its unique "only" child date of release this must have been a hard film to place. Today it's clearly a link between the end of the Arsenic and Old Lace-inspired wartime 'horror-comedy' (ala the underrated Boogeyman will Get You), the pre-psychosexual Freud/Kinsey flood of the late 50s-"  60s, ala Suddenly Last Summer, Lilith, Three Faces of Eve, The Cobweb, Psycho, and Robert Bloch's semi-remake of Cabinet of Caligari (1962) starring Glynnis Johns (below) as a girl trapped in a strange house, in the grip of a strange live-in doctor who may be out to drive her mad, or maybe cure her.


Weird that of all those films I've probably seen Scared to Death the most. I've seen it over 20 times! Probably. That's what's so amazing about it. I can't remember if I've seen it at all, not really. It's not boring, but it is incomprehensible, yet so full of frantic incident it passes like the kind of dream that seems most urgent at the time, but is forgotten the moment you awake.

I recently saw Dinner at Eight for the zillionth time and this time what I really noticed is the loving and nostalgic way the dialogue focuses on the good old days before the Crash, evoking the romantic heyday of Marie Dressler and Lionel Barrymore as they shoot the shit in his office, or the golden matinee idol years of brother John trying to work up the energy to make love to his brother's daughter (the gorgeous Madge Evans) without even a cent to pay for the liquor he needs to avoid cracking up. It's a rough picture in that regard, discussing the past so glowingly illuminates the desperate straits of the present. Scared could almost be a deadpan satirical update, looking back to the intrigue and betrayal of the Second World War, stealing box office receipts and betraying one's dance partner/lover to the Gestapo for money, all leading to a return to America and this strange former asylum with its wandering characters all itching for something to happen, the duplicitous and spiteful war bride ex-collaborator and stolen loot embezzlers, though instead of monologues about the good old days, everyone plays their pasts as cards close to the vest. Collaborators still being ferreted out by newly-discharged camp survivors.

Some, even civilians, refugees, war brides, and con artists wind up trapped in theater fires or bombing raids and are presumed dead. Some wind up in houses that are really sanitariums, where they are the only patient. Or is it just a house with a doctor's office downstairs, one who never has any other patients but you? Maybe it's really a trap. We'd seen Murder My Sweet (1944 - left) with its shady sanitarium, a half-way house from hell for keeping people drugged and tied to beds as alleged alcoholics, where Marlowe wakes and escapes from, the doctor working downstairs trying to convince him he's a sick man and is about to faint (left).
And anyway, she's already dead. What can she do about it? Miss Lavalle...

Women from Scared to Death used to date Cary Gant in The Awful Truth: Molly Lamont, Joyce Compton

If Miss Lavalle's Molly Lamont reminds you vaguely of Irene Dunne it maybe because they both keep their teeth clenched when they talk and because Lamont was Dunne's rival in 1937's The Awful Truth (then again, so was Joyce Compton, who plays Lee's Gracie Allen-esque fiancee). There are weird 3 Women/Person-style identity dissolves with the ladies at the Van Ee residence, as they all have similar wartime perm hairdos and brassy manners, making them ideal "rebound" women for straying divorcees.

You only get these nuggets of wisdom over several viewings of Scared to Death, so get cracking. It's the same with The Awful Truth -- it gets better and better as the layered fine print can be shuckered loose from the intricate, deceptively shallow shell. Death's plot only begins to make sense after about eleventeen viewings, by which time it's all so deep it needs flow charts. As I point in my award-skipping 2003 film The Lacan Hour where I do a whole segment on its use "Momento Mori" skulls, masks, and head effigies, Scared is a movie that has Death on its mind, even though only one person dies, and they do it before the film begins. It begins to make sense only after you've seen it so many times it ceases to make sense at all.

Bela gets impatient for a point to ever be made.

Of course, like the film itself, I can't tell if I'm serious. But as I learned when I first analyzed Return of the Ape Man from a wartime perspective back at the genesis of this site (circa 2003, for Midnight Marquee), it's impossible not to find a connection to anything if you dig deep enough. Down below the surface, satire of art criticism and 'actual' art criticism are indistinguishable. You don't have to be Tracey Walters in Repo Man to recognize the latticework of coincidence, or be one one of those mind-altering drugs Weldon mentions.  The truth will out, even in total abstraction.



Press play
again,
and it's a whole different movie.

I know/knew at least two other writers who love/d this film as much as I do (it's the kind of movie only a writers could love): beloved and renowned raconteur d'horreur classique David Del Valle (though even he admits it's "not Voodo Man") and my belated Scarlet Street mentor, Ken Hanke, who steered me to the best available transfer of this often-crappy PD title (PS, it's the 1999 Sling Shot DVD w/ Devil Bat). We're a dying breed we lovers of Scared to Death. 

Soon no one will be left to love this cockeyed film unless... maybe... you, dear reader, take up the cudgel. It's got a great story! From what I can gather it's about...

what I can tell... so far... Hmm.

I guess I need to see it again. Anyway, nobody paid me to say this.

I just heard you yell
And thought there'd be a murder at least....
--


NOTES:
1. Weldon, Michael Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983)
2. See: At Long Last Lost Lewtons

Dino Di Laurentiis' 1968 sexy sci-fi opus Barbarella probably comes closer than most other mainstream films trying to tap into (as well as satirize) the sense of psychedelic 'free love' that proliferated through its (pre-Manson, but only just) moment, carrying a utopian ideal for a very sexy European future, where the Earth is united and groovy and people greet each other with an open palm and the word "love." Such naïveté utopique and Babylonian orgone gluttony may offend our age's born-again prudishness, but it behooves us to remember that--until the little beaks and jaws of a million disillusionments ravaged her--the spirit of psychedelically-enhanced free love was
so powerful we could still feel its effects as far ahead as the 80s and can at least read about today, like a zillion years later. But was it all just a memory, preset to eat itself? You could call it dated, but how far back to go how far forward? You could go back 3,500 odd years to Shamhat of the Temple of Ishtar, "one of the priestesses who give their bodies to any man in honor of the goddess" (1) who is sent into the woods seduce the hairy pre-Flood Bigfoot-style Enkidu in the Sumerian saga of Gilgamesh or 2,100 years into the future, for a hippie version of the same character, an Earth ambassador of love and sexual manipulation, played with perfect wide-eyed guilelessness by Jane Fonda. Either way, as long as we're not stuck in this drag of a now, where all sex is joyless smash cut thrusting in the now utterly played out HBO doggy style.
Conceived by source writer Jean-Claude Forest, director Roger Vadim, and co-writer Terry Southern, even sex in Barbarella comes with its caveats: People on Earth only make love with exaltation transference pills "for one minute or until full rapport is achieved." And even then only if their "psychocardiagrams are in perfect confluence." They regard weapons as strictly ancient history: all conflicts are now resolved with sex and love. Earth's representative in sexual potency, its ambassador for love's forgiving, aligning, transformative power in the galaxy, Barbarella however, is a virgin in the 'real' physical realm. She tells her first would-be lover, a Enkidu-style hirsute stude --'the Catchman of the Ice and Forests of Weir" (Uggo Tozzi) -- "(physical sex) was proven to be distracting and a danger to maximum efficiency." Her eyes widening just a little bit with fear she adds "besides it was pointless to continue if better means of ego support and self esteem were made available!

Though usually letter perfect, Fonda occasionally lapses into a vaguely scolding put-on of innocence that hints at her future North Vietnam exploits, as when asking the transmitted image of the  President of Earth and "rotating president of the sun system" (Claude Dauphin wearing a black boa and talking at her naked breasts, maybe not intentionally) after he teleports her some weaponry for her mission: "A weapon? What would anyone want with a weapon? The galaxy has been pacified for centuries!" Noting that the Tau Ceti system might "still be living in a state of erotic irresponsibility" it's pretty clear that--for Vadim, for the French, and certainly for ex-pats Fonda and Terry Southern, they're lobbing digs at the mainstream bourgeois Americans. And man, what's so loving about that?

Hey, maybe we forgot, but a lot of us then, and in places now, have experienced the love that has no opposite, the love that goes beyond duality. The love so powerful that even its usually-assigned opposite, hate, is revealed as merely projected self-criticism --hardly the opposite of such an expansive universal force. This pure unrestrained love can embrace even hate and fear, even violence can be forgiven and forgotten at the drop of a hat; an angel can refrain from judging his own tormentors. The only opposite to that force is need, want, hunger, lack, the sort of thing that makes men into monsters.

We see it in Jesus Christ Superstar, we see it in Mother! and we see it in Bunuel's Viridiana and in Antonioni's Red Desert, and we even see it here: a flood of hungry mouths descending on the free love tree, stripping her trunk past its stocking bark so that the once endlessly opening lotuses no longer bloom as their roots are torn away and boiled to feed the billions of starving little mouths for a day, rather than the thousands of enlightened souls forever. This is the same thing that swamped Jesus' life raft: the ceaseless pawing and snapping in such numbers as to reduce any blazing fiery Chris to a pecked-blind Prometheus in a piranha pariah minute. It's the ultimate last laugh of the establishment - finally drowning the spirit of universal love in so much life that even Jesus would cry for a plague, or a war, to thin the herd.


But we can still dream...

Maybe to understand it, you have to have done powerful psychedelics while young enough to handle the accelerated heart rate and in a scene full of supportive friends, all cool and non-creepy and on the same page. Did you feel the tongs of a glorious expansion of the parameters of self so that "you" were no longer just 'your' body, but the entirety of the scene and felt your energy widen from a trickle to a flood? You belonged at long last - to the world! People changed around you. Frowns turned upside down with a simple wave. You were a positive charge changing the current of the world!

And as the figurehead for this kind of power: there arose from within your ranks a beautiful young American woman with intelligence and a high tolerance for pain and pleasure totally divorced from her innocence (Or was it you, Beth?). One smile from this cute girl and a clan would form around her like a cause. There'd ne no need to 'possess' her, as there's no more possession, or objectification, lust, and dirty secrets, around her. All is exposed, absorbed and forgiven. Make love or do not - it is all one, only the urge to own is a sign of ego insecurity and all that is behind you now. Evil and self-centeredness disappears in the face of this bright and shining collective power,  like a dark cloud quickly evaporating in the high desert afternoon. This is why anyone with love in his heart for his opponent cannot be defeated.

Or why cults are so hard to escape.

Hence it makes sense for the President of Earth (Claude Dauphin) to send an unarmed sexually 'woke' being like Barbarella to a far-off planet in the Tau Ceti constellation, where war still exists, and sex is done the old-fashioned way, i.e. not through pills. Her main strategy is to throw herself into harm's way, and be rescued and then use sex to reward her rescuer which --as luck would have it --tends to satisfy her as well. Luckily (or is it karma?) the older, pot-bellied, jowly, grey haired old dudes like Professor Ping (Marcel Marceau) and the president may lick their lips from afar, but they don't drag her down with a lot of flaccid denial of essence (they're too far away). The main villain, Durand Durand prefers the arms' length of his orgasmatron, sparing us the unsightly prospect of his garishly made-up porcine face sweating greasepaint astride her while "Down Down Down! (Drag me Down)" rocks the soundtrack. Thus, her good karma for being so hot and righteous ensures its own continuation through a steady progression of lucky good turns (lovers are all young or at least manly, or at least strangely sexy), and isn't that in the end why karma never fails?

Fonda's fresh-faced innocence catches the eye of this child of Sogo.

A futuristic hippie in the purist form--Barbarella is the product not merely of male fantasy --though she is surely that--but the 'enlightened' male fantasy, the fantasy of the post-smoking, acid-dropping idealist who has the right idea even if he's still lost in his own woods, so to speak. Even as it makes sure to satirize itself, Vadim's film can't help believing in its message - that love is more effective than evil or violence, and that America's ingrained Puritan repression has ensured its cutest sex kittens maintain a healthy naive innocence that a college stint at La Sorbonne and an affair with a Galouise-reeking existentialist named Michel can't ever-fully tarnish or disillusion. An American girl full of peace and love, Fonda's Barbarella is almost invincible in a decadent European environment (i.e. Tau Ceti standing in for disillusioned post-war Europe [2]). Since so many men will be likely to help her, her beauty like a rallying standard for heterosexual union (delineated her tiresome homophobic refusal of Anita Pallenberg), this is much the way Flash Gordon and Dale Arden affected Mongo, enacting a fatalistic round robin with Ming and his daughter Aura by dipping her foreign All-American innocence into the decadent lurid jet set stew of foreign (heterosexual decadence only) stereotype (see: Tigron and Taboo).


