THE POSSESSED

NBC - May1.1977

It may be wrong but just wait until you see a handsome young pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford playing a girl's school biology teacher having an affair with with Wheezy (Ann Dusenberry- above) a foxy female senior. Not only that, he previously had an affair with the headmistress, Louise (Joan Hackett). To his credit, Ford plays him not as a slimy creep, just a normal guy who/s both a good biology teacher whose eye for the ladies ("you're so foxy," he tells Wheezy. Ffoxy' was the ultimate compliment in the 70s) has complicated his life to the point he's planning on transferring to an all-boy's school at the end of the term. Standing at his chalk board, young and handsome in his professorial sport jacket, you may be reminded of a very similar scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which also had him chalking the board as young female students swooned behind "I love you" eyelids. But this Ford isn't playing a third world-looting "hero" who just awkwardly looks away. Instead, he's a looker in both sense of the word, a relatively nice easily led-astray man headed to a date with spontaneous human combustion. 

Largely forgotten today, in the 70s the phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion used to be right up there with the Bermuda triangle, Bigfoot, pyramid power, demonic possession, telekinesis, and ESP. One of these girls or teachers has been starting fires all over the school with her unconscious mind (maybe she's not even aware she's doing it), or there's a free-floating demon lurking around and it likes to start random fires. Or--as Louise insists with increasing desperation--it's all just a series of coincidences. Enter a priest struggling with his faith sent by God to exorcise the firebug demon out of whomever has been... Possessed.

Welcome to the 70s TV movie, where gore was out while sex--even between students and teachers--was OK since censors kept you from actually seeing it, thus maintaining its innocence (1). You can't get much more 70s TV movie than Wheezy flirting with pre-Han Solo after school or riding her bike around the hallway with impunity since her mom is also a teacher, all without being a bitch, or overly nice, or a victim. She's just real, and trying to get out of a burning dorm room but the door is mysteriously locked. 

Of course there still has to be an Exorcis-m and that means a priest struggling with his faith, pea soup vomit, blackened teeth, demonic mocking laughter, and mothers at the ends of their emotional ropes. But the fire thing is unique, as is the female ensemble acting, which before it devolves into Exorcist territory, is downright Cukorian in its naturalistic rapport and clever, overlapping dialogue (was some of it improv'd?), evoking Stage Door and The Women only more naturalistic. Even the co-starring students (look fast for PJ Soles!) are believably wrought, never shrill or cliche'd even when the material around them begins to line up in the Exorcist clone zone. Hackett and her sister (and Wheezy's mom) and fellow teacher Charlotte Nevins especially share such lived-in rapport you wish they would just keep their scenes going and forget about the ex-priest angle. They and the girls all live in the dorms or nearby so there's plenty of time for padding around the darkened hallways on stocking feet, intimate whispering in empty classrooms, the cinematography a brilliant shade of Godfather gloomy... 

Ford's death plus the fires in the chapel that burned the popular girl, and the fires in various dorm rooms, add up to something the shellshocked Louise can no longer explain as coincidence. Enter James Farentino as a Jason Miller-y ex-priest / recovering alcoholic who's back from the grave to fight evil! (Farentino would have fought a new demon every week, if this was a hit and picked up as a series) and Eugene Roche as a Lee J. Cobby-detective lurking in the wings, still looking for a human culprit.

The men arrive and then what? The loads of fire effects seem to be enough until the Exorcist-ripping climax, so what else is on this movie's mind, besides casting a kind of gloom and doom over a bunch of women until a male authority figure comes to rescue them? 

Another notable thing about 70s TV movies: they were by and large, aimed at mature adults of both genders, so even horror movies found plenty of time for rocky marriages, dangerously attractive single men, ambivalence about child rearing, and nervous breakdowns, the kind of thing that don't exist on TV today, not even on Lifetime. Parents are now either saints, absentee, or abusers. Adult sexual relationships have devolved into foreplay-skipping smash cut rutting sessions followed by alienation (IFC, FX, AMC) dangerous obsession  (i.e. Lifetime) , or shameless 'feels'-mining (This is Us). Horror is dominated by frazzled cops or high school or college students, generally all falling into cliches. But in the 70s, especially in TV movies, relationships are mature without need to start shilling about their Emmy-worthiness to Variety. Maybe it's true that the constant lessening of censorship has fostered constant lessening of maturity and sophistication. Today a movie like The Possessed would ease up on the female bonding and crisis management, vilify Ford to the point of caricature, and pour on the blood, screaming, and CGI, all while Farentino mansplains and shouts and waves his cross vigorously. The Possessed by contrast, doesn't judge anyone; it's too busy fleshing out a bunch Bechdel-scoring female educators and well-meaning students doing lots of slow emotional base-touching via measured, unhurried scenes. Hackett especially gets whole chunks of the film to run the emotional gamut. In one memorable monologue she moves from denial to fear to reversion to childhood, to even hitting on Farentino, all perfectly modulated, dramatic without being (overly) soapy or theatrical.

Farentino meanwhile just stands there, blankly bearing witness to these monologuists like a standing shrink. His sad eyes and baleful stare indicate these girls better take evil seriously and believe everything he says, even if he hasn't said anything. Maybe he understands that the role of a patriarchal authority figure is often just to stand there and look like you know what you're doing, ideally without saying anything (since you don't) or doing much at all. In grand female demographic-courting fantasy, the women of The Possessed are here to talk and the men are here to patiently listen, without interrupting, and then do their damn job without mansplaining beyond the cryptic notion that "evil doesn't need a reason." I also like that he's a recovering drunk and confesses he was disciplined for "lusting" in the past. He's complicated, more by human weakness than spiritual doubt. It's not really enough, of course, to differentiate him from Father Karras and all the others, but it helps. 

Alas, aside from all that, The Possessed really has no idea what to do aside from the firestarting for its grand exorcising climax. Squaring off with the demon, poolside, while the gaggle of girls and teachers look on aghast, Farentino seems frozen in impassivity, giving the demon that same baleful stare with which he's been looking at everyone else. The demon just laughs, and makes mocking noises. Occasionally Farentino feebly waves a cross or the demon projectile vomits the traditional split pea soup in his face like an old clown siphon gag. But whole minutes, of just impassive staring on one end, and demonic laughing on the other, seem to tick by before the writers can think up a hasty resolution. (Spoiler alert only in the 70s could a big hug followed a jump in the pool defeat evil). 

It's worth noting the similarities between this and Satan's School for Girls (from over at ABC, four years earlier) are just as obvious as the similarities to The Exorcist. Possessed's all-girl school is in "Salem Oregon" while the Satan's is set in "The Salem Academy for Women." In each the headmistress cracks under the strain of all the deaths and 'accidents' and reverts to childhood.  I'm sure there's more. But what sets them apart is the level of patriarchal presence and 'this is serious' moodiness. The Possessed's students emote to beat the band, freaking out and melting down while the priest and the cop try to re-establish patriarchal hierarchy (their version of 'order) thus draining the school of all the vivacious life it had before the fires started. Satan's students and faculty don't mope or snivel and there's nary a parent, priest or a cop to be found (aside from a few early scenes). Satan's girls have no time for dour patriarchal officiating, faith-doubting, standing around, or melting down, they have a wine party to go to, thrown by a cool art teacher who says they should "condemn nothing; embrace everything." And they do. There's no hint of a Ford-style affair going on with Roy Thinnes' hip art teacher but there doesn't need to be. It wouldn't be condemned if it did, so it doesn't carry any emotional heft. He can throw a wine party for the students and faculty, and no one bats an eye.

That's why I love Satan's School for Girls, but I only like The Possessed you know, as a friend. The type of friend you like but whose dorm room but don't want to hang out with, not when there's a you-know-what down the hall. 

The clear winner is....

----

Interlude:

Call them derivative if you must, but remember the 70s was a time before VHS, Betamax, and even cable for most people, so all we had was network TV (the big three) + PBS, and then whatever fuzzy local channels we could tune in from the closest big city (for us, it was Philadelphia). Any big horror movie that caused a sensation was never going to come to our home screens, not until several years after its theatrical run concluded. And when it did come, it would be censored, edited for TV, the curse words bleeped out or replaced with less blasphemous explanations). So these TV movies were meant to satisfy our itch. We want to see The Exorcist, but we can't for years and then half the film will be missing, i.e. all the good parts. We want to see Jaws but its years away so we take anything remotely connected to the ocean we can get, like Day of the Dolphin, and so forth.  Sometimes, too, a TV horror film might be influenced by films from the distant past--films alive in pop culture thanks to their popularity on TV, like Dracula's Daughter, and The Wolf Man, and Cat People, especially if made by directors and writers in love with the genre, like Curtis Harrington, or Dan Dark Shadows Cutis.

Another cracked gem from Curtis! This is, as you might guess, about a woman with a red hourglass birthmark above her bikini line who kills men and drains their precious bodily fluids. The question is on everyone's mind when approaching a film like this is: just how spidery is she? Is she just a metaphorical black widow, ala that 1987 Deborah Winger movie, or is she actually a giant spider, like in the work of Louise Bourgeoise, or does she have a girl's head on a giant spider body, ala the end of the original The Fly, or is she the reverse, a normal girl with a spider mask on, like Susan Cabot in The Wasp Woman?

It could be any one of the four, or even them all, you have to se the whole movie to find out, and it's worth it!  Even with James Franciosa as a private detective.

See, Franciosa witnessed the fiancee of Donna Mills leave a bar with a strange female, and now her fiancee is dead, and gruff homicide detective Vic Morrow suspects her since her father died in a similar fashion. Franciosa quickly finds himself confronted with the supernatural, and an uncooperative trying to downplay it. Franciosa should really take notes since he seems to have trouble toning down his smarmy energy for TV.  Luckily he gets help on both fronts from Roz Kelly (i.e. Pinky Tuscadero!) as his New Yawk accent secretary who has to do most of his deducing, and she should be the star as she plays off and contextualizes Franciosa's downtown schtick.  She should be the star! Also, Patty Duke, who shows up as Mills' fraternal twin sister and when Duke is around you better stand back and let the woman work. Instead we get Franciosa bouncing through the usual parade of strange, familiar characters. There's Sid Caesar, Max "Wojo" Gail, Bryan O'Byrne, Hard Boiled Haggerty as a boxer (naturally the clue trail leads him to a boxing gym). Finally he winds up covered in tarantulas and dust until rescued by Jeff Corey as some kind of shaman, spooning out an old Native American legend that says a girl who survives the bite of a black widow spider, can turn into a spider every full moon to kill men and drain their blood--a Cat People + werewolf + vampire + spider fusion.  

Can the killer be her sister (Duke), the crazy mother (June Lockhart) they keep hidden away, or the sinister housekeeper (June Allyson) who eyes both girls with trepidation? OR -is there another Lockwood hidden in the attic? When Donna Mills rescues a tarantula and affectionately releases it on the beach, Franciosa suspects even she might be Valerie and not know it. (As Roz says, "you ever seen Three Faces of Eve?"),  Meanwhile, the killings continue, and the full moon has one more night.

Donna, Roz, June, June, and Patty Duke are all great, showing their master ham status. Really, I wish we spent more time with them (especially my favorite over-actress, Patty Duke) than following 'excited terrier who thinks he's a cool cat' Franciosa around the usual gumshoed track. 

No offense meant to Anthony Franciosa, by the way. When he's cast in a more ambiguous role, i.e. a in Dario Argento's Tenebre or The Long Hot Summer he's just right, and he proved he could even be the calm as he was in Tennessee Williams' Period of Adjustment, where the unbearable ham was Jim Hutton). But when he tries to cozy up to Mills, he has the suave subtlety of a greyhound bus. On the plus side, he also brings the NYC method to bear, shading in subtle changes of character as he goes from rationalist skepticism to credulity and belief in the supernatural, with in-between stages usually glossed right over by more traditionally trained hams. 

Love Franciosa or hate him, or just kind of tolerate him, Curse of the Black Widow is still worth checking out. The women are all very fetching in their wide leg pants' suits and turtleneck sport coat combinations (mid-70s autumnal, my favorite look/era/season). And Roz is believably downtown and hip in ways Franciosa only dreams of.  And there are other distinctly-70s motifs: as Andrew Pragasam points out how often Valerie's sexual come-ons are rebuffed by the men she pursues, antithetically reflecting the permissiveness of the era (men could actually say no to fooling around, a rarity in movies of today). 

I'm also happy to say that once she reveals herself in full, the "widow" does not disappoint. The climactic battle is longer and more vividly choreographed than usual for these entries (even if it ends the same way as 90% of TV monster movies) and the final shot of the coda brings it all back to our beloved Spider Baby. So if you love that movie, as well as Mesa of Lost Women, A Chine Odyssey Part 1, Kiss of the Tarantula, Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman, and Arañas infernales (and if you don't, you got an appalling lack of mental problems) get set for 100 minutes of spidery action (a two-hour time slot!) that no amount of method smarminess can't squash.

I am sure I must have seen this in its original broadcast, or wanted to (maybe it ran against football, which my dad automatically pre-empted the evening roster for, to all our chagrin). Nothing great but a nice relaxing journey to take for fans of snowy Colorado peaks and bloody monster havoc (a snowy white bigfoot, though no one uses the Y-word) Since it's post-1975, there's no origin story about why the monster has picked this time and place for a killing spree (since Jaws didn't have one) or attempt to humanize him (like Bruce in Jaws, he's a mindless rampaging monster). 

However, just like every post-Exorcist demonic horror film had a a priest struggling with his faith, post-Jaws monster films had to have a mayor or lodge owner more worried about losing the tourist trade than their lives. In place of slimy Amity mayor Murray Hamilton, Snowbeast has Sylvia Sydney as the owner of the mountain ski resort, tish-toshing her concerned 'heard the howling / seen the tracks' manager grandson (Robert Logan). Sydney brings a warm smoker's warmth to the role that makes her decisions seem far less cardboard slimy than Hamilton's, and there's another woman in the cast as well! The still-foxy Yvette Mimieux shows up at the lodge with her downhill racing gold medalist (now unemployed) husband Bo Svenson, so he can hit old buddy Logan for a job (but will Logan hold a grudge since Bo stole Yvette from him?). Sheriff and gravelly macho man Clint Walker (where hath the Clint Walkers of the world gone?) rounds up the central cast in more or less the Robert Shaw role. After more slaughter piles up, Logan is determined than ever to close the beaches, I mean the slopes. But the beast needs to smash his hairy hand through a gym window and grab a girl's hair right in front of her Sylvia's glassy saucer eyes before she finally agrees there's a serious issue. Luckily that happens fast. 

You bet it's written by an auto-piloted Joe Psycho Stefano! 

The miracle of 70s TVMs like Snowbeast is that the pace is so relaxed that it all seems natural and friendly, even as it runs through its plot on double time so it can be all over in 75 minutes. There's no gore or nudity but no time to waste on dull filler, i.e. the hand through the window, in front of numerous witnesses, spares us at least three scenes of Sydney stubbornly refusing to admit there's an issue, and Clint trying to pin it all on a passing hobo or something. We also get to skip three scenes of romantic misunderstanding and jealousy when Bo walks into a diner right in time to see Logan and Mimieux in a friendly kiss (after agreeing to be friends). It's a trite coincidence all but inescapable in soapy films, but surprise! The two men make eye contact and Bo just gives him a faux-angry look. They're buddies and he's not the last bit genuinely suspicious, again helping 'X' out three pages of trite emotion so we can get to the good stuff. It's little things that, setting up a cliche only to then duck around it at the last minute, finding a shortcut to the next big mauling, leaving us feeling most relieved. 

The result, 74 minutes (most all TVMs were made to fit in a 90 minute time slot) of solid 70s TV monster movie, nothing special, but good just the same. If you can't have Christopher George as your sheriff, Clint Walker is your next best choice. That said, you might roll your eyes when Logan, Svenson, Walker and a still-foxy Mimieux all head out into the monster's turf (the 'aboard the Orca' section of the film, in Jaws-speak), set up a perimeter, standing guard all night around their truck, pump action shotguns at the ready, only to drop them and run into the mountains the moment they see the 'snowbeast' charging down hill towards them. They don't even squeeze off a single round! What's worse, they don't even comment on it amongst themselves once they stop their panicked bolting. I mean no one even mentions that they all had working guns and just dropped them at the first sign of the thing they came there to shoot.  It's a bizarre and unsatisfying moment. I mean, their fingers were literally on the triggers! Instead all three drop their rifles,  run up the snowy mountain, and left Clint Walker-- pinned under the truck-- to die.

It's pretty shady, or maybe bad writing, or they worried it would be anticlimactic to have the beast just get blasted to ribbons before the boat even has time to sink, to paraphrase Jaws terminology. 

Oh well, that was the 70s TVM too: actual human emotions and reactions. It all might strike us as odd today, when actual human emotions and reactions are artificially amplified or censored to appeal to splintered demographics. Like the difference between the original Night of the Living Dead--in all its crude improvisational glory--and something overly produced and artificial like the Resident Evil series. 

I guess, in the end that's why some of us keep coming back to these 70s monster TVMs. We can't get this level of maturity and easygoing open-hearted laid back realism in horror movies made today (or even the 80s for that matter) and we can't get action scenes where people are actually doing action, which means they shoot but can miss, they have guns but might run and drop them in a panic, they might panic in the face of danger, or avoid it altogether. It's like the difference between a guy playing acoustic guitar on the street, who occasionally drops a note or misses a lyric vs. a guy pressing a button on his Casio and playing a perfect, pre-recorded synth melody. Both have their place, but only one feels like home.

KILLDOZER

ABC - Feb. 2, 1974 

So many of these 70s TV movies have women in the main role that when a film is all men in the cast, it's quite a special event. Here an all-male construction crew are the only population of a small uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere, working on clearing some space for a hotel--you know, doing excavation with a massive crane, a portable generator and.... oh yeah, a bulldozer that makes the mistake of breaking open a large mysterious rock, possibly a meteor that came to earth millions of years ago. Hmmm, whatever was in that rock is represented by a ghostly glowing blue light-- has jumped ship, like an electrical spark that moves out of the rock and into the shovel. With its descriptive says-it-all title, you can imagine what happens next. Their entire camp gets bulldozed into a wasteland ---radio, food, weapons, sleeping bags, workers, booze (luckily not all of it)--

Hmmm - an all-male cast trapped in a remote place, with no means of egress or way to reach the outside world, up against a faceless alien--unearthed and awakened after perhaps millions of years--that can jump from one form to another? Was this an inspiration for Carpenter's The Thing? You would think it would be following the blueprint of Duel (which was a big ratings and critical hit) but instead it looks off to the classics in both directions, and--unusual for a 70s TV movie--keeps it lean, stripped-down, no flashbacks or crosscuts to worried wives at home or unscrupulous corporate types making angry phone calls back on the mainland and all that crap--just a cast of six tough dudes squaring off against a tough-ass bulldozer. 

The cast is full of great grizzled and/or familiar faces: James Wainwright, Carl Betz, Robert Ulrich, James A. Watson, Neville Eaten Alive Brand. TV Western mainstay Clint Walker (we could use a man like Clint on today's movie scene) is the taciturn ram-tough crew boss trying to keep the truth from his men, i.e. that an unknown force has possessed their bulldozer and keeps rolling over everything and everyone and killing nearly every human who tries to turn it off. Their numbers already small, dwindle.

Me, I missed it when it premiered in 1974 (as far as I know, I was only seven), but I do remember hearing about it in school, and everyone laughing thinking how easily we could outrun a bulldozer. Yeah but Killdozer has thought about that. so what if there's nowhere to run to, because you're stuck small island and wherever you are, it's gonna find you and flatten you. No hiding in the palm trees, it will just run over them, no hiding on a small hill, it can either climb up, slow and inexorable, or start leveling the hill. And the first thing that damned 'dozer does is run over most of your food and supplies and the radio so you can't call for help?  Then what? No more laughter. To escape Jaws all you had to do was get out of the water. to escape The Car, you can hide out on holy ground, but on a small sandy island, you don't have sustainable options. You have to sleep sometime, and god help you if you're pinned under something or make the mistake of trying to roll under the treads to escape. 

And if he lives, how is Clint going to explain all the property destruction and death to his bosses on the mainland? He's been already reprimanded once, for drinking. (He doesn't react kindly to a surviving whiskey bottle, but he doesn't pour it out either - if he did. we wouldn't be having this conversation). It's an interesting character trait. He has two things to worry about, and the feeling of woe as to how to explain all the destroyed and expensive construction equipment in a way that won't sound like boozy fantasy. He may never have to find out. 

Certainly we won't, at any rate. When the 74 minutes are up, we're whisked back to our own reality, ready for bed or a piss break. No pain, no gain, no fuss. Just man vs. amok machine, and--like a 70s John Henry, kicking its ass, then fade to black. Roll credits. 

Hey, come check out my contributing post for the amazing B&S Movies site: Ten from Tubi Week 12.

I've become a huge fan of Sam Panico and B&S, thanks to his encyclopedic yen for Mexican wrestling and 70s American TV disaster movies, two genres I've been exploring this summer, each a kind of cranial air conditioning, made extra cool by the infectious love apparent in B&S's concise reviews. 

And we both love the Tubi. Sure it has commercials, but they don't overdo it, and the juxtapositions make a great meta-collage (like going from Texas Chainsaw mid-massacre to a sizzling, juicy stake in an ad for Applebees.

These 10 below are totally different, though. Another ten via the link below. Sooo many weird options.

My TUBI Cue (Deadly Women Edition): 10 Weird Vintage Gems for the High and Inside

And then these. All in all, we're living in a truly blessed age.

3. SHARK ATTACK 3: MEGALODON 

(R-rated version)

(2002) Dir. David Worth

Speaking of cranky opinions, I don't like the first two Shark Attack movies and I never liked smamy Shark Attack 3 star John Barrowman (he kept me out of Torchwood) until I learned he was 'out' as a gay man Strange as that may seem, learning Barrowman was gay made him less offensive. His narcissism makes more sense (maybe if Tom Cruise ever came out, I'd finally like him, too). Anyway, that means I can finally enjoy Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, in which he stars as--you guessed it--a smarmy/cocky chief of security at a Cozumel resort. He's destined to fight a large--presumed extinct--fish, a big ass shark, and he'll need all the help a sultry marine paleontologist (Jenny McShane) and her two person documentary crew can lend. Will the inevitable sparks fly between this oceanic white prick and this blue-haired blond-eyed hottie sent from her museum by her smitten dope of a boss? And you better believe there'll be a corporate whistleblower (Roy Cutrona) fingering the shady outfit he used to work for, who cut corners laying a deepwater trench-adjacent electric cable, and who have the mayor and resort owner both in their pocket$.  

Sure it's as shoddy, weather-beaten at the seams, but that's why it's also perfect for a lazy summer afternoon when it's too hot to move more than ten feet from your air conditioner and you're in the mood to see some giant sharks eating yachts full of environmentally irresponsible capitalists in the beautiful waters off resort-studded Mexico. There are other percs as well, setting this one rung above the average Asylum Syfy CGI fodder (several of the shots of the giant shark rising out of the water to devour whole boats are excellent; I couldn't tell if they were using miniatures, or just really well-done analog overlays). And I like that it doesn't feel the need to overdo the capitalist evil 'keep a lid on it' schtick. This movie knows you can make even the greediest capitalists somewhat sympathetic and we'll still cheer with bloodthirsty joy when they, their wives, the mayor, and everyone on their swanky yacht, and the yacht itself, are devoured in big cathartic gulps. 

NOTE: Be sure and get the R-rated version (not the PG-13) both are on Youtube so it's easy to make the mistake. And if you don't get the R, you'll miss the greatest WTF? line in shark attack history. 

4. DEATH CURSE OF TARTU

I like so much about this movie. I like the weird accent of the faux-semi (possibly real?) Native American or maybe Mexican guide. It's how I'd imagine someone with that accent would actually talk, i.e. like he's unconsciously trying to hide it rather than accentuate it the way a lesser actor would. I like Tartu lounging in his coffin listening to his scratchy old tribal drums LP (Can the onscreen characters hear the chanting like ghosts in the distance, or is it supposed to to be the score? We never know for sure, and I like that). I like the boa constrictor slithering around the skulls and campfire coffee pot. Like the film itself, that serpent knows where he wants to go, but at the same time it's in no hurry to either arrive there or explain why he's going. It just goes on. Then stops suddenly and the whole swamp goes silent. The guide notices and points out how the Everglades are normally shrill with insect buzzing, birdcalls, and splashing noises. But there's nary a sound in Tartu's neck of the 'glades. Eerie moments like that abound without the film ever being anything less than sublimely deadpan, gravely absurdist, and pleasantly warped. In gamely failing to bog down in pointless squabbling or sludgy sermons, it's easily best Everglades-shot movie about an amok undead Native American shapeshifter ever made, with even some T&A and rock and roll dancing on the hardwood hammock, if you know what I mean. 

5.HERCULES 

(1958) Dir. Pietro Francisci

 This is the one that started it all (a mega worldwide hit), beautifully lit by Mario Bava, well-fleshed out with mighty Steve Reeves, and the lovely Sylvia Koscina with lovely legs in a short white tunic as Iole. Though it bogs itself down on occasion with lengthy flashbacks of courtly intrigue (we get a dream within a flashback in the very first reel) almost from the beginning, subjecting us to the loathsome antics of a sniveling prince, a paranoid king, javelins-- and then even  shoehorn in Jason and the Golden Fleece--it's still a good, relaxing time at the movies, Soon the sniveler is dead and Herc is blamed. He's bummed to leave but for us it's a welcome escape from the politics and paranoia. He drops by the mystic Sybil and ask that his godly power removed (so her "can fight like other men"), is almost be killed by a thickly carpeted bull, then joins Jason (the rightful king) and Ulysses on an a quest to recover the golden fleece. They meet ape men, sirens, beautiful Amazons, an evil saboteur, and even a rather large dragon monster. It has a roar clearly 'borrowed' from Godzilla, and just shakes autumn leaves off its back (it was sleeping) before Jason offs it with a single spear throw, but it's still nice to have!

Throughout, Mario Bava's masterful colored lighting is beautiful--though its not in HD or remastered besides some color boosting. And there's a lyrical sequence where they're seduced and set to be destroyed a wine-proffering cult of amazons, and then nearly drawn to the rocks by their siren song after sailing off. So there's dialogue rich with gods and destiny fulfillment, adventures, storms, fate, monsters, soothsayers, storms, drugged wine, bucolic frolics, lions, bulls, and Bava's excellently sexy use of frame and color. And Hercules pulls down an entire temple.

And, by Zeus, is Reeves ripped, and oily.

