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.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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).
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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'sall-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.
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.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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 TheLong 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 outhow 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.
Not to tie it all back to Satan's School for Girls, but the Spelling-Goldberg production team really knew how to deliver the kind of TV horror movie you want to see more than once, the kind that don't traumatize, depress, or bore one and then are over before they make a nuisance of themselves, Scary without being traumatic, sexy without being sexual, cozy without being sentimental, leisurely without being boring, the Spelling/Goldberg juggernaut knew how to draw in children as well as adults. The secret - no children and no buzzkills. In the 70s (i.e. pre-E.T.) appealing to kids didn't mean didn't talking down to them or pandering to their immaturity; it meant being adult but in a way kids could understand. Case in point is this early entry in the folk horror sub/genre that predates The Wicker Man and Blood on Satan's Claw and manages to fuse their future tropes to a Rosemary's Baby skeleton. Hope Lange stars as Maggie the modern era wife (she wants a baby) of a 'struggling' artist (he wants success) named Ben (Paul Burke). Their fortunes magically change after inheriting the old family farm, wherein Maggie starts to remember her past life in the 1690s (i.e witch trial era) when her soul last lived there. She has visions of being pressed under heavy stones by an angry pilgrim mob, but is she being tortured into naming names of her fellow coven members, or tortured by the coven for talking? The minute she walks in the door she somehow knows just where all the secret passages are, and wants to split back to Boston. And man, she sure should've.
If this all makes you think of 1978's Dark Secret of Harvest Home,you're not far off, but this is 1/4 as long and goes farther, faster (the family in Harvest Home would still be deciding whether or not to leave the city by the time Maggie has already started wandering around the farm at night, investigating the sound of a girl crying, a sound that turns into mocking laughter as soon as she's far enough away from the house.
That it's past life folk horror is not to say Crowhaven is not also about a woman's paranoia in the age of gender norm upheaval, part of the grand scheme of the post-Rosemary's Baby / Stepford Wives (ie. Ira Levin-fueled)late-60s/ early-70s Yellow Wallpaper / Cracker Factory women's lib upheaval. Horror movies onscreen and in TV were rife with deranged old bats, schizophrenic housewives, and housewives who may hearing things or who may be legit menaced by supernatural forces. Middle-aged actresses spent the first 1/3 of their TV movie investigating strange noises and trying to convince the men around them they didn't imagine it. Rosemary had proved you could have both housewife frustration-borne paranoia and genuine occult happenings. The issue of men thinking it's just "hysteria" and a "vivid imagination," was meant to rankle everyone watching, men, women, and children alike. We kids realized we too would go crazy if people continued to treat us like a child, even after grew up. The family was allowed to be repressive even if there was no abuse or dysfunction. Everything about the nuclear family seemed suspect. Even motherhood was addressed from a position of ambivalence (i.e. 'Is this even my child? Was it switched at the hospital?" or "was I impregnated by a demon or alien?"). a position that would begin to evaporate in the post-Exorcist era (when it changed to: 'this is my child and I have failed her, for cleaving too close to my career at the expense of devoting myself fully to my husband and daughter, and now he's left and she's dying and only the return of the patriarchy can save her!'), a notion that would grow and grow until it blossomed in the sanctified nuclear family of 80s Spielberg.
This is 1970 so, though a childless couple might want a child, it may be only a case of the grass is greener on the other side. A truth driven home by Maggie's bad choices in getting one. Like Rosemary, Maggie really wants to have a baby, and even tried to adopt, but Ben doesn't make enough money with his 'art' to qualify them. Sigh. She wants a baby so bad she'd probably sign her name in any old book to get one. Hmmm, enter a sweet-natured 10 year-old girl with long-blonde hair named Jennifer (Cindy Eilbacher) who Maggie and Ben promptly unofficially adopt after her guardian conveniently dies.
Pre-Exorcist, religion and patriarchal authority didn't have a chance against the occult 70s. There were no doubt-wracked priests, patient cops, frazzled parents nor over-the-top demonic outbursts (the devil didn't need to act like a tantrum-throwing brat the way Pazuzu does; he ran the place). Look high and low in Crowhaven (and in most Spelling-Goldberg productions) and you won't see a single church or preacher (same goes for Rosemary's Baby). The occult carried currency in both the UK and US in ways forgotten (repressed!) by everyone except the Scarfolk Council. The Catholic church would find a boom in attendance after TheExorcist, but in the early-70s, Satan ruled. "God is dead" announced Time Magazine in the hand of Roman Castavet.
But look who's come over for a housewarming in Crowhaven! Cyril Delevanti--still around and kicking six years after dying of old age in Night of the Iguana--as the old neighbor with the backstory on all of them witches; Lloyd Bochner as a rich ex-boyfriend who offers Maggie a job; Milton Selzer as the doctor who can't see any biological reason why Maggie couldn't have a baby. John Carradine (who else?) even shows up as the odd handyman who jogs Maggie's de ja vu when bringing up the same wooden door from the basement that her past life accusers piled the stones until she named names (like Elia Kazan!). John Carradine was working in the 70s TV movie horror movie scene. He played all the roles Bela Lugosi was stuck playing after he got a bad rep, i.e. the butler, handyman, film producer, or shady caretaker.
Meanwhile, their strange adopted child Jennifer is gradually getting spookier, especially when she climbs into Ben's bed due to supposedly being afraid of the bad storm that's conveniently stranded Maggie in town... at Lloyd Bochner's bachelor pad! Jennifer tells Ben she loves him and Eiselbacher nails the creepy moment with a kind of obsessive weird but calm and very adult energy that manages to skirt pedophilia just because of Ben's obliviousness. A few weeks later (she never tells Ben she stayed at Lloyd's) and Maggie is pregnant. Everything's a trade off, and we only know what's coming if we've seen Written on the Wind.
This is not one of those slow burns where half the movie is just 'maybe I'm paranoid or maybe someone's gaslighting me or maybe, just maybe, there really is such a thing as the supernatural'. Sure there is plenty of that--it wouldn't be a 70s TVM without it--but meanwhile plot points tick off and things happen and it all goes far and wide and deep and dark without ever being a bummer. Sure, Maggie's doctor and her husband think she's crazy--we expect that in 70s TV movies--but the big subtext isn't some feminist critique of rigid patriarchal dogma but whether or not we can condemn her for her less-than-courageous decision making along the way. Our conclusion -- we can't. With an ending straight out of left field but at the same time letter perfect, Crowhaven Farm stands tall in the 70s TV folk horror valley. At a lean 74 minutes there's no time to dally there and there's also no need to have things all 'work out' either. Patriarchy seldom survives a Spelling-Goldberg joint, or if it does it's as a defanged totem. Rosemary's Baby made it all right for a new kind of chthonic evil to win in the end, even on prime time, without causing bad vibes. And Crowhaven Farm's ending is one of that victory's short-lived benefits. Does loving this make us evil, or just 'balanced'? Judge ye not!!
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.
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.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
NOTES.
1. i.e. 70s sex in TVMs vs. now, when any first kiss--even on TV shows--smash cuts instantly to joyless rutting and a demeaning climax, regardless of the genre. Thanks, HBO, for ruining sex for everyone except coked-up misogynists.
2. I believe the world can be interpreted any sort of way, and perception and belief create our world through consensual conscious projection. (which is why 'cabin fever' is so fascinating - without the consensus of a large group to keep reality 'normal,' the personal unconscious starts bending reality to suit itself. See Bathroom Pupils)
3. (i.e. the 'Crissy', Bruce's first victim in Jaws)
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.
A bit of a slow burner, on minimal sets, and one very strange and cool empty house (I get the impression the story was written around it), this starts with a happily engaged couple picnicking on a sprawling lawn to the house she "designed" and he's eyeing with veiled trepidation. David (Arthur Roberts), we gradually learn, is an ambitious employee of his fiancee's father (John Beal) whose daughter Barbara (Robin Strasser) is his fairly willful pride and joy. The film starts from that corny image anyone from the 70s is so familiar with (the happy white heterosexual couple frolicking hand in hand through the meadow) and gradually picks at it, all the way to the wedding --Barbara's big happy day -- when she lunges at him with a pair of scissors for snogging upstairs with his ex, Ellen (Iva Jean Saraceni) mere moments after saying "I do."
You would think this would go in a lot of directions from there, but it doesn't. Where it goes is off the rails with bizarre dream sequences, weird phone calls terrorizing David and Ellen. who are now shacked up. The dad doesn't fire David--after all he's still his son-in-law and doing great work. Barbara has disappeared after fleeing the wedding in a bloody wedding dress. Dad's not worried--she'll be back. And then there's the creepy phone calls... and other things...
It's all very well acted by these four leads, especially Beal and Strasser as the definition of functionally unhinged. The final act sees them both cut loose into wild emotional swings across the gamut; with each word they rattle off conjuring a complete change of reading and expression. It's so crazy I had to rewind several times to savor every tic. And as Helen, Saraceni has a bravura scene to herself--veering from terror to fury to anguish--when she's terrorized in their house after David has left for work.
But of course the real star is Strasser. Willful, spoiled, possibly schizophrenic but funny, creative, idealistic, naive and only roiling over the top and onto the kitchen floor at the end, when it's time to really pour it on. Never before has an unarmed, smiling woman in a wedding dress trying to get you into bed seemed so frightening. Watch it and realize the masculine unconscious is a crazy house run and designed by a woman (the anima) whom we barely know, but she haunts our dreams, and--if we don't respect her-- is apt to deliver nightmares from which we may never awaken! Shout out to The House of Psychotic Women!
If you're a stranger to the lucha libre movie world this a fine place to start. Las 'Luchadoras' are a tag team of statuesque wrestling women played by Mexican fantasy film fixture Lorena Velázquez (Ship of Monsters, Invasion of the Martian Women) and American ex-pat Elizabeth Campbell. They fight other female wrestlers in the ring, They brawl with the the mysterious Dr. Doom and his half-dozen henchmen in the streets or they fight in the bad guys' warehouse hide-out, or in the secret--trap door-laden--lab behind it. They fight a lot. Dr. Doom (no relation to the Fantastic Four version) is a villain straight out of the classic Hollywood serials, replete with half-dozen endlessly re-punchable henchmen and a monster from his last successful ape-brain / human crossover experiment (indestructible, thanks to body armor and a metal mask). The doctor keeps sending his monster and henchmen out to recruit new female subjects for his gorilla transplant experiments, but then he decides he needs 'stronger' women for his work (the others die on the operating table). He happens to have heard of two of them...
Amiable, capable, smart and not shy about mopping up the floor with a whole room full of out-of-their-depth (male) abductors, the Luchadoras don't need rescuing; they even come the rescue of their smitten male cop escorts more than once, and they're not threatened by it! Even if you don't go in for wrestling, it's a nice whirlwind of serial-style cliffhanger action, with a real love of strong female characters that America (outside of Russ Meyer) couldn't match. For 1963, that's pretty huge.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.The recent upgrade to HD makes it easy to finally stop wading through the murk of Something Weird's old DVD. And if you're aching for more, Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy, is also in remastered HD on Tubi. If you're hooked after Doom and want a kind of sequel and then Robot vs the Aztec Mummy. All terrific, mindless comfort food for the soul and coolant for the troubled brow looking for some monster action to nod off to at four AM.
Special Note:There are other luchadora movies on Tubi, including The Panther Women, and a lot of color Santos movies, but they have much newer dubs that don't really work in my opinions. Don't let them dissuade you from the older stuff, All of the movies mentioned in the above paragraph were dubbed into English back in the 1960s by K. Gordon Murray.Those earlier dubs are relaxed, low-key, the ambient room sound perfectly matched to the image. But scores of luchador movies weren't imported in the 60s by K. Gordon Murray - and thus never dubbed into English until a few years ago by very modern sounding actors. Though they clearly try their best, the badly recorded result sounds way cartoony, modern and canned - a cold table read for the Cartoon Network from yesterday rather than an old black-and-white Mexican wrestling horror movie from 60 years ago.
But at least there's the older dubs, and Tubi has this, Wrestling Women vs. The Aztec Mummy, The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy and Santo in the Wax Museum, and you can find it, Santos vs. The Vampire Women and The Curse of the Aztec Mummy all with the original English dubs (as well as several other options in Spanish with burned on or fan-made subtitles - check out my curated Tubi list: Mexico de Macabre.)
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.
"This looks like the spot, all right." A gun-toting guy in a cowboy hat and flannel shirt sneaks into a cardboard cavern-cum-witch doctor's tomb and beholds a sarcophagus with a lizard handle. The canned library music soars as he tries to open the lid. He can't. Then it opens without him. The mummy rises --it's a black guy in a fur hat! He kills him and takes the rolled up map the guy brought - it contains the opening credits! The canned suspense music shifts over to some scratchy tribal drumming and chanting (maybe lifted from the director's early-60s high-fidelity exotica collection?) The credits are written in blood! I'm hooked, in that gentle relaxing way I love. 1971 never felt so much like 1965.