Thanks to her almost Cary Grant-like gift for deadpan physical comedy, Fonda never seems remotely passive or disinterested as she regularly uses nonviolent means to her ends. Compared to the much dimmer Ewa Aulin in the similar comic book big budget sex fantasy Terry Southern shaggy dog tale Candy from the same year, Fonda never seems out of control; nothing sexual happens before she's consented. It's her enjoyment -- 'lalalala'-ing in post-coital distraction afterwards, that conversely illustrates her effectiveness as an agent. She's not ashamed about using sex in her work, because she likes it, and on her planet its removal (due to it being a "distraction from maximum efficiency") for over 300 years has disassociated it with any latent Christian shame and guilt, any more than eating lamb on Tuesday, or whatever the old hang-up used to be.



Even Barbarella's rival/shadow, ruling through fear and pain, the Black Queen (Anita Pallenberg, above, voice dubbed by Joan Greenwood) AKA the Great Tyrant, can't resist her charms. With a Sadean mixture of sadistic voluptuary delight, she calls Barbarella "pretty... pretty..." like a kitten. But she must continually do evil to satisfy the Matmos, a magnetically disturbing sentient liquid intelligence bubbling below her city, supplying it with light, warmth and energy, while feeding on negatively charged evil deeds and thoughts, corrupting those on its surface and turning the whole place into one giant wicked orgy of sadomasochism and drugged-out excess in order to keep itself sated. Just walking around above its pulsing current, Barbarella can feel the heady effects, and it can feel her incorruptible innocence the way we might feel a mild electric shock.

Viddy the Matmos!

Ever-bubbling below their feet, its liquid hypnotic light show effects playing on modular TV screens and projections in amidst the posed revelers, the Matmos turns the whole place into a Gomorrah you might imagine while staring deep into a lava lamp, mind reeling with a swerve of the LSD experience into what Stanislav Grof called the third stage of rebirth: the grotesquely elaborate sadomasochistic hell imagery (1) of a bad trip, a sudden total recall of the trauma of one's exit from the constricting birth canal into the hell of the doctor's glaring light and harsh spank. Long suppressed by the even the unconscious mind, this remembrance of this moment of total hell needs a fast coping mechanism. Developing a kind of off-the-cuff masochistic streak becomes a do-or-die necessity: revel in the madness or be rent to shreds by its demonic claws. Barbarella alone finds the third way -- to accept it and not judge it, to embrace the burning blade and be neither cut nor burnt. Hers is a kind of coal-walking purity of essence (POE), the kind that sashays right through the rending claws of those paradise-guarding demons. Like the angel Pygar (John Phillip Law) she holds no grudges. When she finds he has rescued the evil queen after she blinded and exiled him in the past, Pygar carries her to the safety of Barbarella's ship. "An angel has no memory" ends up being the film's last line but it might better be "an angel forgives all trespasses against it."

But that would be too Christian.

SOGO!

As opposed to the lurid visions of Bosch or Barker, the orgy envisioned by Vadim proves pretty nonthreatening, except in a rough trade performative sort of way, conjuring a kind of very-60s heterosexual-centric Warhol Factory-meets-Rome art gallery happening full of ennui-befogged jet set revelers, sprawled on divans and swings around brilliantly molded epoxy resin walls, floors, and round pulsing screens, turning the whole 'street' into a hookah bar/after hours club/ airport terminal, where the businesses seem to include either drinks, prostitution, or mugging. As usual Vadim doesn't really know how to move his camera through such tableaux with any urgency, but the art is still there. Now that we can savor the full breadth of the compositions on the HD color-restored widescreen, there's enough neat shit to look at that the dramatic lethargy doesn't irritate.

Epilogue 1: LACANIAN DESIRE MODEL and ZABRISKIE POINT IN SPACE!

Barbarella's ravenous sexual appetite is awakened into a new dimension by her first experiences of physical love, her pre-set sexual openness is such that she's already disappointed (after mating with both the Angel and the furry Catchman) when David Hemmings (in high demand since Blow-Up) as the rebel leader wants to use the pills (he's been saving them for five years waiting for a stray Earth woman who knows how to use them). Shortly thereafter she's attached to Durand Durand's orgasm piano machine, and what could have been a great moment - his outraged cry of "shame!" on her after she breaks the machine due to her yawning propensity is undone by his dreadful make-up, this weird need of some Italian make-up artists to do up older character actors as garishly as if they were on stage and supposed to look tan to the back row. It's too bad, as Milo O'Shea really sells his insanity with wild eyes and mellifluent voice.

Maybe the single most influential work of the counterculture, as far as high art and especially European 'art' films go - Antonioni's BLOW-UP can't be overestimated in terms of its effect on art cinema and 'beautiful people'-approved films. It became a kind of Kubrickian monolith milestone of high fashion post-modern influence. Vadim's Barbarella therefore resembles Antonioni's less-successful follow-up, Zabriskie Point (1970) more than anything else. Touching on an array of similar concerns and reflected points about the burgeoning youth movement, drugs, changes in sexual mores, and anxieties about the future --what the Point really proved was that Antonioni was unable to be 'hip' two times in a row, though neither could anyone else, it seemed (not even Dennis Hopper). For once he'd made a milestone, Antonioni was as influenced by it as anyone else, making his next work seem like either a copy or a failure. What he did was take a page from Godard and just film the young people being political - and if his intellectual eye found a place to cough "bullshit!" under his breath within the image, so be it.

Vadim's Barbarella covers a similar older straight-male-intellectual base (the only gay voice we hear in Barbarella is the lisping male equivalent of "Siri" or "Alexa" that guides Barbarella's weird neckless, three-balloon protuberance / mandolin space ship): the amok savage children running loose in the wastelands; the languorous orgy; the pretty boy angel/pilot spurred to eclipse a social order that has already, in a sense, exiled him; the young beautiful sexually willing female agent of a remote older male lover, sent into the zone alone on some secret mission; the climactic explosion signifying the Blow-Up of the old order. All that Barbarella is missing is a killer score. Zabriski gets great use out of Pink Floyd and a Jerry Garcia guitar solo. Barbarella uses goofy faux-John Sebastian vocals and obvious, spy movie lounge music. One wants to shake his lapels. "Roger! Something's happening here! And it's not this." Even dated by 1965 standards, let alone 68. There are some nice electric guitar moments, weird electronic string echo-drenches while a few of the wilder light shows are going on, but not enough. The best thing it's got going on is a relentlessly funky bongo beat and some electric bass evoking Nelson Riddle.


But otherwise, so much in common with Zabriskie Point that these bases must have seemed to weigh on the unconscious of the place and time. So let's examine them - all seem to swim up from what I'd imagine as the older establishment expressing its anxieties about the counter-culture while being determined to stay on top of it - even as it was like a powder keg with no keg to define it. They--the older artists--wanted the job of defining it, of being its grand spokesman, or summing up its issues. While Antonioni nailed it in 1966, there was no specific 'it' to nail yet, so he could make an 'it' as well as anyone. By 1968 though, "it" was too big (with a sign that said: you must be "this" young to ride). As we see with the first order, the young and hip of a year ago are the old and in the way of tomorrow.

1. Wild Children: With young people in the late-60s so free, so 'turned-on' and open, there was worry amongst the older generation about their coming grandchildren. After growing up in communes, allowed to skip school, inhaling secondhand reefer smoke, mutated by broken DNA from mom's LSD use, would these kids go to actual public school and learn boring math? Or would they run amok in wild child gangs until they're caught and brought to Sogo to indulge in perverse passions? In Zabriskie Point they throw a rock through the diner window; Daria Halprin tries to relate to them but they just paw at her skirt and sneer.

2. The Languorous Orgy: Imagined often by non-participants or experienced only while zonked on tranquilizers, the late night orgy became a happening - but only as long as it wasn't swamped by horny dudes ganging up on zonked virgin chicks (as in Riot on Sunset Strip), or bikers trashing the place.  The desert hook-up in Zabriskie seems to mutate out into a dozen other couples, horsing around, play wrestling and being otherwise in the moment and young and loose with Jerry Garcia lays out a nice relaxing solo, but must a scratchy affair itchy affair with so much dust and sand floating around. In Barbarella, physical contact and loose playful exploration of one another's touch -this seemed a new and rare experience to the older generation who had maybe not experienced it fantasized about its transformative effect coupled to the horror of the collapsing barriers of self (the equivalent today of hearing about 'bracelet' parties on Fox)--seemed surely abuzz in decadence, with tortures and glazed joyless faces of the stoned participants.

Those who experienced one or witnessed one knew the deadening effect it can have. There's no joy in it after awhile, only pain when its over or broken off from, like getting so used to a hot tub you don't feel it at all, only a terrible aching chill when you step out of it into the dry air. Stay in it long enough and you merge into the furniture, the walls (like the exiles in the Sogo Maze), and no one even notices you until suddenly you stir to get up and move positions and people freak out. Dude, you're still here? Especially if you're the newly sober roommate of the guy throwing the party, who pops out of his door at 4AM to pee, and trips over entwined bodies, as I was circa 1998.

Too is the eerie similarity between all the languid people turning into rocks in the labyrinth and the people cohering out of the desert for an orgy, and the louche inhabitants of Sogo.

3. The Fallen Pilot / Angel: The equivalent of the hanged man who, once removed from his cross on the cornfield row, becomes a crow (as he was long ago) rather than a scarecrow. The Alice/Dorothy female central character has a love affair with this one, perhaps short of length, for he seems above and beyond the current scene. At home in no zone; his beauty is like an Apollonian ideal that can't quite incorporate in the modern Gomorrah of the age and so is sacrificed, crucified, blinded. "An angel doesn't make love, an angel is love," Pygar tells the evil queen who's trying to shag him. "Then you're a dead duck," she snaps back. This little bit of hippie phrase-bending didn't stop Barbarella from shagging him, so why does the Tyrant let it put her off her groove?

4. The cops / guards: The old vestige of the evil (demonized) social order. In Zabriskie Point, Antonioni gives us a cop in the desert who comes to Daira with concern (she's wondering alone in the desert with no shoes) but she treats him like he's a Nazi. Some universal love that is! In Barbarella the guilt is assuaged by having the suits of the guards be empty shells. In Zabriskie they fill the jail to overflowing with demonstrators, but then again what else are they going to do? Topple from their Martian machines at the first sign of a cold? Without the cops, the movements would collapse, like a team falling backwards during tug-of-war if the opposing side suddenly lets go.

5. The Oppressed: The inhabitants of the maze are older people, grown mossy and unhip, gradually growing into the rocks, kept alive only by expensive lotuses (it 'amuses' the Great Tyrant to lay out such a ridiculous expense). In Zabriksie they are the locked-up students, the squares stuck in their 9-5 scenes, and the besieged desert community diners, slowly falling into their beers at the Rumpus Room. Antonioni seems to be trying to come to terms with his own obsolescence but is he just admitting that one can only be shallow and naive once, and no amount of acid can make you forget your hard-won wisdom?

6. The Revolution!  Doomed to fail. On both sides. On both sides. Only the Matmos, and the virgin-whore, survive.

6. The employer patriarch: An older but still virile relic of the old guard. Claude Dauphin on the screen in the opening of Barbarella - he gives her her mission and looks forward to enjoying her sexually sometime in the future; in Zabriskie, Rod Taylor is Daria's employer- possible lover--a virile new breed of capitalist manly men.

7. A climactic apocalypse - it of course never occurs to Barbarella that her free love mantra has kept her and the Black Queen all nice and dry while utterly laying waste to the entire city of Sogo and getting nearly everyone on the planet wiped out in a catastrophic flood / disintegration beam combination. That's America abroad, via Vadim's portrait of his American wife and her overly serious stance on politics, inciting a rebellion and then leaving when it fails and everyone on either side lies dead. Maybe in Italian director Antonioni's Zabriskie America is still intact, the Roy Orbison song after the slow-mo explosion climax Floyd jam lets us know the only casualties here are the young, blinded by their own self-righteous hotness; that's the European intellectual abroad in the American Southwest, as heavy as Baudrillard at a roadside attraction.

8. Don't let our Wasted Youth Go to... more wasted? - The young are beautiful, but their playfulness is so heavy-handed, scripted and flat vs. say the in-the-moment nowness of a document like French auteur Agnes Varda's Lions, Love (and Lies) or the Roeg/Cammell masterpiece, Performance. We wonder what Antonioni sees in these two actors, or in this story, maybe the most heavy-handed film about flight ever.

