Meanwhile, back in Gotham, here comes another chaotic neutral character from DC Comics, the whirling sexy batwielding, bat-smashing Harley Quinn. The engines hum but the advance critical notice is ominously silent. With Joker getting Oscar buzz and TBS showing Suicide Squad to whet the appetite, and as a fan of strong, crazy red queen style villainesses, I'm mildly into it. Marvel is more complex in their mythos despite any Scorsese 'art' naysaying (nyaah!) but DC, home of Catwoman, offers a fusion between Jungian archetypal mythology and those old Mexican wrestling movies, the kind where cultural and financial differences are worked out in fights; and everyone prefers to use high kicks and pile drivers rather than guns, and masks protect us from the painful humanity of archetypal embodiments, and that's pretty cool. And a paragon of macho (he made Fury with Brad Pitt for god's sakes), David Ayers' Suicide Squad is the reason we have Joker getting edgy acclaim, as well as the new Birds of Prey: The Emancipation of Harley Quinn opening this weekend, so it must be acknowledged that some special magic in SS made it a cultural touchstone (all the girls in the club were Harley that Halloween). Maybe the fight club morning practices of director David FURY Ayer helped make everyone seem tougher; or maybe because Robbie was so alluring in the way only hot messes can be; or maybe I'm loyal to SS since I relapsed to it back in Xmas 2016 and my feeling of insane 'emancipation' was perfectly matched in the theme, style and plot.

You may shake your head in disgust at that last--admittedly personal--connection; if you haven't been sober for 20 years as a massive alcoholic whose life went instantly from chronic depression to magical aliveness once he started drinking (late, senior year of HS), who was terrible at sports all through his childhood but was terrific at them suddenly, with a drink in his system to improve his coordination (children of genetic alcoholics often have this weird issue), then you can't know what it means to go from utterly miserable while everyone around you on Xmass day is loud, laughing and swilling Jack Daniels, to being loud, laughing and swilling yourself, to go from a 1 to a 10 in mood over the course of 20 minutes is, itself, addictive. To know the last 20 years of your life are, with one guzzle, a closed book, is so freeing there are no words for it.

It's almost worth being miserable and winding up in the hospital for, that hour of total freedom and a sense that your horizons have just widened by a significant "Kansas-switched-to-Technicolor-Oz" level. for however short a time your biological jailer decrees. Suicide Squad gets that sense of freedom vs. restriction. Viola Davis with her remote control that detonates the jugular vein bombs in the squad's necks being my own biochemistry, no longer able to handle alcohol in any amount, as I would later learn the hard way.

No wonder I too feel the draw of the madness of Joker, a 70s NYC-ish Gotham-set saga of mental illness and delusion... and white male rage! Todd Phillips' film proves a fine echo-drenched tribute to the golden (70s-early-80s) era of Scorsese, and hence perfect in the same year Scorsese slanders comic book movies and delivers his own (early-90s) Goodfellas-"tribute," The Irishman. It all happens in the order it does for a reason.

Some day you'll understand that (1).

Living in a loosely delusional zone between Taxi Driver, if Travis was fired from a temp clown agency, and King of Comedy 2, if Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) takes over the Jerry Lewis role and is finally popped off live on TV by someone twice as crazy as him. He loses his mom, his grip on reality, and his illusory girlfriend and then he finds his true self when a Goetz-y self-defense killing of three rich a-holes on a late-night subway triggers all sorts of fun insane civil unrest as people reason killing the rich is pretty cool if they can't see your face because you're wearing a clown mask. And Fleck, I mean the Joker, I mean "Joker" doesn't disappoint his fans. To paraphrase that old Joseph Campbell quote about "the mystic swims where the psychotic drowns," Joker sinks to the bottom and realizes he's got gills. When you've lost everything, as Tyler Durden says, you can do anything. Of course you can argue it's a symptom of our trigger happy white male rage mass shooter age and we mustn't laugh at such things. But Fleck doesn't use an automatic weapon. He uses a pistol, a present from his Peter Boyle (whom he later stabs to death with... I think... a pen).  Thanks to a great color and lighting scheme (how his red, orange and green suit contrast against the dingy gray of the city) and the way---during his celebrated stairs dance---the low-end roll of convicted felon Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll (part 2)" pumps perfectly through the channels opened by the mind-meltingly deep and true cello chords of Icelandic genius Hildur Ingveldar Guðnadóttir, making for one of the defining moments of the cinematic year.

Pauline Kael would have loved it and recommended seeing it in a dirty 42nd Street grindhouse


But first, before the psychotic can swim (2)-- he or she must find their animal or elemental or archetypal talisman:a penguin, a cat, an egg, ice, earth, a playing card, fir or ice, a coin, or even just riddles: their psychosis and amoral love of crime and villainy can take to the air like a kite. And not only that, their chaotic evil gives Bruce Wayne an excuse to cut out of whatever gala he's slumming through. He's glad to have--once more--someone to chase around (if he grows up), so don't worry about him. The deal: just tie him up and roast him over some hot coals, rather than merely shoot him.

But Wayne's just a kid here. It's all Joker. It's all just Phoenix looking in the mirror and abusing his smile. But that stairs dance to Glitter's anthem works so indelibly as a moment because it takes the time to work, to breathe into it, and because the music is perfect; the stairs are perfect and the sight of this clown, literally, in this super clean clown suit is so perfectly etched against the filthy melange of urban decay/gray that it makes you stop and catch your breath. We can't help but love him because there is nothing this clown wants from us anymore. He's broken through to the other side. He no longer whines for our love or attention (the way, say, Jerry Langford used to do back in his bellboy days), and that's why we must give it. Usually there's something terrifically desperate about a clown, the human equivalent of a needy puppy that starts to whine the moment you cease petting it. But this clown has moved beyond us. The only person he needs to make laugh is himself. And he can't stop.
Everything builds to a fine old triumphant juggalos amok climax, but very last WTF scene after that kind of annoyed me. No, it really did annoy me. But I sure am fascinated nonetheless about why it seemed so imperative to add this little coda.

My guess: everyone worried the ending where it should have been might incite the juggalos to rise the way they way gang violence used to erupt at inner city Warriors screenings, or the old Aurora Dark Knight Rises incident. They even once worried Fight Club would motivate the trolls (back before they were called that) from out mom's basements and teach them the ways of men.

But no worries, the time for fight clubs has passed; the that may have come to don thy juggalo paint and raise a mighty ruckus is also past; because he has assassinated the present and there's no sense fighting if the opponent is but a dream. Safe in troll anonymity behind the goofball mask, we avoid the sting of teargas and truncheons by living outside the flow of time. The NYC of the 70s, the one of pay phones and rampant street crime, seems long gone today but it's never far away. Joker reminds us it's always close by as we walk home on NYC streets deserted of commerce (thanks to Amazon). So why worry about the present with its Disney and Warner Bros. flagships that we once bemoaned for cleaning up the dirty streets of Gotham? They're ensconced and provide fun jobs. Their clowns bounce with big bulbous heads, and if the Joker was just more cartoony, he'd be one of them. But let's face it. He's gone dark. He's joined the past, hanging out in front of the crumbling movie theaters showing kung fu movies and pornography and posing for invisible tourist pictures.

Welcome the overalls

And now - the ex-girlfriend of the Joker (a sexier, younger Joker, mind you, from a Gotham set in the future- see? Time is dead), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) comes pogoing onto screens this weekend. But things are looking grim based on the clutter of the ads and preview's inability to pick a tone, and suspicious lack of advance critical notice. From her 'riveting raver' jumpers, ratchet pompom shoulder wraps replacing her Suicide Squad baby doll trash and vaudeville slutty clothes, to the somewhat grating (and all too sane-sounding) Brooklyn voiceover (monologues for crazy villains should sound crazy -- as in "So I wanted to stop the lightning shooting of my forehead and the only way to do that was steal the fingers of my old math teacher or so the shimmering blue triangle in my bathroom said," and not banal girl power edicts like "so the Jokah and I broke up and I was reel sad until I started doing "Diamonds are A Girl's Best Friend" Marilyn Monroe dance recreations to express my freedom from lack of materialism.


Of course Anna Biller set the bar really high in Love Witch (2016) as far as able to bring a truly feminine eye towards lady sexy craziness. It looks from the outside like Yan and Hodson aren't even going to try, delivering instead what looks like another 'freshly broken up girl finds a yah-yay sisterhood to beat up on Ewan McGregor with' plot. Now, I'm all for beating up Ewan McGregor. No actor in the last two centuries has seemed to so fully warrant retaliation (3) but the kind of crazy that's psychotic rather than just mopey, in films is all too rare, it's like striking gold when we stumble on it, Hence the preciousness this year with Joker, the Beach Bum; the Parasite birthday picnic, the crazy subterranean's weird smiles in Us, the second half of Climax. But so much else in modern movies seems mired in a by-the-numbers sanity that unfortunately dogs even Frank Miller's DC adaptations like a plague. Money is more than just paper, signifiers connect, and noir cliches about shadows in crumbling alleys rule over all.

I hope I'm wrong, because I am a fan. I guess all I can do is wait. And get ready to publish a retraction of this anxious thread. Please... please be cray cray.
---

"I don't know who's crazier, me or you." - Iris to Travis (Taxi Driver)

Phoenix, coming into Joker, knew he had big shoes to fill.... big shoes to fill.... big shoes to fill... (4) The ballsy insanity we see finally erupting from the ratty shell of lil' Phoenix is like the origin story for the comic book bizarro "dog chasing cars" mania we see fully formed in Heath Ledger's "latter period" edition (in 2008's The Dark Knight.)Scenes like his burning his share of the mob's stolen money, a vast mountain of it which he pours lighter fluid on (just his half!) or his giving a loaded gun to Two-Face and leaning his own head against it (after blowing up his girlfriend). We loved Ledger for putting his head in the lion's jaws of true insane criminal genius. He became a kind of totem of lunatic freedom unseen in films since, perhaps, Tyler Durden in 1999. That model hasn't aged half as well ---too laddish. But Ledger's Joker lives large in our modern age of #metoo (he's not rapey) and global warming (he's all about depopulation). He's selfless in his homicidal genius, beyond desire and fear and even the need to commit weird social jokes (Durden in turn was the descendant of Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) the millionaire in The Magic Christian (1967) who ends the film by pouring a lot of pound notes in a big vat of sewage waste, so he can judge all the tories who go wading in, their expensive suits be hanged). When he throws down weird games of kill your friend or anonymous group on another boat before they kill you, it's not--despite Batman's smug analysis--some sick need to prove Gotham is corrupted, it's for amusement and cajones measuring, in the tradition of Price's Prince Prospero in Masque of the Red Death (1964) or Boris Karloff's General Fang in West of Shanghai (1937).

