When your only takable umbrage with a Cannon neo-peplum is a tacky corset worn by Sybil Danning (above) as the evil princess Adriana, then you know you are blessed by the refreshingly primitivist and un-tacky Coates once again.  File it, as I did, in my emergency reserves, right next to Plan Nine orMesa of the Lost Women, something to bring on your laptop over Xmas when you need a break from your brother's loud shouting at Alexa to play various "An Eric Clapton Christmas" over and over. Most Hercules films have all sorts of unforgivable things that make them unpleasant to see once, let alone often (unless the gym muscle rainbow is enuff - even then 95% of the stuff on Prime is in the wrong aspect ratio). To get to the perfect 'all flaw' gem facets of lovely classics like  The Car,The Devil's Rain, and Ghosts of Mars a sword and sandal film  needs to have a wild imagination and a love of movies that overrides limitations. Better to try for a time lapse change from an old witch face to a lovely enchantress than to just cheat it out with a reaction shot. No matter if it doesn't quite work, and better to have a hydra --even if it only has three heads, none of which move, except to slightly raise or lower the necks to breathe fire--than to have no hydra at all. Better to have Hercules stand semi-transparently in the middle of outer space, flexing his mighty self, then to just see him rolling around in the dust behind De Paolis. In each instance of his 'effects' Cozzi all but salutes some older movie he's clearly in awe of. Like Tarantino, he's a true fan of the genre/s. And if you have find memories of making movies as a kid (or now) and love seeing the seams, ala Ed Wood (like a magic show where the wires are visible), then you love Cozzi.

By now you guessed it. I love Ed Wood, and Cozzi  too. I got the double-sided disc of Cozzi's Herc films last summer and I've already seen them bith four times. I still haven't been able to stay awake through the B-side (Adventures of...., the Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe of Herc sequels) but that's OK-- I liked what I saw, almost as more than what I didn't.
Alexa, play "Erich loves a Cozzi-clastic Christmas!"

The lightbulb claiming credit for electricity-
don't trust it's wattage down the mossy stair
to the couch-warm coffin,
where the slightest misstep is certain life!

Cozzi, the Coates-holding footman never snickers.
The electricity from his cracked glass shell,
the brilliance from his busted filament's flicker,
carries Tesla madness, not Edison's argon sanity!
Heed his gonging clarion bell,
the way to the woe-free Lite-Brite city!

If you are afraid to eat the peach,
Cozzi cushions your woeful rise,
like dough left in a proving bin but briefly,
yet as as as leaden as the zeppelin's air,
by which I mean hydrogen! Hurray!

Mirella D'Angelo (Tenebrae) as Circe, the witch disciple of Athena who helps Hercules

See, Hercules isn't just about a muscle-head smashing foes, there's also lessons in astronomy: we learn the planets were formed from broken shards of Pandora's water jar; we learn how the constellations got their names and shapes (they're all things Hercules threw into deep space during fits of rage), and that the four elements are: night, day, matter, and air. These planets and jars are all shot through with color spectrum prisms, flashing lights overlay people so they all fade like Bert I. Gordon giants. (If you get that reference, this is the movie for you).

We learn that the gods were the first beings fashioned on the earth, and they settled on the moon to better observe and judge the tests of mankind. Thus we find Zeus (Claudio Cassinelli!) refereeing a bout betwixt the astringent Hera (Rossana Podesta) and the compassionate Athena (Delia Boccardo) over Hercules' journey, sending in their respective servants on earth to aid or abet Hercules on his epic quest. Perfectly cast as the mighty Hercules, with his huge jaw, dead set against the world, Lou "The Hulk" Ferrigno (well-dubbed by familiar voice artist Marc Smith) has a gift, a way with seeming deep inside himself, unfazed by threats or challenges, but then reacting to stimulus with the sudden reckless energy of a five year-old. His eyes squint to indicate focus on some magical spectacle and widen when roused to sudden violence. When he hears his mother has been slain he drops his harness and shouts "WHAT?" like he just saw his car getting stolen, and goes racing across the fields with these little but super fast steps like a six year-old might run from a barking dog. He reacts quick, like a prize fighter as opposed to a dancer. In short, he is the perfect choice for Hercules because we like him, and he's not a good enough actor to hide his real self from us, so we know he's trying hard, giving it his all, but not trying so hard he casts a dour pall over things.

As Herc's romantic lead/ princess-in-distress, Anderson spends most of her scenes in sexy hanging white linens, wearing a trippy golden crown, natural breasts tastefully cupped by scallop shells (no leering, but beautiful side boobs seen only in passing) "sweet and submissive" thanks to the 'black lotus' (mmmm) waiting to be burned alive as "a bride" of Minos' captured firebird/phoenix. But both evil (agent of Hera) Danning and good (agent of Athena) D'Angelo are very much active in Hercules' life, as is, indirectly, Eva Robins as a glam chaos agent named Daedalus (above, left), with the ability to raise up giant monsters from an erector set series of toys atop her giant waxy head in the land between time and space. With her bat-winged gold lamé skullcap and a gold codpiece (carrying weird echoes of her 'heel'-work as the possibly trans girl in the flashback sequences of Tenebrae) its suitable that Daedalus, representing "chaos in the name of science! Science in the name of chaos!" collapses sexual boundaries while staying all the time beguilingly pretty, alighting the eyes of evil king Minos (William Berger) with the macabre delights of her monsters. As Daedalus tells him, time and space are relative, so that miniature mechanical toy monsters made by figures atop a normal skull size head can still grow as large as houses once 'subject' to the atmosphere of earth.

Though Cozzi stacks his decks with strong female characters there are also some cool characters on the male side, though their faces are often obscured by unconvincing beards: Gianni (Sartana!) Garko shows up in a crazy red and gold-winged refurbished centurion costume; William Berger (5 Dolls of an August Moon) is the evil Minos; Cassinelli should be familiar to Italian crime genre fans (though with his droopy white beard as Zeus he carries a kind of Linus Roche-ness); and Bobby Rhodes (the pimp in Demons) is the King of Northern Africa, who shows up on a rocky beach for one scene, after being called forth by Circe, to make a deal: Hercules will build his people a waterway in exchange for the magic chariot stashed in yonder cave ("and that's how, with the help of the Gods, Hercules created the great continents," intones the chorus-like narrator, "by separating Europe from Africa"). Rhodes has a pretty cool elephant skeleton litter, but Cozzi's budget couldn't swing a Pegasus, so mighty Hercules has to throw a big temple boulder out of orbit and have Circe fashion a magic rope to tie it to the chariot (there's a great stop motion bit where the rope ties itself into a very cool sailor's knot, seriously, that is some wild-ass knot). Soon Circe and Hercules are soaring across the solar system, completely out of our planetary orbit, being pulled along in an open air chariot by a giant.... rock. Does it get any better?  Lesser directors would never even dare try to get away with that, or using erector sets to make stop motion monsters (i.e. the budget didn't allow the clay most animators would put over the erector set frame).


As he did with Starcrash, Cozzi somehow even manages to get an A-list composer to deliver a dynamite full-bodied score to something that would normally be subject to "library" tracks. He got John Barry to outdo John Williams in intergalactic bombast with Starcrash. Here he gets the legendary Pino Donaggio to deliver a prime mythic, hugely entertaining, even more bombastic score, full of Rocky-style coliseum brass and moody deep string ominousness. Did Cozzi prevent him Donaggio from seeing the movie during his composing, like he famously did with John Barry? I'd almost wager... Otherwise they would have, at the very least, lightened the heroic mood. But it's just that heroic mood that makes it all work. A single wink and the whole thing would deflate like a soufflé.

The dubbing too is all first-rate too, even the minor characters get professional well-recorded treatment, with Donaggio giving every absurd action the benefit of the doubt. This is a film never tries to be realistic, it gets that it is myth in its purest form, and evoking the gods is seldom far from any characters' lips, as it would be in any Greek tragedy. The Gods sometimes even seem to address the camera directly, as if this pre-ordained saga, reflected in macro and micro dimensions as surely as any archetypal myth. This approach explodes the barriers between accidental Brechtianism, intentional Greek myth chorus-style theater and a child showing off his toy collection. Cozzi throws everything he has in the box at us, including Zeus-knows-what kind of filters and pieces of rainbow-reflective mylar held over the lens, mismatched matte paintings overlaid with multi-colored stars (white, red, blue, yellow, green, even purple). It's never too much or not enough; it is, in its sublime perfection, the very nature of magic and exactly what (Greek writer) Ado Kyru meant in his famous quote (1). It belongs in a Criterion Channel triple feature between Godard's Les Mepris and Seijun Suzuki's Pistol Opera. 

Then the sequel in 1985. Lots of light effects, overlays, fan art inspiration, clips from the last film, and everything a-nice.

Six viewings in and I'm still trying to stay awake through it all, and I don't mean that as uncomplimentary. For me, it's like falling into a peaceful dream, one punctuated by occasionally druggy reveries and name-that-influence excitement. My only caveat is the tired look of surprise in the 'Colin Ferrell as an old queen trying one last time to get into Studio 54 but his heart isn't in it'-glam of the evil priest (Ventatino Ventinini) but he's only around in a few scenes. Stay awake, and you'll get through him! There's also fire monster animation that seems traced over or color-styled from Forbidden Planet's Monster from the Id and when Hercules sends in his mojo to battle Minos they becomes a similar rotoscoped outline King Kong fighting the T-rex and the snake in the 1933 version); there's also a claymation Medusa ala a DIY fan art version of the one from Clash of the Titans and plenty of Tron-like light video game effects. The music is still great but the dubbing is way too-over-the-top and badly mixed and its jarring to hear different voiceover artists dubbing the same actors from the first film (Lou Ferrigno keeps Marc Smith and he stays refreshingly deadpan). Once again there are no stuntmen or fight coordinators, so the battles have a home movie primitivism. Alas, the costumes have grown massive shoulders for some weird reason, as if the cast is trying to wear all their costumes so they can sneak out of a studio without paying their soundstage bill, rather than posing in their sexy neo-togas. Ferrigno  is never allowed to wear a shirt but dad Zeus is encumbered by a big 'Santa Clause does Catholic christening' robe, a way-too-bushy white beard and a weird yarmulke crown. He looked much better last time, with a simple tiara.