Note: Tubi has the immediate sequel, HERCULES UNCHAINED, which is even better than the first film in a lot of ways (including the dubbing), but the Tubi transfer's image is squished and cropped and a-no good. You can find it on Youtube, though, in a less squished but still kind of analog/fuzzy VHS transfer  and after you do, petition Kino and/or Arrow or Synapse or even Scorpion to goddamned release a cleaned up re-struck HD double feature of both. For all our sakes, so Bava's colors can shine once more. If you doubt how gorgeous it would look, all you have to do is take a peep at the next entry on our list of light summer fun:

6. ERIK THE CONQUEROR
(1962) Dir. Mario Bava

Hercules was such a worldwide hit that everyone went sword and sandal crazy. Mario Bava gave us the masterful Hercules in the Haunted World, and then this; a very Italian riff on the popular Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis 1958 film The Vikings. I'm sure it has that films have some fans today, but like most of Hollywood's output in that time, it's kind of sexist and bloated by today's standards, burdened by the kind of historic sweep demanded by Cinemascope.  Bava's Erik, by contrast, surges with fleet-of-foot color-saturated brilliance, with Bava showing off his ability to create crowds from a handful of extras, naval skirmishes represented by a blazing orange; and with the new HD remaster upgrade. Though not technically a horror movie, there are plenty of skulls and spiders, blazing fires, strange rites, beards, furs, horses, and with a pair of beautiful twins (Alice and Ellen Kessler) as temple virgins consecrated to Odin from birth, but in love anyway, one with Viking leader Cameron Mitchell, the other with his (unknown to each of them) younger brother, left abandoned after the Viking parlay party is massacred by an English usurper's treachery. Luckily he's found by the widowed queen (Francoise Christoph) during a walk on the beach mourning her murdered husband,, murdered by the evil traitor Sir Rutherford (Andrea Checchi). Each grows up in a warring kingdom, leading to their inevitable clash, and of course there are recognizable birth marks revealed to each other in mid-skirmish. 

Sure, it's a familiar story, even when it was used in The Vikings. But Bava baths it all with succulent glowing orange and purples, and torch light, and color gels making everything alive and alluring. And he's a master storyteller in film, with a gift for tracking shots, framing, pacing, lighting and composition, that elevate even the most familiar or cliche'd of stories to new heights. The HD remastered print on Tubi is so good you'll want to pause every shot and frame it. Study the camera movements the way you would study those of John Ford, examine its beauty, color, and composition from every facet. Bask in its pulp brilliance, even if you don't like Mitchell's godawful buzzcut orange hair (what is it with Italians and red hair?), and even if you don't like subtitles (It's in Italian). 

7. THE WHITE BUFFALO

(1977) Dir, Jay Lee Thompson

A long unavailable Dino di Laurentiis classic emerges in full HD restored beauty to make Di Laurentiis fan's hearts soar like hawk. Reasons, many. Wintry mountain beauty (Colorado standing in for the Black Hills of South Dakota) cools hot summer viewing. Jaws-y great white buffalo is a very cool giant animatronic monster (rather than a real buffalo painted white); the mighty rumblings of great beast's hooves perfectly echoed John Barry's moody low-end score. Charles Bronson is an incognito Wild Bill Hickok in the late 1800s, wearing sunglasses even at twilight, never smiling except twice. Everywhere on his journey north to Dakota gold rush, old enemies (Clint Walker is one!) are eager to kill him. So it's one of the elegiac westerns where the men who won the west now slink through like anti-celebrities, inviting assassination for old killings of various people's friends or parents. Also, he has nightmares of a white buffalo charging him, so he partners up with crusty old buff skinner Jack Warden, and heads to where the "white spike" was last seen. 

But there's some other legendary figure hunting the white buffalo, and it's an incognito Crazy Horse *(Will Sampson) after it trashes his camp and tramples his wife and child and half the tribe. Will they bond, despite layers of distrust? A whole chunk of the film becomes about their odd blossoming friendship.

The film is full of strange mythopoetic dialogue that one wonders if anyone ever actually talked like, Richard Sale wrote the screenplay; Hickok greats Warden by saying "he's been known to puddle his britches at a Kayoia war whoop." Hickok says no to sex with old prostitute friend Kim Novak because "sometime back, one of your scarlet sisters dosed me proper" (the first time I've ever heard anyone bow out of sex due to an STD in any movie). Sex is "riding the high horse,""flying the eagle,"  It's also the first time I heard the word "comity" used in a sentence. 

It's refreshing, it's interesting, but doesn't quite work. To make such faux-antiquated folksy slang sound natural you either have to be from the west (i.e. Slim Pickens as a stagecoach driver, for whom slang"Blue whistler -- must a caught her right in the third eye," sounds right natural), or be coached by a director like John Huston, whose Moby Dick adaption, for example, masterfully brings in the poetry and dosed metaphysical anger of Melville's dialogue without ever seeming pretentious, strained, or losing its sense of adventure.

I don't mean that as a dis. The colorful language is part of the reason why I love this damn film. The other part, the white whale, I mean 'buff' is not a convincing buffalo at any time. He's just a big angry monster of a thing, only appearing at night in snowy scenes Thompson wisely shot on a big dark soundstage, with falling fake snow and swirling mist, out of which the beast comes charging. The effect is to make the beast dreamlike, an a true vision/hallucination juggernaut that transcends the boundary between visions, nightmares, and reality. As a kid who loved big haunted house rides and Epcot Center dinosaurs, I'm a sucker for life-size big animatronic behemoths. if you were a kid in the 70s you may remember being excited for Di Laurentiis's 1976 King Kong was to be be a massive life-size giant ape robot. Instead, we got Rick Baker in a monkey suit. Was this buffalo his attempt at apology? If so, good job, Dino! When it charges, it goes by as if on wheels on a hidden train track, its head bopping up and down mechanically, steam billowing from its nose like twin smokestacks. Add it chasing Bronson around in the snow while Samson rides it, stabbing furiously, or irs massive head smashing through a giant rock wall to get at them, and you have a cool breath of rocky mountain Moby Dick meets snow Jaws. Kind of, for awhile, maybe.

Samson and Bronson bond from 30 yards away by making crazy hand gestures and shouting across the snowy hilltop

Of course, the harder you try to evoke a classic like Moby Dick, the farther you're liable to drift off to abstraction, especially if you mix up the hallucinatory adventure with too much of that 'sins of the past' setting sun, gettin' old, Kramer-style 'got m'hands bloody winning the west by and now I'm not allowed to enter Jericho'-style' dove-stroke revisionism. After we spend so much time rooting for this red man-white man friendship to blossom to the point it's almost like a romance, we're left at the altar of nostril fuming indifference, our dicks hanging in the air with nowhere. to go, so to speak. 

Well, at least we have our memories: the white spike charging; Samson's great deep voice, Bronson's disaffected cool, the crazy faux-historic colloquial dialect, John Barry's moodily ominous score, snowy, vivid Black Hills (actually Colorado) scenery, lovely stylized wintry night soundstage buff attack scenes, a few six-shot shoot-outs, ambushes, throwing an Irish drunk off a stagecoach for being rude to a prostitute. If it ends in a shrug, and a bad vibe, sometimes that's how it us in the 70s western wilderness. It's a nice place to visit, and maybe get your hands bloody confronting the unnameable white beast that dwells in the heart of man, but then that 70s liberal guilt finds you, even there--in the snowy white heart of darkness - like a flare up of that scarlet sister's proper dose. 

8. SCHLOCK

(1973) Dir. John Landis

***

The opening blurb --an ad for the film you are about to see-- declares Shclock! the greatest film since 2001, and who are we to doubt it? John Landis, the director of Animal House and American Werewolf in London, had to start somewhere. Indeed, so did mankind itself. And here is the starting point for both: a smart and refreshingly deadpan 'spoof' of every movie e'er made that e'er had an ape in it (and even some that don't). With a great termite attention to momentum akin to Italian movies like those two-fisted Italian Terence Stamp-Bud Spencer comedies of the same era, Landis keeps itself in the groovy moment with a plot that makes reverent use of the entirety of classic creature features without ever mugging or clowning or showing disdain for its audience or inspirations.  

Landis himself (in an early Rick Baker-designed gorilla suit) plays the mighty 'Shlockthropus,' thawed out of his frozen tomb ala  Trog or Return of the Ape Man, Schlock goes on a spree of random killing and grappling with the strange new world of 70s small town culture, as in his triple-digit massacre of everyone at the 'Canyon Valley Metaphysical Bowling Society's Annual Picnic'. Scenes like his bonding with a girl throwing bread to the ducks trade on our familiarity with the 1931 Frankenstein's "flower toss" scene, for just one example of the films referenced.

Despite the staggering toll in life, limb, and property wrought by the Schlockthropus--trash bags full of limbs, broken store windows--Landis' deadpan black humor never wavers, never making light of the carnage, but approaching it with the same dead-eyed square jawed scientific self-seriousness we see in countless 50s monster movies. No one plays it anything but straight and deadpan, that's why it works. The TV announcer on the scene of Schlock's opening massacre may initiate a contest to guess the total limb count, but he doesn't go 'whoa! whoa!' and surf on a banana peel. A blind girl in a wheelchair may force Schlock to keep retrieving a thrown stick, and maybe he can't figure out how to use a soda machine, but damnit, Schlock keeps his dignity. Under Landis' watch even common 70s prank call parlance, like asking a hard-working scientist  about Prince Albert in a Can, is made funny again by being delivered so mercilessly serious. David Gibson's music score could have easily gone the dopey silent film comedy route (Boing!) we'd expect from someone like Les Baxter, but instead sits the inning out or plays the deadpan suspense card. As far as the score concerned, Schlock is as serious as Trog. 

In addition to being a time capsule of old chestnuts (one character even says "I feel a lot more like I do now than I did when I got here" --my granny's frequent one martini-in catchphrase), endless deep cut in-jokes for Landis' fellow classic monster lovers (Forry Ackerman cameo!), there's an extended uber-meta theater scene wherein Schlock sees a movie called  Dinosaurus vs. the Blob which provides a smorgasbord of epiphany via clips from both. (Schlock grasps the implications when he sees people talking about the thawed cave man in Dinosaurus). And in a moment of post-meta sublimity the crowd in the theater watching The Blob's are watching the scene where everyone is watching Daughter of Horror run out of the theater chased by the blob around the same time they start screaming and running out of the theater chased by Schlock --double meta double feature termite in-joke heaven! See it alone or with anyone who remembers creature double features on local TV, and cry... cry for the ape person old enough to remember that simpler time, an ape person with no stake in the modern world, who has to die one day.... that's you, dude!  But til then, there's Tubi! 

NUMBER 17

(1932) Dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Long in the public domain but never available in a nice, non-blurry print, Tubi has the recent Kino upgrade and it looks great, the answer to the prayers of all this shamefully under-celebrated little film's long-suffering fans. It's early sound Hitchcock, very British, very Hitchcock in that deliciously sinister Lady Vanishes-style mystery/suspense./comedy vein. And--my favorite type of narrative setting/time frame--it occurs over a single night, mostly in a single old dark house (and then a speeding train), in almost real time. Detective (John Stuart) is the first to break in, followed by a weird looking scalawag (Lister M. Lion) who was coming down through the skylight; there's a body lying on the floor; an intrepid young girl (Ann Grey) looking for her father or something, and various shady types all convening in this shadowy hallways.  The sole lighting in this old abandoned very dark house comes through candles and flashlights, creating eerie expressionist shadows which give every frame a magical pulp magazine crispness that's super delicious for fans of old dark house mysteries (especially now in crisp HD). So if you like creaking floors, strange numerical codes, sinister shadows, railings people are tied to giving way. no one knowing who's really who, train vs. city bus races, a stolen piece of priceless jewelry for an early McGuffin, stylized fistfights, sneaking around atop and along freight train cars, bops on the head, gun owner reversals, and lots of sinister action, prepare to be delighted. Fun while never descending to slapstick or broad mugging (though Lion comes close few times), and with enough chills to keep things lively and suspenseful throughout. it is everything we love about Hitchcock and all in an hour runtime.  So turn that AC up and prepare for some endearingly unconvincing miniatures as events culminate in a big runaway train headed straight into the Channel. 

(If you want to keep the British 30s suspense-comedy vibe going after this, consider Bulldog Jack, also on Tubi)

10. HORROR OF SPIDER ISLAND 

(1960) Dir. Fritz Böttger

If there ever was a genuinely 'adult' version of this film it's likely been lost, but that's OK, no one comes to this movie for nudity, they come because, like me, they love spiders and women, and when you mix them together, viola! The perfect fusion of Mesa of Lost Women and Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, a real middle child, similar raunchy saxophone-led cop show garage jazz score and mix of great dialogue, cat fights, girl gang solidarity, and man-crushing. 

On their way to a gig in the Philippines, the plane carrying a load of exotic dancers and their manager (Alex 'The Awful Truth's gigolo music teacher' Alex D'Arcy!) goes down; they wind up on a remote island inhabited only by a shifty-eyed monster spider, and a dead scientist. The mostly-blonde women all a-flush Germanic sex appeal are all strong characters and though D'Arcy takes his shirt off a lot --it's hot in paradise (the alternate title)--he isn't pervy with the girls. That is, until he's bit by the giant spider and turns into some kind of monster crashing around the island, with bestial acts on his mind. Now the girls' gotta look after themselves, which they do with ease, after a few catfights, food rationing, trying to stay cool by sleeping on the veranda, swimming in the lagoon, taking off their clothes because of the heat, and generally creating a nice easy kind of tranquil paradise in the mind of any heat-wracked male viewer. 

Sometimes a film is the perfect choice not because of what it has but what it doesn't. Spider Island is never very suspenseful, but neither is it boring, campy, or shrill. And when two dudes finally show up on a raft to deliver the dead professor some crates of whiskey, they're not sleazy or square, or cocky. They're laid back and ok. In one fine scene they even fight over a girl's honor, and then--after trashing the cabin-- stop and look at each other and start laughing. That's the movie in a nutshell. People fight, people make up, and the final chase of the monster by torchlight is a great little climax. For an 'adults only' feature, Horror of Spider Island keeps itself fit for the whole family (at least in a 70s TV movie sense of the phrase). A male fantasy reverie it may be, but one that's never sleazy, winky, campy, corny or shitty. And most importantly, it's relaxing without being boring. Who, when it's 90 degrees out, would want anything more?  

10. 

NOTES

2. PS - I recognize some of the Jungian archetypal stuff may be outdated in our LGBTQ era, but it's still a good analytical tool). 

Hey man, Halloween is a week away so I wanted to share my weird mixes.  Acidemic is so much more than just weird and accidentally or intentionally artsy/psychedelic movies.

Check out these groovy and mystical analog synth-pumping hauntological and wondrous scores and sounds, perfect if you want that chill October vibe and grew up on 60s-80s TV horror films, classroom filmstrips, and the weird vibe of a post-trick-or-treating movie double feature rental. If you like them, press like so I can crack two digits! 

It's one of Netflix's unforgivable crimes ---prompting me to cancel my subscription after 20 years--that they only gave us one short season of this very curious show. The reason is clear: it doesn't fit any category. There is no row for what it is, neither this nor that. It would have been perfect on local TV on Saturday mornings in the 70s, at like 5 AM, the golden hour between late-late show broadcasts of class horror movies and early morning cartoons. Yet it wouldn't fit in either.  The only way I can describe it might be, if Tim Burton produced a puppet show from hell, starring a steady-handed, elegantly dressed, staggeringly talented fusion of Morticia Addams,  Marthat Stewart and Bob Ross. She lives in a groovy mansion with her collection of muppet-esque animal friends, a mummified cat full of Waldo Lydecker-ish put-downs, a stray raccoon she rescued - wearing a pink bow, a big wolfman kind of a thing and monster in the basement who actually does eat one of the more obnoxious guests, and even a human male love interest who might be a serial killer. And he's not annoying! 

That's why it was canceled perhaps - just too damn original. People go on the baking row or horror row or wherever and look for something random and see that thumbnail image with its fancy font (R), and it frightens the gentle folk in search of family values fun, yet makes its ideal audience (the types for whom Halloween is the best of all holidays) dismiss it as ye another PG-rated Sabrina/Hermione Granger-style sleuth and her quirky friends at a haunted school show. The type is by now inescapable on any streaming platform. You know the type, its hackneyed score coked with Elfman whimsy, its cast bursting with hot guys and older British actor suspects). This looks just like that, only with the heroine bake cakes between adventures, or running a small bakery--OMG, 2 Broke Girls crossed with Sabrina the Teenage Witch! 

Even knowing the show, looking at that ad at right, you can't blame the target audience, if there even is any when we get right down to it, for scrolling past it. The macabre touches seem like some cheap gimmick, after thought quirk after Netflix saw the numbers on Sabrina. (I shudder to think what will become of poor Wednesday).

In other words, because someone at the Netflix top didn't have patience enough to let its weirdness slowly accrue a cult, and because the PR people had no idea what it was or who to market it too, rather than let it accrue a cult, they cut it off after one season. 

Truth be told, I almost gave up on it myself. I watched two episodes still in a WTF kind of mood, it was as if Tim Burton produce a morning kid show, the type with arts, baking and crafts of a playful macabre nature?. 

What's unique is the the vibe is in total rapport with the super mellow Christine, whose steady surgeon hands making this big elaborate cakes and cookies in the shapes of tarantulas, skeleton fingers, are a sight to see. There's also a kind of sand mandala Zen to it all as no sooner has she completed these time-intensive masterpieces, almost indistinguishable from cinematic reality, than she just eats them, or gives them away to be eaten. All without a second thought. For a girl who has amazing. clothes, furniture, and stuff (she got the job due to a popular Youtube channel showing off her elaborate place settings and gorgeous Victorian mansion) she is remarkably free of the kind of materialist furor that can possess artists afraid to let go of their work

So don't let the decor can fool you, trading in the mega-budget barrage of Burton production for a kind of muppet show austerity, it goes in such a strange direction you need awhile to tell if you even like it.  McConnell's weird Martha Stewart meets Morticia Addams vibe can throw you off at first, It might take you a year or more to realize how strangely wondrous these six episodes are. 

Maybe I just relate to the obscurity faced by anything that lives outside the pigeon holes,j.e. up on the surface where the hawks--hungry for quick cancellations--can see you. After all, the internet thrives on aggregates and common searches narrows everyone's recommended show list down to tedious specifics. A search for baking shows and all is baking shows; Horror and all is horror. But horror+baking+muppets+weird crafts? That's not exactly aggregator bait. 

I don't have kids so I can't be sure, but I wonder just what level of violence and scariness parents of young kids will accept these days. I recognize the need to protect them from rapey HBO and AMC shows like Game of Thrones, Well, I bought Frank Herbert's super grisly horror novel The Rats and a scholastic book fair in the early-80s when kids weren't mollycoddled by over-parenting moms who won't let their children watch movies or read stories that have villains in them (a real thing, apparently). Here there's no villains either... at least not after they go down to the cellar.  A handsome maybe-serial killer may come over for dinner but he's super sweet and kisses the muppets like he too was born for the magic off-brand indoor voice weirdness of it all.  And now that it's canceled we'll never get to see what he's burying in her yard, just like we never got to see what happened to Cooper after the season 3 cliffhanger Twin Peaks back in yonder 90s. It took us 25 years to find out, he'd split into a very lucky idiot and a long-haired thug with too much bronzer,

But cult rejuvenation may ever be at hand. She has a fairly popular Youtube show now, though without muppets, as far as I can tell. At least we have these six episodes. Me, I love them when stressed out, but best I love them at 5 AM, as a sign-off from an all-night horror movie binge, coming down from something heavy, or feeling like a tuned in a channel from some bizarro world where people as cool and into cool stuff and talented and all that can get a show and make it just like them, where Netflix $$ goes to new, strange, fun unclassifiable stuff like this, something there is no category for. No row in the downward scroll where it truly belongs, instead of throwing fortunes after hack stuff just like other stuff, but with some minor tweak. 

 Too many original and quirky shows have died this way, but petitions by a slowly growing cult fan base brought 'em back. Maybe if you sign the one for Christine,, on change.org, you'll wreak a magic miracle. Me, I would love to get invited over for a tray of baked tarantulas and severed human fingers, but I'm the demo. I watch the Great British Baking Show, to fall asleep or de-stress and I was in love with Morticia Addams as a kid, aspired to be Gomez and hated The Muensters and their middle class values. I always dreamed Wednesday and Pugsley would kill that little Eddie, And I grew up to the muppets like every other 70s kid.  In short, I am still punk rock, old school, Gen-X, from the mid-8os, when punk was a big tent. You could be goth, emo and hardcore at the same time, and there was no Netflix to aggregate us down. Not sure what that has to do with the show, but the must be a reason. Maybe just that it deserved to live. It could have brought us all together like Halloween enveloping Thanksgiving with amoeba deftness.  And now that it's a chill October afternoon, a tray of painstakingly realistic and delicious skeleton finger cookies and a steaming cup of strange tea would be a very good thing,

In honor of Godzilla's 68th birthday (Nov 3) here's my praise and love of my favorite version of that original classic, a truly one-of-a-kind remix by the great Luigi Cozzi. Impossible to find anywhere but on a stream culled from a VHS dupe, its sound and image warped by the ravages of time, it flows like a psychedelic special report from your coziest nightmare (here). The original version is black-and-white and very square. But Cozzi remixed it with a new score, drenched it in strange color, and interspersed stock footage from the A-bomb on Hiroshima, to make a while new work. Its new colors are not 'colorizing' as you and I understand it today, but colorizing branches far and wide, adding extra strange patina to the strange images, merging perfectly with the tracking problems and other image issues. Add a new soundtrack all of it wobbling and wavering and accompanied often by the sound of a whirring projector and you have a kind of found object accidental Brechtian re-paradise for late-night dozers and dosers. 

Dig the provenance of this unique art object: it's a digital mp4 rip of a VHS tape dupe of an Italian colorized (pre-digital) remix of the 1953 Americanized remix (Raymond Burr is edited in so American audiences don't get alienated) of a 1953 Japanese tale about an unstoppable behemoth burning down most of Tokyo, leaving a trail of radiation burns wherever it goes (hmmm, sounds familiar) of a 1953 Japanese original. That's four layers of meta and three different directors---> from Ishiro Honda (original)--->Terry O. Morse (Burr version--->Luigi Cozzi (Italian colorized remix). 

Just to preface: I'm a huge Luigi Cozzi fan (see my gushing appreciation of his other films here). His imagination and love of the genre is so all-consuming it brings his work way past the boring and familiar things that hold up other directors, like pacing, classical-style narrative. Instead, they're everything great about Italian genre movies all thrown together with an endearing primitivism that captures the essence of why we want to see a movie and manages to weed out everything that makes getting to the good stuff a bore.

All of which is to preface this: my adoration of his 1977 Godzilla redux hinges on a developed love for his unique and endlessly rewarding sensibility, combined with not being a huge fan of the Japanese version of the film or the Raymond Burr-insert Americanized version. The whole endless fight to get that scientist to use his oxygen destroyer is the kind of hyper-emotional Japanese romantic triangle soapiness that frightens a lot of Americans away with its tearful, prolonged, over-the-top histrionics. But the Burr foot drags too --inserting way too many shots of him watching events (if an American didn't see it, did it really happen?) and way too much narration.  Also, a reference to black rain and Hiroshimi was edited out for the American version and--rather than add it back in--Cozzi goes for broke in the opposite direction, padding the remix with footage of radiation burns, and-- realizing it's the most important element of the picture--expands the climactic monster scene outward, and letting everything else--the parts that make getting there a bore--go. 

I would have loved to hear this in a theater wired for Sensurrround or whatever it was called in Italy (you can read up on its history here) , with Godzilla's thundering stomps (some of which were added in the remix) making the floor shake. I know that will never happen, but the meta refractions of its current only surviving 'print' give Cozzi's flawless nutcase instincts just the sort of contexutalizing they needed, the final post-modern boost to make Godzilla not only resonant, but a work of found art.

For best results watch at 4 AM in a Remeron and CBD trance after you've tossed and turned in bed for a couple hours and finally get up, move to my big easy chair in the living room (or on your phone in bed with headphones) And.... bombs away.

1. MUSIC

For some reason Cozzi can get the very best composers and scores that rival the classics: John Barry does the score for hisStarcrash and gets Nino Rota forHercules. And here, he's got the amazig Fabio Frizzi and Franco Bixo (aka 'Magnetic System) to kick things off for the grand and disturbingly lovely Hiroshima opening, immediately launching viewers into a hypnotic trance.

Then Vince Tempera adds synths in there and under it all is a wise and perfect remix of the best parts of Akira Ifukbe's origial score (that incredible 'Elegy' that only plays over the TV shots of the carnage towards the end, here comes at the beginning too and at the end of the carnage).  This haunting music adds just the right mix of comfort, tension and grandeur as we find Burr under the rubble. And when our man is on the stretcher, asking for water, trying to be heard over the din of suffering along the rows of other survivors, the music and color makes it strangely comforting. After being buried in rubble even a stretcher on the floor can be paradise, thirst or no. Ifukube gets that with his elegy, Tempera gets it, and most of all Cozzi gets it. If only Hollywood got it. 

You would think expanding the running time by throwing a reel of hand-colorized Hiroshima stock footage up front wouldn't work. It does. We get the before (daily life of the civilians), the explosion (pretty, from a distance), and the after (radiation burns, long tracking shots over the endless grid of rubble). And it's all drenched in weird colors and rendered occult and bizarre by the deliciously ominous Bixio and Frizzi synth music. Even the sky is given a poetic resonance, bleaching out when the sun or bomb get too bright. The result seems like the bomber has flown past the color swaths. When the bomb drops, it looks like a splash of white amidst a Rothko color field. As if draining the warmth and life from the city. 

The combined effect is totally unique. It may be purely the result of necessity (stock footage = the cheapest way to pad), but whether intentional or not it winds up being so much more. Rather than just a document of the global tragedy, the music and colors add intriguing depth. Even today the name Hiroshima still has archetypal power wherever you are so it's not like it's 'stale' or fully 'absorbed' or maybe will ever be. It helps perhaps Cozzi is not American, so bears no national guilt over its use, Italy being the one country to 'switch sides' and, perhaps to its credit, quickly surrender rather than stand and die. Thus we see facets of it through his Italian eyes that we usually cannot when seeing through either Japan's or America's (they're too close to the problem)--that America is the father of Godzilla in more ways than one - we're the Nick Nolte to Godzilla's Eric Bana in Ang Lee's Hulk so to speak.'

The insertion of Burr into Godzilla prior to its American release can seem racist, but once he's dubbed into Italian and we're reading what he's saying via subtitles (i.e. translated back again), all that bad taste goes away and the whole thing becomes post-modern sublime. With the warping wobble of the VHS source giving the voices a strange echo quality that takes him (and the Japanese around him) out of the 'present,' his narration (welcomely truncated for Cozzi's version) echoes through the action like a dream. Welcome everywhere, always up front, he merges into the post-modern warp in a way that's definitely cool. The associations of the Italian dubbing actor makes us automatically re-interpret what we hear as, not just monster movie junk, but an art film ala Antonioni.

4. The use of Ifukube's "Elegy" in the opening sequence of Raymond Burr under the rubble and later after the main attack, and the last part. 

In the original American version, the first act has Raymond Burr is unearthed from the rubble, features just a mournful, plodding minor key oboe (or bassoon?). Dull, then it stops for endless exposition and seldom returns. In Cozzi's, the best parts of Ikfube's score, such as the 'elegy' heard only towards the end via TV in the original version, add a grandeur and marvelousness that situates the film right off the bat as something that's emotional, even strangely operatic, especially after the Hiroshima prologue. When I see and hear this first section of the Cozzi film, I think instantly of where I was the evening after 9/11 (watching from across the river in Brooklyn Heights, eating ice cream on the boardwalk--finding it hard to pick an emotion other than a kind of surrealist shock). "Elegy" fits that so perfectly I don't even have to remember it to feel it. Rather than just play for the broadcast, it plays from the rubble slow pans and flows right up into the ocean with the O2 destroyer. Rather masterfully, too. Watch for example the Burr version of the attack - there's no music - no real noise almost - aside from Burr it's quiet for huge stretches until he starts stomping on train tracks and finally omitting a loud growl.