Jared Leto's Joker in Suicide Squad was, in my opinion, an underrated and very druggy cool serpentine performance, the first embodiment since Ledger's untimely death. Seen through the prism of his adoring lover Harley, we see him first seducing her back when she was an Arkham shrink in a  kind of fledgeling Starling nod, through to his issues trying to fight his gooey feelings towards her by convincing her to fall backwards into a vat of, presumably, magic clown-make-up, planning to let her drown in there, then sighing and jumping in after her. A scene that, strangely enough, reminded me of the end of Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Anyone in a relationship they are ever kind of reluctantly continuing, a love despite their self conception as a rover and a bounder, could relate. Is that love? It's real, and that's even better. Even virgin nerds could respect that kind of vivid anarchic outlaw couple love.


If that's not crazy love, what is? There are so few examples in modern movies it's almost shameful. I think of Gun Crazy (1950) and the scene where John Dahl and Peggy Cummins abandon, spur of the moment, their 'take separate cars' getaway plan at the last second, risking it all just for a few more hours together, or Thelma and Louise going over that cliff. So few outlaw couples films get it right that when they do, as in Suicide Squad, it makes my palms sweat.

One gets a feeling that for her Boids of Prey"emancipation," Harley is not being allowed to keep that kind of moment-to-moment beyond good-and-evil kinetic batshit DSM-V charting, sexy-crazy-cool, becoming instead a kind of de facto good girl whose crazy is limited to a few giggles and goofy dances. After all, there was that one wrong note (every time I see it I make a loud buzzer sound like a wrong answer on a gameshow) in Suicide Squad, where she's shows her possible future as a banal housewife with a baby and Joker heading off to his legit 9-5 job in the sunshine of the early morning if she just surrenders. Ewwww! It's the one wrong note in the film, implying that underneath her bravado and kinetic psychosexycrazycool, she's just acting nuts because her "puddin" is nuts and that one day he'll grow out of it and get a real job, the way friends who didn't know you were gay or bi, presume you'll grow out of it after college and settle down to 'what matters."

Maybe I'm partial because of Xmas 2016 as I said. And right before it started I--feeling trapped, sick, irritable and claustrophobic in that cabin, finally broke apart, surrendered, and took my first massive swig of vodka in 20 years, and the rush of relief and freedom came flooding through right as the film's opening notes of "There is a House in New Orleans" began, with a Dirty Dozen-style montage of life in prison for the squad to be. All that feeling of being trapped, irritable, claustrophobic, six, and tired vanished in an instant, replaced by a feeling of warm, psychedelic liberation. What a perfect metaphor for my finally unleashing my own inner Enchantress after a 20 year lock-up than this tale of a band of captured convicts being let out of jail long enough to save the world from impossible monsters (Enchantress, as it turns out, included)? And just as my vision warped and sizzled so too Ayers' drive-in evoking warping and bubbling, as if any moment the celluloid might catch on fire. And it was all accidental - of course. I hadn't planned on relapsing - I was just drawn that way, blanching from the loudness of my Kowalski-style Xmas coterie. ("Alexa! Play so and so Christmas blankety blank! Alexa stop! Alexa stop! Alexa...!!" I still recoil when I heard that and don't use Alexa and Alexa is not your friend).

Man, that Enchantress (Cara Delvinge- above) was like a sharp intake of breath, the kind alive with tentacles and dreamy electric cloud shapes on exhale, her shimmering South American rainforest ayahuasca energy pulsing and slithering around the bigwig government Pentagon offices like an anaconda of kundalini dark magic. Yet she could still say "you don't have the balls" when mentioning her Jekyll side's boyfriends threat to stab her separated straw heart). Her Jekyll half being a mild-mannered executive assistant to Viola Davis, June Moon, the transformation to swaying dirty shaman a perfect analogy to my own transformation in one gulp from frazzled irritated misery of sanity to loose and amok.

So much druggy energy in that film, man! Watch it again and clock Leto's cobra sway in the club when preparing to kill Common after he expresses admiration for Harley's pole dancing. That's right when the booze was really hitting me, and the way he kind of sways backwards and forwards, grabbing the words he says as if on a basketball rebound. And Common, gradually realizing Joker's insane craziness is too focused his way for it not to finally coil and erupt like a cobra strike of violence, but reacting too late to fight back. Boom! Anyway, that's my defense of Leto's Joker. Moving on.


THE AWAKE RUNNETH AMOK IN THE CITY OF SLEEP

What makes DC comics different from Marvel is that Marvel generally makes every character (this being Stan Lee's secret sauce) complex. There's no all-good hero or all-bad villain - everyone has their reasons and their weaknesses. They are 3-D people down to the smallest role. DC on the other hand, is all about empty types, signifiers with no persona beyond their function. Gotham in particular, is a land of 'types' - everyone not in the main character roster is as banal and shorn of tics as a civics lesson film strip. The news vendor must sound like a blue collar guy from the 30s ("papah heeeeah!"); the thugs must be brutes with bad teeth and a thoid grade education; the victims must cower in the corner of the parking lot before saying "Th-th-thanks, Batman"; the mobster on trial must cover his smirk with his hand as the rigged jury finds him innocent; his lawyer must be a shifty mouthpiece; the DA a noble idiot whose hands are tied. Even Batman with his childhood trauma of seeing his rich parents shot, is a type -seldom smiling, all justice but never killing anyone (that we see, he risks terrific collateral damage in order not to directly kill or permanently maim even the most evil of villains). Who wouldn't be crazy in a city like that? And who wouldn't be motivated to crime, as if no one but you really exists, this is all a dream so there are no consequences to your actions. You'll just wake up when the alarm rings irregardless, hopefully into a world with real people, like Marvel.

Thus, it's fitting that the villains generally wind up not in jail but in Arkham, Gotham's asylum for the criminally insane, where it's very easy to escape. In short, being the only complex characters in a city of 'types' like Gotham has made them crazy. There's no reality to challenge them. Even Phoenix's Joker, whose Gotham is perhaps the most realistic, has no firm grip on reality. It's all a dream within a dream. Phoenix, being the origin story Joker, is just realizing it. He thought he was in real life but by the end he knows it's "just a comedy." The best moment in Squad, for example, is Harley asking one of the other members if he can see the wild light show effects circling above the amok Enchantress and her newly incarnated temple god brother as they turn the Philadelphia (?) train station, into their own evil power station; her relief to find out  she's not just hallucinating is both hilarious and true (to any tripper or psychotic) and in the context of the film, a little touching - that is some growth on her part. The old Harley wouldn't worry whether the orbiting cloud of stuff was real or not. No true psychotic ever bothers to sort that shit out. They presume it's all both real and illusion, hence the lack of consequences. When Don Birnim screams at the sight of the bat eating the rat in the wall during his DTs in Lost Weekend he's proving he's still a punter. A seasoned tripper wouldn't blink twice, even if the bat and rat were really there he'd presume he's hallucinating and shrug it off. We've all looked down at our hands and seen the flesh melting off the bone during bad acid trips, but we're not wally enough to try to cut it off with a bandsaw like in Psych-out or demanding his tripping friends drive him to the ER.


There is one Batman movie where Gotham is nuts as the villains, i.e 1997's Batman and Robin,(above) in which everything resembles one big black light poster; all the graffiti is Day-Glo and ridiculous art deco sculptured skyscrapers threaten to swallow up the villains to the extent they become normal inside the context. It's Batman with his copycat hangers-on Batgirl and Robin, that become the odd ducks. Freshman 15-afflicted Alicia Silverstone as ill-equipped for form fitting black leather tights and also too short to seem at all menacing; Robin bidding for Poison Ivy's attention with Bruce's own money like a bitch, trying so hard to seem straight while wearing little green shorts and a sailor boy crew cut. Clooney's Batman doing his best with this dopey coterie of kiddies but gladly letting Uma and Arnold take the cake and run. But run where?

Heath Ledger's Joker in Dark Knight on the other hand gets that he's dreaming for no city could be this 'film they show you at jury duty'-level banal. He thinks he Batman are the only normal, cool people in town. (Two-Face is only half there). Batman on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge the divide, doesn't even grant Joker a courtesy laugh. In other words, Joker guesses wrong about they're being alike. Sadly, Joker is alone in his full consciousness. He just gave Batman the benefit of the doubt because of the kinky get-up. But sometimes loners dress like bats for reasons that have nothing to do with pleasure, or so they keep telling themselves.

 Lately I've been unable to escape a yen for all things sci-fi mid-60s --the stretch between Sputnik and the moon landing, when an ex-Nazi rocketeer named Werner released through Disney a series of fascinating speculative documentaries about NASA's plans for the moon landing, for orbiting satellites, space stations, and explorations of Mars and Venus and movies presumed we'd have all that shit up in the air by the 1980s or 90s --2001 at the latest. Boy were they all wrong. We've got the movies, though, and they look better than ever.

Von Braun points out the new space station designs in a 1955 Disney film.  This round revolving shape would henceforth be the go-to space station design in all science fiction for the next decade.

It was the Silver Age: the genre grew up out of the comic book lunacy and atomic caution of the golden 50s and into a colorful forward-launching space opera cocktail elegance. It was a good time especially for strong female characters, as they no longer had to fight sexist blowhards to be respected as officers in space command, heads of communications and operations, doctors in astro-biology and chemistry, etc. They could be pretty without having male crew members making comments behind their backs, or to their faces. I've deliberately eschewed any movie with even a hint of that dated sexism, even in critique form. I've also avoided any streaming titles of less than watchable quality, though your mileage may vary. So.... What are we waiting for!? The future's not going to get much older! Blast-off!


I'm beginning to see what the fuss was about vis-a-vis Andy Warhol's favorite movie. It was everything I love in a film: lots of deep reds and grays, tubes, silver eyeballs, theatricality and a total absence of daytime outdoor shots. Ed Wood fans need only know that Dudley Manlove is one of the robots and the link between them and homosexuals would be clear even without that. (We never see any female 'robuts' as Dudley pronounces them (the big headed inventor who helps them bring over 'the soul' via a special glandular resonator from a recently deceased human form into a new robotic model, refers to them as "Clickers," a term they robuts find disparaging. But it all works out as the robuts have an ingenious habit of absorbing their own opposition. Taking place all in one long eternal night, on a couple of crazy cosmic sets, it's never boring as it's never just 'filler' - this is clearly some writer's real labor of love and we imagine it got workshopped at some off-off-Broadway East Village coffeehouse, an early forerunner of the gay kid watching horror movie reruns at home and identifying with Frankenstein and the Wolfman and eventually writing Rocky Horror Picture Show. This hasn't got quite the same flair but we can imagine Frank N. Furter watching it with Andy on his private copy back home at the factory after all the other little monsters are off in dreamland.