"a good many dramatic situations begin with screaming,"

"The black guards are leather men; they are without fleshy substance."

Epilogue II: ALICE TO DOROTHY / CANDY to BARBARELLA - Girl to Woman under a Sexist (male) rubric. 

 Pauline Kael's reference to the film as a dirty Wizard of Oz (3) may be warranted but only in that Barbarella is an innocent girl making her way through a strange landscape with the goal of meeting a wizard /scientist. With every man wanting to sleep with her, there's also the linking up to the same year's Candy, (below), another Terry Southern script (based on his novel) and much seedier (and funnier --for the first half anyway), with a more Alice in Wonderland arc (rather than some distinct mission). Candy just flees one escapade to wind up in another, spurred regularly onwards to the next vignette by some sex maniac she escaped previously. Really, she's little more than a passing lusty obsession for a series of extended comic monologues for Great White Male actors, most of whom end up babbling and groveling more than actual fornicating.  For Barbarella on the other hand, the men come in handy (she always needs help fixing her space ship, like a nymphomaniac parked on the side of a road, trapping men by fretting over her open hood), but rather than following her through some devotion to her niceness and her sincerity in trying to help replace their missing 'pieces,' these men help her because she represents, in herself, a cause, a freedom, a gorgeous openly sexual being whose innocence cannot be corrupted even when she's 'shamelessly' out-orgasming a death-by-pleasure machine. And Barbarella is a master seductress. We just may not notice since Jane handles things so discreetly. All Marcel Marceau's Professor has to do is mention Pygar needs 'inspiration' and she's gently guiding him back to his nest.



Comparisons to Alice in Wonderland are less apt, since the focus there is on a critique of British politics and the girl is too young for the adult set of signifiers we get with Barbarella. In fact you might stack them up in terms of age. Alice is the coming of age myth for the girl between 7 and 13; Dorothy for 13-17; Barbarella for 18-22. And anything older - honey if you haven't trained your animus and incorporated it into your whole so you're no longer looking for incomplete males to act as animus projection screens while your fairy tale your way to maturity, well, you're likely to be animus-dominated forever. If you don't get a milquetoast husband to boss around in the voice of your militant father, the only next stop is the Norman Bates shower of the sacrifice: your younger self (Janet Leigh) is still clinging to the husk and must be cut free to make way for a fully incorporated adult (Vera Miles) to take over.

"Decadence Lost"

One of the film's sexiest costume changes - Vadim shoots Jane in it like he barely notices her heavenly thighs. Then she's into something else - a criminal waste of some great boots.

Unlike the 'hero's journey' as per Jung and Joseph Campbell, the psychedelic Alice/Dorothy mythic trek to maturity doesn't operate on a direct link to consciousness. For the male, there's always that breadcrumb trail or string Theseus unspooled when going through the maze, or some other device to return to consciousness and the social order. He's just a visitor here in the forest, the maze, the realm of the chthonic, the feminine unconscious of the masculine psyche. The masculine unconscious of the feminine psyche by contrast, isn't so cut and dry. It is uncut, and ever-wet. The woman descends not into the  maze but to the social order. She is only a visitor here in the Apollonian world of patriarchy and order. If she's hoping to gain something from her trip here, it's the ability to get back home, not necessarily with any prize to hand, and the home is generally not the one she left, but one where some good true prince (or grandmother) is waiting. She is the maze, the forest, in a way the masculine hero is not. Her role is not as conqueror or reformer or thief of some magic item, but of reclaimer of herself from the jaws of the wolf. She must face the devouring mother, the wolf in grandma's skin, and take over possession of the feminine archaic unconscious, she must become the red queen. She is the forest through which the knights wander, the moon that masculine clouds obscure but never fully blot out.


When Hate turns to Bemused Tolerance

Confession: I used to hate Barbarella. And all Vadim's works. The only film of his I like is Blood and Roses (1961) and it's not even on DVD, Blu-ray, or VHS. It's hung up in legal limbo. You can get greymarket copies but it's frustrating to imagine how much better a nice restored Criterion edition might look. Turns out, Barbarella is an example of how much such treatment can better a film. Before it was badly cropped for TV, with unrestored muddy colors which --with some of the bad dubbing-- made it seem like a total tedious kitschy waste of time. Now it seems quite modern and wondrous, like so many Dino Di Laurentiis productions, it's got a great sense of art direction, with vast soundstage indoor/outdoor decadent tableaux reminiscent of his other great films -- Flash Gordon, Dune, Conan, to such an extent that they're all much better now that they were ever before, since they're initial theatrical release. You da man, Dino

As for Vadim, I guess I was jealous. Not anymore. Why? Because I love his memoir, Sympathy for the Devil. It's impossible to dislike him after reading it. In fact it might even explain his luck with gorgeous women -- his raconteur-ship is without peer!

Another plus is that, with the passing of time, the sex in Barbarella no longer seems as adolescent. Pornography as so dulled our collective senses that semi-softcore period erotica has found an audience in debauched cineastes like myself who can appreciate the genuine anarchic deviance, dream logic, and carefully artistic framing in the works of Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, Radley Metzger, or the propulsive over-the-top vavoom of Russ Meyer We don't 'get off' on them, or see them for their 'adult' cachet as they were created fo --at least not solely. Rather their ability to do whatever they want in between satisfying the demand of the producer (who expected a certain 'Adults Only' rating), they were free to do as they pleased leads to a kind of permissive experimental snapshot of their moment kind of thing that makes them almost time machine-level pertinent to modern instances. Thanks too to a steep drop in libido, I'm not clawing the turf and howling in forlorn longing over the extreme sexiness of Fonda. And John Phillip Law no longer scans as a towheaded focal point for my jealous rage, this maybe thanks to having seen the other big 60s European adult comic book title, Danger! Diabolik, where he stars, and also he's such a good-humored mensch in the extras on that DVD, it's hard not to love him. Also the music has become far enough out that it's back in. The vocals on the title song used to fill me with rage, rhyming Barbarella with cockleshell-a? Infuriating! All that does now though is make me realize what a wasted opportunity it is not to make Barbrella's spaceship look like half an scallop shell, or open up like a massive scallop, or draw some other Venus association, associating space with the ocean, as for example the film The Witch who Came From the Sea would do on such a smaller budget years later. A few connections to myth, to the archetypal roots underneath this stuff, would have gone a long way to making it less instantly dated (it would be 'timeless' instead).

Maybe it won't. Andi doesn't seem to be too traumatized afterwards. We never hear her complain or resist. We only learn she had 'entertained' five of them when she tells it to her father, who--of course--walks in on her in the bed, now totally 'down' from her trip, apparently, and this behavior on the part of the boys as apparently engrained in the LSD ritual, at least in the mind of MGM, as oral sex for bracelets is for Fox News viewers today. In a way, it's her ultimate fuck you, meant to drive him swinging pathetically into a waiting room full of dudes held in a kind of limbo custody because he overhears them mentioning his daughter not being special.

That it was released by AIP might throw you, but since it was made by MGM, dad and daughter must heal their relationship in order to stop further moral decay. For AIP, family is broken, useless, but MGM can't let the parents go, so even when delving into lurid subject matter they tend to employ a kind of roundhouse morality uppercut that dates back to pre-code films like 1931'a A Free Soul (left), wherein the real enemy isn't booze, premarital sex, or drugs--they're just the symptom of parent-daughter estrangement due to parental addiction and/or absenteeism. In Soul, Shearer hungers for the safe, flaccid decency of Leslie Howard and the long nights nursemaiding daddy in and out of alcoholic sanitariums. In Sunset, Mimsy Farmer wants to go home with her cop dad and start dressing like everyday is church.

top: Forbidden Photos of a Lady above Suspicion / bottom: Black Belly of the Tarantula

Thinking of why he's so many leagues above the rest, I'm reminded of the bit in Amadeus when the king tells Mozart to add more notes. You hear the hackneyed Salieri-style orchestrations of lesser composers for whom this adage is gospel, determined to justify their 100 piece orchestra by having every instrument involved in big elaborate sweeping gestures and micro-managerial helicopter (or 'mickey mouse') scoring. Ennio never uses any instrument when none would be better. His is a kind of intuitive drive and love of cinema that transcends scores as we know them today.

There are only a few working composers that get the Morricone touch, that continue and expand his approach in unique directions (away from classical and jazz influences and more towards avant garde and modernist) such as the great Hans Zimmer. But even he knows - Ennio rule (see Zimmer's "Ennio Morricone- My Inspiration"). 

His music is so intensely personal and seems to speak to the individual. Much more than grand pieces that seem to speak to a crowd of people, each piece Morricone writes seems to be personal to the individual listening to it, and that’s a really amazing achievement. (full)

And the best news about Ennio: there are a great many of his scores on LP and on engines like Spotify and Amazon Music, and a bunch of his movies are on Prime, to the point I can't even cover them all in one post. So there shall be three. First: these 7 groovy giallos, all from 1970-75, and all with decent HD or very good SD image on Prime... then, an equal number of westerns, then crime/corruption/communism! After all that, maybe you too can annoy your co-habitants with your obsessive swooning over his masterful use of music to enhance any scene until they too ask 'why Ennio?'

(PS -  Some of these have more than one upload -Autopsy and Cat O'Nine Tails for two- with different quality sources, so if you get a crap/SD/compressed one, try again)



What could have been just another super weird Mimsy Farmer-goes-schizo movie ala Perfume of a Lady in Black (1974 - Dir. Francesco Barilli) where tricks are played with narrative to undo murders and create seemingly random conspiracies just for the hell of it (and no Morricone), Autopsy (Italian title is better: Macchie Solari - but I can see why they didn't call it 'Sunspots' as that sounds like a comedy about a misfit girls' soccer team). is a zippy giallo that, not unlike A Quiet Place in the Country, understands that hallucinations are examples of paredolia amplified by lack of sleep, drugs, withdrawal, mental illness or high fever, and structured by desire and fear, the way a musician on a song might bend and warp the LP you're listening to into the shape of a grooved, spinning golem rising from the turntable mud. Sure, it's just a hallucination - yet it's in far more dimensions than just that 2-D groove you were carved into, that illusion of music, that ghost you called the real world.

The grisly title kept me away from this charmer for a long time, for I thought this was the German medical thriller I'd already seen, or any of the other zillion shows called Autopsy. A pox on lame namers of things Autopsy!

Farmer is playing, for a change, a total professional - she's the one doing autopsies. And due to sunspots there are a ton of suicides in town, which means--for a doctoral candidate in post-mortem medicine doing her thesis on real vs. artificial (really murder) suicides--she's too busy cutting dead people open to stay sane. Her hallucinations and being prone to violence are all understandable due to the stress, the long hours, the sinister way everyone seems to be plotting against her, and being in leering macho rapey Rome. As with Perfume she has a handsome rich boyfriend whom she pushes and pulls with her love/hate psycho killer closeted aversion to sex, prioritizing her doctoral studies. She likes long walks on the beach and lapsing into strange reveries. The lighting is generally better in (at least the second half) of Perfume, but Autopsy makes more linear sense. I don't know why I have to compare them just because Mimsy Farmer is in both. She's the queen of giallo! Or maybe... the king?
 

Barry Primus is Father Paul - not your average priest, he used to be a race car driver - who quit after his last collision killed 12 people. Today Farmer works in the effects department! Coincidence? Morricone's score builds on sustained drones that slowly build and then end in moans and gasps from two women who are either dying or orgasming or both, then the drones start back up again, like the wheezy noises that might creep up from the grave of a murdered organist. Other places Morricone's crew stays busy like little flights of bees trying to keep their buzzing volume down so they can get at the nectar before it's taken by some bullying hummingbird. Piano keys hammer like late-added semi-colons trying to find their place in the ghostly lines of a letter long since sent. Then, whirling dust storms of bird coos thrown through a dissecting machine. More moans, it just keeps delving deeper into that line - the heavy-breathing, dilated line you can taste on your tongue about 20-30 minutes after you drop acid.

The Prime print is a strange beast. It looks beautiful-or adequate (non-HD but at least anamorphic). but I saw TWO uploads of Autopsy on Prime - so keep trying if the one you click on is all messed up, compression-wise. There are TWO.