Supposedly every frame was hand tinted but as it survives on the streaky VHS the effect seems like the tinter/colorizer was hittin' the pipe, so to speak. Sometimes the color is effective (the red skies during the fires) sometimes it seems to wash around but it never quite fades out altogether. The key scenes of Godzilla trashing Tokyo are the most conscientiously colored, and that's what's important, making the surreal presence of the big reptile and its destruction into something so transformational and shocking/strange/all-consuming it changes our perceptions of color. 

6. RE-RE-EDITING

Cozzi wipes out whole dull exposition, and connecting and establishing shots of the Americanized and original version, especially with the phone calls, customs, standing around while narration explains things, and door entrances and romantic triangle sudsiness, and instead stretches out the attacks, the devastation, and the retaliation. He 'Cozzifies' it. Whittling it down to the basics, he then had to add footage to get it to feature length but he Cozzified there too, instinctively knowing just the right passages to expand, such as the climactic Tokyo trashing (adding to the aftermath by a section of post-Hiroshima footage intercut with short inserts of Godzilla breathing his radioactive fire breath and the "Elegy" music again. and the final O2 Destroyer ending, which becomes a slow-mo death dance of bubbles and a prolonged surfacing wherein Cozzi tries to goose up the wow factor by intercutting stock footage of naval ships firing all their guns on Godzilla as he surfaces. In the original it's just a quick pop up, followed by a sad sinking, Cozzi replays and slows down the surface death rattle so that he seems to take forever to die, the O2 destroyer below, the naval destroyer above.Instead of all the preparation, the bubbles and the destroyer and all that seem to take forever - it's like the whole movie blends into a blur or white blobs, pink and turquoise sky wipes, slow-motion bubbles cascading past a doomed Godzilla. He knows what makes an emotional, strong image and how to give such images time to resonate, to envelop us in ways too deep to analyze. 

7. SOUND RE-MIXING

Cozzi and Co. creates a nonstop melange of every kind of sound that lulls me to sleep;-- there's rushing wind, all bubbling and whooshing, the Italian dub sounding like it's being heard outside a shrill Roman theater before the main feature. The din of conversation and busy Tokyo streets becomes a comforting white noise, alongside what sounds like the whirr of a projector, or brisk wind. When the roar of Godzilla comes along it occupies the low end, but is drowned on on the top. Meanwhile the sound of a dance band playing the night Godzilla first attacks Tokyo has a kind of ghostliness reminiscent of hauntologic music of 'the Caretaker', The (post-dubbed) loud pounding of his footsteps (even when still in the water) sounds like Marley's ghost hammering at my chamber door; the blur of crowd noises, Ifukube's music (sometimes it seems like two different passages are playing at the same time), the ocean roar, morse code-style telegraph beeping (to convey urgent news), the explosions and also.... almost of it almost inextricably tied up with...

8. META-SOUND ARTIFACTING

At times you can hear what sounds like grinding sprockets, and the sound wall kind of wobbles as if going through a flanger. Is it the projector screening the film for the video camera, or the sound of the fire of Serizawa's burning o2 destroyer notes and the whooshing of his lab equipment? Are these intentional or the result of age, transfers, the sound recorded for the VHS in a sloppy duping.  When Dr. Serizawa  is down underwater delivering the O2 Destroyer for example, the wobbling of the reels seems like the film in the sprockets is shifting as the tracking issues persist at the same time, as if the water and bubbles were leaking into the camera and microphone. Some spots are slowed down to stretch out scenes, which gives the sound and extra warping weirdness. The line between accidental and deliberate effects is wiped away. For the climax, for the underwater climax, for example, the warping and waving of a comforting wall of soothing sounds, with layers of that unforgettable Ikufube 'Elegy,' under bubbling, ocean sound effects, muffled roars, dialogue up on deck and through the oxygen tube, static from the recording transfers, including the whirr of a projector, all laid in front of each other in layers to form a comforting wall of white atmosphere that then warps and wavers from the video tracking issues 

Compare it to the original or the Burr version and the soundscape is much more austere. The early scenes of Burr under the rubble and working his way to the Tokyo press room are generally silent, with maybe an oboe or a distant crowd noise. In Cozzi's version a weird radio plays constantly in the background, along with ringing phones, telegraph beeping, the rush of conversations, traffic, and the projector itself; elsewhere morse code bleeps echo in successive layers - the  frenzied gull like voices of concerned family members for the crew of the missing vessel. It's a roar in itself, in a good way

9.  Meta Video Disintegration

At one point we see the reel run out and an End of Part One sign flashes; we see the film running out. Elsewhere the images buckle and jump, and echo! Interestingly, the print waits until about 50 minutes in to really fall apart with tracking problems that happens to be during the big centerpiece of the film, Godzilla's rampage in Tokyo. It's as it the sheer size of the monster and the vehemence of the military response is breaking apart film as we know it. It's one thing to have the image jump around when say, showing a couple on the couch, but with rapid edits of explosions and raging fires as a monster the size of a ten story office building beats the shit out of some electrical wires, before snacking down on a train? That makes perfect sense. Even when the screen goes completely dark, before wobbling back, making the monster scenes harder to see, it fits--as if we're watching it live on TV and the camera signal is breaking up. Sure, eventually it gets pretty annoying but then, the problem dies away... for awhile when the attack is over. 

Did the high contrast and rapid editing have anything to do with the problems of this transfer?  I don't know but I do know watching the HD version on Criterion, the monster is very unconvincing - we can see the scenery better, admire the details of the cityscape he tramples through, savor the detailed craftsmanship that went into each building, but it's clearly a man in a suit in the long shots and --in some others-- clearly a hand puppet. The apocalyptic images of the crumbling press building, as it slowly collapses floor-by-floor is truly impressive in the original. And, of course, one should watch that version often. But it lacks the strange post-modern poetry we get from tbe Cozzi version - the way the melt-down of film and of tape seems to suit the gravity of the scene better.

Here's an example - the attack in the Burr film starts at 50 mins in, ends around  101; in Cozzi's, it starts at 50 mins but then ends - ends 101:12 - so like double the length.  Then the end underwater climax in the Burr verison last 6 minutes but the Cozzi version expands to 12, but then goes back to slow motion the explosion and the anguished roar go godzilla - his pathetic rise from the deep only to be mercilessly shelled by the boats, howling and then sinking back down. Cozzi spatters into a full on military assault at the head as if target practice, before it sinks down to the slow motion depths, the sound warped and flangered with the music carrying through a sea of bubbles, almost Wagnerian and triumphant. The beast takes forever to fall back down to the depths. He finally sinks and the sea dissolves again into a sea of bubbles.... We only see a few cutaways to people on the boat but Cozzi doesn't care about them and knows we don't either - we don't even care about Serizawa's brave suicide (cutting his air hose). We're glad to be rid of him and all his crying and tantrum-throwing. 

 I don't know but when you add the washes of pink, yellow, orange, and green blurring into each other, somehow it all comes together as... 

10. HIGH EXPERIMENTAL FILM ART!

The original Japanese version of Godzilla was a metaphor for America's radioactive warping and altering of the Japanese psyche ala the firebombing of Tokyo and nuking of Hiroshima. That version that was then warped and altered by America to suit itself, editing out the Hiroshima references to suit itself, That version then warped and altered, with loads Hiroshima footage added in,

Did Italy's mid-war conversion from Japan's side to America's have any subtextual effect on Cozzi's artistic choices? Either way, he created most astute yet warped meditation on Hiroshima that you're likely to see, especially when the media you see it on has been warped and altered many times over itself. And hopefully so have you!

Thats 10 -- BLAST OFF!

But the cumulative effect of these 10 reasons isn't a downer, it's a great narcotizing embrace, like sinking down to an eternal sleep - the bubbling noises of the surf, the bellowing of the ships. the scratchy vibe, the haunting Ikufube music the weird washes of cool colors, all flow into some wild light-sound extravaganza that satisfied the soul, keeps the spirit engaged and brings me into some skeletal, pre-natal state. Godzilla's oxygen gets sucked out of himself and the water but it feels like it flows straight into me in a whirr of pleasure and that unique balm to the soul only Cozzi can instill. I'm protected against the onslaught of man's blind folly for another night. Thanks to Cozzi and his crew, Burr and his crew, Honda and his crew, the Italian dubbers and the English subtitlers, and of course, the ravages of age on both celluloid and VHS tape... It delivers exactly what I want out of a film I'm watching at some godforsaken hour of the night trying to sleep, but kind of enjoying that I'm half-awake....See it fully conscious during the day the lengthy parts of over-the-top tracking issues can get you down, but sleepy - it's fine - your phasing in and out anyway... so you're in sync. You're in Cozzi-land. See it here

In the meantime in honor of Kat Ellinger's new chthonic podcastTo the Devil a Daughter(on Spotify), the first episode which is about Russ Meyer's Faster Pussycat and Vixen. As a committed Paglian, I am a huge fan! Here's a Deadly Women round-up, including a  piece I meant to publish earlier but accidentally deleted. Patiently transcribed from an old preview screenshot, you're welcome! Kat has kind of made me realize my 'amok chthonic' feminism hinges on my finding the badass femme attractive, so apologies if I slant that way. Know too for me it's also largely in the performance. Are they going for broke, pushing the envelope past the point of cutesy or posey? I mean are they possessed of the maenad gnashing frenzy wildness at the core of the fully sexually voracious, Meyeresque, goddess? If so, argh, I be for ye. 

Whether harpooning little girls' beach balls, kissing fat mental patients while grinding her heel into their toes, or seducing and then Strangers on a Train-ing some dissolute golf pro after he loses a match and goes off the drunken midlife crisis deep end, Carol Linley owns every moment she's onscreen in Once You Kiss a Stranger (1969). She even one-ups (if such a thing is possible) Robert Walker's Bruno in Hitchcock's original Strangers on a Train, a film Stranger makes no bones about imitating ( Linley's character is named Diana Granger, last name of the star, Train-stranger Farley, whose memoir Include Me Out saved my life once) by virtue of being one of the homicidal minxes so beloved by this blog. What middle-aged, still-handsome, slightly drunken-relapsed golf pro (regularly kept from the top prize fee by a better/douchier golf pro on the same tour) played by TV mainstay Paul Burke, lonesome, awash in self-pity, and semi-suicidal, could resist?

Sometimes there's a buggy

And if she's still expected to report in to her shrink every week to avoid going back to the funny farm, and if she was secretly still homicidal, manipulative nutcase, only now endowed with more Patricia Highsmith cunning and less Raymond Chandler laudanum-fueled impulsiveness, well you would have Diana Granger. And what a lucky soon-to-be-framed man you'd be!

But though Diana is wild and able, and everything seems ducky for some sexy hijinx, Once You Kiss... is. not unlike their hook-up itself, wondrously staged (the real thrill of these kinds of Fatal Attraction/Misty-for-Me-type pics is the first third, but just as Diana's scheme falls apart as it unravels in the story, so too does the film fall apart since the writers don't know how to parcel out information to keep us guessing and worried over Paul's now shaky fate. Both Lynley's parents already know she's insane (vs. Bruno's in-denial parents), and she has already been committed once before, which kind of weakens her testimony. The fact that the guy she wants dead is her shrink (the ever-sane White Bissell). There's no reason to think some random golf pro, breezing through town, clean record, is going to want to kill some random shrink, as opposed to the shrink's psycho gamin patient who she knows was about to re-commit her. It's already basically a no-brainer who the cops will believe once you sober up long enough to tell them, Paul. What's worse, Diana even undoes the solid fake evidence she created from tape recording their manipulating the tape him into agreeing the criss-cross, by manipulating and splicing the tape to the point of obsessiveness, making it all too easy for the cops to discern. All this hastens to lessen the suspense as Diana basically becomes her own worst enemy before anyone else even gets a crack at it, destroying her chance at the sort of spooky credibility Robert Walker's Bruno kept almost to the bitter end. That's likely because his in-denial artsy mom and ever-disappointed tycoon dad would rather think their son is just a loafer or a delightful eccentric rather than admit to societal taboo of congenital insanity (i.e. he hasn't been violent enough in the past to be committed). 

 But all that's quibbling. And why do that? There's Jimmy Faggis' super cool jazzy scoring throughout-- nothing too fancy but nothing you wouldn't enjoy snapping your fingers to and feeling like a kind of post-beatnik jazzbo. And like all the best films of this period, there's a catfight between too crazy blondes armed with spearguns and a dune buggy chase along the day-for-night beach. Nothing quite tops the sight of Linley, in her cute minidress, lifting herself out from under a flipped-over dune buggy in the surf, all slow, sultry, and Venus-from-the-clamshell-like. Though you might think she's just playing a male fantasy coquette, Lynley makes the most of every gesture, the groovy bass-front-and-center jazz score races along like a down and dirty wind under her mean girl sails and she just takes off. There's no big set piece like Hitchcock's amok merry go-round, but the film makes up for that in sheer brevity. And at the end the symbolic beach ball is patched; the child neighbor looks slightly older, and, just like Guy in Strangers on a Train, Paul really does luck out, perhaps proving once and for all that straying with murderous coquettes can prove immensely profitable: at the end he gets his wife back, has a sexy memory that doubles as aversion therapy for future straying, and is destined for top prizes as his only tournament circuit competition has been left literally dead in a sand trap. Fore! 

---

Girl Mummies: (the many adaptations of Bram Stoker's "Jewel of the Seven Stars"'

The Danger in Emptiness; FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL! KILL!

Terry Liu as Princess Dragon Mom

INFRA-MAN (1975) 

(from Angels of Death VIII: The Good, Bad & Beyond)

All hail Princess Dragon Mom! Arggggh! Grrr! A shape-shifting, whip-snapping, go-go boots wearing master of monsterdom! A Shaw Brothers version of Japanese Kaiju kids movie, INFRA-MAN is wisely wrought with a vicious villainess or two (Many of the Shaw Brothers' films are remarkably feminist - with badass females on both sides and in the middle of their sagas). Dragon Mom is so cool all other evil supervillains of kaiju movies pale in comparison. Sending out her spies, monsters and hypnotized sleeper agents over to Infra-Man HQ to steal away their big scientific genius for her own nefarious ends, Liu projects real menace, and a refreshingly direct approach to her evil deeds. At the same time you can see her chasing some Buggle around a Sid and Marty Kroft- style evil lair one minute, chaining Batman to a water heater after stunning him with poison lipstick the next, then blowing /herself up to Godzilla-size and becoming a dragon to level Hong Kong after that. She's versatile! And her monster minions are great too, all of them in a row, waving their appendages around in great paroxysms of relish in their own evil while she issues orders from her grand psychedelic throne. 

And when it's time for her to fight, she just turns into a flying monster to make it less awkward for our gallant hero to kick her, which is good because by then he's starting to sag along his sponge foam shoulder padding so it's time to call it a day. If she wasn't enough, Dragon Mom has compatriot hot female with a dinosaur skull helmet and big eyes painted on her hands that shoot lasers. Sigh, If we had DVDs in the 70s growing up, I would have watched this every single day after school and love it more than Ultra-Man,Johnny Socko and his Flying Robot, and Space Giants combined, and I'd be having all sorts of 'phallic stage' sadomasochistic daydreams over Princess Dragon Mom and her snake-like whip arm. All I can do now that I'm all old, discovering this in vivid color on Amazon Prime, is wistfully hit 'play from beginning' one more time (I watch it at least three times a year). Either way, sharp, abrasive voice or no, Dragon Mom rawks. (more)

Columbine Queen: ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1976)

"Unafraid to be infectiously goofball rather than dully sexy, Soles, who so often played the best friend whose goofy, strident, horniness made ber blond danger (such as in HALLOWEEN)--lets fly as Riff. Her little lithe body bouncing around covered in the bright shiny colors that had not yet come to signify the encroaching 1980s, is sexy in its utter lack of sexuality. Her tendency to make funny faces, bug her eyes out, tighten and purse her already thin lips all help to keep her vivid as real-life teenager rather than jail-bait. Never adding more smarts than a normal teen would have, and twice as much heedless momentum, she's a tangle of sincerity, giggles, self-satire and genuine ferocity. I'd be scared to date her. But I'd want to be at parties she was at. That's the kind of girl every high school needs. And her kind would not come again." (more)

Hey Betty Blue, Come Blow Your Mind!

Ballin' the Jacks: TRUCK STOP WOMEN (1974)

"What really sells it all though is the aliveness of Jennings, so good as the restless morally bankrupt Rose it makes it all the sadder to realize she'd be dead in just five years --victim in an accident off the Pacific Coast Highway (at age 30). Here she finds a good match in John Martino as the mafia-dispatched goodfella "Smith" for whom she serves as combination hostage, conspirator, and lover. He should be recognizable as one of Clemenza's button men in the first Godfather. Here he brings far more wit and character than you'd expect, even earning our sympathy on occasion. Best of all, he has some great chemistry with Jennings. The pair know just how to play a kind of villainous love scene, making it always just a little ambiguous whether they're really falling in love or just playing each other for a shot at all the marbles. There's a magical scene in their motel room together in the morning after some indefinite period of late night boozy conjugal bliss: they're getting leisurely dressed and drinking tumblers of breakfast whiskey on the rocks, and we realize maybe there is no difference between acting smitten for a (criminal) purpose and being smitten for real with a criminal. Either way, we want their love or whatever to survive, despite all our best judgment."(more)

No eyes were harmed during production of this picture

Launched (presumably) as a belated Carrie / Patrick / House on Sorority Row cross-pollinated direct-to-video fading grindhouse flower, Lucio Fulci's 1987 opus Aenigma is secretly a deadpan stealth surrealist reverse jack-in-the-box. IF you BELIEVE. All the elements of those films whose box office success Fulci and his producers clearly hoped would trickle down are there: the naive innocent turned comatose vegetable; the vicious prank gone too far; the twisted, messy-haired mom; the supernatural one-by-one ironic vengeance. But rather spiral down in flames, hitting the ususal downbeats, spelunking occasional gory jewels into an otherwise bland narrative river, Fulci drains the water out, replaces it with ether, and throws those jewels right through the camera lens into the post-modern affect eyeball of the viewer (his favorite target). The result, as a horror film it's confusing, but as an artsy concept album with all the usual 'filler' scraped out, it's all peak weird moments, interspersed with a bunch of skips, jumps, and needle scratches. If something seems cliche and familiar, just look a little deeper. Calling it a Carrie / Patrick retread is like calling Buueil's Simon of the Desert a Passolini-esque biblical allegory or The Shining an old dark house mystery. You may have a hard time putting the difference into words the ways all the material is there but the banal narrative 'story' meaning has been erased, replaced with....well....an (a)enigma-- the deeper you look into it the more you realize how much deeper it goes. In not choosing an explanation, except that which one might glean from the evidence (order of shots, zooms, eye close-ups, etc..

It's genius born from post-modern accidental Brechtian affect. Stilted, canned dubbing gives the strangely off-kilter dialogue ("you prefer older men? / Let's put it this way: anything in pants") an almost Wooster Group-level post-modern affect: subverted expectations (using 'fake out' signifiers) flail against the electrified fence of Carlos Maira Cardios' sinister, mystery radio organ score. Meanwhile the set and setting reflect its Eastern-European milieu (filmed in Romania) and evoke my own 1987 college experience, at Syracuse University, a pleace where old world exteriors and cavernous hallways bump up against a nondescript world of grey/white concrete block dorms, classrooms, and galleries, spattered with posters and kids clad head-to-foot in gray college sweats (you could still smoke there, and serve wine at your art openings). In the oppressive anonymity of the interiors may remind adventurous viewers of Andrzej Zulawski's Possession. While that film focused more on insane, excellent hysteric-style acting, here the acting is almost anonymous, a combination of stilted, canned voices and onscreen actors that merge purely in an indulgent viewer's imagination. Rather than snicker and jeer, let the post-modern affect wash over us and we waken from the usual narrative hypnosis, exit the Platonic cave, stand in the cloud-covered sun and marvel at just how crudely fashioned are the puppets whose shadows used to wow us. In the end, like Joe Politano  in The Matrix, we may decide to go back in to the cozy dark of the cavern and take a break from the merciless global warming sun of True Perception, but for now... agape jaws please. The AENIGMA has done its thing on you.

Casual film lovers may not like this enigmacsism (?) but for film addicts who've developed Cassandra-style abilities to predict every beat of a new movie they see, a weird 'off' movie like Aenigma--where the signifier and the signified, like a pair of amateur mid-air acrobats, never quite connect-- is exhilarating. To go back to the Warhol quote above, there's no way to anticipate what it will do next. That powerless Cassandra apprehension (i.e. the dread that sinks into a viewer's stomach when an innocent girl climbs into a strange older man's car) evaporates. Suddenly we have no dread of anything; we're too busy marveling at the discordant dubbing and odd details to even consider what will happen next.  It's just like being a tourist in a strange land where you don't speak the language. You're too busy trying to navigate to worry yourself over the local political in-fighting.

Shit, If you haven't seen it already I hope I didn't ruin it for you. I went in with really low expectations, which always helps. Know that even Fulci's fanbase aren't particularly fond of Aenigma, probably for the same reason I love it.  

Confidentially, I like it way more than Carrie. For me Carrie (left), which I admit is the 'better' film, is one long mounting attack of Cassandra-style anxiety. Maybe if I had no idea what was going to happen next, and had good memories of high school, and hate William Katz's hair, but between the crazy/abusive mom and the rabid tampon-pelters at school, and then knowing the big prom date, her first chance at happiness, is going to end, it's just a stone drag. Also, it doesn't fit together: Piper Laurie is hammy to be repressed, Spacek is too pretty to be a wallflower, and the whole blood bucket prank has way too many moving parts for a gang hormone-crazed delinquents to engineer (it's more believable that they'd just throw some red paint on her lawn late some drunk Saturday night). And what's up with Amy Irving's character, who goes from convincing her boyfriend to ask Carrie to go to the prom so the prank can happen, to forgetting it's coming and basking in her good deed, to then noticing the bucket and trying to stop it? What? Did she forget or is she just covering her bases, trying to fool even us? Did De Palma forget how this whole prom queen thing got started?  It still deserves its classic status, but who wants to see it 100 times and quote it at parties? Once or twice is enough. If it happens to be on HBO and the prom has already begun, I generally stick around. Otherwise, no thanks. I'm depressed enough already.

That's why Aenigma is sooo much better for being not as good. And moving things to college. The prank is more believable, easier to believably orchestrate, and it's successfully sprung and over in the first SIX MINUTES! 

 Don't believe me? Come along on this deep dive into...

it's spelled "meals"!

In the mid-80s especially, those montages and tacky songs were everywhere, not yet recognized at the cliche they'd become. And if we've seen a few mid-80s rom-coms, we're bound to think we're about to see a treacly John Hughes coming-of-age prom-com. The only thing 'off' is the make-up she's wearing, but that only makes us presume we're watching some tacky European 80s version, and that the most we'll get as far as suspense is a nervous first kiss. Maybe some danger with a boy who won't take no for an answer, and then the geeky kid comes to her rescue. All the signifiers are there. We got our weary Cassandra picture in our mind, the plodding pic touching every boring base to get to the horrors we know are coming and "just can't stop" ( or speed up for that matter).

POST-META/MODERN AFFECT, FULCI-style:

The parallels with ghost and film watchers is always right there, in every movie, whether elaborated on (as in European art cinema) or ignored (America). The key to enjoying art films often rests on realizing this, and that the camera POV and soundscape are everything, that characters are often unspoken amnesiacs, adrift in strange worlds, that our sense of alienation is a result of post-modern intent rather than a sign the film isn't 'doing' what it should, i.e. hypnotizing into a cathartic response via an engaging narrative. 

If, for example, the camera is following behind someone running through the park at dusk, in an art film (like Birth) it could evoke in us the feeling we're a ghost chasing after the runner; but in a non-art (most American) film, unless particular attention is called (via breathing noises, as in Halloween) the tracking just means the person we're identifying with/watching is running - so we're running. The camera POV is meant to be invisible. We're not identifying with the camera but the actor. In art films, we sense that while we can vicariously thrill to the events onscreen, we are, like a hungry ghost, forever shut outside of the image, able to access it only in fantasy. In non-art films, there is only fantasy. POV is meant to be invisible. 

The trick to savoring the weirdness of Aenigma, and Fulci movies in general, is to read them as both high art and 'so bad they're good' at the same time. Taken as intentional affect, Kathy can be read as the desirous viewer, lusting after the 'hottest guy in the school", Fred. We late learn she followed him around a lot, annoying everyone, so they arranged the prank to put a stop to it. In her proletariat identity, it's clear Kathy is 'outside' the image even when she's onscreen. And it's clear too she's now in a coma because she wanted to literally be in the big picture. Her debut, her screen test is her big date with Fred. She blows it. 

But you have to be onscreen, to open yourself up to the masses, to realize the awful downside: you're now open to all sorts of derision from the trolls and critics, and jeering idiots the world over. Unless you're an Adonis or a Perfect 10, someone's going to find something to laugh at about you; every incel nerd and slimeball can feel superior from the safety of their moms' basement. If your make-up is done by someone deliberately trying to sabotage you, like a friend of the rival for your part, you don't have a chance.

And thus, exposed and humiliated, Kathy is booed off the screen, shooed back into the cozy darkness, the anonymous audience, the sexually frustrated 'average' people. 

But she never quite makes it back to her seat. The accident knocks her loose between screen and audience, fantasy and reality. Her body is trapped in the real, immobilized, but her spirit can now enter the fantasy and possess a girl who is hot and popular, who's sexually experienced, everything Kathy wanted to be but now never can, except by this hot proxy. On one plane she's a vegetable; on another, an avenging, horny spirit. That we know they're connected is because her comatose face still smiles or has an EKG spike when she kills her persecutors as a spirit, or gets it on as Eva. 

Once we accept that we're basically seeing much of the movie through Kathy's eyes (or she's seeing through ours), the disconnect of the dubbing enhances the doubling and perception through another's eyes. I argued in a post post that if people have a problem with 'whitewash' casting of Scarlet Joannson as an Asian-eyes robot in Ghost in a Shell (which sadly has become a meme for Asian representation rather than being recognized the very well constructed and beautiful movie that is) they should watch it in a Korean or Japanese dub language track, so that the idea a Japanese/Korean woman is inside an white 'shell' would have greater meta resonance. Since in a way Aenigma is very similar to that film in basic premise (someone's ghost in another person's shell) the presence of the bad American dubbing - and the way an international cast of Italians, Romanians, and one American, are all supposed to be in Boston instead of Bucharest- finds a perfect metatextual justification for its sense of artificial dislocation. 

Furthering the disconnect, one of the main reasons this movie rocks so much is the use of miniatures for her POV floating scenes. The roof of the hospital and fake skyline definitely have an air of a dream, of not quite being in a real world. None of it is convincing (why the hospital exterior is a twin refinery storage tower is never explained--though obviously because it was made for an earlier film), but damn is it endearing.  And damn does it further our sense of dislocation, drifting from the diegetic reality of conventional film tropes like a balloon in the winds. Folksy and lovely in their analog playfulness, following the POV of Kathy's disembodied spirit over the train set-like cityscape is like digging William Cameron Menzies' miniatures and disembodied floating camera in Svengali (1931) or The Bat Whispers. (1929).

