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Just a Juggalo: JOKER + The Psychotic Sometimes Swims, Harley Quinn, Harley Quinn

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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.
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 SUICIDE SQUADS AND CRAZY LOVERS
"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."

THE CUCKOO'S NEST, FLOWN TO BITS

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.

THE ROGUE'S GALLERY

Everyone has their favorite villains in this DC-verse and the worst (Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor). When it comes to Catwoman I belong body and soul to Julie Newmar. See my praise on nearby Mediated "Kitty Kali" if you doubt that I'm down. Her playful ease with her mouse-eared crook gang in the 60s TV show is exactly the way I imagined myself in her presence (me being merely seven or eight when I first fell for her), a kitten luxuriating in the clawy grasp of a lithe black-spangled diamond snatcher. Runner up Catwoman would be Ann Hathaway, who still rocks the best eyeliner in Hollywood, and turns out looks great in leather and whipcord. Michelle Pfeiffer's was okay of course, but that Burton sequel was rather leaden and hard to wade through with all Danny DeVito's hamming and Michael Keaton's sulking. And Halle Berry's the worst Catwoman of all, mistaking mousiness for for normal and materialism for a superpower (she's only a hero because when she's about to rob a diamond store, someone is already there first, so she settles for kicking their ass -stealing from thieves being the lamest kind of heroism).

As for the Riddler, there is only Frank Gorshin. As for Two Face, who gives a shit?  On the other hand, who doesn't give a shit? The rest of my love goes to Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy. and Dr. Zodiac himself, Ceasar Romero as the TV show Joker (far underrated over the sea of time, check him out again if the series rolls past you and give a close reading of his giddy mephistophelean relish for crime and cunning).

As for the heroes, there's no such thing as a good Robin - the whole boy sidekick idea is misguided and shows a horrific lack of understanding of the average child reader's psyche (Marvel never had them after Stan Lee took over). The best Batman is Adam West. Batgirl by Yvonne Craig is delicious but the idea of just feeling the right to imitate Batman's schtick out of some little sister copycat style impulse is kind of anathema to what superheroism is all about, Mom! Cindy, get your own cave and animal totem. I support the lesbian slant of the new WB's new version, but what's with the terrible red wig? One bad fashion choice can swamp a whole franchise.

The key to all the villains' success is, as you may guess, insanity without reverting to overplaying/hamming. Anyone can vibe off Jim Carrey's looney tunes overacting the way Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face does in Batman Forever, but the result isn't memorable. Michelle Pfeiffer knows not to let DeVito's hamming upset her catnip cart, so she underplays in Batman Returns. Her dry "Me-yow" is the stuff of legend. But the result of their combination is just back to zero.

And now, between the three recent Jokers--Phoenix's low key psychotic, Jared Leto's druggy serpentine hustler, and the late Heath's ambulance-chasing dog anarchist, the bar has been raised mighty high. The big issue which we will learn this week is: Does Harley Quinn survive her girl power makeover emancipation or does she become just another over-costumed mannequin on which various craftsman all drape to the point of overkill in mad Oscar bids? Shall she be drenched in the stagnant swamp of unconscious Gotham sanity, nailed to the wall of soapy motherhood-sanctification? Shall the Birds of Prey lure her into peppy 80s-scored montages of sisterhood traveling pants shopping and nail salon cattiness? Will this become another girl Ghostbusters making bad genitalia jokes or tired Charlie's Angels boasting of their concert hall-style closet, forgetting to add fire, zest, madness and respect for their sources?

Make no mistake, DC villain roster! After Phoenix's Joker and Robbie's first rendition of Harley Quinn, the writing is on the wall - go nuts or go home. And when I say nuts I mean legitimately nuts, not 'art director given an unlimited budget to grab the Oscar brass ring one last time before he retires by this time really imitating old MGM musical numbers so slavishly the geriatric Academy risks cracking their wrists in applause' kind of nuts. And I don't mean the hamming it to the rooftop with evil laughing nuts, I mean DSM-V-charting here comes the warm jets surrealist gibbering nuts. I mean the 'break the shackles of the establishment and terrify the old academy into turning the channel lest the villain crawl through the screen and grab them around the neck'-kind, the kind that the Academy will only vote for if, like Heath Ledger, the actor has died so can be safely worshipped, or--like Angelina Jolie's in Girl, Interruptedor Daniel Day Lewis' in There Will Be Blood, already on the establishment's radar, via legacy status with Oscar-winning father (i.e. John Voight) or a past winners/nominees (My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father) so they know you're not really... you know... dangerous.

I have a terrible feeling that Robbie's Quinn doesn't have it anymore in Birds of Prey. That she will fall into a Tank Girl, Sucker PunchCharlie's Angels Reloaded kind of shrill anti-action (albeit high Bechdel-charting) melange of gravity-defying high kicks. You know, stuff that won't freak out mom if you end up wanting to be Harley for Halloween again.  That's fine if she's still dancing in the flames of a burning Gotham gala, but if she's helping to put the fire out, because some kid who makes her want to be a mom is there, trapped in a stroller on the far side of a raging banquet table, the trolls of the world's basements won't just rise and storm the City Center in full juggalo riot/looting gear, but worse, as far as the movie is concerned, they'll stay home.

I hope to god I'm wrong. The last thing we need now is another step back from the ledge. We've come so far! Just one more push! And this time, no "it was all a psychotic break hallucination," por favor. Some of us still just want to watch the world burn! (5)

Oops, forgot - it's burning already. Sorry, Australia. Change it back to TCM!


2/7/20: The film is out and the critics have spoken. So far the reviews are good! Looks like I was wrong (though the critics are all dumping on Suicide Squad at the same time and citing references to Tank Girl, which I don't care for. Confidentially, that's kind of why I wrote this, on a subconscious level, like going outside for a cigarette at a slow restaurant, so your food will be there when you get back, getting cold. It's a sacrifice we make for the good of the group. Amen. 

Hurray for Harley I hope. And yr welcome.

NOTES:
1. as Bogie once said to Ingrid in Casablanca, a line that smacks of patriarchal condescension (she's been trying to get him to understand it all through the movie; then she realizes the easiest way to get those visas is to play along and let him think it's his idea)
2. To paraphrase that old Joseph Campbell quote (? was it Jung?) "A mystic swims where a psychotic drowns"
3. Though to be fair, I'm basing that off of three movies he was in where he played a reprehensible swine, his smirky wally in The Men Who Stare at Goats; his entitled abusive/possessive poet in Moulin Rouge; and his bad haircut-sporting traitor ex-boyfriend to Gina Carano in the oft-seen-by-me Haywire.
4. Simpsons quote (S1: "Krusty gets Busted"), because we shouldn't let the last 20 seasons sway us from remembering the brilliance of the first 10 
5. As Alfred sums up the Joker's MO in Dark Knight. 

Retro-Futurism was Sure to Go: 10 Cool International 60s Sci-fi Trips Streaming via Spaceships Prime and Criterion

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 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 in1955 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!

1. CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS 
(1962) Dir. Wesley Barry
***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

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.

2. WAR BETWEEN THE PLANETS 
(1966) Dir. Antonio Margheriti
*** / Amazon Image - A

The Italian title to this one is the "Runaway Planet" or "The Errant Planet" but this was titled War Between the Planets in the US, seemingly to confuse American audience as it sounds so close to another in the director's "Gamma One Quadrilogy", War of the Planets. And then there's his 1961 precursor, Battle of the Worlds from 1961 (below). Forget all that for the moment and enjoy the assured style with which we're plunged into the retrofuturistic world of space station cocktails and astronauts soaring through black soundstage space on visible wires. Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Kill Baby, Kill) is commander Rod Jacskon; his head of communications -as often happens in 60s-70s Italian genre films, they both have dyed red hair; Terry Sanchez (Ombretta Colli) is his lover; his dopey cat-eyed fiancee is down on Earth, and happens to be the general's daughter (Halina Zalewski - who was giving Barbara Steele a run for her money as the darkest yet fairest of them all in Margheriti's Long Hair of Death just a few years earlier). 

 There are no weird aliens, but the errant planet, soaring too close to earth's gravitational field resulting in all sorts of seismic and tidal disturbances. It's uninhabited but impressive and alive, with fields of cold red gelatin quicksand and islands of hairy ground surrounding craters breathing out plumes of cold steam. Going into one to plant anti-matter charges, they find themselves attacked by white tendrils that bleed but repair themselves as soon as Rod stops hacking at them. It's quite a destination. The dubbing is great matching the lips with weird hesitance and fast-talking when necessary. Dialogue is rich.... and wondrous, using the weird pauses of the actors to create mood and drama rather than just making them sound drunk: "Read your retros - don't get clogged, Mack!" / "Who's got the flagship?!" / "I'm engaged to her Terry.... not that... I want to be." / "OK, Terry, but it's every man for himself"

The imdb score is unfairly low, and perhaps based on old faded VHS pan and scans (or memories of being horribly bored as a kid catching it on TV, marveling that an astronaut hacking at white tubes constituted a science fiction movie); but the Prime print is sublime. It lets the scheme of dark colors-- greys, blacks and red that make up the bulk of the colors look really rich and alluring. If space opera style drama and mature, adults doing work as an organized group in constant radio communication is your bag, this is like the base, the raw go-to for all your Italian swinging cocktail space station needs.  I can see it any old time, and if nothing else, it rocks me to sleep like a baby. (If you like it, get Snow Devils, War of the Planets [a totally different movie than the above, believe it or not], and The Green Slime, all avail on DVD-R via Amazon!)

3. VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN
(1968) Dir. Peter Bogdanovich
*** / Amazon Image - C-

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.

4. PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES
(1966) Dir. Mario Bava
**** / Amazon Image - A+

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.

5. TERROR BENEATH THE SEA
(1966) Dir. Hajime Sato
** / Amazon Image - A+

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!

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 6. BATTLE OF THE WORLDS
Il Pianeta degli uomini spenti / Translation: Planet of Extinct Men
(1961) Dir. Antonio Marghereti
**1/2 / Amazon Image - C- / D+

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.

7. LIGHTNING BOLT
Operazione Goldman / Operation Goldman
(1966) Dir. Antonio Margheriti
*** / Amazon Image - A-

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.

8. FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER
(1965) Dir. Robert Gaffney
**/ Amazon Image - A

I couldn't let you go without first unearthing some American trash, because we do good crazy stuff too. Here is our version of Rollin's Viol du Vampire, as a pair of goofy aliens abduct a bunch of women to zap back to their home planet (their side has won a nuclear war but now all the women are sterile). What a pair, the bald pointy eared, vaguely Uncle Fester-meets-Jon Lovitz Dr. Nadir (Lou Cutell) and the aloof Princess Marcuzen (Marilyn Hanold). There's lovely black-and-white footage of driving past NASA's gates and a press conference with their newest astronaut, who--alas--freezes into a photo halfway through. He's a robot! His ship crashes, he falls to earth a burnt amnesiac who proceeds to run amok; the two sides are bound to meet, the "Frankenstein" eventually facing off against the monster Marcuzen uses to intimidate the abducted girls into compliance. Meanwhile James Karen is Frank's inventor who tracks him down on the beaches of Puerto Rico (where the UFO has landed too, smart move for mujer caliente, your highness!)

9. THE X FROM OUTER SPACE
Uchû daikaijû Girara
(1963) Dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu
*** / Criterion Image - B

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.

10. SOLARIS
(1972) Dir. Andre Tarkovsky
 **** / Criterion Image - A

Now that we've basically wrung Prime dry of good and good/bad but great looking science fiction from the swinging 60s, maybe it's time to go full artsy over on Prime (for now), and drift along with Tarkovsky's acclaimed science fiction masterpiece (which seems like a 60s film, due perhaps to the slower pop trend shifting behind the Iron Curtain). Based on novel by big Russian sci-fi novelist Stanislav Lem, it's slow and long yet never less than compelling now that there's a great HD version with glistening elements to the drab imagery and a fully restored panorama of sound. So turn up the volume and focus deep into the sound if you get too bored with the imagery, that's my advice. Like David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return, the vast and ever-shifting soundscape is at least as important as the imagery. The long drive through Moscow's tunnels and elevated highways to the the airport for example, becomes otherworldly when you tune into the way the sound of the traffic begins to discombobulate into the rush of rockets and radio static, the music of the spheres. I can't really remember the rest of it.

I've seen it twice and only stayed awake once. But what better film to usher you out of this transitional phase - Solaris was the adieu to the cautious hopes of the space age. We might have space stations in the future but now we'd be forced to bring ourselves along, not the cool cocktail swinging astronaut being hoisted around on wires while saving the day we want to be, but a complex creature capable of random violence as well as love, and our memories off zzzzzz.
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For other cool Communist sci-fi films from the 70s that seem like they're from our 60s, I highly recommend these two films from East Germany (avail. only in OOP DVD and sometimes youtube)

Im Staub der Sterne
(1978) Dir. 
*** / DVD image - B-

+
(1972) Dir. Herrmann Zschoche
*** / DVD image - B-
Gehen sie (for my review) hier

Final thoughts:
Looking back at them all, the reason why I'm obsessed with these films should be clear, especially to any recovering alcoholic or addict. I've dreamt of these remote, cold places. In space, no one can see you drink, just a jug of liquor, a tape of Cat Women of the Moon (1953) and thou. If anyone can escape the fiction of reality through the reality of fiction... (click)

For further voyages back.... follow the links...
10 "Other" Retro-cool sci-fi opuses streaming on Prime click hier 
Hauntology for a De-new America (Oct 2015)
Retrofuturist Pharma III: The "Metatextual Cigar" Edition: ASCENSION, VENTURE BROS, SNOWPIERCER (Dec. 2014)

Retreat to Move Forward: YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (1983)

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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 ConanFlash 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.

Gettin' Ripped: Luigi Cozzi's PAGANINI HORROR (1989) on Blu-ray

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If ever there was a time to order Blu-rays of things you want to see on your desert island after civilization's you-know-what, it's the canon of Luigi "The Italian Ed Wood" Cozzi, which is now all available from one label or another. I've already blathered praise for his two masterworks Starcrash and Hercules. And now the lunatic eye slash-cum-time warp-devil-dipped and Pleasance-lipped slippery dippy house bash, Paganini Horror (1989) is available on a stunning Blu-ray (via Severin). In our terrifying times, don't we need to laugh at Italian versions of our basest music class fears, to see them bounced hurly burly into cosmic prisms? Shan't we a universe where time loops are illustrated by giant floating hourglasses and spray-painted equations a-go? It's about time, literally, figuratively and obsessively. Now let the music play.

Maybe you saw the cover for this weird Italian gem, with the skeleton playing violin (left) and drew some cheap late-80s punk (the late-80s Italian kind, ala Ghosthouse -which Cozzi almost directed)-meets-slasher opinion about it. Maybe you figured it would be the usual tactless ladle of topless broads and denim-jacketed idiots offed gorily in some house where money for the electric bill grows on trees. Your conclusions couldn't be more wrong. Busto Arsizio's favorite son delivers all his usual tropes and tics: plenty of strong women in spandex and wild hair, planetary shifts, portentous gazes that lead to nothing; lasers and wild light effects, godawful dubbing, spiritual homage-paying (the spirits of Jack Kirby, Ray Harryhausen, Alex Raymond, and Bernie Krigstein all watch over Cozzi's shoulder in numb surprise)... Man, I am talking myself into watching this all over again.... Again? Hmmm? 


Bad in many ways but never dull or unpleasant or lacking for color, it reaches a climax at around three minutes in and just keep building from there until we're out in space, riding cosmic hourglasses to the moon. Dario Nicolodi gets star billing as Sylvia, the owner of the fabled "House in the Key of G", which she rents out for--in this case--a music video shoot for "Paganini Horror" the new song based on the mysterious last piece of written music by our titular virtuoso. Nicolodi announces Paganini conducted black mass rituals there back in the 19th century; he disemboweled his bride and used her intestines as strings for his Stradivarius. And that's how he hit those weird notes only he could hit. Now we know! Lead singer Kate  (Jasmin Maimone) exclaims that this will be "like Michael Jackson's Thriller!"Manager Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) hires Argento-style horror maven Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi) who hangs white sheets around, spray paints the words "Paganini Horror" and puts the hot bassist Rita in a devil mask. And did I mention the All-seeing eye lamp, and the candles? There's a mention of mannequins, but we don't see near enough.


Alas, the most beautiful bassist in all the world, Rita (Luana Ravegnini), is the first to die, and that's my biggest issue with this film. Why her?  Why not literally anyone else? It seems very spiteful of our murdering Paganini. The doe-eyed assistant manager is next. And if we thought it would be one of those lure-and-slash tales, where everyone is knocked over like dominos, we're soon proven wrong. Holes opening up under people's feet, electric energy pulses through those who fall into it.. Albert Einstein looks on, balefully, from a tacked-up poster; electric shocks zap anyone who tries to escape the house... of Paganini! As for that final piece of music, well, no one ever called composer Vince Tempura a modern Paganini to his face; he does okay with the non-diegetic part of the score, not so much the Paganini-attributed song the band plays (If Paganini is the Jimi Page of his era, it would be the theme from Death Wish II).


Naturally the knife his spirit uses has to off the band has a treble clef-shaped handle. It's Cozzi! Naturally there's a cello case coffin and our heroine burns up in it. Not all of the characters die from being stabbed by a steel-hipped Stradivarius: guitarist Elena (Michel Klipstein) gets infected by "a special fungus... like they discovered in the 1800s, on logs... floating along...  certain European rivers, notes Lavania, "wood that was used to make a special kind of violin, the Stradivarius." Elena becomes a hideous fungus-covered monster, Lavinia says "this is the fungus, for sure... I saw it... magnified... in a TV documentary." Music is magic. Though parts drag and there are too many stairs, we get way more with Paganini Horror than you might expect from such a simple and familiar set-up.

If a film professor tells you that when childhood flashbacks occur in red bathrooms
 it symbolizes the uterus, kill them instantly.
We open on the ominous synth notes dotting along as a strange young girl rides up a foggy Venice canal, her violin in her hand and the look of satanic royalty in the way she sits, centered with the violin case in her lap and an evil confident look on her face, the prow of the boat like the tip of some kind of fast moving sea serpent, snaking through the lonely mist as Vince Tempera's soundtrack pulses like Tangerine Dream. At home, amidst her collection of weird dolls, the music echoes with vocals, the girl picks up a Barbie-sized doll with a brown skull face and long white hair (a ringer for the Paganini spirit to come) and stirs mom's bath with it. A stark red wall is behind them...

After the untimely death of the bassist with the best hair, performance, form, grace and make-up of the bunch, the most unconscionable choice is that Donald Pleasance is dubbed by someone else!! His replacement does an okay enough job - especially in his rant about demons when he climbs up to the top of an under-reconstruction clock tower in Venice and throws all the money he got for the Paganini score to the wind. Watching Pleasance try to keep a straight face while talking to money ("fly away, demons, so the real ones can take your place... so what happens with Paganini will repeat itself.... extracted by the one to whom it belongs, his majesty, Satan!") makes for a pretty well modulated rant, but what's the point of even having him in a film if not for that deliciously silkenly seismographic voice?

The dubbing is pretty bad in both versions. Dubbig seems to be Cozzi's Achilles' heel. He seems to have no interest in it, being too busy down the hall painting laser effects onto the celluloid. The result is that kind of lazy mixing where everyone sounds like they're right up on the mic in a quiet sound booth rather than out in the actual environment depicted. Oh well, that's just part of the Cozzi effect. One side effect of it all is the hilarious near-constant screaming of his nearly all-female cast. There is so much that the actresses seem to be running out of breath, their screams trail off, like they're barely trying to keep a straight face, both in the dubbing and the image, running out of wind, the way a child whose been crying for hours starts to almost riff with their crying voice. Is Cozzi making them laugh too much or have they just lost interest?

But what a journey to get to that point! What saves it all and makes it a true gem is the real palpable love and respect for the genre, for strong women characters, and for movie making. It translates to the screen. When Ravegnini and the other girl band members gaze into the camera for their music video, you can tell they're feeling safe and part of the pack, they're not taking it very seriously but they love it. Franco Lecca's deep yellow and red-accented cinematography makes everyone seem lovely with natural skin color (rather than the ghastly pale or gaudy tan we sometimes get in Italian horror films) and Spanish style architecture captured in burnished oranges and browns. Too bad when they go outside it's all bad day-for-night that makes everyone look purple and green. Why?

Ugh, why, Paganini, why kill Rita first? Why not get Pleasance to do his own dub? Why the bad day-for-night? Why the bad vibe end?

Irregardless, there are still enough gateways to other dimensions and strange doorways and all the other trimmings to make six ordinary movies, even if full half the film is just one girl or the other walking up and down stairs and down halls, or screaming. The insane dialogue, terrible dubbing and wacky insanity is all there. We can't blame the master if some turkey who didn't get it took out all the cosmic cutaways. We sure can wish for a full restored director's cut. Wishing is free.

BLU-RAY EXTRAS:

There's a nice interview with Cozzi at his sci-fi store; and the footage excised by the producer fills in a lot of the blanks we don't get and would there was a copy with all the original shots (love the hourglasses floating in space) and an explanation of why that kid would shell out a bag of money to some sinister Hobbes Lane type for an alleged authentic Paganini score.

Anyway, Severin has done wonders with what they got (Did the color grading just give out for the exterior shots, or was it supposed to look like that? Am I quibbling) All we need now from Severin (here's hoping it's coming soon) is Cozzi's unofficial meta-Suspiria-sequel (recently re-available on Prime), The Black Cat (aka Demons 6: Anus Profundis) from 1990. The Prime copy is full frame and from video, but there must be a better source!

And while we're on the subject, what about that crazy shot-on-video quasi-autobiographical Blood on Melies' Moon? I saw a clip wherein the great one himself ruminates in his bedroom about coming to terms with being labeled "The Italian Ed Wood." I guess I'm not the first to call him that. But he should know: we love Ed Wood way more than a more highly regarded artist like, say, Fritz Lang. I have a billion theories why that is but the main one might be the Brechtian distancing opening us up to the interplay of our own imagination, like having the curtains around your favorite play suddenly flung open, allowing us to see all the man behind the curtain. We get a bit of that in, say, Bergman's Magic Flute or Olivier's Henry V but it's intentional and hence a little pompous compared to the accidental Brechts like Wood and Cozzi (Godard--erasing his auteur footsteps around the sudden exposure of Brechtian mechanics as if Danny Torrance slinking backwards in his own tracks racing ahead of his crazed insatiable audience in the Overlook maze--is the Mr. In-Between.)


Maybe it's all too short with a hyper-ironic, if unsatisfying, ending that makes all the parts click into perfect place, the way some insane Mingus Big Band carnival ride turns out to be "Take the A Train" all along in a Charles Mingus composition. Maybe it was trimmed of its cosmic portent, maybe Rita should have died last, maybe Donald doesn't dub himself; but the Cozzi magic is still there and this film is meant to be treasured for a lifetime of Cozzi binges. Who knows how long that lifetime will be? Honey, you better pounce.

Slide, Vaquero! SHIP OF MONSTERS (1960)

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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!


SHIP OF MONSTERS
(1960) Dir. Rogelio Gonzalez
***1/2  / Youtube Image (via Professor Craigles) - C

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.


Ana Bertha Lepe is Gamma (the good one) and Lorena Velázquez is Beta, the bad one --obviously! She played many vampire and other kind of wrestling women in the course of her illustrious career (often battling Santos or the Blue Demon and--in one case--the Aztec Mummy). These ex-Miss Mexico beauty queens wield ray guns and rock tight-fitting uniforms and generally strut about the Chihuahua flats.  The alien monster male samples kept on ice from other planets are each unique and cleverly-if-cheaply--constructed. All are done with a mix of who-cares papier mache and giddy ballsy passion. And they talk! They make rational decisions, and they can make love as easily as they kill. Even a sabre tooth tiger skeleton man gets his opinion considered (and has a great Tom Waits-style croak of a voice). The alien girls are always in control, able to pause Emilio in mid sentence to check up on the words he uses that they don't understand, accessing what we in our futuristic world might call Alexa reading from Wikipedia. My favorite line is when the narrator of the video they're watching to learn about Mexico notes (while showing scenic travel footage) that's it's a lovely country and "for all they've tried, the Mexicans haven't been able to destroy it."

I have fallen in love with this film so much I don't even mind that Lauriano (Gonzalez) has a little brother, Chuy, (Herberto Davila, Jr) with whom he lives alone on a big ranch outside Chihuahua. I generally can't stand sci-fi films set in southern climates as they always have cute impish kids in them, but Chuy is no imp who should be in school instead of acting as guide for the American hero, instead he is an able assistant around the ranch, following Gonzalez around, going off to play with the robot when the talk gets adult. And when the monsters fly into action, Chuy even tackles and kills one of the monsters all by himself with the fury of one of the kids in Over the Edge or The Bad News Bears! Imagine Abbott and Costello doing anything but running in a similar situation and you begin to understand what the males of America are up against. And these two women aren't afraid to either kick ass or make love to the monsters right there on camera. This has to be sexiest film presumably aimed at a younger audience since Young Frankenstein.


That's basically all there is, some outfits worthy of Artist and Models (I could see this film as a collaboration between Tashlin and Bunuel) and some lovely female flesh on display--but each woman is super strong and capable and there's never a thought of turning the good one into a household drudge at the end, someone to gratefully darn socks and make the chiles. A wild seductive dance in a foggy secret alien cave chamber stand as the juicy highlights of a film with no lowlights whatsoever. Would it was available on one of those great discs from the (now sadly defunct) La Casa Negra DVD label. Or, ideally, Criterion!


Alas, it is not - Sigh, the Youtube version is it. Alas, too - it looks like this is Piporro's only foray into sci-fi, and it's a durned shame. I would have been pleased had he tackled more monsters. Why not have Piporro vs. La Llorna!? Piporro vs. the Blue Demon y Santos! Dios mios! Ah well, at least we have La nave de los monstruos, kind of. 

Man, am I losing my mind? I've been watching Tarkovsky, Godard, and Suzuki on Criterion too. I swear ta god, I'm fancy. Criterion should have me do one of their "Adventures in Moviegoing" collections. I'd frickin' nail it. 

Through the Barriers: HIGHWAY TO HELL, BERMUDA TRIANGLE, and EYE IN THE LABYRINTH (on Prime)

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Hey, bud... sheltering in place? Living in the isolation, talking only by phones and Google Hangouts. But mostly.... mostly... watching movies online? Got Amazon Prime? Why not g'head and dig these three gonzo drive-in greats, from Mexico, Italy, and godforsaken Utah. 

THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE
"El Triangulo Diaboloico de las Bermudas"
(1978) Dir. Rene Cardona
*** / Amazon Image - B+

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.

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EYE IN THE LABYRINTH
(1972) Dir. Mario Caiano 
*** / Amazon Image - B

Rosemary Dexter is Julie the devoted secretary of a missing scoundrel Luca (the silver-eyed krimi star Horst Frank); a weird dream in which she's being chased through a white labyrinth convinces her to leave the office and drive out to the coastal town druggie artist colony where he was last spotted. Soon she's set and setting with the resident bunch of languid hedonists. They spend the day sunning themselves and their nights lunging at each other's throats and/or zippers (ala that old Michael Musto saying about Fire Island etiquette: "fork on the right, spoon in the nose, knife in the back"). Alida Vialli is her usual astringent self as the villa's owner and her terrifying but sexy-gruff Teutonic rasp of a voice is in full flower, and super insecure about her handsome younger lover (Gigi Rizzi) who starts taking Julie for long boat rides and strolls along the rocky coast. Someone shoots a harpoon gun at them - but from where? Someone is trying to kill her and in the process people turn up dead around her. What's going on, and why is Adolfo Celli always around to rescue her, aside from the obvious reason of wanting to sleep with her? 