When I can't sleep in a foreign land I'll listen to this in my headphones and watch my Kindle download, with the soothing drone of the voices in this odd, odd film, a mix of some Peter Bogdanovich fantasia (a dozen bottle blondes swimming in the spashing surf with shiny green scale-covered hiphuggers bellbottoms (one of the most sublime high fashion choices in genre cinema, when they sleep with their legs together they look just like mermaids) and communicating via telepathy.  I doubt it was pleasant but the sight of these ladies bobbing in what is clearly freezing Pacific surf, chomping on raw fish under the benevolent protection of their pterodactyl god is a goofy highlight of 60s science fiction. Most genre fans know the colorful story behind this film - a Russian sci-fi film about two astronauts and their robot marooned in a strange, prehistoric world -- that Corman bought (cheap) and brought to a young Peter Bogdanovich to restructure, dub into English, and shoot surrounding footage in English, starring Mamie Van Doren. He added his own hipster voiceover and a constant audio whoosh of sci-fi noises and the 'song' of the sirens, that's heard by one of the astronaust. Though he's probably just standing there gazing at the planet's wonders and pontificating about the glories of Russia's space program, now he's falling in love with the song of the far-off mermaids. But when the astronauts kill their pterodactyl god in self defense, the sirens sing into existence a flood and a volcano eruption.

 Ingeniously, Peter had the props boys build a rubber corpse for the girls to pray over, and also an aproximaiton of the now dried magma-encrusted robot. Is it intentional that the sacred crown Mamie leads their telekinetic prayers with is a chef cap?  With that laconic hipster narration, and the ceaseless pounding of the rhythmic surf, the beeps and burbles of the robot, the odd signing of the sirens and their occasional ESP communications, and the assured quality of Russian footage, it's a never gets-old go-to for a weary Erich. The Prime copy is bad, but there is no existing good quality DVD. I have the double disk set that includes the Russian original and the other film (much more dull, with too many cutaways to Basil Rathbone and a bee-hive hairdoed Faith Domergue) and--sadly--the image for the Prehistoric Woman one skips! The projector being used to make the image skips in the frame! What a drag! That makes this one, the Prime one, the pick.


Fourth on the bill, Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires is actually the best of the three as far as gorgeous cinematography and clever, if not always successful effects. The storyline fuses elements of Last Man on Earth with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and looks forward to Night of the Living Dead, and most notably Alien, which clearly borrowed more than a few things from here. Wise choice, as it's a gorgeous and fascinating film that would be worth seeing even if it was in Italian without subtitles. The plot concerns a rescue mission to a strange foggy planet where the dead rise from their plastic coverings (taken over by fourth dimensional aliens) and the co-ed crew wear sexy high-collared black leather uniforms with deep yellow trim (the sexiest, coolest and most high fashion space crew uniforms ever). and their ship is a huge minimalist black affair. The outside miniatures make the ship look a bit like a floating bar of soap, but are still cool - and the planet is a bizarre world of fog, petrified tentacle tree rocks, and mist, fog and weird noises. The shots of the outside guard looking deep into fog for signs of life are some of the most eerily beautiful in all of science fiction. The dubbing is good (lead Barry Sullivan does his own) and the music is super eerie. It just gets better with every viewing, especially when the print is this HD color-restored super-marvel.


Thanks to an amazing Prime HD image (sourced no doubt from a terrific Blu-ray print), this is a fun, terrible Japanese fusion of James Bond style sci-fi underwater lair building and Jules Verne-style fishmen building ala AIP's War Gods of the Deep, Japan's Atragon, and Italy's Island of the Fishmen (AKA Screamers - also on Prime). A young and impossibly gorgeous Sonny Chiba and a young, impossibly gorgeous blond gaijin Peggy Neal (The X from Outer Space - which is streaming on Criterion and I would love to include in this list, what with its cocktails and dancing on the moon, and moons and space stations as jump offs to outer galaxy exploration) star. A native of Biloxi, Mississippi who came to Japan as a student and stayed for three films, Neal is utterly charming and naturalistic - with stunning features and blazing blonde hair, making her the perfect counterpoint to the Japanese around her (other gaijin actors appear as the US Navy). The inevitable fish people are a bit of a disappointment - all cross-eyed and hammy, enslaved to the evil ruler who controls them via a radio signal (when it jams up, they run amok shooting and killing everyone). But can Neal and Chiba free themselves and escape the lair before they too become fishmen? Meanwhile their American Naval officer friend (Franz Gruber!) labors to convince the top brass to send a search sub after the pair go missing. He won't take no for an answer!

But in the last big climax the film gets really wonky with its editing. Was the editor compelled to leave, replaced by Ed Wood's protege? We get all sorts of odd gaps, like asides and pauses that make no sense in the usually frenzied editing scheme of an underwater lair about to implode kind of climax. I mean the pauses between reactions that actors and directors presume the editor will snip off in order to create continuity (i.e. you cut to what their looking at in the space they leave between their reactions). When the gang are trying to escape and battling the bad guy's minions for space on the emergency elevator, this sluggish pace as each new emotion is formed on the actor's faces, is as annoying as it is delightful' once you've seen it enough times that the weird pacing doesn't bother you, I imagine it will scale bad movie heights. The way Chiba has to fight with the monsters carefully, as to not rip the obviously very thin plastic bag-style material used to make the monster skin (it looks like the silver/grey plastic wrap new appliances are sometimes wrapped in when you first open the box); and the way the fights drag on while the professor and Neal just stand there, looking aghast, rather than doing anything to help.


Man, whatever, papa's got a brand new bag, as the quality of the image is divine. Everyone in the underwater lair wears white tunics, and Neal's hangs on her just perfectly. With her short bob of a blonde hair do and ready-for-whatever innocence she's irresistible and Chiba has these deep dark eyes that suck you through an interdimensional portal; as a result, watching them be covered with oatmeal that's supposed to be scales is a tad upsetting. Yet nowhere near as bad as Neal's tantrum wanting to die rather than be a scaly freak, warrants. Just one of the myriad great and terrible moments when Peggy Neal, Sonny Chiba, and their professor benefactor (lower right) experience TERROR BENEATH THE SEA!

There is a stand-alone version of this on Prime (the "Comic Book Edition") but it's been so yellowed by someone's idea of color grading (for the old yellowed newsprint effect of old comics?) it's distracting. I prefer the "Double Doses of Sci-fi: Hostile Planets and Doomsday" version (it's the first film, starting on the 0:17 mark - ending 1:22). Followed by the forgettable Doomsday Machine, both are just an analog, color-graded rip of the PD title, but--as with the above Prehistoric Women--there is no good HD upgrade available.

Sort of the grandpa of Margheriti's "Gamma One" Tetralogy, it's not to be confused with War Between the Planets (above) or War of the Planets (both 1966), as those are all separate films, part of the same (unofficial) series. All told, they can be read a sextet of interlocking films worth exploring and uncovering, all connected by the "Gamma One" idea of a unified government of capable women and men working together, sans sexism, and capable commanders tackling existential planetary threats. (Don't worry, I'm working on an in-depth analysis)

Here instead of a rugged, quick-thinking, well-dubbed commander there's an aged, vaguely portly Claude Rains, hamming it up to beat the band, but never less that magnetic (this seems like one of those 'last role' kind of things, but he still had a bunch of TV and small roles in things like Lawrence of Arabia ahead of him. G'head Claude!). His voice is all there and he's not phoning it in, even wearing a space helmet and racing like a kid in a candy store through all the alien tubing, he's giving it 100%, even more so as he recognizes he's in a kind of well-written but nonetheless schlocky picture, and rather than just dial it back and coast, the way, say, Karloff might, he goes all in, like Lugosi might, realizing it's a chance to fly downhill with the brakes off as a tyrannical but lovable intellectual curmudgeon who tends his garden in the house next to one of the 'best' observatories in the world. A mix of Mycroft Holmes and Peter O'Toole doing Henry II, Rains' mathematician physicist is so brilliant he can just write an equation on the floor for the world's leaders to see via camera phones, and the world is saved. It's pretty far out how firmly he's in control, able to save or destroy the world via, as he loudly proclaims, it's all done "with calculus!" Like Dr. Who without any of the joie de vivre or love of humanity, but still deep down a good fella. Once again an errant planet is on the way to Earth, this time it's got UFO defenses!  Mario Migliardi did the score, very forward-looking to giallos and the kind of hip music he'd deliver in films like Matalo! in a few years.

In case you can't tell, this list also goes beneath the sea, because if you watch any ocean show and they'll remind you we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about our own oceans. Dark and deep and full of high pressure secrets. As with the other feature on our list, above and below, we're still exploring the uninhabitable vastness of the world beyond our daily access, only it's below rather than above. It's still a trip, man, and we get NASA rockets too. Here we have one of the countless spy movies that proliferated in the mid-60s (spanning both Goldfinger and Thunderball before the craze cooled). A lot of them aren't very good but a few of them are, in that ingenious termite way Italian directors had with cranking out high energy creative budget-defying blasts of spontaneous energetic trash, one after the other. Here, as with so many, death-defying stunts abound - as in the high up fight in the image above as our laid-back super agent fights with the beer baron bad guy whose been toppling rockets while planning to launch his own and plant a laser on the moon. We get some exciting footage of real-life Nasa rocket failures seamlessly interwoven with Eisley's frenzied driving past NASA gates. The rest of the time he's being shot at by a lovely blonde in what's supposed to Florida, chased around the brewery loading dock, trying to escape a hops silo filling with water, and/or being menaced deep in the villain's very cool expressionist undersea lair all while trying to locate a doctor in the midst of perfecting a laser beam device (in the above Sea it was the formula for turning men into sea monsters). Funny, exciting, and always mixing the unexpected with the spy movie familiar - without becoming campy or winky, thank god. It's one of the better Bond imitations and the Prime print image is sublime.