SEXY COLLEGE DIALOGUE DECONSTRUCTED: (Or The preceding scene proceeds successfully in setting up subsequent scenes exceedingly speedily)

Trying their best, a familiar roster of English dubbers from Italian film try their best to both match the lips of their characters and lend some finesse, failingly, to the corny 'sexy' dialogue, clearly written--almost mockingly--by repressed older Italian men trying to write for young American women in a style based on American films they've seen. The resulting combination is a kind of stylized, performative burlesque of savage female sexual aggression, ala John Waters or Russ Meyer, but with the slang and hysteria replaced by a kind of flat, straightforward, comic book-style lack of subtlety. Perhaps its Kathy's horny naiveté finding id-unleashing power via Eva's hot mess nymphomania ("you really prefer older men?" / "Let's put it this way, anything in pants") and the joy of being not the target of the girls' strident put-downs. With the canned flat dubbing making everything abstract, defensive answers to probing dour school mistresses questions are interrupted with sudden non sequiturs ("I had a breakdown, Ms. Jones. A mild nervous breakdown" /"Who's smoking!?"). The effect is sort of  like every line was lifted carefully from some other American film and then spoken by someone who doesn't really understand the movie or the dialogue, and recorded out of sequence. No fully-fledged motif or plot rationale is able to come to completion. Something always interrupts, or steers things away. For example, when Eva first meets her new roommate Jennie she plops onto her bed and says rather strongly, "OK Jennie, let's get one thing straight. For me a successful year means making out with as many cute boys as possible" it sounds strange, starting out almost defensive and ending with a Happy Days-level declaration and forced giggle.  It's such an odd switch from how that declaration began, it takes a few viewings to realize she's answering the cold declaration of the head mistress who's just deposited her into her new form room and, on her way out the door, coldly says "I hope you'll have a successful year." In other words, there's some motivations behind every seeming act of madness, which is why the whole thing survives such repeat viewings. Each line's meaning varies each time you see it. With such unconvincing inflection, the words are totally open to each viewer's projections.

The next day (or sometime) after the accident, Eva and the girls are in aerobics class, taught be Fred, and he says in his familiar voice (we've heard this dubbing artist in a million other Italian imports), measured out in a manner no one would ever talk like: "come on ladies, you don't want a fat ass to get in the way when you get with your boyfriends tonight," as he says this he slaps the ass of a student he's passing. She retorts in an equally measured voice, "I may have a fat ass but if you touch it again I'm gonna slap your face." 

FAKE OUTS:

Eva, proving her sexual aggressive clout, feigns an injury after class to get Fred to come and massage it. Her new roommate, Jennie tries to warn her: "Fred can be a little.. dangerous," but Eva waves it away. "I mean it, Eva--he has a pretty unhealthy reputation.""Good," Eva snaps back, "so do I".

Again, Cassandra viewers may begin imagining Eva not realizing how much more unhealthy Fred is; that she was not warned needlessly.

But after all that build-up, this portent goes nowhere. Instead, the next scene is Fred in his darkened studio, primping before the mirror in his manly body stocking after hours while Mary, Kathy's mute, bug-eyed, possibly brain-damaged mother, who works as cleaning woman (we learn she got her daughter Kathy admitted to this otherwise prestigious school as a special favor) mops up in her drab Romanian frock, almost a mocking satire of his sexy expectations. Her straggly-haired presence is not conducive to his sexy plans or his Adonis reflection, so he rushes her out before she can even gather her bucket and mop. Yet no sooner as she left than he's worrying about her bucket which is left in the middle of the floor, cramping his sexy/unhealthy feng shui. He moves it to the side, but after he looks into the mirror awhile, he finds it back where it was. ("Mary," he shouts, "your bucket!")

Once again, none of this is bucket business is underlined or spelled out with cutaways or ominous cues. But we see Mary glower from around the corner and her pupils turn a digital colorized red. We get the feeling comeuppance is headed his way.

 

Mary, Kathy's muter "retarded" mother, "Crazy Mary" who works as the sole janitorial staff of the school, has sallow eyes and straggly hair, like her daughter, played by a Romanian actress, like the woman who plays Kathy,  seems both otherworldly and totally earthbound, that drab dress and defeated but wild-eyed look common to Eastern European character actors, offset by a keen knowingness that makes the westernized pretty people seem especially vapid. As she's always mopping somewhere in earshot of whatever's going on, it takes awhile to notice her. There's no scene of her at the hospital - she gets no time off to visit her daughter's side - no one sends her condolences. She's an afterthought, at best. But though mute and supposedly a moron, she seems to know what's going on. The question is always what is the connection and who is doing the comeuppance spells, Mary or Kathy or Eva/Kathy? And why doesn't Mary notice Kathy is in Eva the first time, when serving her snails and hearing her talk about eating them in New Orleans (where Kathy and her mom are from, not Eva).

PAGING DR. ANDERSON

As with all the strange things going on, these deft sleights of hand where it's up to us to form an opinion of our own, we never quite learn if Fulci feels we should find Robert's behavior as shocking as we do. The scene is played in a light screwball vein -- a handsome shy man and an aggressively sexual, unhinged young girl who won't take no for an answer - shades of Bringing Up Baby, Something Wild or the Nicolodi / Hemmings hook-up in Deep Red.  And their strange trysting isn't even the subject of the film! It's not even commented on, not even the doctor's relatively cool fellow doctor bats an eye. It's incidental. As far as the film is concerned, we should be paying attention to his attempt at figuring out why Eva has Kathy's memories. And why Kathy's EKG spikes wildly whenever another murder happens next door. He doesn't see that Kathy smiles and giggles when getting it on with her handsome coma doctor via Eva as he's not there. Anderson thinks he can figure it out. We're too busy being thrilled, shocked, and in awe at his getting away with such an outrageous breach in ethics. We can wonder if Kathy developed a crush on him while he hovers over her in the ICU. That Kathy's end game for possessing Eva is more to seduce him rather than wiping out her enemies.

Sex, as it always is with Lucio, is a pretty savage affair. None of his best films have any kissing let alone sex. Aenigma has only one sex scene but it's all bathed in red lights against black backdrop, and glazed with sweat, and it quickly turns in a cannibal maenad nightmare. The rest of the sexy time we see is only heavy petting, along the 'second base' high-school type, reflecting--perhaps-- Kathy's arrested sexual development. Eva kisses him violently, hungrily. She's almost a rapist. But the sex happens only in his nightmares (at least as far as we see). 

In between surrendering to her rough caresses, Dr. Robert continues his vain attempt to discover how or why Eva has Kathy's memories. He never thinks of bringing Eva into Kathy's room at the ICU to see what happens. Instead he tries to get her to play word association games. "Tell me the first thing to come into your head when I say.... 'Charles is a mystic.'" he says That leave us puzzled. The post-modern affect of the canned dubbing makes these surrealist digressions and mentions of Charles, whoever that is, uncanny. He's figured out Eva has Kathy's memories, regularly saying she's from New Orleans when Eva is from Boston, but that's the least interesting aspect of the film, except as a post-modern rationalization for the stilted dubbing. But we never see Eva even arrive outside the door for the date. It's like she disappears. Before anything can happen, Fred's reflection in the the dance studio mirror, presses its face, looking terrifyingly gleeful look in his eye--through the glass until it shatters sending shards flying in all directions as he lunges through to strangle himself. And there's Mary's bucket - right there again. 

What's up with that mystical bucket, Charles? 

The film gives us cues that it's "Crazy Mary" (she's mute but may be a witch) bumping off the people who put her daughter into her coma via her crazy magic. We see her eyes flash red as she stares balefully from around corners when she overhears someone talk disparagingly of her daughter, but we can't be sure if it's her or Kathy via Eva doing the strange magic deaths. There seems to be at least three different underlying culprits: does Kathy leave Eva to go facilitate these strange hallucination deaths as a disembodied, curtain rustling spirit or is it 'Crazy Mary' and her red eyes? Either way we never see Eva arrive at the door, making the death of Fred before Eva even comes kind of shocking - what was all that set-up for about his bad reputation? 

Eva and Kathy presumably wrestle sexily for control

The next day at class someone hears Eva call him a "bastard" for not answering his door, and another of the girl says "Did you say 'bastard'? You must be talking about Fred." But nothing more is said about whatever he's done to them in the past to earn that title. And then when they learn he's dead, they all cry and bemoan how unfair it is that Fred "kicked the bucket," and Kathy gets to still be alive in a coma and it's not the other way around. Meanwhile, the teacher seems indignant they'd interrupt the class; just because one of their teachers was just murdered. It's hard to imagine anyone being as casually cruel and callous as these people, making vicious fun of the mother of the girl they put in a coma when she's right there in earshot openly lamenting how unfair it is that the old-enough-to-know-better probably dangerous presumed rapist (that "unhealthy reputation") is dead while the innocent girl he pranked into a coma, gets to live on as a vegetable. And yet, thanks to the canned effect and the innuendo-free mania of the dialogue, the girls' callousness is so over-the-top it fails to cause any anger or shock in the viewer. Instead, it's kind of thrilling, the same way it would be in, say, a movie by Russ Meyer or John Waters. This bears no resemblance at all to our own high school and college memories, whatever they may be, as no one is this childlike and open about expressing their horrible inner pre-empathic emotions. There is no filter. Even in a coma, Kathy is still a bitch who deserves to die for the crime of trying to fit in, a greasy-rizzy-haired Romanian (Eastern Europe never discovered conditioner, apparently) trying to make it in a pretty Italian girl world. 

Meanwhile, the choices of directions seem arbitrary, in the moment. Small toss-away lines are revisited, emphasized, foreshadowed, forgotten. There's a conversation between all the girls while they smoke a joint in the dorm room--one of them sneers that Crazy Mary is a "retard," so Kathy was the daughter of a retard. "But who'd want to get with a retard?" another girl says. "Another retard," is the reply ".... or worse!" It's just a toss-away line (and forgive me for repeating it) but suddenly Jenny gets worried about the "or worse." 

The huge Romanian buildings make the girls seem very small, a reference to the high doorknobs in Suspiria?

"What did you mean by worse!?" ("I don't know," comes the reply, " but Miss Jones and Miss Fitzpatrick, and Mary lock themselves in her room and I've heard some really weird noises.") And at one point we hear chanting behind closed doors. And Mary's eyes regularly flash a tacky, digitized red when she's doing a witchy stare at a future victim, but the connection, if there's any, between her and Kathy and Eva and Ms. Jones and Ms. Fitzpatrick as far as the murders just hangs there, like the strange picture of the presumed school's founder, whose pursed lips and... curlers (?) beams down from the back wall. Fulci has all these signifiers laying around if the viewer wants to try and piece a familiar story together out of them, but he's already in the next room, so you may as well drop them and keep up. 

Meanwhile, little details are thrown in to keep it interesting, especially at the museum where Eva tricks one of the girls into going after hours. Eva disappears leaving the girl scared as the art keeps changing from to reality - paintings of mass murder bleed (kind of sidewise? or at an angle? it's hard to get the orientation); a severed hand drops out of the painting; an anaconda slithers on the marble floor after Grace sees the marble snake at the feet of a statue; and then instead of Medusa's head in Perseus's hand it's Kathy, all made-up with the gold eye-makeup and hyper clown cheeks from the beginning, (actually, with all that stuff one, she looks like Michael Jackson--above, clearly they just smeared all that make-up from the opener on whatever head the Romanian prop guy had lying around ). Finally a Rodin thinker reaches out to strangle her in the crook of his elbow. Once again, Eva has vanished. 

THE ARRIVAL OF MALE "AUTHORITY"

As the murders accrue, the police and school board insert themselves into the periphery of the flow, adding to the deadpan comical bipolar gear shifting. At Fred's studio the morning after his 'murder', the coroner bends down and puts a stethoscope to Fred's chest. After listening carefully for some time, he stands up, drops the stethoscope out of his ears, and diagnoses cause of death as a "heart attack." 

Rather than wonder at the medical illogic of expecting to hear anything from a dead heart, the cop merely notes "the same thing happened to the guy who invented jogging." Meanwhile Dr. Robert has strange conversations with his nurse that remind you he was once in medical school ("she shouldn't have any brain activity," / "naturally.... She's... in a coma").  A mort par beaucoup d'escargots (a gross needlessly lengthy scene where that poor actress lay there with real snails crawling all over her face) is dismissed by the detective the next day as the girl suffocating herself with a pillow. Italian horror fans will instantly think of Kill Baby Kill, in which the spirit of a dead child is used by her psychic old mother to cause anyone who talks about her into killing themselves. Is that the origin of the Kathy-Mary connection? But that lead too goes nowhere. Since none of it is addressed, none of it is resolved, the meanings proliferate, wash ashore, then dissolve onto the sand or back into the mise-en-scene like waves. 

Whenever Eva hooks up with the doctor, we see Kathy's satisfied coma smile

The authority even washes onto Dr. Anderson and Eva's shores in an amusing fake-out scene that makes us wonder if we've overestimated the looseness of the time and place. There's a scene shortly after the montage of necking with Eva begins that we get a fake-out 'busted' from Ms. Jones, when she asks Dr. Robert to walk with her in confidential conference about Eva. 

"She comes from an important family," says Ms. Jones,  "You must understand, I must think of the reputation of the college." 

We instantly feel his guilt/anxiety on his tomcat behalf, like the next words will be "so I therefore have to report to your unethical and amoral behavior to the medical review board." or at least "I insist you stop seeing her." Instead she asks him to discreetly take over her case personally, and to spend a lot of one-on-one time with her!

"

She's all yours, doc

Phew! 

Literally, he's already on top of that, so we breathe a sigh of relief. But again, none of that is spelled out the way it would be in an American film. Even a Quentin Tarantino movie would underline and enhance this little moment, so even the squares had a chance to feel the dread and relief. But with Aenigma we're not even sure if Fulci notices it. It works, though, as yet another modernist fake-out, pulled off so deadpan it's easy to miss.

The next time Dr. Anderson encounters the head mistress is some unspecified day later when he comes to visit Eva at the school as always (he's even been conspicuously making out with her in her dorm room, like some college sophomore) Then, one day he cruises up to her dorm room door, whistling a happy tune, but the door is locked and Jennie is passing by. She informs him she's been sent away to a 'deluxe rest home" by her parents. It turns out they've been trying to call him but he's been out tooling around. Jennie seems like the adult in this exchange. Throughout the scenes of unethical dorm room necking, she's been there soberly doing homework, making Eva threaten her violently more than once. 

Jennie is a true naif; when she smokes she holds it wrong, barely puffs then exhales in that cute way innocent girls do when trying to seem worldly.  In sum, she seems both younger than the others in experience and looks and older in maturity.

But she's the Amy Irving moral compass.... about to spin out herself. 

JENNIE TAKES EVA'S PLACE

And so begins a lovelorn voiceover from Eva to Dr. Anderson. We never see him reading it, but we do see as she writes it outside at a table on the asylum grounds, the hospital behind her, as indicated by a handful of men in white leaving a building. The scene is very familiar to anyone with movie-watching experience, though there's usually a nurse pushing an old man in a wheelchair around in the background, or a group of joggers entering and exiting the frame, the day's physical therapy.  The letter continues, pining and yearning and fantasizing for him, and so when we see a gaggle of girls jogging in the park, we can't help but think, ah either they'll jog past her sitting at her table, or she'll jogging with them, as per the ususal rehabilitation montage; next we'll see her in a circle of chairs for group therapy, all while the letter voiceover continues. BUT though the joggers are there, and the letter is continuing, we're not seeing Eva anymore. 

It's Jennie. We're not at the rest home at all! We're with the remaining bitches from St. Mary's, running through the park (their gym class probably, now that Fred's too dead to lead the aerobics) and back to the school van to get their backpacks and towels, to lay out on the grass. As the letter continues, ever increasing in its perturbed longing.

And lo and behold whose pulling up in his red convertible.... Dr. Robert Anderson, the focus of Eva's obsessive letter. He smiles and Jennie turns and smiles back, and runs up and climbs into his car, all while Eva's letter pours it on int he voiceover --making it seem like it's her getting into the car in her fantasy. We see her in her room at the asylum, like the dorms only narrower, the round outdoor table she was writing on earlier is now in there with her, tablecloth and all, making there, almost no room between her chair and the twin bed. It's a totally Bunuelian bit of surrealism that just streaks right by. 

Eva's letter continue on, and the yearning and sexual hunger increases in its manic possessive intensity. The montage of romantic scenes (between Robert and Jennie) underneath it make a surreal contrast that comes into sense when we hear Eva threatening to remove any girl who steals him away.  

What we find weird is that, yeah, Eva we could understand, especially if we once had or still have a yen for the damaged/insane hottie archetype (most iconically embodied by Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted). But even for debauched older men, Jennie seems way too young and naive. Eva looked like she could be in her early 20s, and mature for age at that, but Jennie looks easily just 16. And their petting reflects this chaste Lemon Popsicle kind of romance: French kissing and hand holding is the order of the day, in theaters and in the convertible, the camera tracking in close. It's Eva describing passionate sex in her letter, it's Jennie doing a PG version in montage reality.  

BUT THEN! The letter ends, the POV has zoomed up to them making out in the car (above) suddenly, the POV cuts to the hospital and zooms up to Kathy's eyes opening in her green sheeted ICU bed --only now she's not smiling; she looks heartbroken, those big saucer eyes betraying a kind of resigned hungover disappointment / Cut to a zoom up to Eva's eyes in her room, snapping open as well. It's like she's/they're only now realizing it's not them (Kathy / Eva) making out with Robert in her epistolary reverie, but Jennie in After School Special reality, a reality that excludes her. The meta POV angle comes kicking back in the way it did at the drive-in/prank. We may dream we're experiencing it, but it's via someone else now, not even the someone else we've been dreaming through. 

Watching for the first time it takes us awhile to notice this switch.  We're so used to the montage of physical therapy, group therapy, art therapy, under a letter-reading voiceover we don't think twice. Unless we're very good at remembering faces, we can't be sure Jennie is not Eva. The first time I saw it I was thinking that maybe the original actress playing Eva had to leave early, ala the girl in Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire. So he just replaced her and made it an artistic choice that two girls play one role. 

This shot sequence, top to bottom, shows Fulci's genius with using quick edits to move the narrative along, with Eva's obsessive VO letter ending in a declaration he must be hers alone, ending as we slow zoom in on Robert and Jennie making out in his car / to Kathy's eyes bugged open in the hospital / to a zoom up to Eva's eyes flashing open -indicating Kathy's astral POV has noticed it's not her avatar with Robert but her avatar's goody two-shoes back-stabbing roommate. A smash cut / quick pan across a darkened exterior street finds Eva, cooly dressed in all black shirt and slacks, almost Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon-cool, already snuck out and headed, obviously, back to the school. In order to understand this progression you have to take for granted that these aren't random shots  but lead one to the other; as we're dealing with metaphysical high strangeness, like remote viewing, witchy magic, girl emotions, and betrayals.  Nothing is ever spelled out in a Fulci film: we have to presume the order of the edits is telling a story, that each cut to a pair of eyes is seeing the previous image. So a cut to Kathy in her bed with eyes open, unsmiling, means she 'sees' and is not happy, then Eva 'sees' - the information hitting her with the zoom force of Kathy's thought. She's not only pissed but able to do something about it. Fulci spares us all the connectors and explanations and boom - we're out of an asylum we never even saw. Nope. Somewhere along the way, probably in a scene left on the editing room floor or x-ed out of the script, Robert has been 'consoled' by Eva's roommate --the tale as old as time. What is up with girl roommates always having to two time each other by sleeping with the other's boyfriend when he comes over and she's not there? Clearly it's happening at St. Mary's as well as with me up in Syracuse (twice!).

Sure, we know the whole Jennie thing is in the film purely as a trigger for Eva/Kathy's homicidal jealousy. That's natural enough, but what's not is that it's never verbally commented on. Robert and Jennie barely talk outside of the one scene in his office when she needles him about bringing nurses up there. They never even mention Eva. It's like Robert's been replaced by a younger version of himself - the same actor in a different era of his character's life. To them Eva no longer exists, but Kathy still does. While we return to Kathy whose face is ever-illuminated on his TV, her spirit seems to weigh on them.

Back in the school, it's the dead of night in the school, Kathy's mom hears her daughter's disembodied voice in her head--a kind of echo of Carrie's in De Palma's film: "they played a mean trick on me because my mom is Crazy Mary.") This is the first time we've heard Kathy's actual voice since those first six minutes. Mary knows instantly that she's standing there in the shadows, inside Eva (why hasn't she noticed Kathy's presence inside Eva sooner, such as when she served her snails?) Now Eva's eyes are glowing red too, but softer and Mary's eyes seem softer red too, as if the red has disseminated from mother to daughter/Eva. Thy smile at each other and though she's always been mute and seemingly 'retarded' - in her telekinetic voiceover to Eva/her daughter, Mary now 'speaks' perfectly rationally - and they exchange unspoken dialogue. They seem ready to bond closer when we hear the sound of evil laughing, we brace ourselves, thinking evil Eva/Kathy blames her mom for her condition and is now laughing evilly in her face for thinking they could reunite so touchingly, i.e. Mary's next on the hit list. But again it's not, just one of Fulci's many post-modern affect trope-tweaks. Neither of them is telepathically laughing, it's Grace and her boyfriend, (the grinning blonde couple who dressed Kathy up for her date with Fred) sneaking into the building, viewable from outside the window near where mom and daughter are standing/staring. We don't even need to cut back to Mary and Eva to see if they hear or are looking out. We don't need to. Fulci wouldn't use a reaction shot if none are needed. We already what's going to happen next. The curtains will rustle, some lame canned sexy dialogue will occur, and some people are going to lose their post-coital heads. Once again Mary and Eva are nowhere to be found - disappearing from mise-en-scene temporarily so they can engineer creative deaths in the ether. 

AENIGMA, you really are... an Enigma

OK, I'll end my deep dive here. The ending is kind of unsatisfactory--as if they realized time was up so just pulled the plug, so to speak. It works though. And you can always keep the enigmatic Fulci kick alive by watching something like House by the Cemetery (1981) or Conquest (1983) or The Devil's Honey (1986) after this. 

In short (haha), I love Aenigma as much for what it leaves out as what it leaves in: there are no cliche'd young snickering horndog males (no colllege age male even gets a line of dialogue) there's really only two male characters in the film, aside from the occasional flutter of a cop and coroner and little bit parts. There are no montages of time passing, no Boston travelogue B-roll filler, no pointless connecting scenes (arriving/departing, opening doors, no going to sleep, bonding), no engaging in predictable 'character development' and no predictable, bland orchestration. There isn't any 'norm' --if there is its used sardonically, ala the "Head over Heels" montage, so there's nothing to deviate from. There are no children or animals, no pointless tracking shots through asylums. No parents. Only two vehicles: Robert's red convertible, and the school van. The interiors are all old white Romanian architecture, cavernous with twin circular stars going up to a second floor balcony so students can gaze ruefully down at others. The museum is almost empty except for violent art; we never see any food except snails. And when Grace hallucinates the rows of beds on the ground floor, we realize this museum may just be the school with a few changes in set dressing (ditto the hospital, aside from the elevators and the cool morgue floor- which is filmed with three slabs center stage, evoking the space age autopsy theater in The Beyond.)

What it has are bitchy, sex-crazed girls saying outrageously mean things in marvelously stilted dubbed voices while pretending they know how to smoke; Crazy Mary listening around corners as soon-to-be-dead students disparage her and her daughter; frowning school teachers irritated by the slightest display of emotional vulnerability; aerobics; bait-and-switch fake-outs; Carlo Maria Cordio's slinky organ score; the Menzies-evoking miniatures; Eva's savage Russ Meyer-style amok carnality and the usual creative Fulci death scenes; plenty of psychedelic WTF detours like blood raining sideways out of a painting; snails slowly suffocating a (presumably paralyzed) girl who wasn't paid enough (those are real snails!); the doctor and his never-commented-on young 'habit'. And of course that dubbing. 

But it's the wealth of post-modern ambiguity is what really sells it. It's why you can see Aenigma over and over and never see the same film twice. We never know if any of these meanings I've just ascribed to it in this novel-length dissertation are intended or accidental. Like Schrodinger's cat-as long as it stays in the box--neither alive or dead, true or false, accident or intent, genius or stupidty--it's perfect, it's mythic, it's endlessly intriguing. On the other hand, if the box is opened and the cat is dead, i.e. Aenigma is a hack job inconsistent mess perfect to be hooted at during a drunk movie night but any subtext is BS, then what a short-sighted drag of an impression. Why even watch it? And if we open the box and know for sure the cat is alive, it's shuffled off behind the velvet rope of bourgeois respectability and can no longer be enjoyed as a 'so-bad-it's-good / WTF/ outsider gem of accidental Brechtianism.  

But while still in the box, the cat neither alive nor dead, there can be no set response. No 'true' figuring out whether it's Mary and her coven or Eva/Kathy orchestrating the deaths. As a result, the beer-crushing bad movie lovin' plebes and the snifter bourgeois critics, each desperate to define themselves by their likes and dislikes, don't trust it. They never get that being neither true or false is what true myth is all about. Aenigma is like an eternal Xmas eve where morning never comes; or an alien or bigfoot documentary, as long as we don't know the answer, it stays relentlessly intriguing. Once all the meaning is ascribed, it's just a banal grey concrete, poster-covered dorm room mess, and aren't we all?

Hopefully you never read this. 

FURTHER with FULCI

Nightmare Logic: Lucio Fulci's HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981) 

Brokeback Barbarians Vs. the Metalheads: CONQUEST (1983)

Creature Double Feature Night 4: BAFFLED! (1972); CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980)

"Absolute" October- 10: THE BEYOND

Touched by a Locust: EXORCIST 2: THE HERETIC, MANHATTAN BABY 

Maybe that's why--even though we have Prime, HBOMax, Hulu, Disney, Arrow, Criterion, and Kino-Cult and Tubi at our fingertips here in my house (it pays to live with a media critic) not to mention all the DVDs/Blu-rays I have laying around (they, Kino-Cult and Arrow and Criterion are mine of course)--I spend the most time watching YouTube. These 10 films (well 9 and a 70s science fiction show from British/West German television) can all be found on my curated YouTube list (see below) Badass Ladies Too Dangerously Cool for DVD.

Oh YouTube, how I love thee- let me count the ways: 1) Otherwise unavailable or indecipherable international films, often subtitled added by committed fans. 2) The ability to scroll and search around while watching things - so you can stay noncommittal to a title until it does something to grab you; 3) You can make numerous playlists like on Spotify. 4) You can fall asleep watching one movie and wake up and your list is still playing so you can tell how long you were out by where you are on the list. 5) Which I do. Every night, on my Old Dark/Sci-FiTranquilizer: Movies to Fall Asleep to. mix. 6) The weird shit just keeps coming. And in the age when so much new stuff is being released that you can't possibly keep up, disappearing into the pre-CGI past is the safest way to travel, patriarchy be damned. And it is! 