At night, around the cocktails at Vialli's, Julie hears tales of her beloved boss's odious blackmailing, rapey ways--including outing the trans Corrine (played by Peter Kranz) which is mad uncool. Sybl Danning is one of the enclave. The music by Roberto Nicolosi is a kind of trumpet-driven "Silent Way"-style languid jazz, giving it all a kind of broadside post-noir ennui which I am not sure does it any favors. When the suspense ratchet into gear, the music sort of cascades over its the side in drizzles of cymbals and glistening harp swirls. You'll either pick up on it right away or never guess the killer or what's going on, but don't worry, it's all very pretty and Vialli has a great time sinking her big German teeth into the role of a vicious older queen bitch fighting to keep her favorite boytoy. Dexter and Rizzi are both easy on the eyes and appropriately blank and the action is fluid. It may not be the film that kickstarts a giallo marathon at your home DVD / Prime binging weekend, but it won't kill one off either. And if you have Prime, you'll be glad to find it free and looking good (and it's not on Blu-ray or DVD so now or never). 


HIGHWAY TO HELL
(1991) Dir Ate de Jong
***/ Amazon Image - A

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

13 Great Films for Week X of a Pandemic (on Prime)

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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.

1. THE CASSANDRA CROSSING
(1976) Dir. George P. Cosmatos
**1/2 / Amazon Image - A-

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.

2. THE CRAZIES
(1973) Dir. George Romero
*** 1/2/ Amazon Image - A

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.)

3. RABID
(1977) Dir. David Cronenberg
***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

Cronenberg's second film after Shivers, we get a gross medical shot of Dr. Keloid using what looks like an electric cheese sliver to peel off the upper epidermis of heavenly Marilyn Chambers' legs, which is a crime against sexiness. Luckily she gets a chance to really show her stuff and the shots of her walking down the street in the neon lights in her fur coat, her super Breck girl clean hair and Ivory soap skin making her come on to the sleazy lonesome dude in the adult movie house all the more fascinating. The sexuality of viral infections and the way sexual addiction and drug addiction ("I've been lying in bed so long; I ache all over,") are both about ultimately becoming vampires for warmth. As with his other 70s films, Cronenberg is a master at dialogue and believable medical scenarios; When Marilyn finds one of the nurses in the hot tub, she says "I better get out soon - I'm getting all wrinkly." And there's a great detail when a rabid lunatic is shot on the hero's car, the men in hazmat suit spray his windshield where the blood with sterilizing agents.


And now that it's restored the warm-hued photography glows with magic. Nothing is more soothing than seeing Marilyn Chambers bed down with a sleepy cow in a beautifully-lit barn in the dead of night, or smiling as she saunters past a poster for Carrie on the Montreal streets after killing a guy in the adult movie house.

The film doesn't quite gel as well as Shivers - which keeps itself into one swinging high rise; but Rabid is the shit as a film about Canada, a place where the vastness and the niceness go hand in hand, and one hot kitten like Marilyn Chambers can drive a city to its knees with just a deadly embrace.


4. CLIMAX
Dir Gaspar Noe
**** / Amazon Image - A

Sofia Boutella (center above), the lush sinuous Algerian dancer/actress (she was the latest incarnation of The Mummy and a cute alien in Star Trek: Beyond, etc.) stars, or is the most recognizable and sympathetic of the gathered dancers in this ultimate in bad trip dance movies; though we only follow her about 1/3 or so of the time as the relentlessly prowling camera regularly checks in on the various fates of various poor damned souls with the restless rhythm of a jonesing coke fiend looking for the slightest telltale sniffle in a gathered throng. I wanted to list some of the atrocities that result, but one is better off not knowing beforehand, nor the actor's amount of neurochemical 'preparation' for their roles. Their ferocity is so convincing and the flow from organized normalcy (if their wild-but-controlled arcane dancing style, a mix of modern and street filmed--in the longest take--from above, like a zonked Busby Berkley-- to insane madness so organic that--being dancers all--even in their wracked state their bodies never cease moving and twisting to the throbbing incessant music, blurring the lines between this as an 'acid test' tragedy horror film and a kind of extended 90 minute dance performance. It seems almost impossible this isn't cinema verité from some weird circle of Hell, capturing a very real experience with some magic invisible camera, the floating soul eye from Noé's 2009 masterpiece, Enter the Void meets an impromptu Panic Theater happening down at Aronofsky's Chilean basement, or something. Since we barely see anything of the outdoors, or any 'sane' perspective after a certain period in the film, we lose contact with the real world as much as the actors, leaving us lost in the same weird cabin fever collective break.

5. HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (aka VIRUS)
(1980) Dir. Bruno Mattei
*** / Amazon Image - A-

Directed by the sturdy and reliable Italian talent Bruno Mattei, boosted by a deliriously frantic Goblin synth score (some of which is recycled from past zombie outbreaks), Virus welds elements of the Mondo Cannibal genre (thanks to its New Guinea setting and rather revolting stock scenes of tribal post-mortem rituals) and Romero's Dawn of the Dead (as in a combination of a male and female journalist + male members of a SWAT team banding together in a zombie nightmare), with a screenplay co-written by Claude Troll 2 Fragasso (and Mattei). Margie Newton stars as an intrepid journalist who winds up accidentally embedded in a commando team deep into the jungle on a classified mission to investigate a gas leak at a remote experimental plant that's been causing you know what. You got to love when Newton strips down and paints herself crazy colors and starts leading the group into the village ("you can join me in an hour..") to bear witness to grotesque and disturbing mondo stock footage. ("why should nature suddenly start breaking its own laws?"). Great moments like that, or when one of commandos kisses a native during the drunken revelry as a zombie from the background kisses her than takes a bit out of her shoulder, all very casual. It's pretty stomach churning at times but that's what you pay for. The stock shots of the natives, covered in red mud (to keep the flies off?) running en masse, mixed with zombies and freaking out UN reps, is pretty effective in a random kind of found meaning way (we get the image of everyone in Africa just running away from the zombies, forever running, in swarm strength, to nowhere) And there's a stinger of a grisly ending.

6. RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS
(Aka Atlantis Interceptors)
(1983) Dir. Ruggero Deodato
**** (Amazon Image - B-)

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.

 7. SHE
(1984) Dir. Avi Nescher
***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

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)

8. DEATHSPORT
(1978) Dir. Allan Arkush
** / Amazon Image - B-

"Remember your code," Richard Lynch tells 'guide' David Carradine in a great low whisper threat monologues: "every tear of patience builds the value." A film for the dirt bike-riding 16 year-old arsonist in all of us, DEATHSPORT was meant to be a DEATH RACE 2000 sequel but instead gives us moody crypto-poetry, blazing fireballs, matte paintings of futuristic dystopian cities, and that old LA desert scrub being ground underfoot by tricked-out dirt bikes. With no sense of humor about its own absurdity, the mix of Arkush-shot action and Niciphor shot pretentious dialogue wizzes along with lots of crazy lasers shot out of Pringles cans and swords made of colored plastic are held vertically as much as possible since they must weigh a ton. Claudia Jennings is a female ranger guide  (as in the best Corman stealth-feminism, she's as tough and wise and as combat-proficient as any of the men - and prettier too)


Still, it's Richard Lynch, as the bad guy / master henchman, who steals the show. He gets all the best lines, purred in a mellow emotionless forceful calm: "You call me animal, after all I tried to do to make you feel at peace?" Whatever his fall from grace, he's openly admirable towards the memory of Carradine's warrior mother (whom he killed in battle), giving him the ultimate warrior greeting: "Salute your mother for me." Andrew Stein's synthesizer score provides a great minimalist mess of wind sounds, zaps, and sustained notes somewhere between the Bebe's FORBIDDEN PLANET and faux John Carpenter. His attempts at actual melody are terrible, but then---who should appear?-- Jerry Garcia noodles his Gibson forth, in and around in the mix, coming and going at the darndest times. And as anyone who ever sat through a Dead show can tell you, if you depend on Jerry to lead you out of the caves of aimless noodling, well, you're going to be in there a long while and things might get weird.

9. RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR
(1984) Dir. Bruno Mattei
**/ Amazon Image - B+

This is not the usual rat movie, so don't be fooled! It's a post-apocalyptic gang war style cousin to the Warriors of the Wasteland, and Escape from the Bronx, etc. all made in Italy in the wake of the creative and box office success of Escape from New York, The Warriors, The Road Warrior, and Conan the Barbarian. All four elements were swirled together in the Italian trash auteur tradition --it makes a meaty stew. Mattei steals from the best! SNAP. That was another trap.

I still would have run the other way seeing this on some 80s pan-and-scan cable channel, but El Rey and HD have brought new life to it: the restored deep blacks and deep rich grime shades help us get over the general displeasure seeing masses of rats congregated in a room with no clear motive or cheese incentive. In fact these poor rats all seem rather bewildered, tired, underpaid. Lukily director Bruno Mattei made sure no rats were harmed during filming. Oh wait, this is Italy, so yeah they probably were. But in a hellscape like this, the dead are the lucky ones. And at least we don't see them look all betrayed and startled as they're shot with a Bert I. Gordon pink pellet paint gun in slow motion like we do in Food of the Gods. We see one running on fire, but in general they're mere extras; we don't see them much but hey, they try hard, and the editor tries to make it all fit together and I suppose it might if you were half asleep in a dark drive-in.

So these Bronx "Rifts" pull into a deserted (bombed out in WW2 and never restored?) Italian (not supposed to be?) villa and soon are besieged by shots of molti ratti --never funnier than when being pulled en masse via an 'unseen' carpet underneath their feet, towards our "terrified" antiheroes and their molls on the other end of the dusty, empty room. Keeping up the sci fi end, there's a secret chamber with futuristic radio equipment and an opening scrawl that delivers a whole series of post-apocalyptic upsets. You know: evolution amok, up and under. None of it matters or makes sense except as setup for a 'gotcha' ending, which if we're 14 years old we just won't see coming or laugh at the 'suggestions of rat' tongue puppet and great exploding bodies where all the rats come tumbling out.

But what makes it work (for the fans) is the terrible dubbing and game if amateur acting/directing, centering around the dubious wisdom of gang leaders Kurt and the competitor for his alpha position, the Native American GI-esque Duke. Duke's right, after all, Kurt basically makes all the wrong moves; he must have got the job for being best looking; but he spoils his credibility when he says lame shit like"Open up in the name of humanity!!" after blindly trusting Duke to unlock to door and to guard the women in the other room while he and a bunch of other guys try to turn walking down a small flight of basement steps (there's lots of walking in place and reacting to rats that were presumably going to be overlaid in a process shot that never quite took. But the print on Prime is sublime, so whaddaya gonna do?

10. CONTAMINATION 
(1980) Dir. Luigi Cozzi
*** / Amazon Image - A 

Note: there are many different uploads on Prime for this film, so make sure to see the one in HD and the correct anamorphic ratios - the one I use has a kind of 80s comic book illustration cover of a big brain with eyes.

This Italian ALIEN-inspired sci-fi adventure gets a bad rap in some circles but I adore it. Rather than just have some amok alien eating crew members, this keeps itself on Earth in the present, and decides to focus in on the pod-to-stomach-stage, with rows of ugly watermelon slime pods that explode when ripe and cause instant explosions in the stomach of everyone in horseshoe vicinity. I dig the obvious phone book size padding under the victim's shirts before the explosions; I dig the traumatic Freudian-cave-on-Mars flashbacks; the unearthly humming whale-ish noise the pods make when they're fixing to blow. I dig the vibe between the NYC cop who discovers the initial shipment (Marino Mase), the female colonel (!) of the Army's special disease control unit (Louise Marleau) and the traumatized astronaut (Ian McCulloch). The three team up in a sexy 'gentleman's agreement' synergy and head down to Colombia where they're soon ensnared up in a big slimy alien's world domination plan, ala It Conquered the World. Louise Marleau's heroine finds a worth opposite number in lovely blonde Gisela Hahn as the evil mastermind's right hand, and I love the alien itself, especially that bicycle reflector eye and the glistening artichoke coloring. Lastly, what really earns my goofball admiration is the Goblin soundtrack. That late-70s-80s European prog rock style has aged well. I don't know what else you need to make you love this dumbass film the way that I do. Whatever's missing, you don't need it.


11. NEW ROSE HOTEL 
(1998) Dir. Abel Ferrara
**1/2 / Amazon Image - A
William Gibson's future was here awhile ago; this doesn't even seem like science fiction anymore. One has to get used to its haphazard sense of economy (the whole last 1/4 replays the first 2/3 as DeFoe hides out from everyone in an old warehouse storage unit, trying to figure where it all went wrong. But before then, it's a pretty sexy, strange ride. For maximum 90s effect there's a very druggy and erotic striptease club hookup with Asia Argento--impossibly young and vibrant and oh so sexy--set to Cat Power. And the rest of the time Willem Dafoe and Chris Walken hang out in the title hotel, seldom leaving as they coordinate a high-level corporate headhunt steal, using Argento in a honey trap to lure a top feeding Japanese scientist over to a rival corporation. It's all kind of odd but what works and makes sense is just how ahead of the curve it is as far as Facetime, Google Hangouts and Zoom as preferred means of business communication, and how one might become impossibly rich with the click of a wire transfer button, and lose it all just as quickly, maybe without ever getting to spend or see any actual currency. It fits that the movie falls apart so dramatically, looping back on itself in a zonked quest to unravel meaning from itself, and--finding none--just focuses in on how damned hot that Asia looks in a red bathing suit, slinking around the hotel indoor pool like she owns the continent. 

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OK - the next two films are not great, but they are amazing; so bear with me, if you dare,

 12. NIGHTMARE AT NOON
(1987) Dir. Nico Mastarakis
* / Amazon Image - A

If you need a shitty ass version of The Crazies as proof that Romero is a great auteur, then check out this typically dumb Nico Mastarikis movie. A Greek version of Bud Cardos, Nico keeps things jumping in grand 80s Cannon action style, but it's pretty laughable, especially when "Sharon" goes nuts in the police station. You have to love the way Wings Hauser starts shouting "No!" when she's shouting "No!" as if to help amp up the lunacy or he missed whose line it was. Only Wings can take a line like "Goddamn it sheriff, I want some answers and I want them right now!" or "I got a wife in there who's acting nuts!" and make them hilarious without ever being in on the joke.

If it all seems bad, stick around until the wife goes nuts at around the half hour mark, it's pretty goofy after that. And then George Kennedy as the small town sheriff, steering the heavies towards the town drive-in, and it's showing High Noon.

Unlike in better films the blood of the infected automatically turns food color green, not unlike the saliva of the tainted souls in Rabid.

So yeah, a lot of Wings-on-black van violence. Lots of shooting at inanimate objects. Heavy fireballs and for some reason Bo Hopkins turns out to be the real star, as a drifter with military ops connections, yet he can't just shoot like an ordinary person - he has to run and jump and fire from the hip on the run atop the drive-in snack bar roof. The bad guy is an albino dressed in white wearing Lone Ranger mask wraparound shades (and is played by Brion "Wake up! Time to Die" James). He never speaks just rides through the same terrain John Wayne once traipsed and gestures towards his SWAT flunkies to stage the next ambush. With the cheesy synths and lap dissolves egging their horses on, our three heroes -- Bo, Wings, and the cute girl deputy (Kimberly Ross), ride from one stunning Utah Red Rocks vista to another. Seriously, how do some of them rocks stay way up there? At least the henchman bad guy seem like they've shot guns before the making of this film. Since they never speak or take off their shades, we gather they're all stuntmen. We don't get a lot of that from our heroic threesome.

So many bullets! So much firing. Finally Wings gets shot and the movie can get awesome. Theres a great death as a stuntman goes rolling down the rocky hill. When he runs out of targets, our mute albino shoots his own men. At least Bo really is a hell of a guy. He even kisses the girl, old enough to be his daughter by a half mile. Gotta love the 80s. And even the 90s. Hell, even the 00's. It's only the '10s when that shit started to get suspect. Still, it's pretty gross to watch them make out. And what about those poor horses? By the end, you'd think the film had totally slipped its moorings and become some tedious TV western movie for the Hallmark Channel. But then Bo and James square off across the rocks, each having a helicopter flying stationary behind them - gotta love that. Bo's is bigger, with rocket launchers! Get 'im, Bo!


7. ROBOT MONSTER
(1953) Dir. Phil Tucker
* / Image - B

Though the post-apocalyptic fantasia Robot Monster is not as wondrous as Al Zimbalist's other 1953 production, Cat Women of the Moon, (also on Prime) it's like the yang to its yin. The two films are opposites on every front: Robot Monster is shot entirely outdoors and during the daytime; Cat Women is shot entirely on sets representing space and the dark side of the moon (so eternal night). The women of the moon are seductive, powerful and strong-willed. There's only one 'good' cat woman, who, like some Eastern European defector, longs for an American experience ("what you call.. a Coke") with the nice boy radio operator. Ro-Man (the infamous gorilla with a diving helmet) on the other hand in this film is part of a faceless league of all-powerful alien thugs, all with the same booming canned voice. These beings are all powerful, yet even having five or six people left alive on the vast earth is such a massive threat all their plans are put on hold. At the same time, For such a threat to humanity, Ro-Man is very easy to spy on, and leaves his equipment (including the famous bubble machine) right out in the mouth of the cave. No one ever thinks of just knocking over the machines (no doubt as they are rented).

 Like Ro-man I have a real yen for one of the surviving humans, Al-lice (Claudia Barrett), who has a great habit of sticking her chest out, chin up and assuming a sublimely haughty, challenging "I am not afraid" look, all while breathing in a very carnal sacral chakra manner. And though we get way too many patriarchal imbecilities and maudlin praying, the film never boring, and always ridiculous. " I'm impressed that, after all the patriarchal pleas to god and Ro-Man for mercy in John Mylong's German professor accent, director Phil Tucker isn't afraid to have Ro-Man strangle a five year-old girl, and then rip Alice's dress. Bam! Elmer's church chimes come blaring down like someone shot a hole through Goldsmith's OMEN theme. "If Ro-Man wants us, he should calculate us," notes Mylong. "The great one himself sends the cosmic blast!" retorts the head Ro-Man from space Skype. It's so good you can see it again mere minutes after its over, especially if you stop when I say and skip the 'waking up' ending - and just stop after the melange of One Million Years BC outtakes, thus giving you the impression that--fed up by Ro-Man's stalling on killing Alice--the 'Great One' decides to destroy the entire planet, which is a bit like intentionally totaling your new car just because you found a dead wasp in the glove compartment.

And for bad film completists, we have the game George Barrows (the 'nurse' in Mesa of Lost Women) as Ro-Man, trundling to and fro like Cliff Osmond, carrying an occasionally kicking A-lice up and down Bronson Canyon! Savor the thundering Wagner-meets-Raymond Scott-ishness of Elmer Bernstein's booming score (one of his first, and--along with his great eerie work on Cat-Women of the Moon! (Why isn't there a Robot Monster/Cat Women Elmer Bernstein soundtrack album out?) Marvel at the decision of the only family left alive (due to the German doctor's "invisibility shield" and "immunity serum") to tie daughter Al-lice's hand with a shoelace to stop her from escaping their bomb crater basement hideout to meet Ro-Man who feels "that she would understand" him. Gape at sexist lines like "you're either too smart to be so beautiful or too beautiful to be so smart."  Look real close and you can see the effects guy's white-napkin-covered hand holding the sparkler-besieged model rocket, making it go zoom zoooom!

Quit watching before the kid wakes up and finds out is was a dream. As you can tell from looking outside on the deserted streets... it was no dream.

See also on Prime:
3 Neo-Jungian Fairie Wave
3 Off the Road Vehicles
7 Ennio Morricone-scored Giallos (1970-75)
6 Badass Post-ROAD WARRIOR Gang Violence Trips (1982-85)
4 Post-CONAN Barbarian Sagas
6 Dope Analog Sci-fi Nugs (1978-87)
6 Post-JAWS New World Horrors (1978-80)
7 Badass New World Rebel Girl Uprisings (1971-79)
13 for Halloween, Lost Causes and Autumnal Catalepsies
10 Swingin' Monsters of the 70s
15 Cool/Weird Horror/Sci-fi Films
12 Weird/Cool Italian Films
10 Fairly Bad Sci-Fi Gems
13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies
12 Nifty Vampire Films
6 Surreal Wuxia Wonders
5 Awesomely Psychotronic Films to Prepare you for the New Trumpmerica

Acid Goes Legit: HAVE A GOOD TRIP: ADVENTURES IN PSYCHEDELICS (2020)

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"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. 

And of course, the films of THE PSYCHEDELIC CANON in yonder right hand sidebar (top) and my other 'weirder' sites, like Medsitation and Divinrorum Psychonuauticus + Surrealist Collage Exercises!

Gone Hawks-in: AROUND THE WORLD UNDER THE SEA (1966)

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"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.

NIGHTMARE USA: 10 Picks from Prime's Collection of 70s Horror Americana (via Stephen Thrower)

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I've found a fine and massive tome for the summer's reading (and accompanying viewing) in British author Stephen Thrower's NIGHTMARE USA, a mammoth look at the locally-made independent horror cinema that flourished on drive-in and inner-city screens in the 70s and early-80s. Much of it forgotten, maligned, or long-buried in obscurity, even with so much of it out on DVD and, best of all, Prime! He's already curated two volumes of the American Horror Project via Arrow, each with three films, commentaries and documentaries. The second volume has two great surreal gems (The Child, Dream No Evil) and one interesting Vermont-filmed witchcraft tale that has lovely scenery but is slow, vaguely irritating, and empty (not unlike Vermont itself), Dark August. The first volume is OOP but two of the three titles in it are on Prime! So that's pretty cool. 

And so, I have collected, as is my wont, 11 cool films Thrower writes about. Several of them I never would have watched without Thrower's enthusiasm to inspire me. So I have included copious, random quotes from the fast-becoming-indispensable Nightmare USA.

Now, one place Thrower and I differ is in the taste for the hard stuff - the downbeat brutality of sexual assault and slasher films, the blunt force trauma of 'classics' like Last House on the Left and Maniac (neither of which I have yet seen, fearing the PTS). As I've often written, as a sensitive child of the 70s just seeing the TV spots and previews for a lot of these movies left me feeling deeply disturbed and unsafe for weeks. As an isolated teenager in the early-80s, I felt trapped and targeted by slashers. But I am fine with Thrower having fondness for them, as he writes of the slasher movies so infectiously, eschewing post-lib psychoanalysis in favor of a kind of practical-poetic prose coming from an infectious sense of portent. On the habit of having slasher films set at certain holidays and celebrations, for example, he writes of something I know I never thought of myself:
"There's the way in which teen audiences experience seasonal intervals: as each yearly celebration goes by, even the most carefree of fifteen year-olds grows aware of the passage of time. When you're a teenager, to be a year older than another is to occupy an entirely different social milieu. Teenagers thus have a very different temporal awareness. Three years is a long time: five years is tantamount to a generation gap. In general, it's only with yearly holidays that younger people are aware of the passage of time, and thus perhaps of their own mortality. Yearly rituals let the future as well as the past leak through..." (p. 26)
Genius! So what then, is the difference between us? I think England and its video nasty law is the key. He was protected (if that is the right word) by the government from the blunt force trauma I was exposed to.  In the US, wherein the video store 'horror' section was a very traumatic place to visit, fraught with screaming underdressed females in various states of dismemberment. If you grew up without exposure to it (while kids in the 80s for example, formed around it, taking it all with a grain of salt). In England, banned films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Maniac, Driller Killer and The Toolbox Murders were the stuff of legend - viewable only on terrible VHS dupes smuggled in like hashish. As a result, the mystique we initially felt as kids, driving past the sleazy marquees in the pre-video era, the excitement of the forbidden easily beats the depression of suddenly all the forbidden being rubbed in your face, made horribly visible. I resonated strongly with the feminist backlash, and absorbed the indignity (see notes for more details).

But the 70s also was rife with fariy tale-style supernatural-based horror, the ones that look to dreams and surrealism, ala Susipiria, The Beyond. To me, that is all different. Even things like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and I Drink Your Blood are different enough, as the violence is more across the board and less misogynist. A a kid I developed a deep fascination with secondhand descriptions from babysitters (who looked like Lynn Lowry in I drink your Blood or Suzanna Ling in Kiss of the Tarantula) and their cool dangerous boyfriends who could go to the drive-ins, and my own imagination of their dangerous, sexy lives, of which these movies were a part. Going to see an R-film the first time in the 70s was like a right of passage; after VCR and cable boom, the R-movie met nothing.. Gradually, the surge of gory horrible misogyny on display at video stores began to be quite warping and upsetting; it happened (to me, anyway) so slowly it took me awhile to notice, but eventually leaving me so soured on my own gender it took finally reading Carol Clover and Camille Paglia in the early 90s to lift me out of my guilty ashen miasma. 

Time has mellowed it all somewhat, and so forth, the violence is contextualized, and ---in the all forgiving lens of nostalgia - made safe and fun. Kinda. Maybe. 


Luckily, there are really two sides to Thrower's 70s horror lens. There's his love of the shady, un-PC blunt force trauma of things like Maniac, Sex Wish, Abducted and Victims and there's what I love and what I didn't even have the words to describe until he pointed it out in his praise of The Beyond (via his Fulci book) and The Child
"Disorientation, not storytelling, is the key to the film's pleasures... this brand of straight-faced narrative absurdity is something I particularly like, maddening though it may be to students of dramatic arts. The Child's disconcerting oneiric shiver is intimately bound up in its lack of sense. " (p.351)
These oneiric shiver films include things like Lemora: A Child's Tale of the SupernaturalLets Scare Jessica to Death, and Messiah of Evil, The Child, and Phantasm. And Thrower's admiration is infectious. I still avoid things like The Toolbox Murders, but that's where Thrower is a good guide for this journey. I can discern what's surreal and cool vs. traumatic (if Thrower thinks something is genuinely disturbing, I know to keep my distance). Luckily, at least a good half or more of the films Thrower mentions in Nightmare USA are sexual misogyny-free (unless the girl gets to be the killer) and available on Prime. Here are 11 I found there that I can either heartily, or perhaps cautiously, recommend! But there are many, many, many more.


1. EATEN ALIVE
(British Title: Death-Trap)
(1976) Dir. Tobe Hooper
*** / Amazon Image - A+

This used to be one ugly, loud full frame downer, but thanks to Thrower's appreciation I realized I had to see it again, via Prime's gorgeous print in HD anamorphic widescreen, wherein the reds and oranges of its color gel-emblazoned mise-en-scene glow like the magnificent Louisiana swampland back alley cousin of Suspiria and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Trying to recapture Chainsaw magic, Hooper tells the tale of 24 hours or so of a deranged hotel owner (played here by a terrific, muttering, shaggy wigged Neville Brand) who tends to feed disgruntled guests to his tourist attraction giant crocodile.  Hooper creates elegant tension and a kind of surreal fairy tale ambience as Brand's entire Starlite is indoors on a set, with jungle swamps bathed in pink, red, and rose, the mist like some beguiling seductive dark Disney haunted house ride. Marilyn Burns (the heroine from Texas) arrives with a super insane, twisted-up  husbnd (William Finley) and a distraught daughter (the croc eats her puppy) who ends up spending the bulk of the movie hiding in the crawlspace under the hotel, trying to dodge Brand's scythe and the crocodile while hoping someone hears her screams above the swamp noises. Apparently Hooper was never too happy about the final result of all this mayhem, but Thrower is fond, and his fondness is contagious. 