I only discovered William Grefe's canon recently, thanks to the Arrow exhausting retrospective. I may have been scared off in the past by faded color and unrestored cropped images, but now the colors glow and everything is ducky thanks to Arrow's good work. I still haven't been able to finish one all the way through, except Tartu, which I've already seen three times. Florida native, Grefe knows how to deliver on location in the Everglades, and to convince his young cast to swim therein, and get eaten by a shark, bit up by gators and snakes, dancing to the transistor radio's generic rock, making out (lots of boyfriends getting kind of pushy and hormonal), but never crossing over into crass, wading through the marshes pulling a swamped fan boat, and screaming excessively. It all works thanks to a concentrated time frame and linear plot, following a day in the life of an archeologist and his unwitting students who make the mistake of ignoring the native warnings about treading in the vicinity of Tartu's grave. He can rise up to smite them in the form of a bull shark, a snake, an alligator, and finally a muscular young brave. Add a scene with them being trapped in Tartu's spooky cave for awhile, and his mummified corpse rising up to the sound of the thumping tom-toms. and you have a recipe for 88 minutes of Floria supernatural delight, even if it's all (the tomb scenes aside) shot outside during the day in natural light and unconvincing day-for-night (I presume, since they carry around lit lanterns).
Ironically, Grefe must have genuinely thought a shark attack couldn't happen in the fresh water of the Everglades, as he has the professor even announcing its impossibility to his students, and coming to believe in the curse because it couldn't happen otherwise. In point of fact--as any Shark Week fan can tell you-- bull sharks (the very shark in the Tartu stock footage) can live in fresh water, for days at a time if necessary. And they do swim up the Everglades, where food is more plentiful than the open ocean! And they can and they have attacked people in the Everglades! Yet this archeology professor doesn't know that. so concludes the supernatural is the only explanation! It may be the first (and last) time in any movie where a professor comes to believe in the supernatural truth via a misunderstanding of a natural event (rather than the reverse).
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
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:
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).
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.
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 Horrorrun 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!
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)
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).
I heard about Flux Gourmet being totally weird. Well, a new Peter Strickland film is a time for nervous celebration! 'Celebration' because anything by old Strick-9 (his cool nickname, I just decided) guaranteed a totally original, multi-genre-exploding work of art; 'nervous' because original multi-genre-exploding works of art don't always 'land' --especially when stretched to feature length. You may gaze in awe at his always-beautiful imagery, thrill at being able to recognize all the embedded references, savor the alienation of Antonioni-esque post-structuralism, and yet when you pick a time to go to the bathroom, you don't feel the need to 'pause' or hurry back to your seat You can be pretty sure you're not going to miss any detail of plot or lose the narrative unction - as there is nothing to lose.
The cost of experimental eccentricity, alas, is stasis, the pre-Raphaelite fairie bower. We gaze in rapt awe like Hylas at the beauty of our own reflection, wondering when the nymphs will drag us under into rapt cinematic hypnosis. In Strickland's pond, they never come!
But Strickland may yet find a way around this edging. With each film he gets closer to making a real normal movie. He came closest with his last film In Fabric (2018) and so to celebrate the serving of Flux Gourmet, let me dust off this unfinished gem of a review I started after watching it a few months or years ago.
PS- Dig my prolonged urine metaphor opener. Shout out to the Yellow River Boys!
Wise cine-urologists say: When a director aims the golden arc of his film in three directions at once, he better be on his toes, lest he be left with piss-sprayed shoes.
Peter Strickland is just such a reckless streamer. His films are homages to the golden shower of 70s 'Eurosleaze,' splashing beautifully into a shiny, serpentine urinal of experimentalist meta-satire, dusky cinematography, and vivid collapsing, ever-shifting signifiers.. The signposts by which we recognize all the tics and tricks of the era's erotic 'dream/nightmare'-makers (Franco, Rollin, especially) are--in le universe Strickland--twisted around to leave us with that strange, alienated feeling where we kind of step out of the narrative, and it's as if we're waking from the dream of our own lives, the dream where time stops, the clocks melt, and the illusion that dreams and waking life are mutually exclusive evaporates in the cold heat of a blazing moon.
That's why it comes as no surprise that Strickland's latest,in Fabric (2018), wiggles that stream of consciousness into three different streams, hoping one at least will hit the mark. We get a) a dark 70s-set period piece surrealist dystopian satire of England's Tony Richardson-style 'kitchen sink' (i.e. working class yabbo) character dramas; b) a high-fashion updated or Tales of Manhattan (1942)-cum-decadent-capitalist horror satire equating fashion retail with kinky sex, black magic and of course, death; c) a work of détourned experimentalist fashion decollage, exploring the way the concept of "objectification" refuses to hold still and have its picture taken. In short, rather than leaning on Franco, Kümel, and Rollin, you can feel influences from Antonioni (modernist alienation), Bunuel (surreal deadpan satire), Argento (wild vivid colors and sudden violence you can feel in your nervous system like a cold shock), Fulci (gore as high art), Gilliam (dystopia!) and Kubrick (glacial gliding) all coalescing around a kind of Stan Brakhage / Tony Richardson collaboration for a Situationist detourned Sears catalogue from the mid-70s. Sure, technically about a red dress that kills its owners, sold by a Satanic department store, in an outskirt of 70s Londin. But that's like saying Psycho is about the difficulties of juggling a small business with being an invalid parent's sole caregiver.
What does it say about this film that the idea of the dress itself as a sentient, relentlessly destructive garment is perhaps the least interesting thing about it? The 'enigmatic uncanny object destroying everyday people' motif is soooo last season it's not even kitschy. We've already had Rubber (a tire), Christine (a car)or The Car (a different car), Maximum Overdrive (many cars) or Killdozer (take a guess)--or--probably the films Fabric most closely resembles as far as adhering to the 'possessed object killing a series of folk' narrative structure--Death Bed - the Bed that Eatsand The Mangler (a laundry press). As is often the case,there's no origin story to Fabric's monster dress - no flashback to a satanic dress designer or a meteor crashing through a boutique window; or a shamanic child laborer in Malaysia weaving curses into the fabric (there is some kind of curse stitched in, but it doesn't explain anything), or anything like that, but that's ok. What matters is that Strickland never misses a chance to run the camera's scissor gaze up and down on the crushed velvet curtain of a scene. The end spends lots of time showing us the blazing hypnosis of the devilish TV commercial, implying that if we ever die while watching TV, it's conceivable we would never even notice the program had changed. The image would just catch on fire and melt into our dispersing attention locus.
Whether or not it's attempting to be some caustic lower berth satiric response to the gushy texture-and-privilege fabric worship of PTA's Phantom Thread (1), no one man may know. I don't think so, but Thread did come out the year before this. And it's all connected by a... string. But this ain't no portrait of an oh-so sensitive famous guy tortured by his own rich famous brilliance and a doting fan/wife/personal assistant with a streak of Munchausen by proxy, this is about Dentley and Soper, a fashion oasis that really put the 'tore' in 'store.' The mannequins loom like aliens moving to a century-long circadian rhythm (we never see them move, but they do, like plants). The vampiric alien department store sales staff are all statuesque mannequin-like black-haired pale skinned women who speak in a kind of philosophical sales-pitchin' English, never addressing questions or people directly, speaking only in (masterfully-written) commerce-bent aphorisms. The store has an old time chute for the payments, where the money goes up and the change comes back along a ceiling tube (bringing another chill of 'bored child of the 70s' recognition from the check-cashing drive-through at the pre-ATM bank). And an old timey elevator runs through the middle of the place like a steampunk serpent. And if you think you know what floor it's getting off on, you're mistaken, it goes down, down, down, to where souls and skin and cloth stitch together in ways 'Cronenberg meets Barker at the 70s fashion outle'-ian.
There can be no doubt, In Fabric succeeds at whatever it's trying to do. It's always lovely to look at, sumptuous in a way that makes one wonder "where's all this money coming from?" because "who is the audience for something this esoteric?" The wonder is that the level of cinematography and craftsmaship is so high as films this weird are usually low-budget shoot-from-the-hip affairs. Not so In Fabric! The dream sequences are special highlights. Witness the lovely color and surreal composition of the below, the demon newborn beckoning! I could watch this film forever... but would I have really ever seen it?
It doesn't pay to tell you too much about what's going on, so I'll just elaborate on random moments and the general framework which is a kind of Damien Thorn parable, with an evil red dress in place of a Satanic changeling, and a vampiric sales staff instead of shady nursemaids and big dogs.
First, a divorced black middle-aged bank teller named Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) buys a dress for her blind date (i.e. to wow the eyes of her unseen suitors), and second, a geeky ectomorph trapped in a working class yobbo hell with a fiancee wife who spends most of her time on the phone with her family. To go into all the hows and whys would do much to ruin the WTF progression of the film. For watching a guy dance at a pub in a red dress with some guys twice his size all rapey or not as they get hammered is to wonder what the hell is going on and that wonderment is the best part of Strickland.
Since this is all set in the 70s-80s (Strickland's and my childhood era, tellingly), she's going on and pre-internet date, this being when you answered personal ads in the newspaper and they leave messages on your gigantic answering machine. And you don't even get to see a picture before meeting them. As I can assure you from my internet dating during the early wild west dial-up modem days, that's not a good idea. But she gets lucky, and maybe it's the magic of the becoming red dress she's bought from aver Satanic department store. The guy turns out to be a salt-and-pepper middle aged knight in shining sweater armor. A guy any middle=aged black bank teller would be glad to grab, and he's into her! Thanks, red dress.
And man she needs a break. Her artist/slacker son treats her like a servant, passive-aggressively lobbing his ever-present girlfriend's vagina in her face via his bizarre but very cool art. At the bank, her grinning identical twin bosses give her a carefully HR-approved talking-to after she takes five extra minutes in the bathroom, and surreal Bunuelian/Brazilian digressions ensue. They also ask to hear and then analyze her dreams--which are then depicted and presented as key portents towards maximum work efficiency (these dream elements will recur and are are like a welcome tide that keeps drifting the film outside its kitchen sink harbor).
But the dress may be just setting her up for a fall, for demons like to prop you up higher before knocking you down, like an angry kid building a tower out of blocks. During a walk through the park a pit bull attacks her sleeve and she gets blood all over the dress! The washing machine in the basement goes rogue when she throws it in, and tears itself out of the wall leaving a deep gash in her hand. Even in remote cornfields, mannequins seem to watch her every move. What does it mean and why her? Is it because she tries to take the dress back?
Not only will the store not give a refund, they refuse to even take it back. The staff do not look kindly on this attempt at abandonment of decisive and initially admirable lifestyle upgrades. The saleswoman Ms. Luckmoore (Fatima Mohammed) did warn Sheila that the girl who modeled in the catalogue died in a "zebra crossing," on a catalogue shoot in Africa, but then she assures Sheila that the dress was washed "throughly" before putting it back on the rack. There's only one like it, one size fits all, and it has the habit of trying to strangle you or floating above your son's lover while she's having an orgasm and freaking everybody out.
So it finally finds it's way to a thrift store where it's grabbed almost sight unseen by a passing lorry driver who make washing machine repairman Reg Speaks (Tony Bill) wear it for his bachelor party, which consists mainly of getting roiling drunk and dancing and drinking to the point of puking with his fiancee's macho-charged brother and their yobbo co-workers. Their crazed boozy mania, howling in the streeets and circling Red in the dress like a Ned Beatty in dem woods. At home his fiancee/wife, Babs (Haley Squires). His boss is so tough that he expresses his hurt at not getting invited by a long angry stare. Meanwhile a bored housewife tries to seduce him when he comes over to fix her 'ahem' machine, and he diffuses the situation by giving a monotone recitation of all that might go wrong with a washing machine and how each issue would be repaired. Apparently this is like a hypnotic turn-on, even thrilling those banker twins, to whom Reg applies for a loan to open his own repair shop after he's fired for not writing up an invoice when repairing his own washing machine. The boss doesn't say a word, just eats Reg's time card while the crazy synths of Cavern of Anti-Matter's strange clangy score drones to a head.
It's only when Babs drops by Dentley & Soper's for an exchange of the red dress (which she just throws on a rack after they refuse to accept it, oh Sheila why didn't you think of that?) that someone is able to fire back enough retail savvy to make an impression on the vampiric staff, out-aphorism-ing them at their own game and rattling their implacability. Too bad the dress has evil plans for her whether she effectively got 'rid' of it or not, which includes burning the store down during a riot over a place in line while she ends up hiding out in a changing room. Is the whole message of the film that one small altercation over who was before who in line can lead to looting and rioting to the point film itself may spring its thread in the sewing machine projector and wind up unspooling down around your projectionist/seamstresses' feet like an amok and endless serpent?
So what 'ave we then? Gorgeously photographed and stylized imagery that plays on childhood memories boys have of first arousals poring over Sears (or in this case, Harrod's?) catalogues; deep tissue social satire that sometimes tips over into the obvious (oopsy!); genuinely dark and unrelenting comedic horror about the imperfections and oily parts of the human body vs. the bald wild-eyed perfection of the department store mannequin? All this and body horror galore can be found IN the endlessly perverse and fascinating-- if a trifle obvious around the gills--FABRIC, a movie so weird the producers or whomever had to rename it, adding "Dressed to Kill" at the end in re-release (just so folks know it counts as a horror film as well as a Bunuel-ish surrealist satire).