Peggy Neal is back! I know this is cheating since this one is only available on Criterion channel, worth getting for this film and Destroy All Monsters alone. Different from an ordinary kaiju movie in that it's set in that once-seemingly inevitable future of permanent bases on the moon, operated by a United world order where young people of both genders were given high ranks and dangerous jobs on orbiting space stations and manned Mars explorers. So here we have a young team of go-getters, including cute blonde gaijin astrobiologist Peggy Neal (in her other big film aside from Terror Beneath the Sea - above) and three Japanese men blasting off to Mars, stopping off on the moon to party with cute Michiko (Itoko Harada), whose got a crush on the commander, who crushes on Lisa (Neal) who crushes back but knows Michiko crushes so hard she can't get in the way, and also none of it gets in the way of their sororal professionalism. As with The Green Slime (part of the above mentioned "Gamma 1" series), the danger comes from when a tiny alien spore sample taken from free floating space (it gets gummed up in their exhaust) is brough down to earth, escapes its jar (ala Alien) and soon grows to kaiju size and starts running amok, devouring energy. The monster--dubbed Guilala--is hilarious, with a weird paper airplane-shaped head, the edges of which curl up when blasting down any model plane or tank that takes a shot at it. Luckily a trip back to the moon helps Neal synthesize the solution. But is there a solution to the human heart?


The Criterion image is soft but hey - if not for them it wouldn't be out on anything but a $60 import. And it's a must. In my mind it's the seventh film in the Gamma One series, which I often visit in a kind of chronic obsessiveness, after The Green Slime. If there's cocktails being served at little soirees on space stations or orbiting planets or the moon in a 60s science fiction film--and there's no cranky old American B-actors dragging the moood down with their patriarchal foot downing, you can bet I'll be there.

We live in a mighty strange time, but when things look bleakest, don't forget about our ace in the hole. Nothing can be too bad when we have YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (1983). This bonzo-zipped sci-fi/dinosaur fusion flick from celebrated Antonio "Anthony Dawson" Margheriti ("Mar--garehhh-tee") is slam bang without feeling rushed, buoyant but deadpan, guileless and sincere in its ensemble acting. Dopey, good-natured, thrilling, filled with dinosaurs and lasers, mirror halls and gorgeous cave girls (if that's your idea of a good time). A nonstop letter-perfect melange of adventure and desire, YOR is an ideal go-to for times of woe and uncertainty. Woo! File it on your A-list shelf next to FLASH GORDON (1980) and SHE (1982) and you'll never want for giddy (but too deadpan to be straight-up camp), rock-and-roll, post-reality, early-80s sci-fi action madness.

Because let's face it, in the cinematic world of cavemen fighting dinosaurs--which paleontologists never tire of reminding us never happened--the prehistoric Hammer movies of the 60s, early 70s, like ONE MILLION BC and PREHISTORIC WOMEN can get stodgy and po-faced, filling the minutes with too much patriarchal grunting and head-butting and far too little stop-motion monsters and nowhere near enough lusciously tanned limbs. On the other side of the spectrum are the Wynorskis and Olen Rays, camp fests with ridiculous names and a camera that zooms up to (fake) cleavage like a snarky eighth grader.  Dude, I get it. That's your demographic. Ugh.

What I mean is, there has to be an in-between. A movie that won't embarrass us when real live girls are in the room, but a movie that also won't bum us out with too much male pantomime over patriarchal stick-passing. This isn't 1984 anymore, and we are not newly-laid eleventh graders turning our house into an orgy den of hooky-playing couples while mom and dad are each at work. We grown but if we want male jostling for power we'll frickin' watch SUCCESSION.

F-that, bro. YOR? Forget about it. "Dawson" knows what we need, and how to present it in such a way as we're not too embarrassed to love it.

The moment the "De Angelis'" rock opera anthem theme song churns to life and begins its shriek into the theme song ether: "He is a man from the future / a man from yesterday / his game is destiny!" you start making room in your desert island disc stash.

Proud and we desire
He's never seen the sun!
He's always on the run!
The list goes on and on.

The English is weird but the intent is universal 80s rock star badass. Barely have the opening theme's last chords ended when Yor (Reb "the real Captain America" Brown) has already killed a life-size papier mache triceratops/stegosaurus combination monster in vivid, up-close battle. It's one of the best, most realistic struggles between man and dinosaur ever, as he's right in there, stabbing away in the eyes and head as the beast slowly dies, blood dripping down, its eyes wild with fear and fury. We feel complex emotions about since it's a stegosaurus and thus a plant eater, merely trying to protect its young cub, which has been trapped by two cave persons. But hey, it's a tough world, so we have to get used to it so you don't feel too surprised when you're eaten. At least Yor's kill of the big beast feeds the whole village and he's welcomed as an honored guest. They dance around licentiously and party in ways that grunting bunch of neanderthals in ONE MILLION BC never would. Wooo! Yor shouts. And you feel he's having a good time, genuinely. And it's terrific because hey, it's rare.


It's clear though he doesn't quite fit, because, you see, he's blonde and what's that strange medallion on his neck? He doesn't remember. He's got some weird past thingee he has to find out about. But for moment - Woo! Some celebratory dancing, crazy drumming, and licentious bonding with the statuesque if slightly weatherbeaten Corinne Clery as Kalaa (!), and we're already feeling the love.

But that can't last. Two minutes later the tribe is attacked by giant hulking ape men, the leader of whom is lusting after Kalaa. Since Yor happens to be single and she's done the dance to woo him, it's clear they are meant for mating so it comes as a shock when he spirits her off before they even have a moment to copulate. He must rescue her, and does so in a very familiar looking cave structure via a long chase and battle that would be the climax in any other movie but here is just the first in a long line of wild rescues to come. Woo! He rides into their midst, hang gliding on a bat monster's stiffened corpse! If you're not down for this trip by now, stick your hand in the Aboria tree of manliness and see if the sting is as painful as they say. Cuz honey, you're nuts. WoO!



Kalaa's guardian is the trusty Pag (Luciano "Italian Peter Lorre" Pigozzi) who ambles along on the adventures, rounding out their new wandering threesome. Over desert hill and rolling cliff they wander, meeting new faces all the time, and if the goddess of fire worshipping lepers Roa (the comely and overly-made-up Aysha Gul) turns out to be a real hottie, if you'll forgive the expression and if, like Yor, she thought she was the only blonde with a round medallion in the world, then nature must take it's course. Paag reminds Kalaa that in this realm a man may take many wives (Woo!). This is Flash Gordon if Flash wasn't such a prude with Aura, Ming's sexy daughter, out of loyalty to Dale, a jealous Earth girl whom he literally just met only hours beforehand. Don't you hate when chick's do that? Not here. Yor's no prude, bro, and Kalaa may get mad but she's no uppity cockblocker. This is Italy, or Israel, or somewhere sex isn't for lewd snickering or indignant eye rolls. it's just a thing that happens and is ver-a sexy.

There will be other women in Yor's life before it's all over. Carol André shows up in the third act, on the mysterious island where lasers and complex machinery rule the day. And my favorite, the beguiling Marina Rocchi, whom Yor saves from a (again admirably life-size) dimetrodon.

One thing that stands out, that really makes this a latent beloved film of mine: the monsters here are very much in their natural element. In a lot of the stop motion dinosaur action we get via Harryhausen, for example, can err on the side of the science fair diorama: we see dinosaurs fight and hang out in the midst of barren desert, i.e. how their habitat looks now, all these millions of years later, making us wonder how they can possibly survive with no vegetation or cover (but making it easy to appreciate Harryhausen's animation.) In YOR, the beasts emerge from caves and jungle and it's hard to tell where they end and their surroundings begin. Their natural camouflage means they strike from wthin deep thickets, which seems much more realistic to the setting, with Yor and Kala climbing all over these giant (life-size) heads, hacking away, the beasts dying but slowly, from loss of blood, savagely stabbed again and agin in soft tissue areas. We're allowed to feel mixed emotions once the look in their big saurian eyes changes from rage to fear and then then the flesh of the dead beasts are eaten at big celebratory feasts, so it's OK. That's just how it is.


Man, what a film. Where has it been all these years? I remember the commercial for YOR! One Saturday morning or late Friday night in the 80s, watching local TV, while I was 16 (?), and thinking damn - this is Conan with lasers, dinosaurs and Reb Brown hang gliding off a dead bat creature into action against a bunch of ape things, looking kind of like the Marvel character Ka-Zar. I mean, I could tell it was pretty low budget, but its imagination and gonzo gumption was clear. We who loved bad sci-fi and dinosaur movies could hardly believe our luck at what was to come! Yet we never heard from YOR again until it showed up on Amazon streaming 30 years later.

I promptly bought it--sight unseen--for $10 or whatever. It was worth the wait and the money just to have it on my iPad, ready to bring to Hell or jury duty.

Hell, 30 or so years isn't too long and ten bucks ain't too high (the Blu-ray is out now. I bought it for my brother last X-mas and he fell asleep within five minutes!)

Itn short, YOR - it's time has come. If you love Conan, Flash Gordon, and even--despite its dour tone--the 1966 remake of One Million BC, as much as I do... if you sit around wishing there were Blu-rays of 1982's Sword and the Sorcerer (only avail. with a Rifftrax on a shitty dupe) and 1983's Hearts and Armor, well, maybe you're a nostalgic completist who may be waiting awhile. In the meantime, if someone tries to fob some hyper-banal mainstream imitations like Ladyhawke or Legend off on you instead... you know what to do.

Competition of Kalaa (from top); Marina Rocchi, Aysha Gul, Carol Andre

And like Luigi Cozzi's so-bad-it's-sublime Hercules, YOR scores big with me as there are more women in the cast than men, or it's at least the numbers are even. And though they do get rescued now and again they nonetheless are warriors, net-weavers, and/or holding significant scientific positions.

A special shout to Reb Brown as Yor! He would have been perfect as Flash Gordon, as he lacks the kind of self-conscious aww-shucksitude apparent in Sam Jones' twinkly eyes. Not that that film isn't the best or that we don't all love Sam Jones, but Reb Brown would have crushed it. Naive as he is, Brown is acing clearly from the heart. There's not a gram of self-consciousness in him. I dig that he also encourages those he meets to drink the blood of the slain triceratops in a dim nod to Siegfried. "Drinking the blood of your enemy gives you their power." Though that's the first and last time he does so, it's just one of the fantastic little details Marghareti peppers the film with. Not all his films hit the mark but over the years he sure has given us a still under-appreciated canon of energetic termite art. Woo! Proud and we desire! Now more than ever, the man from the future is the man from yesterday.