Especially now that it's all remastered, widescreen and with those gorgeous red and pink Suspiria gels it's like some sick interactive ride, from the lower crawlspace with crocodile and Night of the Hunter-style bogeyman chases), to the hotel exterior with cars coming and going and the croc ever-hungry, to the second floor with sex and bondage (in different rooms, and the sex being consensual, 'whew') all contributing to the dense, wild sound mix, where the sound of the swamp all but obscures the dim sounds of the child screaming for help two floors down and the struggles of the bound Burns. The musical score, meanwhile, is all over the place in the best possible way (the book includes a great interview with composer Wayne Bell). Thrower notes:
"It's true that compared to its perfect sibling (Texas) it suffers from a limp and a stoop and a crooked gait, but in all its malformed glory it still commands respect for its unrelenting weirdness, its vicious hysteria, and Neville Brand's wonderful performance." (p. 441)

2. THE PREMONITION
(1976) Dir. Robert Allen Schnitzer
*** / Amazon Image - A

It's a gorgeous print of a fine, weird film that's filled with stunningly weird moments, including every moment the foxy Ellen Barber is onscreen. Acting crazy in a red dress and black choker with cameo portrait and long stunning black hair (above), we totally get why a weird looking clown like Jude (Richard Lynch) her buddy from the sanitarium, would be so smitten with her he'd let her obsession (to kidnap the child taken from her and given up for adoption when she was first committed to the sanitarium) become his, to the point of losing his own mind even further than he had previously. There's a lot to admire in this unique and marvelous film, but it's Barber's beauty and Lynch's insanity that stand out. If you're not a fan of Lynch's burn-ravaged face and eerily calming voice, what's wrong with you? Here he adds a great touch of moaning insanely when driven to violence-if you've ever lost consciousness in a rage-based white-out you can really relate. As Thrower notes:
"Twice during the film, Jude loses control and Lynch's performance makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. He summons a pressurized, resonant tone from deep in his chest, one that sounds viritually electronic ((think Tim Buckley circa Starsailor): it will haunt you long after the film is over. The cry ascends like a nuclear warning, from inhuman oscillation to frenzied shriek. Normally he'd be the villain, pure and simple. Instead, even he is shown with love; indeed, love is what motivates him. He adores Andrea so much that he donates his ever waking moment to her obsession. He only snaps when Andrea settles for less. Clutching a mere doll, she sinks into her own delusion and Jude, having staked all on their joint venture, is left high and dry: a psychotic who's bet his heart and lost. Richard Lynch is the sort of actor that David Lynch ought to seek out, and after seeing The Premonition I found it hard to watch him in less demanding roles (for instance Delta Fox or Deathsport): in their mundanity they seem disrespectful." (p.324)
He also adds that "like Thom Eberhardt's Sole Survivor or Willard Hyuck's Messiah of Evil, it deserves a far greater genre profile. " That he goes to them, two lesser-known gems I personally love, as examples of undersung brilliance, it lets me know I'd like this film, and I did. To be sure, I love those two films more than this. It's marred by yet another squaresville husband (the adopted dad) who studies parapsychology with a smirk and almost lets his masculine logocentric pride keep him from trying all sorts of crazy shit in order to be reunited with his daughter, and there's no satisfaction of seeing him realize the truth and supporting his wife's supernatural instincts verbally (i.e. changing his tone) even after he realizes she's right. And there are scenes with way too much crying and hysterics from adopted mom Sharon Farrell (Schnitzer must have been too shy to cut her anguishes short, realizing she was giving him a powerhouse emotional display), so as a result all the best stuff happens in the first half when Lynch and Barber are closer to center stage and a great dark but compassionate mirror to the adopted parents in their little world bubble, but hey, overall it is a beautiful, unique film.

3. WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA
(1976) Dir. Matt Climber
**** / Amazon Image - A

I love this film and wrote about it, some would say 'at length'here. Thrower included it in the first volume of his curated American Horror Project (along with the previous film on this list), and Prime's copy reflects no doubt the hand of a qualified, loving restorer. 
"(it) turns out to be one of the strangest and most perversely beautiful horror films of the seventies" Thrower notes. "The movie changes the metabolism of its genre; the scares are oblique, the overall tone languid...  The Witch Who Came from the Sea is in another league; a genre masterpiece deserving of a much higher profile..." (p. 514-515)

4. PIGS
Dir. Marc Lawrence 
*** / Amazon Image - B+
"It's a personal favourite of mine, one of an initial handful of titles that inspired me to embark on this book (Nightmare USA). Alright, so there's a lack of action, but the absence of a forward-driving narrative is an essential part of the fun: Pigs doesn't fly; it floats. There's a muted, psychedelic feel to the film ---you feel kind of stoned watching it, a sensation that's cued up by Charles Bernstein's wonderful 60s theme song (...) and his often startling score, which employs lots of Jew's harp (a neglected psychedelic instrument in my opinion)." (Thrower- p. 489)
Me too, bro, and it was definitely great being able to que this up on Prime immediately after reading about it. It goes down easy, but I'm not sure director Lawrence is right as the pig farmer / diner owner. With his brooding gangster brow and acne-scarred face and New York sass, he's livened up everything Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum to Diamonds are Forever, always playing basically the same doomed thug. Here we have to buy him as a reticent graverobbing (?) pig farmer (who everyone knows is digging up corpses to feed to his pigs, which sounds exhausting) / diner owner / former circus persona, whose property lies at the tail end cul-de-sac of dusty desert nowhere. Watching this with the subtitles on, it takes forever for him to actually read his own visible lines so we have to guess if he forgot them or is just registering fear and evasiveness as he dodges sheriff Jesse Vint's patient probing into who he's been feeding them pigs. We'd love to see some tough guy moxy, but instead he grasps too much on the 'trying to hide something' shyness. Luckily, his (real life) daughter Toni Lawrence, shows up, with a mysterious past, and a need for a job and a place to stay. She is truly unhinged and they make a great pair. Sure, he makes a few mistakes in cleaning up her mess, like leaving a spare hand outside of the pen. Also, who keeps pigs right behind a diner? The smell alone would ensure no one comes near with any kind of appetite.

Anyway, with its sombre mix of grit, ennui and psychosis it must seem uniquely Nightmare USA grade-A prime, and that it's one of Thrower's favorites probably has to do with his being British, hence he's more keen on the kind of distinctly sweaty desert vibe it has. Maybe England is too small, old and settled to really have ass end of nowhere style cul-de-sacs like the town that holds Lawrence's pig ranch/diner. Maybe only Australia, with its vast empty outback, really understands that there's nothing romantic about it.  

Me, there are a few things I don't like, for instance the cover art (which looks like some dreary Scholastic paperback) and the title. It's not sexy; I think of obese cannibalistic slobs eating people with all the finesse of a high school cafeteria wiseass in a badly-lit 80s slasher movie. BUT I have a soft spot for girl schizophrenic killers and Toni Lawrence's glee in killing and her delirious, relaxed almost post-coital relaxation afterwards, all bloody and calm, is pretty awesome. I like movies where female killers don't need to be violated before dicing up any stray idiot male, for any reason whatsoever, and who enjoy their work. 

5. DEATH BED: THE BED THAT EATS  
(1977) Dir. George Barry
**2/3 / Amazon Image - B+

My appreciation of this super strange film stems 100% from soaking up the prose of Thrower's loving appreciation before hitting the 'play' button on yonder Prime. Thrower even mentions George Barry learning about it via the Scarlet Street Message Forums, my old alma mater! I've tried to get through Death Bed in the past, before reading Thrower's praise, but found it incoherent and overly winky.  But after reading Thrower I found the tools to love it for its very weirdness:
"Death Bed deals in transcendental mysteries (the impossible geometry of the bed, bigger on the inside than the outside; the occult means by which it is created and destroyed), but Barry summons his demons from a fantasy world disconnected from religious tradition, telling a story of demonic seduction that has nothing to do with the Church...

"Throught the film, poetic images allow the slender narrative to take a back seat (...) We see blood blossom from the eye-socket of a skull in the bed's fluid interior; roses blooming from the same skull, now magically buried in the soil outside; a shattered mirror fragmenting into a kaleidoscopic collage; and the pages of a book turning into mirrors that capture the flames of a fire. Such imagery suggests the Romantic tradition, as befits the Artist behind the glass, like a fey whisper caught halfway between English Gothic and the Scandinavian Symbolists..." (375)
Full of great lines, strange characters and a totally unique plot and place and a totally unique setting. There's a giant bed in a small one room building, with black walls covered with strange surrealist Victorian era inks, and a lit fireplace!) and great lines ("Flowers? you brought flowers to the country? I hate to disillusion you but they do grow wild up here." / "What have you been reading that we couldn't find you?")  Weird voiceovers and a haunting elegant synth melody.


There's a kind of proto-emo kid art project 16mm glory to the film; as Thrower notes, it's a true original. It's not afraid to cut away to people in coffins, to move from one person's inner monologue to another, and full of strange one-sided conversations between a Goth-ish artist trapped behind one of his 'paintings' --actually a drawing!--  talking to the demon bed ("it's been such a long time since your last meal") and wishing he could get warn the unlucky visitors ("you gaze upon me as a painting on the wall, I gaze on you a serving upon some monster's silver platter.") but he mainly talks to the bed ('your insides are bleeding, why?) We see blood enter the urine-sea that is the bed interior; book of glossy mirror pages; nude doubling; fires inside books; some strange object that like a peyote bud sticking out of the severed mouth of a coppherhead; strange dreams, people sleeping in bed with their sandals still on. This bed movie has it all. A scene that takes comically forever of one of the near-digested victims climbing out of the bed, and dragging herself almost out of the room (her legs covered in blood) takes what seems like forever but then builds to a magnificent, almost Tarkovsky-esque payoff for our patience.

The best scene finds a young hippie pulling his hands out of the bed and seeing they are now skeleton hands. "It's amost like a surgical operation," he notes. As his phalanges and metacarpals fall off one by one, he comments "great." Alas, they don't move from the room of their own accord but just wait there. "til your appetite returns?" wonders the artist. No one freaks out or asks what the hell is going on, no matter how weird things get. They just burn their skeleton hands in the fire and wait for the demon to sleep so the artist can finally talk beyond his painting. "Young lady I will wake you halfway," he notes, sounding like Herbert Marshall. "Find the remnants of the fingers of your brother; take a strand of your friend's hair." When she cuts a magic circle around the bed, the floor bleeds!

Ever the modest soul, Thrower doesn't mention his outtasite weird music band Cyclobe composed new music for the film's DVD release (Barry was unhappy with the original composer; he had every right to change it before release since, after all, the film hasn't been officially released before coming to DVD. It was on bootleg tapes, never in theaters). "It's a movie where dreams and reality are interchangably bizarre," Thrower notes, "where humour, horror and surreal imagination are tucked so tightly together they've merged into a single, unique night-beast... There's nothing else like it, and if you love it there is nowhere else to turn: you have to go back to the bed." (384) Amen, I'm getting sleepy already. (The best time to see this? 4 AM.)

6. PHANTASM
(1978) Dir. Don Coscarelli
***1/2 / (Amazon Image - A+)
(See The Tick-Tock Inititation)

Props for using actual night, with pitch-black corners; "you got some over-active kind of imagination!" but then he throws the kid the keys to his gorgeous Plymouth Barracuda (?); the kid has a cool lunar wall bedroom mural of the type that were cool back then (I always wanted one, like the killer in Manhunter!)

The score by Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave is very au currant with Carpenter's Halloween and Goblin's Suspiria, derivative in that super cool way Italians have of shamelessly stealing something but then riffing off it to make it their own at the same time. (All the sing-song music box melodies can be traced to Ennio Morricone, but he borrowed it from Komeda's on Rosemary Baby, etc.) Gotta love a kid who just straps up and goes out to investigate a funeral parlor in the dead of night, with a knife taped to his leg. And his cool older brother says things like,  "No warning shots. Warning shots are bullshit," after handing him a shotgun. It's definitely a bad boy's life. "We gotta snag that tall, dude and we got to kick the shit out of him." 
"Phantasm mixes genres with such smart but unselfconscious verve that it's only later you realize you've been watching a sci-fi horror film about grave robbers from another world. That's right, the same plot as Plan Nine from Outer Space. Could this be the film Edward D. Wood was seeing in his mind's eyes? Certainly nothing could be further from Wood's ineptitude than this assured and constantly inventive movie." (487)
7. SIMON, KING OF THE WITCHES
(1971) Dir. Bruce Kessler
*** / Amazon Image - B
"Simon, King of the witches is an intelligent, warm and witty addition to the early 70s witchcraft subgenre, starring the ever-wonderful Andrew Prine... (the theme is not satanism and there's no dilly-dallying with the trappings of inverted Christianity)" (p. 503) 
I remember this one as having a fairly big push, as I saw TV spots as well as coming attractions; I remember wondering why on earth we'd care about a male witch who seemed more like leader of some sewer-bred tribe of step dancing Seven Brothers gypsies. Turns out, it's pretty cool thanks to a typically laconic turn by the great Andrew Pine and a serious, non-goofy respect for actual magic ritual. This is the film to play for the white magician in your life, the Wiccans and the magically inclined or anyone with a Tarot deck. You got to love a movie wherein our cool laid back magus Ptinr does a big 'cosmic working' to get the DA arrested for planting evidence against him (as reprisal for dating his daughter!) and then sacrifices the narc who planted it. But then somewhere along the line somewhere, someone or some things messed up! He has to go rescue his druggy chick (the DA's daughter) by leaving the time/space continuum and venturing inside a cosmic mirror, zooming deeper and deeper into the finesse abyss to rescue her from a... what? .... an acid overdose freakout??? 


The Prime print is only in full screen and kind of on the soft side but hey, this still awesome and worth checking out. For the longest time it just wasn't available, so this is a godsend to patrons of the 70s occult and genuinely odd, very 70s films. (see also this older Occult Prime list, from 2016)

8. MESSIAH OF EVIL
(1973) Dir/writers - Willard Hyuck and Gloria Katz
**** / Amazon Image - D+

I think sometimes the interviews and backstory of production--especially in fractured imperfect gems like Messiah of Evil and The Child--can sometimes detract from one's enjoyment. If you learn the director is unhappy with certain scenes, or if an actor you admire was a jerk on set, sometimes you can no longer have this innocent one-to-one admiration for the film's fairy tale sense of dislocation and mythopoetic eeriness; the kind of thing that may be a result of cutting corners or producer-insisted script changes for example, maybe it's better not knowing.  My love for The Child is slightly dampened by the news of the shafting its makers received no returns via the "creative financing" of distributor Harry Novak led to them never making another film. But then again, the prose of Thrower makes up for it. (I wouldn't have even known about The Child if not for this book, and I certainly wouldn't have ponied up the dough for the American Horror Project vol. II on the off chance I liked it. But I knew from Thrower's writing it was for me, and within the first few minutes I not only knew he was right, I wanted to jump for joy, knowing here was the movie that could stand next to Messiah of Evil, Sole Survivor, and Lemorra: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural that I was looking for (and I also loved most of Dream No Evil, and thankfully Thrower warned me in advance about the terribly obvious voiceover that's like if a bad cinema studies teacher was narrating the movie to a continuing ed psych class. 

Alas, the only thing great about seeing Messiah of Evil on Prime is--if you don't know whether you want to shell out the bucks for a decent transfer/copy of the OOP Code Red DVD or Bly-ray--you can watch this version to acquaint yourself with whether it's worth buying, like a fuzzy online pre-date. Thrower's interviews with Hyuck and Katz, long having gone onto the big time, don't really add to its luster, but Thrower's writing sure does:
"Hyuck captures a sense of unease that you sometimes get in our mechanized society when the fever of daily traffic is subdued by nightfall. If you've ever hitch-hiked and found yourself stuck for hours beside motorway slip roads near industrial estates, with their giant arc-lit loading bays, you'll have some idea of the picture I'm trying to draw --inhuman, hostile places, emerging after dark from behind the facade of banality. The lightning... brings that hard-edged frigidaire ambience in from the periphery and onto the city streets, turning unremarkable shopping areas into glittering consumerist cemeteries." (p. 238)
Note the way Thrower masterfully fills you in on some interesting experiences of his youth, but only in this unique context. How he could hitchhike after watching so many psycho movies, I confess I do not know. 

9. BLOOD SABBATH
(1977) Dir. Brianne Murphy
*** / Aazon Image - C-

This mostly amusing pastoral witchcraft tale would fit perfectly at the late night end of a double feature with the Esperanto language Shatner-starring Incubus, and/or Corman's The Terror. Like them it's a mostly outdoors tale of evil women seducing a disillusioned soldier (Vietnam this time) turned lost and wandering pilgrim, trying to navigate his feeling of love for a woman whose either a witch or an animal daemonic spirit. This time, a seemingly benign old sage takes him 'in' (so to speak) after his heart is broke, but the sage has a weird relationship to the succubi / witch coven who so torment our solider: he provides them with a child sacrifice every year, donated by the simple peasant locals. 


Interestingly, at a bar to celebrate the harvest (one of the few indoor scenes), a moth-eaten dipsomaniac priest lets slip the sage's habit of sacrificing a child every year; we don't get the expected freaking on the part of the solider at the news: we get a flashback to his unintentionally killing VC kids. Then he ends telling the priest he wants to lose his soul! Even better, the priest goes nutzoid and his voice shoots up an octave, rising to a tone of hysteria, which is awesome. Actually, the first two times he does it, this slow measured actorly build to an upper octave FREAK OUT - it's superb, and then he does it several more times. He seems drunk. Later that night, he drops by the coven, to bitch about the witches' sacrificial habit and do the slow upper register FREAK OUT a few more times. We learn that they had a 'no molestar' agreement with the priest; the head witch (Ilsa star Dyanne Thorne) offers him choice her women as a kind of Manson prostitute chaser. "You've kept your part of the bargain and I've kept mine!" But that's about to end. Our drunk priest wants no more sacrifices and the soldier wants to lose his soul. That's about the plot.

One would love to see this film in a decent print, a nice HD restoration instead of this murky VHS transfer because this is one groovy movie. When the soldier finally does lose his soul he goes nutzoid, trashing everything and shouting "Yylaa!!!!" before running off after his long-since-flown lover witch. His voice shoots up three octaves until he sounds like he just finished a set with his black metal band.  But then he runs around with her (now wearing clothes!) in a field of all white flowers. His hair is still terrible but her wig is worse. She's got a great jawline and nose combination though, that evokes Claudia Jennings if she liked wearing giant platinum wigs and couldn't act. 

Anyway its pretty cool how amoral it all is - the villagers are cool with the sacrifice (good harvests) and only the priest is a whining hypocrite, so to have our vet going from being all self-righteous and haunted to acting like a grinning Hyde-monster jackanapes. Then his witch girlfriend wigs out to see he's guzzled blood at the sacrifice - why wasn't she there? She's not grossed out long though, as he starts freaking with both the coven leader and the chief witch. Meanwhile just as he's lost her soul - Yylava. 

Overall though what we really get is a lot outdoor dancing, a mix of what I can only guess are strippers asked to put some pagan into their numbers. It's not unlike what some hippie commune might make, with the sage as Manson and the priest as old man Spahn. When you wonder where else it could go the vet is chased around a field by a hippie van and run over (sorta). Maybe the folksy theme song heard in the beginning and end can explain: "The wise are not so very wise; they never seem quite sure / there seems to be conflicting views." So true. 

Thrower notes of the star Geary, "he looks like he'd have trouble fighting off a persistent moth, let alone the Vietcong. Blood Sabbath draws much of its amusement from such miscalculations" before confessing "If you simply have to watch an early 70s witchcraft tale, this one is probably the most fun. (424)

10. KISS OF THE TARANTULA 
(1976) Dir. Chris Munger
** / Amazon Image - A+

A kind of fusion of Spider Baby and Axe, this tale of a socially dysfunctional but very pretty girl who lives in a mortuary, loves spiders and her undertaker father (but hates her mother and her cop uncle) moves very slowly, as if edited by a sleepy metronome; as such it used to be a burden to sit through, but now on Prime it looks really great, all HD and beautifully, forlornly-lit. I like just enough about this film to recommend it for the hardcore arachnophile. There's a strange Philian Bishop score and a cliche'd roster of evil characters set up like nine pins. Luckily, the film has good sense to let Susan keep center stage and have everything fall neatly in place for her, i.e. though tarantula bites are no more deadly than bee stings (letting them loose over humans is more likely to lead to the poor things being squashed by flailing limbs) she can somehow not lose a single of her pets as they create spastic heart attacks and panic-induced accidents when released into closed quarters with her foes. These scenes go on and on like G-rated versions of the tarantula scene in The Beyond.  Either way, if you're really zonked and really love Spider Baby but wish it was longer and not funny or great, maybe you'll get into it. There's a great climax where SPOILER we watch her very carefully lift (via straps and a crank) one comatose girl's body out of a coffin and then lift and lower her paralyzed lecherous cop uncle up and into the coffin, before covering him up with a wraps and then replacing the girl back in the coffin on top of him, closing the top to cover his muffled screams! It's almost Tarkovsky slow as he muffles his panicked cries of "Susan!" But will dad arrive home in time to spoil the show? 

Making up for the slowness is star Susan Ling, one of those uniquely 70s babysitter type girls, like a prettier Joni Mitchell. Thrower is a fan of the film but wisely points out she's far too pretty to be a wallflower.and the idea she'd get even for the crushing of one of her pets by releasing them all into tight, confined spaces with thrashing adult-sized humans, makes no sense (at least the film doesn't try to kid you that the tarantula bite is lethal; the adults die of fear and panic-related accidents and heart failure)
Kiss of the Tarantula has a morbid setting (much of the action takes place around a marvelously Gothic funeral home, set in the wintry woods redolent of Fulci's House by the Cemetery); the-girl-and-her-spiders concept is so weirdly charming it can survive the glaring inconsistencies; and the death scenes, though slightly silly, are actually quite bizarre and memorable. (...) The naive electronic score by Phillian Bishop, who also did the score for Willard Hyuck's Messiah of Evil and Thomas Alderman's The Severed Arrm- ... is memorably cheesy and Moogalicious and there is one great sequence...." 
I shan't spoil it, but the other big reason this movie is on this list is a very happy ending. In this day and age, that and the Moog alone are worth any slog. 

See also:

It's kind of a sin that Thrower didn't sling props at this undersung rough and ready, uniquely African American masterpiece 

OTHERS 
(praised in Thrower's book but not covered here):

Spawn of the Slithis (looks great in HD but seems awfully dull and homegrown), Scream Bloody Murder has terrible full frame video quality and looks too depressing to stick with for me (but avail. for those who don't mind feeling angry and depressed after a tense film); Godmonster of Indian Flats seems a bit to Billy Jack's mix of preachy environmentalism, tolerance, and wild west show didactic and the monster sucks and comes too late and is overly packed with portent, and looks muddy and slovenly; GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE is covered here; MICROWAVE MASSACRE is too vulgar and for me; I also don't like MOVIE HOUSE MASSACRE and THE NESTING  but they are both on Prime and looking great. I saw most of the The Strangeness but the Prime print is still far too murky and dark for a movie set 95% inside a dark mine, but it looks as probably as good as it's gonna get. Me, I admire its chutzpah and great monster but I'll stick with The Boogens.

Paula of the Apes: CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN, JUNGLE WOMAN, JUNGLE CAPTIVE (Scream Factory Universal Horror Collection VI)

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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.)

Naturally, all four look amazing, better than they ever did (on my old VHS tapes). The only thing wrong is the lack of so much as a five-minute documentary on Paula Dupree aka Sheela, the Gorilla. There's not even a bit of feminist outrage about why there's no documentary to accompany her overdue moment in the sun.

Whatever your impressions, Paula's origins as a character are easy enough to trace: she's clearly conjured by Universal idea men after noticing the box office generated by RKO's Cat People (which came out the year before). Like Irina (Simone Simon) in that film, Paula's animal instincts are triggered by raging jealousy and sexual frustration, bringing home the war-enforced separation subtext loud and clear. What soldier or homefront 21 year-old warrbride climbing the walls at home thinking about foreign women with their clingy claws out or handsome Lockheed shift managers couldn't relate?

A gorilla brain transplant melodrama that was recently introduced on TCM by its biggest fan, ape suit connoisseur John Landis (an intro not even included on this bare-bones set), the set's fourth and last film is THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL (1941), a groovy strangely noir-esque and poetic tale of a man wrongly convicted and executed whose brain is transplanted into a gorilla body after death and then comes back to find and kill the the gangsters who framed him and are now after his moll. It's interesting and cool but it's really Paula's boxed set. Don't try and steal her agency, you sexist/species-ist. It would be nice if Scream gave us an ape woman documentary. Even a commentary--even a five minute bit on the sexism that has led to the characters exclusion from the Universal pantheon. 

But the films themselves have never looked better. You'll be surprised at the attention given to spooky lighting Dmytryk's CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN, it's so gorgeous now in the HD glimmer it's beguiling; and the beauty of Evelyn Ankers' face is more striking than it ever was on video or TV; her flawless white make-up; the planes of her face marvelous in their matte alabaster. Even her hats are dynamite.

CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN
(1943) Dir. Edward Dmytrk
Film: *** / Image - A+ / Extras - F 

We first meet her while she's happily (for some unknown reason) being lifted out of ship storage in a tiny little cage and loaded onto the docks of America for her life of exploitation by her new owner, the circus after a presumably normal life in Africa. She's a gorilla, at this stage in her accelerated evolution--i.e. she's a guy in a gorilla suit--but she's a naive sweetheart with way too much faith in the inherent goodness of her captor, a dullard lion tamer played by Milburn Stone. Her life might have been one of happy servitude, if only she didn't catch the eye of a visiting glandular specialist played with superbly creepy understatement by John Carradine. Like the evil fairy godfather of some kind of Moreau island Cinderella myth, smooth-talking Carradine turns her human--thanks to the glandular extracts from patient Martha Vickers (three years before trying to sit in Bogey's lap while he's standing up in The Big Sleep)--so she can land a prince charming, i.e. Stone, who prefers cool hat-sporting Evelyn Ankers. Vicker's older sister, Ankers read in a medical journal that Carradine fixed up "a completely deformed child" and also "reversed acromegaly 'due to a hyper secretion in the pituitary gland," which is why, for some reason not evident in her beautiful countenance,  he takes her kid sister to his isolated, creepy mansion "clinic" in the first place.

If Captive Wild Woman is actually good, rather than just kind of smirky and uncouth (due to the unconscious sexism and animal cruelty on the part the "hero"), it's thanks to the flair for horror shown by director Edward Dmytryk who takes the time to get the atmosphere and peripheral horror details just right, like the glint of madness in the eyes of John Carradine as he watches an offscreen Sheela strangle her drunken abusive handler; or the way his hillside clinic is constantly bathed in thunderstorms and billowing winds, contrasted with the moody, deathly still interiors. Naturally his operating room is hidden behind a false bookcase, far from prying eyes. That Ankers would just leave her sister alone for days in this spooky place seems rather careless, but as Carradine's picture is in all the medical journals, she reckons he must be trustworthy (as evinced by her engagement to the idiot Stone, she clearly places far too much faith in the patriarchy).