There can be no doubt, it succeeds at one or two of its chosen artsy arcs, but when there's no 'normal' to rush back to, no 'home base' from which to get our bearings (as we could, for example, in the knotty-legged sanity of Sellers' Group Captain Mandrake in Dr. Strangelove, orMargaret Dumont in Duck Soup), we can't find a 'whole cloth' from which to start all the ripping. We can only judge it as a collection of surrealist remnants, half-off at Harrod's, one-day-only; they don't add up to a cumulative effect, but taken as weird vignettes they look like a million bucks.
At this level, In Fabric is only a sporadic triumph, a genuine 'going out of existence sale' wherein if one row of cast-off ideas and satiric notions doesn't grab you, keep shopping as every corner's bound to hold an object you just have to try on to lift your dull little life into some kind of dystopic dispepsic new light.
So what if the clothes don't fit? They're literally unlike anything you've seen before, with so many startlingly dark moments of satire that any random 20 minute chunk is the wildest feature I've seen all year. As a whole though - one wonders what Strickland wants out of us, other than to maybe 'wake up' to our programming? Are the Duntley & Soper commercials that are always on TV-- all strange color bleeds and cryptic 'come here' gestures from the frozen smile sales staff - meant to evoke hypnotic triggers for comsumer society mind control? Are we being dared to find all this trenchant, or is Strickland taking the piss?
It's one thing to insult us, but when you insult our first world consumer entitlement you better be armed with a sense of forgiving catharsis or warmth by the end. Otherwise, your movie smacks of sophomore film student self-righteous preachiness, like a trust-fund Marxist lecturing his dad on socialism over winter break. Don't expect applause if you depict your audience as clapping seals, especially if you don't throw them any fish. The fish may be plentiful, but they're too far away, and the lashing talons of social satiric harpies wait for any outstretched hand. Oh how you mock blind King Phineas with the sound of your dazzling stitchwork feasts!
ORIGIN STORIES - or "Why Erich breaks out in an uncontrollable rage if a girl drags him into a fabric store"
I think I can explain the origins for In Fabric, as well as the whole homosexual or metrosexual or bisexual male's yen for fabric texture and fashion on film vs. the straight male's terror and loathing of it. Strickland cleary. has the same formative year memories as I do of being a child dragged around to fabric stores and fashion outlets in the 70s by mom (according to Wiki, it was mainly the now-closed Jackson's in Wiltshire) bored for what seemed like torturous hours in women's fashion stores, getting reprimanded by the sales staff for crawling up the mannequin's skirts or hiding under the racks. As a (straight) boy, my sole source of pleasure at these stores came from ogling under the mannequin skirts and staring qua-lustfully at the provocative pictures on the nylon labels. That only lasted a few minutes though, then you're back to being bored beyond endurance. If you're a boy dragged to such places, it's impossible to be neutral about them as adults.
Kids today got cell phones so are never bored on that excruciating level. But we of Gen-X. We knew boredom. Stuck for hours in these stores we either snapped from the strain, resulting in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome / personality split leading to a career in fashion--or developed a vivid imagination to lose themselves in fantasy; and when they grow up they have a rich escapist streak plastering over a lifelong fear of being bored. That's me. I still get insanely claustrophobic if I'm in a fabric store or ladies' fashion outlet for more than fifteen seconds. Just be a girl I'm shopping with and tell me what you want to try something on, I'll either leave instantly or start a huge in-store fight. It's automatic. I can't control it. Mother!! Mother, why!?
I ended up saving my sanity by getting mom to buy me those three-in-a-bag $1.29 Gold Key horror comic book packs--I can still see the covers in my mind's eye now, especially Boris Karloff -Tales of Mystery--which the now-closed Wannamaker's had hanging on a child's eye rack by the cashier, as if sensing the need for my escape. Thank you whoever thought of that! Today, I can't walk past a display for ladies pantyhose without imagining Karloff's dapper mustache (above left). Gold Key you are aptly named. To paraphrase TS Eliot, thinking of you confirms a prison!
Strickland meanwhile must have developed far differently than either from those experiences, with the result is that In Fabric blurs the line between the store and the comic's contents. His film is even structured like an issue of Karloff Tales of Mystery replete with multiple stories connected by a thread (literally in this case), harnessed to consumerist critique and clear reverence for the sexual allure of glossy red fabric when beautifully filmed against dark backgrounds in 35mm. With In Fabric, Strickland escapes to the 70s fabric store for his horror fix. I want to shout at him as the Gold Key lights the path through the darkness, Strickland, you're going the wrong way!"
I'll never quite feel it, but I understand it.
Stuck in the zone of the gigantic maternal Other, looming over your small stature--and being neither the focus of her loving attention (she's looking at clothes, so just stay close by and don't break anything or annoy her) nor freed from her presence (i.e. allowed to escape to your den of toys, wherein YOU are the giant), you are stuck in a Spenserian fairy bower built for someone else, destined only to watch the process of slow materialist seduction from the outside. Your young imagination is so desperately bored and alienated you either have that split personality break--i.e. fall into the enchantment of another gender's fashion scene and become determined to make mom's clothes for her (thus restoring yourself to the center of her attention, i.e. her Lacanian phallus)--OR you become withdrawn into your own interiority, shutting out the maternal altogether, losing yourself in the all-male world of dragons, dinosaurs, and advancing German tanks (i.e. the realm of the absent father, taking the hero's journey of differentiation from the mother).
In short, dragging your son to the fashion store too many times will either make him a fey dress designer, filmmaker or escapist nerd. Unless, of course, he has a Gold Key in hand. Escape is always just a prison away.
And one final question: when you die alone in front of the TV, does it really keep playing? Or does the commercial beckoning you forward melt away, like a mannequin in the flames of a black-out riot, the dripping plastic of the sales force entwined with malfunctioning cathode rays, adhering to your wiggly soul and dragging it down into the abyss of paying the full price.
(updated from orig. 2012 version) Every time I've seen HALLOWEEN it's been in a different visual format. I was only 12 when it hit theaters and transformed my grade school cafeteria into a never-ending whisper orchestra of giddy ever-mounting dread, like that "night he came home" tagline and the butcher knife pumpkin were slowly sandpapering our coccyx down to a sense of bottom chakra vertigo. We were too terrified by the credits and that theme song, even the font, to watch the rest when came on late-70s/early-80s network TV. But we passed through the living room while our parent's watched it, catching just enough of a glimpse to give us a nightmare charge. It was, of course, pan and scanned, and edited, and different material inserted to pad the time that change the meaning of the whole film. And even then, I could never stay in the same room with it for long.
It wasn't until college that I saw the whole thing through to the end, the original version on VHS, panned and scanned, and me immune to slasher fear through whiskey. Once afraid only of murderers I was growing up to be afraid only of cops.
First, we must note Carpenter has never made a film remotely like it since. There's no other non-supernatural horror movie in his catalogue. And despite Dr. Loomis's rantings about Michael being the boogeyman, death itself, darkness" etc., in this first and best-by-far film, he is still just a maniac. There are no 'slasher film rules' yet, the virgin can't be certain she'll even be the final girl or what that even means. These future archetypes are all being created with this film. Carpenter is writing directly on the primordial subconscious. The only imitator to really pay attention to the actual style and substance of Carpenter's film is Sean S. Cunningham in the original Friday the 13th. Everyone else kept the subject 'killer stalking teenagers' but missed the trees for the forest - not examining the variations on cinematic language that made the original HALLOWEEN so scary.
Carpenter is a stubborn iconoclast who does his own thing so never chased the cheap bucks of the slasher film he and wife/producer Deborah Hill invented. Thus, HALLOWEEN stands alone as a modern film classic that might be sidestepped by some film deconstructionist/analyst writers due to its unseemly progeny and Rob Zombie remakes. But here, at last, I'm old enough, and have gone so very long without ever being stalked by a killer that I can watch this movie and have only pleasant goosebump fear and not the queasy proto-feminist anxiety and Satanic Panic headline dread of auld. And I've noticed some ingenious aspects of Carpenter's framing and story I wish to share. Attention all future horror filmmakers! Don't just have a killer with a knife and wonder why your film sucks and Carpenter made it look so easy. Pay attention to blocking, lighting, and above all, realness and in-the-moment termite art observance.
a. Cross-cut Time Melt: Carpenter subverts cross-cutting in order to slow down 'real-time,' doubling or even tripling the length of scary suspenseful moments so they seem to melt and suspense becomes almost unnaturally intense. Tick-tockality (I coined the phrase in cinema criticism before the advent of the app, so I get to keep it) means a small narrative/diegetic time drawn out via cross-cuts that don't imply simultaneous movement. In this way the climax of the film takes up like 20 minutes but it's really all occurring over 5-10 minute period of actual narrative/diegetic time. So if you're watching Michael come slowly after Laurie as she pounds on the front door trying, to wake up the kids to let her in, the scene seems to go on forever. How can anyone walk that slowly? When we cut between them, we pick up where we left off. If Michael was walking past the neighbor's mailbox right before we cut to Laurie pounding on the door, screaming for Bobby to let her in, when we cut back to Michael he's still right next to the mailbox. The other 'side' freezes when not seen. It's an effect we're not used to as viewers, except in our nightmares wherein scary moments seem to stretch out and melt time. It's very effective, and rarely used. Mostly cross-cuts are used to avoid jump-cuts, allowing for easy trimming of undesirable moments in a shot.
b. Concentrated Time Frame - single night: magic hour-to-darkness. There's a palpable fear of the oncoming night suffusing the first 1/3 of Halloween, from walking to school to driving towards babysitting jobs, smoking weed in the car and talking about Mitch Cramer. There's a long scene of Laurie and Annie driving, shot from the backseat, as if we're one of the babysitters or children, watching the sun go down through the front windshield. It being autumn, the darkness falls fast, so we go from late afternoon to early night in a shocking but beguiling jump cut. Any kid squriming with delight waiting for the night to fall so we could go trick-or-treating, or the drive-in movie, or fireworks, to begin, now finds that goosey delightful feeling coupled to insurmountable, roller-coaster climb dread.
c. In-the-moment observed (the mundane-rendered uncanny) detail -The sequels to Halloween go the wrong way, making Michael an unstoppable killer, turning all the victims into the audience, imagining progressively more destructive deaths for the killer, trying to ensure he'll never come back, the cast of victims grows obsessively large, the death scenes, black comic relief characters and other cliches abound, and their gore takes over from suspense. The bigger they get the less scary they are. The sense of the unstoppable killer begins with Michael, but never ends across the spectrum. No one keeps bleeding when their stabbed or sliced. Everyone's blood has great clotting ability., not just Michael's. Instead of, say, drawing out the scene of say, finding yourself locked inside the back yard-separated laundry room in your underwear while trying to wash the spaghetti sauce off your pants, or being on the phone and hearing the dog die outside, thinking only of it's 'getting lucky' - the banality of the conversations rendered uncanny via the external threat, of drawing out every moment of entering a house, yelling the names of your presumed friends inside, wondering with mounting dread why all the lights are off, finally coming in a side door, walking through the rooms, finally walking slowly up the stairs, the tension ramping with every step, we rush heedlessly to sudden death. Take the sequel for example, with the focus on naughty nurses and their asshole EMT lovers in the hospital jacuzzi in the hydrotherapy room, then suddenly bam - a syringe crammed into the dude's neck. No slow drawn-out deaths, no suspense, nothing but creative deaths, i.e. what people remember from the movie rather than the slow functioning engine that gave the deaths palpable fright.
The combined effect of a, b, and c, is a sense of inescapable existential dread of what's coming and/or unseen, imbuing even innocuous details with uncanny unease.
Part of the success of this strategy may stem from our familiarity with historical epics, like Gone with the Wind, for example, wherein whole decades fly by between busy but static real-time tableaux of eventful key moments in both the life of the heroine and the South as a whole: In the narrative structure: coming-out parties wherein the news of war first breaks out, and Scarlett and Rhett first dance. We become familiarized to the idea that we wouldn't see something, some closely observed detail, if it wasn't foreshadowing and advancing to the story. With this 'training' of our ability to 'read' a film, slower movement within a single 'ordinary' scene --where nothing special seems to be happening (such as Rhett's daughter's riding her pony around on the track while her parents watch)-- fill us with mounting dread.
In this way, 'tick-tock momentum' subverts our familiarity with this epic tack. Just keep showing foreshadowing details, each slow step building the suspense with a progression of possible foreshadowing so that even innocuous minor details, keys, pumpkins, beers, TV, become imbued with uncanniness and anxiety about the coming of the night. You can do this forever, dragging the night forward until we begin to relax our mood; but when we keep feeling the lurking menace, this focus on mundane detail helps us appreciate what may be our last moments. We suddenly cling to our moms and dads, aware of all the dangers they've saved us from; thanks to them, we considered ourselves immortal; thanks to Carpenter, we realize this is not so.