Daedalus, Minos and Zeus are all back and played by the same actors, though they all look like the intervening three years have widened them (probably the fault of the bad costumes and hair). The lady playing Hera is different and suddenly we get Laura Lenzi (the cute mom in Manhattan Baby) as the goddess "Flora" (?) who thinks it's a good idea to revive the evil Minos (via that old upside down blood donor trick no doubt gleaned from Hammer's Dracula, Prince of Darkness) as he has a grudge since Hercules killed him in the last film (but she doesn't count on him hating the gods, too). Lots of rebel gods zapping in and out of the dimensions of time and space (outlined in a glowing green). Outside of time and space, they all stand on giant surrealist mesas above bubbling matte paintings and below rainbow starred outer space, evoking the weird trans-dimensional zones of 60s Jack Kirby comics. When mortal characters step outside space and time they wave their arms around to give off trippy trails, supporting my theory on where the many arms of Hindu deities come from (see my post on Dvinorum Psychonauticus). In short, it's a gem with tons of hand-painted lasers and crazy light of effects, and a cast that's at least 3/4 women and none are ever being sexy or maternal (Bechdel A+!). Sure it's a step down for the mighty Cozzi after the 'heights' of the previous film, but priceless lines like "Quick! Step inside the stone mouth!" and "Grow, Hercules! Growww!" help smear over the wounds, as does the feeling of drifting dreamlike abstraction, the way it seems to veer at times off its own axis into the land of hazily remembered Saturday morning cartoons, albeit tinged with an indescribable mournfulness for the loss of big screen outdoor options for its like. If Cozzi's the Italian Ed Wood, this is clearly his Night of the Ghouls! Look fast for a shot of the rock-pulled chariot from the first film pulling into view from behind the moon during one of the many astral zip-arounds. Is it a sign Cozzi is using the same footage, or is Hercules truly outside of time and space, so the past and future exist simultaneously? Hurrah for Cozzi!
Here they are, would there were more. All have the distinct brand of the Italian Wood. There's a few TV shows he did, unavailable here, and a few projects where he stepped in to help (or was stepped in himself), such as SINBAD, which I'm still slogging through. But these four! A me bella! Perfecto,


This Italian ALIEN-inspired sci-fi adventure gets a bad rap in some circles but I adore it. Rather than just have some amok alien eating crew members, this keeps itself on Earth in the present, and decides to focus in on the pod-to-stomach-stage, with rows of ugly watermelon slime pods that explode when ripe and cause instant explosions in the stomach of everyone in horseshoe vicinity. I dig the obvious phone book size padding under the victim's shirts before the explosions; I dig the traumatic Freudian-cave-on-Mars flashbacks; the unearthly humming whale-ish noise the pods make when they're fixing to blow. I dig the vibe between the NYC cop who discovers the initial shipment (Marino Mase), the female colonel (!) of the Army's special disease control unit (Louise Marleau) and the traumatized astronaut (Ian McCulloch). The three team up in a sexy 'gentleman's agreement' synergy and head down to Colombia where they're soon ensnared up in a big slimy alien's world domination plan, ala It Conquered the World. 

Louise Marleau's heroine finds a worth opposite number in lovely blonde Gisela Hahn as the evil mastermind's right hand, and I love the alien itself, especially that bicycle reflector eye and the glistening artichoke coloring. Lastly, what really earns my goofball admiration is the Goblin soundtrack. That late-70s-80s European prog rock style has aged well. I don't know what else you need to make you love this dumbass film the way that I do. Whatever's missing, you don't need it.
A parallel program to the Argento-Bava-Soavi school, this unofficial metatextual sequel to Argento's Suspiria (and sixth in the catch-all Demons series) factors in post-modern self-reflexivity to keep you guessing, including the Mater Suspiriorum  source of sources (Thomas de Quincey's Confession of an Opium Eater). Argento is name-checked and there's even some familiar Goblin cues from Suspiria.Screenwriter Marc (Urbano Barberini) writes a treatment for the story of a witch named Lavania. He thought he made the name up. But there was a witch by that name, and she's rising from her grave a little farther every time the word 'Lavania' is spoken. Her face and hands are grotesque pustules (ala Lamberto's first two films), but she begins to take over the mind of Marc's wife, Anne (Florence Guérin) and causes her to hallucinate guts flying out of the TV. A hot local psychic encourages Marc to change the character's name to something else, but he won't.  Meanwhile, without even knowing the story he's writing, new mom Ann starts to demand to play the role, saying she "is" Lavania. How would she know? But what about sexy Caroline Munro, who starts luring Marc into the sack for the Lavania part? Michele Soavi plays the director. I didn't even have time to mention the undead financial backer! Confused? Join the club. Still I'd rather go on a Cozzi ride-- even if its bumpy, and dangerously near collapsing--than play it safe on some competent piece of junk like Lost Souls or Stigmata -hai capito? (full review here). 

For me this is the great unknown. I stopped watching after 10 minutes and there it sits in Prime Video Library (I actually bought the download in a fit of Cozzi mania). Tis no Hercules! The guy doing Lou Ferrigno's dubbing is different (no more Marc Smith), and the sound is in general all shoddily mixed which makes a huge difference (Is there an Italian language option on the Blu-ray?). Considering the whole thing is given cloying storybook narration a mom (Daria Nicolodi, but we don't get her cool sexy-scary rasp of a voice! Instead it's the kind of generic TV mom voice) reading to her kid.

I don't think any of this is Cozzi's fault, he did write the story and work on the script but buddy Enzo G. Castellari (the genius behind the1990: The Bronx Warriors and Warriors of the Wasteland) was set to direct but got sick or fired or something, and Cozzi took over. I suspect too the English dubbing and the storybook framing were added without his participation or input, probably by crass producers hoping to market it as a kids' movie. I wouldn't be surprised if the idea that the story is based on an Edgar Allen Poe Sinbad story came from Cozzi too. That macabre prankster!

Despite my not being a fan of the Jersey mullets (the 'do of choice on all the unturbanned male heads here in this dopey land), there are treats galore, notably John Steiner as Jaffar, going for record highs OTT  and, well... WATCH THIS SPACE because I have a feeling, with a little digging, there's treasure buried under all this flossy mange.



NOTES:

1. "“I urge you to look at bad films, they are so often sublime.”– Ado Kyrou

Hurricane Dorian spiraled over the Bahamas over Labor Day as I watched the ABC Friday Night Movie THE BERMUDA DEPTHS (1978) via Warner Archive DVD-R. Its crystal blue skies and clear crystal water, lovely reefs, white sands, giant turtle god, unconvincing helicopter and boat miniatures couched with a mysterious 'round the bend' attitude towards the Bermuda Triangle (we loved thinking about that triangle as kids --the name alone had a sexy sea spray currency) was regularly contrasted with flips back to the Weather Channel, back in 9/19. The meteorologists standing before giant maps, caressing the predicted motion lines of swirling vortexes, electric with the anticipation, repeating themselves and their predictions as Dorian, a thousand Moby Dicks worth of water and air, full of impersonal fury and barometric fluctuations sat on the Bahamas and twirled and gave the Keys the eye. , and swirled some more. 



Since they weren't allowed to stop talking, the meteorologists could only spin, themselves, in place, waiting for that giant monster to whirl our way. Occasionally they'd cut over to B-roll of Floridians busy buying out the bottled water by Price Club forklift full. I'd cut back to the Triangle... to The Bermuda Depths and to.... her. I was mostly alone that weekend, couched in that special warm glow only watching hurricane coverage on a cloudy weekend can bring. But The Bermuda Depths was something else, harnessing the electricity of the storm and the excitement on "Weather Underground" to a myth so deeply lodged in my equatorial trench of Self I could feel my whole soul vibrate apart like my psyche's tectonic plates were dropped on one of those old electric football game boards. 

Today its weeks later --I just caught on my way to work that hurricane Humberto, the next in the chain, was heading for Bermuda, but chickened out, skirting up and around the "Triangle" rather than daring to go through and take its chances. Poor Humberto, just a lot of colder air on warm water after all. But more are always coming. It's hurrican season, announces Dr. Knabb will protect it, through my ardent love of Connie Sellecca as Depth's mysterious sea nymph Jennie Hanniver. 

Have I only imagined her? I still the feel the warmth from kissing her I'll spend my whole life missing her  Jenny.... Jenny....

The folksy wide-eyed black housekeeper (Ruth Attaway) tells our brooding (grown-up) Magnus that Jennie was so vain and beautiful back in the early days of colonial Bermuda that all the men on the island loved her. When her ship was caught in a storm in the Triangle and about to go down she made a deal with "the other god", the "one who swims below" to stay beautiful and young forever, in exchange for an eternity of 'service' to the leviathan's murky aims. She lives "out there" in the sea, "what you folks call... the Triangle" If Magnus is comparing notes, he keeps them under his hat. He refuses to believe his Jennie could be a ghost (until that is she reminisces about when her father used to host 'quadrilles' and invites him to dance to her ever-present Vivaldi).... but she's connected (the same as) that turtle. And is it the same turtle that crushed his dad and house? NOoooo! 

ABC Friday Night TV movies like Depths made deep and lasting impressions on us who were children at the time --a movie so weird and wondrous those who hadn't seen it wouldn't believe the wild stories of those who had. It lay dormant for decades, unseen and gradually considered to be a folk myth. But through the giant claw machine of the Warner Archive, it is exhumed, and it is a treasure. Bermuda has never seemed so beautiful, Jerry Sopanen's brilliant cinematography plus a color restoration (?) results in a blue sky, clear water, white sand, tanned limb clarity that leaves a hole in the heart, evoking among other things, Dali's magical paintings of magical Costa Brava. 
A kind of oceanic ghost story it sails the same currents as Night Tide and even Beach Blanket Bingo and the unforgettable romance between Bonehead and Lorelei. Maybe it's because I'm a Pisces, but I'm even haunted by the theme song. I was dissatisfied with the end but, after I switched back to the Weather Channel watched the twirling storm still just hovering over the Bahamas, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and her--Jennie-- with her raven hair, perfect olive tan, waterproof no-smudge eyeliner and the ability to reflect light from her eyes so they glow like an inhuman creature.