Dazzling in its dark green color scheme, sinuous and lithe in its poetry-infused high crime punch, irresistibly sheathed in Isao Tomita's mix elegant harpsichord and slinky bass, Fukasaku's 1968 Japanese spy/crime film is camped out high on the luxurious side of Stylish Caper Mountain. Imagine a Josef von Sternberg/Dietrich collaboration on a late-60s European spy caper, then replace Dietrich with a Japanese drag queen (Akiro Miwa) and make her a master criminal in the Irma Vep mode, squaring off against a smolder-eyed master detective named Akechi. Duelling throughout while winning each other over with their brooding poetic flair, they fill their exchanges with perceptive and moving poetry (well translated for the subtitles). It's based on a play by Yukio Mishima (Japan's answer to Jean Genet/Antonin Artaud) story by Edogawa Rampo (Japan's answer to Edgars Poe and Wallace) and enriched with the sublime poetry ("the law, my brother""the prison cell, my gift")

Instead, Fukusaku's camera is always right where it should be, calmly, assuredly- trained squarely on the amazing Miwa in the title role. Wielding a sword with the buccaneer dash of prime Errol Flynn one moment and collapsing on her luxuriant bed it in a swooning whirl of girlish infatuation he next, she's is the perfect amalgam of drag styles: high camp without winky self-awareness; classic glamor without studied pageant queen self-importance; larger-than-life charisma without histrionic  self aggrandizement, and above all, richly sketched oscillating moods and emotional extremes, veering from cold criminal glee (she loves crime) to impassioned infatuation, poetic rapture, and sudden fury. She even gets a first class death scene. "I knew ot all along; your hearts was a genuine diamond. " 

2. TEMPTRESS OF A THOUSAND FACES

(1969) Dir. Chang-hwa Jeong

When the average person thinks of Shaw Brothers cnon, they usually think of shirtless bald guys smacking the shit out of each other in big indoor/outdoor restaurants, Buddhist monasteries, and palace foyers; but there was so much more to them than that, like atmospheric wuxia, the kinky horror, swooning romance, war movies and spy films as well.! Especially now that most of them seem to have been remasered on beautiful HD, to dismiss them as those baldheaded slap downs to miss out on a wealth of wonder. In addition to their flowing misty soundstage cherry blossom orchards and vast secret lair sets (see my praise here), they score well on the Bechdel, with plenty of female fighters, sorceresses and--as in Temptress of a Thousand Faces--master criminals with armed armies of adoring underlings. A mysterious master criminal with a huge mask collection that lets her impersonate just about anyone to pull of high-end jewel heists, Temptress operates out of a vast, trap-filled, very cool underground cavern lair that would give Dr. No, Fu Manchu, Diabolik, or Fantomas a run for their money. The only one who has a prayer of catching her is Chi Ying (Tina Chin-Fei), female detective several levels smarter then the men around her--police chief included,. The whole film becomes, essentially, their duel of wits, fighting over--amongst other things--Chi Ying's man, who--once the Temptress wears Chi Ying's face, has only their kiss and sexual performance to tell them apart 

To remind us of its Shaw heritage, the highlight here are plenty of long, well-choreographed fights, including Chi Ying sliding down a water pipe on a ten story building to avoid capture; and a long chase from the street outside the precinct up to the top of a tall building, over several rooftops and down a drainpipe on a ten story building.  The climax starts with a great knockout brawl between the two Chi Yings (after the real one escapes her cell where she's being forced to watch her boyfriend get seduced by what he thinks is her). Sure it's a pretty cliche'd situation, but the way these girls through each other through doors and windows and walls of Ying's small apartment- is a sight to behold, foreshadowing the badass trailer fight between Uma and Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill Vol.2. 

And dig the big Bond style climactic gun battle in the secret lair, as Ying and her boyfriend manage to shoot a hundred bullets out of their pistols, decimating most of her vast army. And woe to the weird ending, which implies sexual abuse at the hands of horny low-ranking cops grabbing up the Temptress's concubines and carrying them off kicking and screaming into the sunset, while the cops and prisoners all laugh before striding off, leaving the Temptress's body lying there, bullet-ridden, on the ground, forgotten. Oh you Shaws! For every sixteen strides forward, one small kick in the shins to send you home smarting. 

3. FRAULEIN DOKTOR

(1969) Dir. Alberto Lattuada

Man, I'm seeing a trend as, like the last two films on this list, this one is from the late, late-60s, as time when women's lib was on everyone's mind, and people were taking chances that maybe are still ahead of their time. Is that why this big budgeted lesbian junky spy WW1 Zhivago-esque pulp epic from the Dino Di Laurentiis international juggernaut production company still hasn't received an HD or digital release of any kind? With a thunderous Ennio Morricone score and a bona fide reckless awesome Suzy Kendall performance as the lead---supposedly real life 'other Mata Hari' WWI sex spy (, i.e. the same character played by Marlene Dietrich in Dishonoredand Myrna Loy in Stamboul Questnearly 40 years earlier. This is way more adult than those though, with lesbian seduction, drug abuse, unspeakable chemical warfare, and dangerous seductions right and left, all marketed to associate with Dr. Zhivago, as an epic of historical sweep, with Kendall subliminally evoking Julie Christie, and the big trench warfare climax evoking all the Russian revolution and WW1 footage of Lean's masterpiece. 

gettin' high after a job well done

However, this ain't your mom's subliminal Zhivago, unless your mom is a lesbian junky super spy working for WW1 Germany (i.e. the bad guys). Epic ambitions or not, this is from Di Laurentiis, the epic-scoped European Roger Corman, who gave us Conan, Dune, King Kong, Orca, The White Buffalo, and so many other essentials. That means thrills and lurid entertainment takes center stage with the sweep as a backdrop (as opposed to the reverse in Lean). Fraulein's Ennio Morricone score delivers an irresistible concoction of avant-garde frisson and emotional sweep, trumping (in my opinion) Maurice Jarre's endlessly repeated peasant carnival Zhivago waltz theme, especially when he pulls out his swooning big guns for the Capucine/Kendall hook-up.

Dipping its toes in a druggy kind of debauched super genius amorality that, personally, I adore, our Fraulein prides herself on her chameleonic efficacy and seductive ease with role playing, moving from London trollop to imperious master spy striding past the crew of her assigned U-boat, giving orders while looking through the periscope, to super demure, shy French maid, shyly acquiescing to the lesbian vibes of her French poison chemist employer (a seduction so central to the film it makes it on the original movie poster which may have a hand in it being so unavailable/unreleased on DVD - a little ahead of its time).,  The only time we sense we're seeing the real her is when her eyes dilate at the sight of morphine being given to a wounded soldier, or in the back of the sub, shooting up in celebration of wiping out her target ship. With the London counterintelligence spy master (Nigel Greene) and his turned German spy / Doktor's occasional lover asset in hot pursuit she deftly stays one jump ahead all the way. Based on supposedly real events, this Poison Ivy-style woman Capucine plays is allegedly based on a real person, supposedly (a kind of variation can be found in the 2017 Wonder Woman). Which is just so weird it's got to be true. 

Lesbianism was present in movies from 1968 of course, but still handled with sordid quotes around it, so we knew the filmmakers considered it perverse. Such things were either debauched displays for male consumption or lurid tableaux of deviancy meant to disgust us, i.e. what would be lurid and degrading in the hands of someone like Aldrich (ala his same year's Killing of Sister George) becomes--in Lattuada's hands--tasteful and enticing and even a little sad (we feel Capucine's gratitude at finding someone in this age of closets and fear who is open to her overtures; and are saddened knowing it's all a lie) Ennio Morricone delivers some amazingly, mythic, quiet, non-judgmental romantic balladry for their first kiss, giving it a way more of romantic sweep than that between the Doktor and her reverse double agent confederate (James Booth, refreshingly practical, cast and coiffed probably to subliminally evoke Omar Shariff's Zhivago, the way Kendall evokes Christie - just a theory of mine). 

Still, if this is a historical romance, more than with Booth or Capucine, it's a romance between the Doktor and morphine-when she stares lustily at the soldiers in her Red Cross train (she's disguised a nurse) you know it's because they're being given morphine and she can see the vials, not because she's horny (though you may have to be an addict of one stripe or another to pick up on that - it's not spelled out). Alas, the filmmakers miss a good ending by having her not shoot up in the back seat of her limo to celebrate, maybe with a big box of stolen from the French hospital train she helped set up while disguised as an altruistic Italian noblewoman,, crosscut with the nurses back on the train, overwhelmed by the influx of soldiers dying from the gas attack she helped into being, realizing the box holding their morphine ampules is missing so the boys are just going to have to bear the pain. 

Still, I forgive them. It's so rare in a movie like this you would feel that junky longing, have drugs and lesbianism be part of our antiheroine's story, but not the focus, neither one defining her chameleonic character, that they can be forgiven almost any oversight.  

And with Dino's other production it may be packed with extras, vistas and sweep, but it also zips along, high on the joy of forward momentum. Only the end, a muddy sea of extras in gas masks with helmets too similar to tell if they're German or French, all climbing over each other trying to escape or capture various trenches and roads, does it get a little Lean-ish--i.e. got to get your money's worth with those thousands of dying and gooey French soldiers-- but by then we're at the climax, so a little sweep isn't going to kill you. 

Oh Capucine, a chemist like you should have known: never trust a junky. (full review here)

4. GUNSLINGER

(1957) Dir. Roger Corman

Executing a deft outflanking maneuver around all the liberal guilt-tripping, corny sentiment, and labored symbolism that usually dampens the mood in any 50-60s 'revisionist' western, director Roger Corman keeps the tale lean, sexy and over fast, i.e. his specialty. Easily the best of AIP / Allied Artists' handful of westerns, this gender-reversed, mud-soaked saga of two strong women facing off to the death over the right to keep bars open past three AM (!), is criminally unavailable on DVD, or Blu-ray. Why? Is it because there are two deadly strong women locked in violent struggle and the patriarchy is basically portrayed as either cowardly, craven or conflicted? Beverly Garland stars as Rose, the wife of a murdered sheriff of Oracle, TX, who pins on his badge since the men in town are too cowardly, especially the lily-livered mayor.  Alison Hayes is Erica, the saloon owner/madame behind the killing, out to corner the real estate market by buying land then sending her smitten runt bartender (Jonathan Haze) to steal back the money. In addition to making her close at 3 AM, Rose also orders her three prostitutes out of town by the end of the week, and that's just going too damned far. Erica brings in the titular gunslinger Cane (John Ireland) to take Rose out at the end of the week; but he ends up falling for her! Considering Erica and he used to have a thing back in the day, that doesn't go over so well. 

It may sound pretty trite yet in Corman's hands, and courtesy Charles B. Griffith's and Mark Hana's typically tight script, this romantic triangle is actually pretty perceptive and even mature. Rose and Cane fall for each other but are both professionals who won't bend from their duties, making it doomed from the start. The countdown clock as the weak ticks down to zero hour is a good touch (Erica is waiting for the telegram that will announce if the railroad is coming through, and will make her a wealthy woman, or if she's just going to start blasting everything in sight). Guess what the telegram is gonna say!

Perhaps the only reason Gunslinger isn't more widely celebrated today on a cult level (it rates a lowly 3.7 on imdb for some ungodly and probably sexist reason) is that western fans are threatened by the gender revisionism? I usually roll my eyes at lady gunfighter movies as they're either campy and histrionic (Johnny Guitar), brooding and overproduced (The Quick and the Dead), or cutesy-poo (Cat Ballou), but Corman does everything right, and doesn't waste a second on filler.  People get shot right and left and die in the mud (Corman was plagued by rain so this is far from your usual desert setting) with no fanfare or drawn-out showdowns. Rose has no problem--no tears or misgivings--about racking up an impressive body count. I think Corman gets at a real truth about gunfights here that few others really do, i.e. the killer instinct is everything: the resolve to fire while the other person is still working up the steam it takes to violate nature with such quick, irreversible finality, fully cognizant of the fact that by raising your gun your chances of getting shot rise past the point of no return - this is what wins battles.

But man oh man, Roger! If your film is about a battle between two strong, inflexible, beautiful, deadly women (who have one of the best female-on-female bar fights in film history) why give it such a generic title as "Gunslinger"? I.e. why presume the most interesting character is going to be John Ireland? It sounds like its deliberately hiding inside a thick herd of generic westerns, hoping no hungry critic spots its creative weakness and lunges.  I wouldn't have ever even seen it myself if I wasn't assigned the whole Corman oeuvre back when I wrote for the Muze Search Engine way in '99. Man, am I grateful I did, grateful I lived next to an UES video store that had it (duped) and grateful to the understandin' soul who uploaded this 'un to yonder 'Tube. Keep the faith, ladies. All aboard for Oracle!  (full review)

5 . HEARTS AND ARMOUR

(1983)  Dir. Giacomo Battiato

Here's an Italian epic of swirling pre-Raphaelite beauty full of line-crossed lovers and knightly battlin', a kind Eschenbach Parsifal version of the Crusades. Edited down to a feature length from an Italian TV mini-series (like YOR, yo!) and seen in America--if at all--mainly idling on the shelves of early mom and pop video stores (in one of those early oversize cases). Never released on DVD or Blu-ray (yet) it's a movie that might be too romantic for the Conan crowd (unless your favorite part is the trysting with Valeria)--and too overwrought for the Excalibur crowd (unless your favorite part is handsome Lancelot getting it on with Arthur's wife in the misty glen) yet too action-driven and semi-sleazy for the Harlequin romance crowd. The plot finds a small cadre of noble Muslim knights ride around scrapping with the a similar number of Christians, occasionally rescuing fair maidens or getting cats out of trees and having a nice bloody time of it, until they fall in love with a maiden from the other side. Naked trysts in the lush and misty bower make it hard to go back to the usual Jetts/Sharks falderal.  But back they must go! Tanya Roberts--the fairest Moorish princess of all--bowers it up with a tow-headed Christian knight who rescues her from a mid-creek ravaging. Lovely Barbara De Rossi is a Christian maiden rescued from a (different) mid-creek ravaging by an invincible suit of armor which she then wears until the bower and a handsome Moorish knight doth beckon. Meanwhile a Muslim warrior women who actually looks remotely Muslin is shunted to the side. Uncool! But with De Rossi in that armor and all, what choice do you have, eh, blondie? There's also a stone that turns you invisible if you put it in your mouth. A sleazy monk uses it to start a temple-side ravaging but this time Tanya rescues herself (you don't need to see them for your knee to find a perp's balls - always remember that, girls) - and grabs that precious ring, I mean magic stone. 

With its lush cinematography making fine use of the deep shadows created by old growth forests (dig the pre-Raphaelite evocation in the screenshots above),  with high-fashion Italian armor designs (dig that rooster comb helmet!) and with her wild, long hair straying down u in lovely wisps over her gleaming armor, De Rossi is a real vision, like the knight and maiden in J.W. Waterhouse's 1893 "Belle Dame sans Merci." rolled into one. It won't make your sword & sorcery top ten, but it's still a nice addition to the post-Conan sword and sorcery boom. Aside from a few hairy situations, it goes down easy as a Sunday morning mimosa at an East Village brunch with all your prettiest hussy friends. 

6. GREEN SNAKE

(1993) Dir. Tsui Hark

Tsui Hark is definitely--like fellow Hong Kong auteur Stephen Chow--an acquired taste for a lot of mainstream American audience, wizzing by so quickly, veering crazily from one emotional height to another: romantic hijynx, crazy myth-building, sudden flashbacks, highwire action, HK music video-style sex, Steadicams zipping around like hopped up taxis, practical and--sometimes--CGI effects, soapy love story, comic interludes of bumbling scholars, horror/gore shocks, etc. it all flits by like shuffled cards, made all the more confusing thanks to often too literally translated English subtitles that--at best--provide a kind of avant-jazz counterpoint or koan-style poeticism to the action rather than clarifying events (you have to kind of trust yourself to understand the plot on faith as you don't get time to process; if you pause to unpack you'll get even more lost. His big crossover hit was 1987's A Chinese Ghost Story, and its love story between a naive young human and a sexy spirit, threatened by a soul devouring androgynous forest demon. Here's kind of an inverse variation, adapted by Chinese novelist Lillian Lee from a popular Chinese fairy tale. HK superstars Joey Wong and Maggie Cheung star as two sisters water elementals, serpent daemons who get to come onto land as humans during a big festival, setting up shop in beautiful empty house perched along a floating lotus-filled pond, leading off to the sea. The younger Green Snake (Cheung) is mischievous, curious, a little wicked, eager to experience the strange emotions of love (even faking crying at one point); Wong is the more mature White Snake who ends up falling for naive Buddhist scholar Hsui Xien (Wu Hsing-Kuo) and learning all about sex (her orgasm floods the river); and heartache (after he finds out who she is and bails in fear)

There's no doubt the Buddhist monk Fat Hoi (Vincent Zhao) has mad power; when he meditates, rainbows shoot out o fhis head (left) but he's very inflexible in his need to imprison any demon who crosses his path in his demon-trapping bowl, even a spider spirit turned devoted monk whose glowing prayer beads prove a hunting reminder to him that he can be wrong. With clarity of purpose being a pre-requisite for enlightenment, this muddying of moral waters threatens to undo him. When the beads wind up in the hands of the snake spirits he's forced to let them go, but that doesn't mean he wont try to break it up the White Snake/Hsiu Xien romance, spiriting Hsui off to a rocky island monastery full of dead chanting monks, determined to keep the snakes away from him at any cost, regardless of what he wants, neither of them knowing White Snake is giving birth to Hsiu's son. 

The cool thing with Buddhism-based horror and fantasy is that the monks and Buddhas have just as many if not more magical powers as the evil ones do. In Catholicism-based demon movies God is usually silent and basically impotent. His faithful are left alone against the overwhelming force of the demon until the very last minute, usually martyred for their troubles.If The Exorcist was made in Hong Kong, for example, Max von Sydow would be shooting lasers out of his mudras and spinning chakras and light sabre cross, and so it is here, with the taoist monk clearing out the flood waters with a wave of his stick and bringing about a magic rainbow- or shooting vast lengths of cloth out of his sleeve to trap spider spirits. Only gradually does he realize his inflexibility --labeling all demons as bad --is turning him into the villain. Things reach a climax when he becomes determined to deliver ------ from the two snake spirits that have him bewitched. Whisking him off to an ancient temple full of dead monks chanting and trying to save him - converting him from his love into the way of the boddhisatva, or whatever, while Green and White snake try to rescue him by eroding the temple into the sea, not realizing their blasts of water are flooding the town nearby - things build and build to a head and one wishes American films were this Jungianly complex. It's a bit like Mozart's The Magic Flue but with the queen of the night and her daughters the good guys and Sarastro and his monks the bad, with Parsifal caught in the middle. What, you don't get that reference? The Buddhist scholar is like Hopsy in the Lady Eve, with Jean an Emma (1) rolled into one (thus "snakes are my life" can continue to be his motto while still being a devoted spouse)  That better?

As with Sturges' film, we in the audience are 'in the know'The Little Mermaid, The Lure - it all goes on the same mythic frame - the woman spirit/unconscious/water/anima and her ultimate surrender as she comes into the light of marriage with male consciousness. - Ideally they merge totally - as in the union of Prince Eric and Ariel where the father from the sea is present at their wedding to wield his triton - i.e. land and sea unified. At its worst, she's screwed over patriarchy, ends up dying for a worthless man who the wilder sister--the one who never sold out--promptly and quite rightly kills (as in The Lure.)

One thing though - the translation on the YouTube video I saw is the typically abstract. Especially when the monk and the snake sisters--the girls eroding the monastery rock from all sides--the monk shooting out giant rolls of red cloth at them-- it gets really wacky:

"This spell? I accept it," says the monk when they launch mojo his way "You guys! The cassocks."

"Come out and he want to make us in," shouts Green Snake. "Sister who can still go."

"Cassock - have you thought about my cassock?" 

And my favorite, a parting jab at the monk's manhood: "What magic weapon do you have when I am out of the shower?" If you can translate what those subtitles mean, and you kind of can if you've ever taken a poetry class or tried to communicate in a language you barely know, or both at the same time, and there you are. The Cassock is you.

It's spiritedly acted (Cheung twisting and undulating and crawling along surfaces or swimming silently through the water in an unforgettably delightful sight), swooningly romantic (yet perceptive about human relationships), spirituality profound, Jungian, and exhibit A in how sublimely alike are western fairy tales and eastern fairy tales/myths - pointing at profound truths of Jungian archetypal psychology no amount of fractured subtitles can obscure. The patriarchy can obscure it though - so cherish yonder YouTube upload while ye may. You never know when Green Snake could slither back into the murky river and never be seen again outside of some OOP Tai Seng non-anamorphic, faded DVD. 

7. NADJA 

(1994) Dir. Michael Almereyda

A loose unofficial hipster downtown NYC b&w remake of Dracula's Daughter (1936), with Elina Löwensohn in the Gloria Holden role? Did I make this movie? Just like in the original, our antiheroine is in town to steal her father's (Dracula's) body from the morgue and burn it (so he can't come back) after Van Helsing (Peter Fonda!) stakes him shortly before the film begins. The zonked 'love child of Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy' Galaxy Craze plays Lucy, the drifting wife of Van Helsing's nephew (Martin Donovan in an early role as perhaps the most unconvincing boxer ever), here doubling as a kind of Jonathan Harker once she falls under Nadja's spell. Could it be that-- as in Bell, Book & Candle and Bringing up Baby--there's some kind of archetypal feminine magic at play in their chance meeting? 

Director Michael Almereyda proves himself quite adept at overlaying classic noir and Universal horror elements over familiar beats of black-and-white hipster downtown young people conversation, i.e. Jim Jarmusch peanut butter crashing into Todd Browning chocolate.  Nadja have a great round of expository meet-cute dialogue that mixes poetry, exposition and dark humor, all mixed together rather marvelously if faux-pretentiously. You can get an idea of it in the following exchange at the bar: Nadja tells Lucy she wants to see her brother (Jared Harris!) even though h wants to destroy her. 

 

"Does he live in Carpathia," Lucy asks.

"No," Nadja eyes her coldly, as if the answer is far more remote, "Brooklyn." 

The score is always on point (nearly every track is something I had in my CD collection at the time)--Portishead, Spacehogg, the works--and the black-and-white photography is luminous. You don't have to have been a nocturnal druggie hipster poet in 1990s NYC and a classic horror 'monster kid' who can pretty much quote the entire original 1931 Dracula, but it helps. (Have you seen my "Ten Minute Dracula one man show, recorded before a hip audience on an East Village rooftop in 1999?). See it with The Addiction (which came out the same year, is also in black-and-white, starring a hipster vampire, but is set in the West instead of the East Village and more about drug addiction than love), and then add A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night for a Black-and-white druggy downtown vampire triple feature!  And also check out Almereyda's similar unjustly forgotten hipster update of Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, The Eternal,(1998), 

8. MURDER BY THE CLOCK

(1931) Dir. Edward Sloman

Thanks to decades of unavailability (never even on VHS), very few critics and classic horror and mystery fans have given themselves over to the pre-code lurid greatness of Murder By the Clock, nor waxed sufficiently euphoric over the gleefully homicidal performance of Lilyan Tashman as Laura, the conniving and super-evil wife of lily-livered Herbert (Walter McGrail) who stands to inherit a fortune once his irascible, locked-in-the-past, bitter, premature burial-fearing aunt Julia (Blanche Friderici) kicks off.  Living in a giant super dark Addams-esque house with only her totally deranged, inhumanly strong simpleton son (Irving Pichel) and his no-nonsense housekeeper/caregiver for company, it's going to be pretty easy to sneak in and speed that process along. That is, if Laura can browbeat him into enough homicidal submission.

We know what's coming in the third act, because in the first scene we see Julia, her son and his caregiver visiting the family crypt to check the 'alarm horn' inside; she can let everyone know if she's entombed alive. After Julia makes the mistake of announcing she's changed her will over to leave everything to Herbert, you can guess who's going to put her in there.

Man, like Night of Terror (1933), the filmmakers make full use of the temporarily lax production code to throw a lot of high weirdness into the mix. It would be a good enough old dark house movie just between Julia's morbid rantings, Pichel's lunatic laughter, the eerie expressionist graveyard across the street, and all the midnight creeping around. But then....here comes Tashman, grinning ecstatically when watching her husband get strangled. Oh! Oh, that Lilyan! Oh! what a gal!

Plying her strange, ugly/sexy seductive 'charm' with all the subtlety of a punch in the face, Tashman proves one thing ably: shy, backwards, and horny men will always let themselves be manipulated by sexually forward women no matter how unpleasant said women may be. It can be oh so tough for shy guys to resist an assertive girl, even (or maybe especially) if--like Tashman-- she's only slightly attractive. It's sex as a coarse but palpable fact; you can practically smell it. First, she manipulates her husband into killing Julia; then manipulates her sculptor lover into killing her husband; then, after Pichel is jailed on suspicion for his mom's murder, she lets him all but molest her through the bars while convincing him to break out and kill either the husband or her sculptor lover, whichever is still alive by then! So she's got every man killing every other man to be with her. Whoever survives is who she'll turn on, claiming all sorts of coercion to ensure they get the hot seat, especially with her damning testimony (probably while shooting hungry looks at the male jurors) and now that she's basically inherited her way into being the wealthiest widow in town, the chief of police isn't about to accuse her of anything.

So, cops aside, all the men are easily seducible murderers, the women either bitter, manipulative, or dead. Only the homicide cop on the case, William Boyd, has any integrity or suspicion of Julia. She may have the other guys cowering, drooling, or at each other's throats, but Boyd rejects her advances with practiced ease. Still, he seems to admires her relentless confidence. He even admits--before hauling her away-- he's genuinely impressed.  

What a gal! They don't make 'em like that anymore, and maybe this film shows why, even while making us wish they would. Tashman's Laura is so unique in the annals of evil femme fatales and horror monsters she should have aFamous Monsters of Filmland cover to call her own (maybe a painting of that gleefully homicidal look, her claws bared, above).  Her brand of aggressively carnal pre-code horror seems strong even today.  Tashman is like the evil mirror image of Mae West, as sexually subtle as a bag of hammers and just as damaging.

9. STAR MAIDENS

(1976) British-German TV

From the start of this very 70s very Europen sci-fi TV show we know we're in a world very far ahead of our own. `Over cool worldbuilding effects and a pumping loungecore theme song, a female narrate announces we're on tthe planet Medusa, a world far ahead of our own on almost every level. Their secret: women rule and men are considered inferior so kept as 'male domestics', 'nursing fathers', or labor.  As a result violence is almost totally abolished (men are kept in check via a harmless freeze ray. Earth is considered too backwards and "disease-ridden" for them to visit; and they worry their 'illegal men's movement' may hear the rumors that men rule over there and want to escape. That fear is not unfounded! Soon Adam. a handsome rebel and his nerdy tech geek buddy Shem are escaping Medusa in Adam's mistress's pleasure craft! "It is said the Earth is a male paradise where women are kept subservient!" Adam crows. 

If you're already wincing at the thought of Wynorski-esque camp parody at the inclusion of that last line rife with cleavage and blonde perms, you can unroll your eyes. After all, this is England! And West Germany! In the 70s! A rare perfect storm of progressive ideas, the show occasionally veers close to dopiness but overall never gets too strident or campy.

The clothes are an amazing--but relatively functional--brand of 70s Euro fantasia: thigh-high leather boots, tastefully kinky choke-collared shirts, flowing dresses, and elaborate long hair. There's one great main Medusa set, a kind of very dangerous looking bi-level mall style main area, and a few cool intergalactic crafts.  acting stays deadpan. 

Retrofuturist to the hilt, it's an invaluable record of the decade that

his used to be on PBS over here - which is how I first saw it as an impressionable ten year-old. So you know, it's got class and--unlike most Brit sci-fi of the time--it seems to be shot on 16mm rather than video tape. To make this a joint operation we have a Fulvia (Judy Geeson) an elaborately coiffed member of Medusa's elite, and the frowning and suspicious German chief of security, Octavia ( Christiane Kruger) they're worse than we every were to women, well... in the first and second worlds anyway... in the last 100 years or so. Women even get to vote over here! At least, in the western world... now.