2. Bleeding Darkness - The edges of Carpenter's wide screen are always either black or tending towards darkness or some offscreen vanishing point, bleeding through and erasing the difference between the screen and the dark of the theater, or the room where you're watching the film (which for Halloween should definitely be in the dark). The darkness of the screen makes for many places to hide, and the innocent kids seem always about to be swallowed up. The early scene of the nurse and Dr. Loomis and the nurse driving to the asylum is so dark it seems like any minute they'll crash into a wall or be swallowed up by the black. Eventually you can begin to think the screen extends all around you, and the immersion into a state of delirious paranoia springs to life; on the old fashioned pan and scan TV the slasher was effectively boxed in, trapped. But on the true masterly Panavision rectangle, there are no edges to stop him from flowing out like a nightmare baby with the bathwater darkness.
3. Forbidden Sound- The viewer's relation to the image onscreen when watching any movie is generally associative dream-like narrative immersion. Unless there's a distraction in the theater, or we suddenly have to go to the bathroom, chances are we're completely absorbed. This absorption is something Carpenter deliberately disrupts by leaving us way behind or far from the action. The muffled voices of the people talking far away from our POV killer perspective is very unusual in any other film: we can hear them just enough to understand what they're saying, but not be sure we're meant to. If you've ever heard Blue Note jazz records on a really good pair of headphones you know you can sometimes hear people whispering or talking very low in the studio - whispers - maybe the producers talking over lunch orders - you can't tell if you're hallucinating or not. It's the same way with Halloween. The break with golden rule sound mixing throws us off balance. Are we supposed to hear their words amongst the breathing and ambience? Maybe, probably, but the result is a feeling of privileged, eavesdrop information unusual in cinema, especially horror cinema which exploits the voyeur impulse but not the eavesdrop impulse.
Carpenter gives master-worthy class on how to generate maximum dread from just a series of long shots down tree-lined suburban streets. Carpenter popularized the killer POV at least in the suburban setting, but did more than just that - he made every shot seem threatening. Note the use of big dark trees in the post-opener daytime tracking shots around the neighborhood.. At the right of the image above we see the road disappearing into the distance, to the left and middle is a big dark spot of bushes. The shadows are rich and deep (at least on my Anchor Bay DVD) on both sides, with the car and house fronts in the center like a lonely outpost flanked by Edward Hopper-style darkness. The darkness almost seems to be sucking the light parts towards it like a black hole, thus we get the feeling of movement without really moving (unless we're watching this in a car).
5. Reverse Angle Denial: As Sheldon Hall notes in his essay "Carpenter Widescreen Style," we never see Michael see.
"(W)e are often positioned along or beside Michael but we are denied the reverse angle cut which would show us his reaction if he were not wearing his mask: the necessary pre-condition for empathy as both Hitchcock and Carpenter have noted."
"We are however given just such a reaction shot when positioned with Laurie at the several points where she becomes aware of being followed. At these moments --such as when Laurie watches as the car Michael is driving passes her and Annie (Nancy Loomis) and comes to a momentary halt, or when she looks out from her bedroom window at Michael standing below--suspense derives in part from the fixed distance between Laurie/the camera/us and Michael: she is not close enough to identify him clearly, to recognize or dispel the threat, and the camera does not close the gap. A variation of the device is Carpenter's manipulation of the distance of the camera from Laurie and her friends. It does not always stay with them as they traverse the sidewalks of Haddonfield, but will sometimes hold a fixed position as they walk into the shot's depth. In refusing to be prompted into movement, to be motivated by the action happening before it (as is customary in classical cinema), the camera's objective autonomy suggest Michael's subjectivity even in his absence, and again increases our anxiety for Laurie. (2)
Carpenter is a huge Hawks fan, and Hawks' films are all about the dynamics of group action, with the camera situated to represent one of the people in the group as people argue and layer their dialogue, so that no matter how grim the action we feel involved and comforted by a sense of belonging to the group. This overlapping dialogue draws us in. It comes too fast for us to think, just like real life, we can only follow the thread. We never see what they don't see. We're with them all the way. We feel connected and competent and brave in their presence. Even the "Winchester Pictures" logo in the beginning of The Thing, with the crossed rifles denotes a kind of rock solid safety - strength and solidarity in firepower, frontier-style.
But soon enough that image burns away as "The Thing (from Another World)" begins. It's surely no accident that even when I was too scared to watch HALLOWEEN I had already seen the THE THING around 100 times, it was like a security blanket, it always 'worked' its magic, but in HALLOWEEN the film is metatextually swallowed by the darkness, as if a screen barrier suddenly slammed down between me and this beloved 1951 classic. Cutting back and forth to the kids watching, the overlapping dialogue momentum in the background, between babysitter phone calls, becomes trapped in the slower-than-time amber dream drip of Haddonfield, IL. It's a reminder of normal life's warmth, exiled, reaching towards us through a fence.
In Halloween that warm Hawksian feeling exists, but it's only a by-product of ignorance; the babysitters are too wrapped up in their boyfriend issues to even notice the ample warnings. Hawksian framing (middle range, waist-up) occurs but Carpenter inverts the sense of security, as in the shot below where Nancy and Laurie flank the kids watching TV inside the room. Though we would hope they'd be aware of the onrushing menace, protecting the kids and able to handle danger, the dialogue is all focused on Annie teasing Laurie about Ben Tramer, continually interrupted by ringing phones, requests from the kids, and noise from the TV; instead of overlapping dialogue ala Hawks it's overlapping cacophony. It could almost be like a Hawksian comedy--Bringing up Baby or Monkey Business- certainly in her way Nancy fashions herself a vivacious wild child like Ginger Rogers or Katherine Hepburn, except that there is a devouring 'shape' coming to eat them, a devouring giant leopard of a figure (to use the iconography of BABY -- see more on that here).
The fundamental difference between Hawk's comedies and dramas lies in a similar lack of perspective: comedies occur when the the hero thinks he's in danger (but he's not); in the dramas the hero knows he's in danger so he can pretend he's in a comedy. In Halloween the heroine thinks she's in a drama, which should mean she's actually in a comedy, however it's we who know she's in danger, not her. It's like the end of the climax at the jail in Bringing up Baby, wherein Susan brings in the killer leopard thinking she has the tame one, if that two minutes was stretched to a full hour.
What makes the film terrifying is the emptiness - the lack of reliable adults. There's a single cop (Charles Cyphers), a shaky Ahab of a criminal psychologist (Donald Pleasance, in a career-defining role), a nurse in the rainy darkness of a car, the rainy darkness of the front lawn of the asylum; then just the encroaching darkness of the suburbs. Except for one or two shots in Laurie's English class, we seldom see more than one or two people in any given shot. Always the emptiness remains. Imagine being part of the team in THE THING and taking a nap in the coffee room and waking up and everyone is gone!
Note the deep ornate shadows falling all over the street as the sun sets in the shot below. You can barely make out the three figures walking down the sidewalk at right. This is hardly a conventional shot. It's something Martin Scorsese might do, and maybe Robert Altman, but Altman would keep their dialogue at a higher level. They'd be far away but sound up close. It's no wonder both Altman and Scorsese love rich sound mixes and overlapping dialogue.
Movies that try to depict a threatened middle class existence tend to omit one key element, probably because a) licensing issues and b) the difficulty of avoiding 'streaks' from the diegetic recording of a recording. People live and work in place where the TV just isn't. But if you look at the truly scary films of threatened middle class teenagers, you see a through line from Halloween (where they watch a double feature Forbidden Planet and the Thing, the bulk of the movie seeing to occur over the length of both those films) to Scream (watching Halloween) to The Ring (cursed video) to It Follows (watching Killers from Space and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet)and so forth. Having a TV on in the background hits really close to home. Do producers not know that? Are Hollywood filmmakers not aware of what the rest of the world does all night? Either way, this is a godsend to smart filmmakers as the presence of a TV, obliquely commenting on the action like a Greek chorus, is an element that hasn't been done to death. So use it, future horror filmmakers!
I know of a lot of people who resent having to grow up and face the wearying demands and pressures of adulthood. All actions have consequences, and for someone as emotionally arrested as Michael the consequences add up only to bodies for disposal and use in creepy tableaux. He seems to have a point, as sexual excitement over boys so overwhelms these three friends that it shuts out all the warning signs coming their way. Watching them from the illusory security of our living rooms, we all have a tendency to try and get ourselves off the squirming hook by thinking 'ah they get what they deserve for not locking the door or closing their car door or letting the dog come in, the way narrow-minded parents will look for some reason their kids are lying when they say they've been abused by an uncle or a priest. It's a vain attempt to avoid the crushing sense of powerless anger. Annie especially is guilty of ignoring danger signs -- first by the barking dog--which in her self-absorption she thinks is growling at her even though it's clearly growling at something else. She sees it only as an inconvenience as--what else?--she's on the phone. Later she hears a potted plant crash on the porch, and the yelp of the dog being strangled; all she can presume is the dog is getting laid. She's blind to anything and everything unless it's related to sex and boys.
Whether we remember it or not we've all been babysat and we've all had to deal with the sudden arrivals of horny boyfriends, anxious to take advantage of a temporarily parent-free space. Maybe we've also, once in high school ourselves, taken advantage the same way. As kids our budding crushes on this older but not yet adult girl are dashed by this coarse brute's arrival. Is this not also a fine metaphor for our own sense of powerlessness? We can't stop the boyfriend and we can't stop getting old and having to one day get a job. And we can't stop the night from falling. Michael terrifies us because he represents an alternative too dark to consider consciously. We can just disappear down the rabbit hole into an eternal 'Other.'
8.b - Tele-Cocooning - Even Laurie is guilty of this, while on the phone with Annie she ignores Tommy's excited ranting after seeing the Boogeyman across the street because she's appalled after learning Annie told some Ben Tramer that Laurie liked ho, Look at the way Jamie Lee twists the phone cord and twirls her hair in overwhelming anxiety at Annie's matchmaking gambit. This fear causes her to miss the sight of the boogey man across the street and dismiss Tommy's anxiety the way her friends have dismissed hers earlier when she spied Michael peering behind bushes. Much has been written since the dawn of cell phones about this bubble of security and separation a phone call brings, leading us into traffic or down deserted muggy streets, etc. This effect is as pervasive as TV in real life but again, most slashers and horror movies fail to pick up on it.
8c.) Focus up! - Imagine if Captain Pat Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) was so wrapped up in the issues with Nikki (Margaret Sheridan, above) that he ignored the danger in The Thing? If he just told everyone they were hallucinating after the ice melts and not to bother him as he and Nikki canoodled upstairs? Maybe that's maybe why Carpenter's remake is all men. It's not the women's fault, men just aren't as strong multi-taskers as Hendry anymore, at least not in the movies. Women confuse them. They can't navigate a woman and a monster at the same time. One will always get away.
The music of Carpenter is so essential to the film's success you would think his imitators would try for something similar, hiring Carpenter to score their works, for example, or reaching out across the sea to Goblin, or Ennio Morricone. Instead, they lean back on the same-old / same-old orchestral cliches we've heard so much of we either roll our eyes or never even notice it. Even Manfredini's Friday the 13th score only has the "keee-kee-kee ya-ya" cue to differentiate it from the usual Hermann-string aping banality of a thousand other films just like it. (The real scary music in that film is the sound of rain beating down on canvas). The only American-made post-Halloween (early-80s) movies made in the US (other than those made by Italians) I can think of offhand to use eerie synths and odd time signatures are Phantasm and The Bogey Man. Let me know if I've forgotten any others. Today they are much more common, as in It Follows.
10) Escape
I knew quickly that when left alone at home during my circa 80-81 slasher squirrelly phase how to fight the monsters. Turn the lights on, check the doors and windows, and then turn the TV on loud so you don't hear the scratching of the branches against the shingles outside. I'd always turn on something nonthreatening but playfully spooky from the desert island video collection - FORBIDDEN PLANET? THE THING? If you've read this far I'm pretty sure you know I own both on DVD, and had them on tape before them, and I know they can protect you from fear like only a competent group of quick-thinking, heavily armed officers on your side can, the guys in THE THING will even make sure you get a cup of coffee no matter how busy they are. If you're on Altair IV, maybe the captain will let you sneak out and hit Robby up for some genuine Rocket bourbon.
Of course when both films are on the TVs in HALLOWEEN that sense of security is just a fleeting memory -- faded color, washed out images-- the kids only marginally paying attention, as right behind them, gathering in the darkness of our gaze --they're about to be devoured. And now the killer is leaking out of the screen and into the surrounding darkness of the theater or your living room. All you can do now is make sure your back is against a sturdy wall, far from any window where a hand can crash through and grab you by the throat. Stay alert, with porch light on and guard dog, knife and baseball bat by your side, and keep watching... keep watching THE THING.
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!
Next up - Old radio shows. These stand the test of time and are great for Halloween chills if you still have a functioning mind's eye and need something to listen to while you sit in the dark staring at your lit up jack-o-lantern or flickering fire.
And then some Demonic Soundtracks and Scores for Non-Existent 70s-80s horror films
And don't forget my Youtube List if you want to tune in deep to the late-night weird, guarnteed to get you in the crispy mood.
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!