With perfect blank naturalism, Sellecca gives room for anima projections (contrast other actrresses too self-aware to be enigmatic; the anima can find no screen in such a one. Their screens are already too full.... of themselves

It's not an easy role to pull off well, as one needs to be--in a sense--a blank screen, to nudge the viewer's anima into using the coiled energy of the far-off hurricane to fire up its projector and WACK! focus right in on Jennie, to get the pining ache that comes from one of the male psyche's all-too-rare reunions with our ever undersea/seen animas. How could I blame the film for being true to the anima's nature, and all too quickly shutting the projector off again? Dreams where the anima appears operate on the same principle. One can only pine for her to come again. And this is--alas--the relationship at its purest. The anima appears so that her absence may be felt. For she does read our letters, even if she doesn't answer. In a way, she even helps us write them - for we're a projection of her unconscious as well.

Though this dream girl aspect ("have I only imagined her?") often irritates me in other films, it works here as there's plenty of evidence she's more than just a male fantasy or a psychotic hallucination. The men who don't believe she's real are--after all--trying to catch a turtle the size of a Victorian mansion on a boat barely the size of one of its flippers. And besides, she's real to Magnus, and to us, watching. We never see him through other people's eyes talking to the air, for example. She's never seen by anyone else - she only comes out when he's alone. Eric (Carl Weathers) and Poulis (Burl Ives) have no doubt about the turtle, but don't believe Jennie is real. If the Jennie thing was all done as some kind of Harvey-Walter Mitty style fantasy we wouldn't even be having this conversation because, ugh. If there was some big reveal where a mad scientist is behind it all and/or it's a scam and the scammer would have got away with it if not for those rascally kids, or really if it relied on any rational or even metaphysical 'explanation' it would undo the spell, and be cheap, I'd be out. But the way it's all filmed, the way the story goes down, it never loses its Jungian "one-the-one" beat, where the film itself is a dream within a dream, and there is no waking, only a renouncement of one layer of the dream, which may or may not be a transition to adulthood.

The problem is, his buddies--the Apollonian 'group' to the Dionysian pair-bond-- won't leave Magnus alone - they find him wherever Jennie brings him, even to a secret, gorgeous grotto (his dad, whom he learns was 'eaten' by marine life, was washed out to sea; his mom--we learn--was lost at sea earlier). Why did he not hide, not heed Weathers' manly call, as if a friendly but nonetheless cockblocking Captain Bligh rousting Christian from his languid island hammock. Without a second thought, presuming she'll be waiting when and where he deigns to look, Magnus leaves his ghostly love to go fishing with Eric and Dr. Poulis, as they set about trying to catch a creature so massive that there is no boat big enough to do anything but be grateful the thing stays down below.
Like Tera (Valerie Leon - left) in Blood from the Mummy's Tomb via gloomy Andrew Kier, his daughter (also Leon), my own anima (1) was arranging the vision of herself, using the crackling energy of Dorian to start the projector to life again, beaming herself onto Jennie. I longed for her as Magnus does (he spends his time with the boys brooding over her, talking about her to them even as they shrug her off as a figment of his imagination, which is a very rude way of mentioning it). She commands you, in your fibrous core, to choose her or over your salty sailor brethren. Do so and there will be no need for words --thoughts are told in currents, shifts in oceanic temperature, and a kind of perpetual mix of whale cries muted through waves that seems to light up the soundtrack the way sunlight lights the waves in the film's many day-for-night shots. 

Is my anima the dreamed or the dreamer who dreams herself real through dreaming up a dreamer to dream her? James Villers in Blood would probably purr that we already know the answer to that one, don't we? (CinemArchetype #2)

It doesn't make any sense--that Poulis and Eric would dismiss Jennie but think they can catch a deep sea leviathan with a tug boat and a little net, but that's part of the dreamlike unease to the film is the idea though that Dr. Poulis and Eric believe they have a chance in hell of single-handedly capturing the beast heightens the dream suspense, the futile cockblocking element that always crops up in ur-otic dreams involving the anima. She will always be ours forever but first you have to just go do one little thing. Don't go away! Wait here and I'll be back. But of course she's never there, or you never make it back. Not for years.


Magnus, too, is an archetype, he is the young fisher king, the Parsifal (and McCloskey does a great job with this vague role --imagine Tom Cruise or, say Jason Patric as Magnus, and shudder); Burl Ives is once again the fisher king (see #12 of CinemArchetype 24) and he does it so well. There's also the hanged man (literally, in a tarot sense, as man is dragged to the depths by his foot - those are pearls that were his eyes, etc.); the anima, her monstrous familiar (in a Gamera-logical sense) and even a wild/wise woman (Attaway's amazing one scene as the black housekeeper / conjure woman / folksy exposition provider).

This choice, to run off and go fishing rather than roll in the ripped ruined mansion's depths, or sleep with the fish, is one typical of a certain stage of adolescence, at least it was for me, actually right around 1978, when I was 12. Having to choose between your girlfriend/s and the boys, trying to drag you off to do guys things while she waits and gets pissed-off and/or you never see her again. BUT it's because he does go that this becomes myth. If he didn't, he'd be snared in the faerie bower of amor, of eros (1), Aphrodite's scallop shell closing down on them like a submersible honeymoon coffin (ala that thing Bond and Barbara Bach end up in at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me where it eventually turns all Corman Poe). In the dream the dreaming ego always goes off with the guys - he always has-otherwise there is no myth, only an enchanted knight slowly dying of hunger under the poppy trees, ministered to by a dozen doting fairies with no idea what humans eat but a refusal to let him crawl away.



The production team behind the Depths are Rankin-Bass, names familiar to kids all over the world for the puppet-animated catchy tune-spattered Xmas specials we all saw every December, like Rudolph and The Year without a Santa Claus; and the first two animated catchy tune-spattered Tolkien specials - The Hobbit and Return of the King), so they clearly knew a few things about how to tap into the deep strain of Jungian archetypal myth that can structure kids' merging into the adult sphere. With the same Japanese crew and director: Tsugunobo Kotani, with whom they'd teamed up with for the more-conventional The Last Dinosaur TV movie from the year before. But while that movie stayed a 'boy's life' Hemingway meets Edgar Rice Burroughs kind of macho affair, The Bermuda Depths is infinitely more even-handed and light in its touch. Trying to talk about it, as Tyrone Power says in Nightmare Alley, "is like trying to put the ocean into bottles."  Like the waves going in and out on those beautiful white sand Bermuda beaches, all things are momentary. These are opportunities to practice the fine art of letting go, for one must let go. The sea nymph must return to the depths, lest she melt into a skull ala Sandra Knight in THE TERROR (1963) and the Vivaldi concerto end, replaced by... Diamanda Galas...


As with all great anima-scapes, when there are so many great elements it's almost better that they don't add up. After all, dreams never do. Too often these affairs get hung up on small details of logic, which your anima, the artist designer of your dreams, realizes rightly are the soul-killing logistics that make daytime so much less wild and thingee than the night. The best TV movies of the era took advantage of the fact that there was no videotape, or reruns, no chance to rewind and go "did that even happen?" so they could do as the dreams did, and leave out whole chunks of logic, presuming we could fill in the blanks while we refilled our glasses and ran to the bathroom, much as the dreams themselves try to fill in what's missing in our day-to-day thinking. We made our own connections over the commercial breaks, and the TV movie relied on that relationship, and as a result were primed to deliver long-lasting myth. By the next morning at school, our own telephone game embellishments might already be added, and no way to prove them wrong - so any holes in its mythic sail were already patched. Decades later and once grim myths / rites of passage like Suspiria and Carrie are known by heart, no embroidering possible. But things like Bad Ronald, The House that Would Not Die and Bermuda Depths became the "I'll have to take your word for it" living myths, more scary and strange with every re-telling... gradually peeling away from the land where any normal film made of celluloid and blood could ever do it full justice. 

SPOILER -

Depths may, it's true, lean a lot on that unsaid commercial break dream logic for its power; lot unsaid in this far from perfect film, but that's its weird charm. The main part: the lack of any clear villain or negative emotion. We root for the turtle of course - it's not like it creeps up on land to kill people - oh.. aside from early on killing Magnus's dad, but he started it by tampering in the forbidden... Bermuda Depths --oh yeah, I see. Far more interesting is the unusuual and barely relevant fact that the cast is perfectly balanced along racial and gender lines, and how in the end, the only one with a clue to the events transpiring is the housekeeper for Burl: she knows enough to see the skull behind Magnus's eyes, and to realize he's the bad guy, because he gives up on the love of his life just because her turtle familiar wipes out every other male in the cast in its stubborn effort to stay alive. That he didn't die himself should be cause for his to not be such a shit about turning his back on the ocean, and throwing his shell necklace back into the sea. He turns his back on her, and the sea, to get even with it, for what, not giving up its secrets? Is Dorothy to be shunned by the scarecrow, lion and tin man for refusing to let them dissect Toto, transplanting his brain, heart and spleen to these needy training wheel animuses (see CinemArchetype #3, stage 2)?

--END SPOILER

Enter 3 meteorologists. trace their batons back and forth around the barometric reading map like junkies combing the carpet after the last grain is licked off the table, or conjure wives summoning demons from the depths of their cooking pots, roiling like the  sky, the steam from the stew like the coiling clouds from her wooden spoon. 

Is Bermuda's cosmic bill paid or will the hammer come down? No amount of blowing or fanning will change its mind. The world ends and the giant turtle comes up for air. This is in revelations. This is coming. Up at Niagara, the Native American art museum is shaped like a turtle... they know the score. It's been vacant for 22 years. I was there in 1989 with my girlfriend when it was open and full of Native American turtle imagery, the turtle carrying the world on its back, the incessant Falls, the force from which it gains its mighty roar...... my girl, her raven hair and crystal blue eyes... the turtle with the world on its... am I still there? Am I ghost wandering that stricken empty shell?

Life was always going to be fleeting. We're all just waves that crash on the shore and leave only children, maybe, and photos of ourselves and mentions on the web that are only really 'there' if someone reads them. 

We were more used to that in the 70s, because TV shows came and went, irretrievably, forcing us to accept the fleeting nature of things. The only way to record was to put your cassette tape recorder by the speaker and hope for the best. You'd at least have the audio. My first mix tape was made this way, holding my tape player up against the radio as favorite songs came on: Fleetwood Mac and Abba mostly, missing the first few seconds of each. Never did I tape the Eagles  --they were, frankly, terrifying. "Hotel California" chilled me deeper than my spine could reach. So did the words "Bermuda Triangle" - it was if the words themselves could suck you under.