Our objections to Carradine's Mirakle-style plan in today's more enlightened world aren't as extreme as they might have been back in 1943, but meanwhile our compassion for women and abused jungle animals (namely the lions and tigers Stone forces to work together in his sick big top displays) make our 21st century hearts sink, especially when we hear he's captured and brought back "20-30 cats", all in these tiny crates that don't even give them room to turn around. Neither the cats nor the now-human "Paula Dupree" (Aquanetta) get a second glance of credit for making Stone the big shot he is. i.e. the cats aren't praised or rewarded for learning tricks (the way they seem to be in the Clyde Beatty footage that's intercut with Stone's, and which shows Beatty more of a hypnotist with a real connection to the cats rather than Stone, who is more like a dopey front for uncredited female agency (since Paula is able to control the animals through telepathy and a deep jungle connection, for some unexaplained reason - like a glandular side effect). And Sheela/Paula isn't awarded for her loyalty to lion tamer Stone, whose life she saves from outside the training cage with her moody stares, Stone just admits she can be a big help to him and assumes she'll always be there in the wings as long as he needs her (he doesn't ask her permission to use her this way; he acts Carradine's permission, like he's her pimp!



That's another big sore spot that can either be read as a dig on the expectations of returning vets to just boot all the working-during-wartime women out of their jobs, it's really Paula who trains the big cats with her staring, and Stone isn't needed at all. He should be fired and Paula hired full time, given a big hat to make her look taller, like Mae West as Tyra the lion tamer in I'm No Angel (yet there's no mention of her even going on the payroll, anymore than the cats themselves). Instead, super square Milburn is only too willing to take all the credit, with the indispensable Paula as forgotten as, perhaps, a stuntwoman or voice artist who dubs a character's singing voice, doomed to anonymity to foster the illusion of another actor's supremacy in all things. She does get some publicity but the papers admit they don't quite know how she figures in.

The other women in the cast fare no better at the hands of men: Carradine's long-loyal female assistant balks at threatening the life of Vickers (via partial brain transplants) in order to turn Sheela more human, so Carradine kills her without so much as a second thought (word to the wise: if you're going to turn your mad scientist boss into the authorities, don't boldly proclaim your intentions while alone with him down in their scream-proof secret basement). And Ankers' job at the circus (she's the owner's assistant) is treated as utterly superfluous to Milburn, to whom she's little more than chattel, another animal ("I hope you're as easy to train when we're married.") Poor Martha Vickers, meanwhile, is dumped off and left to the mercy of crazy Carradine without a second thought, which is weird since she exhibits no signs of illness whatsoever, nor is her opinion asked of whether she's comfortable being left at some stranger's eerie house for an indeterminate amount of time. When she displays trepidation, Ankers even chides her, treating her with the same infantalizing contempt with which she herself allows herself to be treated by Stone.

Unlike Stone's lion tamer, however, at least glandular expert Carradine knows enough not to try to get married. He's prideful but he recognizes his own psychopathic villainy. There's no excuse for Milburn's because it's so unconscious and accepted it took us decades of slow-burn enlightenment to finally realize how rotten it is.

Martha Vickers is refused one phone call by sinister Carradine - Captive Wild Woman
Fortunately, Dmytryk --unconsciously or not -- is an ally; and in her way, though she's homicidally jealous, to the point of killing the house matron at Ankers' girls' residence after she climbs into her bedroom to kill her (over jealousy for Stone for some reason), she does end up slaughtering Carradine and then rushing to the rescue after the big top catches fire and the lions and tigers run loose and start chomping on Stone. Like Lota conveniently does for her man in Paramount's 1933 film, Sheela saves Stone's life, rescuing him from a mauling by Nero the lion before being shot and killed by a nervous cop who who doesn't deign to figure out it's a good ape or reckon he might kill Stone, who's slumped over her shoulder. And yet, two seconds after what should be her martyrdom, the circle has closed around Stone's white male privilege once more. Paula/Sheela is totally forgotten; the cop is not even reprimanded; Stone plans his big show to come (it doesn't seem to dawn on him he's lost his apron string safety net) and we actually end up with a homage to Carradine's looney doctor, whose ever-windswept sanitarium gets a final glide-over during a coda voiceover about the price of daring to delve into God's domain. 

Paula (Aquanetta) tries to restrain her delight at having these two grade-A specimens (J. Caroll Naish, left; Eddy Hyans, right) as her sole companions during her post-surgery convalescence
JUNGLE WOMAN
(1944) Dir. Reginald LeBorg
*1/2 / Image Quality - A / Extras - F

The second film in the Dupree saga is easily the worst, thanks to both the jumbled, lazy flashback structure and banal time-wasting bits of low-energy hamming by a woefully miscast J. Carroll Naish as whisper-talking psychiatrist Dr. Fletcher The narrative itself occurs as flashbacks illustrating Fletcher's whispery testimony at the second inquest for Paula, after he's both revived her from the last film and then killed her himself. Thus, the film is structured as a flashback but then the first part of the flashback is a flashback to the last film, all of which is stretched to tedium as Naish putters around one issue of the case after another, as if he hates to part with a single line of dialogue. At his tony sanitarium, the only inhabitants seem to be himself, a few staff members, his daughter (Lois Collier and her bland fiancee (Richard Davis) who drop by now and again-- and the gorilla he takes home from the circus fire of the last film, who then becomes Aquanetta again, but then walks away from her bed before Dr. Fletcher or the nurse notices the change. This means Naish gets to eat up more time as Fletcher wonders where his comatose gorilla's gone and where his cute amnesiac drop-in came from. While Fletcher tries to put two and two together, history repeats itself as another super bland idiot fiancee catches Paula's eye.

But neither that bland fellow nor Naish are even the real reason the film is such a drag. That dubious honor goes to Eddie Hyans as big old George (upper right), the orderly at Fletcher's sanitarium. He plays a needy Lenny-style imbecile with the kind of flat almost self-sabotaging half-assedness that makes you feel like a fool for even paying attention. As he falls into a childish obsession with Paula. (Why the hell wouldn't he?), lines like "I don't annoy her; I was just bringin' her lunch," or "aw, it's a gyp," sound like he's doing a drunk impression of Tammany Young in It's a Gift (1934), itself not a bad thing, when your drinking buddy does it at 3 AM, but not in a Universal horror film.

There are one or two great Lewton-esque scenes, both stalking scenes set at night on Naish's vast estate as Dupree (unseen) stalks Naish's daughter (again mirroring Irina chasing Alice in Cat People). In the best of the two, with nothing in the music to indicate danger; we see the couple out on a canoe out on the estate's groovy pond/lake at night. The scene is quiet, romantic, no music; everything is perfect enough we start noticing details like the moon, the reflection on the still water, and then something stirring below the surface, starting from shore but making a bee-line ripple-eddy straight towards the lovers' canoe. You can feel the typical over-emphatic mickey mouse composer chomping at the bit, begging to underscore everything with strings and woodwinds, and that he didn't bespeaks to someone, somewhere, along the film's assembly line, making a genuine eerie cinematic moment, simply by removing, rather than adding.

Meanwhile Fletcher us so dumb he still can't figure out what is going on; even with all the copious evidence, even without Milburn Stone showing up to try and fill in the blanks from the last film.  And Fletcher is so removed from cognizant reality, he refuses to call the police, even after George's body is discovered on the grounds, torn to shreds, not out of squirmy guilt but because he genuinely believes it was some wandering animal, and therefore just an accident not worth a policeman's time. One can only presume he's dangerously incompetent and not sociopathic, as the bodies pile up it never occurs to him to even consider hiring a security guard. The reason is probably pretty clear: in grand Universal B-lot style, nary an extra outside of stock footage may be found.

Even at only an hour long, even packed with footage from the last film, this is pretty slow going. Only the rage expressed by Paula has any resonance: the more angry she becomes the scarier she gets. All the while though one wonders why Aquanetta was cast in the role. Did some producer think she resembled some idealized fusion of Dorothy Lamour (then a hit at Paramount) and Simone Simon? Whatever the reason, she's too short to pack menace as a human, and lacks the eerie poise and dark feeling of ex-pat isolation that Simon brought to Irina. But, if she can't really act, she sure can glower, and that is something.


JUNGLE CAPTIVE
(1945) Dir. Harold Young 
**1/2 / Image - A / Extras - F

Jungle Captive is certainly terrible but at least it is atmospheric and miles above Jungle Woman (1945) thanks to an amusingly sinister turn by Otto Kruger and the always fascinating Rondo Hatton as the smitten killer assistant who first steals her body from the morgue (an ape woman's corpse just can't get a break). Hatton and Kruger are so good they aren't even the same genus as Naish and Hyans from the last film in the trilogy, so don't hold your past-film resentment against them. There is no pretending to be anything but shady with this pair. Standahl (Kruger) isn't even a doctor, just a laboratory scientist who sees Paula as the perfect loophole to the 'no experimenting on humans' rule in science (she's technically a lab animal), moving up a few steps from his experiments bringing life back to dead rabbits--with Rondo snarling and holding a gun on morgue technicians a far cry from dopey Hyans mooning over Paula and mumbling like some half-assed Bugs Bunny gangster flunky.

Once again, animal abuse and control plays a huge part --with Rondo whipping a Great Dane (fortunately, as with Milburn in the other film, just whipping the air or the ground in front of him) who is scared of Paula's lifeless gorilla body. But, always a welcome presence, droopy-eyed Jerome Cowan is Detective Harrigan of Homicide. and Amelita Ward is the fetching Liz Taylor-eyed assistant and, for some unknown reason, Vicky Lane steps in as Paula Dupree. Everything just got better! Almost. 


Another element that lifts this above Universal's tossed-off B-movie dregs: little bits of macabre deadpan humor, like Hatton advancing from behind on Ann, his big hands all looming in the grand 'Creeper' tradition, only to then just take off her coat,  and just the habit Kruger has of bugging his eyes out as the moody noir shadows hit his features just right; or Ann realizing too late that Kruger is the one who stole the ape, and Kruger kind of relishing her shock as he announces he needs her ("You see, Ann, I need you... I need your blood.") When she tries to reason with Molloch (Hatton), he's unswayed. Stendahl comments: "You see, Molloch (Hatton) is a true scientist. He understands the unimportance of a mere life when it might impede progress." Kruger could be awfully bland as a good guy, ala his sober sages in Dracula's Daughter and Magnificent Obsession, but when he's a villain he's pretty intriguing, eagerly playing those same noble features against type with a kind of aglow eerie relish. Here especially he's pretty good, maybe even better than he was Murder, My Sweet. And he and Hatton have a fine working colleague rapport, until of course, they don't.

Ann is pretty dimwitted but she trusts Kruger, who harvests her blood to bring back Paula and she's been nice to Molloch. That's where Stendahl makes his mistake, for like all ugly brute thug assistants, he develops a crush on the pretty victim. "Why, Molloch!" Kruger says, mockingly, "I believe you feel sorry for my pretty assistant. Don't be a fool! We're scientists, not sentimentalists." 

Elements like Kruger's wry delivery and Hatton's looming aside, there are other things to cherish here too, like the atmospheric almost James Wong Howe-ish lighting (which was never really in evidence prior to Shout's sublime Blu-ray restoration).

Unfortunately, these things aside, it's still kind of a shrug of a film thanks to the blank space where an ape woman should be. Paula never seems to shake her somnambulistic amnesia throughout the film.  She can barely be bothered to be jealous over some all human girl's luck with the men. It's all much more about Otto and Molloch vs. Detective Cowan and the 'good' couple, with Paula only real snapping to life when she has a chance to play rescuer as the lab inevitably (I think?) goes up in flames.

A few extraneous details: my old girlfriend was named Paula so I sampled more than a few lines from this movie in my DJ phase in the 90s, including "Paula's brain is gone. Her reactions are those of an animal." But that will mean little to you, though it took me a long time to realize it. In fact the reason I bought all three films on video tape over the years was because her name was Paula. It soothed my broken heart in many a way, even though our breakup was mutual and I didn't want her back, it was just that she was so far away, and I was suffering from missing her. Watching Jungle Captive, I still do. 
----

I could go into the MONSTER AND THE GIRL (1941) also included on this Shout Universal Horror edition and maybe I will at some future date. But I don't want to steal any more of Paula's agency than the world has already. She's too far gone now to ever be redeemed or suddenly re-valued, anyway, but why add insult to injury. Ignored and maligned by history, to ever have her likeness reproduced on a stamp, or an Aurora model, or even rate as either a coded lesbian archetype ala Irina in Cat People or a Halloween hairdo like The Bride of Frankenstein. She may have been exhumed and revived in the diegesis of her films, but never in real life. Though her closest cousin may well be the Wolf Man as far looks go (when she's right in between gorilla and human girl form) the bottom line is, Paula just doesn't know what she wants to be. Clearly her murderous  behavior has much to do with Irina's - in that being ignored and belittled and slighted by the guy who catches her eye makes her insanely jealous over the girl he prefers, leading to her turning all crazed with animal hatred and vengeance. That she and her writers never figure out where to go beyond that, stuck in and endless repetition, (or even reach that, effectively, in the third film) speaks woefully of their imaginations. Never quite all the way a bad guy or a good, her murders are all emotionally driven, failing the Bechdel test in so many ways, but paid for in the end by her coming to the rescue of the code-approved (i.e. human, white, Christian, heterosexual, and age appropriate) pair bond, killing the real villains, usually as flames lick her fur.

Maybe it's all that middle of the road-ness that stops her from connecting with audiences today. She lacks a James Whale / Karloff or Lewton/Tourneur combination to make her sense of all consuming isolation connect with wartime audiences (particularly romantic couples coping with prolonged, eerie foreboding while separated by WWII). Conversely, also also lacks a Browning / Lugosi combination to make the monster's sense of otherworldly Gothic sex fever resonate across deeper valleys of the unconscious. She lacks Chaney/ Siodmak fatalism, or even a Ricou Browning /Arnold sense of eco-awareness.

What she has instead is the story of absence; or a gaping void where her own arc and narrative might have grown outside of patriarchal manipulation and exploitation; women (and animals) are still recovering from such blatant encroachment, ever trying to shake the yoke of 'captivity' and finding it impossible, even in death. Lucky for her (as opposed to the gloomy Larry Talbot/Wolfman who seeks 'release' all through his last five or six films) after her third film she's able to finally, permanently die. In this one thing, maybe, she reigns triumphant. It must be.. glorious.

The Gamma One Sextet: WAR OF THE PLANETS, WILD, WILD PLANET, WAR BETWEEN PLANETS, THE SNOW DEVILS, THE GREEN SLIME, BATTLE OF THE WORLDS

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This Friday (9/25/20) TCM is screening three of the six films that loosely comprise the Ivan Reiner/Antonio Margheriti  Gamma One series, a mid-60s sexy space future where the United Democracy Space Center manages all the interplanetary threats, where endearingly cheap analog (in-camera) special effects, tough guy performances, cohesive interplanetary space-military jargon, and occasional stealth feminism serve a no-nonsense scripts. At. 6:45 AM (EST) there is War of the Planets (1966), then at 11:30 AM (EST), The Green Slime (1968), and finally, the first in the series, The Wild Wild Planet (1965) at 2: 45 PM (EST). If you haven't seen them, set the DVR and prepare to be wowed, or at least amused. 

What is so fascinating is how they linked, not as some obvious series with a prefix in the title, but they recycle sets, props, character names, actors, miniatures, and a general mise-en-scene future, with a united government and revolving circular space stations in orbit around the solar system with names like "Gamma One" and "Gamma 3." But this isn't a TV series-based movie series like the Star Trek films, nor a series stemming from instant pop culture pervasion like Star Wars, these films aren't titled to draw attention to the others in the series; it's as if each one is stand alone, but just uses the same characters, actors, writers, sets, and props.  They're just there. What are they? And why am I so fascinated?

Getting to know these films can be confusing - they have similar names, and casts, but things keep changing. The main four films that comprise the "Gamma One Quadrilogy" were shot over a two year period in the mid-60s by genre journeyman Antonio Margheriti (using the Americanized pseudonym 'Anthony Dawson' in the credits) with co-producing and writing by American writer (and Batman co-creator) Ivan Reiner: Set in a future where mankind as moved out into space in much the way Werner von Braun laid out in early Disney films, with space stations revolving (to duplicate gravity) around the Earth, the moon, Mars, etc. The key station is "Gamma One," where men and women work side-by-side, clad in corsets (for the men only) and muted polyester, as interplanetary threats--'wild' planets, mutant-making splinter societies, abominable snowmen, and unified intelligence 'diaphanoids'-- come and are dispatched by intrepid commanders. Then the writers from the last film went Margheriti made went over to Japan two years later to make another unofficial entry, with none of the same characters but set on "Gamma 3" instead of Gamma One, and organized around the same Central Space Command idea. If you add to these five a film Margheriti made in 1964 that plants a lot of the seeds we'd reap in the Gamma One quadrilogy, then you have what I term the Gamma One Sextet - and you can even add a 1963 Japanese science fiction movie that seems a partial inspiration for The Green Slime if you want to be thorough. 

If you watch these films a few times you learn what the differences are between the Gamma, Alpha, and Delta space stations, the names of ships (given the names of planets, just to confuse) and manned satellites (like "Echo"), and they are not easy to keep separate as often the effects referred to are either not added (probably for budget reasons, or they looked too ridiculous even for Margheriti) or the same shots are used for exteriors. Also, the names of crew stay the same from film to film, but actors switch roles, furthering the mystery, alongside the overly similar titling. For example I was a fan of War Between Planets for a long time without realizing War of the Planets was a totally different film, albeit with some of the same cast in different roles. 


Of course my enthusiasm for this odd duck series may blind me to their niche appeal. The special effects are pretty bad, but to me that's part of the charm. First, there are no optical effects at all in any of these  films. Forget  about CGI, or hand-painted glowing shapes, here there's not even a laser beam scratched into the celluloid. When floating in space the wires are always visible, and far away astronauts are represented by floating plastic toy spacemen. When these characters fire their lasers (one guy even pronounces them 'lazz-ers'), it's as giant cigarette lighters meet blow torches, so they have to aim at things up in the air as that's where the flame is going anyway. When the ships roar through the cosmos there's this prop with three of them flying in formation, each spitting fire into nose of the one behind from their exhaust as they roar through the cosmos: in the light of the fire not only do you see the clear plastic rod connecting all three ships to each other and being held up by some offscreen hand, you can slightly see the studio back wall, painted black to resemble outer space but the lines of the Exit door visible in the light of the sparklers. The stars are almost afterthoughts, hanging low in the sky;  the Earth, when visible, is as 2D as if it was hanging in the back of kid's a stage show. Sometimes the darkness of space is more a light blue depending on how alert the lighting tech is. But who cares when the exterior miniatures are super cool like this? The imagination is there, in typical Italian genius style.

Here are the Main Four, the Gamma One Quadrilogy:

 THE WILD, WILD PLANET
I criminali della galassia 
(1966) Dir. Antonio Margheriti 
**1/2

Though it has easily the best of all the movie posters (above). a title that urges you to consider it in the same hipster vein as Wild, Wild West, and a lot of great miniatures, ideas, and kooky sets, the first in "Anthony Dawson's" official Gamma One quartet suffers from too many gross outs (and a hero whose horror of genetic difference is both reprehensible and contagious), and too many outdoor scenes back on Earth (nothing takes the air out of a goofy sci-fi movie like bright Italian sunlight), and a ridiculous villain in the corporate chemist "Mr. Nurmi" (Massimo Serato). A eugenics-crazed lunatic with his own corporation-owned planet, Delphus, and a master plan to abduct 'perfect specimens' via a chemical that shrinks them down to Barbie-size, he's always clamoring about "perfection" even as his Klingon-esque eyebrows are peeling off under the sweaty soundstage kliegs. Nurmi's plan to purify the world is ridiculous, but even more so is the incredible slowness of Mike Halstead in Space Command to figure out what's going on. He regularly misses obvious clues (clones appearing in several places at once) and dismisses his own sister's eyewitness accounts as hysteria. Eventually they figure it out, but the skeevy irritation lingers. Still, this is such a completely realized mise-en-scene, such cool futuristic miniatures, futuristic cars, ray guns, etc. that it's hard to stay mad. 

One-Offs: One tack that would disappear after this first entry is a typically-Italian anti-corporate motif in the form of gigantic chemical company CBM -who can get away with whatever they want, leaving Halstead to have to escape his house arrest to throw himself into the fray. It's a cliche'd antiauthoritarian slant that doesn't taste right in this kind of utopian collective future. 

Special Effects: As with most of the series, the effects are terrible - ray guns are basically sparklers and lighters cranked to eleven (all effects are in-camera) Luckily Margheriti would rather give you a poorly designed alien world than just have another static, cheap, talky scene. But oh brother, don't get me started about the grimy-looking "Proteo Theater" with its butterfly dancers! Man, does Nurmi have some odd ideas.


Feminism:  The romantic bickering between the 'married to his job' commander of Gamma 1, Commander Mike Halstead (Tony Russell) and martial arts expert Connie, i.e. Lieutenant Gomez (Lisa Gastoni) has aged very badly. Connie doesn't give a good an impression of women in the workforce. She ignores red flags galore when she gets the leering proposition to go away to Nurmi's off-limits corporate planet, Delphus, merely because he calls her "a marvelous jungle animal" that he wants to to "explore."  And when she snaps to Mike, "I want to be treated as a woman, not as an equal" you want to find the macho idiot who wrote that line and belt him black-and-blue with a feminist film textbook. Worse, Connie goes from demonstrating kung fu to freaking out when blood comes out of the shower on Delphus, then to being locked up in an old-school medical version of a pillory without any argument.

On the plus side: There are some excellent miniature cityscapes and planetary landing areas--they glimmer and shine and are gorgeously photographed; all sorts of futuristic spacey ideas come zipping past, and Margheriti takes time to give us busy (indoor soundstage) exteriors of the UDSC, replete with televisions in windows advertising things like the "Compu-doll" (a computer animated talking baby doll) and "Nu-Face" an at-home plastic surgery kit. These scenes were given relatively lavish attention (and would be reused in the subsequent films). I will forgive the terrible blue eyeshadow/pink lipstick combination of the enemy kung fu women because, well, I love the idea, though it's funny they fight the men, while  I like that the film has the guts that makes it okay for the enemy agent lady to abduct a young moppet for no clear reason. There's a great hotel room fight between a bunch of kung-fu hittin' babes and the three space force Gamma 1 officers (which include a young Franco Nero in a supporting part); and a cool mid-air escape from an apartment window by Halstead after he's confined to quarters, when his crew (including Nero) swing by to pick him up in a craft before zipping over to Delphus! Good stuff. There's a cool shoot-out where the boys massacre a whole army of mutant clones, their four arms waving menacingly (some only have two but who's complaining?) and a final all-out brawl as the set is flooded with bloody eviscera-water that must be seen to be believed

Egregious Offenses:Nurmi's mission on Halstead's station is to create living, autonomous human organs for transplants; Halstead looks at them and expresses his distaste; and then we're supposed to buy that a villain hung up on perfection wouldn't think his beautiful people might object to a life spent lounging by an open swimming pool full of blood and pureed human viscera (which they're also expected to shower with) that eventually spills through during the big collapse climax ala something between one of Danny Torrance's special Overlook elevator and the flooding of the Romans after Moses gets across the Red Sea. Parts of the film seem to have been cut for budget or time -though we have but a glimpse of Nurmi's grand plan to become one with Connie (slice both people in half, literally, and splice them together!). And his planet Delphus seems to be awfully small. The tour of his place (under the blood lake) is freaky thoiugh, with a room full of deformed mutants straight of an AIP Lovecraft adaptation and trays full of severed limbs being dumped into the lake as 'leftovers'. The most disquieting element though is the uncanny look Nurmi's cloned henchman, a tall sharp-nosed man with an obscenely bald head barely covered by a fascist infantry cap, wearing a cheap black rubber raincoat too sizes too small. He's like that icky guy you have to be friends with just because he's the only other kid into punk rock. Luckily all his clones have four arms (making them "a freak... a sickening freak" as reactionary Halstead dubs him). The rest of Nurmi's 'perfection' army are women suffering a surfeit of cheap oily make-up, unflattering costumes (only the men wear corsets in the future!) with a dislike of harsh words, and trapped in godawful hair styles. Luckily, they're good at kung fu, and a big hotel room battle with Halstead and his men (including a young Franco Nero!) is a highlight. 

Enzo Fiermonte status: He's called General Fowler here (the "italian Burt Lancaster" plays a general in all four of the main quadrilogy but never keeps the same name)

Hopeful Hints: there's a pixie-faced brunette girl who keeps popping up as an extra in all these films as one of the crew. I have yet to find out who she is, but it's fascinating that she's always around in all four films. Look for the half-shrunk scientist at the end, close to the bottom of the screen at the end, when Connie is all revealed in a fetching bathing suit and the gang is kicking back with cocktails by the (normal-colored) swimming pool. He's not bitter,

WAR OF THE PLANETS
I diafanoidi vengono da Marte 
(1966) Dir. Antonio Margheriti
***

Now safely off of Earth and up on Gamma 1, Commander Mike Halstead (Tony Russel) and Lieutenant. Connie, Gomez (Lisa Gastoni) are celebrating New Years, up to their old 'not as cute as they think' unprofessional bickering, and all the Gamma stations are competing for the best space display - or in Gamma One's case, a live space ballet of cheerleader-style letter spelling Happy New Year (in English! Did they shoot one for Italian too?). But while that's going on - terror strikes - when one of the officers on duty that night, Captain Jacques Dubois (the Satanic-looking Michael Lemoine) is possessed by a green gel light and fog - a hive mind of bodiless creatures roaming the galaxy in search of the ideal hosts, are attacking the space stations through their green light displays (which the revelers presume are fireworks or something). Though it takes awhile for it to sink in as the crews are all getting drunk and/or snogging (the dress designer Berenice Saprano doesn't waste a chance to trot out lots of cute space babes in various futuristic--albeit tasteful--dresses.), Margheriti proves himself a master of well executed crowd movements in the the way the emergency is gradually relayed from just a peculiar observation in background radiation all the way to evacuation of all guests, and the way the guests--drunk--make it hard to get rid of them.  


The glowing green lights everyone sees flashing in the corner of their eyes are supposed to be something tangible, though all we ever see of them are rushing green smoke illuminated from a green light off camera. We have to take Halstead's right hand man's word that "you did it commander - you knocked 'em right out of orbit" by- luring them between two lead shields and then blasting 'lazzers' at them? Some pretty weird effects appear to be missing. When he tells the crew to "get ready with the .38s!" it's pretty funny - imagining shooting bullets at green smoke and that magically clears it away. We're a long way from the same year's Planet of the Vampires, which managed to get by with using a few bicycle reflector lights to a much better effect.

Egregious Offenses: The gross idea of some dusty old automated system and you just push a button and get "Lobster tails ala bracco" instantly delivered in a steel block and you just sit right down and start gorging yourself is, in the scheme of things, pretty gross considering it's been a long time since anyone reloaded the fridge. "What do we do with the garbage, leave it for the maid?" asks young Franco Nero. It's been a long time since I heard a lobster so disgraced! 