Though it's labeled a giallo in the traditional sense, Luciano Ercoli's Forbidden Photos...  has a direct link with the romantic-sexy soaps of the era meant for bored housewives, guilty about even fantasizing infidelity, so needing elaborate justifications, i.e. she needs to cheat with a younger handsomer, more virile man to save her husband's life or business reputation.  Through an elaborate sequence of events, sex with a handsome stranger becomes, not a marital indiscretion, but a noble sacrifice. This time-honored ploy stretches back to the silent age, up through the pre-code era (Blonde Venus) up to the 50s (Jeopardy) and even the 80s (An Indecent Proposal). Oftentimes the night of passion (or afternoon) was depicted as something sexy or enjoyable, but just as often vile and sordid, and only occasionally - as here- both). Still, whether or not she enjoyed her ordeal, or even fantasized about such an overpowering beforehand, is irrelevant - her feelings were her own.

Ah, but there was the alternative, where the woman is so horrified at the changes it's making in her - ala Blue Velvet and this red telephone keeper from director Luciano Ercoli. She showers and showers afterwards, but still feels his pawing.



The cast is relatively small, narrowing down the suspect list, with clingy undersexed housewife Minou (Dagmar Lassander) doing what's necessary to hold onto husband Peter (Pier Palo Capponi) a business tycoon in danger of losing his company. Simon Andreu is the mysterious masterful man with a tape of Peter confessing murder. Andreu's love den black and full of exotic art, like white hands coming out of the wall. "Don't worry, you'll enjoy yourself a lot more than you imagine," he says. "Take off your coat!"
Other suspects include Dominique (Nieves Navarro), who was once a lover of Peter but that's all over, or is it. Another suspect: pills, since Minou is taking Valiums again her erratic behavior may be the result of a breakdown. At least that's what Peter says.

Clearly "mother's little helper" was creating a whole splinter group from the main drag of the Edgar Wallace-centric giallo, beyond its loosening grip lay orgy sex clubs and Satanic sects. In films like Case of The Bloody Iris, All the Colors of the Dark, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, the married wife left too long at home in bed sexually frustrated while husband's gets menaced by attractive knife-wielding male (or is he just  fantasy) trying to get her to return to the sex club they started.

I'm not a fan of Dagmar Lassander's look here: her stooped, defeated posture, the combo of tacky powder blue frock with matching eye shadow, fake red hair, and pink lipstick, but I am a huge fan of Nieves Navarro as Minou's sexy-cool liberated bisexual swinger friend Dominique, even though she rocks a lot of the same pale blue/pink look. A star of an array of quality if unexceptional giallos, Navarro  always seems to play the same part: a cool liberated character who seems to have created swinging late-60s/early-70s Milan or Rome to suit herself. Some of her ideas may not gel with today's society ("I'd adore being violated") but I don't think that would faze her much; I also like Andreu and his love den ("I must say, your performance has been more than I expected.")


Morricone factor: One of 17 scores Ennio did in 1970 alone, he's just doing a job here, but doing it well: the title theme coos along with the traditional wordless vocalizing (something that no doubt helped with international markets to avoid lyric confusion), with a gentle trumpet part floating high over a dreamy Barcelona netting of strings. Later the suspense builds with the same netting rattled by a single four note refrain, swimming against the grain of trumpet and strings like an incessant, nagging guilty conscience. Elsewhere woodwinds move in and out of mimicking police sirens, funky organs and wah-wah guitars groove in the nightclub scene. And if that scene gets confusing it's because both Minou and Dominique are wearing strange new wigs!



Leaving Prime at the end of the month!


Based on Edgar Wallace's crime novel "The Clue of the New Pin" this beautifully-photographed (and lushly transferred to HD) thriller occurs in that most ideal of all giallo settings, a private Catholic girls' school (in England, supposedly), one foolish enough to hire the devilishly handsome Fabio Testi as a 'phys-ed' and Italian teacher. The girl he's with now os still a virgin so Rassini (Testi) thinks she's once again holding out by saying she saw a knife flash as they drifted past a maybe murder scene. She wasn't, but kind of was. The knife thing as Freudian a fear of penetration excuse is so on point here it kind of cracks the code of what Diane Keaton called that "whole Italian... thing." Also, nothing is more gross that lying in the bottom of a boat, I don't care how dry it is, it's not dry.

Morricone's score builds on a mournful bottom note single-hand piano refrain that slowly builds into two hands, wordless cooing vocals hitting dreamy high notes and strings cascading sadly like a waterful trickle of circling hawks. The girl insists there was a murder - the score gets really weird, pitch bending to a kind - lazily drifting downstream. Turns out there was a murder but how can Rassini explain being at the scene of the crime without getting fired? But soon the killer knows he and his star pupil saw something and the murders begin anew...someone is killing off the girls in his class, it's up to Rassini to stop it, with the cops running parallel and intersecting investigations.

A slinky Morricone bass line, brushed drums and honking off-key trumpet mute (expertly blending into the honk of a BMW car horn) let us know this is going to be a touch Hitchcockian as well as sordid, even cop show at times, like a kid smashing a funky TV cop show score into a Herrmann-esque thriller then recording the crash, and riffing off the dying honk of the steering wheel, viola!

Thank god then, for the Morricone score which provides a cacophonic counterpoint whenever it can. You don't even need a story when Ennio is at the top of his game like he is here. All crumbling electric guitars, atonal mashes of the keyboard, deep breathing and wheezy organs, he catches and balances the woozy mise-en-scene the way a patient friend might help a stumbling drunk to his car.
Considering the by-the-numbers direction of journeyman-hack Paolo Cavara (Mondo Cane) and the fact that Tarantolo's screenplay was written by woman (Lucille Lans) it's perhaps no surprise that a) the film is lacking the drive and momentum that toxic blend of male Catholic guilt and seething sexual frustration can provide, and b) its strengths lie in its 'weaknesses,' in its swooning, feminine sexuality, which we guilty scholars will note is almost completely free of voyeuristic "eye"-conography. The stripping nude of the female victims and the paralysis method seem to set the stage for kinky trauma, but the editor knows that when they stop screaming and act dead, the tension goes out and it just becomes mannequin-jabbing necrophile boredom. We have Spasmo for that! (Another great Ennio score in that one, but it's not on Prime).

With so little suspense or empathy generated by the killings, the big mystery becomes how a cop as foggy and strung-out as Giancarlo Giannini's Inspector Tellini ever made it to homicide in the first place. He should be handing out parking tickets, at best. From a surrealist standpoint the detective's confusion and rank incompetence puts him in the rarefied realm of somnambulist shamuses that have been knocked into weird zones between realities: Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart; Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense; Asia Argento in The Stendahl Syndrome; Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly-characters who may or may not be already dead, as if they awoke from a dream into the film and don't really remember a damn thing about investigative protocol. But at least in those films the target always turns out to be someone or something intrinsically tied up with the pursuer. In Belly, the final disconnect becomes more of a Dirty Harry sort of "this time it's personal!" punch out, which illuminates our hero's darkened path not a watt. Oh well, if you're so xanaxed out you don't even know where or who you are it helps to have some really weird Morricone to help you home. One psychedelically twisted note of discordant guitar and you know that you're safe in the beloved giallo genre, where druggy amnesia isn't only forgiven, it's practically essential. (see full -6/09).


Franco Franco Nero smolders and drinks valiantly against the rushing tide of fatalistic Ennio Morricone-scored vocalizing and surging drones in this fine giallo, an example of how you can dip into the tricks and trappings of the Argento-via-Hitchcock paintbox, rather than be merely derivative, create something vivid and cool, vibrant and alive. Partially excavating the deep roots of childish lack of impulse control beneath macho vanity and alcoholism, Nero plays an ex-husband womanizer journalist who still loves his ex-wife (Silvia Monti) even though he's shacked up with cute blonde Pamela Tiffin. Teetering between Keitel Bad Lieutenant transcendental-abusive and Nick Nolte Affliction DT-delusional, Nero follows clues leading him to murder victims that he knew, and so forth. I've seen it six times and I still can't follow how any of these people are supposed to even know each other. Maybe Rome is very small, so when you hang out at a bar one night (the opening swinging nightclub scene, cracked to bursting with stares, slinky electric organ music, and possible leads), everyone you meet will have all sorts of interconnected secrets. As long as modernist international architecture leads to wild post-modernist compositions like these, baby, you go right ahead.

A highlight is Ennio's dreamy music for a passage that finds Nero spying on through a side window on some languid afternoon sex show being filmed in silhouette on a wall shot through glass beads, laden with queer innuendo as one realizes the extent being gay in the 60s-70s meant continuous exposure to blackmail, so everyone had to sneak around, drawing the eye of curious detectives and journalists following up any random clue. Here we get glass beads, strange hungry looks, and Ennio so breathy perfect time stops altogether in a fairie bower haze.

it's all in fun

As in so many detective thrillers of its time (when the real-life "Zodiac" was big in the public eye), astrology factors into the murders. We realize the killer only strikes "on a Tuesday, sacred to Mars, favorable to Aires!' (The Italian title translates to 'Black Day for Aires") Light through Venetian blinds, the roving camera, crisp sets, good dubbing, a sense of the phoniness inside the souls of the characters that not only excuses phoniness in the film but resembles Antonioni-esque fatalism as much as it does Argento diabolism. Even when the crippled heiress (the ever-glowering Rosella Falk) is being terrified, crawling across the floor like a snake towards her distant wheelchair, she's framed beautifully by a stone lion, dark yellow curtains, and a gray cat, Morricone's organ fugue underscoring her funeral even as she's still alive.

Debits for the heavy reliance on day-for-night in the stalking/killing sequences, as if they all occur in some heavy gravity zone of deep blue eternal concrete twilight, where all light sources, tunnel roof lights etc, glow with a deep azure-green halo like you're just watching with very dark sunglasses on. Were they shot by the AD while Bazzoni was lining up his international style architecture lines and making sure the light gleans deep and merciless into Nero's weeping, drunk crystal blue eyes?

One of the cooler and more noteworthy things about the critical buzz for the highly trippy new horror folk film MIDSOMMAR is the notion that one should not do psychedelics before seeing it. There have already been a few freak-outs in the theaters showing the film. (I won't link to the reports, because lightweights have no place on this site) but I am fascinated that psychedelics at the movies has become such a commonplace thing now that it's not a question of whether one should trip at the cinema or trip at all, but a question of which tripped-out druggy horror films are best seen straight. "Sober audiences may feel like they’re tripping," notes Fast Company's Joe Berkowitz of Aster's new film, "but tripping audiences will probably feel like they’ve died or perhaps were never born at all."

I agree with Joe: Midsommar Delivers the Most Realistically Trippy Drug Scene Ever, for Better and for Worse. It didn't occur to me to go see it tripping, but now I sure wish I did! I'm a fan of that 'never born at all' feeling - isn't that what movies are all about? (3) Between this and Climax, and last year's Mandy, and shows like Euphoria, its heartening to see the ways psychedelics have moved from this kind of dirtbag-disreputable guilt-by-association into a kind of hipster mainstream respectability, done in hopeful moderation when the time is just right and nonfatal nightmares of self realization when the time isn't. They can be informative without being didactic. Gone are the Judy Blume-style inaccuracies of after school specials like Go Ask Alice, replaced with a knowingness about the pros and cons of the trip.


In the past, when psychedelics were represented on film, it was always with a patina of dirtbag mummery: naked broads in body paint frugging through a kaleidoscope via a hyperactive zoom lens.  Hallucinations were usually embodied by actors or latex puppets, completely divorced from the context in which they were perhaps originally hallucinated - the impossibility of getting the full scope of expanded consciousness across all the telephone game hands it takes to put into practice. (6) Drugs were associated strictly with a certain swath of music, and mired in an ever-oscillating mix naive idealism and burnt-out paranoia. For before we could really delve into the nature of a drug hallucination, it would be gone. A lot of us preferred to stay home alone, tripping and trying to record our visuals via painting, or ranting into a microphone, or scribbling poetry - but that too was dangerous, with no one to bring you off the ledge one could think oneself into a bad trip pretty fast. Thus the bulk of drug-taking imagery in cinema has always been--until recently--of a Lowest Common Denominator kind of vibe, both naive and skeevy, a bunch of easily-influenced kids shimmying to a guitar solo like lemmings to a cliffside chimera.

With Midsommar we finally move past those breakwaters - gone are the banal psychedelic imagery we're used to on film, and now -- forever, hopefully, thanks to CGI and director Ari Aster's modicum of restraint comes the imagery of psychedelics as they actually are. Anchored to the expansion and contraction of the breath (is one 'hallucinating' when they become aware that the entire planet 'breathes' in ever expanding/contracting waves of energy?).