It's spring in the pre-or-post disease era, time to crack open the Youtube and dive into my weirdest/best discovery de la Mexico since La Maldicion del la Llorona (1963). Long unavailable in English either dub or subtitles, it's now got quite legible subtitles on El Youtube -aqui!


For fans of classic matinee sci-fi/horror who'd rather have va-voom sex appeal in their sci-fi western comedies rather than hokey Gene Autrey tunes (as one finds in that hokey 1935 serial The Phantom Empire - which is actually the closest thing this film has to a hermano), Mexico delivers Ships of Monsters. The plot: two glamorous Venusians coming home from a long quest rounding up fit male specimens from the galaxy to repopulate their female-only planet, make an emergency landing in Chihuahua, Mexico for their robot to make repairs. Perhaps you've guessed the rest. A freewheeling vaquiero wins one of their hearts with his songs?

It's a familiar tale, sure. I won't bore you with a list of the legion of comedians who've gone to the moon or Venus to find all sorts of babes suffering from an extreme hombre shortage (a sorry lot, the earthmen usually are: fading off the B-list, chemically-addicted, cursed by terrible bangs)

And that's the key difference here: Eulalio González! Ay dios mio!  Pipporro! And he's cool!


He possesses a genuinely disarming smile, a naturalness in his awed reactions; a dewy twinkle in his dark glassy eyes, and a gently lilting yet masculine baritone voice that deepens to a questioning smolder at the end of every sentence. He's also got a great kind of hippity-hop Elvis tango dance style that's funny without sacrificing very palpable sex appeal.  An inexplicable juke box in his kitchen provides the instrumental back-up to his songs, which he performs to the agog wonderment of his alien women visitors (while their robot plays with his little brother outdoors). Though a comic foil in a lot of other vaquero movies (it says here), Gonzalez shows a great way with each of the ladies in turn: he's passionate, confident, and a little confused with the good one; flattered but firm in his 'no!' to the one who transforms into an evil vampiress and frees the monsters from their frozen cave hiding place to run amok. He holds fast. If a spark flies, it's true love and worth being faithful for even if you just met them both at the same time. I never understood why Flash would turn down Aura when Dale is just some blonde earth woman he barely met an hour earlier.. until now.

Everything cool about the 70s waits for us in the depths of this Mexican-Italian co-production made at the height of the craze for all things Bermuda Triangle. Not only do we get a killer doll picked up from floating in the sea by a rich man's child, but lots of old sea monster... etchings... floating face down in the waves. So met. Directed by Rene "Mexican Schaffner" Cardona Jr.. starring the ever slovenly Hugo Stiglitz as the charter yacht captain and John Huston as the aging patriarch in search of Atlantis in the middle of a certain triangle. We never really know as we're never off the boat or see land, and its groovy. Naturally an aging Bond girl is aboard (Claudine Auger, still foxy but orange is not her color) here an as the bitter wife of drunken doctor Carlos East. Huston's other, younger smokin' hot daughter with nice legs (for awhile) is played by Gloria Guida. The doll (who in some creepy shots is doubled with the Linda Blair-ish face of Nailea Norvind) tells the kid when everyone on the boat will die and drinks the blood of attacking parrots and later the ship's cook, whose jagged death is blamed on falling ketchup bottles. Meta shit like that and the sea monster etchings leave us much to ponder


Part of a cornucopia of late-70s films--including recently-reviewed and loved by this site, Bermuda Depths (also 1978), triggered by the immensely popular Leonard Nimoy-hosted TV show In Search Of...,(which covered the Triangle a year prior - we all saw it), and with a memorable albeit familiar Stevio Cipriani score (and sound effects when things get all triangle-weird lifted directly from Forbidden Planet), this Triangle never dull mix of sea folklore, bitchy histrionics, creative deaths and strange events (including a parrot attack).

The film is clearly shot aboard an actual boat (we never see a speck of land, which adds to the film's eerie unease) and we get to know and like the soothing bobbing up and down in of onboard life. And there are some nice underwater sequences amidst the Atlantean ruins and it all benefits greatly from a widescreen transfer (albeit not digital on Prime, it still looks strong). The whole thing never quite gels but--in a way that's not dissimilar to other 70s catch-all horror affairs, like The Visitor-- it triumphs in the end through sheer abundance of weird happenings: everything from a parrot attack to a mysterious magnetic force that almost capsizes the boat while they investigate a mysterious SOS from a ship lost at sea for a decade (a lengthy nighttime sequence full of odd boat tilting and magnetic disturbance); there is also a mighty hurricane, and even a convincing underwater visit to ruined Atlantis.

One of those films I'm rather amazed I ignored until now, mainly because of the all-too familiar sight of the Satanic burnt policeman (C.J. Graham). But there's a lot more going on on the H-to-H than burnt cops, like a never lovelier Kristy Swanson as the damsel in distress, dragged across the dimensional border into Hell for being an eligible virgin, leaving her dopey naif fiancee Chad Lowe behind in our mortal world. Richard Farnsworth plays mournful gas station owner at the edge of 'Perdition,' who lays out what the hapless dopey-eyed groom must do to get her back (he was in a similar situation night under fifty yars ago), equipping him with a magic shotgun and a car souped enough to make the jump to Hell.

Thanks to a surplus of over-the-top action, towheads driving dusty vehicles, and long straight desert highways, you'd be forgiven for thinking Highway to Hell is Australian. Actually it's one of the last big American designated cult pics, a relic of a time when big studios shared drive-in screens with indie distributors and wildly unhinged 80s drive-in ready gonzo classics actually made money, or lost it, but either way they went for it. The golden era of 80s cult films, man, thanks to Prime their legacy endures (see here for more Prime options). Though it's from 1991, it's sooo 80s, occupying a comfy zone between a bigger budget version of Hell Comes to Frogtown or the 1982 She, both personal favorites.

It wouldn't be much of a faux-Aussie road chase odyssey without a colorfully-attired gibbering biker gang, one of whom wearing a top hat and one carrying a dandy sword, one sucking a wawipop, one with dyed blonde hair and spikes, etc. to menace our dimwit hero.

Good use is made of the alien-looking deserts of Utah and Arizona, with wild pit stops such as a dead cop-filled diner, a wild strip club gambling den inside a giant Jimmy Hoffa slot machine, and the surreal confines of the foreboding Hell City. Cool matte paintings, grinding car chases, non-CGI crashes, devilish strippers, carousing evil figures from history are played by dimly familiar faces (the whole Stiller family is here for some reason lost to time: Jerry Stiller is a cop forever unable to get a refill; his son Ben Zoolander Stiller is Attila the Hun; daughter Amy is Cleopatra). Look fast for Gilbert Gottfried as Hitler; and rock star Lita Ford is a busty hitchhiker! I probably missed some others underneath the thick make-up of the damned. An array of sometimes-funny bits about hot this or damned that crop up: undead road crews shredding lost souls into body part cement, etc. And not unlike our man Orpheus, Chad Lowe is both helped and hindered on his mystical but very American SW quest. Swanson, never more fetching, has a super foxy scene where she plays a demon in disguise coming onto Chad while wearing a billowing black dress in a sultry 80s style MTV boudoir, licking the blood from his nose. Though we'd crawl across cut glass to be with her, too, we eventually come to like the can-do gumption of this slack-jawed tow-headed Chad Lowe; he goes way beyond that to rescue her, and that's before it gets really weird!


So, if it's not too much trouble: surrender to this loud action-horror-comedy's quirky mix of thrills, insight and dumb sight gags (whizzing by too fast to elicit any groans) and crazy car chase and brawling action and you're bound to wind up exhilarated. The Prime print is A-okay.

The post-end title "where are they now" crawl seems tacked on by producers after some test screening audience cards asked too many questions.

Man, some folks just can't let shit hang.


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More Recommendations and Review of Available-on-Prime Hidden Gems:

12 Weird/Cool Italian Films
and so much more.... somewhere

There's a pandemic going on outside and a bad year for spring pollen makes us indoor kids all sneezy and paranoid, thus robbing us of the schadenfreude we'd normally feel at being told we must stay inside in front of the TV all day. But that doesn't mean we don't make excellent guides through the jungle of weird and justly forgotten films from the 60s-80s with which Prime is overrun. So let me hack you a path through 13 wildly post-whatever films, starting from the first failure of CDC style checkpoints in Cassandra Crossing (1978) onwards to Italian cannibal zombies all the way back around to the past-post-apocalyptic Rats: Night of Terror--not to mention all the groovy psychedelic stops along the way. This carefully programmed series of 13 films that examine the drastic things humanity is simply too 'human' to do to save itself, until it's too late.


So, if you can still drink, o pen up another packet of powdered whiskey and sneak some peeks through the black rainbow looking glass end of reality films.

The dad of the director of Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy is clearly highly qualified to tell a tale of what happens when a wounded, contaminated terrorist winds up hiding on a speeding international incident of a train, requiring colonel Burt Lancaster to make some tough decisions, like having the military in hazmat gear welding bars over all the train doors and windows so no one can escape, rerouting it onto a disused line so it can crash into a ravine (thus saving the world and the secret germ warfare program) and machine gunning anyone who stands up to them. Ingrid Thulin is the voice of compassion and reason butting his head. Passengers include Martin Sheen and Ava Gardner are an odd pair of con artists; OJ Simpson and Richard Harris are officials aboard trying diplomacy and then machine gun violence; Lionel Stander is a conductor; Lee Strasberg a stereotypical old European Jew for whom all the systemic abuse of civil liberties is just a little too familiar. Alida Vialli, Lou Costell, Sophia Lauren, John Phillip Law, and Ann Turkel all run around in the back, hoping to help or hinder. In other words it's pure 70s cinema: a bloated cast of international stars on a runaway moving vehicle and one of those unresolvable "many must die so more can live" kind of tough choices that let us sympathize with both the military and the innocents battling against the sudden cessation of freedom.

This horror film of George's offers a clear indicator why it's so important to let people shelter in their homes rather than herd them into gymnasiums. The drastically under-equipped Major Ryder and the cool whiskey flask-packed Colonel Peckham (Lloyd Hollar) figure the best way to contain an outbreak of 'Trixie' --an experimental depopulating agent designed to infiltrate the water supply like a fatal dose of really bad acid--is to round everyone in the affected sleepy PA town at 2 AM and herd them into the high school gym. Trouble for the military: this is rural PA in the early 70s, full of bitter and and armed Vietnam vets in no mood to have the military push them around yet again. Ryder could have quarantined easier just by letting everyone sleep. But almost from the get-go we've got infectious military drums as the doomed army unit scrambles into gear during the chaotic, very well-edited rattatatat scenes of the military trying to set up a field office in the local doctor's cramped offices, treating everyone in town like they're criminals, not telling them what's going on ("We've been promised bullhorns and loudspeakers," notes Ryder. "No telling when they're going to arrive!")