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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 TheMuensters and their middle class values. Ialways 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,
October - the time when the old classics should come out, and old horror fans like me dust off the gems that do it for us every year, the grand perennials, some since we were knee-high to Zuni Fetish doll. I've already written about mine in past Halloween lists, But there's always others. Always new ones. Some are great but don't have 'repeatability' - the layered gems you can watch over and over. For me it's important they have atmosphere! Gothic vapors! Scary synth music! Ghosts! Action! lots of wind and swirling mists. So if you're wondering what else is there besides AMC's same-old Halloween marathons and the same-old TCM classics (Kwaidan, Eyes Without a Face, etc.) If you got Prime, Shudder, Tubi, Arrow, whatever, let these be yours. (All the films listed are streaming on Prime and/or Tubi unless otherwise noted)
The king of Italian horror, maybe even of horror, period, maybe even king of cinematographers his painterly warmth and lighting complexity making him kind of Italy's answer to Josef Von Sternberg) Mario Bava's films are almost all amazing but as far as spook show Gothic chills perfect for October, nothing can beat his directorial debut Black Sunday (except his later Black Sabbath, and Kill Baby Killof course). Sunday not only introduced Bava (the film was an influential smash hit around the world, released by Roger Corman and AIP in the US) it introduced Barbara Steele to the world as the first bonafide female horror star, fit to join the ranks of Lugosi, Karloff, Lorre, and Price. She plays an evil witch, accidentally revived when a curious doctor's fight with a bat causes blood to fall into her eye-socket; and she plays that witch's 'good' descendant, destined to be possessed or whatnot --it's all lining up (shades of Jewel of the 7 Stars transplanted to the 1800s.. ) Lots of creepy castle tracking shots, with Lewton-like walks to the barn in the dead of night, undead rising from graves as wind blows ominous. In terms of sheer rewatchability it is so without peer one has to look all the way back to the 30s pre-code Universal horror films to find a worthy comparison and--truth be told--it's better than most of them. It basically ushered in a whole wave of European supernatural Gothic horror films, most starring Steele, a few of which were good, that reverberated well into the 70s. Get over the dubbing and occasionally schmaltzy score, just imagery, the pacing, the lurid touches, the thick delicious atmosphere, and the unique formula of sexy and terrifying that are the wide eyes and heaving chest of Barbara Steele; the nods to Val Lewton and James Whale. And Steele, and Steele again. Afterwards, forever transformed, you should immediately seek out Black Sabbath andKill Baby Kill.
Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy recounts seeing Frankenstein vs. the Wolf Man in a matineeas a small child and finding his life's purpose. And you can see he wasn't kidding with Night of the Werewolf, Not only does it pit classic monster against monster, he redressing many of the wrongs committed by Universal in that film (the title monster fight lasts barely 30 seconds before a flood ends the movie, hgere it goes on long enough you don't feel cheated, and it's with a woman!. This redresses the sexist wrongs of other Universal horrors, like Dracula (whatever happened to those three hot wives? They get only two brief scenes and no dialogue and are never seen again, ditto the Bride of Frankenstein). Not so with the women in Naschy's Night of the Werewolf! Women vampires are all over the place and they're sexy, powerful, smart and strong, with great hair and skin. And instead of fighting with Lugosi's tired Frankenstein, he's fighting with a super-powerful undead Elizabeth Bathory and her assorted vamp and zombie underlings.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.In short, Paul Naschy, over the course of his countless "Valdemar" movies, became the werewolf we never really got from Lon Chaney Jr., who spent all of the sequels trying to die, chasing the scientists who bring 'the Monster' back, movie after movie, making us all wonder why he doesn't just jump into the nearest threshing machine instead of moping after Univerzal monster's equivalent to Dr. Kevorkian. Chaney's love interests tended towards hunchback servants and mopey gypsy girls who mooned after him; all of whom did nothing for him but provide victims for his full moon bloodbaths. Burly body-builder Naschy's squat, ruggedly handsome physique and even-keeled manner imbues Valdemar with a romantic nature that's inherently aristocratic and proletariat at the same time. He's the werewolf we always wanted, even if his make-up is nowhere near as elaborate. (though I've never been a fan of Chaney's wolf face - too pouffy and poodle-like; I much prefer the less extreme but scarier version in the underrated Werewolf of London.
The focus isn't on Naschy here though, but on three super gorgeous tourists coming to a remote tomb on a holiday, wanting, for some reason, to revive,Elisabeth Bathory (we see her and her minions put to death in the Middle Ages opening, as was the style of the time. The one gurk us totally evil while the other two girls seem rather naive but one admires their brazen self-assurance, plunging fearlessly into a vast cave network to find the tomb and revive Bathory, becoming her vampire handmaidens. The 'good' one amongst them falls for Vlademamir but will she be able to kill him when the time comes. It's another interesting echo of FVTWM that Valdemar has a deformed servant in love with him, though in her case she's quite hot even with half her face burned into monstrousness. Her hair is great. In fact all their hair is great, the same color, long brown and more or less straight. Clearly Naschy has a type. It's OK though as all these women are strong and self-reliant (there are way more in the cast than men, making itreminiscent of the films of Luigi Cozzi! And Jack Hill!)
In other words, Night of the Werewolf is revisionist classic Euro-horror heaven and the cinematography--thanks to a wondrous recent restoration, glows with lots of candle and torchlight golds, deep inviting shadows and swirling luminous fog. It's lovely to look at, and aside from the sex and gore is good for the whole family
Note - Tubi just got a whole swath of HD-spiffed Naschy numbers that look gorgeous. If you want to compare them, just look at Werewolf vs. the Vampire Women (a much more accurate title for this) also on Tubi. OMG it looks bad. Stick with Night, and you'll never want to watch anything else.
A once nearly-forgotten cracked emerald in the American rough, recently given a fancy upgrade by the folks at Arrow, The Child may be set in some remote 30s-40s corner of woodsy mountainous American folk nowhere, but its real location is the dream nebula where childhood nightmares rattle bedroom shutters in the still of the October night in the land of super quiet, super black nights only cloudy country nights provide (that kind of darkness and dead silence are why I live in the city and sleep with a white noise machine) and unearthly squawking moans seem to come from the air itself. Shoehorning themes and moods from Night of the Living Dead and The Omen in amidst its folk horror ominousness, The Child tells the story of a strange but sweet young woman, with period length long straight black hair and strange silver eyes, who arrives to nanny a bratty 11-year old sociopath named Rosalie (Rosalie Norton) after the apparent death of her (bi-polar necromancer) mom. Rosalie's dad is only a shades less demented than the dad in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Luckily, the adult son is tall, chill, and sane, thank God, and there's not much to do there in the dark at night, so they just may hook up, or he might turn into a scarecrow while she dances through the misty front lawn dream on Halloween night after freaking out at the sight of a jack-o-lantern seemingly moving on its own.
There's a masterful use of real darkness here that's rare in horror films (that jack-o-lantern seems to come out of nowhere). Yessir, The Child radiates a real country dark, the kind that seem to swallow the world around you, so that someone could be standing mere feet away from you and you'd never see them, so you strain to hear any sound of breathing in the silence, the kind of dark of where only candles and oil lamps make little bubble sancturaries of warmth and light in the surrounding inky opaque emptiness,. (1)
Then there's that score! Splitting the difference between avant-garde dissonance and soap opera style angst, Robe Wallace's score pushes the sound effects and echo-canned dialogue out in front of what sounds like a grand piano being pushed down a hill. Do the characters hear those strange echo-drenched honks ever in the distance/foreground). The post-dubbed voices of the actors seem as if they could be part of the score too--unheard of by each other, pushing the foggy-wind leaf blow folk horror imagery into the uncanny world between waking and sleeping, that zone when half-heard sounds are freed from signification and even innocuous objects create deep uncanny chills.
And like all the best uncanny folk horror-style films (the film it probably resembles the closest is Lemora; A Child's Tale of the Supernatural) it's both warmly familiar, genuinely disturbing, relentlessly surprising and super strange. No matter where you think The Child is headed, it's never goes there, not until the last act, in which it suddenly drops everything and bolts out the door in one long careening climax of zombie horror, It's as if the truck that rescued creaming Marilyn Burns at the end of Texas Chainsaw Massacre crashed into a Night of the Living Dead construction site run by a Rhoda Penmark/Murder Legendre hybrid. In short, God--or something far more ancient--bless The Child!
It took me a long time to warm up to this weird gem, being too cool for what I believed was misogynist gore as a teenager, but after catching the other films in Fulci's undead trilogy,City of the Living Dead(1980) and House by the Cemetery (1981) on TCM, I knew I was wrong. There was so much more here than that. And so much less. Now, thanks to the miracle of streaming, a beautiful HD remastering is ours for the clicking. Sure, it defies narrative cohesiveness and seems to exult in gore for gore's sake, but it's so atmospheric! It's what Fulci meant by an 'absolute' film. A pumpin' Fabio Frizzi synth and pianocore, a script that's just cohesive enough to make the weirdness continually 'dream logical,' ambiguous expressions that seem to imply pages of strange suspicion never written. It's so 'in the moment' it forgets all about the future, leaving us constantly on our guard. Everything is just off. There is 'normal' moment we expect having seen hundreds of horror movies, the foreshadowing is its own uncanny effect with no pay-off, and vice versa. The result is that even minor details seem that's not imbued with the uncanny. From the start with a period prologue of Shrike the warlock painter's torture crucifixion (nailed to a wall, doused in lye, flogged with chains (we never learn why) and walled up in the basement of the "7 Doors Hotel" thus opening one of the seven doors to Hell), all the way to contemporary times, as Catriona MacColl inherits the crumbling edifice and sends Joe the plumber down to the vast, flooded basement. The painting the warlock was working on when he died is gathering dust on the ground floor, a strange hellscape that looks like the surface of some macabre moon, dotted with corpses covered in dust. Workmen fall off the roof, Joe busts through a crumbling wall allowing the warlock's decaying hand reaches from the crumbling wall to crush his face. McColl scoffs at the legends even though the service buzzer mysteriously sounds for the warlock's old room at odd times. MacColl encounters a willowy blind blonde psychic Emily (Cinzia Monreale) with greyed over eyes and a seeing eye dog standing in the middle of straight bridge the goes on for miles over the swamps. She brings Liza to her apartment, passing through a garden with some of the biggest frond leaves I've ever seen. She also plays the ominous theme song on the piano, while regaling Liza with the story of Shrike While somehow one dimwitted handyman and his mom get the hotel almost ready to open (the time frame is one of the things totally of whack) the painting is dusted off and hung in the lobby where its strange power seems to take over those who look at it. At one point it bleeds. Emily touches it and reacts like it carried electric current. The doctor (David Warbeck) worries Liza is either crazy but then reads the book of Eibon (A Lovecraftian tome ala the Nerconomicon). Meanwhile tarantulas take about a real time hour to eat a guy's face, the old lady cleaner has her head forced onto one of those Shrike nails by the handyman who arises from the muddy water in the bathtub. Then it gets really weird.
Don't ask. Don't tell. Just dig the unforgettable shots- Emily standing with her dog and white eyes; the blasted surface of the Sea of Darkness; the masterfully creepy zombies, the strange close-ups, the gore, the guts and the gusts and the gusto; the crisp atmospheric photography of Sergio Salvati (perfectly brought out by the HD remastering), and Fabio Frizzi's eerie synth music and strange piano refrains, all form the perfect combination to evoke the utter brilliance of dream/nightmare logic. You'll either want to vomit and gouge your eyes out or immediately cue up Fulci's other films. There is no middle ground.
When hack directors rushed to imitate Halloween, ushering in the slasher boom at the end of the 70s, only one or two filmmakers looked carefully at the structure of the shots Carpenter used, paid attention to the tick-tockality of the time frame, really listened to find what was so effective about the score, instead of just thinking "guys in masks stabbing teenagers, got it." and going off to make bland copies of content rather than form. Coscarelli didn't need the content, as he got the music right, the vibe, the use of cloaking darkness and the power of twisting old trees and drive-ways. Then Coscarelli went on did his own, highly original film. His previous works had all been children's films (another seldom-written about genre for 70s independents) and it pays off here as he treats the kids with respect and compassion (more Over the Edge than E.T.) Centered around a young lad terrified his brother will leave him behind when he takes off after their parent's funeral, Phantasm ushers in what I call 'older brother' films, all but forgotten these days, but in the 70s cool kids like Jackie Earle Haley played kids with older brother figures who let them sip their beer, smoke a cigarette, shoot guns, ("No warning shots. Warning shots are bullshit."), carry knives, drive before they were legal, and generally do their own thing. The kid here gets to do most of that and at one point throws the kid the keys to his gorgeous Plymouth Barracuda at one point. Gotta love a kid who has his own dirt bike and knife, knows how to shoot real guns, and isn't afraid to go out to investigate a funeral parlor in the dead of night with nothing but a knife taped to his leg. No wonder this movie has become a classic. When your older brother tells you, we "We gotta snag that tall, dude and we got to kick the shit out of him," It's like paradise for any red-blooded 70s American boy of the era. Every time Mark leans out of the speeding Barracuda to fire a shotgun at the tall man's hearse while Mike drives, I'm enthralled like a ten year-old hanging out with my best friend's cool older brother all over again. It goes deep into the archetypal masculine oomph. Oh there's also a girl, whose blind grandmother is a psychic and who runs an antique shop with her older sister, a scene I wish went on forever.