As the backpacking guests at the weird Swedish commune take mushrooms and then drink some unknown herbal tea, we have to pay attention to see the way the deep black interiors of the flowers in Dani's hair widens and contracts just like a tripping pupil, or the way the tendrils of the vines wrapped around her May Queen throne stretch to accommodate and encourage her ever-more tarot-style royal movements. The sacred space and time generated by ritual circular movement is made palpable in the flow of energy up the bark of trees, or the flow of energy between people entraining their breath and movements to the music guiding them in an endless May Pole dance.

Ever quick to invent new phrases, I dub this new trend, so indelibly volleyed first by Ari Aster in his new little horror semi-gem, Midsommar, 'hallucinaturalism' - i.e. going for what a drug trip visual actually looks like, the way hallucinations actually work, not as kind of totally separate from the world around them, but a space beyond time where we can see the breathing of flowers, the growing of plant tendrils, the spiraling out of the breath, the rays of the sun, the soul leaving the body.

Am I myself getting of ahead? Surely the plot should be pretty familiar to you if you've ever gone to visit a rural commune with a friend of a friend for either a weekend camping/party or rock festival (we had the 'Barn Bash' at our guitarist's family farm, among other events). Such areas make the perfect tripping zone - no cops, no cars, no drawer-searching rehab-calling parents, unless there's a pen with a bull stamping around in it, no real danger. But even so, one can find one's mellow being harshed by one's buzzkill old lady, the type who invites herself along and then makes frowny faces every time you want to do funnels, or shrooms, or whatever (she doesn't want you to do them without her, but she doesn't want to do them yet... and it's always yet). Our main backpacker heroine is a kind of damaged co-dependent bi-polar buzzkill Dani (Florence Pugh), tagging along with her passive-douche boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), the kind of guy who's too cowardly to break up with her so close to the triple suicide of her sister and parents, or figure out how to not invite her as he tags along with his anthropology masters degree buddies on a summer vacation to the solstice midsummer celebration at the agrarian commune of their Swedish friend Pelle (Vilhelm Bolmgren) who seems pretty normal. They're expecting a kind of cross between Burning Man and an Amish barn raising party. Well, they get all that and more too, in the clear light of day, forever (the lack of a setting sun or nightfall is one of the film's most uncanny elements).

Bobby "Haxan Cloak" Krlic's score might veer strangely close to Colin Stetson's for Aster's previous instant horror classic Hereditary - especially near the end, when the Phillip Glassy synth drones and cascading triplets come flowing into a kind of transformative sound re-baptism - but he gets the paranoid drones just right and the strange chanting diegetic songs are just the perfect level of strange. Though it lacks the core of great acting we get from Toni Collette, leading to a kind of gaping hole in the middle of the narrative, that's OK. And it's OK that it doesn't really add up to much beyond the sum of its parts - and that at 2 1/2 hours it still feels like so much of the film is missing.

Still, it's got enough great moments and, again the 'truest' hallucinations ever in cinema, and maybe the best druggy sex scene ever. It's right up there and it encompasses all that is interesting, beguiling and terrifying about such 'communes' - the collapse of privacy, of independent thought and of a kind of binding that obscures the commonality.

Dani's moaning and screaming at last finds its entrainment absolving MIDSUMMER NIGHT MOAN  “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.” ― Joseph Campbell

 Paranoia and a feeling of secure group belonging, a kind of tribal security. are--one would think--opposites with a huge grey area in between - it's that grey area where most of us exist, never quite committing to the rapture of the group mind via becoming one of a tribe (a "worker among workers" as they say in AA) nor spinning off into complete isolation (wherein you paint your windows black and don't answer the door or phone anymore, and spend your nights screaming into a pillow as hands come out of the walls and just being able to put on your shoes and go outside for a six-pack seems like some impossible dream).

On psychedelics one isn't necessarily free of one's issues, they're just magnified. But with the right group--a primal scream therapy group at your therapist's office every other week for example--you can magnify your woes to such a large degree they disappear from the horizon.
Now, if you have taken drugs like psilocybin, LSD or ecstasy (I refuse to call it 'molly' - it's 'x' or 'ex' damn you) at a big hippy commune or outdoor music festival or pagan commune or weekend party on some sprawling farm - and you may have been, as I have been, dozens of times, dancing away, surrounded by happy hair-twirling hippies high as hell, and suddenly--out of the blue-- gotten paranoid. These people are all rabid monsters and you might be sacrificed to some ancient god during the height of the ecstatic rave orgy and even if you could escape, you have no idea where the nearest cop is, or if he's in on it, or even how to dial a phone in your current state. Every girl seems to be hitting on you through her ecstatic breathing, tendrils of pink azure longing tapping your chakras and filling you with her scent and wiles, but not in a good way - in a Monarch 7 Eyes Wide Shut kind of way. Every guy you know seems to trying to lure you someplace remote so they can hit you up for shrooms but you don't want to share any - they're not ready for this shit - their neediness and jonesing like daggers in reverse. Only your reflection in the mirror reminds you that you're even you, and how far over the rainbow you are. A few shots of Jaeger and a deep breath, a song you like, a chance to go onstage and sing "Sweet Jane" and maybe you're okay again. The trees wiggle indiscriminately.



Whether hot coal walks or bad acid trip paranoia, initiation ordeals leave us tightly united to the group without the need for a common enemy. Rather than bonding through collectively hating on some outcast, which is like the cheap knock-off Elmer's of social binding, it is through this initiation (which when it goes too far and frat dicks get ahold of it becomes 'hazing'). (2)

---
NOTE: This site is devoted to fear of the unknown and unknowable, there are no pictures or descriptions of any tangible monster or human-related terrors. To bask in the comparatively comforting glow of tangible horror, look toDr. Twilite's Neighborhood. 

In this Issue:

“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.” ― Jean Baudrillard

"Fake it 'til you make it"- old AA proverb

Written and conceived by doe-eyed El Salvadorian ex-SNL writer Julio Torres (the genius behind the 'Wells for Boys' sketch) and the startlingly deadpan young writer/comedian Ana Fabrega, LOS ESPOOKYS, a new HBO comedy is one of the first to be filmed in Spanish meant for American audiences as well as the world. Set in Mexico, the show chronicles the interlocking adventures of a group of horror make-up/effects specialists who--for a fee--stage 'real' scares: everything from UFO abductions, to exorcisms, sea monster sightings (to drum up seaside tourism), and old dark house hauntings and so forth. Fans of  classic Mexican horror, Ed Wood, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the ficciones of Borges, the deadpan drollery of Fred Armisen (i.e. Portlandia) and all the true (?) ghost and UFO shows on cable--ay dios mio!-- must love it.

Aside from the deliriously deadpan ultra-fey Torres (as emo/goth/his own thing cookie fortune heir Andres) and the vacant Tati (as the group's idiot savant intern), the show stars Bernardo Velasco as Renaldo, the sweet-hearted ringleader, and badass flaca Ursula (Cassandra Ciangherotti). José Pablo Minor is Andres' hopelessly vain fiancee; Paloma Moreno Fernandez is the possibly hypnotized TV hostess whose E-style clip news show becomes a showcase for these 'real' happenings; John Early is a coked-up pyramid scheme health drink scam artist who power talks Tati into buying hundreds of cases of his energy drink on credit, then comes after her with the coked-up fury of a rabid dog; Fred Armisen is Renaldo's Uncle Tico, who lives in America where he's a master valet who rescues and then hooks the gang up with Carol Kane as a kind of Doris Wishman/Roberta Findlay horror director; a stereotypical blonde American ambassador (Greta Titelman) enters the picture when they need work visa and she may be willing to expedite if it means they stage a haunted mirror abduction that will garner her an extra week vacation. It all only gets weirder from there, but hey - we're with these unfadable titans of scariness, every haunted step.

dee-glorious

Aside from this powerhouse cast, great concept and deliriously rapid but easygoing pacing, it's just nice to find a show on HBO that cares nothing for sudden, disturbing misogynistic sexual violence. Instead we're blessed with a colorful, good-natured zesty comedic dissertation on the way reality encompasses the fictional to create living myth, popping with great colors, sublime ensemble acting and subtext that brilliantly encompasses the way magic-realism keeps myth alive in Mexico (the way it just isn't in hopelessly materialistic Yankee-land).  In stepping out of the borders of the US it delves deep into the more open-minded mythic social structure of Catholic-heavy Mexico, a land where imagination still reigns and one can believe in haunted houses, get thoroughly scared by a bunch of ghosts, but then show up the next day to hire the gang who faked it all for your own event, never once letting the dichotomy of that, of belief/scared coupled to knowing its 'faked' - bother them.


While Smithsonian and the 'SCI' channel deliberately obfuscate UFO "truths" by exploring already debunked cases (then proudly debunking them), and History and Travel go the other route, Los Espookys transcends both to arrive at a 'hole' truth superior to both fiction and the socially-accepted parameters of 'reality'. As we see with the clients that hire them and the people they scare or entertain, knowing (or suspecting) something is fake doesn't detract from the power of the myth, especially in a more mythic place like Mexico. There the metatextual post-modern simulacrum of our current era is implicitly understood in ways America, being itself a simulacrum, will never see (the way fish don't notice water). There's no need to add a logos-choked materialist 'skeptic' like Gunnar Björnstrand in Bergman's The Magician (1958) or one of the smarmy hipster naysayers that even History Channel UFO shows once employted to keep in the idiotic little investigatory teams (see "Zealots of Doubt"). Free of America's terrified knee-jerk tenure-brass-ring grabbing first-world 'expertise', there's no need to protect the borders of what constitutes reality. Once undefended, it disappears.

You can read that last paragraph two ways, either as racist (Mexicans are dumb enough to believe anything and can't afford to go to Harvard) or as an example of the Latin American gift for magical-realism ala Garcia-Lorca / Jodorowsky / Castaneda / Borges. We come to the zone where we have to realize that Spanish /Latin American conceptions of the supernatural exist on an infinitely higher plane than the true/false dichotomy of the North. In the mythic reality of Mexico, the wall between the real and the vividly imagined is not only elastic, traversable, and illusory, but porous. The ability to traverse freely across this barrier is something that Americans only get during the LSD trips, or as young children, or during schizophrenic breaks, or when suffering from an intense fever. It's something we'd never usually see in an American TV show where we're constantly on the scent for hoaxes and scams. We're so terrified of looking foolish to our peers(and maybe attracting all sorts of scam artists who sense our 'kook' gullibility) that it's far better to just keep our lips frozen in a perma-sneer of disbelief.

Will get fooled again - Jaime Maussan

The Mexican consciousness (based on this and other shows, purely) is by contrast not as concerned with governing one's belief system based on popular opinion as if they are still stuck in some stressful high school pecking order.. An example of this difference is the undiscerning Mexican TV UFOlogist Jaime Maussan (left) who tends to take all evidence presented as truth rather than hoax or misidentifications. If photos, video or witnesses are proven either deliberately or accidentally off the mark, Maussan never seems to feel ashamed or taken for a fool - he merely puts one case down and moves onto the next.  For him it's the wonder, not necessarily the affidavit. A snarky UFO doc I saw awhile ago actually released a close-tied bunch of big silver balloons into the air above Mexico City when they knew he was out filming to trick him - and he fell for it. But is he dismayed? Nope. And frankly, that's what makes him way more intriguing than some of the other authenticity-obsessed types who never seem to get any evidence at all.

In the world of Los Espookys, there are multiple realities within the diegesis: the horrors staged by the group are fake, but demonic events, hauntings, inter-dimensional mirror abductions, etc. seamlessly occur as well. The funniest of these being an ancient underwater creature who promises to tell Andres the truth about his birth (he believes he's a demon child who was left on the doorstep of his adopted parents), provided he first show her The King's Speech on his laptop.

In the meantime we in Los Estados Unidos turn to horror films for our fakery, living the myth through that extra window of separation. That's the end moral in the show, where Renaldo learns that it's better to scare people for real in Mexico than make bad movies in America. To make fake reality is to make myth - this is not hoaxing, this is the anti-hoax. The skeptics of America would stamp HOAX on pictures of Santa, and FAKE on Easter Bunny mall pics (as in my own expose of Bunny Fraud, via Queen of Disks - above left) this is aiding the supernatural with a screen for itself to project on from within the collective unconscious.  Trying to say what percentage of the universe is still unknown makes one look stupid for just trying to answer, like casting a fishing line into New Jersey and when you don't get a nibble, declaring it an empty lake.

Certainty is a luxury reserved for the ignorant.