Enzo Fiermonte status: He's called General Halstead here (Mike's father!). He's slightly less behind the learning curve than usual.


Plusses: 
Lots of groovy tracking shots this time, one involving a helmet-less stagger across a flat planetary surface to escape at the climax, with a red tinted space sky and full size ships and vehicles crawled gaspingly passed in favor of a bigger craft all the way across the red sandy (all indoor soundstage with cool lighting) landing area. There is also a marvelous walk across what is a big hangar / boiler room / garage / soundstage garage on either Gamma One or Earth, as the crew set out on this journey to a remote mining planet (Mars?); and a long, kind of pointlessly elongated automated walkway journey down into the dark recesses of the mine where the "hosting" ceremony is going on. The big New Years parties on all the various space stations and Earth HQ are also shown in elaborate detail, as if we'll see these people again (we never do). Along with the first film, this is one of the more sexist of the series, with Sanchez easily hypnotized into a green trance, and spending most of the movie a zombie, and there's an older officer as well (same deal). They don't get much dialogue but Sanchez gets all pissy when--again--Mike treats her like an officer in front of the troops instead of getting all romantic, which seems hopelessly unprofessional. She looks good though, and there are more than a few pretty faces floating around at the party (such as that unbilled pixie-faced girl from the previous film).

WAR BETWEEN THE PLANETS 
Il pianeta errante 
(1966) Dir. Antonio Margheriti 
***1/2

You guessed it - the title to this one is the "runaway planet" or "The Errant Planet" if you want to be exact. But distributors eager perhaps to jump on the press they did for the last film (or was this one first?) but banking on a short memory.. ? no, anyway you look at it, the nearly identical title makes no sense, especially considering its got much of the same cast and props, so that if you were sleeping through the last movie you might not be able to tell the difference!

Cast: This is one of my favorites as it has Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Kill Baby Kill!), who with his regular voiceover dubber whomever it is is a master - at matching GRS's brief lip movements with great torrents of tough snapped dialogue, which is the way a coiled natural leader with a GI Joe-style handle like Commander Rod Jacskon would be. The dubbing is great matching the lips with weird hesitance and fast-talking when necessary. Dialogue is rich.... and wondrous, using the weird pauses of the actors to create mood and drama rather than just making them sound drunk: "Read your retros - don't get clogged, Mack!" / "Who's got the flagship?!" Great lines like the interchange with his on-station lover Terry Sanchez (Ombretta Colli)

"I'm engaged to her Terry.... not that... I want to be."
"cant you keep her from coming up here?"
"I'm afraid..... it's more... complicated ... than that."

It's in charge of communications and she's way more low key and professional than Lisa Gastoni was with Mike Halstead in the first two films. They've been having an affair when not too busy with space; and there's just one hitch - Rod's dopey, cat-eyed fiancee is down on Earth, and happens to be the General's daughter (Halina Zalewski of Long Hair of Death fame). Pietro Maretellenzana is Toby, AKA Capt. Dubrowski, who is buddies of sorts with Commander Jackson but has a hard time taking orders.

FX: The exterior (beyond the pull of the space wheel) is once again the worst part as far as being convincing, and therefore the best - while they stand on the edge the stars don't move as they would if the wheel was spinning (to create gravity) and naturally the flying through space is all done from wires so everyone looks like they're lifted up by the seat of their britches. Man it's ridiculous but the music is nice and ominous and weird.

Enzo Fiermonte status: He's called General Norton here, and Janet (Zalewska) accompanies him like a secretary or something, even getting him to cut short an important meeting so she can whine about not hearing from Mike on Gamma One! Norton, that's so unprofessional! 
 
It's not so much it's that riveting but its rich with delight.

that unknown pixie-faced extra - left, behind Ombretta Coli.

There are no weird aliens, but the errant planet, soaring too close to earth's gravitational field resulting in all sorts of seismic and tidal disturbances. It's uninhabited but impressive and alive, with fields of cold red gelatin quicksand and islands of hairy ground surrounding craters breathing out plumes of cold steam. Going into one to plant anti-matter charges, they find themselves attacked by white tendrils that bleed but repair themselves as soon as Rod stops hacking at them. It's quite a destination. 

The imdb score is unfairly low, and perhaps based on old faded VHS pan and scans (or memories of being horribly bored as a kid catching it on TV, marveling that an astronaut hacking at white tubes constituted a science fiction movie); but the Prime print is sublime. It lets the scheme of dark colors-- greys, blacks and red that make up the bulk of the colors look really rich and alluring. If space opera style drama and mature, adults doing work as an organized group in constant radio communication is your bag, this is like the base, the raw go-to for all your Italian swinging cocktail space station needs.  I can see it any old time, and if nothing else, it rocks me to sleep like a baby. That cool dubbing voice of Stuart's "Don't get clogged, Mac!" it's like the manly manna to lure me out of any panic attack as gelatinous planet surface seems to envelop my ship, essentially burying me alive. "Use your retros!"

THE SNOW DEVILS
La morte viene dal pianeta Aytin
(1966) Dir. Antonio Margheriti
*** 

Personnel: One again the name Ivan Reiner crops up in the writing credits. Is he like the show runner? He never wrote another movie series (but co-created Batman with Bob Kane and invented most of the cooler characters--Joker, Cat Woman, Riddler--himself, but got shafted from the spotlight). Reiner and Devils co-writers Bill Finger and Charles Sinclair (of Batamn fame) went on to do The Green Slime! 

These show a regular improvement, gaining steadily since the herky-jerky Wild, Wild Planet
The exterior that opens things this time is snow-bound, a tower on the north pole, where "General Norton has approved Commander Jackson's new rotation schedule," i.e. things are quiet and now everyone can take off. But then - wham! 

Cast;Giacomi-Rossi Stuart's Commander Rod Jackson is back from the previous film and is no longer with either girl. He's free agent, lounging around with sexy countess's who play mini golf in their gardens with pet parrot; or at the karate gym, working out with Japanese martial artists (giving Sanchez a chance to speak in Japanese, to which he replies it's a "singu-war preszher" to talk with her- thus undoing any racial progress). Ombretta Colli is here, though now she's called Lisa and has strange cheekbones and is dating someone else and I'm also not crazy about her hair, up in this wildly unkempt 'do. 

And what's the deal with the way the hot "countess" is seen only in passing at the pool spa where Jackson and his buddy Captain Pulaski (Geoffredo Unger, back from the grave from the last film) are hanging out with a ginger kidwho I can only assume is Toby's orphaned son seen at the end of the last film? Well, the kid only gets the one scene (thank goodness) and soon Rod and Pulaski are jetting off the Himalayas; and we're back to a very frumpy looking Halena Zalewski in the same outfit and sagging reptilian black hair bun and gold lame jumpsuit, but she's no longer engaged to Rod and no longer the general's daughter - she's called Lt. Sanchez, now!  

Debits: This is a very segmented film, not unlike Empire Strikes Back in that it seems to be several different films welded together, from the weird intro of Rod and Pulaski's vacation spots (which we never see again) to dispatched to Nepal to climb the Himalayas (or at least a few snowy sloped hills somewhere in the Italian Alps), to a cave leading to the Snowmen's secret relay station; the indoor scenes, such as a strange 'night life' sequence with their guide (Wilbert Bradley) cavorts like he's in a voodoo trance, and is given misleading inscrutable close-ups to make you think he's a spy; but with his crazy eyes and racist dub he's like a black-Italian actor doing an impression of a sherpa that would embarrass Alan Bourdillon Trahearne. To the last segment, the flight to "the big one, Jupiter" and its moons for a mission to save the Earth once again. Each part is interesting, but the whole is never completely mythic as its predecessor.  
Also, we miss the the actor who did Rod's English speaking voice in War Between the Planets. The new guy is fine, but it's jarring to lose the last guy, as he and Stuart were a perfect match.

Music: 
Angelo Francesco Lavagnino's theme song has a groping rock edge; making it second only to the Green Slime as far as a groovy theme song, with a slinky lead guitar and a pleasingly ominous beat. The main instrument for the rest seems to be an open mashed piano, lower keys banged and boomed so all the strings vibrate. Tres cool.

Enzo Fiermonte status: He gets to stay General Norton this time, even if his daughter is now nonexistent (With Zalewska playing Lt. Sanchez). He's just as ineffectual as ever, getting all flustered when Jackson isn't right at his post even though he just approved leave, getting mad he didn't use the helijet, not realizing it's been destroyed, and so forth.


Uniforms: I like the red triangle on their navy blue uniform with the light blue trim. As with Wild Wild Planet the costumes and make-up are all substantially cheap-looking, but once we're in the caves with the snowmen there's at least some nice painted frost, cold air (for steam breath) and clever lighting (purples and greens). Best of all, the snowmen themselves: giant actors in elegant in green vinyl bathing suits over dark grey long underwear with red capes and sashes; with puffy grey hair, beards and big medallions they look like a crew of Germanic salt and pepper "bears" at some 70s disco. 

Odd Touches: it takes awhile to kick in at first there's some weird things; the winter station has a blue and black uniform and there's a beefy silver-haired actor as the commander of the station - a weird symbiosis to the big snow devil aliens and his salt and pepper beard. There's a yeti footprint in plaster, a global warming plot, and a 

FX: As with all the other films in the series, the laser guns shoot a mix of sparklers and flames, like giant cigarette lighters/blowtorches (every effect is in camera) but there are some gorgeous miniatures, including a snowbound arctic station, burning heli-jet sabotage,

THE GREEN SLIME
(1968) Dir. Kinji Fukasaku
****

Writer/co-prpducer Ivan Reiner is back one more time as is the space station design and overall vibe / mise-en-scene; instead of Gamma 1 this time (or in addition to), it's Gamma 3, further out there. Neither Jackson or Halstead are around, nor is Margheriti, but Fukasaku more than makes up for it with a well-oiled thrill machine. Shot in English with what seems to be a bigger budget, a better sense of pace and dynamics than the Margheriti films, it's a load of cohesive fun. This time the Toby-Rod dynamic from Between is back, with the square-jawed Commander Rankin (Robert Horton) sent on an urgent mission to blow up an encroaching asteroid. First he has to go to space station Gamma 3 and that means bumping into station chief Vince Skully (Richard Baywatch Jaeckel, sporting an aggressive blonde buzzcutick and a short guy shoulder chip.) Skully fights him every step of the way, and then the mission is almost blown thanks to a dawdling biologist who found something interesting. Uh oh. Shades of X from Outer Space as even a slime or a soap bubble can turn out to harbor the invasive species apocalypse if moved to the wrong set of stimuli.


Back on Gamma 3, Rankin moves in on more than station command, there's also the chief medical officer, sexy-lipped Lucian Paluzi (Thunderball), dressed here in sexy silver glitter open-midriff disco-heralding jump suit. (if you're old enough to remember Marvel's "Dazzler" character, it's a very similar look). The camerawork is tight, with impressive close-ups; and tough (non-dubbed) English language dialogue, and of course the monsters are incredibly endearing, if sloppily-painted, and they make a groovy whir-squeal noise as they go breaking through walls in search of the electric current that stimulates their cell division. I remember my first ever rubber monster thumb puppet from the gumball machine when I was two or three, I loved that thing. And it looked just like this, so maybe I'm prejudiced. 


Pros: It's probably the best parable for letting liberal empathy make you a bad leader (Skully is the kind of bleeding heart who would "kill ten to save one" as Rankin puts it. Paluzzi sticks up for him in that same puppy dog pity way that Katniss frets over little Peta in The Hunger Games. I think at one point she even says "but he's trying really trying,!" as if that makes a good leader. There is also a good parable to glean with the way the slime spreads and multiplies as an invasive species, ala COVID wherein once an invasive organism jumps containment, you have to keep evacuating, no room to fret and 'try', It's not long before the whole station must be blown to shreds before it crashes and spreads its tentacled plague to the World!

Score: Love that theme song! It's off the chain, the hook, and the wall. 

UNOFFICIAL PREQUELS:
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BATTLE OF THE WORLDS
Il Pianeta degli uomini spenti / Translation: Planet of Extinct Men
(1961) Dir. Antonio Marghereti
**1/2

Sort of the early prequel to Margheriti's 1966-7 "Gamma One" Tetralogy (note its American title is Battle of the Worlds, and is not be confused his War Between the Planets or War of the Planets, both of which came later), here we have a runaway planet entering our solar system and taking up orbit around Earth, all predicted by an aged, vaguely portly Claude Rains in owl spectacles. Hamming wildly but dubbing his own voice as a Hawking-style grand vizier of physics, Raines even wears a big space helmet during the big alien planet-landing climax, racing around like a kid in a candy store through miles of alien tubing and red gel lights (an early version of the "runaway" in War Between the Planets) while issuing grating 'music of the spheres' from his portable synthesizer. (The alien UFOs are maneuvered via sound waves, leading to lots of overlaid asynchronous tones as ships race into heavily-edited dogfights). Mixing Mycroft Holmes and Peter O'Toole doing Henry II, Raine's mathematician physicist is so brilliant he can just write an equation on the observatory floor in chalk for the world's leaders to see (via camera phones) and he initiates an interplanetary war. Meanwhile the young couples (a pair from a Martian outpost, and a pair from his own observatory) fawn over him and stand around in awe and then saddle up when it's time to ride out of orbit and take on "the Outsider" (as Raines dubs the interloping world). In many ways I like this film more than that Wild Wild Planet that came next (there's less sweating and Raines really gives it that added oomph). It may lack a more fully realized UDSC mise-en-scene of the Gamma One-verse, but it's a good start (with the pre-extant Martian outpost, etc) in visualizing how it will work in future films. Meanwhile, Mario Migliardi's score smoothes over any soft patches and helps to give the rocky island scenery a proto-giallo sense of class, but the barrage of jarring synth noises in the second half may wake your sleeping girlfriend if you don't keep the volume low. Long a PD title, one can dream of seeing this one day remastered to look as good as the (above) War Between the Planets. What else is the stuffing of the stars, Professor, if not such dreams? At least let us see what these dead aliens look like? The big climax finds the astronauts all gawking at what looks like a Rauschenberg 'black' painting leaning against the tunnel floor.


10. THE X FROM OUTER SPACE
Uchû daikaijû Girara
(1963) Dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu
*** / Criterion Channel Image - B-/C

Though it shares no co-creators, it's pretty clear this was a partial inspiration for The Green Slime, with its plot of a biological sample taken during a routine expedition With a happy astro-theme song and groovy lounge soundtrack (courtesy Taku Izumi), a cheerful shade of blue for the outer space backgrounds, and cute if unconvincing space miniatures and sets, X is set--like its Gamma One predecessors, in that once-seemingly inevitable future of space stations and permanent bases on the moon, operated by a United World Order where attractive young people of both genders hold high-level positions on orbiting space stations and meet after hours at the space lounge to dance and be interrupted by urgent news. Here we got cute blonde gaijin astrobiologist Lisa (Peggy Neal) as the girl in a group of four bound for Mars, stopping off on the moon to party with cute Michiko (Itoko Harada), whose got a crush on Capt. Sano (Shun'ya Wazaki), who crushes on Lisa (Neal) who likes him too but knows Michiko crushes so much harder. Japanese sci-fi gaijin mainstay Franz Gruber sports a goatee as a high-ranking scientific advisor (he also counsels Lisa when hearts gets too heavy). Planetary danger erupts when Lisa collects a tiny alien spore she found stuck to the ship's tail fin and brings it down to earth in one of those sample jars that alien spores tend to escape from when everyone is off having cocktails. This one leaves a chicken size footprint etched in acid and immediately grows kaiju massive. 

Though quite joyful and triumphant (just this side of The Giant Claw in pleasing ridiculousness) Guilala's attacks are a bit on the weaker side compared to his more esteemed Toho comrade, but with all the fun jetting back and forth from the moon to Earth to that loungedelic Taku Izumi score, the glowing soap dish UFO visits, the widescreen medium shot compositions, the luminous glowing skin of the two lead actresses, and Guilala's aerodynamic head curling its edges when blasting laser spitballs, you may forgive it most trespasses, such as the soft foggy print Criterion is stuck with on their DVD. 

Grooving at the moon's astro-lounge, foggily

The Criterion image is soft but hey - if not for their "It came from Shochiku" Eclipse series, it wouldn't be out on anything but a $60 Japanese import (and you would never buy it without first knowing how much it rocked). To think, I may never have known it, and I wouldn't have gone on to hunt down and see Atragon and Latitude Zero on overpriced Tokyo Shock DVDs.  Man, I'm sick just thinking about it, because if there are cocktails being served on space stations or the moon in a 60s science fiction film, I shall be crawling forth, insatiable. There is no 'counting days' when there are no longer 'days' without Earth's gravitational spin! 

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So...

WAR OF THE PLANETS and THE WILD, WILD PLANET and THE GREEN SLIME - are all on TCM Friday 9/25. 
Yyou can find BATTLE OF THE WORLDS and WAR BETWEEN PLANETS streaming on Amazon Prime. For more cool 60s science fiction on Prime, check out this post from a few months ago. 
As for THE SNOW DEVILS, you can get it on a nice DVR from Warner Archive (once you're hooked on the rest.). The X FROM OUTER SPACE is on the Criterion Channel (you heard me!)

PS: For the longtime readers wondering when I'm going to pull out of this retro sci-fi / classic horror funk, know I've been working hard on a major pice about Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. It's coming up next! It would be sooner if the new blogger interface wasn't so buggy and lame! 

Old Dark Capsules X: THE PHANTOM (1931), DRUMS OF JEOPARDY (1930), MURDER BY THE CLOCK (1931), HOUSE OF MYSTERY (1934), THE GHOST WALKS (1934)

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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,

These days, I wonder if I might be alone in this last part. Everyone has Halloween, or at least Guy Fawkes' Day, October filmic canon, but modern kids and even their parents have grown up with soooo much in the way of options for viewing. They don't have to love the old dark house movies, the way we Famous Monsters-reading kids did, we who were like shaking junkies waiting for every new TV Guide to come along in the Sunday paper so we could underline anything remotely spooky looking and then try to get the timer to work at the dead of night or even set the alarm and wake up so we could sneak downstairs and tape it, just so we could pause during the commercials, in order to fit more four rather than three movies on the six-hour tape (which were like two pounds each and $12) and also, if needed, manipulate the aerial to get a clearer picture, including standing up and grounding it by holding the antenna in one hand and the wall in the other, all just for something like One Body Too Many or The Ape Man. Why would anyone bother treading through such blurry dross when there's every single old horror movie on streaming all the time? And if we don't get used to the genre and learn to love its creaks and groans, the Cat and the Canary or The Phantom of Crestwood might not be the sort of thing we even know how to appreciate in the coming post-civilization! Won't you help? 

Maybe now, during these strange times, even with Netflix and all that, I may yet recruit fellow travelers in the hoariness stillness.

What is an old dark house movie vs. say, a mystery or a thriller or a straight-up horror movie? Well, just as all of 'modern' country music stems from a handful of songs by Jimmie Rodgers, Patsy Cline, and Hank Williams Sr. (which stem in turn from old string band reels and traditional ballads) so all of the old dark housers are based on a handful of barnstorming mystery plays that used to tour the country in roadshows, The Cat and the Canary (there are at least four film adaptations, including one lost to time "The Cat Creeps"), The Bat (at least two faithful versions and a zillion spinoffs) and The Gorilla. From these three basic plots spins the entire genre (just as the three in turn spring from drawing room mysteries and barnstorming Victorian melodramas). 

What makes an old dark house movie, aside from the old dark house itself? Usually there are a few recurring sinthoms: a threatening note; the reading of a will; a terrified maid; a shifty-eyed butler; a smart aleck reporter or PR agent; a gorilla; one or more secret passages; a masked madman; incompetent cops or asylum guards who might actually be escaped patients; an imperiled heiress; hidden jewels, greedy heirs forgotten in the will unless the current heir dies or is proven insane; a black cat racing up the stairs, the sound of sheet metal thunder / stock footage lightning cutaways; gnarled or furry hands reaching out towards oblivious heroines as they sleep. One or more corpses! Repeat! 

For settings they fall back to an era long before the dawn of suburban tract homes, when extended families all lived together in big cavernous houses that were passed down through generations. Today they are mostly all cut up into co-ops but some still exist. If you've ever stayed overnight in one then you know ho creepy it is just waking up in the dark and trying to find the bathroom at night. You can easily get lost in the dark, and if you hear a strange noise it's almost impossible to search everywhere; families can live comfortably together without ever seeing one another; guests can fill the rooms for long weekends of creeping around long hallways; and if the cops in the foyer hear a scream somewhere above, they may not even be able to find the one who screamed by the time they get up the stairs and down the cavernous hall; (and by the time they search the next floor, they hear a scream or a shot somewhere else, and it all starts over. Once you split up and search different rooms you may never find each other again).

The secret panels and hidden lairs are what I think most grabs me. The idea people could be watching you through the walls, and you'd never know it. Or more cozily, vice versa. If you don't believe they're real I can tell you from experience: nearly every single old mansion has them, especially if they were built before or during Prohibition; but no one thinks to look for them. They'd rather say you're crazy when you say someone peered out from behind the bookcase. I've been in two rich kid houses that had hidden rooms adjacent to their bedrooms, secret spaces so quiet and isolated you could do whatever you wanted out of sight or smell from parents and staff. Never before had I seen total freedom just a hidden door away from mind-numbing conservative patriarchal bourgeois repression (as in the hidden playroom of Holiday).

But then, in general, the old ultimate patriarch, the dying old codger in the wheelchair symbolizes the extent of social isolation, of both sides, the rich patriarch's alienating inflexibility -driving his children against him until he only sees them when he's on death's door, their hands outstretched, or the children themselves, who've shut themselves away in hidden lairs of excess, the wealth affording them the freedom to wind up utterly alone in a room full of mirrors, in each case, their massive house becomes void of all but a few weird servants who become as disturbed and jaded as the owner, sinister and paranoid, taking on the demeanor of the owner. When forced to face mortality via the old will, only then is this hermetically sealed world of long shadows and empty rooms suddenly thrown open to relatives, cops, and cameras. The cops must pick through the list of suspects in search of where the old man might have hidden the loot or who may have killed him. If you've ever gone through the effects of a dead loved one then you know the weird frisson - like investigating your mother's or father's most private life, everything that was hidden from you all your life. Now, nothing personal is off limits. That's why the number one famous last words of our modern age isn't "forgive me, father," but "hide my porn."  

THE PHANTOM
(1931) Written and Directed by Alan James
***1/2 (or * depending on your tastes)

"Say, that guy ain't no regular butler!"

The saddest eyes in show biz - Niles Welch
One of my new favorites in both the so-bad-it's-good and the old dark house genres, the surreal-comic barnstormer THE PHANTOMs (1931) clearly marked a real departure for the the mightily-titled Supreme Pictures. They made a lot of silent era westerns and serials, and a lot of their cowboy stock can be seen here, amazed and uncertain how to act, as if this isn't just the first time they've spoken out loud on film, but the first time they've been indoors for longer than it takes to rob yonder general store. Consider the opening: while the.... Phantom (the name always comes with pregnant pauses) is waiting is on death row, the chair warming up, the warden talks about the case with a reporter up in his office; someone mentions the plane buzzing the yard. Suddenlhy! Outside the window ''the Phantom" breaks jail and jumps from the big house wall onto the top of a passing train and then a biplane roars overhead and throws down a ladder. The.... Phantom reaches up, grabs the ladder and is lifted away into the air and thus to freedom! Since it has almost nothing to do with the rest of the film, and the stock seems significantly more degraded, we can't but presume the scene is lifted from one of Supreme's silent era serials (a not uncommon practice at the time). Especially if we love bad movies, of course we won't complain! We don't complain at the stock footage Ed Wood uses, it's part of the charm. Anyway, it's hard to know for sure if anything connects in... The Phantom...

The insult follows injury as we drift into loving incoherence: Though the Phantom was on all the front pages, a notorious master criminal on death row, once he escapes no one knows what he looks like! It never occurred to his jailers to take a single a mugshot. No one knows who... the Phantom... really is! All they know for sure is that, back at the time of his sentencing, he threatened to get even with the DA (Wilfred Lucas). Enter rock-hard Sgt. Collins (Tom O'Brien) who signs on to protect him and his society reporter daughter Ruth (Allene "Sweetheart of San Antonio" Ray). Her editor--the cool older dude who loves her--is sad-eyed Sam Crandall (Niles Welch -upper left). He's the coolest character in the film, just watching him waft across scenes like he's up to his knees in mud, one wonders many things about this deep-eyed actor. Did he have a death in the family before shooting started? Was he still treating early sound recording like it was 1929, when you had to speak... slowly... and... clearly with many pauses... or is he just too drunk to remember his lines and is being fed them through some whispering off camera prompter? Whatever the reason, he has a distracted, stop-starting melancholy gravitas that perfectly fits being put in the odd position of being asked by Ruth, his one true love, to promote square-jawed cub reporter, Dick (Guinn "Big Boy" Williams) so Dick can be successful enough to marry Ruth! "So... if I give Dick the job," intones Sam, gradually adding it all up for the yokels in the back row, "you and he... will be married?" (she nods, clearly thrilled). 

Just to let you know he's the real hero of the story, Sam puts Dick on the big, career-making story. And guess what that story is... Where and who... is the Phantom?!


it's a mystery this time, pardnuh! 
Poor Sam, he's really better off without her. We never get why this  Britt Reid / Lamont Cranston -style man about town would be into an overdressed, "tipsy, nicer Lina Lamont"-voiced square like Ruth, aside from she's the only girl in the movie (aside from her comic relief scared maid). Ray and Williams clearly played Supreme sweethearts of the rodeo many times before this and they fit together well (he's twice her height, it works if she stays on her horse) when Niles was probably the city slicker land grabber. For all that, Williams's hard edges help give him an inscrutable air, like the director wants us to think he might be... the Phantom... (as far as being a reporter, he doesn't give the impression he knows how to hold a pen). Both these guys do all right but Ruth has more of an adjustment moving off the silent ranch and into the sound boudoir, like she's trying to crawl out from under her blonde wave and stacks of fur wraps; her squeaky voice clashes antithetically with the heavy sense of experience she radiates, like she can't quite pick a voice or persona to bring with her into the age of sound recording and is always wishing she could just ride silently back to the saloon. Too bad she couldn't.  The Phantom was her last film until 1949. 

Supreme made naught but a handful of pictures after The Phantom and as far as I'm concerned it's a shame there's not a lot more like it from the same stock cast, as they are all--like the stars--clearly uncomfortable having to remember lines or speak clearly. Everyone plays these stock old dark house characters-- from the terrified maid to the passive-aggressive butler "James"--like they've never seen a sound movie before, lending the whole thing an endearing air of primitivism. As a result, The Phantom becomes to old dark house movies what Luigi Cozz's Hercules is to peplum or The Shaggs'Philosophy of the World to quirky pop music, in short, a kind of primitivist folk-art approximation that's way better than the more coherent but ordinary entries. This extends to Allan James' direction and the camerawork: the framing of each scene is so inept it skirts back around to brilliant. Characters swingle and dingle in corners of the screen during long static shots. Every element is slightly off, even the silence. 

Even more than most of its early sound contemporaries, 'room tone' is is almost a character in itself. Thick and hissy, it's like we're hearing what air sounds like for the first time; it's so thick we're amazed how easily people can walk through it (though speaking is often slowed, careful, as if they don't... quite.... trust... that words will carry through this thick aether). And the way each character deals with it is unique.