What a movie - a genuinely original dark fairy tale plot hinging on a totally original metaphysical / ancient alien theory, a boy's fantastical perception of the strangeness of graveyards and mausoleums, the line between dreams and reality, and the way living in central-Portland is like living inside an abandoned tomb gone ruined with old growth and sinister shadows, enhanced by that familiar (1) but super creepy synth music, Plus the plot tweaks Plan Nine, to be about our worst fear -our dead parents coming back as crushed dwarfs trying to kills us and that we die will be crushed stuffed into big beer kegs and launched through a tuning fork gateway to another dimension. It could still happen!
This 1982 Aussie thriller has been seldom seen or mentioned until recently Perhaps its bland poster and generic title is to blame? It's got a unique plot, friendly characters, vivid deep dusky cinematography, very cool wallpaper, and a sublime Klaus "Tangerine Dream" Schulze score adding the perfect mix of otherworldly eeriness to the homey surroundings. The sliding camera and dark furnishings keep us always on guard, even when things are all in order and sweet.
Jacki Karin stars and brings a mix of steely energy and frazzled nerves to the role of Linda, a woman who inherits her recently deceased mom's old folk's home somewhere in Australia's vast outback, so drives in to both take over and figure out what's going on with all the deaths. Reading mum's journals she can't decide if the mom is insane or covering up or trying to solve a decade's long murder spree. At night the camera prowls the dark moody hallways, as Linda has pull-focus slow motion POV memories of being a traumatized child. What horrifying thing did she see in the steamy bathroom?
With Schulze percolating his eerie but synth drum-inundated score as the wallpaper and lighting making it all feel like some splendid hybrid between Kubrick's Shining and Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives. The strange goings on get stranger. Good thing her old friend and ex-lover Barney (John 'Wolf Creek' Jarrat!) is around to keep her grounded! To say much more about it would be doing you a disservice but suffice it to say this film evokes a kind of warm-blooded Shining if it was an active old folks home about to collides nto a kind of four alarm Chainsaw-ishwhirlwind of strange and ingenious moments, captured with beautiful dusky cinematography. See it with the lights off, dead sober, alone, your nerves dilated and screaming with alcoholic withdrawal. You will be changed.
The French love their poets the way Americans love TV actors. Poetry for the French is normal and respectable, not something for your girlfriend's parents to passively sneer at when you tell them your post-graduate plans. They French love Romantic proto-punk French poets like Baudelaire, and that luminous centerpiece the Symbolist 'dead before 30' dozen, Brittany's own Tristan Corbière. To say this, is to say too that they love those who can locate the beauty buried deep in in the ruins of death, and, too, the macabre ruins of death at the core of youthful beauty. They don't need Halloween there, as far as I know, for they have Corbiere, and they have Jean Rollin.
I'm not sure which part of Françoise Pascal's final monologue/ voiceover during her climactic nude cross-bearing is from him, but I do value that it's hard to tell since all Rollin's best death-poetry-drenched classics reek of his spirit. This is maybe the most reeky of all, rank yet sweet with the fragrance of autumnal wet graveyard bouquets and freshly upturned earth. I also value the ominously mist-wreathed black train parked in the weeds in some overgrown train depot (when the couple stand atop the engine, with its painted black former iron flag trimming it evokes the angel of death looming behind them like some doting father). I value also the dilapidated look of the small town; the opening working class wedding feast (at which both characters seem to clearly not belong --as if already ghosts). Mostly I value that the film takes place over one late afternoon-into-dawn. Slowly, in real time, their Rohmer-esque idyll turns darker, moving from unease after hooking up too long in an open crypt, coming up to find the gates locked not knowing the way out, running through the graveyard in a slowly mounting surreal escape nightmare. Suddenly the distracting noises and peering eyes they were escaping down there are gone. It's as if they climb out into a whole different dimension. Dark falls fast in autumn.And the cinematography doesn't rely on noticeable artificial light, allowing this fascinating, huge, old, creepy, sad and beautiful graveyard to become a character in itself. Thanks to the beautiful Redemption label restoration, you can see their figures, (the red and yellow sweaters were a good idea, providing haunting contrast against the dark olive greens and withering old marble stones) even as darkness chokes the corners of the frame like its slowly blacking out from asphyxiation; the graveyard seem to be closing in around them, choked in vines and meandering fences, twisted vines and crumbling crypts. There's no glaring spotlights or day-for-night nonsense, making Jean-Jacques Renon's photography all the richer for being so dark without going completely murky or artificial.
Then, when the sun finally comes up and the the conqueror worm's snacktime looms you can feel your pupils contracting yet this does nothing to dispel the Corbière-sy darkness, even as it illuminates the dank far corners and cobwebbed shadows of eternity like a thousand watt bulb in your grandparent's attic.
Finally, a few seconds before you're even starting to get irritated, it becomes a surreal mournful cry for death; it becomes a love song, a longing for the loving embrace of la mortalité, finalité et l'éternité. One of them survives, and returns to that old familiar Rollin rocky beach his fans know and love like their own backyard. More poetry?! Please, monsieur. Then it's over - barely 70 minutes long, yet feels like forever.
My favorite Corman movie, this loopy black and white tale of reincarnation, hypnotism, knights, witches both good and bad, devils and Satanic graveyard dancers zips by in an hour and leaves my jaw agape every year or more, since it finally showed up on streaming (it was MIA for an eternity). I love everything about it. Charles B. Griffith's and Marc Hana's droll script, and Corman's speedball econo direction, the array of sexy, over-the-top, or otherwise awesome performances, the feeling of flowing poetic weirdness that it can only come from being shot in sequence over one long night in an empty supermarket full of black toxic mist to disguise the lack of backgrounds and of course the perfect pair of 'dueling witches' the shazam-smokin' Alison Hayes in the sexiest dress of her career, and Dorothy Neumann as the bent and hook-nosed good witch (don't be fooled by appearances! In this Middle Ages Oz only bad witches are lovely).
I love the casual way the good witch Meg Maud (Neumann) asks the stranger at her door "Are you from this era or from a time yet to be?" as if hypnotists from the future were not uncommon. Or her explanation of how she got her powers from the same evil place Livia did, but managed to keep her soul at the expense of her looks, and how Livia and Meg Maud size each other up and admiringly realize "you will make a good opponent" in a wager for the life of Helene and love of Pendragon (Richard Garland), Helene's super-boring handsome idiot knight.
I saw UNDEAD when very young on TV and the scene were Duncan seeks shelter at the witch's house is to me the eternally definitive Halloween moment, it's archetypal in the best of ways, for I fell instantly in love with the whole shebang, a monster movie fan from then on. ) and dimwitted lover).Meant to tie in to the then-craze for reincarnation (set in motion by the popularity of the Bridey Murphy story) the story quickly throws logic and even metaphysics to the wind, and ends up derailing the 'Grand Scheme of Things' when Lorna Love is able to whisper survival tips to her about-to-be-beheaded for witchcraft Middle Ages incarnation, Helene. Whoa! That's not how hypnosis works, but hey -- go for it! It's very clear throughout that Corman had his mind blown by Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL. The idea that archetypes like Death, the Devil, the inght and the Witch could be directly represented as if straight out of a woodcut, this redefined 'so old it's new' and it fit Corman's loose ballsy style like a glove. Besides, what else is intuition and spirt guidance if not hypnotized selves of the future shooting us tips and cautions from their future psychiatrist's space couch? And what else are the voices one hears in one's head that-- if you answer --either means your schizophrenic or a witch depending on the century?
Submitted for your aghast confusion, Dario Argento's Inferno, i.e. Suspiria's imperfect but still essential sequel. It is, as Lucio Fulci would say, "an absolute film," i.e. a piece of textural 4D art that defies the parameters of conventional narrative to move into a world of image, sound, and sensation, wherein dream logic, surreal color-drenched atmosphere and nerve-piercing intensity need serve only themselves and our own semiotic grasp of cinematic codes is used against us--there is no need for dream sequences because reality and nightmare have bled inextricable ; where wherein close scrutiny yields no insight, but where you come in halfway through, aren't sure what film it is you'r watching, or finally get back from the snack bar, you don't need to know what you missed. Start anywhere, it's all going the same direction. The end credits scroll have to bring you back from the abyss and tell you "you have been watching INFERNO" since by then it's impossible to tell.
The story is straight out of a dark fairy tale, wherein a curious resident of a Satanic old building in NYC finds a book about her building and learns of 'the three mothers' (mysterious old witches whose power and malice know no bounds). One supposedly lives there "under the soles (souls?) of your shoes" The building is full of secrete entrances and crawlspace, holes in attic roofs where the rain gets in and floods ballrooms seemingly under the basement. When the exploring sister drops her keys down into the flooded hole and--in prime dream/fairy tale fearlessness--jumps in to retrieve them, you know you're not awake. Later she sends her brother a letter about the mothers and her suspicions and, for some weird reason, the mothers are determined to stop him from reading it or learning about them.
But whither Goblin? Dove sono i Goblin?
Rather than the mean old "Goblins", the score is instead a distracting, very un-scary melange of Switched-off Humperdinck tuning his baby grand, "Switched-on Verdi" at Chipmunk speed, cliche'd orchestral suspense cues, all of it scary only in their ability to make us lose our faith in Argento's artistic judgment. Was he blinded (or deafened) by his love for ELP?
Luckily, even when making strange ill-advised steps, the overall mise-en-scene plunges so far into occult symbolism and strange fascinations it makes up for it with brilliantly and somewhat intentionally abstract 30s pulp cover compositions, as if a tripping Edward Hopper was painting Raymond Chandler book covers in early two-strip Technicolor. Inside the frames lurks un unpredictable web of archaic symbology and (possibly kinky) obsession: broken glass door-knobs, elemental magic (fire, water, and air especially), arcane tarot and elemental symbolism, bibliophilia ("our lives are governed by the words of... dead people" intones the Satanically eyebrowed archaic bookseller) grisly killing (of course), and secret rooms and floors that seem to be like black box gallery spaces for contemporary art impressions of broken support beams and attic storage; a surreal visit to an old Roman library late in the rainy dark (the cab interior at night, cocooned in color-drenched pouring rain) and its secret basement re-binding room, demonic hands stirring the glue pot; an enigmatic young witch (Ana Peroni) showing up in a music lecture to stare at Mark (Leigh McCloskey) chanting under her breath words he can't hear because he's got headphones on; Mark meeting neighbor Dario Nicolodi whose whispers he can hear inside the walls; a creepy butler shooting her up with he pre-bath opiates, using a special thermometer to get the water just right inside her undeniably strange blue/red-lit apartment (I can't tell if living there would be a dream or nightmare come true); inevitable hands covered in hair with a knife to cut the suffering short when the animals fail the coup de grace. On and on....
As Mark says on the phone to his wet sister, "a lot's happened."
Watch it again, it's a different movie. I actually reviewed this already (as well as the following film) and forgot I did! That's how enigmatic and ever-shifting a perennial can be. Never the same film twice, never any better, never any worse. As haunting to superstitious minds... as a ghost.
The director of Room 237tackles another deep weirdness, this time it's sleep-paralysis. During interviews with a series of troubled but erudite sufferers, Asher gives us suuuuper creepy re-enactments of their sleep paralysis experiences. With the infamous shadow people (one of the strange common threads) rendered in inky with spooky HD blacks against blue/red color scheme evoking Argento, each sleep paralysis moment is so vividly recreated the film transcends mere 'documentary' to become something truly new, twisted, meta, and deeply illuminating. For me the creepy highlights are the alien figures composed of TV static, a subject's recollection of a night when his weird hippie girlfriend at the time conjured a blue lightbeing while on a hike (the actress playing the girl is truly uncanny), and a meta moment where we see bedrooms of the interviewees all connected by a common interdimensional soundstage/sleep study, where the beings move between rooms, conjuring Monsters Inc., that "Girl in the Fireplace" Dr. Who episode and other things that cause a sudden jolt of uncanny epiphany. Have we seen this in-between place ourselves.... in dreams, or like secret passages in Argento movies? Either way, it's short, illuminating, creepy in the best and most Halloween of ways.
Fairly terrible opening narration (mispronounces 'humanitarian') a but then there's a great 80s Italian faux-Journey song "The Wild Life" and I'm in. Sure, some snob zombie circles turn their noses at Zombi 4: After Death, but it's got everything I want in an Italian 80sfaux-Fulci Zombi sequel: dark, moody cinematography (lots of deep greens and dusky reds and inky blacks); endless backlit fog through the old growth forest and expressionistic boards over holes and broken out windows, dusk-til-dawn timeline, vivd photography capturing the fine flicker of light in the darkness, cool characters who don't waste time with histrionics and sexist or class-conscious bickering and an apocalyptic ending. Fragasso made some turkeys in his day but this one starts strong, bouncing along on its feet, and it never slows down except to try and get some sleep in the wrecked makeshift missionary-run field hospital (i.e. shades of Fulci's indelible Zombi 2) while an armed and reliable mercenary stands watch. One weakness though, his undead buddies are out there, and they can talk, and still shoot their M-16s.