More than ever, the mountain of evidence in favor of UFOs is so high you only have to start reading and watching cable to get that stoner jaw-drop kind of feeling. If you doubt, just look into Dr. Roger Leir's implant removal and the subsequent forensic research on said implants; the death bed confessions from high-ranking leaders in the military and aeronautics industry (Phillip Corso, Richard French, etc);  the case of Phil Schneider and the Dulce Wars; the stories of Bob Lazar; and the videos and firsthand accounts from military personnel assembled by the Pentagon's exotic technology study group vis-a-vis whistleblower Luis Elizando - the evidence stacks higher and higher if you can handle it. But it's terrifying the more convinced you become. That's why a parallel belief that it's all just hoaxes, our own advanced technology misidentified (due to lack of communication between black budget military projects) or drones piloted by mischievous third world supervillians or brainiac little rich hackers - is so important for our peace of mind. If you think the fabric of our social reality wouldn't tear in a million pieces if such news as an alien presence was made 'undeniable', as in, pics of the aliens landing on the White House lawn on CNN, you haven't really thought it through. We haven't officially acknowledged the alien presence in at least 3000 years. As a result, we've been allowed to build some neat shit, confident it's the first time it's been done. Would a neanderthal feel inspired to learn basic math if he was met by people of today?? He'd just bow and pray or try to smash your smart phone out fear. He'd feel no sense of actual progress and achievement, only an ocean of inferiority so vast there's no point trying to build a boat.

There's a fascinating episode ofM*A*S*H--the season six finale ("Major Topper") where the unit runs out of morphine and has a full house of suffering casualties. Colonel Potter decides to try the giving out placebos until the real stuff arrives. He instructs his doctors and nurses on the importance of acting as if this placebo is the real thing: they must show absolute confidence in the power of the pill. They tell patients it's a very potent new drug, etc, even stronger than most opiates. The slightest lack of conviction on the staff's part can lead to... nothing... no effect. But they pull it off, and for most of the wounded, it works great.

Is not the razzle-dazzle carny tricks, the shaking rattle and strange dances of the shaman, the mix of hocus pocus and hypnosis, similar to the belief in the placebo? Conjuring healing spirits up out of feathers and sage smoke, the shaman conducts the air, blows tobacco smoke in the face of invisible demons, and create psychic currents in the mind the way the snake charmer blows his drowsy reed.

In the eyes of a debunker, this would be a hoax. Would the "Mythbusters" feel the need to storm the MASH tent and wise the patients back into a world of 'honest' pain? Since the mainstream medicine can't quite figure out how a trick of the mind can affect the physical healing process so strongly (or vice versa, as in the stigmata), surely they must point out it cannot technically be working.
The mind is a curious, unknowable thing, as vast and strange as the universe it's part of. Fiction is seized on as needed - thus a book that never existed, like the Necronomicon, is now sought after by people who believe it's real; then some enterprising genius writes one --a kind of post-myth truth. Or consider the case of Carlos Castaneda's "Teachings of Don Juan," based on the teachings a Yaqui shaman who, by most accounts, doesn't actually exist, but people say they have 'studied with him' - did they mean the took mescaline in the Mexican mountains and spent an hour having a life-altering psychic conversation with what he thought was a snake but turned out to be an abandoned grouse nest?

The brain that works so hard to deny the unknown is itself dangerously unaware of its own unconscious. The person with such an attitude may be in some form of repetitious denial from, say, being laughed at in elementary school for believing in fairies. An affirmed atheist is usually reacting against being forced to go to a very dogmatic church as a child, little knowing or allowing himself to know that there are millions of other, better ways to envision God -they have killed off their sense of wonder by a desperate bid to belong to the 'right' side, to believe only in what is firmly and conclusively 'known' and areso hostile to ideas involving aliens, ESP, reincarnation and ghosts that even concrete evidence is dogmatically disregarded. They have a flimsy sense of self and groundedness, otherwise they wouldn't have such a closed-minded reaction. They are the witch burners of their age.

The American Embassy in Mexico City in the Age of Trump

In their way, atheists are really no better than the creationists, for really, any decent Pisces could show them a third alternative, where both evolution and creation, where God and no/God can easily fit into a single paradigm (DNA as the computer language God uses to code itself into existence).

This goes both ways of course - the undeniable power of God-- a holy visitation - a heavenly hand reaching from the clouds opening up behind you, to touch your shoulder and electrify your kundalini like a bolt of lightning, can either lead you to join a holy order and renounce selfish ways - you asked for a sign and received one! Or to think about doing that, then shrug it off after awhile when you realize what a drag that would be. Maybe you were just 'expecting' some big holy event, some Potter placebo effect, and it was delivered. Thus the doubter who insists on a sign before belief--and then gets just that sign--often refuses to believe anyway.

In sum, we're better off without either undeniable evidence or a dead worldview that allows no wonderment about the world. Los Espookys' genius lies in this, in becoming the "/" in the either/or dichotomy. To find the truth behind the unknown too soon may seem like a good idea, but then you're stuck having to pretend to be surprised later, when it's finally time to open your present. The trick is to have already forgotten what it was, because you're so stoned all the time.

Summer always brings three things to casa de Acidemic: Marlene Dietrich movies, Val Lewton, and bad shark movies. For reasons known only to them, Syfy isn't deluging us with their Asylum and Offshoot giant and mutant shark movies this year's Shark Week. Maybe because they don't have Deep Blue Sea 3- Blewing Deeper and Sharknado 7 - Rise of Megiteracudadon is still getting CGI-ed into existence. But a lot of their 'best' are on either Syfy on Demand or Amazon Prime, along with some others you may have heard nothing about. Here are some, with notes to help you navigate these seldom-critically chummy waters. Ratings are all relative to a certain level of badness and audience indulgence. The criteria is the ideal lazy Saturday afternoon half-nap - a certain level of humor and beachy vibes and Bechdel professionalism, i.e. women (as per the Corman tradition) as sheriffs, scientists, grizzled shark hunters, as well as lifeguards and shark-drawing bathers) -and just enough thrills to keep you watching, not enough to bum or stress one out, and wit without getting puerile, imbecilic, or tawdry).

One of a trio of neo-'head' movies (along with CLIMAX and MIDSOMMAR) that marks 2019 as the year psychedelics became the new weed and weed became a nootropic, THE BEACH BUM signals the return to the ever-in-style bad boy auteur Harmony Korine, his stoned-ass hour has come! Furthering the sunglasses and turquoise Florida ecstasy-dilated forward kinetic momentum of his 2012 masterpiece Spring Breakers. This time it's no two-week college vacation but a way of permanent life, sans guns, unless you count poetry as violence, and the occasional cold cocking a cripple with a beer bottle as somehow deserving of legal repercussion. Moondoggie doesn't. Sailing with the ocean wind at full speed, damn the too torpedoed to keep up with the headlong momentum of a poetic madman on an everything that comes his way binge, swapping out Saint Pete for the party-hearty Key West. Which is a 24/7 raging town where everyone knows and loves the Moondog (no relation to the famous NYC street musician - except perhaps subliminally). Once a literary lion, now a sun-trippin' chronic-bong-rippin' alleycat, Moon spends his days fishing on his crazy Rube Goldberg-does-gravity-bong-hits houseboat with a few naked girls, and at home with an understanding maid who helps him up when he passes out on the floor. Welcome to drop in on any party, make out with anyone's girlfriend, or rush anyone's stage, Moondog's wise enough to never judge anything or anyone--he makes 'the Dude' seem uptight and reminds me of my previous parlay with enlightenment (see my 2012 Galactic Awakening and its ensuing poetry here) but awfully hard to maintain once reality sniffs you out like a police dog and sinks its judgy wudgy fangs into your tender fetlock. Fame sure helps keep that dog leashed though, allowing the Moondog to sashay through life as if it's his own private dream where he only he knows he's dreaming.

Maybe he is, maybe we're seeing people's reactions to his antics through his own rose-colored shades, and there might be a different movie, through the eyes of a sober, weary soul who just wants to drink in peace, for whom Moondoggies' antics are just tiresome reminders of how much less 'fun' such behavior actually is (forcing the witness to re-evaluate how charming booze actually makes him). We see a bit of it in the way he does judge his daughter for marrying a straight-edge dillweed, but it should be clear enough to him why his daughter is so hungry for structure.

And indeed, it seems like a dryly self-aware fantasy for delusional poets, those of us who surrendered the dream of being the next Charles Bukowski or Hunter S. Thompson shortly after realizing the real world had no space for such people anymore, except as small chapbook distributing visiting professors who spend half the year traveling the country giving readings at tiny bookstores. In real lifethere's simply no more room in the pantheon of greats for us - the living rockstar poets of today, man. Times have changed, man. The idea that anyone could be famous for poetry in a party town like Key West is itself a fantasy, like going platinum for your self-produced album of mostly in-key acid rock jams.

In case you can't tell by my veiled bitterness, I had a mild taste of 'the' life back in Syracuse back in the late-80s and NYC in the early-90s, when I was doing radio and TV voiceovers; a time when someone like Maggie Estep could still get on MTV (so there was hope/ for us all / to rise / like dough / on flour-strewn boards / the rolling pin and the proving / the open mic salted but not too soured  / over thyme, etc.), but I needed far too much chemical enhancement to stay that positive for more than a few months straight without winding up getting strep throat or a massive flu (impossible to avoid up in Syracuse where the snow never melts and the heaters carry molds stretching back to the dawn of time). But I talked the talk and walked the walk, and I knew the Moondogs, and loved the drugs and sometimes could even stand listening the Grateful Dead or reading Wallace Stevens, But that's the genius of Moondog, he sails through life irregardless of the clammy claws of the social order. Even stripped of his riches, he finds wealth in an endless assortment of local color with which to run wild, never judging the violent anymore than the righteous.  Even forced into rehab, he finds a way to handle it - to just break out at the first opportunity and go deep underground. A real outlaw.

Matthew McConaughey is brilliant in the lead, playing an extension of the character he'd already perfected to the point of godliness 26 years ago in 1993's Dazed and Confused, the Zen floater on currents of non-focalized amorphous fraternal love and bliss that make him able to pull down complex poetically-phrased thoughts that stun and reduce his pot-struck cronies to near tears. We see how he's tapped into the same divine hedonistic source that made him so deft at pulling the tachyon potentiality strings that alerted his daughter to his presence behind the bookshelf in Interstellar (see 'Space is the Place: Sun Ra vs. Mathew McConaughey). He's a high brother. He reminds me of me in college, of course, thanks to the band I was in; I too had a rep where I never had to pay for drinks or covers, and would sell xeroxed copies of my chapbook for $1 each, and was welcome on any stage, to improv poetry over jams from my fellow bands, at least for a few years. All that went away of course, and its absence crushed me like an empty can, almost sending me on that long swim until Night of the Iguanasaved my life. But I would have loved to show my dad this movie as if to say "see dad! You can get rich on poetry and unemployment."

Still, in the end it's a fantasy to imagine anyone could make enough money on a book of poetry to be able to please a cash-guzzling southern "literary agent." Coupled to this naive view of the solidity of the publishing world's financial status, is the idea that with enough weed you can float past the consequences of busting out of a court-mandated rehab, stealing a boat and going on a wild crime and auto theft bender spree with a vaping felon (a thugged-out Zac Effron), breaking a bottle over a crippled man's head as he steers home in his electric wheelchair, knocking him down and robbing him so you can afford booze and prostitutes, without it affecting your Jimmy Buffet worldview; that because you're so filthy rich, the cops will just forget all the damage you've wrought. (almost like how it was considered 'in fashion' to be robbed by Jean Genet). He never serves time or is caught. Fleeing to his house in the Keys seems to do the job. As with the ending of Taxi Driver, or the little 'ride to jail' escape dream shard by Edward Norton in Spike Lee's The 25th Hour we've somewhere along the line crossed over into wish fulfillment fantasy.

One aspect of the brilliance of Korine's work, stretching back to his script for Larry Clark's seminal Kids (1995), is that he trusts his audience to navigate this kind of deceptive murk as it were the clear water of a tropical beach, that hides broken glass and invisible jelly fish -- which sting you without the music on the score changing from happy beach jams. He gives us in The Beach Bum, as he did in Spring Breakers, a morally bankrupt antihero on a truly endless summer, encouraging us to identify without emulation, to get a feel for the kinetic freedom of those willing to do whatever it takes to stay in the bliss of the moment, unattached to possessions so much as seeking intoxicants and never saying no to weird opportunities, nor even judging people's actions as right or wrong, to not go on a crime spree after seeing the film's ostensible heroes commit crimes and get away with them.