Raise the roof! Shout Factory TV via Prime have dislodged some of the long buried Corman gems from the late-50s beatnik Corman AIP days wedged up in the ceiling beams, including three of his very best: THE UNDEAD (1957), SORORITY GIRL (1957) and MACHINE GUN KELLY (1958). Long unseen by anyone not expressly looking (never on DVD), the sudden availability of these three gems should be great news to Corman fans like myself: the writing is go-for-broke inspired (Undead being a crazy riff on Bergman's Seventh Seal crossed with a Bridey Murphy hypnotist angle that prefigures The Terminator) and Corman's genius hipster acting regulars are all here, including: Barboura Morris, Dick Miller, Richard Devon, and --of course--the divine Susan Cabot. She's not in The Undead but she leads the pack in Girl and Gun, and though she's the bad guy in both we root for her most every step of the way. Cabot plays these characters with such in-the-zone confident relish, such modulated catlike finesse, we don't blame Corman for letting other details slide. As he would do in the next decade with Vincent Price, he spots a star making magic, and lets 'em loose. He knows magic when he sees it, especially the affordable kind. Thus Cabot gets almost as many lines, even though she's not the title character, in Machine-Gun Kelly as co-star Charlie Bronson.


I kept trying to get really good screenshots for this post but it's hard to nail down Cabot's expressive features, as she has a way of running through an array of moods and sly glances while doing a kind of restless movement thing with her head bending low and snaking up as she inches towards her prey. Both playful and a little macabre, the way she goes from mildly worried when, for example, someone threatens to rat her out to the dean in Sorority Girl, to a kind of brief animal rage, knocking the rat out, to determination while rummaging through her things, to triumph when she finds some incriminating evidence that will hold the rat's tongue in a blackmail quid pr quo, to playful cool once she has the rat under her control. What matters isn't the evidence itself, or the idea someone could get kicked out of school for spanking a pledge at a sorority house--which seems ridiculous--it's the irresistible way Cabot has with controlling a scene, with goading the other characters into pushing back, then taking their slaps or incriminations with a cat who swallowed the canary smile. It's theatrical, but it's a special kind of movie theatricality that scriptwriters can't often predict - suddenly their lines take wing as someone like Sue Cabot susses out all the fissures and peaks and moments the writer maybe didn't even know were there. 

She got a contract with Universal earlier in the decade; they loaded her into the background of a bunch of forgettable westerns, so she went back to NYC to act on the stage. Corman saw a tough confidence in her, tough enough to be sensitive and open, that kind of courageous raw nerve that lets her saunter up to a cop and make small talk while her man's in the bank next door, if you know what I mean. He put her in the lead, Sorority Girl, then she stayed with him to make six films within a three year period of 1957-59: Sorority Girl, Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, Carnival Rock, War of the Satellites, Machine Gun Kelly and The Wasp Woman. I've seen and reviewed them all (for defunct search engine Muze) and at least half are pretty good. The two released by ShoutTV onto Prime however are the bona fide best when it comes to punchy cool scenes that manage to use a single room set as background for so many tense and riveting exchanges, conversations so layered with turnovers of power and threats of immanent violence we can feel the young eyes of Tarantino glued to them.

Tough enough that she could play complex villains and flawed heroines. She was believable as an aging-- and then younger-- owner of a thriving cosmetics line in The Wasp Woman; and as a scheming harridan --the only brunette in a tribe of Viking women (and marked therefore as the villain)--in Viking Women and the Sea Serpent she could be the girlfriend of a tough guy like Charles Bronson and not even gripe or sob if he socked her for taunting him and teasing him in front of the other guys, and she could be manipulative sadistic sorority girl determined to abuse her hazing privileges to ridiculous degrees. And she could win our admiration almost in spite of ourselves, every time.



Though Charles Bronson gets the title billing, it's made very clear throughout that Susan Cabot is the real show, the real leader of the gang, and she has a field day! Her character, Florence "Flo" Becker, is based loosely (one presumes) on the real-life Kelly's wife Kathryn: the brains of the organization and apparently the one who styled her husband's public image, even convincing him to use a machine gun as a talisman. Why isn't she the title character? Because she was too smart even for that. Instead, well, Cabot's Flo gets as many if not more lines than Bronson's Kelly--who all too often is undone by a big streak of fear. She's way more courageous, witty and pro-active than everyone else in the film. She keeps reminding Bronson he's her "little baby," and her "gun arm," and she chose him because he was so weak and pliable! She tells him that in front of the other members of the gang, including the Morey Amsterdam as a dime-dropping fink mad at Kelly just because he threw him against a cougar cage and his arm got ripped off.

Bronson plays Kelly with kind of tough with just a hint of functional sadism over top of the fear, but he can be nice too--it's a full 3D performance and Bronson shows why he deserved to make it big, with his mix of Pennsylvania steel mill-style stoicism, breaking it up when Richard Devon tries to rape Barbara Mouris (their kidnapping victim's nanny) and even playing paddy cake with their kidnap victim.

Some elements of the true story have been shifted around (here Kelly and co. kidnap a rich guy's child -- in real life they kidnapped the rich guy himself) and it's a bit rough with our modern sensibility to see cougars and other beasts in these tiny cages, meant for tourist gawkin', but Corman films it all with a punchy, vivid urgent style so there's no time for feeling glum about anything. This is no plodding origin story where we need his whole arc. This is just a few crazy heists, and then the cops get 'em, the end. Bang! Corman has no time for tedious art or Big Statements, and in the process of stripping things down he's way more insightful and illuminating than most of the overblown prestige gangster pics.

To get back to Cabot's Flo, what lets the audience know she's the real leader of the gang is the way only she seems totally at ease with danger. And she's always dressed to the nines, sauntering in and out of the hideout trailing her fur stoles while the men all have to lay super low, bickering and playing cards.. As luxuriant and catlike as one could ask for in a super moll, she's the one casing out banks, drawing out maps, flirting with the guards for the inside dope. Kelly is prone to freezing and running away out when confronted with any memento mori, coffin, skull paperweight, or obituary column.  He needs constant teasing and reinforcement to get him to man up and wield the gun. She gets him to man up by flirting with his outlaw cronies (none of them have molls), and yet during a heist he's thrown off his timetable by the sight of a coffin being loaded into the funeral home basement near the bank. He freaks out, misses his cue, and his partner (Jack Lambert) ends up holding the bag and having to shoot his way out. This leaves Kelly gangless and with a new enemy for setting him up, prompting Flo and Kelly to lay low at Flo's mom's house, a whorehouse, as it happens. Mom is a badass madame played with real moxy by Connie Gilchrist. Savvy and cool, she brooks no umbrage from Kelly, unfazed by his tough guy veneer, realizing he's no good. We see where Flo gets her her scathign wit and her lack of fear when it comes to tough-talking, hard-hitting men.


Cabot is as brave as Flo, relishing her character, investing so much playful nuance and force it's amazing. Part of it I imagine is her theatrical background, the ability to play extended single takes covering a lot of different emotional moments, and she does it daringly well. Unlike most 'moll' characters in crime movies, her Flo enjoys the life of crime. She's a long way from being just eye candy, sulking around on the couch eating bon-bons and occasionally whining about how much she misses being able to out dancing, irritating a pacing James Cagney as he plans their next escape or break-out. Here it's just the opposite. She's the one going out and doing all the work. And at the end it's she who is toughest, ready to die shooting it out with the cops, using the kid as a shield, etc.  And when push come to shove she's the one ready to go down swinging. Kelly just--well I shan't spoil it.

Gerald Fried whips up some really peppy rich jazz for the score, a million miles from the phoned in Dixieland ragtime generic nonsense usually played in the 70s during their 20s-30s nostalgia kick. I mean, man, this stuff rips, I found myself unable to stop snapping my fingers and at one point was lifted out of my recliner as if on the wings of Gene Krupa. And Corman makes sure it's all edited tight on the ones as bank heists and elaborate getaways come off like clockwork tied to the precision jump-back crackerjack flap the pack rack rhythm of the band. Fried had just done the score for Kubrick's The Killing a couple years earlier and the buzz was still generating. It's 61 years later and he's still working! Every day is Fried day!


Alas, aside from this small period of working with Corman (six films in three years: 1957-59), Cabot never really made the lasting mark she should and could have. Cabot went back to NYC and Boston after The Wasp Woman to do mostly theater, and then, her tragic death (1). As for that, well, I don't like to dwell in my favorite stars' murky home lives, lest some detail or other ruin their viability as a screen for some archetypal projection, such as Cabot is, to that mix of anima, trickster, cougar and devouring mom I have deep in the collective cinema unconscious. Cabot could embody all these archetypes and more, in a single scene, perfectly modulated, all with a catty class and oomph that reminds us strong cool women come in all decades, shapes, and sizes, that a short brunette with shark eyes, clunky shoes, and a weird smile can wow us to core, even in a B-list gangster movie, or a sorority sister psychodrama meant to fill in a B-slot at a drive-in. Greatness always finds its way to the light!

Readers know I look askance upon adoring fetishistic biopics, the auteur often covertly trying to align their own stars with their heroes whether its conscious or not, and in the process making, as they say, a movie about--to borrow Zen koan-- a pointing finger rather than about the moon. Ignoramuses! What do they know about great art and suffering? They love to make a gorgeous finger and presume the moon will magically appear. Well, for Ken Russell, it may be thrice as true as for others but he at least goes for broke - he's all in. He'll show you the moon, and then stick that finger in its deepest crater. Such a crater is GOTHIC, the 1987 all-out wild night in during a storm with Percy and the future Mary Shelly and her swinging mystical half-sister Claire at Lord Byron's 19th century Swiss chalet while quaffing laudanum, indulging in rock star sensuality and wordplay, conducting a seance, trying to contact Mary's dead baby, etc. and conducting a ghost story writing contest. Mary winning in the long term with Frankenstein (with Percy's help) but Byron's personal physician Dr. Polidori wrote The Vampyre (with Byron's help), creating the first work of vampire fiction. So you could cite this long druggy night as the birth of the gothic style of horror fiction and the first salvo towards the Universal pantheon. BUT here we're a long way from normal narrative, more like a creative lunatic ground zero, reminiscent of what an intimate group sex acid trip might be if held at a swanky mansion done up with creepy haunted house carnival ride tableaux and wild sound effects.