The sets and costumes off the Planet Medusa are great, prime retrofuturism; there's no liveable outdoors there (due to asteroids), so the vibe is--as in Logan's Run--a kind of harbinger that the entire future world would be all indoors., one giant mall. This was back when malls were something new (I remember the afternoon I first saw this show on TV, my dad was watching it when mom, my brother and I got back from the Montgomeryville Mall in PA. That was also the day that Dan Fogerlberg's "Sometimes when we Touch" premiered on the radio. Between that song, and the show, and the mall, the whole ethos of masculinity I grew up in (i.e. where if you're a man, crying is the ultimate shame) seemed to crumble like an impacted colon after a warm saline enema. All I remember about it was that the idea of being a kind sexual slave to Judy Geeson seemed very appealing, to the point I remember that afternoon so well, even we though we never saw that show again, and I never even knew its name--and no one I knew had ever heard of a show like that--for decades. On the Scarlet Street message boards, they tried to make me think I imagined it!

Anyway, alas, Medusa is only where about 1/3 of the action is, the rest of the time bulk of the film is spent on Earth, set in and around bucolic castle of the sort the BBC has been Masterpiece Theater-ing since the dawn of time. But that's OK - it's so very British, so Dr. Who-esque that the Brits--a geriatric scientist, his female assistant, her fiancee, a French scientist under the old guy, and a line of bobbies--barely raise an eyebrow over the arrival of the boys, offering them political asylum even as the girls show up in their big floating patched silver inner tube saucer, demanding their men's return. The girls start bossing around the men at the precinct, and address all their questions to the female assistant, which is awesome. To them, Earth is no threat and --since this is not America--no one shoots at them or reacts with violent knee-jerk hostility. Fulvia is a bit of a pill: "There's only one thing I can teach you about our civilization," she tells the curious elder scientist, "it does not suffer the pomposity of foolish little men, that's why we are more advanced than you." But it's pretty fun watching them boss around the bobbies and researchers with imperious authority. 

As for the men, it's endearing to watch them freak out and run when a young girl threatens to call her mom. Little lines like "the ship controls are too hard for a man" float by so dryly you have to find them for yourself. Little bits like Octavia smirking when the minister is unable to turn on a megaphone when yelling up at the hiding males up in the castle; the lads worrying the castle's sole elderly security guard will call his army to stop Shep and Adam, so they zap him ("the castle is ours! Lock the gates!!") Their childlike glee at feeling like they're breaking loose from their maternal prison is something every older boy goes through; the way it's done so low-key with funny bits just flying right and left under the radar of the director and composer who might try to underline them with comic stings, (wah wah waah)  and sitcom pauses.

Another fascinating element is how it seems to anticipate wireless remotes and the internet. Everything the aliens do is via devices connected to a remote mainframe computer, which lets them access information and even control earth cars remotely. Say what now? And I also like that the nightmare canon produces images of what the boys fear most, which turns out to be their mistresses.

"You think all men have a subconscious fear of women?" asks the doctor. 

"On Medusa, naturally," says Octavia "Isn;'t that the way true of earth? 

"no" he says

"I was talking to you Dr. Becker" (his female assistant) she says ignoring the scientist. 

"I wouldn't know" she says, surprised and almost protective of her relative subjugation.

"Pity,' Octavia says."It's the key to good government."

 It's not perfect and critics whose voices I respect chide me for recommending it. The last episode is kind of hard to accept, i.e. hat some predatory space ship rolls up on the girls and all they can do is meekly acquiesce since they've never learned to fight back or strike first. Dude, we've watched these girls use their freeze ray on men all over the livelong day, and now they're just meekly surrendering --to robot-coded men! Even Fulvia orders Adam not to fight back, which makes no sense, like Gandhi beating his  followers with a stick for fighting.  

Fulvia is the most eager to have her man back after he escapes to Earth, a little 'too' eager. But she's awesome when she protects the frightened prime minister as if he's a five year-old. Octavia is less interested in her man and more in the big picture: She doesn't want earth's barbaric patriarchal social structure infecting the purity of their own planet. Together they're a bit like a female version of Spock and Kirk, though by the second half of the season Fulvia (the Kirk) is on Earth dealing with the runaway men and Octavia is on Medusa dealing with typical sci-fi hazards like a berserk cold storage computer, an alleged assassination, and crazy meteors. Both planets get their share of humorous moments but nothing really tops the scenes of the escaped men running around with their puffy shirts open, shouting "I'm frightened!" Or when Fulvia soothes a rattled male politician like a fireman talking a kitten down from a tree.

But all in all, what a strange, crazy, highly advanced show this was. Now that I'm watching it again, I find that, in light of its subversive gender power switch, its unavailability is most suspect. On a post-feminist level its absence is downright conspicuous. It still stands alone in daring to imagine women not just in positions of authority usually (at the time) reserved for men, but as masters of a society that's evolved far past what we usually imagine. By switching the usual gender bias, suddenly the whole usually invisible patriarchal blueprint is suddenly illuminated. Damn, isn't that what all art is supposed to do, dearie? 

See Also:

I. ANGELS OF DEATH

II: Great Women of Horror

III: Badass Brunette Edition

IV: Lynn Lowry Special Edition

V: Magic Slut Split/Subject Edition

VI. Girl Mummies

VII: FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL!

VIII: The Good, the Bad, and Beyond

IX: Lullaby of Broadway (special)

TRUCK STOP WOMEN (1974)

HONEY WEST

CHARLIE'S ANGELS (1976-79)

68 KILL (2017)

Salute to Beatrice Dalle (Hey BETTY BLUE, come blow your Mind!)

Babes of Wrath: Dangerous Women of the New Depression

Top Ten Acidemic Women 2010

Tiffany Bolling!

WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA

PJ Soles in ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL

Catty-Cool Susan Cabot

Pure Ladanum: Marlene Dietrich

In Praise of Red Queens

Prepare for the Coming of the Matriarchy: 

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN, DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT

THE LAST SURVIVOR, DAGON, DEMONS

5 Babes for the Bernie Nation: BOUNTY KILLER, HARDWARE

THE LAST SURVIVORS, CENTURION

Today we're using a single shot in Hitchcock's 1963 classic THE BIRDS as a jumping off point for a fusion of Freud, Jung, Paglia, Wood, and Zizek that will catch HALLOWEEN, FORBIDDEN PLANET,  PSYCHO, even SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER in its devouring maternal phallus beak / knife / impossible tree sloth claw maw. 

Do you dare attend?

We will FIGURE out the connection between the weird domestic drama and the bird attacks. Turns out, it's Lydia's fault! I take it you've met Lydia? 

I saw the BIRDS after a long walk in the trees, just cuz it was on Showtime when I got home. This bit of info is important. Like a 'random' spread of tarot cards, the unconscious sometimes finds a functional mythic common language in the text - and Hitchcock is Freudian the way De Palma is Hitchcokian, (which is pretty cockian). 

This symbiosis betwixe the personal subconscious (i.e. the viewer) and the collective consciousness (i.e. the film)  might otherwise be denied when the conscious mind 'picks' the film. I wouldn't have chosen THE BIRDS on after getting home, all exercised and starved for TV, it was just on. That's the collective unconscious at work, alive in the randomness of chance, the feeling god or something is always communicating with you through some medium or image, be it a random bird call, the passing cop car siren, the dog food commercial, your unconscious is always watching you somewhere in the field of your vision. Can you spot him/ her / it? That's (the) UNCANNY, bro!

Nowhere is this more vivid than THE BIRDS (1964); its icebergs go so deep their edges cut through the outer hulls of waking sanity. Like any enduring classic, it continues to make more and more sense the longer you watch it (i.e. for me, 40 years of seeing it regularly at least once every couple of years). As a kid I was just irritated waiting for birds to finally attack -then it rocked. Now as an adult whose read Paglia's indispensable BFI book on it, as well as the writing of Robin Wood, Zizek, etc. - it's Lydia's parts that rock me. The bird attacks can get indulgent, but Lydia is always watching.... us 

As the unrelated (or so I thought as a child) connection between the human drama and the bird attacks becomes clearer and clearer until a certain awareness of nature as a reflection of the human unconscious (or vice versa) takes shape. We don't see the link until the link sees us first. Watching Birds as a child with my own parents, we used to bemoan the boring subplots of Melanie and her facile would-be screwball flirtation. ("Get to the birds already!" my dad would shout). If there's a direct link between the domestic drama part- the strange love quadrangle going on between Mitch, Melanie, Annie, and Lydia of Bodega Bay--and the birds attacking, it eludes most casual monster-craving viewers, maybe for good reason. And for the first dozen viewings I didn't see it either; I still felt it was all more akin to the obligatory qua-romantic sidebars of things like It Came from Beneath the Sea, Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, or Tarantula, rather than the deep dish Id dive of Forbidden Planet.  

That's the connection so key to this post: When you remember woman shares her elemental subconscious with nature itself, and that Lydia is a quintessential devouring mother archetype, suddenly the bird attacks make perfect connection with the drama.

Morbius' Krell-manifested incestuous desire / see also: Bob (Twin Peaks) via Ray Wise.

Freud was a huge talking point in the late-50s/early-60s. Freud became suburban, a bookshelf staple of every liberated couple, alongside the Kinsey Report, and paved the way for a swinger explosion.  The Freud most clearly handed to us children on a PSYCH 101 platter comes form Psycho and Forbidden Planet. 

The latter offers the explanation of the monster from the id in a way that makes sense even as kids: our repressed (verboten!) hormonal desires seeping through the fabric of our veil and into the natural world. We can imagine our own monster tearing up the school, teachers, bullies, while we sleep, sort of glad we never have to take responsibility for our desires coming true the way Morbius does. But if we woke up to find them all ripped limb-from-limb, we might get a guilty feeling without knowing quite why we should. We didn't have anything to do with it, and that's true in a way. Should Jekyll be punished for Hyde's crimes? The realization that the crux of the ego and its centered 'consciousness' is just the loudest voice in the room, and when it finally quiets, strange beings living downstairs in our brain take over the controls, eager to throw out all the poisoned shit you've been dumping down in their living rooms. 

And there's someone else down in there too, boy, and they resent being locked down in the fruit cellar. 

Do you think they're fruity, boy?  

MOTHER THE BLOOD

No matter how many times we get that oft-bemoaned epilogue lecture in PSYCHO, for example, the implications of Norman and his mother complex stay mysterious. The elemental subconscious doesn't suddenly become 'solved' just because we're given the cinematic definition by a learned psychiatrist.  The idea of "mother" transcends our own psyche, envelops and devours us.The psychiatrist shows us the ladder down into the hole but only guides us far down as the censor will allow. There's still an endless abyss waiting below. It's a cesspool roiling under the walls between ourselves and our own mother. 

If she can reach... under... and hijack our unconscious id monster, maybe she can hijack the natural world's as well... the birds can become her own id monster. She's connected to the turnings of nature the way can never be, consciously.

As with Morbius' Id monster, Lydia can't be blamed for the bird attacks. It wouldn't / couldn't be a conscious connection. She wouldn't even be aware she's causing it. There's no one to tell her either. No PSYCHO psychiatrist inhabits Bodega Bay to explain the link. There's  no Krell brain boost equivalent that would allow Mitch to guess the origin of the bird attacks (i.e. paraphrasing Forbidden Planet: "Mitch, the birds are your mother's fear! Tell her you don't love this girl! Tell her you'll never leave home!").  No one in Bodega Bay understands poltergeist activity, nor do they know of animal familiars, elemental manifestations of unconscious drives, or the dangers when the wise old woman's natural magic is misappropriated by the her jealous savage devouring mother unconscious (inside every Athena is a Medusa trying to get out). Lydia can't quite control her powers--or even be fully aware of them--any more than could Morbius, or Norman. Each kills--or tries to kill--all younger rivals, be they Leslie Nielsen or Melanie or Marion. to keep their child at home, to foil attempts to empty their recessive egomaniac remote planet / small town kingdom. Empty nest syndrome has its roots in some vile pre-Promethean mire of incest and human sacrifice, Cronus eating his own young, and all that shit. 

Norman <--> Mother  -- // Knife--> Janet Leigh

Alta < --> Morbius-->// Monster > Leslie Nielsen

Mitch <---> Lydia -->// Birds>-Tippi Hedren

For Psycho, the mother in Norman's mind is a horribly blurred version of the superego's harnessing the Id to manifest the phallus of the mother (the knife) before the phallus of the Norman gets to experience enough pleasure/power to escape the poisonous incestuous bond. Norman killed the mother and her lover the way Lydia tries to stuff Mitch, like some ornithological specimen, in her living room and keep any interested females in Bodega Bay blinded by her flying monkey gulls and kept where she can keep an 'eye' on them. When Melanie devolves into a child after her bird attack, her voice gets a note of hysteria, all high and whispery in a kind of super demented child kind of way, indicating she's regressed and is no longer a threat; Lydia instantly relaxes her grip (note that the birds don't attack after that). 

The borderline between Norman and his mother and the (phallic) knife; Mitch and Lydia and her birds, (or the opposite version, Morbius, Alta and the Id) all become startlingly clear once they're all compared and filtered through your Penguin Freud. How could we have ever missed them? 

It's no idle accident the kids are watching Forbidden Planet on TV in Halloween. The equation is one slightly altered since there's no strong parental figure therefore, aside from Dr. Loomis and the sheriff. Here the instigator is biology and the forceful peer pressure of Jame Lee's friends.   

Jamie lee Curtis <----> virginity // Michael -->sex

FORBIDDEN PLANET on TV (left) in HALLOWEEN at left: The approaching (invisible) id monster's footprints onscreen go unnoticed by Nancy Loomis and her babysitting charge; heightening subliminal associative chills.

Let's take a deep look at one very telling shot that makes the Halloween parallel clear:

MODULE 1: THE SHOT OVERHEAD LOOKING DOWN ON BODEGA BAY AFTER THE GAS STATION EXPLODES. 

"an anthill at the foot of a bridge"

It's an extraordinarily eerie moment, giddy and exciting: we go from the noise of the cafe--the doubting ornithologist with her dry, chirpy lecturing; the hysterical mother frightening her own children (a clear case of maternal projection in microcosm to lend a shadow to the larger one outside); the old drunk repeating "it's the end of the world!" - it all instantly stops with the cry of "LOOK!" and a rush to the window. 

Outside, the gas station attendant is hit by a gull and falls over, dropping the gas nozzle; the gas leaks in a fast downhill pool towards the feet of the traveler trying to understand the panicked noise from inside the cafe. He drops his cigar match... BOOM

Halloween (1978) Killer POV

But something is off. The camera isn't floating or swaying in the air currents. The POV camera is just standing still up there. It's not a bird's eye view. Birds don't usually stand stock still, neither do helicopters, usually. And weirder still, we hear a muffled but heavy breathing, as if through a thick heavy mask, or from inside a snorkel.

 Seeing it this time, after the walk, by chance, I was reminded of Halloween's opening tracking shot with POV clown mask as young Michael mounts the stairs. Here it's the same sense that we're wearing the mask. This arial god's eye / bird's eye view comes with breathing that sounds like we're a kid in a snorkel looking down hundreds of feet through clear turquoise water/sky to the ocean floor/fire, people scrambling like tiny crabs in the sand below. 

Even then we wouldn't be able to hang suspended in place, not this Steadicam smooth. 

This shot in The Birds though, this high up, the person whose eyes we're looking through seems to have his feet firmly planted on some invisible ground. Can it be Lydia, up there, like Marcello Mastroanni in the beginning dream of 8 1/2? while asleep back at home, shuddering from the sight of her eyeless neighbor Fred, her elemental unconscious soaring skywards above the damage her id is causing, but connected to her death driving instinct while asleep, forced to look down through her rending harpy bird of prey eyes at the carnage below, like Faye Dunaway forced to see the killer's POV in Eyes of Laura Mars? But she's not bobbing in the wind as she's also grounded in her bed? 

At the time, the first viewings, we may not even notice how odd that is, that weird breathing and sense of motionlessness, such odd choices go unnoticed in the chaos of the scene. We're too busy enjoying what we assume is the 'bird's eye view.' The change in shot helps us even out our sympathies. Rather than the sense of eerie dislocation and unwilling complicity we get from a killer POV in a good slasher film, we're allowed a kind of lordly relaxation. Now we're running with the flock, so we can size up our own target for the dive bombing. The killer POV implicates us and scares us with its 'too close for comfort' mortality. The bird / Lydia POV is so abstract it frees us from responsibility.

Dozens of viewings over the years later, and the odd details start to accrue in our minds but this motionless, heavy breathing arial shot refuses familiarization. The sound of muffled breathing is eerie. This is certainly not meant to be a bird's eye view in the traditional sense, Hitchcock would not miss even one key detail of this sort by accident. He brings us somewhere way outside normal space, some giant deer-stand or motionless Ferris wheel from which to peer down on all those scurrying, burning ants. 

 How did Hitch get such a still shot? It's not a photo, (maybe a process shot) as we can see the flames burning below; even as the birds gradually circle down around and into the frame in front of it, there is no movement from the camera. The birds come in on all sides of the camera but the camera doesn't even flinch, as if it is representing some out of body experiencer, ordering her minions down into the scene like the wicked witch directing her monkeys from a bomb sight in the belly of a frozen in time B-17 while lying in bed at the same time.... Lydia... is that you?.

III. BLIND JELOUSY 

In grand Oedipal style, wherever Lydia's goes with her animus bird force, she leaves only blinded reflections, henpecked children, and symbolically neutered adults in her wake--the anti-sighted. The male gaze, the female gaze, all gazes are snuffed out, the bird claws and beaks act as the censoring scissors; Medusa, turning men from gazers into inanimate portraits or pajama wearing eyeless corpses. Amok maternal instinct creates a legion of blind, hobbled, castrated men, ala the men who crash the matriarchal corn king crowning in The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, or the remake of The Wicker Man. 

But as the snapping biting birds rage out of control, children too are symbolically violated, like an out of control once-benign victorious army "looting and pillaging" a defenseless civilian population, one that poses no threat at all to Lydia's maternal empire; and finally spilling over and threatening even Lydia herself (just as Morbius is threatened by his own id).

Even Melanie is guilty of this, noting proudly of her nonprofit: "We're sending a little Korean Boy Through School." sounds almost like their keel-hauling him through the sky somehow, or floating through the belly of a whale: "After that we're sending a German girl through a jet engine."

Even the daughter, Cathy is guilty of this: she has the two imprisoned love birds, as trapped in their cage as Lydia wants to make Mitch and Cathy in Bodega Bay. The two imprisoned birdies, forced to shelter in one spot while all around the fellow creatures are flying loose and free, attacking their former oppressors and jailers (one can see them flying up to SF to blind the pet shop owner from the first scene  on her way home from work). 

By the presence of the blinded father (above) in the upper left portrait (the darkened eyes is no coincidence), we realize the return of the blinding agent (the maternal phallus - beaks, knife, etc) is inherent in this dynasty. Note the arrangement of the scene: Lydia, sitting, cuddled with Cathy, denotes her new place as another child of the Lydia, or at any rate, subservient. Mitch seated below the portrait, uncomfortable on a bench, as if waiting in line for an Oedipal "haircut" (his eyes darkened beneath his heavy brow) and Lydia, centered, organizing the table as if arranging a tea party for her stuffed animals. The father's expression in the painting is one of bland eyeless contentment - death has allowed him to escape the predicament the others are in; being dead and blind means he's paid for his escape already --he's out of Lydia's reach. This is the aspiration of Mitch - an escape from Lydia's clutches, from the rending scissor talons of the enucleating barber.

But the father's blindness is more than just a symbolic castration in the Lacanian sense. In joining the social order, submitting to symbolic castration, one gains a third eye vision not limited to any one POV. In a way it's like the privileged position of the viewer. We have no visible representation in the film, so can move our sympathies everywhere and nowhere. Most of the time our action is squarely centered on Melanie, but then Lydia goes by herself to Dan's farm; we even get the omnipotent POV the master of the birds. We're free.

And we still have our eyes.

IIIA---

 THE ALL-SEEING BLINDNESS 

"a doll's eyes" - Quint (Jaws)

"the devil's eyes" - Loomis (Halloween)

from top: X, Halloween, Birds, Jaws, Psycho It's not just that Michael never speaks in Halloween that makes him scary, it's that you can't see his eyes. The black socket effect we get from Mrs. Bates or Dan with his broken tea cups, may be 'actual' rather than merely hidden, but the omnipresent aura is the same. Note that Michael's eyes are not hidden by, say, sunglasses or even a more recognizable mask, something that would bring a distinct symbolic identity - i.e. sunglasses, an Italian giallo killer ski mask, a rapist-style nylon over head, a motorcycle helmet, a clown mask etc.) The features or identifiable marks of the mask of Myers are stripped away, even the skin pigment of the original (William Shatner) mask is removed. The lack of identification of those images by which we detect a soul's presence, is what creates the uncanny chill - the blinded person is made tragic yet free- the movie can't 'get' them now. They see no evil. Forever. Of all the imitators that came after Halloween, only Jason --the first Jason, with the sack cloth mask-- in Part 2, understands the importance of the banal / nondescript in a facial covering, something to drain every last possible attachable symbolic reference from our paeradolia lexicon. Our egoic consciousness is revealed as a desperation--to the point of panic-- to label and therefore dismiss the as yet unidentified possible threat. Any attempt at humanization therefore comes via the 'window to the soul.' Michael is rendered at least 50% less terrifying in the original Halloween once his mask is torn off and we briefly see a vaguely mongoloid young man with glazed-eyes and a slack-jaw. Jane Addams is terrified by a savage cry in the jungle night is terrifying until smarmy David points out it's a "Guarana monkey" (in Creature from the Black Lagoon). A photo of a strange beast in the water is freaky and exciting--is it the Loch Ness monster!!?!!-- until someone points out it's an 'Irrawaddy dolphin.' Hey, stop ruining this for us, science! The dolphin, is still the same uncanny monster but now it's suddenly 'friendly.' as someone calls it a dolophin. The cry is still the same bit rendered banal by knowing it's a monkey. The mask of Michael cannot be quantified or safely ensconced in the symbolic rolodex however. We can know it's a Capt. Kirk mask, but it's at best an uncanny variation. The lack of features helps it resist personification. Acid trippers know this too well. Staring into the bathroom mirror to check your pupil dilation (proof your dose has 'kicked in') is a time-honored tripping tradition. You lean in to check your pupils for the tell-tale in-out dilation, but then you're pulled through into the inky void inside your own pupils. You too, in your deepest core - the black hole in your being-- are a shark, or a killer, or a doll--emptiness finally recognizing its total lack of distinguishing features. At your core you are the black pool deep inside the electric well from which all perception flows. To have perfect vision would be for the whole eye - and beyond-- to encompass the black of the pupil... an eternal stare in the mirror void. All is else is transitory, shadows and light. The blackness of the pupil, beholding its own darkness, the void staring into the void, this is our eternal truth --it cannot be qualified or labelled. The self and the emptiness of space are one; suddenly you are like a cloud finally realizing you were only ever water and air; you've never been permanent - just a sudden locus of perception through which the I AM tries to understand its own black vastness. The dark of the dark is technically blindness - but it is all-seeing. You are seeing through its porthole right now. The concept of 'all-seeing blindness' can expand to the merely limited rather than blind outright: a killer in a full head latex mask has their vision and hearing substantially curtailed, making them easy to evade in real life; but in the case of Michael Myers, he crosses past human associations and into the god/dead zone (the lofty arial perch we 'see' from above Bodega Bay). Even with obscured eyes, this chthonic devouring god 'sees' the total picture, i.e. Oedipus' full realization of who killed his father and just who Jocasta really is (or Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer, seeing "the fact of God" by watching the sky fill with hungry black birds swarming down on baby sea turtles). Even Dan, the neighbor friend of Lydia's, who is the first killed by the birds is granted a kind of lewd all-seeing power in the jagged jump cut close-ups as Lydia sees him (top), as if he's sitting up in bed to receive an early morning lap dance. Or as Ray Milland originally said in X-the Man with X-ray Eyes after he had blinded himself, "I can still see!" - a line considered too horrible for mid-60s audiences to contemplate so was edited out of the final cut. Our unconscious selves--the monsters from the id included--after all, see without benefit of our open eyes (i.e. we're usually asleep when they come) and they see and know way more than us. And its their job to process things we've seen that are so shocking our conscious selves can't even admit they happened. We black it out. But something in us still has to have seen it, the thing that has no eyes of its own, only the plates, the films, it reviews and stores after our eyes finally go dark.   SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER -  Violet Venable (Devouring Mom #3) See also CinemArchetype 9--- the Devouring Mother

Module IV: "With all due respect to Oedipus"

All of the Birds' id-generated carnage is Mitch Brenner's fault. 

If he was stronger--less a mama's boy--he would have shacked up with Annie Hayworth regardless of his mother's machinations, and they would have escaped Bodega Bay, Lydia's fledgeling bird volleys crashing harmlessy against their windshield. 

Now it's too late: the combination of Lydia's grief over her husband, plus the supportive presence of Annie Hayworth ensures a kind of continued arrested development for Mitch (does he sneak over to Annie's house for booty call quickies after Lydia and the censors go to bed?)

Coded Sex references abound in The Birds. They "strike, disappear, then start massing again" not unlike an erection during an extended sexual bout, 

Lydia does some massing herself, gradually working herself into panicked frenzy worrying about what will happen if the birds--her own monsters from the id--get into her house--or consciousness--penetrating her Krell steel shutters, so to speak, like tissue paper. 

Now that I'm engaged in the Freudian reading of the film, I think having a radio announcement that the birds have risen up all across the west coast, maybe even the world, is contradictory and unneeded; The radio announcer says "the reason for this does not seem clear as yet" - but years in the psychiatrist's chair would help explain the reason for the birds to attack in Bodega Bay. The shrink at the end of Psycho talks about how Norman became his mother, only in reverse. In The Birds the mother becomes her dead husband in a weird attempt to become the non du père Mitch. She wants to become a good 'pack leader' (to use the Dog Whisperer vernacular), but she is too scared and full of self-doubt, so a demonic air elemental takes over the job, her fusion of Ariel and Caliban, who, like Morbius's monster from the id, makes Lydia's most perverse unconscious desires, her repressed-libidinal paternal phallus burlesque-- come true. In each case-- The Tempest, Forbidden Planet, Psycho, The Birds, Suddenly Last Summer-- a single parent uses and then is used by the fermented power generated by their unconscious repression of base incestuous desire. Morbius can't have/keep his daughter away from the alpha male visitors, but the beast of the Id, perhaps, can, just as the birds can see to it that no one disrupts Lydia's dominion over the Bodega Bay matriarchy, and that Mitch never finds a mate that might keep him in SF instead of with her, cleaning the gutters or fixing the leaks,

Similarly, once Melanie is 'broken' like a wild mustang by Lydia's rending avian animus, she too is no longer a threat, and the mother assumes matriarchal dominance. Her relieved smile as she cradles Melanie's head says it all. The birds are calm. Lydia has what she wants. She's gained a child rather than lost one. We can only assume now that Melanie is reduced to a monosyllabic traumatized PTSD sufferer, dependent on Lydia's care, the birds will gradually begin to disperse, the maternal panic that launched them now organically re-adjusting itself to peaceful living there in the Bay. 

Similarly, if the captain had decided to stay on the Forbidden Planet to marry Alta and father some grandchildren for Morbius, it's likely that monster from the id would gradually dissolve down to some poltergeist dish rattling when Morbius felt too ignored or unappreciated. All the captain and Alta would have to do is come visit on the weekends, help fix the leaks Robby can't reach, so to speak, and the monster shall be tamed. (The tigers and edited-out unicorns friends to Alta again rather than threats.)