This time the outbreak is confined to a single remote jungle island--the result of a witch doctor's levied curse (left)-- Whatever, man, who needs a reason when there's a beautifully-lit cave with a doorway to hell and a woman with sandy blonde hair trying to stop the zombies by putting the medallion given to her by her missionary parents--in the center of a bunch of candles?
Lastly, don't confuse Zombi 4: After Death with Hell of the Living Dead, AKA Virus AKA Zombie 4, though that movie is pretty good in its own right (see link below). Zombi 4: After Death--with its misty, chilling jungle atmosphere, steady propulsion, good dubbing and the typically dynamite 80s synth score by Goblin (lifted from earlier movies, but so what?)--is the one to see when you want to keep the vibe going after watching one of the established zombie classics but have just run through all the others in a zombie binge. Scripted by Rosella Drudi (Fragasso's wife and writer of the inoperable Troll 2), it's got some sensitivity in its female characters' dialogue and--as usual for Druidi's scripts--it's laden with deadpan absurdity that may or may not be intentional. May we never find out! (Tubi)
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).
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
For some reason Cozzi can get the very best composers and scores that rival the classics: John Barry does the score forhisStarcrash 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...
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!
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
Hey ho, just a note to let you know I'm still writing, just not posting as much as my brain's too foggy to keep on topic (I keep drifting, like a Tennessee Williams heroine). Still, I may be blocked but I'm writing all sorts of in-progress pieces for next year, even trying to cobble a book together so don't despair (any more than the fate of the earth already demands).
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?
Bearing all the hallmarks of being not-quite-a-TV-movie nor a big screen feature but something lost between (like, say, Aldrich's Killers remake), Once You Kiss a Stranger doesn't really work as a thriller. The pacing is off and it's way too quick to tip its hand. But boy howdy does Linley have a field day. She doesn't ham it up or overplay, just enjoys her character's toothy malice in a way that's most infectious. She's a lot like Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep, whose own father admits she's "still a little girl who likes to pull the wings off flies." If you know that film as well as I do, then you know in the code-enforced ending, Bogies says "we'll have to send Carmen away... from a lot of things. Maybe she can be cured, it's been done before." Dude, that's not what happens in the book! But you can almost look at this movie as The Big Sleep 2: Carmen Returns, if--after she's sent away from those things--she's presumably cured and released and then set up with her own Malibu beachside bungalow by her trust fund.
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!
We can't all be like Phillip Marlowe and instinctively know not to have anything to do with such a hot mess. In the right midlife crisis frame of mind (glug-glug), any man can lapse into something he'll almost instantly regret. Sexual allure, an open invitation, and a moment's weakness have combined to topple presidents, kings, queens, despots evangelists and even TV stars, so why not a highball-sodden pro-golfer moping through a midlife crisis? Why not, indeed, Paul. All your better judgment is hereby suspended!
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!
"I can't say more, for to spoil even one twist or turn on this wild ride is to lessen its blunt force impact. Suffice it to say, for we fans of strong assertive women (those who score along the Hawks-Meyer GF spectrum rather than the 'strong-willed mother-type' Ford-Spielberg curve), this bonanza of badassery is--especially in the time of plunging markets and collapsing governments--something we desperately need. Why wait for a normal woman to be brutalized before turning savage? That, to me, is sexist, inferring a woman needs a man's cruelty to light her inner bomb's fuse." (more)
"The Partridge Family vs. Brady Bunch dichotomy provided parameters for our collective 70s pre-sexual psyche, and maybe that's partially the idea a Susan Dey archetype untethered from her prim bitch overprotective mom and ginger brother, running away with a Satan-worshipping boyfriend and winding up rabid (ala 1970's I Drink Your Blood --her first movie role) or foaming at the mouth thanks to some new STD (Shivers), chem warfare agent (The Crazies)--or just really speedy acid--rang so many popular unconscious gongs. The times demanded a girl who could slice off a woman's hand with an electric carving knife and come off as an innocent, a free spirit, cranked to eleven, a girl so pure the needle spins all the way around to the other extreme- batshit homicidal, with no stops in between. And no hysteria or hamming. If you've ever known and partied with the type then you know how rare and intoxicating they are, the sweet sudden shock of dread when what was once a feeling of smitten love and devotion to her sweet beauty becomes sickening blood-chilled dread, the realization you were so far on cloud 9 you made the mistake of letting her get between you and the exit."(more)
"If you look gamely into the rubble of collective abuse heaped on this year's MUMMY a true fan may find a true treasure in the form of lithe Algerian dancer/actress Sofia Boutella. As the warrior priestess assassin Ahmanet, Boutella (in the prologue) kills the pharaoh's baby or some lovely thing and is mummified alive in an unmarked tomb. Naturally she astral travels, tracing the seams in the fabric of time and space, riding the centuries like a surfboard until she's found just the right sky cult-brainwashed, Illuminati orgy-crashing, aging A-list actor to exhume her and see her safely ferried across the channel to jolly England. Damn right I'm talkin' bout you, Tom! " (more)
"The film's been compared to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and indeed there's a kind of bent similarity but Texas' qua-feminist throttle isn't all the way open the way it is with Faster. The buzzing you hear isn't Leatherface's chainsaw threatening Marilyn Burns but Varla's wheels crushing 'the Vegetable'. They'll have to send him away "from a lot of things" and we imagine suddenly that Carmen Sternwood would be a great candidate for this gang, to take Billie's place after she dies, as would Claudia Jennings from Truck Stop Women (1974). Well, we can't have everything, unless we want to make a movie ourselves.
Hmmm I'm not trying to put any ideas into anyone's heads, but it seems to me a badass girl gang crashing a lot of different genres would be just the thing. A lot of folks have tried and they end up being the usual overwrought nonsense with one too many well-scrubbed thugs locking overly siliconed strippers in trunks, in between lugging bags of cash in and out of hotel lobbies, shots of sunglassed douchebags smirking into rearview mirrors, abusive backstory, flashy meaningless over-editing (you know the ones I'm talking about - no names) and female violence done with "this hurts me more than it does you" anguish in their eyes rather than sadistic relish. (more)
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)
"Millie Perkins stars as Molly "The Mermaid," a single barmaid at a seaside dive on the beach of Santa Monica, "The Boathouse," owned and operated by the pleasantly grizzled Long John (Lonny Chapman). She's not just great babysitter to her two adoring nephews, beloved of clientele and employees, but she has the ability to 'get' good-looking men as if fishing them out of the television. Aside from headaches as her brain struggles to keep the lid on her buried incest childhood by cloaking it in all sorts of nautical imagery and oceanic sound effects, she's perfect. Maybe she's mad as a hatter, and has a weird thing for good-looking men on TV, as if they can see her from the screen, and are propositioning her. Maybe she keeps talking about her lost-at-sea captain father as some kind of omnipotent hero despite her more grounded sister who assures her kids he was a monster. But she's not 'victim' crazy, not a cringing trauma victim or a twitchy mess. She's crazy in a way that encompass sanity within itself. When a bubbly blonde actress (Roberta Collins) at the bar bemoans not being liberated, which is now a requirement for TV she glances over at Molly in her patchwork denim and declares she could be in commercials: "You look liberated." The older barmaid Doris (Peggy Furey) adds that "Molly is a saint, a goddamned American saint." Later when her nervous welfare-collecting sister Cathy (Vanessa Brown) shows up to try and convince them of the truth, "you think she's just about perfect," she says to Long John. "Yeah," he snaps back, "why not?"
"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)
Dalle doesn't need a reason to kill or castrate- you don't gotta be a rapist or nothing-- it just comes naturally. Thus her crazy sexual frenzy in TROUBLE EVERY DAY is truly terrifying and sexy at the same time; she puts the softcore sleaze of BASIC INSTINCT's ice pick murders to shame. The guy she eviscerates in TROUBLE isn't even that bad of a guy, just broke into the wrong house and didn't run when he had the chance, not unlike the poor string of sods falling victim to doe-eyed Marilyn Chambers in RABID. (more)
"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)
You and the Night (2013) aka "Les rencontres d'après minuit" Dir Yann Gonzalez's tale of an orgy magically turned into a winter bonding session, has such a "alone and slutty on Xmas" vibe I felt I hard to post this full version of an older review. Viola!
You'll either love it like a new crush or think it's too jejune et naïf, or--like me--do both at once, in alternating currents of cringe and swoon, but you're bound to agree: if Jean Cocteau was doing a contemporary film about a Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA) meeting on snowy Sunday midnight, inside a soundstage spaceship, and everyone (i.e. gorgeous men and handsome women, a Cocteau signature) was feeling especially vulnerable and lonely (for only the desperate come out on a night like this) and the meeting was small enough that everyone got to share at some length, and then they all went out to the diner afterwards and walked and talked til dawn, all bonded close by abject loneliness and the perfection of the moment -- You and the Night (aka Les rencontres d'après minuit )is exactly the film you'd have.
Or if you want to go the other way, if Radley Metzger was doing a contemporary film about a late-night after-the-bars-close party at the futuristic apartment of a pair of MDMA-dealing swingers; and the cast were feeling especially vulnerable and lonely, and they all wanted some kind of experience, and so they all dropped (everything from ecstasy to inhibitions) and, instead of having an orgy, wound up bonding and confessing and just passionately holding hands (as one is apt to do on it) and then--their group bond cast in stone, and then, born anew in each other's esteem-- went mentally swooning and swirling across the Parisian night as one giant loving phantom until dawn (and if there was any signature Metzger sex, it had been snipped out long ago by censors), You and the Night would be exactly the film you'd have.
They thought they wanted an orgy, but what they found was 'connection.'
Don't laugh! Why do Americans laugh at these things!? Why do they fear the openness of the heart?
Kate Moran and Niels Schneider play the beautiful rich jet-set hosts (they have a kind of deadpan debauched sophisto Bela-Edward rapport) aware of, and encouraging each other's rampant sexual appetites like only an open-marriage-having pair of jet-set swingers can (shades of Score!) with a love-in/live-in drag queen maid (Nicholas Maury, Call Your Agent). The guest all represent certain beautiful people types common at these soirees (uh, presumably): Alain-Fabien Delon (Alain Delon's even more gorgeous son) is the "Teenager." He left his parents because they were "too afraid of life." A runaway hustler with his own loving code, he found himself there on the lonely benches of the Parisian parks in the midnight hours. Fabienne Babe is the "Star," insisting the hosts turn out the lights before she comes in, so no one can see how old she is, and they oblige, and she comes slinking into the scene, kissing each one in turn with the lights off, before getting comfortable enough to even later take off her wig.
All of them have their story. The Star dives into the tale of her beautiful sexy son, with whom she had a Kay Parker-esque love affair. Eric Cantona is "the Stallion" -with his horse cock ever proudly out at half-mast, lamenting that his sexual desirability derailed his destiny.
His destiny? He wanted to become a poet.
Sexual vigor somehow prevented him from writing poems.
The cast continues: Julia Bremond is "the Bitch," a gloriously unhinged nymphomaniac with bad bangs and a need for constant verbal provocation. She goes on and on about her preference for orgies that have rooms full of masked "rednecks" with their cocks out and ready ("they come all over me and I love it!").
Strange as it is to say, Les rencontres d'après minuit works because it is French, and only the French could deliver (or hear) lines like "my cock became my obsession--I forgot poetry" or "I curse the cock that tore me from my destiny!" with a straight face. Since we're reading it in subtitles it's somehow OK). In the US, upon hearing you've decided to be a poet, everyone--your parents especially--roll their eyes, but should you go to France, they revere you! They still may not show up to your open mic night debut, but they're proud to know a real live poet.
If you waste that talent on just being a stud, monsieur you will never endure the ages.
As the gathered orgiasts' individual, and quite fanciful, tales, stories, and dreams are unfold, they are reenacted through a colorful whirl of pretty intensely minimalist artificial backdrops and mythic costuming. We see very stylized vignettes wherein the terrors of self-doubt and loneliness strike even in the thick of orgiastic fantasy. The Slut's recurring dream: the "armada of cocks" at her "disposal" is depicted in a Suspiria-esque orgy hall, but populated with a series of exhausted middle-aged and elderly men, naked with masks on, slumped against the red and black striped wall, and as she crawls forward past them, her face aging and sagging as she goes. We're told the story of the hosts' love affair via painterly tableaux, presumably, some fictionalized version of North Africa. His saying goodbye to head off to war in some ancient/timeless past, with his fine Arab charger at his side; she later finding out he's dead and digging up his coffin with the help of a magical black-winged gypsy angel (Maury) whose price to bring him back from the dead is to always be around them as a lifelong threesome, that he might bask in their gorgeous love and join in as the mood and moment strikes. She agrees and her man comes back to life, though sans an eye (he has a very fetching scar and eye patch). Moran is awed of Maury's power: "You're like Jesus!" ("Oui," Maury says, "only worse.").
They live happily ever after.
Or do they? Why does death seem to be looming so near Schneider's side? Things seem so perfect, yet her one-eyed war vet never really lets go of that comfy coffin.