We can see this kind of pre-MTV yen for adding surreal pre-music video imagery to musician, artist and film star biopics in his whole 70s output: Valentino, Lisztomania, The Music Lovers, Savage Messiah, Mahler, and Oscar Wilde attending a performance of his Salome's Last Dance at a high-class brothel. The results erring all-too-often on the side of the bawdy and grotesque, often leading to pretentious and unwieldy dialogue, with the subject and a taste for bizarre imagery and no real way to make them cohesively match. It's not to say he couldn't deliver, especially when given an actor able to actually sound natural in his artsy waxing, like William Hurt in Altered States or Oliver Reed in The Devils, wherein a handsome, brooding star kept the revolutions on some kind of firm axis.

For Gothic we almost get that. There's Natasha Richardson as Mary, very good in the tense agonized sweat-sheen fear states but upstaged in the looney-tunes Anita and Marianne-style cool glimmer twin reflection department by Miriam Cyr as her nympho-mystical half-sister Claire, shagging Lord Byron (who isn't) and pregnant with his child; Julian Sands comes off probably the best of them all as strung-out Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), totally haunted by a terror of death coupled to regular bouts of opiate withdrawal (though based on the plentitude of laudanum seems unlikely). Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron comes of just so-so. One expects a little more as far as leaning into the madness rather than seeming like merely a smooth-talking cad. His demons seem to consist of dimly realizing the human damage his bisexual orgiastic take no prisoners approach to sex has wrought upon his partners. Lastly, there's Timothy Spall, overacting the roof off as Dr. Polidori, gamely keeping everyone high off their asses while eschewing the orgy in favor of banging his hand on the nail that holds the cross over his bed (presumably to keep himself from masturbating -- a mortal sin!)

Since this is a Russell movie, the sex and drugs are all urgently leading to something, that old devil moon again. Here it all hinges on a seance where, they believe, they accidentally summon a vampire spirit into the chalet during a seance (guided by Claire, a medium). It howls from without, laughs from within and mocks them from the next room, driving each character deeper into the strange bowels of the villa, and into their own labyrinthine minds.

The main thing is, though, in a house stocked with servants and guests all in different rooms, who would be surprised to see a shadow or hear a voice laughing in another room while trying to sleep? These things are where Russell shows a surprisingly tenderfoot awareness (exhibited in his earlier Altered States) of the effects of the drugs being taken. No one really high on laudanum is going to give a shit about someone laughing in another room, or get the heebie jeebies about death - that's for the next night, after the laudanum runs out. It's the same sort of confused thinking that leads some writers to confuse the DTs with drinking instead of with not drinking. The DTs being the result of alcohol withdrawal rather than overuse.

The wild unhinged supernatural whooping might have been easier borne with a better druggier sound mix (ala recent works like Climax and Spring Breakers), there's the feeling none of these actors might have done drugs except maybe Julian Sands, who has a kind of kinetic sexy madness with his poesy lines (never forget how perfect he was in Naked Lunch, this is a guy who knows how to seem like he's being seen through a psychedelic prism, full of creepy come-ons where you find yourself being led by him into strange alleyways when part of you is screaming to run but another part is enthralled. Here he's an opium addict who needs higher and higher doses to keep the poetic madness and fear of the grave from reducing him to a howling, gibbering (but still shockingly loquacious) thing. Luckily Sands makes it very sexy and has a fine moment standing naked in the storm atop the roof shouting about electricity. Cyr, for her part, a muse not a writer (the Anita Pallenberg of the group) does a bang-up job as the one with a mind more open to the supernatural forces. Sheends up the movie on all fours, covered in mud with a dead rat in her jaws but everyone realizes she's the only sane on in the group.


Still. no one in the grips of full bore withdrawal or laudanum intoxication can say complicated mouthfuls like "I was almost conscious when the smell of the damp earth hit me! There was an oppressive weight on my chest!" without slurring or jumbling the words. And if you compare their rantings to other 'all in a night' dialogue-driven movies about single nights amidst a small coterie of intoxicated artists, such as Performance, one comes away with the same impression of Russell one gleans watching Altered States. If he has done psychedelics, he darned well didn't do enough.

Good evening friends of the creeping floor! October is halfway done. Over the next ten days leading up to Halloween, Acidemic will be presenting several curated double and triple features of films streaming on Prime, one every other day until Halloween. (I was going to release on super long 22 film post but my reviews for each were too long, so it got kind of unwieldy). At the end, there may be a massive round-up. And hey, man, even if you don't have Prime (or live in a country with different licensing), you can find these greats lolling around in all sorts of spots. They're worth the hunt!

The AIP graveyard is alive with beatnik dancing thanks to ShoutTV via Prime. Right now they're showing both parts of a 1957 AIP "Made just for Halloween" double bill: THE UNDEAD and VOODOO WOMAN. There's no time like tonight or any night to experience this bizarro only in America in the wake of Bergman's SEVENTH SEAL could such a thing be possible. Shout + Prime = the October majesty of Satan and Marla English.

The director of the strangely super creepy Shining theorist documentary Room 237tackles another weird subject: sleep paralysis by, once again, interviewing a series of slightly un-normal people in depth about what can either be termed their deep transpersonal insight or near-psychosis, in this case with creepy re-enactments of their sleep paralysis experiences. Each recounted dream/waking nightmare is vividly is recreated for an approach that transcends mere 'documentary' to become something truly new, twisted, and deeply illuminating. Creepy highlights include the human figures composed of TV static and the awake encounter during a hike between a man's weird hippie girlfriend and blue light being. Somehow the girl herself is almost as surreal and otherworldly as the blue glowing spirit. In another uncanny moment we see the bedrooms of the sleepers all connected by a common interdimensional soundstage where the beings move between rooms, conjuring Monsters Inc. and Dr. Who's "The Girl in the Fireplace" episode, and too many other things not to cause a jolt or realization. Have we seen this room before ourselves.... in dreams? Jonathan Snipes, who crafted the moody analog synth score for Room 237 (a propulsive, chilling soundtrack I still listen to) does the eerie score of slow traveling synth drones and creepily accelerating 'asleep on the highway' rhythms, with his creepy percolating klave during the scary recollection of "The Hat Man" being a special highlight of uncanny disquiet.

In short, though technically a documentary, Asher's film makes a fine addition to any streaming horror marathon or, in this case, dream logic double feature.(For more on sleep paralysis on Acidemic's sister site Divinorum Psychonauticus, see: Demon Sheets: Sleep Paralysis Theories)

A disparate bunch of dislikable travelers, along with two 'good' ones, are pulled towards a remote bed and breakfast style inn/house full of dolls thanks to a storm and car trouble. Little do they suspect, the eerily tolerant elderly couple played by Guy Rolfe and Hilary Mason.are there to welcome them into a land populated by..... you guessed it. Creepy and colorful, beautifully photographed, and with just the right note of macabre glee, all ages are welcome to the show if they don't mind a little or a lot of blood. Of the six travelers, only an sweet-dispositioned endomorph (named Ralph, what else?) who never lost his inner child connection to dolls, and the very imaginative daughter (Carrie Lorraine) of a particularly hammy pair of life-size dipshits (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon [the 'mean' rival shrink trying to give everyone electroshock treatments in From Beyond] and Ian Patrick Williams) may be spared. Everyone else is asking to die--or be shrunk and locked inside a ceramic doll-shaped encasement. Even the jangly-jeweled over-acting Madonna-ish Aussie new wave punk hitchhikers (Cassie Stuart and Buntley Bailey) are asking for it by, amongst other things, trying to rob the place after the humans go to bed. See late at night the dolls come to life and are rather insistent on everyone else doing the opposite. The pissed off parents accuse Ralph of the murders since he's running around covered in blood, but he's innocent! The daughter and Ralph are accepted by the doll council but everyone else, beware!


There's a refreshingly non-carousel-sourced score by the impossibly named Fuzbee Norse, and since Charles Band's main man Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) directed, it's invested with considerably more style and care than usual for a New Moon/Empire production, The HD Prime print is sublime allowing Marc Ahlberg's cinematographic craftsmanship to fill in every ornate room and hallway with deep black dark corners, and nooks brimming with malevolent lifeless doll eyes, all lit by the fireplace, candles, or the incessant cracks of lightning from outside. Pretty darn perfect for an October drinking sesh, bro. Just be respectful of the noise levels, or we newly sewn-together old folks are gonna get ya. ++

 Tonight, a double feature of prime Prime old dark house thrillers, each set rollicking over gloomy Gothic estates with their own secret chambers to the burial grounds, tombs with cats, gems and vows of vengeance beyond the grave, an assortment of shifty-eyed suspects and a couple of 'kissin' cousins' who haven't seen each other since they were kids, teaming up "shoulder-to-shoulder" in a kind of young hip 'divine right of hotness after a key death in the family ramps up the antics of a relentless killer. The denouement of both is even similar, with surprise villainy where you used to least expect it. Prizing heavy Gothic atmosphere over whodunnit base tagging, these films make a perfect October night in. Working can wait, as the old hillbilly in that WB cartoon once sang, this is para-diise... for some of us. I'm rating and reviewing these according to my eccentric patriarchal whims, as stated in my will...

Often creatively ranslated or interpreted (the English credit is "Seven Deaths in the Cats Eyes" and on imdb it's "Seven Dead in a Cat's Eye"), La morte negli occhi del gatto is worth seeing under any guise or language track, provided the colors are as lovingly soaked in dusky golden, maroon and black, as here. And with her huge eyes and endearingly crooked smile, Jane Birkin makes a fabulous Edgar Wallace-style heroine; her suitor/cousin, Hiram Keller (Satyricon) is the pretty but blank Hamlin-esque 'madman' Lord James MacGrieff, kept a virtual prisoner up in his fabulous top of the castle salon with his paints and pet gorilla (you know it's an old dark house movie when there's a gorilla, provided it's played by a guy in a gorilla suit- and this is one of the worst I've ever seen. I'm in a peculiar kind of heaven). This international-Italian/French co-production finds Lady Corringa (Birkin) hiding the fact she's been expelled from the nun-run girl's boarding school she's been attending and dropping in unannounced on her mother and her aunt, who lives in the ornate castle and won't sell it even though she'll get no more money to run it. Soon mom is dead and our unlucky ingenue is possibly going mad in a mansion full of eccentrics all vying for possession of the elaborate yet crumbling secret passage-ridden ancestral estate. She's a bit like Paulette Goddard in the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY if the Bob Hope part was played by a brooding Byronic pretty boy chief suspect... and he had a pet gorilla; and she came to the reading of the will with her mom, but her mom was murdered and then appeared to her as a vampire ghost at night, with a Hamlet-like demand for vengeance.