As with Norman in Psycho, the death or absence of the father gives the maternal animus a figure to project in its bid for total control. Lydia does everything with the idea of a correct way based on memories of the dead husband ("if your father were here!" is her rallying cry) in a classic example of what Jung called a woman being 'animus-dominant.; The figure of dreams that was once a demonic dream lover is now a humorless patriarch whose possibly arbitrary patriarchal laws (rendered overly inflexible by Lydia's animus' interpretation) are part of the natural moral order of things. 

Probably always a bit controlling to begin with, the death of Lydia's husband triggers the demonic bird version of the Krell brain boost. Lydia lies there for "a night and a day" (grieving) and then emerges from her cocoon with a vast power not available to her consciously - but the birds can sense the power of her bottled up anxiety and controlling nature of her animus. They're reacting to it like they would a call to migration, the kind of internal code that leads them to all fly south at the same time, or make the same turns and not collide as they fly in circles. 

Consciously neither Morbius nor Lydia can't recognize this force as their other self, of course, the sustainability of their overdeveloped egos hinge on not being able to recognize their complicity in anything evil. In fact blindness to their complicity is what causes the 'hysterical symptom' in the first place- a build up of repressed energy (3). If they were the type to be able to recognize it, it wouldn't happen in the first place! This is one of the reasons therapy is so effective over self-help. The therapist is able to hold a mirror up to the ego and show it all the things it cannot or will not see about itself (i.e. the ugly back of its own beautiful head). The ego may lash out and call the therapist a quack but if the patient is smart enough to interrogate that knee-jerk response within themselves, they realize that as I once said to my own therapist "If what you say gets me so mad I want throw something at you and run out of the room, I know you must be right."  With confession, and self-acceptance, the pressure of being bottled in and ignored the fuels the outbreak of beaks or claws dissipates like opening a well-shook soda bottle only tiny tiny bit, so the air can gradually leak out rather than explode.

In short, if Lydia had a therapist, there wouldn't be a bird problem in Bodega Bay. This is the miracle of our modern age, and a perfect place to stop. Until next week then, and here's your bill. 

SYMBOLISM!

   

NOTES 

(1) If you read certain passages of the Old Testament, you know which god I mean. It's the god that puts the Jews through hell with painful prolonged rituals, and animals with endless sacrifice (each new member must bring 20 doves and a sheep, letting their blood washes over the altar before they're nailed to the church door, etc. It's the god of the Aztecs and Mayans and maybe the Picts and Romans, a god recognizably bloodthirsty, who spares you his wrath when you throw him someone or something else's soul torment, their life energy. 

3. i.e. like Poltergeists

Confession: I'm a late-blooming Joryhead, what the kids all call a "Joryphile," or a Jory Doodie, or a Jory Rider. A lot of film snobs won't even know who I'm talking about, but they'll notice him every time, but then not think about him. He just does his job, so the character gets the credit, not him. Taking over scenes with an effortless depth of delightful evil, he can radiate a sullen abrasiveness but his irrepressible intelligence crackles like electricity out of his occasionally crazy blacker-than-black eyes. That deep melodic nicotine voice, totem pole posture and vulture nosed visage made for a perfect Lamont Cranston/Shadow (in the 1941 serial --easily the best of all adaptations, which isn't saying much, alas). He could bring dripping racist venom to a Tara overseer in Gone With the Wind, or do a crippled bitterly racist Tennessee Williams' cuckold as easily as he could radiate stoic steady-burn decency as a half-breed fisherman getting the Bellamy treatment by a flinty little grifter who barely comes up to his belt buckle. He could bring baritone ethereal majesty to a night-tripping fairy king with head-to-toe black glitter glam, rocking stag horns and black lipstick like he was to mid-70s androgynous alien glam rock spectacle manor born. And when times were tough, he could bring aggro peevishness as a petty cash astronaut whose idea of battling cat women on the moon is to sulk in a corner and then pitch furious woo to his 'by the book' commander's girlfriend! What a range! 

In real life, he was born way up there in the frozen Yukon at the start of the century, this Coast Guard boxing league champ, this trodder of the Broadway boards, this "A-list Charles Middleton", this king of men. The glint of a keen madness sparked often in his jet black eyes, making them hypnotic and full of delightfully macabre implication. His aquiline nose evoked a totem pole hawk that was coming alive at the sight of a passing muskrat. Unpredictable, never quite over the top, but ever perched there, he made even ludicrous characters seem grounded and grave, all while goosing the movie ever forward with that smoldering smokestack engine of a voice. Imagine him as Rasputin, Ming the Merciless, or Abe Lincoln, or anything calling for a tall, dark and strange characrter, Jory would crush them all, and have some left over for Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein his monster, and Prospero of The Tempest OR Caliban

That's Victor Jory, honey! His birthday is August 15, 1945, so we just missed it. But to make it up to his deserving legacy, let us make every day a VJ day. And demand TCM honor him with a Summer Under the Star retrospective!!

1. Oberon - Midsummer Night's Dream

1935

I love about 4/5 of this film to pieces, and 1/2 of it unto death and another 1/4 of it is just painful. I refer to Weimar expat Max Reinhardt's wild imagining of the enchanted, fairy-filled night and the truly wondrous and archetypically resonant performances and costumery of Jory's Oberon and Anita Louise's Titania. My feminine unconscious/anima has chosen her for its projection (it used to be a girl on a Virginia Slims billboard in Seattle, so she's moving up in the world) and when I need solace or to commune or to ask her to stop tormenting me, or just need to see her, I pop in the Midsummer. Her voice is way too high and shrill, almost causing microphone hiss in its high register, but she looks marvelous, and the unconscious is nothing if not images (sound a distant second) and one has to suffer to be with the anima. That's why there's Mickey Rooney as Puck.

That's the thing about the movie. You can tell this was a stage show and--sometimes an issue when a play is put on film--by the way the actors project way too loudly and intensely, as if forgetting they're in a film and not still roaring to be heard way out in the far tree-lined picnic areas of the Hollywood Bowl. Mickey Rooney's Puck for example is so over the top you can't help wondering if you should call an EMT as someone spiked his water dish with enough amphetamine to kill three ordinary children. and the braying hamminess of Cagney seem imported wholesale from the stage (he makes it work though, cuz he's goddamned James Cagney and his character (Bottom) is supposed to be bursting with good working class scamp cheer. And then when he's all ass-headed and in Louise's enchanted lap he reins it in, making a fine contrast- as if being an ass (he's not called Bottom for nothing) humanizes him, delightfully introducing himself to Titania's armada of little people fairies.. But then there's the constant tittering of Herbert over everything anyone says at rehearsal, as if words themselves were inherently naughty.. I'm okay with the rest of the laborer team, even Joe E. Brown as Flute, the Bellows Mender, is all right with me. 

But Jory doesn't have to strain or pierce or bray -- that booming voice comes with its own echo chamber, from deep in the vast  caverns where the titans wait, chained, for their chance to rise from the volcanoes of the world--that's where Oberon's voice picks up its timbre.  My favorite moment is when he's just standing and leaning back on his horse, the changeling by his side, his huge black cap trailing out behind him as the curtain of night over the slow procession of his daimonic bald dancers and their amours, a curtain protecting them from the first pink lip of the dawn, all of them stately and walking riding towards the camera, Erich Korngold letting rip every ephemeral nuance of that gorgeous Mendelssohn music, Jory somehow manages to access some deep reserve of godliness for this sequence that's truly otherworldly. Holding that pose, staring of into, past and through the camera, his face alight with full awareness of that sweet sadness that always comes at the end of one of those perfect, magic nights. That's why it's so important he shows back up with Titania at the very end. Last night's magic won't come again, but why mourn when we can just fly ahead of the dateline and stay in night forever?

God knows I tried, Oberon. God knows I tried. (see also The Hold Steady's "First Night")

As the racist morphine addict bedridden husband of Anna Magnani in The Fugitive Kind, Jory overflows the banks of bitter redneck opiate-addicted patriarch cliche and steals the picture right out from under Brando's reshaped nose. He even steals the film from Joanne Woodward, the sole source of light in the whole place, as a drunken libertine (i.e. town tramp). She's great but stays within the limited borders of her stock character (she tries to save him by leaving with him, but he only pats her head and smiles). But Jory's invalid junky husband Jabe is alive. Sweating and speaking very slowly, and deeply, with coded-homophobic (kinda) slow burn rage, he's more of a man than anyone else in the film, and that goes double for Brando's pontificating coded-bi/gay Christ figure, moving heedlessly towards his crucifixion with a warm resigned smile. Even fans of Williams, such as myself, may roll our eyes at all this, but Jory takes what could easily have been an over the top performance of spiteful venomous drug-fueled malice and turns him into a human cobra. 

As far as vivid Tennessee Williams adaptions go, this is strictly bottom of the shelf as far as clearly was written when he was much younger, and more flowery and poesy-prone (ala Glass Menagerie) and Lumet foolishly tries to have it both ways, both nitty gritty and waxy poetic, but he can't find the through line. He's too much of a city boy to depict southern hostility with any measure of complexity. Sydney, you best stay in the city until you're ready to bring a Philadelphia cop back down there to straighten things out, rather than leaving all these ladies (including a hypnotized Maureen Stapleton) trapped in the orbit of Brando's Christ on a Quaalude (he's name is.... Valentine) and Lumet's NYC actor's studio rage against the Jim Crow/homophobic goof ole boy machine. What a shock you'd take offense at them, Sydney! 

Thing is, a guy as gorgeous as Brando is here-all a shimmer in Boris Kaufman's black-and-white photography--should be New York or San Francisco, or at least New Orleans where he can find what a local magistrate calls"mixed" parties, why he decides to linger in the podunk town when he's able to leave, is a total mystery. Unless he's got a masochistic yen for tree branch noose-a-fixion, to coin a phrase it's a big leap to think he's staying around for Magnani's ever-unsmiling general store owner, who married one of the pricks who destroyed her life, ala Lady Anne, Duchess of York, or Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. But hey, say what you will, Jabe is a man. And like the other film in this post, Jory has that rare ability to make you feel like his character exists prior to his scenes, like he's been talking and setting shit up while you've been downstairs, following handsome Brando acting all far away but transfixed by Magnani's weirdly sexy frumpery. 

Good thing Jory is there. His Jabe may be a sweaty junky monster but he's still the only one cool enough to chopper out of Lumet's self-righteous hick inferno when the time comes. In the meantime, excuse him if he upstages Brando and Magnani even from upstairs and off-camera. Seething a fine gothic menace, he  runs refreshingly against the grain of the typical 'jealous cracker going loco' stock Karl Malden ushers into Baby Doll, and/or Ed Begley's hypocritical air-hog blustering name in Sweet Bird of Youth. Jabe is not a cypher or a type, Jory croaks him into real life, a man tortured by jealousy and the constant flow of misery tempered by narco-bliss that is drug high / opiate withdrawal cycle that his whole soul is warped by the poison. (more: Tennesse Williams at the Mill of Rubes)

When you're no longer afraid of being scoffed at for not scoffing at it--NY's hottest club is:  Paranormal... Caught on Camera. Let go the need to have a secure frontier of the known, and surrender to its paranoid free association panel of experts, weird videos, stock footage and old time illustrations and you can feel archaic primal electricity  roaring back through your neurons, like ze olde times. We can get a taste of how wild and weird the world around was before stupid science came along with their stupid-ass naming and classifying and magicidal quest to bust up our myths. Take our diseases and ignorance, but leave us our myths, man. We need them. And like some open channel back to archaic folklore, with Paranormal: Caught on Camera, we get them: familiar animals are made strange again, People from far away are possibly bigfoots, ropes covered with ice chunks are once again serpents, misfired rocket boosters are strange UFOs, a paradigm-shattering sign of the apocalypse may also be a bunch of silver balloons; a dead sea serpent blob thing actually a chunk of whale blubber, an angry fairy zipping around the camera to one person is a pair of mating dragonflies disturbed in flagrante delicto in the other. But the show is not going to give us the skeptic side, and anyway, why make a fuss. It's not going to make a difference to your daily life, so if it gives some people the thrill of mystery and the return of myth, why bust their bubble like some third grade Santa-truther?

And besides taken as a whole as an object/record of folklore, not unlike an Alan Lomax recording library, the show offers the perfect fusion of past and future, of living myth.  Everyone now has cameras at the ready, along with infrared, and all sorts of ghost hunting apps - and they're using them to unearth glimpses of what before could only be relayed as campfire anecdotes. These videos which "catch" the uncatchable, make visible a small shard of our collective unconscious' broken dream mirror--even if we're just seeing what we want to see, we can at least see what that is, and just who inside us wants to see it. 

At any rate. we can interpret--along with the assembled and very colorful group of talking head experts-- but we're can never see enough to get the whole picture. We're always so close, but, season after season, we never get closer. Maybe it's important to keep it that way. Knowing none of it is real would be too sad, knowing all of it is real would be too scary.  But not knowing either way, we're like a cat chasing god's red laser pointer--if the cat gets frustrated that he never seems to catches it, well, he's looking at it all wrong. If he realizes the futility, gives up and goes back to loafing around, he's missing good exercise for his ancient hunter faculties. But if he suspects it's all an illusion, but still chased anyway, recognizing the benevolent hand of their owner behind the curtain but not letting on, that's myth in action. So even if you think you know the whole story, one way or the other, keep it to yourself, act 'as if' and don't ruin it for the younger kids!  

A staple of the game shelf over every 70s rec room closet. 1. JUNGIAN MYTHIC RESONANCE:

 “I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud." - Jung

The Ouija board: there is perhaps no better illustration of Jung's collective unconsciousness and its ability to manifest autonomous threads into the fabric of (conscious) reality. With everyone's hands on the planchette--presuming no one is consciously trying to consciously move it--the combined unconscious energies fuse together to generate an autonomous spirit, a combination fictional collaboration wrought by our inner children, and perhaps some real incorporeal spirit that's been waiting for just such a surplus of electro-magnetic energy to cohere into 3D time/space reality (the invitation of the ouija users being the equivalent of removing the password on your combined WiFi.) Sure, the answers the resulting 'it' gives may be nothing more than a fiction generated by our combined unconscious desires. Then again, it may be disembodied autonomous spirit, a shared ancestor / past life, or even a nonhuman intelligence, like a demon, using your combined unconscious energies like modeling clay to sculpt itself into a form you'd recognize in your collective memory. Be the demons that manifested at the dawn of civilization (daimons), personifications of the repressed energies that allow modern civilization to properly function (demons) or even elementals dredged up from the slumber of nature (elementals), these beings may transcend the boundaries of self, reality, expression, tine, space, and consciousness. 

Then again they could be ghosts of people who lived in the area, or portions of their souls that never quite found the white light exit. 

Then again, it could just be a lot of giggling and saying "you moved it!""No I didn't! You did." and then moving on to some other game. That's my memory of it. And that's just as valid, in its way--that's what Jung's mythic archetypal landscape is all about. Sure it's your own inner journey translated into narrative myth, but it's also 'just a dream.' 

But like all good myths, the Ouija board has evolved with each new generation of telephone game mythic improvisation. What was once a harmless spooky slumber party pastime has become the paranormal version of a loaded gun left in the dresser where your kid can find it. To the ghost hunters and psychics who've come to help you with your haunting, admitting you used one in the past has become the myth equivalent telling your doctor you still smoke three packs a day even though you have COPD. The look in their eyes says "you f**ked yourself'." Because you see, in today's world, demons are the ultimate catfish, the psychic internet predator to whom all prey--no matter what their age--are children. And everyone who ever used one, it seems, forgot to lock the front door before going to sleep. 

Note figure running in distance

2. LEGIT Creepines:  Shadow People, Skinwalkers, Orang Bunian, Gnomes, Duende & Black-Eyed Children, Kuntilinaks, Reptilians, 

I can take or leave all the videos of unsightly 'paranormal researchers' breaking into abandoned properties in search of subscribers to their YouTube channel. It's funny when they start yelling at ghosts to get a reaction, then running away shrieking in a panic when the ghosts oblige. And I can take or leave the nighttime UFO sightings - they could be anything from that far away. BUT those maybe-accidental captures of shadow people, poltergeist action, trail cams, security cams, and shaky stuff shot by quick-thinking normal people who suddenly see something really weird and remember to film it. Favorites include a strange naked woman/dog thing running around in the jungles caught by accident on some jungle snake expert's nature show; a sleeping panther/human caught on Skinwalker Ranch; a Belgian cyclist's glimpse weird lizard man dropping down into a creek bed in Thailand; a pair of deformed, shadowy orang bunian lumbering out of the darkness towards a foolish ghost hunter in Indonesia (lots of terrifying stuff coming out of Indonesia!); black-eyed children in the background of videos of some kid dancing around the living room' jet black shadow people suddenly peering around the corner or standing in the dark of the basement, darker than dark; babies and dogs reacting to some unseen thing in the corner; weird little monsters captures accidentally running around behind cupboards or reaching out to touch the hand of a kid playing in the closet, or appearing in a basement stairs doorway like some evil little black imp. I'm getting pleasantly scared just thinking about some of this stuff! And I'll take scared of the unknown vs. scared of some real thing. 

I also love what I think may be legit ghost when there's an orb shooting by right before something weird happens, and it sometimes elongates or takes a kind of shape before melting away into some action. If any of this shit is real, it's these--and if these are real, than goddamned we live in a crazy world with dimensions far beyond what our human eyes can normally see, an' shit. 

3. Earnest witnesses who are either great actors or legit scared out of their skulls 

Sure there's a plethora of scabby dirtbag ghost hunters, a most unsightly lot in general (the American ones in particular, no offense) which casts--bearing their yen to acquire YouTube subscribers in mind--doubt on their findings-- but then something happens to them in their videos and they're scared out of their minds, running out of the room, shrieking in a high register nobody would ever intentionally fake. I mean, it not a good look. And either way, horror film actors should really take a good listen.

Most of the witnesses though are normal people from around the world who just happen to catch really weird shit almost accidentally, like little hands reaching out from corners to touch the child they're filming playing in a cupboard; shadow people peering around corners; people on motorbikes in India who pass some bizarre glowing white sheet wearing figure or large naked lady in the rain walking backwards - it sends them driving past, screaming at the top of their lungs. Nothing can stop the involuntary high-pitched shout and exhale screams that come roaring out of their mouths before we lose sight of the thing and the picture goes all chaotic as they race for their lives down the road, or stairs or back to their cars.  I especially love the Muslin djinn hunters' in the Middle East, their panicky but rather lovely prayers when things get weird, all translated with subtitles on the show almost like poetry: "I seek refuge with the complete word of god, from the evil which He has created." one man shouts when things get weird. "In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful " all rattled off in this mounting panic as they hear doors slam shut. It's worth its weight in gold. 

Then again, they freak out over a smudge on a window because it's almost a face and they never think twice about pareidolia, which throws everything into question. 

4. Folklorist Lynne McNeil 

Here is the kind of folklorist/paranormal expert I like: Lynne regularly espouses the correct dualistic approach towards the paranormal, recognizing that a perceived phenomenon may eventually have a scientific explanation without losing its mythic heft. In a landscape marred by reductionist either/or-ness,  McNeil brings this eternal paradox into the mainstream. She gets the fluidity of meaning, so concentrates instead on gut reaction, the relevance of folklore's eternal function as the sonar we use to sound the abyss of our collective and personal unconscious. And she knows just what to say that makes the video scarier, even while slyly placing it in the context of folklore rather than conventional reality.

She has the best understanding of how beliefs affect reality as well as vice vera ("You actually draw things to you with your attention to them.") as anyone I've heard, outside of Jung, Patrick Harpur, and Graham Hancock, because she's not afraid to seem like a flake rather than professor, and at the same time is clearly vice versa. G'head, Lynne, keep this shit grounded in a mythic folklore contest, even while treating it all as possibly real as well as psychically symbolic. It's all three, and more...

5. Brian Cano

Stoic, slightly wistful, Cano's gently measured brand of freeform sincerity and soul-eyed extempore is the gentle heart of the show. To paraphrase one of his own comments, he makes me question my skepticism. He talks like the camera is a rattled girl he's trying to pick up a girl at Burning Man. I've seen my buddy Max pick up a girl within ten minutes at a party with Cano's type of soulful-eyed gazing and sincere patter. Once I saw Max's eyes go all compassionate soft, I  knew I'd be going home without him. It never failed. Cano has that kind of soul-eyed magic--the sort we usually only find in the young men of South America, or sometimes Spain.  

It's important to remember that all the paranormal expert talking head reactions are presumably unscripted and with Brian it sounds like it, but that just works to his and our benefit, as he lets his pedagogical freeform take wing. Most of the pundits keep it pretty real, not reaching for some kind of profound summation of the human experience but Cano goes for it. I picked three of my favorite Cano-isms:

One a Loch Ness video:

"Why are people fascinated by lake monsters and things of this sort? Because it infuses wonder back into our world .... the thought that, all right.. there's something out there... that maybe something is eluding us and evading us, and maybe that means all our other hopes and dreams... are possible."

On a UFO video: 

"Unidentified flying object:- it just means there's something in the sky and I don't know what it is... but I feel like someone knows what it is --and even if I'm not aware of the explanation and.. even if it's not something for public consumption... someone has to know... what that is."

And on a unicorn video:

"While this video isn't definitive proof unicorns exists, it does raise.... questions. And where there are questions there has to be follow up. Maybe someone will want to follow up on this video and go 'you know what? Let's see if we can track down this unicorn..."

I hope if he reads this he doesn't think I'm being snarky. I love him like I love Ed Wood and Luigi Cozzi, for their priceless primitive simplicity--as if they have no id or superego to self-sabotage the purity of their response. 

Aaron Sagers "are we ready for that?"

6. ALL THE OTHERS

They're all well edited together to brainstorm all the wild theories they can within the brackets of commercials, for the oddness they've seen, to deliver a smorgasbord of opinions, precedents, past folklore and modern phenomena. With those ring lights surrounding their pupils like some otherworldly marker, casually talking at or past the camera in a way that's not alienating (unlike the doofus experts in the British version, Unexplained: Caught on Camera, which does everything wrong that Paranormal does right). Aside from when they sometimes use "spirit" as a singular name/noun even for plurals (like "deer" or "fish" ) there's no one on here I don't like. But here's a few I like especially Aaron Sagers, for his sharp sartorial sense and natty beard; the always visceral and funny Ghost Brothers who've been in many recent seasons and provide the unashamed total fear response, and the sweet Susan Slaughter, the blonde babe of the show--i.e. the one with bleached feathered blonde hair, substantial but expertly applied eye liner, and beguiling matte lipstick prosaic but informative--especially about cryptids in Central American (her area of familial origin) of which there are legions. Saphire Sandalo is the hot brunette, sweet and full of gorgeously gruesome details about the vast and lurid lexicon of cryptids from her own ancestral home of the Philippines. Derek Cayman is the grounded facts-relaying guy, with his podcaster hat and another fine beard; Mark Moran with his pale countenance and ever-present black (Civil War?) infantry hat gives us a measured, thoughtful analysis;  

Moving on, Rachel Evans is the one with the quirky glasses and seems to have the most natural, intelligent reaction and seems genuinely amused, genuinely into it in a way that she makes kind of vivvid by contrast to the others who labor a bit towards professorial seriousness

Taken as a whole, they're all either endearing for trying to sound like an authority at a lecture, pointing out good mythic anchor points, or expressing their natural reactions as normal people, it's like a whole camp-out campfire of people with cool stories their grandmothers told them about their own encounters back in wherever, and endearingly flaky insights... and...this being the age it is, they have their videos on their phones to pass around, making everything seem twice as possible. 

7. NO BUZZKILL COUNTERPOINTS

I imagine there are some people who get a smug satisfaction when a video later turns out to be a hoax, or misidentified natural phenomena, or pareidolia but those types have been mostly weeded out of the paranormal TV landscape. The powers that be finally realized no one is watching these shows to hear that ghosts aren't real, or the UFOs are swamp gas. And now that UFOs are finally destigmatized, those rubes look especially foolish and dogmatic  and can ghosts be far behind? One gets the idea we're never gonna know for sure either way, so let's ride on it being real--it's more fun. As long as the hoaxers are willing to fully commit to the story, and it looks realistic, it's real enough to get the shivers we want, which are the reason for watching it, then let's do it. I'm in. It worked with Blair Witch. And if any of it is real, which I mean centuries of eyewitnesses and mountains of evidence can't be all wrong, then this is the frontier!! Just don't spoil it, science!

Just like civilization mows down the forests in its expansion, so too science crowds out the mythic and magical by incessant investigation, and the magicidal urge to name things, to file them away in phyla and kingdoms and trace their DNA until all their mystery and monstrousness is gone. They ask for a hair from a Buddhist relic of a yeti scalp, so they can find out it's from a bear and just ruin the party for half of Tibet. The doofus mythbusters find the secret water supply inside the weeping virgin Mary statue out behind the church, thus rendering a thousand hopes and dreams dashed. Placebos can work miracles, but not when these buzzkills are around. 

And hey, they aren't around... on Paranormal: Caught on Camera.

8. The Wry and 'on it' Stream-of-Consciousness Editing and Music

The ability to zip up and in and provide almost everything we think we want to see to back up the theories espoused and witnesses testimony, showing the clips' over and over, zooming in on the creepy parts and freeze framing, each segment opening with a big red blob plopping down over its place of origin; masterful cuts of movement editing, slow-motion zooming in and out of the frame, inserts of TV static between shots, closeups of lights and outdoor security cameras. A lot of stock footage images of helicopters, hospital staff, computer screens with shadowy tech guys, close-ups of newspaper clippings, friendly dogs gazing lovingly at their owners, plenty of old paintings woodcuts, cave drawings, old time sketches of Native Amrericans beholding grey aliens, drone footage of the region,  sketches, Northwest forest tracking shot, mountains, volcanoes, dragons, olde historical photos, magic marker illustrations of weird cryptids, enough to keep a dozen interns busy searching for royalty free images off the internet and enough to make each segment so much more than just the video and expert reactions.

I'm not necessarily a fan of their constant use of spooky music even during scenes where we should be straining to listen for creaky footfalls. But generally they do quiet down if we're listening to some EVP or crackle in the attic. And they know just when to insert some Carpenter-style piano, Hans Zimmer-style coxic-buzzing drones, and grinding surges of drums, string samples, and mounting synth tension.

9. THE MYTH-REVIVING MIRACLE OF THE BLOB-SQUATCH

Another great illustration of the collective mythic unconscious in action - 'Blobsquatch' - how so many videos seem to just show a black blob in the distance, as if the Squatch has the ability to blur out his own image on tape, like the producers do for T-shirt logos. Similar to the night time UFO lights - these can have the feel of a 'RORSCHACH BLOTS - CAUGHT ON CAMERA - with the experts all talking about what they see and think it is, letting their pareidolia run wild and free. 

Sure it's hard to believe the skunk ape video where he looks like a skinny guy in a black sweatshirt, so waterlogged it sags dow in the arm inseam, trying to run through the swampy muck (it's no easy thing to be blurry and indistinct yet still unconvincing) but in general I like to give them the benefit of the doubt (i.e. that they're not just hoaxing it to sell skunk ape keychains) but that's genius or pareidolia, we have no control over it--our brains will try to make a recognizable face out of just about anything. 