There's a brilliant druggy breathy moment between college students Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson (who funded their trip south by robbing an all-night cafe), and James Franco (the drug kingpin of "Saint Pete", who bailed them out when they got busted for drugs in their hotel room during their initial massive coked-out orgy) - the three are all twisted up in a weeklong naked threesome on beds of money, guns, and drugs, when suddenly the girls grab a gun and stick right in Franco's face, as if to say, sucker, we got you now, and are going to take all his cash and split. Franco is we're expecting to either get pissed off or panic, but he quickly brings himself back into the moment and starts fellating the gun. Is this something they improvised? Either way, it's brilliant - all with repetitive whisper ASMR whispery drug/sex talk. It's that kind of kinetic in-the-moment response that earns our admiration and makes both Breakers and Bum work as twin masterpieces of duplicating the best highs of the drug experience, they are the corbeille américaine nouvelle vague - as accomplished in their heedless momentum as Truffaut's one-two punch of 400 Blows and Shoot the Piano Player at the dawn of the swingin' early 60s. Of course those weren't separated by seven years in which Truffaut only managed to make two music videos. But there were so fewer drugs floating around then. The best one could do was expired US Army amphetamines and endless wine. God knows the shit Korine's been doing, it probably doesn't even have a name yet, just a molecular number.

There is a moment early on when, to inherit his share of his late wife's millions, Moondog must first publish his long-delayed new book of poetry. To motivate him, he's totally cut off, and even kicked out of their Miami mansion, essentially forced to look for hand-outs as he bums around with his typewriter in a pillowcase. Then, he's arrested and forced into a 12-month rehab but he escapes after a few days and never looks back, nor does he have to! Between that and the way his rather dubious poetry is so highly regarded that he can stagger up to the podium at the Pulitzer Prize award dinner and babble about his cock and be embraced like a scruffy saint, his daughter now laughing at his jokes again, his cash released and presented to him in a giant slab, lets you know this is the kind of fame imagined by a stoned poetry class freshmen ranting at his school's open mike nights, but he rants / to no avail.

To no avail.

But I know these Moondog types, I partied with them, and it's certainly true that they liven up their corner of the scene. As long as you don't expect coherence or to be your own center of attention, you're bound to have a good time when they're around. Certainly they're no mooches, unless they don't happen to have anything, which they seldom do as they're too generous with it so it's gone very fast (Jesus with the loaves and fishes they ain't). Still, we understand why Snoopp would give him a plane, a massive wad of cash, and a wheelbarrow full of weed, to make his getaway when the law closes in on Snoop's pleasure palace. At the same time, none of his new friends ever proves hard for the Dog to leave when he gets the least bit bored or called off on his magical road. He end up never having to shoehorn a glommer off of his leg, which alas happens quite often in real life. Everyone is as welcoming as they are understanding of the cosmic forces which draw him thither (or they're just happy to see him go).

On the other hand, for every one of the charming Dogs there are about 100 mooches. Magically, Moondog never attracts such needy barnacles. After I graduated I'd drift back to that scene and there was a would-be Moondog (but really just a joneser townie) named Doug E. Fresh (who actually looks a lot like MM does here, as far as facial hair, but with a much rattier, townie-style face). He didn't do poetry but he did have raps, which were the nu-poetry in 1991, and he'd never stop reciting them. You'd hear him recite the same lame rhyme flow over and over through the night as he hit on each new girl at the party. I'm sure, in his mind, he thought he was as irresistible as Moondog, but that's the genius of having McConaughey in the role. Swap him out with, say, Robert Wuhl, Ethan Hawke, or Eric Schaeffer and see if he gets the same howda ya do without it feeling like someone is buying him friends.


I can't spoil the ending, nor do I want to give up many plot points since there are so few of them - let's just say that he walks it likes he talks it, and no amount of challenges in his late wife's will can prevent him from doing just as he pleases, whether that includes leading a chorus of homeless inside his wife's and his pearly gates, to go swimming and then trash his own living room (shades of 2017's Mother!) or celebrating... something by a kind of ritualistic self-immolation (and Korine loves to film outsider derelicts smashing rich people furniture, a tribute to his beloved Werner Herzog, and perhaps Bunuel).

It's all just a dream anyway, so why not do as thou wilt? Jonah Hill's accent as the super rich literary agent lets you know just how much of a fantasy this is, especially in this day and age. The only literary agent living that high on the hog today is JK Rowling's.

As I get older and older, the kind of in-the-moment hedonism, McConaughey displays here leaves me feeling both assured and slightly lost, not that I didn't get enough of a taste for that kind of life in my prime, but that I could never sustain it for long. Other people in my group could ride it all the way, and in some ways that wave is only now beginning to break. I'd have loved to be a fly on the wall during this shoot to see just what they were all smoking, if they actually smoked that much. Like Nick Charles with his drinking, one can really only smoke so much pot without hitting a kind of plateau and either crawling over to the TV to waste the rest of the day, crashing onto the beach, or going into a paranoid heart-racing tailspin. Nick's drinking consumption would probably kill a normal human being but it's a kind of fantasy of excess. Especially in this day and age, weed has become so strong most of us can barely handle more than a single hit or two before reaching that breaking point wherein it's no longer fun.

I'm sure that's not true for all of us. Couple guys I know... they could. But they sure ain't about to write poetry. The biggest weed smoker I know did get one to write memoirs, with my encouragement, when he was in jail, and he was a natural with lots of sharply-observed details. But he didn't have access to weed then, I assume. He stopped writing once he resumed smoking.

Thank god then, there's a man like Moondog, out there smokin' and livin' a dream.

Where will the crabs go,
when there's no more crotches like his?

A key element of Korine's mise-en-scene here is pace. For all its momentum, Spring Breakers would up in plenty of circular eddies, with sound bytes repeated over and over, like a breathy, coke shiver mantra, and dead ends like jail and the wearisome Catholic reticence of Selena Gomez. There's none of that here, just a forward march move of the Dog, so that even rehab seems like it's part of an incredible outlaw journey undertaken while stumbling genially forward. There's never a dead stop. We seldom, if ever, see Moondog either eat or sleep --he's never shown as starving, dizzy from lack of a decent meal, looking for a place to shit or pee, or throwing up from too much booze; he passes out once on the floor once early on, and his loving housekeeper rescues him but as soon as he's back on his feet he's off and rolling away the doobs.

Korine captures a very rare and difficult to do right interiority in his mastery of this style. Just as he did with Breakers, we're given the 'inside' view of a very high man. We don't get a 'true' external but we do sense that, with just a slight shift in the POV, Dog's antics might seem the height of uncool tragedy. We get glimpses of the underside to Moondog's shenanigans in the corners of frames sometimes, like the poor old lady in the wheelchair he sends flying across the veranda into wall while bounding into his daughter' wedding ceremony. It's okay because she's not really his mother, or something - and she's forgotten. We don't even see if anyone helps her back into her chair. Indeed, the way the other person in a chair we see is cold-cocked and robbed, we wonder if the Dog and/or Korine has an unconscious resentment against the physically impaired, which is uncool. On the other hand, there's his erstwhile dissing on the loathsome banality of his daughter's choice in husband, which he does right there on the wedding floor. On the other hand, he doesn't recognize him as the kind of straight edge type of spouse sought after by adult children of flaky drug-addled partying celebrity parents (ala Saffie in Absolutely Fabulous or Christian Bale in Laurel Canyon). In other words, her choosing a doofus is partially his fault.

What makes Korine's view unique, is that the Moondog gets away with it. Is it because he's a celebrity or because he's Matthew McConaughey?

A few years before I had my first drink there was a chapter on alcoholism in my middle school health class. Actually it was that textbook that inspired me to try and smoke weed for the first time, being up til then a depressive punk rock straight edge: on the very last page at the end they point out they quietly mention pot has no long-term negative effects and indeed might promote immunity health and that psychedelics have immeasurable therapeutic value when done in the right circumstances. Alcohol on the other hand was a poison en par with heroin as far as detrimental health value and erosion of competency. We learned on the other hand that, though weed made you stupid if done to excess, it was reversible. Quit smoking and all your brain cells would grow back.

In this health class was shown a movie on the dangers of booze we see is a girl in a high school play and she's a big success. On opening night and then during the curtain call, down the center aisle of the crowded assembly room comes drunk mom, in her bathrobe, staggering onstage to bring her embarrassed daughter a tattered flower bouquet, babbling into the mic about what a great daughter she is before crawling off to sleep in the wings. Ugh! We might also think of Norman Maine's drunken crashing of his wife's award speech (either at the Oscars or Grammys) in any of the Star is Borns).  Seeing such naked sloppy attention grabbing is--in those films--not unlike lifting the rock off a bug nest, for the disease thrives in hiding, the alcoholic ideally (if they have stock on hand) seldom gets out of bed, unless it's to pee, throw up, or find the TV remote. Like a cat, most of an alcoholic's life is spent sleeping, as the digestive system (liver, pancreas, kidneys) tries to get some food value out of the onslaught of toxins thrown its way in lieu of regular meals.

My point is a fine one, as one who knows both the inside and outside of those sprees (for once I got sober, my dad's behavior--for he was a steady drinker--neither as drunk nor as sober as me--went back to being rather hard to take at times. Repetitive- he had a period of about 1-2 hours - from cocktail hour (4 PM) to maybe 8 or 9 PM, when his sparkle would wear off and the scintillating wit would kind of run out and go back to the same old stories, like a TV channel that runs out of new programming so just replays the shows from earlier in the evening. He'd laugh --in the same spots in the same way--at the same jokes (even the same enunciations!) he'd made the night before, and even the night before that. Whether it was waxing rhapsodically over the tenor of Montgomery Clift's work in Judgment at Nuremberg or extolling the virtues of Frost/Nixon, laughing in the exact spots time and again. I learned I could never be a movie usher, with the same film again and again on in the background. Good lord, I can't even imagine.

Dialing it back, anyway, my dad ceased to be annoying once I too was drinking. I know too the cushy inside of that - I know what it's like to be all warm with whiskey mixing heroic grandeur and emotional sweep into the blood, so that every flourish of your hands in time with the sweep of some Bernard Hermann passage feels as if you're conducting the whole of Odessa across the steppes, a one man Dr. Zhivago of emotion and scope all encapsulated into your every head turn. What's genius about Korine's and McConaughey's excellent work on the Bum is that it captures that rush of genius feeling without the need to either back it up with genuine brilliant diegetic poetry or anything like actual consequences. We're so conditioned to presume that with the wife's dying will edict about getting his act together coupled with the judge (who even confesses she "used to be a fan") remanding him to rehab, that he'll emerge with a haircut and a suit and we'll have the other polarity, which is what--if Korine was a 19 year-old screenwriting student at some generic writing workshop, he'd be told is important for character arc (I can just see the teacher drawing a big half-circle on the white board and gazing hopefully at Harmony like he's a precious little five year-old), workshopping it all down until it's another 28 Days (2000).

Clearly, Moondog needs no lessons in learning boundaries or how to open up to people, he can just do it while getting lit with Snoop Dogg (Here called 'Lingerie' so we don't get our 'dogs' mixed).

Cigarettes helped obscure how unattractive that all looks from far enough away. Now in bars you can see all the way across the room, and smell the way proximity in a small space while drinking and being flushed with drink leads to a boozy mist in the air that smells like a tang. Luckily, we have Korine here to remind us how wondrous it all looks from close enough we're on the inside looking out, and everything sure is beautiful. The jokes keep coming, from Moondog shaking off his jealousy before it can blossom (when he sees wife and Lingerie making out on the dock) and goes deep into the fountain, swimming around while masterfully keeping his drink always above the waterline; or his temporary affiliation with Martin Lawrence's hilarious 'swim with the dolphins' boat guide, who winds up leaping in to a pool of sharks by mistake and has his foot bit off (which Moondog helpfully tosses into the ambulance before ambling onwards).

In the end, bro. It's all good. It looks great. And it even ends in such a way as we expect movies to end, with millions caught up in empty explosions and a cat in jeopardy. And along the way, Matt McConaughey is so very much his stoner self he all but smokes the film right in front of you.