There's something cool about cops trusting the adult judgement of civilians (including giving them guns); I like that nearly everyone is armed, like they'd be in a western, and everyone has no problem barging in places, skulking in and out of passageways and swimming through the thick crackling and hissing air; and it's meant to be a mystery, so you can't tell if Dick is... the Phantom, or Sam Crandall, or is it that short guy who runs around with his face covered in a black slouch hat and a cape pulled under his hawklike nose so he looks just like The Shadow crossed with Chico Marx (Sheldon Lewis). Waving his big oogie-boogie hands at either Ray or the terrified maid, one suspects him of being..... the Phantom.... but is he?


The dialogue is weird, too (including the first time I've heard the use of the word "cool" in a behavioral context in any 30s film, allowing suspicion to flood the motivations of nearly every character. the relationships are very vague. For proof, here's one of the great, surreal exchanges of vague dialogue; this between Hampton the DA, and Niles' enigmatic editor:
Niles:"Well Mr. Hampton, I'm sure you'd like to know what this is all about."
Hampton:"Yes... I would."
Niles:"Well.... I'll be very glad to explain it."
Hampton:"Good... come on and sit down."
Niles; "OK"
(cut - we never hear him explain, etc.)
Beholding the row of failed brain transplants

Then there's the climax at the mysterious private rest home, an amazingly dark hall of odd shadows with a dream-like massive palm frond-bedecked reception/waiting area, a hidden operating room, and secret passages. Ruth pretends to have fainted to warrant their barging in; out of the woodwork (in some cases literally) creeps storky William Jackie. With buggy Bruce Spence reptilian eyes and and the kind of lean tall body where, were he to turn sidewise, he might well disappear, Jackie speaks in either a terrible or genuine Swedish accent with a bunch of fractured possible clues buried in his dialogue. 

Note his surreal exchange with Dick, who insists on staying on script with his answers, regardless of what the crazy Swede might say:

Jackie: "Shhhhh- dis here's a crazy hoose: there's tree tousah why hunda why a men her 
Big Boy: "What... What did you say his last name was?" 

       Jackie: I say Dere's 7,777 seasick men here and dere all crazy, like me." 

        Big Boy: ohh

Jackie: You know my son, he is the daughter of this here stable." (etc.)
The finale gets even 'crazier' once Ruth is spirited away to the secret chamber operating room by the brain transplant enthusiast Dr. Elden, who mulls over the shelf of skulls from his failed attempts with his fey lab partner Alphonse. What's truly crazy is that this guy is running an asylum but, if he's the Phantom, no one ever noticed he was also on death row, especially not his two assistants, the freaky Chico Marx as the Shadow guy (Sheldon Lewis) and naughty Frenchman Alphonse (uncredited). It seem unlikely that they were the ones who busted him out, so the end reveal holds naught together. 

The craziness is whole-hog when, moving shakily down the long 'shock corridor' in the dead of night, trying to find the abducted Ruth by shouting her name as he walks down the hall, Dick is handed a note from one of the doors, reading: "She's in Uncle Tom's cabin." Outside in the garden, the chauffeur is knocked out (by someone else) but wakes up and blames the stork-stepping Jackie and they get in a fight which Jackie presumes is just playful sconce bonking. The end finds the endangered Ruth stalling in the operating chamber while Dick tries to get the secret door combination from Jackie, who would rather tell him the story of "a-Yack and Yill."

The fistfights are all sped up and clearly unchoreographed but it's fun to watch everyone chase each other around sofas and operating tables and all the other nonsense, fake fighting in the way we used to do it in my old super-8mm action films. Still nothing compares to those great, sad cutaways to Niles, whose monotone expression as Sam Crandall never changes, looking stricken with his eyes wide as if he might any minute be revealed as... the Phantom. For some reason he's smart enough to know that the hot tip about the mental asylum is worth investigating... rather than a lure from... the Phantom, and he brings the cops and the DA along for the ride. 

The big reveal is that though old Same seems to know all about what's going on well before we or anyone else does: "Print that "Phantom" story just as I laid it out, credit... Dick Mallory." He's not the Phantom but just a lovestruck hangdog dude who wants the apple of his eye to be happy... even if it is without him. In other words, Dick Mallory didn't write it, Sam wrote it, but Dick gets the credit so he can marry the girl the guy Sam loves... "and take a few weeks vacation to get married" - that's how you tell a mensch, he loves her so he steps aside. Sam, I say to the screen, don't worry. With those sad Irish eyes and that tony power position, you're going to get plenty of dolls on your dance card, with less squeaky-doll voices (but for Asher, alas, nothing more in the way of work after this than a few minor parts, just like Ray... and nearly everyone else).

You might think I've flipped being so into this bad film, and maybe I have. Haven't you?

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DRUMS OF JEOPARDY
(1930) Dir. George B. Seitz
***

It's never been on TCM... or DVD, or VHS, or TV, but one can find the 1931 Return of Fu Manchu if one looks hard enough (I finally got to see it on Youtube a few months ago but then it was gone again) and one should. Until then, Drums of Jeopardy offers basically the same plot, and Oland seems to have just as much drunken fun there as he does as crafty Fu, in a very similar plot line. In many scenes in both his eyes glisten with the ecstasy of drink. By day he was playing good guy Charlie Chan over at Fox, by night he was slinking out to wreak havoc as Fu Manchu or--in this case, master chemist Boris Karloff. Enraged by his daughter's pregnant suicide (she won't name names, but she's hiding a clue, the famous necklace, the "Drums of Jeopardy," a Petrov family heirloom, no doubt stolen and given to her by the craven father; so he crashes a dinner party and stares down the entirety of Russian aristocracy, demanding the guilty Petrov step forward. He doesn't, but Karloff knows it's one of them, so why not kill them all.... one at a time...one to each brother, and father, in return, as receiving one of the "drums" (supposed to denote immanent death --hence the name). Convenient coincidence? Maybe. But very cool. 

Petrov's scene at the restaurant gets him hauled off to jail but.. in a purloined letter brought to the now Moriarty-like Karlov by his right hand man Mischa Auer, we learn he later escaped jail to become a leader of the Bolshevik secret police. He's now hunting Petroffs all over Europe, with a small but very capable squad of men at his command. Very cool. The letter also says what boat to America the remaining Petroffs are taking to escape, allowing Karlov a chance to prepare a warm reception.  

As with the Oland's Fu Manchu films, his motivation may be grief (unlike the Sax Rohmer Fu), but he's clearly having a blast and we're rooting for him and his Trotsky-like right hand man (Mischa Auer) all the way, and relishing how they manage to have all the luck (like when the comic relief auntie is sent in her nightgown out to the streets to find a doctor and she runs right into Auer). and loathe the bland and bickering Petroffs and their flatline American aides. even though he takes way too long to kill the final one good Petroffs, allowing him chance to escape with the random girl who dared to help him by calling the cops when he showed up shot and disoriented in her apartment after another failed attempt.  The bland good may prevail but whatever, the atmosphere is plenty thick, and there's cool moments like sharing a cigarette with the Nayland Smith equivalent (who trusts it's not poisoned as that would be "too easy") 

Oland can get great mileage out of little lines.

"They sent me for a doctor," Auer tells him in their hideout a block or two away.
"Well" says Karlov, "we must not disappoint them." He turns and looks back, "get my hat and coat and my bag... my black bag. "

The endangered Petroff is surprised to see Karlov leaning down over him when they arrive, the comic relief aunt fretting as she shoos them in: "you don't think he's going to die?" 
Karrov: "that would not surprise me... at all."

Too bad then, that the Nayland Smith character arrives to chase them away! But they're not gone long. The Amazon Prime print is pretty good, so dig in! 


HOUSE OF MYSTERY
(1934) Dir. William Nigh
**1/2 / Amazon Image - C-

"Hindus! Tom toms! Apes! Haunted Houses!"

the posters for this film are lame so I figured I'd show
this (Mike Kaluta?) salvia hallucination comic book cover
There's a lot going on with John Pryn (Clay Clement), a super shady archaeologist who robs an ancient temple in India. He's such an entitled colonialist shit he whips the high priest with a riding crop, causing the old man's prayer bead necklace to break (the beads scatter down the temple steps dramatically). No one seems willing to stop him, the temple dancer girl Chanda (Joyzelle Joyner) likes him and helps him outrun the temple's pet gorilla. Rather than worry about getting the jewels back, the priest just levies "the Curse of Ka-La" --all who gain from his theft will die horrible deaths at the hands of some giant ape or other (what else do you want from an old dark house movie?). It can only be... "the curse of Ka-LA!" 

Years later the man finally agrees to share his stolen treasure with all of his expedition's investors (or their heirs). The catch, they must remain in his gloomy mansion with him for one year to um.... protect themselves from the curse of Ka-la! Naturally they all start dying in mysterious ways, and what's up with that motionless stuffed (?) ape in the library? And why does he have Chanda around as a kind of spiritual housekeeper/mistress. What's her deal (she can't be an out and out mistress or wife --miscegenation was still illegal in southern states.) ? And the sound of the drums... of Ka-La keep pounding when it's time for another killing. It's impoverished and star-starved but it does zip along. The only caveat is the annoying young insurance salesman heir as the ostensible hero. He thinks he's mighty irresistible, hitting on the now crippled Mr. Pryn's cute nurse. She tries to ward him off but where's she gonna go to get away? Urgh. So dated. Luckily he has just enough of Jackie Oakie dab about his cheeks and stances. 

The archaic early sound makes sure long pauses occur between each sentence (it seems much earlier than 1934). The long rambling scene of Pryn rattling off the terms of his share giving and the terrible curse is a great time to get popcorn or go the bathroom. Exchanges like: "Chanda is a strange person." / "Person? hah! She looks more like Gandhi's ghost" are pretty offensive. Luckily, the sharp-tongued old broad married to the fuddy-duddy professor has some good lines and there's an unspoken lesbian vibe between the faux hypochondriac  psychic"companion" who calls on her control, Pocahontas a lot, leading to great exchanges between "them" like asking Pocahontas "What is that which afflicts our nostrils and enervates our senses?" / "This night," answers Pocahontas "one of you will go behind the veil."

Meanwhile everyone not currently dead regularly dim the light for seances with the kooky psychic in the pitch dark until the psychic herself gets a giant ape neck snap. There's a looney plumber with a big cigar and a funny Vaudeville patter. The overblown comedy of the dopey cop ("There's been a murder committed here... Who did it?"). As with all these kinds of things, there's not a lot of tears shed for those gone beyond the veil and the three cops are each stupider than the last... in fact, this is almost a copy of the Gorilla, except instead of Bela Lugosi as a sardonic butler, there's a dopey plumber walking around with a stogie, and... of course... Chanda, a very interesting character in how she ultimately last man stands her way to glory! 

THE WAYNE MURDER CASE
(aka Strange Adventure)
(1932) Dir. Phil Witman
*** / Amazon Prime - C

It's of special interest since the reporter is very smart and cool and a girl; she's not afraid to scoop all her fellow journalists, yet they all think she's regular. There are a few knowing glances between her and her cop boyfriend and they both definitely know how to ferret out clues and sneak around the big empty house undetected to spy on murders, murderers, and tip-toeing suspects. In fact this is about the easiest piece of detective work ever since there's no dopey habit of being constantly in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gal reporter "Nosy" Noodles (June Clyde) and cop boyfriend Mitchell (Regis Toomey) swap banter and he threatens to take her over his knee if she doesn't keep out of his way as he ponders documents and sends chicken-eating coppers to round up the gathered throng. Both Mitchell and Nosy have skills as far as how watch without being detected, leading to a lot of cool little scenes of watching Nosy watch people creep around in order to pounce on each other, kind of like "Sleep No More" if you ever went to that. The old duffer, Silas Wayne, who kicks is a hateful fool so we surely don't mourn him and there's all sorts of great little touches, like wry bit of fake jewel substitution: Silas realizes his big rock is a glass fake, then the secretary deftly swaps the real one so Silas re-test it, then puts the fake one back in the safe and Silas tests it again and its fake, thus sending for the cops but then he's dead!! And Dwight Frye plays the romantic gigolo nephew. It's barely over an hour and there's a gooney dude in overisize hood and black sleeves, waving his arms around.




With racist butlering ministered by 'Snowflake.' He misidentifies a suit of armor as a "night-guard" amongst other things. 

MURDER BY THE CLOCK
(1931) Dir. Edward Sloman
**1/2 / Youtube Image - C

I've long been a proponent of this one, which to my recollection has never been shown on TV, either on TCM or back in the UHF era, and has never been on VHS or even some misbegotten Alpha DVD. For a long time the only proof it even existed was a loving write-up in a classic horror film book I had as a child.  Few critics have written about it, or waxed sufficiently euphoric over the gleeful performance of Lilyan Tashman as the evil and conniving Laura, conniving wife of lily-livered Herbert (Walter McGrail), nephew of the bossy premature burial-fearing matriarch Julia (Blanche Friderici) of the once-prominent Endicott clan (their memory evokes Ambersons-style magnificence in the mind of the cemetery groundskeeper across the street). Today, the big house holds only Julia, her only son, a totally deranged but childlike simpleton (hammed through the roof and beyond by the great Irving Pichel) with immense crushing power in his strong hands, and the no-nonsense housekeeper, who has to regularly check the 'alarm horn' inside Julia's waiting tomb (fun fact: being buried alive wasn't uncommon in the 1800s and early 1900s, leading to a craze for burial horns, visible windows in coffins, easy-escape tombs, etc i.e. Poe wasn't the only one to become obsessed by the terrifying idea). Anyway, what sets the dastardliness of Murder By the Clock in motion is Julia's foolish idea to--after a bickering row with the maid one afternoon and realizing the house would go to brain dead Pichel when she dies, Julia makes the mistake of changing her will over to her spineless louse nephew Herbert her prime beneficiary! Not smart, Julia! She's murdered the night she signs the will... like clockwork! Are we going to hear her funeral horn in the third act? I'll never tell. But I will say it would be a great old dark house just between Julia's morbid rantings, Pichel's lunatic laughter, the eerie graveyard across the street, and all the midnight creeping around the old mansion. But then you add the divine Tashman. Oh! Oh, that Lilyan.

 

Plying her strange seductive charms with all the subtlety of a punch in the face, Tashman proves one thing ably: shy men will always let themselves be manipulated by sexually forward women... they're just so grateful not to have to bust the first move. It can be oh so tough for shy guys to resist such a girl, even (or maybe especially) if she's only slightly attractive (i.e. 'ugly-sexy'). If a really beautiful woman comes onto a man who isn't used to it, the effect can be a kind of uncontrollable terror, stammering and running out the door (followed by weeks of self-reproach). If the shy guy and the hot girl do end up having sex, it's never any good. See, the hot girl is used to being bedded by expert seducers, which means they're more like wine snobs rather than just normal gals dying of thirst. A shy guy is too inexperienced to measure up, and on her end, she's never learned to be grateful, been sex-starved, eager to please. But an ugly-sexy lady like Tashman, a cop might figure he could let her seduce him and then arrest her. And that's why she's so dangerous. Over the course of the film she first manipulates her husband into killing Julia, then after she's dead, manipulates her sculptor lover into killing her husband. Pichel is blamed for Julia's murder - jailed on suspicion. Tashman's Laura comes to visit him and true to its (pre)code, lets him all but molest her through the bars while convincing him to break out (he can bend the bars with ease) and kill her husband, and/or her sculptor lover - whichever is still alive by then. So he's got every man killing every other man to be with her, just throwing them all into the big gloomy house, hoping none of them will live long enough to rat her out. Hot damn this lady rulez!

And ultimately the thing is, there is no hero or romantic lead to root for which makes it kind of a strange ride: all the men are easily seducible murderers. Only the homicide cop on the case, the Bickford-esque William Boyd, has any integrity.  Julia may have the other sucker's snowed with her ugly-sexy seductive pre-code wiles, but he's not having it. Still, he admires her powerfully for trying; some might say Boyd brought a little bit of her to Zolok, the evil ruler of The Lost City (1935), the glint of feral madness in the eyes, maybe. 

Welcome to the Zugsmithery: SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE (1960)

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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.)

And she's not the only assett: a stunning Tuesday Weld is the hitherto raining beauty queen. (she accuses Van Doren of "making every other woman in the world feel flat-chested"). Weld has been trying to get lumpen football star "Woo-Woo" (Norman Grabowski) to try at least for first base rather than just running off in a stuttering virgin panic. Trying to help Weld out, Dr. Mamie gives him some good counsel --just one of the surprising moments van Doren handles with a sensitive aplomb worthy of a real therapist, yet hitting all the right comedic notes with a deadpan feather ("boys with nicknames are usually sensitive"). No wonder he ends up falling for her instead of Weld, but it hardly matters. There's too much else going on as the film slowly builds to one of the stateroom scene-style 'everyone onstage' madhouses. One can't forget (though she doesn't make much of an impression) Maila "Vampira" Nurmi is around as a sexually frustrated lab assistant. And there's so much more. 

Mijanou, in a nice color photo (I couldn't find a good Sex Kittens still

For all Van Doren's range, the secondary romantic lead, Mijanou Bardot (Brigitte's sister!) basically steals the bulk of the sex appeal as a Russ Meyer heroine-style, sexually voracious exchange student out to bed a cross-section of ze American male for her term paper. The forthright way she explores a cross-section of manhood for her term paper is inspiring, the stuff of semi-terrified fantasy. She ends up zeroing in on a "real live Chicago gangster" in the form of Allan Drake as "Legs" --whose squeamish semi-reticence is met with bewildered academic urgency ("Do you want to set science back thirty years!?") He and his pal are there to lean on this guy "Thinko" whose been gambling rather too successfullu Though far from the most interesting of the Mad style cacaphony of crazy characters, Drake's rattled "Legs" becomes more interesting purely through his gradual tolerance of Bardot's unswerving affection, eventually, like some Anna Karina anti-heroine, she joins the bad guys ("This dialogue, pure Roaring 20s, no?!)

"I"One of the most possible people you'll ever meet."
"One of the most possible people you'll ever meet" 

And that's good Legs comes around and conquers his sexual panic. Hey, you'd be surprised how many normally red-blooded American males can't handle a beautiful girl suddenly throwing herself at him like a freight train. A man might fantasize all through his pained adolescence about such moments, but if one actually comes, it's--and Lacanians know this all too well--his reaction isn't aggressive cool, but panicky; he starts to stutter, spills his drink, and before you know it, finds himself running away, covered in sweat, desperate to get home and begin his lifetime of self-reproach over this this chickening out. To go from tortured adolescent longing for this golden chance to tortured adult regret about blowing it is almost a rite of passage; hopefully one can glean the message - you are a complicated person and the unconscious half of yourself is a spiteful anima out to keep you for herself, so she can occasionally creep up from the attic and molest you while you dream. This is the comedic gold mine understood only by a chosen few in the comedy business. College is, in this film, the zone of endless Lacanian objet petit a proximity; campus life is visualized as a zone where fantasy is freely imagined by those who have only been there in passing and thought 'man if I was in college I could score with all these chicks' and suddenly they have to put up or shut up.  The women--namely van Doren, Weld and Bardot--have all the brains and assertive libidos, and the men are reduced to terrified deer in the headlights. Such is the Russ Meyer-esque vein mined by Albert Confessions of an Opium Eater Zugsmith in the long-derided Sex Kittens Go to College. 

L-R: Tuesday, Mijanot, Mamie
I don't have all the answers; I have no idea why this awesome comedy gets such a bad critical rap, unless male critics are too threatened by the idea of a genius bombshell who's not evil, passive, helpless, materialistic, or moronic. As of this writing it has a 2.2 on imdb. and Lenny Maltin gives it a BOMB ("don't say you weren't warned!"); Glenn Erikson says "Compared to Sex Kittens, Otto Preminger's Skiddoois a profound statement on the human condition." An uncredited imdb writer calls it "one of the most legendarily worst films ever produced." But I say, if you've been to college and like to get wasted and love Russ Meyer, Ed Wood, and Roger Corman, used to read Mad and Cracked then at least consider checking it out. I think a lot of these low budget zany comedies get a bad rap, especially if they don't have big recognizable directors (like Frank Tashlin or George Axelrod) so that critics can guess how they're supposed to respond right away. This isn't a guffaw style comedy, but how often did we laugh reading Mad as kids? 2/3 of the time we didn't even get the jokes. We had no idea what they were talking about running satires of films far too dry and adult for our interest, like The Sandpiper and The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.  Some comedies don't have to be funny. Ask Albert Zugsmith, the strange figure who could go from producing films like Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind, to directing unclassifiable strangeness like Confessions of an Opium Eater, The Beat Generation, and Sex Kittens Go to College. He also produced Russ Meyer's Fanny Hill! 

If you don't see that list is all connected, then you need to learn so very much about the spirit of revolutionary cinematic anarchy in the service of sexual stimulation. (Behind me right as I wrote that phrase a Quaker Oats commercial said "Where new normals are created.") That's the beauty of the Zugsmith touch.  Watching Vincent Price sailing madly down the sewer towards Frisco Bay oblivion in Opium Eater for example, leaves us more questions than answers (it a horror film? A white slavery expose? A surreal odyssey worthy of Bunuel? 

It is all that and more; it's the Zugsmithery. 

The simple fact is, there are so many things to zero in on here in the Zugsmithery that if one element annoys you, there are ten more to delight or flabbergast. For me the annoying element is Van Doren's assigned romantic lead, college PR rep Martin Milner (the supposedly hip jazz guitarist who had to have weed planted on him in Sweet Smell of Success). Talking fast in a kind of high-voiced style, sort of imitating Cary Grant at his most flummoxed in Arsenic and Old Lace, Milner tries to steal scenes as if he;s feeling the need to give the film a square white fall guy center, to link the film to every other banal desperately mansplaining-flooded "sex" comedy flatlining on big screens around America at the end of the 1950s. Tather than letting the women rule as they do anyway, Milner lets a kind desperate flop sweat reduce his square lead idiot to tatters. That said, he still comes out a few yards ahead of Eliot Reid's smarmy detective in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as far as worst male counterpart to a busty comedic titan

There's one other caveat: I also don't like the cop-out ending (SPOILER ALERT!), when Mamie hangs up her shingle and goes back to Vegas to continue her tassle-tossing, so that Milner can romance her without feeling threatened. When she says "for the first time I feel like I'm really using my brain" one wants to track down writer Robert Hill and beat him senseless (I feel the same way at the end of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls when smarmy David Gurian is accepted back into the fold and the lesbians are blamed for their own deaths.)  Ugh! If there's one thing I loathe it's those smug white privilege-touting SWMs (i.e. Smug WASP Morons), often young men with clean cut hair and a pipe and an unearned lordly air, as if they believe the Madison Avenue plastic fantastic wave that tells them they--by virtue of their educated SWM status-- are in charge of any other genders and races they might encounter, determined to solve whatever bothers them until their comfortable patriarchal homogenization reasserts itself. Sure, not all these guys are insufferable; watching them today becomes more insufferable with every passing day of my work's sensitivity training. Ugh! (Of you can't get enough of my ravings on the topic, check out: CinemArchetype 13: The Skeevy Boyfriend. and Vanishing Caloric Density: The Queen of Outer Space.

 Luckily, balancing out Milner's forced hysteria, there's wondrously wry turns by Jackie Coogan as Admiral "Wildcat" McPherson (borrowing W.C. Field's drawl wholesale as the college's financial underwriter) and John Carradine, proving he isn't limited to shady butlers and secondary Draculas as a professor. Turns out Carradine is adept as hell at deadpan comedy as one of Mamie's firm supporters. Unthreatened by her mix of sex appeal and brains he calls her "a positive vision" while helping her into his faculty-packed jalopy (her chimp sidekick sneaks into the rumble seat) for a night of buzzed carousing (or  "simple homespun country fun" as he assures her) at local college tavern, "the Passion Pit." To overcome any further doubts as to her qualifications as either genius or stripper, she hypnotizes the gathered faculty and patrons to join her in a crazy rhumba. Conway Twitty watches, moved, and sings. But that doesn't phase the benevolent and respectful ardor of the older men, who are--essentially--too debauched to be troublesome (the greatest libertines never mash or paw; they lean in only to spook off the riff-raff). 

Small bit parts and great lines float around ("I'm a selectman of the church!" rants the cop who arrests the admiral when his morality is on the ropes); Charlie Chaplin Jr. (as a bewildered fire chief); the imposing and magnificently bullhorn-voiced Babe London, who arrives in town representing "the Paddy Pad Brassier for the larger figures gal"  - At the end she's heading off once more into the great beyond: "You people don't deserve Paddy Pads! I'm taking my brassieres to Europe where they'll be appreciated!")

And over all, it's one of those great fantasies where all the women are stacked and leggy, and the men well-written and acted (Milner aside) nincompoops. With poops like Coogan and Carradine, how bad can things get, no matter how much Milner dashes around like some kind of universal chaperone (telling Jayne "You are a bit much for a growing boy to face at nine-AM in the morning.") or the flash-frozen "Woo Woo" mopes and Moranises? Sure, the ending is total chaos as all the disparate parts come together in a big science lab/classroom climax (with the gangsters and Thinko finally squaring off) but at least half the gags hit home and if you don't really laugh, well, one of the beautiful gals is usually onscreen to rest your eyes on while you wait for the next zany character to come tumbling into the scene. For all its faults, I think I like it better, as a whole, than either Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (which has an icky homophobic/misogynist subtext) or The Girl Can't Help It (which has an icky Tom Ewell smarm). Sure it's not as good as Lord, Love a Duck but what is? Even that's not perfect, though it sure is Milnerless.

 The question is, does Sex Kittens link up with Opium to delineate and auteur style for the Zugsmith? Maybe not, but it does indicate a termite interest in veering from audience expectation and letting the sewer carry us where it may. If Vincent Price were to show up, waving an opium pipe as he sails past, we might well find one. I don't think he is going to make it, but really, it's probably just because he was under AIP contract and in 1960 was making House of Usher.  Hey, maybe I am crazy or just benefitted from a nice buzz and low expectations. I think you can't pin high hopes on it, it's not any better than Invasion of the Star Creatures but if you tolerate that, there's plenty of galakazoom and maybe even some ringy-dink; best of all there's full-bodied and nuanced performances from Bardot (casually carnal), Van Doren (sensitive and balanced - she talks, not shouts, further stranding the sub-par actors--Milner in the ham flats) and Weld (less to do than in Duck but still ravishing with some good rapport with Van Doren--with whom she remained fast friends--and Bardot, who together have a kind of sisterly ruling benevolence, watching over the male college co-eds and faculty the way proud cowboys watch over the herd in Red River. Even with the cop-out coda, this baby isn't Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, this here's the Pussycat! 
 