The score's a bit on the dimestore Morrione cop show side, but that's hardly bad thing. The main benefit here is gorgeous photography lush enough that at times Birkin's luminous hair is so perfectly reflected in her candelabra's lamplight we can count the strands. This film bumps up three stars now that it's not a panned, scanned, washed-out mess. Margheriti clearly loves along with the writing of the godfather of the giallo, Edgar Wallace.



One of the stand-out elements here are the clothes, which 'nod' to an assumed setting of 1930's England, but just nod, keeping the high fashion edge rather than getting bogged down in stuffy details like bowler hats and woolen overcoats. For her mourning wear (above) Birkin is given a beautiful black fur collar and her nightgown's sexy without being tacky (Von Sternberg would have approved). The whole production, aside from lingering close-ups of rats eating the face of victim #1, is very tasteful. The music is the orchestral suspense-generating variety rather than the moody giallo electric guitars of the time, but that's not worth a demerit. Indeed, the only demerit is maybe dubbing Serge Gainsbourg (he's the detective) with a fake Scotch burr.

A beloved classic in the disembodied head canon, this has Herb Evers as a furrowed doctor with a yen for wild experimentalism. He has a new formula that overrides the bodily resistance to foreign invaders, the very thing that makes limb and organ transplants so iffy a prospect. With his new mix, you can just stick anything on anywhere and it will work. There's just one issue and that is in the past his experiments have not gone well. There's a thing he made out of parts locked in the lab closet, banging on the door when its food bowl is late. His assistant, with a mangled arm, waits for his chance to finally be two-fisted. Virginia Leith is Evers' sultry fiancee, whose conservative doctor father is Evers' mentor. He gives Evers shit about using his drug to save the lives of patients even after dad's already pronounced them dead. Dad wants to test it on hundreds of lab animals first - hinting at the incalculable cruelty of the scientific mode of inquiry. (May they all be smote come the The Day of the Animals!) Anyway, Evers and Leith are headed up to the country for the weekend - car wreck - fiancee's head goes flying. He scoops it up in a coat and races home to get to work. Down in his basement there's also the sad result of his past failed experiment: a hideous mostly unseen mutant locked unseen in a closet. His assistant waits to be next for a transplant (he has a withered useless arm and hopes for a fresh one) and has a habit of teasing Leith's head, accusing her of being a freak!

Occuring in some strange twilight realm of tawdry nightclubs and louche stares, Brain features two great performances -- notably Virginia Leith as the severed head of the evil doctor's fiancee, rasping her threats and pleas from inside a TV tray full of blood; and Adele Lamont as an initially wary streetwise photography model (back when guys would pay money to take their own snapshots, a kind of DIY smut meets amateur photography class - a practice that seems largely to have deservedly disappeared) whose body Evers figures would be.... just right... for his beloved fiancee.  Meanwhile, Leith bonds with the thing in the closet, forming a unique friendship in the monster annals ("I've got to see your hideousness and you've got to see mine!" and "I am just a head... and you are whatever you are... but together we're strong!") A whole other avenue of tragedy opens up when he finds a girl (Adele Lamont, in the other great performance) with a scar on her face who considers herself marred, though it's barely noticeable and she has a slammin' body which she uses to pose for dirty old men shutterbugs. Her disgust with men ("I don't date men") is palpable and deserved; she really conveys what it must be like to endure endless come-ons and harassment as a young hot single broad with a slammin' body. That's what makes it all the more tragic when she falls for Evers line about fixing her face (she remembers him from an earlier visit to the hospital after the initial tragedy). She trusts him and winds up roofied back at his house. She was so smart up to a point, not to trust any man, that we really feel for her as the POV camera shows Evers walking expressionlessly towards her as her vision blurs to blankness. Knowing now about Cosby et al, it's horrifying to think how often this same blurred vision and feeling of mounting helplessness and fear goes on and on in real life.

Adele Lamont dares to fall for Herb Evers' bullshit

I've only seen this cult-deserving gem three or four times, and though I love it more each time, it's not as addictive to me as Plan Nine, Mesa of Lost Women or Cat Women of the Moon. But as bad movies go, the sort with not a single 'normal' moment, it's a gem to be treasured, and it's never looked better. Written by the (Italian) director's wife as a satire on (American-style) vegetarianism (!) we're left to wonder, does she think so little of us, or is she a witch, or a genius? How can a script have so very little to do with the way real life works, in America or anywhere? And how did we get so blessed to have Troll 2 in our lives, and now--for the Prime scenesters, ever just a click away in beautiful richly-colored HD? We must have ate something wonderful...

The story has four person family (please don't make me tell you their names), deciding to swap houses for a summer vacation with a family way out in the country, to unplug and get some real country living. What they don't know is that the town they'll be staying in, Nilbog, is "Goblin spelled backwards!" The locals are real hospitable and crazy about green food coloring and at the drop of a hat turn into gnarly little goblins (or trolls). On moving into the new house, the fam finds tons of food laid out--real country hospitality-- but it's all green-tinted and the ghost of the young Joshua's grandpa tells him he has to stop everyone from eating any of it! It's dangerous! Freezing time for 30 seconds so he can think of a plan! He doesn't just grab it all and throw it on the floor like a normal person, he stands on the table to pee on it. We don't see the pee but we cut to him being led off to his bedroom to watch his father menacingly un-notch his belt.... then tighten it. Yes, it's that kind of a movie. At that point you're either in for life, or hitting stop like its a red-headed stepchild.

For those of us left, oh so many highlights it's hard to pick even a few, but most of my favorites center around Creedence (Deborah Reed), a kind of witchy mother to the trolls, who lives in a comfortable looking refurbished church, where she turns visiting humans into trees, which she then grows in little pots, to harvest as food for her little goblin charges. As if a graduate of the Fuad Ramses school of acting, Reed milks every line, every syllable, as much as possible - eyes bugged, lips curled back in an obscene smile. Her victims tend to be virile young boys, a gaggle of whom have followed the girlfriend (Joshua's older sister) of one of them to the country in their Winnebago. Nothing gay about them sleeping together with their shirts off. They're there to meet girls! The dim boyfriend promised them. But they're camped in a true nightmare of a town --they don't even have coffee at the general store, "There's no coffee here in Nilbog. It's the devil's drink!!"

Finally the great "SHE" starring Sandahl Bergman comes to Blu-ray in a flawless edition from Kino, released the other week. The Image and Sound are sublime, it's never looked better, and with a great interview given for the disc by director/writer Ari Nesher (yes that Aris Nesher), its pedigree as a cult rock-and-roll intellectually distaff comic book adventure can at last loom as medium large as it deserves. Finally we can examine the film in the light of what it is, a wildly imaginative, comic book-style adventure mixing all sorts of genres together to form an idea of what a post-apocalyptic renaissance faire might look like if its inhabitants roamed around and infiltrated other early 80s genre movies. It's a land where boxes of cereal are sold as antiques and one can wander from an underground mutant kingdom to a rich young werewolf pool party dinner/dance orgy in a few connecting woodsy shots, finding themselves captured by a bewigged 18th century naturalist and his tutu-wearing flunky; a war-torn city run by vicious warlords who regularly raid the countryside for women, a faux-Christian telekinetic Christ mutant and his funky monks, and so forth. There's a kinky edge, to be sure, with Bergman's goddess "She" and her right hand warrior woman enduring whippings and other torture, and all sorts of wildly imaginative Alex Raymond-style violence, but feminism always looms larger than sex (there is none). I kind of like that, as in the end, sisterhood wins out, as She goes back to her --but I can't spoil it.

Validating its worth as a great cult film, a kind of cross between Alphaville and Flash Gordon (1980) is an extra interview with Nesher, an Israeli film critic-turned-director/writer who made this in his 20s once out of his obligatory military service. Turns out he's an intellectual Cahiers du Cinéma type who went on to a distinguished career making 'serious' films in Israel like Rage and Glory, but also enjoying keeping his hand in with American genre junk like Doppelganger and Timebomb. -A handsome well-spoken guy who shot the extra while in New York for a retrospective of his Israeli films at (I'm guessing) Lincoln Center, the fact that he spoke so highly of his time making the film (a great anecdote his lunch with Fellini, who was shooting a film one soundstage over and had complained about the constant blaring heavy metal they were playing.)

There's a kind of Parsifal hero's journey that, when I originally caught only the last 2/3 of this back when it was on Netflix and seemed nothing more than a bargain basement Conan copy-cat, but Blu-ray and HD have been kind to such things, especially the ones made in Italy (as this was) which really hum along from wild set-piece cliffhanger to cliffhanger, with a little more than a little sex thrown in. (There's no sex here,

 Finding it to be a great post-modern melange, with mighty Bergman as the goddess of her little slice of the post-'cancellation' wasteland, wandering to the north with a handsome idiot (since it's pre-ordained by her oracle) and running into scrapes with everyone from New Yoahk-accented mutants to crazed warriors in a ruined city, acolytes of a 'one god' mutant boy who can control matter with his green flashing eyes; a powdered-wig naturalist and his tutu-wearing henchman, who are collecting and notating the flora and fauna and treating their captives like butterflies pinned to the wall. There's also a rack, flogging, the old trash compacting wall cliffhanger, and a lot of cool feminist force (Nesher wanted to make sure women weren't objectified, but man do we become thankfully acquainted with Bergman's incredibly lithe dancer legs. Symbols of great strength as well as lithe dancer grace and beguilement. )

This is what it looked like before the Blu - murky.