It's long been one ugly looking film but recently it's gotten a loving restoration; Prime's print glows with warm colors, at least in the beginning where the blue eyes of a blonde girl seem otherworldly and rampant fire burns heavenly orange and the naked skin of nurse Lane Carroll is a heavenly in its rosiness. Romero edits in the same multiple camera whiplash style that made Dawn of the Dead so unique in its structure.

As with our own codename: Corona, Trixie travels faster than the ability of the governmental operatives to contain it, and by the time the right response arrives we have to widen the perimeter of the outbreak and start all over again. ("If Trixie jumps perimeter, this could could travel across the entire continent.") When instructed to send in one of the scientists who worked on the virus, they grab Richard "Dummies! Dummies!" France (Romero's equivalent to Cronenberg's Joe Silver) "Jesus Christ this is so RANDOM!" he shouts. He's masterful, and centers the film with that great bullhorn voice.

Lastly, you have to love any film as clued in the bliss of the morning hours, it's a film that starts at one in the morning and sees the sun come up on a whole new world about halfway through. It's not unlike the morning after one of those old SU block parties in the late 80s, with zonked people staggering around and the sense the town has been altered by chemicals and nothing will ever be the same again. If you were there, you know what I mean. And there's Lynn Lowry as a sheltered young hippie-ish girl who winds up losing her virginity to her father during one of the more disturbing sequences. They're all going insane so we can't really judge him by the same criteria as the sane, but there you go.

The remake is also on Prime, and pretty good as far as these things go, but now that it's been restored to glowy perfection, the original is the way to go (PS -There are numerous uploads of this film on Prime, at least where I am, so if the image isn't sublime, try another link.)

Right up there with Nightmare City and Contamination as far as recently-discovered Italian psychotronica I can return to again and again when the never-ending film marathon of my life runs dry of viable programming options. I've already seen Raiders at least four times since discovering it in 2017. There are so many reasons it rocks: Christopher Connelly and Tony King as a pair of mercs who own a boat together, with Hawksian attention paid to cigarettes, alcohol, and manly camaraderie (they also have a helicopter pilot buddy played by Ivan Rassimov). Giola Scol is an archaeologist flown from her Machu Picchu dig to a remote oil derrick where George Hilton and company are raising a Russian sub, due to an Atlantean plaque found down on the ocean floor. Then... shortly after the sub is raised, so too comes.... Atlantis! This triggers a strange reaction in a certain percentage of the nearby population, turning them all into marauding savages, driving around in their pimped out bikes and ride slaughtering everyone who's not infected with their strange madness. The leader calls his gang 'The Interceptors' and announces the return of the Atlanteans and that all others "but one" must die. Time to get the molotov cocktails lined up, and--luckily--find a warehouse full of guns and ammo.
Naturally we wonder if John Carpenter ever saw this movie as it bears striking resemblance to his last great film: 2001's Ghosts of Mars. In both films the ghosts of a violent, ancient genocidal race are accidentally awakened from their timeless sleep, possessing normal humans to dress up like metal mutants, wiping out all non-infected human life in preparation for the original inhabitant's return (2).

Naturally with the word Raiders in the alternate title, one expects a certain amount of loot grabbing (a lot of films in the 1982-3 era had to have ancient treasures laying on altars deep within booby-trap filled tombs and pyramids), but that's towards the end, during the big super-weird climax. Mostly there's a lot of molotov cocktails being thrown and guns and rides and great real time stunts, like people jumping out of a helicopter onto a speeding bus, or vice versa. The whole thing leaps around giddily from one scrape to the next, but we can always figure out what's going on but never what's going to happen next, making it 90 minutes of action packed awesomeness. It's not on DVD so Prime is the only place to see it.

Sandahl Bergman is the goddess of her little slice of the post-'cancellation' wasteland but decides to wander to the north with a handsome idiot (since it's pre-ordained by her oracle) and in the process runs into scrapes with everyone from New Yoahk-accented mutants to crazed warriors in a post-war ruined city and even acolytes of a 'one god' mutant boy who can control matter with his green flashing eyes. There's also a powdered-wig naturalist and his tutu-wearing henchman; and decadent werewolf aesthetes listening to a gramophone (led by David Brandon).  Sandahl and her right hand woman endure the rack, flogging, the old trash compacting wall cliffhanger, and display a lot of cool feminist force. Israeli auteur Ari 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.

Bits like Sandahl's being startled into sword out readiness after stepping on a stray rubber duck by the werewolf elite's swimming pool all come tumbling and it's very well paced, relentlessly entertaining and packed with crazy songs, rock anthems galore. The Prime print is great clearly taken from the latest must-have Blu-ray edition. (full review)

"Drugs can be dangerous," notes Nick Offerman, dressed as a scientist in this cautious documentary, playing off all the anti-drug 'educational' films they used to show us in school. "But they can also be... hilarious."

The new Netflix documentary, full of animated renditions of famous comedian's flashbacks, is more than just an LSD documentary or an extended episode of Party Legends. With the presence of pro-therapeutic model doctors like Deepak Chopra on hand (who points out the impossibility of objective reality), it's both a hilarious trip story montage and a medical vindication (with psychiatrists like Charles Grob who use it in clinical trials to help terminal cancer patients let go of their fear of death, etc.) with a final putting to bed of the demonizing double talk. All those phony DNA-warping trials that went into making it illegal during the Vietnam war are finally booed out of the room.

That's not to say it's not full of sound advice on the dangers of dosing. They put cautious stress on set and setting--but it's really an attempt to ease off the stigma that has too long associated good drugs like mushrooms and LSD with 'bad' drugs like cocaine and heroin. Non-addictive, not always 'fun' but nearly always insightful about one's own psychological make-up (even a bad trip can provide ten years of normal psychotherapy in a single night), as long as you don't do nothin' stupid, like dose when you're already drunk and its 5 AM, or try to drive. (Not that I haven't done both).


While it made me very glad to see HAVE A GOOD TRIP, and it gave my a tang on my tongue and sweaty palms, that burning sensation in the in the third eye (lodged above/between/behind the eyes like a blazing solar bullet), that excited feeling I used to get when my psyche could sense an immanent drug trip even before I maybe had decided to have one. During my own acid/shrooms heyday, approximately 1986-1998 (did you know I invented 'micro-dosing'? You're welcome!) there was something much cooler and more political about drugs because of the war on drugs was at its nadir. Even spoiled white college kids could go to jail for life just for having a few shrooms in their pockets at a Dead show. The danger made it all so sexy and intimate, we were outlaws! Narcs would show up at college asking for larger amounts of course, trying to sweet-talk dumbass freshmen into big enough deals that could send them away for life; the trick with cops was always to act nonchalant, no matter how thuggish they may get and how many drugs you had stashed in your car. Narcs would show up at our parties with all the subtltey of Jack Lemmon in Glengary Glen Ross talking about their friend Joe, or whomever was dumb enough to mention one of us could hook them up. Narcs like Johnny Depp in that show 21 Jump Street were supposed to be cool! (It wasn't until Ed Wood that we were ready to forgive him). Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign made it mandatory for insurance rates that companies gave urine tests to their employees, like it was some kind of 1984 gulag. Maybe some still do, I don't want to know

All of which I mean to say, well, man. A documentary like this, right out in the open on Netflix. I would never have thunk this thing possible. Today, it's only the older talking head celebs they have on this show, like Sting, who really understand just how bad things used to be. For us older folks the very idea of an acid documentary seems like, in order for it to have funding, it would have to lean on the down side more than the up. As Sting puts it, stressing his initial reluctance "I wouldn't want to be an exercise in the just say no campaign." I'm not a fan of his music but I fell in love with him here, especially talking about assisting in the birth of a calf while tripping on peyote, and his clear-eyed admission of having plenty of bad trips, noting: "sometimes it kicks your ass, sometimes you need to have your ego kicked down a rung or two." Indeed, a bad trip is just a sample of the Buddhist idea of Hell, where the burning flames are the demons devouring the shreds of ego still clinging to your soul like crusty flesh moths around a burning lightbulb until at last its full wattage may shine forth. Try to telling that to yourself when your writhing around on the floor moaning pitifully as little carpet gnomes shred your eyeballs, though. It doesn't help.

these guys re-enact and Anthony Bourdain story

Unsurprisingly, there are some uptight little pishers like Adam Scott and Ben Stiller don't jibe with drugs at all (I knew there was something else about them I didn't trust!). Stiller talks about the one time he did it and wigged out ("fear and anxiety just being amplified"), walking past the half-inflated animals late at night on the UWS the night before the Thanksgiving Day parade, etc. Incidentally, I had that same experience in the mid-90s, but I loved it! Tripping to a half-inflated Snoopy at 4 AM = pure weird bliss, but Jerry got so wigged he ended up calling his parents! They were off somewhere shooting an episode of The Love Boat! Great details though, gotta love him for that. Elsewhere are those two knuckleheads at the left, enacting an Anthony Bourdain story of a narcoleptic stripper dying on them in a hotel room where they're doing massive amounts of shrooms and cocaine. Noice! They really bring home the full dose of paranoia that can result when you can all but smell the naugahyde in the back seat of the cop car just from thinking about the trouble you might now be in. (The presence of the late Bourdain lets you know--if the startling young age of some of these talking heads didn't give it away beforehand--that this film is many years in the making).

Since his dad is Jerry Stiller, I guess it's OK, and I do like Zoolander, but still, Ben proves my hunch was right, and that he's the type of guy we called a wally, i.e. they don't want to trip but they also want to hang out with you while you do, dragging you down with their banal idiocy. And if they do trip, an hour or two in, they want someone to drive them to the ER as they think they're dying (or worse, they want to give themselves up to the cops). Other comedians in the doc talk about the idiot "friends" it's good to avoid --the ones who find out you are tripping and give you a hard time going "Woo! Woo! You're going down a tunnel!" and all this other moronic townie dirtbag shit. We get a sampling of the wrong crowd too in an a hilariously over-the-top Afterschool special re-enactment that again, only those of us of a certain generation X will be able to relate to (the afterschool special being a thing purely from the 70s, when shows like Go Ask Alice gave us such confusing demonizations of high school drug use we were left as misled as if we read a Judy Blume book for a guide to human sexuality.)