The Swirling Mists of Chu Yuan: 70s Shaw Brothers Wuxia on Prime: SENTIMENTAL SWORDSMAN (Trilogy) HEAVEN SWORD AND DRAGON SABRE (1&2)

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There are seemingly hundreds of old Shaw Brothers kung fu and wuxia films on Prime, enough in fact you can find a whole sub-school of them that fit your exact likes for your own massive bender. Me, I avoid the "Shaolin" ones, full of sweaty young bald dudes smacking each other and going through their callow revenge/shame-training montages in bright exteriors, with nary a female marital artist in sight. These are usually dubbed, often badly, with the same nasally Brit doing half the characters. I prefer the more esoteric "swordplay thriller" wuxia, from Shaw Brothers, in Cantonese with gorgeously-lit nights rich with elaborate decor, expansive sets, swirling mists, and strong female characters as deadly as their male counterparts, or more so. The best and weirdest are ussually directed by Chu Yuan (aka Yuen Chor) you know it's one of his when an old woman might triumph in a fight to the death with three experienced male martial arts heroes, as in the climax of The Proud Twins). The Chu Yuan output can be uneven, but generally come stocked with dazzling swordplay, wire-aided spins, jumps and kicks, recurring characters, period fantasy garb where everyone is dressed like gossamer princesses and plots that avoid corrupt governments and peasant exploitation in favor of cool supernaturally-tinged mysteries, where all the food is poisoned by smiling princesses and "Devil Grandma" and everyone is challenging each other to duels over magical weapons and hidden kung fu manuals as the plum blossoms shed their snowy petals in a slow, regular rain against the gorgeous soundstage night sky. Heroes wander from one beautiful background to another as they seek to level up against the one or two ranked swordsmen left to challenge their skills. There's seldom any vengeance to seek beyond some ancient grudge of the hero's teacher or parents passed on to the next generation. The battles tend towards almost Leone-level cool (Leone is clearly a big influence on Yuan, to the point that in many films hero Ti Lung walks around in a Clint Eastwood pancho) and Hawks-level gallant, wry professionalism between foes. Rather than duplicating some past reality, Yuan's wuxias snake through a land of mysticism, strange invincible light-shooting weapons, with colored Bava-style gel lights running through vast impeccably-lit soundstages that seem to stretch out to the infinite and--during magic hour shots created by a blazing visible circle of orange studio light--create a rarefied neither/or space that, to me, evokes the essence of my favorite dreams.

Also, they've probably never looked better than they do now, via Prime's seemingly endless collection of HD prints coming in on the Celestial Pictures distribution label. Since Shaw studios cranked out so many of these, they wisely kept all their sets seemingly mostly standing, connected to each other so they often seem to occur in the same netherworld of ornate plum blossom-filled gardens, temple ruins, secret lairs all aglow in foggy green and purple gel spot lighting, waterfalls, cliff face alcoves, little green water pools in the rock, meditation chambers, secret caves, ancient ruins, bamboo forests, indoor/outdoor restaurants, brothels, gambling dens, palace reception halls, booby trap-filled hallways, clan meeting halls, thief-filled roadside inns, and mystical fox ghost dens. While the more fight scene-centric Shaolin films seem to forego beauty in the name of athleticism, the Chu Yuan swordsman thrillers all keep the focus on the beauty, the strange characters, droll wit, and elaborate charade-style plots where one mystery reveal tops another, and every setting has its own colorfully-named gang of killers waiting in ambush. Swordsmen heroes uncover elaborate assassination plots, protect invincible clan weapons, search for lost siblings, discover long-missing kung fu manuals (and attain the mystical powers therein overnight), and above all, seek vengeance the one opponent who can finally give them a real challenge to their acquired skills. Some of these champions and villains have chi of such power the practitioner glows red and shoot rays of light out of their palms. They can all jump straight up two or more stories, do endless midair flips and super high kicks (via unseen wires) and all regularly take mid-fight breaks for bits of conversation confessing elaborate crimes, making grand threats, and/or professing innocence and being set up before resuming rounds of high-wire swordplay and kung fu combat.



Here are some of my favorites (all on Prime), and of course, check out my round-up of more fantastical supernatural based wuxias from my last big wuxia bender: Wild Wild Wuxia!

 THE SENTIMENTAL SWORDSMAN 
(1977) Dir. Chu Yuan (aka Yuen Chor)
***
Sentiment is not always a plus in the martial arts world, or so the bad guy--the evil Plum Blossom Bandit--says to the venerable ace swordsman hero Chi Lu-hsiang (the venerable Ti Lung) after praying on his sense of honor and loyalty. Now in self-imposed exile from his wealth and lady love, the venerable Chi Lu just coasts around for ten years, knocking back jugs wine, pontificating with Taoist realizations in that unique 'talking to the air' Ti Lung way, and slowly getting a Doc Holiday style consumptive cough. Since he's ranked the #3 best martial artist in the world he has to duel constantly; he prefers to gaze wistfully at the plum blossoms, or watch the world go in fitful fights and boasts behind his back at the bar. He drinks because his one true love wishes she was with him instead of the husband she has, the friend Chi Liu gave his everything to out of gratitude ten years ago. Or is that --like many alcoholics (myself included)-- he'd rather drink to to numb the pain of losing his only love than get the love back, even if she's right there, pining for him in lonely solitude. If that sounds like Geoffrey Firmin to you, then, cheers, old man! It maybe sounds like me, too. Or any drunk.

Cool characters include Lin Xanier, the whore of martial arts world,  offering to marry the man who finds and kills the Plum Blossom Bandit. She's contrasted w the modest beauty of the sad, sober creature Lin Hsin-ehr (Li Cheng) pointlessly sweeping up this empty courtyard, for no conceivable reason, waiting for Chi Liu to return to his home, the beautiful estate he gave up out of his woefully misguided sentiment.  



The ironies compound: despite the title, Chi Lu doesn't even carry a sword, preferring to parry with his fan. He bats his opponents around, blocks strokes with his fan (folded), and when things get tiring, just whips it open, wizzing some of the darts out of the folds, killing his foe instantly via at least one to the neck, the opened fan bearing the words: "Little Li's Darts That Never Miss." Who would want to duel with a guy who does that? Isn't that cheating? Either way, he's doing a lot of killing with those darts --a bunch of martial arts social climbers have been duped into thinking he's the Plum Blossom Bandit (who throws poison plum blossom darts and dresses like a pink ninja). Luckily a young bumpkin wanderer-- the irrepressible Ah Fei (Derek Yee)-- shows to cover Chi Lu's back. Other bad guys include a fake plum blossom bandit, a despicable old member of the 'Seven Incredible Men' who poisons Li's wine, and a doctor who notes that "Nothing is better than drinking to death" and then cures Master Li with another glass of wine! You were poisoned by wine and the cure is more wine! "Why would trivial matters such as life and death get in the way of drinking?" Lu gets it; he keeps drinking though his consumptive coughing (or is it an ulcer?). Whatever the reason, he doesn't let it stop him. Go for it, bro!

Under Chu Yuan's direction, the rich atmosphere and expansive shadowy, mist and water-enshrouded indoor/outdoor sets keep the eye continually seduced, like cold wine down a parched throat after walking out of the hot sun into a chilly lounge, with just the right amount of wit, mystery, exotic atmosphere, emotional sweep, and Sergio Leone-style cool dude posturing to keep one's attention.

Cons: There are two too many draggy moments between Li and his "past in the past" philosophy as he refuses to even talk about how why he gave away his wealth, woman and house ten years ago. Another rarity: lots of exterior shots -- a relative rarity in the Yuanverse-- as they walk to Wudang Mountain to see if Li is the Plum Blossom Bandit. We get lots of long shots of these traveling heroes in dwindling numbers walking all the way to Wudang, and not eating for many days  (they keep running into the Five Poisons Kid, who manages to poison everything in advance of their arrival). Fights are all on the soundstage but occasionally cut to outside (and there's a comparative lack of mist and moody atmosphere compared to the other two films in the trilogy, though still plenty compared to any non-Yuan).


THE RETURN OF THE SENTIMENTAL SWORDSMAN
(1981) Dir. Chu Yuan (aka Yuen Chor)
***1/2

"There is no truth in the marital arts world - only dead people, gold, and fame"

Correctly considered one of the few sequels better than the first. Laden with swirling mists and plum blossom evenings ("they've bloomed too soon," notes Ah Fei "and will die sooner.") it has an almost mystical reverence for alcohol coupled to savvy awareness of the process of alcohol addiction (and evocations of Rio Bravo and My Darling Clementine). Rather than any Plum Blossom bandit (the masked pink ninja villain of the first film) it's the real plum blossoms that count here, seen at night, under softly falling snow, amidst tiny waterfalls and glowing lanterns, with mist rolling over the ground. The beautiful plum blossom trees of his estate being in bloom in in fact what lures ever-drinking and coughing titular swordsman Chi Lu (Ti Lung again) back home, where his lady love still hopes he'll come back to live finally. But Chi Lu is also looking for trusty Ah Fei, who's been missing from the martial arts world for awhile. Where did he go? He's cohabitating with that slutty martial art groupie Lin Xanier (Linda Chu) and has become a tranquil nonviolent early-to-bed health nut, spending his days counting the plum blossom blooms, blinded by love and tranquilized by the drugs she spikes his tea with at night so he falls asleep way early and she can sneak down to the whorehouse and whoop it up with the head of the Money Clan! Once he finds out, heartbroken Ah Fei plunges into alcohol addiction and winds up imprisoned in the Money Clan's brothel, groveling around on the carpet for a drink as the prostitute's laugh and pour wine in his face. We're reminded of the opening of Rio Bravo, especially at the climax when Tung Li's lady love brings Ah Fei his old clothes and sword after he's finally sobered enough to join his old friend in a duel at Summit Mountain. The duel is set at dawn, and the Money Clan leader's golden robe looks great in that artificial early light as the red sun pierces through the mists and trees, the sky gradually getting brighter as the duel wages on, 


While the echoes of Rio Bravo are clear, there is also evidence of Chu's familiarity with the Sergio Leone westerns: various Morricone-esque electric guitar and weird rhythmic strains erupt on the during big duel squaring-off staring contests. There's also a nod to the numbering system with each martial artist ranked fourth or fifth and all trying to climb the top and go up against #1, or at least the next person up, evoking the yakuza films of Seijin Suzuki. What a world! As with the first Sentimental film, there might be one too many frustrating melancholy exchanges between Chi Liu and his glum platonic love, but the scenery is gorgeous and Yuan knows how to parlay the need for fighting and position jostling amongst martial artists into an endlessly fascinating series of sword battles --Leone-like exchanges of midnight cool, honor and last words amidst the blossoms. Fights on a silent flowing stream, each fight better than the last. More slow motion than one might expect for a Shaw Brothers film. But hey.



----

PERILS OF THE SENTIMENTAL SWORDSMAN
(1982) Dir. Chu Yuan (Yuen Chor)
****

Perils of the Sentimental Swordsman skips the mopey romantic Chi-Liu drama of the previous two films and works as a stand-alone adventure, with Ti Lung returning as Chi-Liu-Hsiang, going undercover as a villain who needs to flee the reach of the law in order to infiltrate the 'Ghostly Village,' a kind of hard-to-find extradition-free settlement that one has to walk across clouds to find. A really cool place, it recalls the fox ghost realm of Yuan's Full Moon Scmitar (1979) coupled to the rocky and oh-so hip Bat Island in another Chi-Liu Hisiang stand-alone adventure, Legend of the Bat (1978). Any place where the first thing the guide shows you after you cross the 'Valley of the Shadow' into the Ghostly Village is the liquor store ("Hell's Cellar." announces their Charon-like guide. "Do you need to buy any wine?") is all right with me. His fame preceding him,  Lu gets handed a gorgeous little pad, with a servant ("this is a blanket") and neighbors that include a mincing gay stereotype, a foxy siren known as "The General," and a wild gambling lunatic played by the irrepressible Lo Lieh. Turns out the masked 'phantom' who runs the place is organizing a revolution out in the real world, so they can all come back to 'Earth' without fear of incarceration. 


The thing is, who is a spy for the current throne and who isn't? People try and confess being a spy to out each other, so who can you trust? Meanwhile some ghosts fly around in an immaculately green-lit mist-shrouded haunted ruin atop a nearby hill.  Spending a night up there on a bet, Lo Leih does the Costello monster comedy bit, quaking with fear while being gaslit by the ghost stealing his food one bite at a time, etc. with Chi-Liu as the Abbott. Great stuff. The sword fights are okay but it's really the spooky elaborate beauty of the sets and eccentric characters I vibe with; the always dark or at dusk/dawn inner/outer mist-enshrouded otherworld of the Ghostly Village and the colorful never-ending parade of villains, like scruffy elderly rogue named Dugu Fei, aka "the Handsome Loner," known also is "the one who disdains his kinfolks." And this time there are no exterior shots or even daytime shots. Everything occurs from dusk to dawn, aka the time of ghosts, eddying through the gorgeous swirling mist like whirling vape-nados. 

-----------------

HEAVEN SWORD AND DRAGON SABRE
HEAVEN SWORD AND DRAGON SABRE 2
(Dir. Chor Yuen AKA Yuan Chi)
*** 

Good luck keeping up with the byzantine plot of this strange two-part affair, especially since it kind of starts in the middle of some probably massive novel by Louis Cha (the Prime blurb lets us know it's also a popular TV serial). If you read the whole thing in advance I presume you wouldn't be scratching your head as we whizz past one crazy fight scene after another. If not may help to have seen The Battle Wizard first, as it borrows a lot of the same elements, like the hero finding a special oasis halfway down a cliff where the hero mends his wounds and finds ancient power in eating or drinking the blood of glowing toads, red frogs or giant pythons, and Hsueh-Erh Wen as a snake-handling venom-loving girl, and kung fu manuals that impart instant super power. This time we follow a dashing young hero (Tung Shing-Yee) this time seeking to find out who's behind his foster father going crazy after an evil monk killed his family and sewn seeds of dissent against the Ming clan with all the other kung fu schools.  The two titular magic blades are--when brought together--possessed of some dynamic magic but really don't figure that prominently. Mostly there's poison, antidotes, hair-raising rescues, and strange deals, interrupted weddings and people once thought friends becoming bitter enemies and vice versa. 

As with most of these Celestial Shaw Brothers films, one of the unique aspects not often found in western action genre is the prevalence of female led-fighting clans like the Er Mei (the female counterpart to the Shaolin Temple). At Er Mei they keep their women sharp by forbidding all sexual contact with men, and they take an especially dim view of pregnancy. Here the Er Mei clan is led by a rigid white haired old super Buddhist nun with super deadly kung fu schools, who kills the girls who transgress, and eventually passes the reins to the secret love of the leader of the Ming clan, which makes his rival in the other clan super jealous, and around and around. 

The first film flows much better as the focus stays on young Tung-Shin Yee, curing himself from a Buddha's palm wound inflicted on him while a child, growing up under the protection of a renowned pharmacist who tries every cure in the book to keep him alive. All this will lead him to the promised land, eating the red frogs, finding the secret manuals, saving and taking over the Ming clan and getting to the bottom of all the grudges that have led to the Ming Clan being unfairly blamed for all sorts of calamitous behavior. The result, everyone watches various duels at the Gang Ming Summit showing off what they know, and the good don't kill the losers, that's how you know who's good. 


At the end, even the villains may well take note of the power of the Buddha by renouncing their past, shaving their heads and joining the Shaolin monks in humble contemplation of the Amanita Buddha. Glory to Amitabha. I kind of like that kind of ending as it vibes with my own saving through the power of AA. Glory to the higher power as you understand it. 

All is emptiness...




Fuest's Places: THE FINAL PROGRAMME (1973) aka THE LAST DAYS OF MAN ON EARTH

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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. 

Taking leaps of adaptive liberty (I'm told) with Michael Moorcock's countercultural touchstone (in Britain) novel, it's the tale of dissolute hard-drinking bad boy billionaire super-genius scientist military hardware collector and helicopter and (off-camera) jet pilot Jerry Cornelius (Finch). After a native funeral up in Lapland for his genius billionaire father,  Jerry plans to take resolve his family differences by dropping napalm on the ancestral mansion and jetting off with his (implied incestuous) sister. But first things first, he has to get the napalm, that means running around London meeting eccentric arms dealers. As some bizarre passive-aggressive urge, he teams up with sexy androgynous computer programmer Miss Brunner (Jenny Runacre) who has some (off-camera) habit of absorbing her lovers and/or anyone whose knowledge she seeks to possess (like arms secret peddler Patrick Magee). Cornelius finds this dimly interesting as he sets about helping her and her three Quentin Crisp-ish scientist cronies find the 'last program' that his master computer genius father was working on before he died. He doesn't know what it is, but it involves some Italian pretty boy waiting in the car, and it's supposed to bring about the savior of the new dawn, a self-replicating perfect hermaphrodite human: the best of all man and woman has to offer - a fusion of two brains, two genders, into one, a being that can finally formulate and answer the ulitmate question.... why?


Sure, in its mad bid to be drolly satiric, and painfully hip, the result has not aged as well as one would hope: superfluous cameos like an ineffectually mugging Sterling Hayden as eccentric arms dealer Wrongway Lindbergh ("the Wrong way. is the right way," is his motto) reek of that late-60s 'older stars trying to fit into the counterculture via eccentric cameos' desperation.. There's also that bit where the ride up to Lapland in a balloon (which is I guess, kept handy for films that can't afford a Phantom F4, which Jerry supposedly pilots). But the whimsy and twee touches are kept at a distance. I do like the three wise men scientists (Basil Henson, George Coulouris, and Graham Crowden) who follow Ms, Brunner around; they more than make up for all the elements that seem to be missing. For example, Jerry's quest for napalm (he pronounces it "Nepal-m") and the rescue of his strung-out sister from his junky brother Frank's druggy clutches. We never really see the sister until much later so any inkling of what kind of strange incestuous reason he has for this is left unexplained. This is a film that blithely skips over vast and possibly interesting mythic arcs that may be in Moorcock's novel in favor of hit and miss (but at least it swings for the fences). Futuristic satire like a restaurant where wine and alcohol comes in dehydrated cubes (Jerry orders French toxic river sludge, demanding to know 'which bank' it was culled from.) or a pinball arcade where Jerry meets his stoned connection (Ronald "Why don't you tell me where the Ark is... right now?" Lacey) are well executed but may induce groans in those who by then have higher hopes for this strange, otherwise very hip movie. 

He is... nefarious

Perhaps the only film that comes close in its style is 1971's Hammer film Blood from the Mummy's Tomb.In that film too, a strident dominatrix-y intellectual badass female (Valerie Leon) runs roughshod over trios of stumbling old men scientists (George Coulouris and Aubrey Morris appear in both) while teaming up with a fey amoral aristocratic hipster (James Villers instead of Finch) to bring about some earth-shattering prophecy by ushering in a new kind of woman. Here, Runacre handles her carnivorous authority with cool throaty confidence and instantly establishes a deep in-the-moment sultry rapport with Finch's Jerry, one cool young super genius sexy cool titan to another. One can't help but wonder as to what a great Lady Macbeth she would have made opposite Finch in Polanski's 1971 film (instead of Francesca Annis, though she was fine enough). It's their scenes together--and her beating up Jerry's brother, the manipulative junky Frank (Derrick O'Connor)--that really crackle. 

Luckily most of the film involves the pair of them, with the three scientists making the perfect back-up band. Far from the usual stuffy bowler-and-brolly types we'd expect to be harumphing in the background or the dreaded reverse (that Richard Lester-ish style of conservative faux-hipness), these three-four older scientists manage the hitherto impossible - each being cool and individual while functioning as a cool ultra-dry comedy team. Aging scientists unconcerned with the surface flash, they're in pursuit of completing--with the straight facedness required to convey now-or-never urgency--a complicated experiment that's beyond mad/daft and that needs to be executed at a certain, looming time. 

Overall it's a film free of villains, unless you count Frank, who's taken over the family estate, setting all the futuristic alarms and traps --including psychedelic light attacks ("designed to cause pseudo-epilepsy:), elaborate inflatable tunnels (a mix of a carnival bouncy castle and Corman's Masque of the Red Death), poisoned gas, and poisoned needles shooting out of walls while the siblings shoot at each other in weird homemade futuristic air guns (just to be extra weird and save on blood expenses).

But all of that is fine with me because of the cocky actorly rapport with Runacre and Finch as these kind of super-cool amoral hedonist next-gen scientific wits in fabulous clothes and --in his case--a kind of foppish arrogant feminine elegance; hers, a Bowie-esque androgyne sexy-cool. With her tousled orange hair and natty slacks and his too-tight black velvet blazer and black nail polish, they're a superb-looking team, like they've spent a lot of time improv --they're destined to entwine! 

Hint: Fans of Hammer films (and their ilk) might recall Runacre as playing a great insane red-dress wearing schizophrenic Folies Bergère dancer in the same year's The Creeping Flesh.


There's a great climax set in an abandoned Nazi submarine pen deep under Lapland, where "the best brains in Europe" are kept in jars (groan-worthy but still interesting), working overtime to answer the "ultimate question", and sunlight is harnessed and accumulated during the midnight sun period of summer to power the special device Jerry's dad was working on before he died. It ends just how you'd think, though I shan't spoil it. Anyway, I recommend it. Take it for what it is, and just enjoy Fuest's wicked sense of design style (the submarine pen and other futuristic sets evoke fond memories of Fuest's Avengers episodes and Dr. Phibes Rises Again's ancient Egyptian tomb). I kept thinking I wanted to live down there, and get drunk with these people ("The classic sanctuary fixation" notes Ms. Brunner) to wind up safe and sound after the Fall, ready for the new dawn.


Note the empties behind them while brainstorming in Jerry's flat. His freezer is empty except for hundreds of McVities' Dark
Chocolate Digestives. I can really relate

Navigating the family mansion's "defences"

How the Hell Was Won: DEMONOID (1981), CRUISE INTO TERROR (1978)

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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 TerrorThe 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 Doorand The Devil's Rain and The Legacy, abide. 

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

DEMONOID 
(1981)- Wr./Dir. Alfredo Zacarias
*** / Prime Image - A+

DEMONOID might technically be from 1981 but if you melted down a 70s shelf full of occult paperbacks, then wrapped the result up in a mix of R-rated nudity and gore + PG-rated TV movie covering, Demonoid would be what was left. Here we have at all, packed into a 92 minute thrill ride: a severed hand racing around, possessing one person after another; crazy train/car chases involving possessed victims; subliminal flash cuts of the severed hand's accompanying demon, its clawed hand raised with a mighty sword; dazzling fashion juxtapositions such as Eggar's mixing hardhat and high heels); absurd lines and misguided hamminess; Stuart Whitman's half-hearted oft-vanishing Irish accent as the priest doubting his faith; a whole TV mini-series worth of crazy twists and ridiculous contrivances welded into 92 nonstop minutes full of a familiar prime-time ABC TV movie innocence that makes the moments of nudity and goofy gore all the more startling.

But best of all, for bad movie lovers like me: talented actors trying to be convincing wrestling with a rubber hand. No one beats this hand; its demonic aura affixes to the next victim, now both evil and inexplicably driven to sever their own hand and, if possible, offer it to Samantha Eggar on a silver tray. It was her who discovered the original hand--last affixed to a Mexican Inquisition-era topless hottie-- buried deep in her husband's Mexican silver mine. The hand belongs to her. Do you hear? It crawls up her leg while she's sleeping and tries to initiate a ménage à trois with her drunk miner husband Mark (Roy Jensen). It possesses him for a consolation and soon he's leaping from his grave after Haji (Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill) sets him on fire for winning on 24 consecutive tosses at a Las Vegas craps tables. He cuts his hand off by slamming it on the car door of the cop called to investigate, then the cop drives off in a hurry to go make a plastic surgeon cut off his hand, at gunpoint - no anesthetic, while forcing Eggar to watch. The movie has barely begun and we're already in such fucked-up awesome territory one finds oneself longing to smash their hand in the doorjamb to join the party.

Devoted readers know I'm a fan of evil mummy hand movies, especially Hammer's 1973 gem  Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (the best of the many adaptations of Bram Stoker's 1903 novella "Jewel of the Seven Stars"). This is kind of a Mexican-Spanish Inquisition riff on those adaptions, with the tomb discovered accidentally and the hand being far busier. It's its own thing, baby - and it zips fast. The giddy flavors of De Palma's Fury are here coupled to some of the spiritual tropes of The Exorcist, It's got it all. 

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?"). 

Eggar is perfect in the role. Smart as a whip and never totally scared, only horrified. When she watches as the priest blow-torches off his evil hand while staring at her in an impressively unwavering, shadowy leer (above) it's as if great and terrible acting meters merge in the gas tanks of some tailspinning biplane and somehow keep it aloft for whole minutes after it should have crashed. When she widens them in horror, which is often, her eyes become almost perfect circles, so bright they shine right through the spiderweb spiral ironwork (top) from which she watches Stu blow-torch his hand while staring at her in shadowy, inscrutable Satanic gravitas. Richard Gillis' uneven score at times evokes the ominously advancing synths of Carpenter; at other times it's fairly generic TV suspense-ville, but if you love good-bad 70s TV movies, but all the sublimer for it, covering many abrupt tonal shifts and sublimely meshing with the nice cinematography, the shocking gore, and the environs of the different victims. It calls for us! As Sgt. Leo says, "In the name of evil, you and I must obey." 

------speaking of evil-confronting 70s priests, check out:

CRUISE INTO TERROR
(1978) Dir. Bruce Kessler
ABC TV movie - **1/2    

Here's a Friday Night TV movie nearly every kid remembers from 1978 on ABC. I think I just got braces on or wisdom teeth out or had a throat infection or something as I have a memory of great pain and pain killers swirling in my brain in alternating currents, which elegantly gels with its sexy mood. There's also the reason we all remember it, for it has a unique spin on the mummy: here we never see a mummy or a ghost of a mummy; we see instead a child-size breathing Egyptian sarcophagus... possessing a sexy passenger list on a sexy cruise to Mexico. y make no sense, but it's a truly original, nonsensical idea, probably born from some writer dropping acid at the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" exhibit which was then all the rage. Whatever the origin story, I knew I could at last see the film again even though I'd forgotten the title and everything else about it, just by googling the words "breathing sarcophagus." See? We all remember.

Still, I was too giddy and/or sick to remember if I liked it at the time (probably not) but it turns out this is a cute little gem worth rediscovering for those with the fondness. Would there was a Warner Archive DVR or some such thing the way there was/is for Bermuda Depths or Terror at 37,000 Feet (the film incidentally fits between them in terms of watchability), if for no other reason than the scenery, and attractive women gamboling to and fro on deck. It would be great eye candy, as relaxing as a lazy hammock Sunday. 

Robert "Charles Townsend" Forsythe is a hieroglyph-reading missionary priest on a cruise with his sexually frustrated, lingerie-wearing wife (Lee Meriwether). Noted archeologist Ray Milland is on the ship, headed for sunny Mexico to prove his thesis there's an Egyptian tomb there. A physicist, assorted babes, and first mate Dirk Benedict (Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica) are aboard as well, and they're expecting you... ooh...ooh.

No Love Boat this, though there is some bed-hopping (Starbuck is very busy) and sunny days scuba diving in beguiling bathing suits. What is the strange curse hanging over the ship, causing accidents and freak encounters, some fatal (amongst other 70s occult crazes was a fascination with the Bermuda Triangle). One of the near misses is a harrowing encounter between three lovely snorkelers and a "vicious" (small, blue) shark (any self-respecting child of the post-Jaws late-70s scoffed at the tourist's overreaction to this harmless specimen'). Then, the ship breaks down and leaves them anchored in the middle of the ocean, conveniently right over the spot where archeologist Ray Milland needs to dive for his missing Egyptian tomb, thanks to a handsome physicist named Matt Lazarus (Frank Converse) recalculating Ray's figures and tells him the tomb he's looking for is actually sunk below the waves, "two degrees off our present course!" Captain Andrews (Hugh O'Brien) can't say no to a dive when the ship stalls out over the exact spot. Everyone wants to dive for the treasure and be rich! Freak storms and accidents abound. Let's go diving!