In its past incarnations it looked kind of cheap and rundown but now, on this solid Blu-ray transfer the witty genius of the film can really be felt. Bits like Sandahl's being startled into sword out readiness by the squeak from stepping on a stray rubber duck by the werewolf elite's swimming pool; David Brandon as the ridiculously gorgeous Sebastian Venable. It's all very well paced, relentlessly entertaining and packed with crazy songs, rock anthems galore, reflecting the style of the time, but in Europe, when prog and metal was taking the edge to the limit and avoiding the slick empty synth sounds the AOR guys in the States were convinced every artist needed to have. Similarly, the much bigger-budgeted groupthink-bespoiled Red Sonja seems to have, alongside Conan the Destroyer derailed the Conan train (thanks be to director Richard Fleischer--"great" choice in director--and his PG-minded producers). If only SHE had been freely avail when I was a smitten-by-Sandahl Conan worshipper back in the day, but as far as I know this never made it to the rental store... or other... 'til now.

Anyway, Blu-ray of the year!

Runners-up:  HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD (Kino), THE PSYCHIC (Scorpion) and PORT OF SHADOWS (Kino) and PAGANINI HORROR (Severin),

Sure, it's Superbad for girls-ish, an all in a single night/day "better cram all our partying into one wild time before graduation" flick. Certainly one can't do ecstasy and then be 'down' a beat later, especially if it's your first time even drinking; and sure, it's almost logically impossible for all the things that happen to happen before dawn. But hey, one look at the credits--which include a crew and production team of so many damned women--and it's a thunderstruck galvanizing moment. Lady Bird  may have launched the volley, but this is the film that slays the oncoming charge, the backlash brigade. The only sex on display is a lesbian third base foul in the bathroom with pouty beauty Diana Silvers (Ma) but the main thing is the intense screwball comedy patter between Kaitlyn Denver (a revelation) and Beanie Feldstein (the pal in Lady Bird). What dialogue! What energy! Finally another comedy duo where they know each other's rhythms like real best friends and sweep us along in their tide.

 I wish I had been able to see this movie in high-school instead of shit like My Bodyguard, and all the Stephen King adaptations with their endless bullying and abuse- all of which made it seem like it's impossible to attend school and keep your dignity at the same time. While I don't envy kids growing up in the age of constant texting and slutshaming, (in the 80s, sluts had a very special place in our hearts), at least there's no teacher-ignored assaults and bullying itself is at least less tolerated and therefore less visible. None of the stuff they hope for comes to pass but in the process, they realize there was nothing to fear or be intimidated by in their peers. Maybe that's the lesson America as a whole needs. The enemy has always been in our heads projected onto others and exploited by some sock puppet think tank in Russia. Stop fighting shadows and look deep into the eyes of your mirror foe... Dumbass.

Another woman's solidarity pic, this has a roster of familiar faces as the March sisters, including Hermione Granger and Midsommar's Florence Pugh as the 'normal' one who marries Timothée Chalamet's Laurie after he's spurned by Jo (Saoirse Ronan). Its odd zipping back and forth structure has apparently confused a few viewers not well acquainted with the book or its three more linear previous adaptations. I'm not acquainted nor confused, as I have seen the Winona Ryder version from the late 90s. I cried at that one, all boozy and emotional on a rainy Sunday screening, but this one is better, though I cried less. Chalament makes for much more engaging Laurie than Christian Bale was (Bale always seemed like he was encroaching on some precious girl time) and Louis Garrel makes a magnetic Friedric. I especially loved the first half, all rich with overlapping simultaneously occurring chitchat dialogue as the girls all tumble over each other in brilliantly choreographed movements worthy of a Hawks screwball comedy, albeit with the cinematography of Yorick Le Saux capturing an eternal dusky autumnal period richness and Gerwig's keen familiarity and clear love of the book palpable in every frame. Streep and Chris Cooper are reunited again after Adaptation as the cool older generation and steal all their scenes (this is the rare story with no villains, not even the vaguely patriarchal publisher). A great early moment is a stunning tracking shots of Jo racing excitedly down the crowded period NYC street after selling her first story, and a haunting art gallery-worthy golden hued nighttime train station romantic 'possible concession to the publisher" climax. And of course the various plays and attics, lots of well photographed, orchestrated and attended dances, and some existential moments on a windy beach.



The plot may parallel Black Panther, Lion King and a zillion other movies/myths with some positions jostled vis-a-vis rightful heir to the crown battles, just with the ocean instead of Africa, but who cares? The tale was old when it was told in The Lion King and, probably, when Sir Thomas Mallory wrote Le Morte d'Arthur in 1485. It will never get old, as long as there are dudes hanging around guzzling brew instead of reclaiming their kingdoms from bureaucrat usurpers. But much as I mancrush on Jason Momoa, there's one reason why this should be one here, and one reason should be enough: the wet, straggly hair.

There's a moment when we're up close in Nicole Kidman's waterlogged grey (!) straggly dreads when it hits us - the hair in this movie could have gone horribly wrong: anime flat, soft boy gelly, or dry or worse, taped down, the sort of lazy cop-out akin to the having kaiju slap-downs occur on cloudy days (freeing animators from dealing with bothersome afternoon shadows and scale-glint highlights), but director James Wan (Fast and the Furious - the most consistently good dude-friendly action series ever) wisely knows the wet hair makes or breaks this movie and our belief these people are actually underwater rather than just making swimming gestures in slow motion in front of a blue screen. I'll grant you, all the hair isn't that amazing (Heard's artificial candy apple Ariel red) and some of the acting is hammy, especially by Willem Defoe who speaks in that declamatory outdoor voice kind of over-enunciation of Saturday morning cartoons where voice actors talk to each other adult characters like they're really talking to children despite their booming declarativeness and moving their lips in such a way as to make things easy for the dubbing crews to come.
Then you have Patrick Wilson -- one of those items you just keep getting on the menu though you never ordered it, maybe because it's not offensive enough to send back or deliberately request be left off the plate, like the pickle and the little tub of cole slaw at the diner. It might be delicious if you really dug into it, but why would you when there's mighty Dolph Lundgren as the King Triton-cum-Sea Monkey? There's that green spangle scale costume and clashing dyed red hair too on the usually sublime Amber Heard as the girl who brings the Momoa down deep to prevent a massive ocean-land war. Bad color grader, bad!

None of that matters, because this is the best of this kind of Henry V/Arthur-esque scraggly king and his girl and his mother riding in to the wasteland to declare his might against his kingdom's enemies together' movie since Dune. And then there's Jason Mamoa, with his massive beard and super-brooding eyes and gloriously tattooed body, is the kind of king you know you can swig beers with but then proudly serve, not unlike the Hemsworth Thor when we first found him way back in 2005 or whenever. Such a genius casting move to make him all a half-Polynesian / half-Poesidon rather than the towheaded Aryan in green slippers from the comics, and keeping his hair and groovy mods rather than streamlining him to some whitebread DC pap ideal in elvin slippers and orange scales

One weird but strangely hopeful sign too: the presence of a set of African-American father-son high-tech submarine pirates who open the film boring into nuclear subs to kill the crew and steal the nukes. What an idea --an African American father -son bond but they're the bad guys!! It's all well and good to put African Americans as sidekicks and main character heroes, but casting them as villains, for DC that's a huge complexity for which they should be congratulated. Watching them in action, we're so conditioned to scan a pair like this as stars in some underprivileged small scale drama that acknowledging them as evil and the Russian nuclear sub crew as the good guys, runs so counter to a lifetime of movie conditioning it quietly cracks open a long-closed iron door. Are we free of those prisons now? Am I showing my age just by pointing these firsts out?

Kaya Scodelro gives a star-making performance as the tough ex-swim champ who didn't win on her big chance or something, and is heading past the barriers back to her immanently flooded Florida home where divorced handyman dad (Barry Pepper) isn't answering his phone. The result, daughter must rescue dad and dog from an influx of gators from a nearby gator farm, rolling in with a massive catagory 5 hurricane. All things considered (see above), it couldn't be more timely. The sets are amazing -including a massive flooded exterior, where the whole neighborhood, from the house across the street to the gas station, is actually flooded. Rescue teams come by but those gators won't quit. Aja uses every foot of the four stories of the house, from basement up to attic are used to wreak maximum suspense. The gators keep coming, and Haley keeps rising to the challenge leading to a pretty memorable final shot in a rollicking film that keeps one engaged and entertained from the beginning to the end.
I know, too many comic book movies in my list/s, but I can't help what I watch or like or what stands as genuine mythic arc lighting and social progress and screw anyone who disagrees. It's funny that Marty Scorsese's dislike of Marvel movies becomes a meme when The Irishman is such a cliche in its format, from Scorsese's regular guy narration to the moments chosen to focus in on, such as Joe Pesci's irritation with his wife's smoking in the car as an excuse for those stops along the symbolic Jersey road. Does Marty prefer not to drive so doesn't know that's a feature most cars have, that you can roll down a damned window?). It's simple shit like that. Scorsese thinking that we should feel involved in Leo Di Caprio's urge to kill the man who killed a father he didn't even know, when it was a fair fight during a big 5-Points battle (Gangs of New York) or that we're not supposed to be sick to death of De Niro's character's surprise when he's slammed by the gaming license committee after he refuses to keep Joe Bob Briggs on staff, even "farther down the trough" (in Casino). Such moments seem to indicate Marty is severely challenged when it comes to the basics of reality.

The best Marvel movies, on the other hand, don't give a shit. They're mythic, and so much more attuned to reality than Marty's asphalt-eyed adoration of regular guys. Though its plot is hardly original even in comic book movies, Lady Marvel has got everything great films should have. And as the title character, Brie Larson proves a sea change along the lines of the one we see in Booksmart and Little Women and Crawl, i.e. the arrival of 'last wave' feminism, wherein strong female characters no longer need to keep banging on the edges of the shattered glass ceiling like the millionth spokesperson for grrl power. The ceiling is busted and Brie knows you can just move on up through and, rather than stay up there making a speech on glass ceilings, looking for some small corner still uncracked so she can break it a bit more; to use a D-Day parlance, she's smart enough to gets the hell of the beach.  No longer merely identified via the handrails of the 'strong female woman' but eight miles beyond it, the way Sam Jackson's Nick Fury's whole demeanor changes when he realizes this is marvelous. While Captain Marvel was a wearisome snooze as a man, with Brie at the helm she's part of a grand scheme that points out to America, in the most mythic way, that in the next war, upcoming election pending, we might well be the fascist bad guys.