But I also believe Sasquatch is real--on some level-- because when I accessed the Akashic records back in 2008, they told me so -- he's the descendent of the nephilim, who live for over hundreds of years. They're hiding from the greys who had a mandated from their extinction via the Great Flood, from back five or six thousand years ago. The ones who survived fled to the mountains where the water never reached or underground in vast caverns full of oxygen-producing moss and trippy mushrooms. Don't think they are ancient just because we still see the same ones that survived the flood (antediluvian people, like Enoch. father of Noah, lived for hundreds of years). They are actually only a few hundred years old since they avoid the greys by skipping through time via alternate dimensions. (When making us, their replacements, they de-activated the DNA strands that let us hop time and space, and also gave us--not unlike that bastard in Blade Runner, a shorter life span, lest we become a threat through our accumulated power). That's why even though they are more primitive in a lot of ways, they're still way more powerful than us. We'll never catch them because they were never really here, or there-- yet they've always been here, more than us. 

Yet they are hungry or encroached on they will you and your pets. So if they visit your backyard, leave them some apples or leftovers. Maybe the blobs will come to enough focus you can get a close-up, like this bad boy: 

I believe in this pic - caught by a guy who says they're more human than ape. I think people confuse them with guys in gorilla suits ala the old dark house movies, or 2001, showing the difficulty we have with imagining a true missing link. But they're just as much hairy giant humans as they are apes. I might be wrong, but this pic is so outside the expectations  we have  I feel like it might actually be real.  This and the recent Colorado train sighting --  where he's taller than Chewbacca and blends in  so well one wonders if his hair changes  to golden brown during droughts.

That's the Pisces dualism in me: I believe it's all a pareidolia hallucination but I know it's real --more real even than we are. Us trying to trap one is like a sketch of an orange trying to trap a falcon. Or vice versa. 

10. Paul Kaup's Narration.... is always..., dependable

Sure he always phrases everything exactly ..... the same way, with that build up...and then.... the point. When he says "Whether it's someone..." you know he's going to pause then add "or some thing."  After awhile you can finish... his sentences,  while you fold... laundry. And though I miss the kind of voiceovering that was over-the-top ala the old Scariest Places in America show, which ran on the Travel channel 10 years ago-ish, and was awesome in a totally chintzy, Impact font-using melange of tour guides, B-roll, weird insert shots of screaming interns in cheap wig and period costumes--or the grave importance of the guy who does A Haunting, I accept and enjoy his more hinged delivery and less..... hammy... speaking style. Kaup, you're all right.

IN CLOSING

In case you think I'm a flake for loving this show, you're right. But I'm also a die-hard Jungian. and fascinated by the sociologic need this show fulfills. I know Jung and fellow comparative myth analyst auithors influenced by him like Joseph Campbell, Bruno Bettelheim, Maria Louise von Franz, and Robert Bly would all dig it.

 These days we don't necessarily get grandparents and nannies sharing the weird folk tales and cryptic encounters told them by their own old country grandmothers the way we used to. Cable TV has stepped in to fill the gap and man is it coming through. Its cup runneth over by rolling with the "it might be real" half-fulls rather than the "but it's probably fake" half-empty skeptics. Sometimes you feel like you've taken crazy pills sometimes when the talking head gallery doesn't roll their eyes at things that are clearly projector images on clouds, box kites covered in foil, big silver balloons running out of air and attracted to the cooling asphalt at night so it looks like they're walking down the street, video artifacts, or barn owls peeping over roofs, possums with broken tails, and so on, but that's just part of the myth-building. This is a zone where the demystifying classifications of science are undone, so known animals are returned to their phantom monster status. 

Magicidal (if it's not a word it should be) science is like the gaggle of pinch-faced moral majority bitties running Claire Trevor' chthonic mythic archetypal prostitute out of the town at the start of John Ford's Stagecoach. Luckily there's a border (1) these prim types will never across, to a place where we can be "safe from the blessings of civilization," Those rancid rationalists and false skeptics (1) may pretty brave in town, but dare not follow us into the Geronimo country where truth and reality fall away from each other like amok booster rockets, and found footage horror fiction, analog horror creepy pastas, and  real phenomena (which is which?) all swirl together for the ultimate TV equivalent of telling true ghost stories by the fire, PARANORMAL CAUGHT ON CAMERA! 

---

Further Reading:

 My 2012 Guide to Cable's Paranormal Ghost Shows

Zelots of Doubt: Or Why Skeptics are the New Cranks

Demon Sheets: Sleep Paralysis Theories

1. (the paranormal is alive and well in Mexico)

Just like our phones handshake with the cloud, the deepest level of our dream basement connects to all others, and to the earth itself, filtering its blinding high-speed flashes through the lens of myth. Through this deep dream spelunking thou mayest widen the girth of your soul until it's a big as all outdoors, for the demons cannot grab you when you're empty air, or drain you when you are all the oceans. 

We haven't really discussed the anima mundi here in the CinemArchetypew, and that's as it should be. We've been wrapped up in the Self's archetypes, and now it's time to look at the world's. There is a soul we're all a part of, and one by one, its own archetypes appear in dreams--the elementals. Like the sock puppet faces put on the hand of Gaia, we have to put a recognizable face put upon the natural world's unstoppable forces. A beautiful illustration can be found on a classic SNL sketch where Christopher Walken plays a "man who's very scared of plants" and so puts googly eyes on them--essentially creating earth elementals.

Saying these personifications are all in our head is forgetting the vast unexplored forests of our minds. Our ego wants us to forget, like a jealous lover trying to alienate us from our biological family, so it's understandable why scientists would consider "all in your mind" grounds for dismissal. When I say 'we' generate sentient autonomous energies through our belief in them, science scoffs, but exorcists and snake oil salesmen understand. We'll never know which came first, the demons or the humans whose fear gave them names and raison d'etres. But if they're not 'real' then neither are we. And as for faith healing, the snake oil heals all ills if the the salesman did a good job of pitching it. Placebos are the true miracle drug of our age, but you got to believe in them--which means you need a charismatic pitchman with the power of persuasion at their disposal, a kind of placebo reiki. 

Thus these forces are the basics, the root chords, the pigments from which our (cinema) 

archetypal world is painted. 

They're all in the world's head, of course.  Luckily there's a cure for that --and it's only a dolla. 

WATER

Both sympathetic and terrifying, like children of a certain age, these oceanic elementals can be temporarily captured and harnessed but never broken. Cage them and you rule the waves but gain an immortal enemy. Release them and you bring on yourself the mercurial mood swings of weather systems and underground earthquakes. Love them and be one with the sea, a drowned sailor slowly turning into both a jaunty skeleton and part of the sea itself. Now that's amore. 

1. Naomie Harris - Tia Dalma / Calypso

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN

(series, starting w/ Dead Man's Chest - 2006+)

Dir. Gore Verbinski 

Say what you want about how exhausting these films get by their belated ends, Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean series is packed with termite imagination, ingenious art design and keen little details, all of which are impossible to absorb in one sitting (I like catching them on network TV already in progress, watching them in about one hour increments on idle channel-flipping weekend afternoons, often drifting off before the last reel from sheer overstimulation.) 

And for me a big selling point is the cosmic archetypal romance between the ocean-floor bound Davy Jones--a truly virulent and mind bogglingly well animated character whose octopus head is covered in breathing bivalves (an under-appreciated bit of CGI mastery)-- and the sultry Calypso (Harris), the ocean elemental long kept bound to land by some magic spell that has been allowing men to sail her surface without being crushed by her stormy wrath when it's 'that time of the month', lunar-tidally speaking. And so she runs a cafe/bar where everyone hangs out when not aboard some ship or stranded on some desert isle. 

Harris' Calypso speaks in this sultry Jamaican accent where she kind of grabs the backbeat of normal conversational tones, so that her voice becomes like warm tea or whiskey, filtering in through the cracks of sailing man's bluster, suddenly turning the world a little more full and magical through her voice alone. The sequence in Dead Man's Chest, wherein the pirates free her from her chains, to allow her to return once more to the sea (so she can wipe out the advancing British armada), is full of questioning: will a water elemental, long-imprisoned, feel bound to any bargain with pirates?  Why would the ocean keep a promise to the mortals who've long enslaved her? It's certainly a unique situation. 

But maybe if you learn to love the hurricane, your own elemental immortality may result. It's about letting go of the mast and, with a hearty yell, plunging into the maw of the kraken with the free abandon of a trusting infant being thrown into the air and caught again and again by their giant, loving father, never once entertaining the idea dad's hands may slip.  Thus cavorts Depp's Captain Jack, feyly staggering to and fro with ingenuity and immorality. And what water elemental can't help but smule?

2. Linda Lawson as Moira 

NIGHT TIDE 

(1961) Dir. Curtis Harrington 

A sense of desolate loneliness runs through Harrington's debut feature that makes it--watching it alone and sad at 5 AM--a little too close to home for comfort, yet comfort comes anyway, thanks to the lure of the sea. Harrington--hip to the power of elementals as part ot the California magick crowd--lets the sandy  isolation find solace with the caress of cold, lapping waves. So it is a a beautiful sideshow mermaid Moira (Linda Lawson) connects with a shy sailor on leave (Dennis Hopper)--the only other solo wanderer in all the deserted Santa Monica Pier, an eerie late night locale that feels like a NYC side street rolled up and smoked by the inky ocean. Harrington gradually let go of mer-perso mhystique as we realize another seafarer, a retired captain, is responsible, maybe for filling her head with whatever blarney will keep her tied to him. So will this Calypso find a new Flying Dutchman or stay landlocked with her retired captain semi-father?

Fortunately the film's unique spell is so strong (Harrington was/is all into magic with pals Kenneth Anger and  Marjorie Cameron --who has a small role as the film's equivalent to Elizabeth Russell's strange cat lady "sister" in Cat People - a clear inspiration') that any amount of sober explanation in the denouement doesn't detract from the archetypal spell. 

In the end, the young Harrington's lonely drifting "we're all ghosts here at the fair"-style poeticism captures well the personification of the ocean elemental (his style of occult magick gets most of its energy from these kind of forces, so it makes sense). Ask not if she's real or a wave morphed by pareidolia, just listen and hear her siren lure heard faintly in the roar of ocean wind passing ghostly through the sea snail coils of your cochlea. Yea, though she may be the corrosive effect of long term salt air exposure on your rum-soaked neurons and the prolonged sexual frustration of being too long at sea, that that doesn't make her any less real. She's the mystic crossroads where your desire and the Anima Mundi intersect, the phallic beam of your film projector giving shape and substance to the formlesss/all-forms silver screen ocean. She's the point of infinity wherein you may well disappear, for it is said no drowning man ever feels alone again. Wrapping you up in her permanent warm embrace, she's all you ever took to sea for. 

4. Connie Seleca as Jennie Haniver

THE BERMUDA DEPTHS

 (1978) Dir.  Tsugunobo Kotani

A kind of oceanic ghost story, the delectably weird and Jungian archetypal 70s TVM, The Bermuda Depths sails the same lonesome sailor's anima currents as Night Tide and even Beach Blanket Bingo's touching affair between Bonehead and Lorelei. It's such a perfect illustration of the anima (i.e. a sexually frustrated sailor's desperate paeredolia-spiked mirage, so seals, even rocks, take the form of beguiling women in the oceanic haze) it's practically emblematic. But we're discussing the elemental aspect as well, which is much stranger and more unknowable and she functions this way too. We may think she belongs to us, our personal anima, but she is the ocean's anima, not ours.

Maybe it's because I'm a Pisces, but I love this weird TVM, I'm even haunted by the theme song, "Jenny" ("Have I only imagined her?") I was dissatisfied with the end but, aren't we always dissatisfied when we wake up from dreaming about her? I watched it while switching back and forth to hurricane Dorian on the Weather Channel. Man, what a perfect symbiosis to my sailor psyche. I couldn't stop thinking about.... Jennie-- with her raven hair, perfect olive tan, waterproof no-smudge eyeliner and the ability to reflect light from her eyes so they glow like an inhuman fish, or like Dorian's twirling eye, which was heading towards Bermuda as I watched. What are the odds? It was like she and her giant turtle were letting me know they knew I knew this synergy was no accident. 

Though this literal dream girl trope ("have I only imagined her?") often irritates me in other films, it works here as there's plenty of evidence she's more than just a fantasy or a psychotic hallucination. The men who don't believe she's real are--after all--trying to catch a turtle the size of a Victorian mansion in a rinky dink tug boat-- so they're not reliable arbiters of reality. And besides, she's real to Magnus (Leigh "will soon play the dick EPA guy in Ghostbusters"  McCloskey) and to us. And she goes goes with the turtle, we learn, and the turtle might be the devil. Weird choice, Satan! 

No matter how far down the bizarre Bermuda Depths goes, it never loses its Jungian "on-the-one" beat. The film itself is a dream within a dream, and there is no waking, thankfully, only a renouncement of one layer of the dream for another, which may or may not be a transition to adulthood but is certainly a tragic end of innocence and a smart adios to the ocean. Only the sailors yet to be, not yet castrated by their entry into the social sphere, are naive enough to think there is any difference between the sea, the sun and the land, or between dreams and 'reality.' Hopelessly enamored and ever risking being dragged to hi death, Magnus does what I had to do with alcohol. He turns his back on the one thing he loves most. He chooses not to drown in the arms of his warm oblivion. He self-beaches. One a mythic level, this is more than the usual castration needed to enter the social order--this is fishing out that which was cut away (the Lacanian objet petit a) feeling whole for a brief minute, then throwing it back into the ocean. The alternative? Drowning, in all it uncut glory.

AIR

The Anima Mundi's most abundant and strangest element. It's neither here nor there. Bullets cannot harm it, only H-Bombs, "exploding even the air itself" (-Eros) --the ultimate cheat/imbalance thrower. The Air controls the birds of the field, and wraps the earth in its love embrace.  

 5. Lydia/Melanie 

THE BIRDS (1963)

Sure it's an oblique connection, but that's the beauty of Hitchcock's film. In going to Bodega Baty--leaving the toy shop (as they say)--Melanie brings the birds with her, but it's Lydia's sky. Everything you bring to it will be used against you. in this case to create a poltergeist-style crypto-incestuous manifestation of crypto-incesteuos  anxiety. Strong pre-Edenic human emotions,--the ones kept way down where Cronus eats his young--are the only fuel a 'Mother Nature' elemental manifestation needs to shriek its way into existence  When it reaches its apotheosis you can even hear its Michael Myers-like breathing / killer POV up in the sky, gazing down at the flaming Bodega Bay gas station.  

Notice that once Melanie is reduced to hysterical child--in shock and powerless--the birds are calm. Lydia doesn't have to worry about Mitch remaining in her nest, the threat has been neutralized. 

The air elemental has a similar elusive quality. It both is and isn't in any particular place at any particular time. When it inhabits a body, or any electromagnetic non corporeal matrix, it can always lift or melt away. Similarly the bird attacks are mostly terrorizing rather than deadly. They can get lucky and peck out some eyes or break the skin in enough places the victim bleeds to death (like Melanie's potential rival Annie) but basically it's the uncanny sudden surplus of them that's unnerving, that they can appear and disappear and choose their moment. The sudden surplus of Melanie's presence, too, in this very settled town, unnerves the locals who tie her to the disturbance, rightly, even thought they're not sure how. The beast's exitence isn't her fault, though, she's only the father. 

6. Anita Louise - Titania 

MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM (1935)

With that crazy proto-glam sparkling outfit, Louise shows a dancer's grace, waving and moving her hands as if she's the same density as the air around her, alight with night-tripping changeling stealing, breeze riding elegance. It's almost a relief that her falsetto voice is so annoying, maybe two registers above Louise's normal speaking voice, almost causing feedback in the recording equipment, but if she hit a low Hawksian woman register, like, say, Lauren Bacall or Margaret Sheridan, I'd probably have to kill myself to stop the pain of my ardor. Oberon, the king of the night, is also a night elemental but I just wrote about him in my Victor Jory appreciation. He the absence she fills, the black of the sky while she is the moon and/or stars. They are as one.

7. Rex Ingram - the Genie

Thief of Baghdad   (1940)

The more times I see him as God in The Green Pastures or Lucia, the Devil's son, in Cabin in the Sky  the bigger my awe of Rex Ingram. For Thief, he's a terrifying but ultimately good-natured 'chaotic neutral' genie or djinn- no Robin William pally-wally stuff for Rex's genie, so don't mistake his boisterous good nature for allegiance beyond those obligatory wishes. And if one of those wishes is to set him free, like Calypso in the above, you have to just pray this nonhuman force decides to keep its word. So it is, perhaps, that dealing with elementals is like putting the gun down first in a stand-off- we can only hope we don't get blown, burned, drowned or buried as we step out of our magic safety circle and contend with the mercurial unknowable forces of the world. We take their love for granted at our peril. From a Jungian angle, keeping humble and granting them autonomy is a way to give yourself your wildness back. Without that kind of lunatic trust in wildness, life gets mighty stale, and then symptoms of hysteria break out -- a numb arm here, an earthquake there, hysterical blindness here, floods there--and fire always waiting to burn you out of the equation. 

8. Sandra Knight - "The Girl" - THE TERROR (1964

While the Hellman style wasn't yet a recognizable 'thing' in 1963, after seeing his more acclaimed features (TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, THE SHOOTING),  you feel that innate "Hellman-ness" in THE TERROR's dreamy 'edge of forever' iconography: tidal pools, spinning compasses, crashing Big Sur waves., ambiguity of relationships, and the fluidity of feminine identity (they tend to be nameless, billed in the credits as "the woman" or "the girl"). Such anima ambiguity perfectly fits the ghostly figure played by Sandra Knight in THE TERROR, who is, like many of these elementals, also functional as anima. She can appear as a hawk, swooping or circling overhead amd/or swooping down on someone to kill them.  or wandering around the cemetery ether. Depending on which of the film's many directors was at the helm, she's an elemental hawk/girl spirit, a local girl possessed by a vengeful ghost, or a normal human girl who thinks she's a ghost thanks to hypnosis coordinated by the mother of the son who the Baron killed when he found her in bed with Ilsa, his young wife, or--as Wonka would say--reverse that. If that melange of identities seems unclear remember that Hill and Hellman were coming in for the second half of a project begun by Corman as a straight Poe-ish Gothic, and continued by Coppola as a folk horror tale of hypnotism and revenge. Rather than twisting further toward Corman's Karloff Gothic or Coppola's folk horror, Monte and Jack came along brought it farther out, turning Helene into an enigma reflecting transmigration of souls, the transitory nature of the flesh and the relentless ocean tide whiplash reframed as a mirror to eternity's corrosive caress --in other words, bring on the Hellman, and bring out the best. (full)

FIRE:

9. The Fire Itself - BACKDRAFT (1991)

Ron Howard is too earnest for me a lot of the times, but he's a solid director, a kind of William Wyler of his time, and Backdraft has one great aspect, the portrayal of the fires these guys go against as a kind of conscious entity, eagerly surging ahead to, well, who could top Owen Glienerman's masterful succinction:

In Ron Howard’s Backdraft, fire comes roiling across the top of a room in billowy, black orange waves. It gets sucked behind the walls, like a genie pouring back into its bottle (for a few seconds, the film seems to be running in reverse motion), and then, fueled by a surge of air, it explodes outward with ever-greater lightning force. During a climactic inferno in a chemical warehouse, it seems to come at the fire fighters from every imaginable angle — an elusive, shapeless hydra with a thousand incendiary heads.

Owen! You ruled the 90s, at least for me, with my free EW subscription and the world so much simpler.

10. Bob - Twin Peaks

(1991) 

There are several ways the dimensions between worlds--the dream abstraction of the Black Lodge, and regular mundane Twin Peaks, Oz and Kansas--can be bridged - one is deep meditation and/or DMT opening the usually closed halls and tunnels of the mind so that your consciousness can finally meet itself--another, is FIRE. Fire crosses over--if you look deep into the flames while listening to a story at night, the flicker acts as a kind of organic stutter-stop in a film projector, blocking the transition from frame to frame out of our vision. Bob then moves through those black shutters, jams up the sprockets so the film, whose images are so fleeting that, if one stays under the blazing lens for more than a few extra seconds, it starts burning a hole in the film. Isn't that what trauma does? It splits the film in two. This is how the Eyes Wide Shut / One Eyed Jacks crowd--also very big in Oz symbolism---use incest to turn young girls into normal people by day, sex slave assassins by night? To gain power you must corrupt the innocent, that corruption is the spark that starts the fire that--as the Log Lady warns Laura in Fire Walk with Me--is hard to put out once it starts consuming goodness. 

And so Bob is always burning--Lynch often glazes him in fire overlays---a fire elemental--but is trapped in the void where fire must wait, dormant, contained until he's able to enter the minds of those who allow him to, from there to corrupt and kill like the fire he is. Putting him out to take a whole season, as we learned in Twin Peaks: The Return. But fire walks with us whenever a match is struck, ready to light a cigarette or burn down half of Nevada. And anyway, you got to have him to keep warm, and to make the slain creatures you consume taste good. 

Smaug (voiced by Bennedict Cummberbach) 

- The Hobbit movies

More than some abstract monster in the giant lizard vein, Smaug speaks, has a great sense of smell, and a tremendous lot of gold to horde. In Jungian terms, he's the anal chakra, that sense of power and control when infants first learn to hold in their poopies. As a fire elemental he materializes the full empty obession of greed, the way greed can run amok, destroying everything in it's --'ahem' ---past, determined to burn the world down to save the gold it ultimately has no actual use for, aside from a bed. The mountain he sleeps in is the perfect model for what we might imagine contains fire, keeps it out of sight--fire sleeps in the mountains. 

Earth: 

"These little shreds shall, indeed, stand for all."

                                          - Walt Whitman

12. Poison Ivy - BATMAN & ROBIN

13. Deborah Reed -Creedence Leonore Gielgud - TROLL 2

Bottle cap glasses-wearing, hair-in-a-bun, horticulturists by day, sexy wild-eyed wild Earth elementals by night--each using their beauty, evil and chemistry to greenify an undeserving world--sounds like your kinda gal? Well, rejoice! One is a cult classic that just gets better with repeat viewings.and the other--shot at about 100,000x the budget--is unendurable, but in each they transcend in the earth elemental sorcerous hotness. 

In BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997) Uma Thurman plays a bottle cap glasses-wearing horticulturist, hair-in-a-bun horticulturist by day, who becomes a sexy, wild-eyed Earth elemental by night, using psychoactive plant powders to create a green inflatable-muscled henchman (a way more fun Bane!), and to 'greenify' Gotham by eliminating its pesky human residents into mulch for her beloved plants. The rest of the film is awful as hell but she's great

Batman & Robin was poorly received with good reason--marred by terrible casting choices (Alicia Silverstone and Chris O'Donell are all wrong for Robin and Batgirl, like Sophia ----- as X-Men Phoenix). Hell, I walked out after the first ten minutes, to sneak into the movie next door (as one does at multiplexes). But now, later, catching it in a Sunday afternoon stupor on cable after seeing the infamous and much beloved TROLL 2 the night before, I officially love some of it it in all its terrible glory. The two actually make a great and terrible outsider fantasy double feature, especially when one considers the similarities between Batman's Uma Thurman (channelling Mae West) as Poison Ivy with - (channelling a tripping Margaret Hamilton) as Melora Cregar in Troll 2.

ALL THAT aside there's clear references to both the 1934 Black Cat and the 1932 Blonde Venus. And though her sub-par Mae West double entendre dialogue is badly written ("my garden needs tending" / "some lucky boys are bound to hit the honey pot"), pulsing with missed opportunities, Thurman seems to be having fun and looks great in her Miss Jolly Green Giant couture. Rolling her eyes, carrying on about Mother Nature having her day, and 'greening Gotham' after ridding herself of the feathered and furry caped crusaders, Uma alone finds that perfect balance between the high camp of the TV show (borrowing a page from Julie Newmar) and 'blockbuster'-style acting. As someone who always felt guilty over the purposeless murder of evergreen trees at Christmas, I applaud the tru-baller anti-veganism, which makes her the spiritual earth elemental sister of Deborah Reed in Troll 2 (1990)

And for TROLL 2, Reed is the bomb- overacting more than Batman and Robin's entire cast put together, she's truly a sight with her terrible teeth and wild hair as both the climactic full-on witch and the sinister-sweet librarian gardener of Nilbog. But she does have one scene where she sashays all sexy into the TV and trailer of one of the last morons standing and makes his cob pop something fierce. The bro just stands there, terrified, erect and immobilized, leaving us to wonder: is he waiting for a direction from off camera, maybe trying to hide his erection or not blow his first opportunity by saying or doing something awkward? Either way, his popcorn is soon so ready he'll want another bag.

14.MOTHER!

Jennifer Lawrence is an idealistic pregnant Mother Nature who just wants to be with her man and have a quiet night at home while she works on fixing up the house and he labors on his poetry in the sky, or upstairs. But of course an out of control violent human population, driven mad with religious devotion to their poet hero, end up mobbing the place for an impromptu party that burns all out of hand, zigging up from the Old to New Testament. The way Aronofsky films the mounting chaos via going from room to room as J-Law tries to get these ragers from destroying her plumbing will ring eerily true for anyone whose ever had to call the cops on their own party to get the ravenous hordes of strangers out of their house before it's completely destroyed. Some critics and audience members can't handle certain scenes but anyone familiar with Catholic and pagan iconography surely won't object to seeing their symbols concretized. Lawrence has been very hit-or-miss lately but here it's a definite hit as she goes organically from happy wife to annoyed host to terrified home invasion victim and beyond into thunderous avenger of her own lost abundance. 

(full)

15. Skinwalker / Evil Tree Spirit - 

EYES OF FIRE (1983) 

Films like this highly uniquely otherworldly and long-unavailable episodic folk horror film is one of those regional recent rediscoveries, like Blood Beat, Death Bed, The Child, Lemora, The Witch Who Came from the Sea, and The Bogey Man that reminds us how startlingly weird and fresh 70s-80s horror could be--the trick was finding them in the endless sea of hack cheap slashers. This one is drenched in horror-adventure period piece magical realism along the same general plot and time frame as The Witch --i.e. late-1600s America, when the wilderness was still largely the domain of Native Americans, a few British or French military-maintained outposts, wandering fur traders, and small, remote religiously uptight enclaves. And--of course--earth and fire elementals are around, luring and devouring the wee ones roaming unchecked in the woods. The elemental here is a witch doctor earth spirit hypothesized to be made from the blood of innocent creatures, killed to give life to other less-innocent monsters, pooling in the earth until it takes the shape on an avenging earth spirit. As with The Witch, we have a a delusional preacher patriarch of the kind that essentially made the laws privileging white males so deservedly obsolete--in this case an itinerant preacher who takes up with the wife of a long-absent fur trader and her gaggle of kids. They end up needing to escape downriver when the town tries to hang a redheaded girl stepchild just because she knows how to speak with the trees. Sailing on a wooden raft, shot at by Native Americans, they end up finding a place of their own in a patch of woods the local Shawnee fear to tread, haunted by a malicious soul collecting tree spirit magus who is soon sucking them all down to his web of interlocked roots and shroom filaments til all that's left is their faces jutting out of trees. Gradually the survivors barricade themselves into their fort walls defending against the ghost band of past settlers and Native Americans turned into a naked bunch of Woodstock style mud dancers, glowing with lysrergic red energy, and even an evil changeling shuttled into their midst that the preacher takes as his own. 

15. Marsha Quint - The Howling