Ripe for some Love Boat style ship corridor of shame cabin-creeping, the guest roster includes several cabins full of foxy ladies and hot-to-trot wives whose husbands are either frigid (Forsythe's priest) or too focused on work (Christopher George's wheeler/dealer stock broker). The others are mostly single: Stella Stevens, Lee Meriwether, Jo Ann Harris, Hilarie Thompson. Lynda Day George (with Christopher--her real-life husband). They're both still hot and bucking at the seams (George's crack about "I can still look at the menu" when the other bikinis pass by is the kind of passive veiled crack that makes a couple's single friends roll their eyes and snort like impatient stallions). Looks like Starbuck has to step in again!

If you're a fan of 70s bad films you know the 'disparate slice of humanity forced to work together plotline was almost inescapable thanks to the popularity of Airport,Poseidon Adventure and 1977's Day of the Animals. And you know it's he 70s when virile men can rebuff the sultry come-ons of foxy ladies without judging them one way another; players like Dirk Benedict's first mate aren't depicted as sleazes in need of canceling so much as guys doing their manly duty to please the perfectly acceptable and natural desires of the passengers. If in our current climate you think that can't possibly be true, catch an episode of Love Boat, where the crew are all basically allowed and encouraged by the captain to bed down with the guest stars -- it's practically part of the job!-- and you have an inkling of how sex-positive we all were in the 70s. The national obsession with right-wing prudery had momentarily abated and mainstream America had what Alexander D'Arcy's gigolo piano teacher in 1937's Awful Truth call "a continental mind." 

That's one reason  70s TV movies are so fascinating, and remain so-- the openly sexually liberated prime time zeitgeist. 

As reverend Mather, Forsythe struggles just as much with seeming like a prude as he does with seeming to understand hieroglyphics (this was, after all, "Charlie").  When he reads an engraved tablet dredged up from below and exclaims"It's a serpent-headed bird!" or--reminding them of the fate of those sorry and/or dead archeologists who opened Tut's tomb and woke the "curse of the pharaohs"--demands the passengers not "mar that tomb!" can't help but draw laugh. Just like a buzzkill censorious reverend of the pre-code era, he seems determined to steer this vessel as far away from interesting and titillating as he can get it. On the other hand, at least he's not also having a crisis of faith  like Whitman in Demonoid or sulking and making shitty remarks like the mighty Shat in 37.000 Feet). Keenly aware of his limits as an actor, Forsythe never tries to hide himself in a 'performance' -- he knows his limits. 

And anyway, his priest is soon proven right. No sooner has the sarcophagus come on board than the cast is going full greedy savage arguing over where to sell the booty and how to split it, the evil spirit growing in strength the more bad vibes it sows. First its ruby eyes start to glow, then it breathes. We never even see it open! What is inside it? We never find out.  Its ruby eyes flash and cause sudden storms when someone tries to injure it, spooking everyone not under its malevolent sway. As more and more of the cast become sensually liberated agents of evil, the film gets funnier and freer. When Thomson snaps at her mousy friend Debbie (Jo-Ann Harris) for being too scared to even shoot a flare gun up in the air ("I'm scared, Judy!"). A flare gun for god's sake, if you'll pardon the expression. Of course Judy snaps! Finally and forever, full of devilish brio saying basically "stop following me around!" It's supposed to be the effect of the ancient evil at work (as in Exorcist) but it feels more like the effect of good, liberating shrooms. 

So does a sudden contempt for weakness and morality and unreserved attraction to earthly delight and fiery power make one evil, or just cool? Countering Forsythe's bland gospel is Milland ("I do not believe in biblical fantasies!") The captain (Hugh O'Brien) tries to explain all the deaths and storms and ship failures as coincidence, though it gets harder and harder as the freak events accumulate. 

Still, there's no arguing with a skeptic, and sometimes that's a good thing: "There is a devil --it's in here, all of us --his name is greed, fear and all of the ugly things we can never face." So deep, bro. He even has a fancy poem to send us all to bed in a cautionary mood:

There is a devil, there is no doubt,
but is he trying to get in us
or trying to get out?
Why can't it be both?.

 The 70s will all end soon enough, where it began- on the sidewalk outside the Dakota. (1), but was the evil of libidinal freedom vanquished, or was the good of libidinal freedom stifled?



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Some Other Good Occult Movies of the 70s:
1. The first Dakota death-- Terry Gionoffrio in Rosemary's Baby in 1968 (the first attempt at impregnation, inside a fiction that manifest in culture as a televisual reality) to Lennon in 1980 (in a reality dictated by fiction) - in each case a metatextual rupture - the devil's favorite kind, though the early 80s Satanic panic hysteria effectively drove him underground by then, back under the rug of our collective unconscious, the covens replaced by a sea of slashers, just as the paperbacks were replaced by video rentals

Somebody's Sins: SAINT MAUD, VIY

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One subtopic of horror cinema that never grows stale (when done right) is folktale-sourced religious mania. I don't mean the dull misogynist witch burning and repressed hysteria, I mean the hallucinating, stigmata-and-schizophrenia ecstasy and torment of the holy fools. I also like the literal interpretations of bygone era's living mythology, ala 2015's The Witch, transferring to the audience the mentality that may well leave us all to believing witches were real. and the Catholic Inquisition saved humanity from a pervasive barbarous pagan evil that might otherwise have rendered mankind into a state of perpetual fear and savagery (instead of just being sexually frustrated maniacs unable to tell when they're projecting because Freud is still centuries away). 

Myth is more alive than ever; just check out the supernatural documentary on the Tavel Channel, the plethora of ghosts, aliens, shrouds of Turin exposed to radiation, miracles and youtube videos run through idiotic talking head commentary. Ghosts, demons, sea serpents, yetis, and aliens hover ever on the edge of scientifically consensual reality. Like true mythology, the best shows never quite cross over to fiction (and being dismissed as hoaxes, paredoloia or mental illness) or scientifically-consensual reality (and moving wholesale into some world-shattering new reality paradigm). The best supernatural horror films tap into that 'maybe' - ala The Blair Witch Project, The Exorcist. As long as there's no ultimate signifier 'real' to contrast our protagonist's experience, we never know what is real or imaginary (i.e. if Shelly Duvall walked past the Gold Room and saw Jack at the bar, talking to an empty Shining air, for example, which would put a damper on the scary ambiguity.  Without that outsider/sane viewpoint, the first person experience of our main character has to be taken as real, in a vivid way we can experience in the safety of the theater or couch. We can, during this sacred temple space/time, believe everything we see kind of. The best campfire tales are the 'true' ones, the ones that happened to a friend of a friend, you swear it; even if we're 95% sure it's just an urban myth, the lingering jolt of fear wakens one's sleeping senses. When we know for sure you just made it up, that you're making it up on the spot--it loses a lot of its cachet. Watching a film, we can feel it's real even when clearly fiction; the same does not hold true in direct experience. 

When there's even the remotest chance it's real, Death becomes externalized and thus we become immortal, weightless, enraptured and divine. When there's no chance it's not real, our mortality crushes down on us like a great weight. 

Myth, then is truer than reality, because it creates a coherent language out of the randomness of direct experience. In myth, the devil literally lurks within every temptation, appearing in a cloud of smoke when someone mentions selling their soul for a drink. You can't say that devil is purely fiction. After all, the end result is the same. Just because he acts invisibly, his dark energy infusing its way into one's soul via fermentation rather than sulfur and smoke, doesn't make him any less effective. The extremes of light and dark breathe in myth the way they never do in reality (unless you're manic, schizophrenic, insomniac, tripping, and/or an alcoholic). I can't speak for schizophrenics, but I've been or am all the others on that list, and have seen both angels and demons, I've ridden the snake and walked inside the dragon. Once, for several weeks, I experienced that super rare 'pink cloud' where a flickering rose-tint infuses personal perception. AA members who stick the landing long enough to find the 'pink cloud' can tell you the same thing: the same Monday night meeting that at first was kind of a sad shuffle of broken nicotine-scented boredom and percolated coffee one week suddenly glows with a pink-hued love that makes just being there akin to paradise the next. Which one of the two is 'real'? 

Knowing these things can happen from firsthand experience, it make sense that the best movies I've seen in all of COVID--the age of internationally mandatory cabin fever--are about saints and spiritual pilgrims. The 2019 Irish horror film SAINT MAUD, one of the few newer films I've seen lately, is a slow-build minor masterpiece (written/directed by the improbably- named Rose Glass!) about a home care nurse (Morfydd Clark) sent to live with and care for Mandy, a terminally-ill dancer/choreographer (Jennifer Ehle) in a big artsy seaside mansion. Deeply lonely and an undiagnosed, the ascetic Maude gets these sexual current waves of pleasure when praying to her Catholic god; when the waves stop, she falls into a harrowing depression and puts broken glass in her shoes or kneels on pebbles for atonement, olidifying with ascetic intensity the link between modern self-cutting high schoolers and Middle Ages flagellants.  When Mandy grows afraid in the dead of night she she momentarily rides the Maud god train, and even catches one of the waves (maybe) while they kneel together. Taking this as a sign, Maud takes it on herself to ward off the dancer's partying lesbian hustler (a kind of anti-Maud) in a move I'm sure she doesn't realize is the sort of thing abusive caregivers do. But if you think she's going hobbles and starves Maud, or and makes her write with a broken typewriter or serves her cold parakeets, you're mistaken, I'm glad to say.

So where is this going. Maud, what are you up to? 

 We can never be sure 100% she's not a modern day Joan of Arc since we see only see and hear what she sees and hears. Thus we know there's no evil in Maud, just what we presume is her unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic hallucinations, misinterpreted as godly messages and interventions (as they often are). We feel for her especially if we've suffered from manic-depression or drug or alcohol addiction. She's addicted to the thrill of the touch of God, and when it dries up, she reaches out for booze and sex like she's drowning. 

Saint Maud veers with deft drunk savant brilliance out of the path of the typical cliches and snags that so often ensnare neo-horror psychotic female-protagonists, avoiding--though exploring--torture porn obsessions with, auto-mutilation / self-cutting (The Skin I'm In, Thirteen), romantic desperation (May), performance/ persona intertwining (Persona, Always Shine, 3 Women, Clouds of Sils Maria, Mulholland Dr.) or incapacitated victim/mentally-ill caregiver endurance tests (Baby Jane, Misery), Saint Maud's only cliche'd element are the usual smash cut ruts (1). The film's dusky cinematographic beauty and wild, cathartic transfigurative ending makes up for any stale passages. And if we've recently seen Dream No Evil (1970) and longed for a Ridley Scott cut (i.e. remove the pedantic voiceover).

VIY is the other of my new mythic religious faves, a 1967 Russian comic-horror piece about a young monk and a witch he winds up ensnared by after a spring break sleepover at a peasant barn.  Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol, Viy has the rock hard power of genuine myth behind it and a great, wild-eyed hero in clowning Leonid Kuravlyov. A monk in seminary school (with the terrible bowl cut and burlap robe to prove it) he finds himself forced to read prayers over a beautiful dead girl by a cossack landowner whose word is basically law, at her dying request. It does not go well, and by the third night the witch is calling out the big guns, enough trippy demons coming out of the walls to trigger any bad salvia flashback. Luckily, there is an endless supply of vodka... at least if you live until the cock crows. 

Though we can see it working just as well in a trilogy ala Black Sabbath (1963), this short  (70 minutes) never seems dull even during the many day and morning scenes of the Philosopher's incessant escape attempts. The Russian folk horror detail is so point we feel like we're hearing this told by the fireside after a hard day at the harvest. Scenes such as when the Philosopher (as he's called by the cossacks) is ridden by an old farmer hag through the fields and the dosed sky like a human unicycle, have a fairy tale surrealism that both beguiles and amuses. The bemusement of the Cossacks and women of the farm as he rants, dances, and raves is almost as precious as the 60s comic book color scheme of gray and deep purples in the room where she lays; leading to a great--almost Hemingway-esque--contrast between the cool, ghost-filled nights and the idyllic pastorale of central Russian farm life: singing, dancing and napping in the warm sun, with big peasant food spreads laid out and a never-ending supply of breakfast vodka. And then, climaxing in the third night when the witch pulls out all the stops! Hot damn, Satan has  a real foothold. 


A short (Russian movies all seem to be either three hours or barely 70 minutes long - with nothing in between) but essential gem, you can stream Viy on Shudder but it's in a hammy English dub. Me, I got Blu-ray so I could watch it in Russian, as Satan intended. The power of the Jesus, electricity and lasers take care of the true cineastes. Spin the wheel of fire, poppa, your thin blue is raining coming down.

NOTES
1. You know what I mean, where boy meets girl with a kind of impersonal hello at some dingy bar and we smash cut to the last few seconds of some joyless hand job or mutually demeaning doggy style. Yawn. Maud, you're better than that!!  

Acidemic presents: Erich's 4 AM Favorites - on Youtube!

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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!)


Free to Be You vs. Me: SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983)

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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! 

There's a lot going on in this strange, intentionally disjointed film we choose to call Sleepaway Camp, especially the much ballyhooed shock ending. I only recently finally saw it, having lifted my self-imposed ban on all early-80s slasher films (the feminizing scars of my squirmish 80s boyhood finally healed) and was amazed how well it captures the vibe of my own experiences at summer camp. Watching one lazy Sunday afternoon, I fell under its spell and began to feel like I was actually there, thanks to its languid pace and crowded mise-en-scene. Most importantly, it gives us the coolest pair of kids in all of camp slasher moviedom: Ricky--played with  tender but unshowy ferocity by Jonathan Tiersten--and his catatonic cousin Angela (the indelible Felissa Rose), who barely know each other but are packed off to summer camp as one unit by their very weird guardian (Desiree Gould, who makes Deborah Reed in Troll 2 seem restrained) after a weird boating accident. 

Summer camp is terrifying until you get through the first few nights; after that it becomes a mix of giddy anarchy, boredom and relentless dirtiness. If you've already been there, maybe you aren't so apprehensive. Ricky was at the same camp last summer -- he's a legacy! He made friends there! But it's the first time off in the boonies for cousin Angela. Not exactly shy or terrified per se, while Ricky renews acquaintances, Angela just sits around, quiet and unassailable as the Mona Lisa, doing, saying, and eating almost nothing. She doesn't even seem to be miserable, she gives the world around her nary a clue as to her inner life, causing most of the other campers and counsellors various degrees of consternation. Initially attracted by her mystery, the more hormonal idiot males circle her like predators, irritated by her lack of reaction to their overtures and provocations. The girls in turn are irritated by the attention she gets from the boys they mistake her impassivity for snootiness. In one way or another, everyone is provoked and then irritated by her serene disinterest. Counsellors try to make sure she's fed and unmolested but even they wind up on the outside. If they push too hard, bad things tend to happen. If they just let her be, no one mysteriously dies.

Ricky, in the complete opposite camp, comfortably ensconced with his rowdy but cool boys-only clique, doesn't care if his cousin doesn't want to engage. Whatever she wants is all right with him. He lets her sit there, and only steps in if someone starts bothering her. He protects but doesn't engage. This rote proximity-respectful chivalry is a great character detail that gives Ricky a kind of untarnished nobility. He doesn't have to understand her. As far as he's concerned, she's all right as she is.

Being a slasher movie, plenty of offensive people at this camp don't respect Angela's space, and soon end up dead. But it's not with the murders that Sleepaway Camp earns props from me; it's not just because of the 'shock ending.' 

For me, it's the curious way the male counsellors are all Italian muscle guys in super tight  shorts and white tube socks (the style of the time). It's the campers, the vivid ugliness of the way white socks look with grubby sneakers and shorts, over legs just beginning to sprout hair; it's the young cast's richly lived-in semi-improv vibe; it's the slovenly look of the group cabins--awash in snack bags wet bathing suits, towels, floor stains, clumps of clothes, late sleepers--and the almost von Sternbergian way kids race in and out of the ratty screen door at the edge of the frame, to quick grab their swim suits or baseball gloves, laughing at something we didn't hear, and then racing out again. The many daytime scenes and lived-in mise-en-scene make it more of a summer camp movie with slashing rather than a slasher movie with camping. Its characters breathe and bicker like actual people and when they die it's not because they have 'transgressed' but because they wandered off the real people reservation. When they cease being original and real and become a camp stock cliches--bully, pedophile, mean girl, date rapist, blackmailer, etc.--it makes the subsequently inflicted violence more rewarding than scary. Unlike most slasher of the era, the moral is not 'stay a virgin' (these kids are too young for that), but stay a true character, fluid and 3/D--keep it real or face the consequences.
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TIRADE ONE:
WHEN I WAS A KID, WE WERE TOUGH AND BLAH BLAH CIGARETTES AND FIGHTING

Ricky, especially, never falls into cliche- and he stands as a refreshing holdover from the kids of the 70s movies, who were often badass little punks (see CinemArchetype 23: the Wild Child), like Matt Dillon, Jodie Foster, and Jackie Earle Haley, i.e. the days when characters like that were the good guys. This was a time when junior high schools had student smoking areas. It wasn't until E.T. that kids all became doe-eyed saints. Before then we would have taken Tobey Maguire and kicked him into a trash can. It's no wonder most of us (male moviegoers) wind up conditioned to wince whenever a new boy shows up for his first day of school in a movie. He's generally pushed into a locker before he even gets to his first class. Never is there a boy we can identify with and admire and trust to take care of himself regardless of whatever new hell he's packed off to. But now and again we have a scrawny nerd who relishes the chance to throw down against some idiot twice his size--ala Dreamcatcher, Over the Edge, Bad News Bears, Brick --and man, it's such a relief! A kid like this may get their ass kicked, but they never lose their moxy or our respect. All bullied kids need to see such things, to learn it's not if you win or lose it's that you're not cowering, or avoiding, or pussying out--that cowardly avoidance echoes throughout the remainder of your life as the default settings for your behavior when forced into any threat or conflict. Even picking himself out of a trash can, Bad News's little blonde Tanner (Chris Barnes) is more of a badass than all the Karate Kids combined because no matter the size or number of the other kids, he won't back down. They have to throw him in the trash just to be sure he doesn't follow them and slash their hamstrings with a homemade shiv.

Nowadays, this fighting spirit is so repressed and shunned it can only explode in ballets of high school gun violence. Even then it's only by armed loners, never by fed-up masses of kids determined to fight back against curfews and petty institutional persecution or over-parenting. In fact, these kids today, they don't know how bad they have it, because they're whisked into child therapy the moment they fight back. 

For my generation--who ran wild in the 70s with a degree of freedom that would terrify parents and children of today--badass kids in films gave us ideals to strive for; they provided a compass for the chaos. Jan Michael Vincent teaching Jackie Earle Haley to drink beer and to drive a futuristic tank-trailer in Damnation Alley; Jackie Earle Haley tooling on his dirt bike,  and smoking a cigarette in Bad News Bears; Claude pounding a 1.75 liter of bourbon on his way to a party in Over the Edge... Nowadays? the Haley equivalent can't get on a motorbike without a helmet and elbow pads, even if the diegetic child protective services is long-since nuked.


A lot of the lamer adult filmmakers think kids identify with, and like to see, other kids in movies. It's one of the great tragic mistakes of pop culture history (and that goes double for sidekicks - i.e. Robin, Short-Round, etc - any kid who has a poster of Short Round, or Robin, or Superboy [1] on his wall - run.). There's only one kid we--as kid viewers or badass adults who remember being kid viewers--want to identify with:, the Wild Child. We saw them running amok in films like Logan's Run and--of course--the "Bop! Bop!" street gang in Star Trek. We don't want to identify with the goody-two-shoes kids our own age. We want to be older. We wanted to be Han Solo, not Luke. We may identify with the scared first day kid getting passively shoved against the lockers, but we don't want to. And we'll hate any movie that tries to shove this little pisher down our throats. The badass wild child, on the other hand, he's all right. He's got guts, and sometimes guts is enough, even if he ends up getting beat up and shoved into a trash can, he's all right. 
===
END TIRADE (sorry, ahem)

Why this is all worth mentioning is to praise by contrast a dirt-encrusted kid like Ricky, who can get along with most of the kids without being either the showboat center of attention or a bully, is a great fresh air blast in a sea of one dimensional stock kid types; he had a girlfriend the previous summer, and she's back but dating another dude, so he's hurt but tells her off and gets over it. He holds his own against the bully contingent--he bullies the bullies, if you will. Neither a nerd nor a Ferris Bueller smartass, Ricky quickly re-establishes his pack of cronies and starts going about his summer camp activities, keeping his troubled cousin always within eyeshot, but always leaving her to do her thing, which is...what? Sitting still and watching? It's her thing, man, leave her alone!

Is she in a kind of fugue state? What's Angela's deal?  Is she doing some weird act in a VC Andrews style plot? It's as if the camera hypnotizes her in place. She only comes alive when the camera isn't looking for her or at her, at which point the killer's POV takes over, craftily hiding in tight spaces and waiting for the perfect macabre "accident"opportunity to present itself: a drowning, a hornet nest tossed into the shower, scalding vat of hot corn-cob boiling water in the camp kitchen... all befalling the deserving. When it can't be blamed on freak accident anymore, the knife comes out. People get it right through the thin lining of shower stalls. Meanwhile Angela's taciturn disaffect seems like a red flag cape, inviting hormone-amped teens to charge at her, which in turn gives valid reason for their deaths. It's a kind of hormonal Mona Lisa Venus fly trap of projector screen anima-bivalence.

Man, those socks are so on point.

Ricky is no saint either - and in a unique centerpiece we see him and his boys play a very relaxed softball game that seems to go on for about ten whole diegetic minutes of the movie without building to a victorious climax or agony-of-defeat downer one way or the other (it's lulling without being dull). Getting the real rhythm of a summer camp softball game is hard--the way the distances between players necessitate different styles of throwing, the hit-or-miss at the bat, the satisfying 'thwump' of a base hit, etc., the bucolic real time of it casts a nice mood we wouldn't get in either loudly-scored exaggeration like Bad News Bears or misty Rockwell nostalgia like The Sandlot.  We're spared even the cliche of the kid busy playing his electronic game and missing the key fly!  Here he actually manages to put his boxing game away and go "oh shit!", put his glove on and catch the fly -- all without slow motion and cheering and swelling horns.  If anything, the victory is in the way it captures the leisurely stillness of an actual game, the peculiarly laid-back rhythm of the sport itself. In fact, to make it all the better, Ricky's a bit of a bad winner, rubbing the losing team's face in their gambling loss, deliberately inviting retaliation from the other camp's team so he can have something to retaliate back to, getting into a brawl for no reason other than the game's yin demands an uproarious yang. Watching I could feel that itchy constant of phantom wet socks under grass stained pebble-soled Keds. 


I don't know how or why Hitzik figured a slasher film could really benefit from all this real time softball business, but it works. Each daytime scene is crowded with kids running around in and out of the frame in an almost Von Sternberg level of movement from all directions and angles; every cabin is laden with a very real-looking color-blind melange of socks and discarded camp shirts, sleeping bags and kids crashing in and out of the front screen door to pick up or drop off jackets, change into swimsuits, etc. Campers race into the bunks to either shed a sweater or grab one depending on the weather change, then zip out as if they're keeping a game waiting, all hopped up on kid energy for the activity at hand. Friendships are struck or missed out on in each brief contact. On the whole, these campers are nice, normal, trying their best. Most make an honest effort to break through Angela's haze, and don't hold it against her that they can't. It would be much easier to just have a few campers in each shot, but this camp is thriving and on the whole, benevolently run without being mawkish or overly "nice." The head counsellor, is a muscle-bound Italian-American dude in tight shorts who looks like he should be bullying a guy named Eugene or combing his hair in a gas station mirror but he's actually a stealth sweetheart who makes a concerted effort to find Angela something to eat in the kitchen after she refuses to eat anything at dinner. He seldom leaves a medium or wide shot, just materializes in and out of frame to try his best to make Angela comfortable, then sails on in a seamless Hawksian flow. 

Even the few bad apples are--a few loathsome creeps aside--really just restless, seething with hormonal surges they can't control, taking out their energy in a way that, deep down, is probably well intended. Her enigmatic silence proves such a challenge to the hormonally unhinged older male campers they all but try attack her yet they barely make a dent on her serene distance (not sure if that was written into the character other than making it seem like actress Felissa Rose was struggling to keep a straight face. It's so refreshing not to worry about either of these two groovy wild kids: they take care of themselves just fine. We're put in the position of feeling bad for boisterous, creepy, bitchy, and horny idiots who unwittingly sign their own death warrants just because they can't abide that sphinx impassivity. It's so refreshing it's like a plunge into a cold lake after seemingly decades trapped in stale unairconditioned cliche classrooms.

Other characters in the film also defy cliche: I like that the camp manager Mel (Mike Kellin) with his cigar is cool without being callous, and amiable without being soft ( He watches the boys fight while talking to some counsellor girl - barely interested in either the fight or chat with the girl but keeping an eye on everything- to let the drama play (he'd probably intervene if they brought out weapons or he saw real blood). 

That's another great thing, the welcome anti-pedophile sadism, as when the scalded would-be rapist cook screams in agonizing pain and the other cooks and the camp manager just kind of stare glassy-eyed--without knowing for sure he had it coming just sensing it by the unseen audience's rapture-- and all the doctor can do is leisurely imagine the agony he must be in, lamenting that his morphine can't cover all the pain at hand. It's icky but soooo much nicer than getting there through the cathartic engine most exploitation filmmakers rely on, wherein they have to 'out-traumatize' each other in depicting misogynistic ultra-violence in order to 'earn' the climactic cathartic revenge (as in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Here we get the correct ratio - a pound of retribution for an ounce of offense. 

Us cool nice dudes know that being castrated in the movies invariably implies you deserved it.

To paraphrase Naveen Andrews line in Planet Terror: We don't need the reason, sweetheart, just your balls.

The counsellors (the nice Italian stallion head counsellor Ronnie (Paul DeAngelo) is in the red track suit)

The killer of Sleepaway Camp operates on a modus even more precise than the alienation caused by watching your friends or older siblings drift off for casual sex, leaving you--the only one who senses danger all around as you're not yet blinded and deafened by horomones-- alone at the campfire, or out swimming, or trick-or-treating. This hormonal call was Jason and Michael's trigger switch, their knifing and slashing marked a steadfast refusal to enter the realm of adult sexuality, either as an a priori rejection or a post-shaming after some fumbling attempt to alleviate their budding biological imperative. (The final girl's own pre-sexual wariness made her more aware of the killer's).  Blaming the killer's socially stunted sociopathic inhumanity on stunted sexuality is to get it backwards. What makes us 'human' is our resistance to the harsh whip and carrot of our body's biological urges. The scourge laid onto our backs is never consistent enough to become mere background noise. Our only salve is sex or killing, either is a welcome relief. Meanwhile, grace of kindness and support comes from somewhere more benign, not a carrot but a salve that reminds us we're more than just sex drives and latent violence. Like Ricky watching out for Angela--a higher power keeps us from reverting fully to the savagery our body relentlessly craves. 

But at the same time, why else are we at this stupid camp if not to kill kill KILL? Angela gets that. In the end, she is us, and her own spectator, which is why her kills are all conveniently POV. We can't even be sure she did them. There's more than one way to get a head.... or other appendage. 

NOTES
1. Marvel doesn't have kid sidekicks --Stan knew the score, there's almost no recurring children characters in the whole MCU
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