A fascinating rags-to-riches tale of DOLEMITE, a DIY film that broke cult midnight movie records and made its star and producer, Rudy Ray Moore, famous. It's a FUBU affair, with Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore, a stand-up comedian who makes a name for himself in his neighborhood and black clubs when he starts using the boasting limerick-style sexual potency pre-rap rapping of the local street bums in his act. Calling himself Dolemite he's soon putting out 'blue' records and eventually getting financed to make a small low budget movie. Stealing electricity and using local film students as a crew, the film goes onto become a smash hit primarily with all black audiences who'd been longing to see just such a participatory raunchy mess. Eddy Murphy disappears into the role of Moore, and captures the highs and lows of the character, letting us into the mix of go-for-broke moxy that every struggling filmmaker yearns to capture. The 99% black cast backing him up is top notch. Best of all, here is a film about the black experience that eschews any tired examples of racism as an impediment to success (there are police cars or social sermons) to focus instead on black culture taking the tools of the trade and making their own damn movie, free and clear of any liens on having to represent some kind of black crisis, black pride, or other "Big Message" that so often makes black movies seem like dreary liberal preach to the choir racism call-outs. The take-away is nothing sort of a revelation, a glimpse into what a post-racist black culture might look like, free of the need to define itself by past oppression or economic woes. Like the poetry of Langston Hughes, the film has the guts to reach way past that and provide a mythic core to the African-American experience and what it is--outside of music, of course--may still be forming, but Dolemite is my Name is proof of patent. The sea change is nigh. Black-made movies about black people making their own movies is just the first step out of the reactionary ghetto. The signs are all around that even as this world burns and drowns at the same time, the cinematic alternate is looking mighty rosy.


Though in the end the reveal doesn't make a lot of logical sense, the meanings and interpretations remain intriguing and varied. And like Endgame, certain key termite moments transcend the whole and become original, real, iconic and terrifying. Lupita Nyong'o in particular is so balls-out crazy and lit so well that her round huge eyes and glaring white teeth, blazing but barely making a hight against the all consuming blackness of her ebony face, becomes a terrifying monster behind the mask of normality, as if the gleaming smiles of past America's past black caricatures come ripping open to expose some kind of terrifying archaic savage. It's such a wild piece of acting we can feel the pantheon of great horror icons opening up to embrace her, should she deign to stay. If the film itself and its weird obsession with Hands Across America can't quite live up to the expectations we all had after Get Out, it's still loaded with enough weird symbolism, an examination of a century-old problem in the African American community (i.e. that no one can enter the upper middle class without carrying the guilt of not helping the community they left behind move up too (and thus draining their own bank accounts). It's a problem that has never gone away in human history but is surely felt quite keenly in the African America community. The idea of this other linked world never quite feels real but it's beautifully lit, shot, and acted, with enough great horror moments that it earns a spot in this looney-tunes list.


Well, in addition to the joy of partying like the tab for the world is about to arrive and, rather than admit you can't pay it, you just stall and start ordering more rounds of shots, the big 'last day on earth' celebrations also have a very real flip side, a tendency to lose a grip on their usual semi-cool and mythic elan and to get blubbery and let every character take a sobbing bow, dying in one another's arms left and right. I can't spoil the surprises in the bottom of the Endgame cereal box but, as with Toy Story 4, the maudlin goodbye speeches and dewy-eyed "human" contact moments kind of wind up in a fender-bender five mile back-up that seems to freeze time in place while the saccharine strings build and the hugs commence. One of the reasons I risk critical reputation (!) by regarding these movies so highly is their mythic resonance, but when they get like this they're no longer resonant towards the larger myths - the Parsifal/Moses/Perseus hero with a thousand faces archetypal blueprint --and more just a homage to a homage, like Red Riding Hood cut with B-12 and baby powder. Maybe that's what they call the actor's 'reward'. You can see the reward in TV shows, where--even in dramas--they'll let certain actors with musical theater roots belt out an anachronistic song, or the whole cast will do some choreographed lip sync dance party and you're like ugh.

Then again, as with Aquaman's hair, all the angst and sobbing (dude, no one gives a shit about Pepper Potts!) is worth it just for Thor's big gut and devolving from mega-hero to slovenly dude playing videogames and quaffing beers with the survivors from Asgard's destruction at the end of Thor: Ragnarok. The scene where he time travels and bumps into his mom (dead since Thor 2) and she instantly gets he's from the future on an important mission, and the way he plays it, clearly overwhelmed and finally breaking down in her arms,made my cinematic year. Go Thor! Go!


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 HBO series to be filmed in Spanish but meant for American audiences as well as the world. Set in Mexico with forays to LA, 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 (for will readings) and so forth. Fans of classic Mexican horror, Ed Wood, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the ficciones of Borges, the wheezing of Togella, the drollery of Armisen and all the true (?) ghost and UFO shows on cable--ay dios mio!-- must love it. (Full: "Disinformation Please!")

This Gallic Stephen King-ish tale isn't the first to use Stephen King's collective ouevre as a genre unto itself, but it is the best. Ala It 2, we have a group of grown-up childhood friends in a French seaside town who reunite when one of them commits suicide at one of her book readings. Their leader, a hot girl version of Stephen King, is forced to realize her writing both creates and comes from the evil spirit, a kind of La Llorona in a mildly twee-meta vein, Marianne. The whole "you must write me so I exist" angle can get your eye rolling if you're not from a country that reveres writers (i.e. like the USA, where we're notoriously contemptuous of them), but the acting is all great and there is perhaps the scariest actress performance ever in the shape of Mireille Herbstmeyer as the possessed mother of the 'suicide' girl - clearly they're using some kind of imperceptable secret CGI to enlarge her eyes and mouth ever so slightly here and there, never enough to really break the wall of normality, and that's why it's so terrifying. Maybe the best use of 'subliminal' CGI since What Lies Beneath. 

(in French with English Subtitles)

6. Of course, Rick and Morty - season 4. It's just as wildly imaginative, trippy, densely woven and filthy as it ever was. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, I don't know what they're smoking over there, but find out what it is and distribute it to the other shows. Great as it is, I only add it last, almost in secret, as the troll fan contingent and other elements give the show a tainted aura outside of itself, particularly where uppity broads like my own beloved #mefirst feminist cohabitant is concerned. But hey, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, and all the other 'can't we just have this one thing?' blah blah appeals we SWMs make to keep the things that double us over in hilarity free from associative slime. Ohm, it's a shrinking island. I'm on it and increasingly worrying if the streak of 'just kidding' no fear gestures I make are getting through, or if I'm just sounding like a Drunk Uncle. That's I guess the challenge of the 20s. But guess what? Now we have a name for the decade! It's been weird trying to find the right moniker for this past 20 years, "way back in the aughts, or the 10s, or double-00s, or the 'teens" - nothing sounds or feels quite right. But the twenties?! Hell Yeah the 20s. Long may they roar, quietly.


P.S. - The best show, as far as prime time, was of course THE MASKED SINGER, but I'm too embarrassed to praise it properly. Had I the balls, its odd mix of Ken's annoying comedy, the crazy inspired dancers, the relative sexy middle-aged pair of statuesque female judges with normal looking lips, the idea of a game show with no prizes and no real losers (and the whole Who-scored demasking climaxes), the way the amazing host Nick Cannon never misses a beat, looks great in a Sikh/magician turban and stresses the hard G and K in the title (i.e. the "MasKed Sinh-Ger"), the strange, strange but wildly imaginative performances, and the propensity of judge Nicole Scherzinger to shed more than one tear the moment shit gets ballad-ish (plus her tender love affair with the "Thingamajig"), the amazing editing, cutting to random but always trenchant audience reaction close-ups, and the fact even hoity toity brainiacs like me and mine can get just as into it as some red state Fox viewer and neither of us have to feel slighted or ironic. If we can all agree on this show, there's no limit to the things we can achieve.

It's maybe a strange accident all the films on this list are American (save one), but I doubt it. American flag tweet!

PS- I use quotes for as my editor sig other notes, a real decade would end next December 2011-2020. In the end, so what?  And the end is coming! Iran, shit like that. Who knows? But the movies will be here, and so this list focuses more on scrappy independents, crooks, witches, and outlaw lovers rather than preachy biopics and Zen-still meditations of the sort beloved by the bourgeois. There's no reality anymore --don't kid yourself.

PS - I left some major Art out of this list as a result. I mean, I liked 2011's Melancholia but let's face it, the thing was depressing. I cried during Tree of Life (also 2011) but I watched it right as I learned my dad was dying so the fact that it was the perfect movie to see at that time and in that state disqualifies my judgement.  I still am only halfway to appreciating Inherent Vice, but Kim Morgan hails it as the jewel in the crown of the decade and she sees things deeply enough to know. Maybe I'd resonate differently with it if I lived in LA?

Irregardless, the results are in, amigo. What's left to ponder?

See also:

Scary without being cruel or callous, sweet without being corny, David Thomas Mitchell has made  one of the most succinct and scariest cinematic coming-of-age myths ever, with the best scary cool analog synth score not made by John Carpenter. A dream-past reverie on that mortal moment when we realize we're now 'grown' and not 'growing' --so we begin running from death as it runs to meet us fast as a mental patient's relentless stalking countdown. Seeking immortality in the sexual drive, 'passing it on' through the generations (Life as the original STD), the horror of birth and fear of death commingled like atoms to form the core of what makes 80s slasher movie tropes our new Grimm's Fairy Tales archetypal lexicon. Beautiful pink and blue lights and 70s suburban shadows make every shot a luminous poem alive with vaguely 30s two-strip color used on films like the original Mystery at the Wax Museum. A masterpiece. (see: It's a Carpenter Hush)

By special request, to round them up for easy reference. Here is Acidemic's Tarot Deck of CinemArchetypes, a guide to analyzing cinema and its connection to your own reality and life via Jungian archetypal psychology. Things are about to get weird. But then aren't they always? Peel the onion and it all leads here...




There are a couple more of these on the docket, including "Elementals," and the long-awaited "Der Trumpen," (can't get to that one til the smoke clears, and the fire rages on). But to round them up for easy linking. Here is the Tarot Deck of Cinematic Types and their Jungian array-aage