And the cat lives!
--


For a nice chaser to the Moondog's shaggy antics, check out the paralyzing bad trip energy of Michael Cera in two underseen little gems from Chilean director, Magic Magic and Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus. 
The other two psychedelic hits of the year: CLIMAX, and MIDSOMMAR

Leave it to Europe to deliver on the promise of HD cameras and non-union expressionist German handwerkers, taking the time to bring old masters' lighting and composition to even their low budget fantasy. Here are--if not quite a slew, at least a few--fairly interesting, more or less family-friendly (presuming your kids are cool), dark fairy tale-style forays into deep Jungian crypto-horror, hailing from the Emerald Isle, Germany and Italy. The accents might not always be there (they sometimes seem to be doing 'American' accents) but the lighting runs from good to decent - these aren't your average DIY SOHDV miss-terpieces, but legit little minor key gems, just looking for a rocky outcrop to nestle in amidst the sprinking waterfall between YA fantasy fiction and horror, waiting for the right mopey young person, reading Bronte or Keats while perched on a fractal-patterned tapestry spread over the mossy rocks, to catch the secret glint of.


That they are all findable in the rocky maze of Prime (in the US at least), is a blessing. Normally we'd be able to see these only at a 'Fantastic Film Festival' where sneaking out after ten minutes would be, well, you'd hate to do it since you know the filmmaker and cast are probably in the row behind you and you're the only non-crew/cast member there, and really, it's not them it's you, etc. One of the reasons I stopped submitting my own work at festivals was to avoid this very thing. Just know this: the genesis of this post began after my surprise at the loveliness of The Forbidden Girl's cinematography. The other two films listed were the only ones I could watch to the end. I've started, stopped and flicked around on, dozens of similar titles on Prime just to get to these three (I was hoping for at least five), so bask in your moment if one of these lost kittens are yours! The rest of us, bring your grains of salt, your huddled sage-and-sandalwood candles yearning to be lit!

Performances are all superb, especially Jytte-Merle Böhrnsen, so alive from one moment to the next that capturing a good screenshot for her was like asking fire to hold its flicker; and Hain, whose mastery of the sort of raspy, old world seduction where we believe she could hold both young and older men in her sexy cobra stare on separate floors at the same time. Tange is legitimately frightening yet also romantically tragic and Gaidot shows he's more than just a pretty face through Toby's spirited can-do gallivanting in the face of insurmountable supernatural cockblocking. There are some less-than-successful CGI elements, depicting a kind of shadowy quick-moving ghost creature (shown way too early) ever trying to steal back Laura to hell or wherever, prowling the long Overlook-style hallways with their murky lighting mix of candle light, gas lamps, and the occasional dab of electric light, the CGI black smoke whiffs don't overstay their welcome (except for some tacky fire effects here and there) or become bogged down in tacky Danny Elfman whimsy cues, though composer Eckes Malz's reliance on familiar orchestral and chorale themes does seem a missed opportunity for some good droning synths). The camera zips and prowls on padded feet so we feel like we're skulking around the mansion's spooky vastness on stocking feet in the dead of night, to get the lay of the vast land. It's a hard thing to get right, but by the end of the film we feel like we know all the ins and outs of this weird wondrous place, including how to escape it.

One of the story's many strengths is the total absence of a distinct black/white dichotomy. We empathize with the romantic yearning and sense of irrecoverably lost time in the sad eyes of the older pair of lovers and can't help but wonder whether the real villain is actually Toby in his blind determination to rescue Laura whether she wants to go or not.

Jeanette Hain

America, Canada, the North, vast empty night skies, rows of dreary tract homes without trees or sidewalks. The Winter, the dwindling Fall, dying err it arrives. Can it be here at last, the chill, the leaves and the first day of school all at once; the bell of the end, the clicking wheel of life and death. And in film, dreams fill the void of the empty road, sky, and life.

And of course... autumnal Italy, art is older than America many centuries over - the orange hair of Nicoletta Elmi as she comes roaring at you with a hammer like a modern instance - and all on Prime...


The Prime thumbnail image for this film might fool you into thinking it's another 50s black-and-white Donovan's Brain retread (there are over a half-dozen movies with the same ironic title) but accept no substitutes: your Brain of choice should be Canadian, from 1988, and bathed in wintry Ontario wanness. The titular brain is a giant fanged alien head floating head (less Donovan, more Arous), so don't worry about being gypped on the monster end. It's using TV signals to brainwash parents into believing their children are dangerous illegal drug addicts! If that brings you a shudder of recognition, maybe you were a teenager in the 80s (the decade of urine samples and 'surviving straight'-style rehabs). Also you might be thinking of the divine Carpenter's They Live from the same year, but that was less about suburban rebels and more about inner city homeless. Not as relatable!

there's obviously no such thing as irony on this Brain's planet

The mise-en-scene of The Brain boils down to the welcomely familiar Hitchcockian lovers-on-the-run model as a smirky antihero (Tom Bresnahan) reaps the bitter fruits of his practical jokes when no one believes his conspiracy babbling, especially his girlfriend (Cynthia Preston) who works at a local diner and doesn't brook his tomfoolery. Still, escaping from his rehab leads to a great stretch of film where he's just driving around his local streets, eluding the funny farm wagon. The lead goon for the rehab is a hulking hipster of a thing, and the sight of him wafting gracefully out of the bughouse white van in his lab smock and credentials tag, brandishing ID tag and hypodermic and slinging a doped Tom over his shoulders like a bag of dogfood while fighting off his buddy and girlfriend, is one of those stealth cool/creepy sites we take for granted in movies like this. Anyway, old Tom deserves it: wasting his chemistry skills on the sort of spiteful anal-retentive panks too gauche even for a detention-magnet hesher. He's got a lot to learn.


Hypnotizing the whole Canadian town in order to suck up their brainwaves for his alien disembodied head ruler, Dr. Anthony Blakely (a re-animated David Gale) is a kind of Dr. Phil meets Dan O'Herlihy in Halloween III x Patrick Swayze's in Donnie Darko. The plan is to launch a global satellite system that will enslave the world but in the meantime, kill that rascally kid! The gift the big brain has for motivating the populace to kill smirky Bresnahan leads to great moments like housewives grabbing up jackhammers and swords whenever they see him and going crazy and hallucinating tentacles if they try to disobey. As the Brain grows ever bigger the more consciousnesses it devours, car chases and fights occur on the same drab suburban roads we all drove up and down every day while in high school, the kind with no sidewalk, or trees: tract homes hung in brick rows along soggy front lawns, peppered with shrubs and grey windows. It's grim but familiar territory and we can well imagine skulking in the property dividing bushes, taking backyard routes along tiny strips of shrubbery-filled no man's land to sneak home to get a change of socks. And the TV studio is also a rehab and looks just like the high school and the high school looks just like dorm rooms --it's all made out of concrete blocks, painted white or grey walls as prisons without bars. Again it's so familiar it's like the filmmakers are inside your head, rooting through your public high school memories like your own unconscious dreams.


Now we can watch a film like The Brain and--in addition to reveling in the great, over-the-tip but super slimy and welcomely analog latex monster, remember back to a time long before the internet, when cable and video was new and our current erosion of consensual reality only in its infancy, early enough that films like Videodrome and They Live seemed more speculative than historical. 1988--as evidenced by both The Brain and They Live coming out the same year--reflects a moment in time when parents were turned against their own children by hysteria-mongering TV pundits and first ladies urging everyone to just say no to drugs, even as every other facet of outlaw self expression was slowly rolled back on us. Our only quasi-legal 'fun' came in skipping school with one's girlfriend and maybe another couple to fool around a upstairs for hours while the parents were out working, then going to the mall and smoking cigarettes at the mall Spaceport. Too specific? For those of us living in this post-real America of the Now, where dueling 24/7 news channels turn political footballs into bombs and Russia crashes our future's hard drive with flag-pumpin' sock puppets fanning flames of the fires they faked us into fearing, this has never been more prescient, blah blah.

Forget all that relevance. Come back to when this was all just science fiction, when it was all just part of a mid-80s micro-wave that saw deep into the 'reality' that cable TV and video rental stores seemed doomed to propagate. The Brain never caught cult status like fellow Canadian Cronenberg's Videodrome or Carpenter's The Thing, but it's more fun than both put together, with the teen couple like a suburban version of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, running around the TV station chased by zombified guards and an ever scarier fanged beach ball. If you were a pot-smoking hippy or punk teenager in the 80s you may relate, as Nancy Reagan and hysteria-mongering news reports convinced your mom it was OK have you shanghaied by Christian extremist rehabs if she found a bag of oregano in your jeans.

Now that weed is practically legal, the real addiction is cell phones. There is no rehab for that ailment, and the world is already in the thrall of some ancient online Slavic monster that has no name... let us call him - Yogxander SoPutggi'noth- and his Necronomicon the Faciem-liber!


Brazilian director Monica Demes has clearly taken some points from other b&w womyn's rites vampire features, like Michael Almereyda's Nadja and, especially, Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone in her feature debut, filmed in Iowa while under David Lynch tutorship at the University of MUM (i.e. Maharahrishi University of Management). Sophia Woodward stars as Lucy, a dissatisfied woman living in a twilight world of the flatland emptiness-drenched midwest, where she's bossed around by her dad (she works at his gas station as a cashier), almost raped by his creepy-hot mechanic (Matthew Lloyd Wilcox), and bossed around by her doughy husband (Sam Garles).  Lillith (Barbara Eugenia) rides into Lucy's dreams to wreak some vengeance, though her dreams seem like they're also happening in reality. When it seems like it's almost always night, when days pass like dreamy flashes, which is which? That could be a sign to click 'stop' and keep scrolling, but resist! In a lot of ways this works as good as or better than Lynch's own Twin Peaks: The Return in that it's at least not boring and there's not as many badly-aged once-cute actors to remind us of our own crumbling mortality every second.

What helps most is that Demes and her cinematographers have found a way to capture the deep spooky blacks of the Iowa flat straight landscape, where the night extends outwards ever blacker into the vast distance, while letting us see, gradually, as shapes and faces emerge into an invisible lighting spectrum; there are blacks on blacks in ways one hasn't seen since straining to find Joe Spencer's tattoo on the cover of the Velvet's White Light/White Heat album. Filmed mostly in the dead quiet of night, with huge empty starless skies- a film that exists already deep in the void.

A kind 80 minute nightmare logic poem, Lilith could have been a real bore in lesser hands, but Demes takes a few pointers from Lynch (who cameoed as a security guard in Nadja!) by papering the cracks with a droning avant-garde minimalist underscore, adding intensely hypnotic layers to the empty darkness of the landscape; its few twisting trees, tapping into a meditative, pleasurable unease.

This is a dark movie, and the camera settles in for long-held static shots comprised often mostly of darkness, shadows of tangles of trees overlapping, or long flat stretches of road, with angry or zombified faces illuminated by dashboard lights at the wheel. Since it is so dark we're always peering into it, straining the emptiness out for faces; and sometimes, when one does show up, Demes ingeniously keeps the score quiet about it --there's no jangle of music letting us know what to feel and when we should feel it, and/or see what may even not be there. Thus, along with Lucy, we quickly begin to go crazy ourselves, as a defense mechanism against such unyielding emptiness; the uneasy wintry place where daylight savings' time is almost a relief, crushing out the latter half of the day from the reminder there's nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Strain real close now, and let your paredolia fly!

It's not perfect, moments like sudden CGI flash of fangs, or a dumb shot of Lilith hanging upside down from a tree are more dumb than scary or dreamy and throw one out of the moody spell. (Demes might have taken a look at the way bat conversion is subliminally alluded to in films like Daughters of Darrkness rather than spelled out); it would be the same in Witch Who Came from the Sea if we saw shots of Millie Perkins wearing a pointy witch's hat and straddling a trident-ended broom. It also doesn't seem believable that Lucy's chucklehead husband would announce to her that he invited his boss and his wife over for dinner and therefore he expects Lucy to cook some nice meal for them when their kitchen is the size of a matchbox and it's not the early 1960s anymore and it's clear she never cooks anyway and holds a full time job.

We hope she'd tell him to go fuck himself, or that Lilith, her dream anima-avenger shadow, will rip him asunder, but this is a movie not really on a realistic level -instead it has a kind of dreamy 'is Lilith real or is this girl hallucinating, seeing her murderous alternate personality as a fantasy (ala Millie Perkins in The Witch Who Came From the Sea); but who's complaining when--instead of the usual trenchcoated middle aged working stiff investigating detective we get lovely Eden West in big aviator shades and a leather jacket is the cute lady motorcycle cop investigating the mechanic's mysterious disappearance. With first timer--or any--horror movies, it's sometimes not about the cumulative effect and the cohesion into a nice wrap-up payoff, it's about the mood and the moment. And on that, Demes delivers!