Along the way there is plenty of groovy candy-colored animation ala the other big trippy Netflix animated show, Midnight Gospel. Among other treats, we get a groovy sound mixes of how voices and music sounds when your hearing is slipping in and out of the space-time continuum, animation "trees are waving kind of musically at me" There's a bit about wigging out at the Van Gogh Museum as one of the fields of rippling wheat paintings sucks him in while scared tourist families gawk (I've been there, but at the Met). We get Nick Kroll remembering being covered in sea weed down at the beach and running around being the seaweed monster. We get Bill Kreuzman (the older drummer for the Dead, left) talking about being so high his cymbals were melting. (a nice visual - I been there too! Both seeing the cymbals melt via on stage with my own band, and seeing his melt at Dead Shows!) Aesop Rocky mentions having great sex and when he cam "a rainbow shot out of my penis." (never saw that one myself, but I've never been much for sex while tripping, it's too intense already.

As Rocky points out, acid is "not for everybody," he notes, sagely. "I'm an artiste, It's my lifestyle." Man, I totally agree. One of the reasons I stopped trying to be such a keen promoter, was the realization people weren't using it the way I did, originally, as an artistic/spiritual quest device (with overcoming paralyzing depression being a nice side effect) but to get f--ked up.  Sure, I've done that too. But it's wrong, man.

Too many funny bits to name, but you can tell this is assembled by someone 'in the know' and they took their time to get all the details right. I love how the first half of the documentary stresses the danger of looking in a mirror while tripping (which I don't agree with!). The second half stresses how cool it is to look in the mirror while tripping (I was right!). With a little kid dressed as a machine elf pointing out helpful dos and don'ts that sometimes contradict. Watching this for me, I felt my self nodding excitedly, my palms getting clammy with flashback sensations. I got a little misty remembering my mindset back in the late 80s, the total political drug war making a documentary like this all but impossible except on the DL (my band and I made one, but it's not on youtube -- too inflammatory, or so I thought).

As one of the talking heads notes, tripping visuals have never been captured very well on film except for the carpet patterns in Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Donovan gives us a natural history. Zach Leary (Tim's son) notes DMT "is the express train to the ooze." Reggie Watts gives us a sage bit of bad trip-avoiding advice: "when it doubt, zoom out."

As usual, however, it's Deepak Chopra who states it all so succinctly reality seems suddenly to have never been a dangerous or confusing place: "In reality there is no such thing as colors and sounds, just a fluctuation of energy in an infinite void." Right on.

Evie Oddly - Drag Race winner, a sign o' the trippy times

I can tell you there was one old tripper that shed a tear, like all Chopra's sticking up for tripping is a viable therapeutic and creative tool, even in the un-PC 80s or anti-drug AA groups, this documentary made me feel as vindicated as the movie Ed Wood did back in the glorious early 90s. I set this blog up back in 2006, the way Claudia Cardinale's fake-Irish husband Mr. McBain started setting up his station in the middle of nowhere, knowing the train was headed his way... little did I suspect that I too would be more or less killed by Henry Fonda by the time the train got here! I mean, here we are, in the age of Midnight Gospel, Climax,Mandy,Midsommar, The Beach Bum, and now this. And I am alive... but at what cost? I can't even do a hit of cough medicine without having an anxiety attack.  What's important though is that I have made peace with that, too. Is no longer needing to be hip more important than being so? Is having tripped 100+ times 20 years ago as important as wanting to trip once tomorrow?

It depends!

I no longer don't fear death they way I used to, if that makes sense. But isn't that the province of the young, to face death through some scary gauntlet and come out a better, calmer person? Now the thought of just going to the hospital terrifies me so I keep myself constantly distracted. It's not the same, but sobriety makes a clear-eyed stare into the void rather hard to do, which is why AA stresses prayer so much. Drunk, I could look down the barrel of a gun without flinching. Tripping, I could feel death's cold hands on my just seeing a picture of a gun in a magazine. Sober, I can't even sneeze without having a COVID panic attack. I believe in God, but only because I've had so many religious experiences I'd be a fool not to, like giving back a lifetime of Christmas presents because I won't believe in Santa.

Ultimately that's the big issue Have a Good Trip skirts around in favor of funny stories; the nature of reality and the link to a higher power. Of course, whether or not there is a God is irrelevant to faith. There is no this, so how can it not be that? Once duality is transcended, the game, the seeking, is over. Once one goes back down from the mountain, knowing what lies beyond, what can one do but pick up their burden again, and continues on participating joyfully in the sorrows of the universe, so as not to spoil the surprise for everyone else? Knowing this, as the Upanishads say, the rest is known. This is the trick Luke could never figure out when fighting Darth Vader in the awful Return of the Jedi. To fight with love in your heart is not violence. When someone tells you to just say NO, tell them to KNOW is better, but be sure and name check John Lennon in The Yellow Submarine who does that to the Blue Meanies' big marching NO font-monster.


When I saw John do that the last time I was in a mystical experience (during the 2012 galactic alignment), I suddenly, in that satori moment, understood how true love transcends duality. All hatred is self-hatred, and melts in the presence of pure love, the love without attachment, which is beyond opposites. A fully open palm cannot strike itself. When in doubt, zoom out! And above all, may this documentary, and whatever you may find in this site, inspire you to....


Further:

June 17, 2012:
Tripumentaries: MAGIC TRIP, DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE, 2012: Mayan Prophecy and Shift of the Ages, and ROBERT THURMAN ON BUDDHISM

June 25, 2015:
Summer of my Netflix Streaming I: A Psychedelic Odyssey- Though all these films are long gone from Netflix streaming, woe is us. You can still program a nice 12 hours of dosed post-whatever viewing from them if you can track 'em down. 

"We know less about the deep oceans than we know about the surface of the moon!"

There's never any question of getting the bends in the fun and oceanic quasi-sci-fi adventure film Around the World Under the Sea. In fact it's the one element that seems the most unscientific about this charmingly odd duck of a movie, produced by the ever-adventurous Ivan Tors and ably achieving just what it wants to do, i.e. pleasurably evoking the previous nine or so years of ocean-related TV adventure series, Irwin Allen sci-fi films, and Jacques Cousteau documentaries; and I say that as someone who is totally fine with the uncommented on presence of a macro-scoped moray eel doing the duty as the requisite giant sea monster (ala what kept us kids watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea reruns). In fact, I love it. I wish there were more (no giant squid or octopus) but what can you do? There's a deep-breathing Shirley Eaton, so it skews slightly older, and that's cool, too.

Lloyd Bridges (from TV's Sea Hunt) co-stars with Brian Kelly (from TV's Flipper) as two divers on a mission to assemble a team of the leading oceanographers, tech gurus, oxygen mixers (Shirley Eaton), and undersea miners (dull as dishwater William Thompson) to travel the oceans deep and plant seismographic detection devices around the 'ring of fire' and other places via an experimental yellow submarine, the Hydronaut ("she can circle the globe on one cartridge of nuclear fuel!") Are you down for the trip yet? Or would you rather slog through another week of CNN watching the world above you burn, like it does in Irwin Allen's movie version of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea?

Along the way there are rescues (the best one being early on when Bridges dives down to help his sinking buddy with no oxygen tank, and swims 100 feet or so down -doing no real good except to bang on the top of the window). I love it, as no one is perfect. The steam heat of Eaton almost crashes the sub as McCallum is busy trying to woo her and nearly collides with an undersea cliff.

Keenan Wynn co-stars as one of the breathing mixers. And I am fascinated by his bachelor pod under the sea (he lives in a giant NYC studio apartment-sized diving bell several thousand feet down). I have had dreams about just such a place; in these apocalyptic times it's looking better than ever! The only difference is that his lacks a VHS player and TV, instead has an LP player and a nice stack of records, and an ongoing chess game via shortwave. That's OK, too.  Lloyd Bridges dives down there and tries to convince him of all the lives he'll save by helping install a chain of underwater earthquake detectors along the Pacific 'ring of fire': "I don't care - let 'em all go." Wynn fires back. "I got it made down here! I got my research, my books, my music!"

Bridges and Kelly, reminding us of a time when men looked like men.

To provide evidence, he shows a shark hatching from its egg: "He's trying to free himself from his nourishing egg yolk! He wants to be born!" The analog is clear. Wynn doesn't want to, preferring to stay in his nourishing egg under the sea. Like I say, I relate to his churlish disposition; it doesn't seem quite fair to drop in and guilt trip him like some crafty Greenpeace canvasser.  So he's going to leave all his lab animals to just die in his undersea cave because some scientist wants to save Asia? To prove Wynn's misanthropy is just a lazy doge, Bridges leaves the pod without the right oxygen mix to get back to the surface alive, banking on his old pal coming to the rescue. 

Another of my favorite crew, Eaton has that wry knowing look--both haughty and turned-on, dismissive of your interest in her yet intrigued, steaming up the cramped ocean spaces, and throwing the alpha male young buck Kelly into a state of mating season heat; and vexing the Metalunan forehead of David McCallum as the wizard at communications and computers. (Meanwhile dull as dishwater Marshall Thompson occasionally puts his arm around her, presuming she'd marry him in a minute if he asked). I'm no fan of McCallum (he's like Klaus Kinski without the froth) but I like the way the he and Keenan begin their ongoing chess game (magnetically attached to the side of the sub so as not to take up space) without a single word but he's way better an option for Eaton than Thompson, who'd be more believable as her father, even in the 60s. (though he's only 12 years her senior). Luckily, providing handsome manly gruffness as the guy who gets Eaton into whatever bed there is onboard, because he treats her the worst, Kelly beats them all.

The reason for Kelly's gruffness is clear: once they're all submerged on this groovy experimental vessel, the steam rises. You can feel Eaton's pheromones oozing off of her into the mix of sweat and salt water steam. What makes her allure so unique is her rather harsh face --she's not afraid to keep those jet black roots and big black eyebrows, with wide, cunning eyes (as she showed in the The Million Eyes of Sumuru), that devouring face, those gnashing teeth. She's from a brand of mid-60s Bond girl that includes Honor Blackman that, with the era's preference for inch-thick eyeliner, could be seen staring at you with a wolfish smile from a mile away without binoculars. "I've caught them all," is her first line of dialogue, seen on land, after rounding up escaped guinea pigs. But by the end, it's clear who she really means is the entirety of the Hydronaut crew. "You're a lot on a man's blood pressure," admits Bridges. But he also notes she's excellent at her job and men are going to have to get used to women like her being around, i.e. it's not her fault, and she's not just here as eye candy, or a secretary. She's the leading expert in her field and we regularly see her proving it. There are a few shots of her bringing orange juice in and out of rooms on a tray, as if the filmmakers felt the need to satisfy some archaic gender typing; but we also see her injecting the men with chemicals that will help them absorb more oxygen from the limited air, and keeping an eye on her guinea pigs for signs of changing in the breathing. She's a great one for oxygen.


The climax involving a last minute extra sensor right at the foot of an underwater volcanic eruption includes lots of great, albeit unconvincing, miniatures and colors as the bright orange light of the magma creates deep blue dark shadows on the sub and its interiors, evoking Suspiria and early two-strip color films like Dr. X and Mystery of the Wax Museum, with the ship balanced on the lip of a volcano, then sliding vertically so that they're all trying to work while literally falling on top of each other.  and the last minute plan to blow the sub in half to rocket the top half straight up to the surface ensures the framing gets understandably messy--even Twister-esque--in the interiors but man the exteriors look gorgeous in this big climax, with the deep volcanic stock footage and model work casting a cool contrasting blue and orange lattice of shadows as the colors filter through the dark ocean water.

 It's not for everyone, and I'm no specific fan of underwater TV shows from the 60s, but I have warmed up on movies where the sea monster is a normal-sized predator in an aquarium battling a tiny model and there's something downright Hawksian about these professionals all working together and the slow burn romance bathed in steam.

Truth be told. Not even sure why I like this movie, its title seems designed to weld Around the World in 80 Days to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and it sure is derivative of a lot of different TV and movies like Fantastic Voyage as well. But that's all okay. One amazing element is just how little the film seems to care about the usual oceanography documentary stuff. We see the Great Barrier Reefs and so forth but only in passing. The only dolphin is one programmed to attach magnetic mines to ships.Clearly most of this was filmed on the dry dock or with miniatures in big tanks but I love that. In CGI or life-size 'reality', with endless digressions on the wonders of aquatic life, it would be a snooze (or more of a snooze than it is). Instead, it's almost Hawksian. And in these trying times, regardless of whether you think, like Wynn's salty dog, we should "let 'em all go" or be like Kelly and Nolan and "want to be born," getting far under the sea away from the dizzy situations back on land seems hard to resist. I know a lot of harried dads would love this movie with a few cocktails after their nagging wives go off to bed. Submarine movies work a special kind of magic for us air-conditioning-dependent summertime older males, and provide the ultimate metaphor for late night viewing itself, that special privatized sphere of buzzed insomniacs, when the lack of prying eyes frees you to unfurl all your hidden tentacles, and--even if it's all too dark to see except through a single glowing window--the world is yours.

An oft overlooked part of Universal's monster pantheon, Paula Dupree, the gorilla/human hybrid, starred in her very own trilogy: CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN, JUNGLE WOMAN, and JUNGLE CAPTIVE, all released in a three year-span of 1943-5 (the height of wartime and--for some reason--the height of gorilladom - see RETURN OF THE APE MAN: Revisiting the Wartime Savage from a Post-Modern Perspective!). Like any number of popular monsters, she was regularly brought back from the abyss from the dead by unscrupulous (male) scientists, made brunette human to suit their own likeness, but reverted back to animal form as soon as some dull as dishwater leading man overlooked them as romantic partners in favor some equally square blonde.

In all three films, Paula ends up shot, shot up, or otherwise killed. Three times! What a lives! And what a set from Scream Factory! All three films (+ another gorilla-friendly sub-classic) comprise Volume Six of their Universal Horror Collection, a series which rounds up all the titles that Universal didn't consider 'pantheon' enough to release themselves, i.e that don't feature one of Universal's chosen males: Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, Dracula, The Invisible Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Phantom of the Opera (this last one being, to most Universal fans, a dubious inclusion in the pantheon, at best, though an Abbot and Costello vs. the Phantom of the Opera would have been... no doubt unbearable.)

Autumn... despite our current plaga, it means all the best things in life (and death) are now arrived.. especially old dark house movies from the 1930s,

If you don't think film critics can make mistakes, consider the terrible reviews given the sublime SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE, a C-list 1960 madcap comedy (once likely called SEX POT GOES TO COLLEGE but changed due to pot references) about the effect a super genius doctor of medicine,  psychology, and physics (plus ten other degrees) has on a small town college when she arrives from Vegas to assume the role of dean (hired by "Thinko" the computer/robot who is "never wrong!") Why is she causing such a stir? Just because she happens to arrive in the body of "the Tallahassee Tassle Tosser," Mamie van Doren. Often billed as being to Jayne Mansfield what Jayne Mansfield was to Marilyn Monroe, Mamie underplays with such calm authority that even those who sneer and deride her 'type' would be impressed if they could leave their male sexual panic at the door. Not only can she can carry a film, she can stay cool and grounded as a photographic memory and 13 doctorates-having genius. No doubt she is the right woman to lead this cocakamamie college into the "space age" she can give you the page # of any given text. In short, Thinko is not wrong; she's qualified above and beyond the rest of them. The sparks fly because no one can handle the fact of her hotness. This inability is never depicted as anything but 'their' problem, and reflects perhaps the irrational hostility of critics (similar to the unearned scorn heaped on Myra Breckenridge.)

 
What to do about Jon Finch? He can look as wan and bloated as any British drinker but when the dialogue and co-star is right, boy oh boy, he's like a prime era Peter O'Toole (in richly Shakeseparean, commanding voice crossed with a delightfully dissolute feyness) possessing a young Jim Morrison's dandy jaw line and heroic drug intake. Robert Fuest's dark, freewheeling, and--for a long time--hard to find British sci-fi satire from 1973, THE FINAL PROGRAMME (distributed stateside by Corman's New World Pictures as The Last Days of Man on Earth) is finally here in a stunning new transfer. Now we may marvel and swoon over Fuest's beguilingly surreal production design (he's the man behind the Phibeses), Finch's alcohol-enriched roaring, literate energy, and a roster of sublimely-etched side characters. Marred only by the occasional groan-worthy satiric jabs at consumerism's future ouroboros vanishing point (the world's supposed to be ending, but the budget can't afford crowd scenes or anything too dystopian, so we have to take Finch's word for it) and a kind of disappointing resolution, it's worth checking out for the game and hearty. 

INTRO: THE ORIGIN OF SATANIC PANIC

Blame it on the foundation-rattling popularity of The Exorcist andRosemary's Baby if you want, but the 70s was occult down to its bones, wilding out adults and children alike (if we were too young to see them in the theaters, we caught them edited on TV). The devil was--all through the 70s--kid-friendly; he carried a current of underground electric jouissance that connected our elementary school playground gossip chakras in a unified field of ouija boards, vividly recounted movie plots, slumber party telekinesis and deep dish absorption of TVMs like Dark Secret of Harvest Home, Crowhaven Farm, Horror at 37,000 Feet and the discussed in this issue, Cruise into Terror. The uncanny magnetism of the neighborhood covens often depicted in these films acted as a sort of tribal mask obscuring the mysteries of adulthood, which lax (in hindsight?) parental guidelines enabled us to often witness firsthand, even with inflexible bedtimes preventing us from seeing them to the end (denied closure, we'd lie in bed and dream the endings, and lurid and dark those endings were, way more lurid and far darker than the chaste denouements rattled off for us by a half-asleep mom the next morning). 

I forgot to mention the preponderance--as holy children's writs---of scary 70s paperbacks. These were so important because if you saw a movie either on TV or the big screen and you loved it, you had to accept the fact you might never see it again. The only way to 'own' it would be to buy the novel or soundtrack album (or the bubblegum cards). The child of the 80s could have his mind blown by the 'horror' aisle at the video rental store, but for the kid of the 70s, it was the supermarket checkout paperback rack that promised the 'real' scares. While mom shopped we'd stand hypnotized by the beguilingly cryptic occult covers, that underground jouissance current snaking right into us.

That all changed in the 80s, of course, when we could at last own these films, as well as rent stuff far too gruesome or sexual to have ever even graced out TVs before; But today... now... these final days, for some of us, The Car,  Beyond the Door, and The Devil's Rain and The Legacy, abide. 

Oh yeah, and....these two...

Dopey Stuart can't believe any of it, even God's holy power seems beyond his belief system. Will he, like old Father Karras ("how can I be of service when I have such personal doubts?" he actually says this during his opening prayers - I mean c'mon! And instead of running track like Karras, Stuart works out at the local boxing gym), make the ultimate sacrifice? Who cares? As the hand makes its rounds, its chosen hosts get so frisky and loco, even after being burned down their skeletons, that you can't help but applaud the reckless high-wire idiocy of it all, reserving eye rolls only for the half-assed soul searching of Whitman's continuously wrong-headed padre (does he really think a security detail --a pair of cops in their car outside her apartment---are going to protect her from a disembodied hand? ("What are they gonna do?" quips Eggar, "arrest it?"). 

NOTES

Erich Kuersten's "4 AM Favorites" as 4 AM is a curated list for the magic hour whether you are just waking up or staying up all night. People not alive to the moment are asleep, There is no pressure to do or be something as the people who pressure people are absent. If they woke up they'd try and drag you to bed with baleful eyes. Film bingers well know this hour, it's often where we first saw an Ed Wood film on TV in the 60s-70s. Stewed to the gills, hopelessly high and twisted, coming home from a night and early morning on the town or waking up as a child to sneak downstairs because you can't sleep, it's all the same. We 4 AM film watchers are all in it together. For me, it's the best time of all to be alive and in front of the screen. Your superego checks out at three AM prompt. Now you got nobody to shout over. Magic is afoot.

Here are some of the weird and wondrous films meant for those hours, now culled onto a youtube list, so you can just press play, open the browser window wide, crack open another jug, and let the magic flow til dawn and beyond. Perfect for on the road travellin' too! Not as good as having the DVDs and a big screen, but sometimes emergencies. Sometimes there is no DVD to have.

(PS none of them were uploaded onto youtube by me. I'm just curating!)

There's been an exciting upswing in the media presence of trans and/or non-binary young people these days, not merely activists or carpetbaggers but genuinely cool, free, unique types better than both boxes checked together; I wouldn't dare name some and by error omit others, but I think they can perhaps be measured in their coolness by their response to Sleepaway Camp, which in today's climate might be deemed 'problematic' in its association with what is and isn't horrific (or further, how a girl might change her sex due to a boat propellor or if that even fits into anything.) I think it bodes well for the future that the heroine of the film is also a murderer and has gone on to become a kind of gender-bending icon, as well as a kind of de facto female Freddy/Jason for the slasher set. We need more like her!