Other tasteful, surreal vignettes include he Stallion's brush with the "Komissar," a whip-smacking Russian officer played by Beatrice Dalle (see: Betty Blue Come Blow Your Mind!). In a block box theater version of a Russian prison, she orders him to crawl on fours in his BVDs while she snaps the whip, and says embarrassing things like "Stab me with your pork sword!" and drives herself to climax. The prison is a model of economy in soundstage art direction worthy of Ulmer: we see the bars of the cell they're in; we hear the sounds of other prisoners in the darkness; we see the hands reach out to him through the bars, pleading for release; through the miracle of light and shadow the prison seems to extend for miles in all directions, a giant Shining cell bar maze of men trapped in the mental prison of their own kinky desires.
But now, here he is, safe and free and in the company of this rarefied orgy. "The Stud" confesses he thought he'd never get out of there. " I'd still be in that cell, frozen with terror and paralysis....like all those who long to revive the wind."
Revive the wind, Stallion! Sheathe thy sword and hoist the notebook paper sails, that they may be filled with gusty couplets!
The French have a far more poetic cinema from which to dig for inspiration and reference than we vulagares Américains, who only have the films of John Cameron Mitchell (i.e. Hedwig, Shortbus, How to Talk to Girls at Parties) as proof we're inclusive and occasionally capable of nonjudgmental drug-and-music assisted love and acceptance. Perhaps this why only the French and French film fans and weird cult movie enthusiasts will be predisposed to love this film as much as I do, despite its ridiculous theatricality. Mme Jannings notes on imdb:
"This is a movie that cannot be seen with the eyes of evasion. It is a movie that needs to be watch it (sic) with the eyes of the soul as well as the physical eyes, without prejudgments, and without taboos."
Oui, mademoiselle! Can Americans (and Brits) feel these genuine sincere and warm emotions, even as they roll their eyes and sigh "oh, brother!" just to cover their bets, as I am now doing?
Sure, You and the Night has a pleased-with-itself, breast fed-til-18 sense of entitlement, but it's somehow not as offensive coming from pretty young European aesthetes as it is from America's nepo-babies. Sure, it's so much like a theater group performing a SAA meeting in a science fiction bubble where qualifications come alive as surreal vignettes, but it's got such a warm and inclusive heart underneath its art school posturing it's hard to resist. It's the supreme abstract style of, say, Anna Biller welded to the open heart of John Cameron Mitchell.
And most importantly, if you wish to understand Cocteau, which is to understand France, and you wish to understand Radley Metzger (Score, in particular), and wish to understand Herr Mitchell (i.e. Hedwig), you must appreciate that--once you are no longer ashamed or frustrated--sex is no more dangerous underneath its leather studs than a little puppy. Once embraced with total acceptane, magic can happen. We're talking Apollonian Kenneth Anger-via-Max Reinhardt magic ritual-fairy dust settling like snow (which also falls at one point). It's a magic that amply compensates for its overall...eh, ow you say, eh.., self-indulgent wankery? Just say yes and magic happens. I'm as cynical as any of my fine American brethren but I was in tears by the end the first time I saw this...
Director Yann Gonzalez would continue his polyamorous erotique-cum-Argento style/structure (albeit with far more graphic sex and the introduction of brutal violence) for the neon-drenched Knife + Heart, a nicely surreal post-giallo about an aging alcoholic lesbian director of gay porn (well-played by Vanessa Paradis) trying to win back her ex-lover (Kate Moran!). It's set in the 70s, so she keeps calling her from filthy phone booths, pleasing for another chance. I don't blame Paradis' porn director for wanting her back, as I'm kind of enthralled by after her You and the Night, wherein her final tearful proposition in the dawn's early light had me bawling and happy the way I hadn't felt watching a French movie since the first half of Betty Blue, which I used to drink and cry to obsessively back in the early-90s.
And then there's the great chillbient (is that still a thing?) M83 score (i.e. Yann's brother, Anthony), a perfect choice for amping the intensity of 21st century ecstasy-tinged post-club emotional all sunrise bonding. If it all adds up to a nice bunch of parts rather than a movie, well, what of it? Love leaves a new hole for every old one it fills (that line is mine, but you can use it, for we're all one.
Even more importantly than all these little perks, You and the Night is a unique film but one that shouldn't need to stand alone, unloved and in the snowy night. Not anymore. It's every loner's dream to find a readymade clique of like-minded good-looking outcasts to call a family or artistic collective. For libertines such as these, it's a love far rarer than the carnal or romantic. If you find it, you have to drop everything and run with it all the way, to the grave, and--especially if you're a debauched French poet--even beyond.
Don't laugh at them.... not now. Just come in, come in.
No eyes were harmed during production of this picture
"Every professional performer I've ever seen always does the exact same thing in the exact same moment in everything they do.... They know when the audience is going to laugh and when it's going to get interested. What I like are things that are different every time. That's why I like amateur performers and bad performers--you can never tell what they'll do next." - Andy Warhol
"How does a girl that's braindead experience a violent emotion?" -- Dr. Anderson
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...
The first shot is a close-up on the words 'St. Mary's College - Boston' all in grey -- etched on a plaque or against a grey stone step. The camera pulls back to reveal a black-and-white photo of, presumably, the population (apparently) of said college--about 26 female students and teachers, standing arrayed on the stairs of an old building, flanked by stone lions. Horror fans of course instantly think of the last shot of The Shining, so presume most of the people in this picture are, or will soon be, dead, coupled to an evocation of lost innocence, enhanced by a a Picnic at Hanging Rock-esque wooden flute, mixing with the sound of chattering girls and a low drone like a flatline EKG crossed with the bell between class periods. So tragic.... we're feeling it. The loss of innocence, probably. So much promise...
But look closer: the girls are all unsmiling; their arms crossed, hands buried in their sleeves (as if in strait-jackets), looking into the camera with grim, set faces as if to warn the viewer not to enroll in this joyless academy. With these strange little details subliminally tweaking our perception, we begin to sense these girls are complicated. You can't call them innocent, or evil. We're not sure what even to call them, now. But then the camera zooms slowly towards one of the windows, so it begins to seem like we're sneaking in through a dorm window.
We suddenly jump cut from the slow zoom in on the window to a close-up of a girl's eye (top image)- which then closes to receive a thick application of gold eye shadow. A Christopher Cross-esque lite FM style pop theme song starts. A male's dreamy high register croons "You've got a feeling / deep inside." We must be in a St. Mary's College dorm room. We pull back from the eye to see the face and black frizzy hair and straggly body of an insecure young brunette getting ready for her Cinderella debut, with a pair of playful blondes, one a girl, one a guy, doing fairy godmother duty. Clad all in white college sweats, like grinning angels, they smile and exchange glances with each other, holding up an array of nighties and underwear up against themselves while giving fake coy laughs and throwing them on the bed. The girl they're dressing is not smiling, She doesn't even look nervous. She's just standing there frozen; she seems totally blank as if not sure of what's going on. The credits come up in a cutesy font all lowercase. We hear almost no diegetic sound except their occasional muffled laughter as the song goes on.
It's a montage we've seen a hundred times: the familiar friends helping a girl try on clothes until she finds just the right look (usually as the song ends). At one point they look at an outfit, then each other, and shrug, cutely in unison, to indicate no, not this one. Finally, they nod in unison- the look is just right. Their Cinderella is ready for her--presumed--first big date. The song reaches a zenith of emotion and its chorus, "Falling head over heels / And I just can't stop."
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).
And yet, something feels very off. The brunette girl, small and gawky, is so stiff and awkward with such. blank expression she looks like a mannequin come only halfway to life, eyes showing she's desperately trying to move but can't quite work her limbs. She's wearing so much eyeliner and gold eye make-up and cheek rouge it's like she just crawled out of an 80s Egyptian disco. But that might be just us, our taste. Maybe the ancient Egyptian prostitute look was big in Romania (where this was filmed). My very first date ever, circa 1983, came out with me looking that bad and she was--come to think of it, Romanian (like this actress).
Intentional or not, it begins to dawn on us that our familiarity with cliches may be being nonchalantly used against us. Certainly there's no foreshadowing evidence to suspect foul play ahead. American producers would be irate - worrying they'd confuse the audience, and so fill this scene with ominous strings and evil glances. But Fulci gives us nary a shred of portent. We think we recognize a slightly evil look in her 'friend's' eyes but can't tell for sure.
The temptation of course is to accuse the film of being 'bad' since it's not giving us any expected signals we'd associate with a late-80s horror film, one given fairly bad marks even by the director's devotees. It's also not an 'art' film by a recognized genius like Lynch, Antonioni, or Polanski, so we can't be sure it deserves praise and admiration for the surplus of alienating affect.
It shouldn't matter. What matters is that our Cassandra of Troy precognitive anxiety and impatience is no longer oppressing us. When we can't recognize the sign posts we no longer feel we have to drive. We're safe out to to sea, totally lost, swirling around in the tributary between the river of genius and the ocean of boneheaded crap on an oarless raft. We can kick our feet up and let the wind be our tour guide.
As the credits end, the music stops. The next shot starts with a sudden surge/stop of a car brake. The girl, we now learn is called Kathy (Milijana Zirojevic) is in the front seat with a handsome but evil looking older man named Fred (Riccardo Acerbi). It's pitch dark night outside, no streetlights or anything. We know where he's parking. She seems nervous, calling him by his surname, and 'sir'--making us assume he's her teacher or a doctor or something ("I'm not sir to you Kathy, Just Fred"). She mentions, voice trembling with shyness--that they were supposed to go dancing. He waves that away, "did you really want to go dancing?"
Instead he basically attacks her, as Italian men in these movies tend to do when with a girl alone in a car.
We grit our teeth, prepared for the usual screaming and threatening, scratching and clothes ripping. The innocence of the last sequence, all that gussying up for the big date, now comes into place as a kind of brutal irony: it's Pretty in Pink turning into Bergman's Virgin Spring right out of the gate.
But--instead, Fulci's camera moves outside the car looking through the rear windshield, we hear her moan in ascent. She's into it!!
And she won't shut up about how into it she is ("I've dreamed about you so many times!")
It's now that the awful canned effect of the dubbing really hits us and we recoil, up out of the narrative moment and back into our seats. She starts a flow of moans mixed with nonstop babbling about how much she wants him. Unlike most people, she can't shut up and get in the moment, so neither can we. She goes on and on ("so big, so strong.") She's clearly inexperienced and very horny, and just doesn't know how to go about not revealing either thing too soon. She's already tipping her hand, as we--the sexually experienced--call it. We laugh at her because we're experienced enough to be quiet when fooling around. So now, once again, we have shifted our identification locus -- and we still don't quite know if any of this is supposed to be what we're feeling.
To sum up: we went from wistfully remembering our nervous first dates of the mid-80s, to amorphous anxiety on a naif's behalf (wondering if she's being set up to fail, or if the make-up woman is blind, or that caked on look was cool for 80s Romanian night life), to dreading her impending assault by an older Italian macho sleazebag, to shock and relief at her response, to post-modern shock due terrible dubbing to sneering at her annoying babble, all in the first five minutes.
OK, now we find out why Fulci's camera was outside looking into the back window of Fred's car. Suddenly - we reverse shot to a row of cars parked hidden in the shadows just out of sight in the darkness. Fulci zooms up to the windshields of each one to find several fellow students laughing inside. We see the couple who dressed her during the song in one of the cars, too. We can't hear them through their windshields, but when we cut to inside their cars we still hear Kathy. Fulci moves to Fred's car to show a microphone pinned to his dashboard. We presume they're listening in on the shortwave radio, like they're at the drive-in.
The meta effect is instantaneous. We've come full circle on our identification with Kathy and now find ourselves implicated in the prank due to our laughing at her declarations uttered in that flat dubbing. We're one of the bad kids now, laughing at the terrible performance and Fred's car parked in the row in front of them and on the screen, both the viewer and the viewed.
In tricking us into laughing and sneering at Kathy and her naive babbling dub, Fulci has implicated us in the prank. We're part of the evil kid contingent. Fulci, you devil. What have you done to us?
Soon the kids start their engines. The row of sudden headlights blind her through the back window; Fred breaks the clinch and laughs in her face, sadistic mirthless, mocking (Remember, this is supposed to be her teacher). Horrified, she gets out and starts running into the darkness, illuminated in the slowly following car headlights like a Wake in Fright kangaroo, the kids leaning out of the windows, roaring with exaggerated evil glee...
With more of his strange, deadpan pacing, Fulci drags this chase out to the point of absurdity. We go from feeling embarrassed for her to just hoping she either turns around and stops looking behind her every few steps, or just gets hit by the car we know is inevitably coming. Instead, she keeps trying to run while looking over her shoulder, but it's hard to do that. The more she looks back, that the slower she runs. Fulci drags a series of shot/reverse shots of her running/looking back--illuminated in the headlights--to the evil kids in the row of pursuing cars, leaning out of the windows like college sweatshirt-clad Road Warrior stunt men, laughing with merry glee. Eventually her running kind of slows in with that voluminous red dress blowing in the breeze and her clumsy gait and bad make-up she evokes some kind of clumsy-footed flightless bird, her round eyes alive with a mix of fear and embarrassment.
Then, she finally runs out into the road and the path of a screeching car.
Ever the practical minimalist, Fulci knows there's no need for a shot of her body hitting the pavement (actually I'm sure he would have had one, in grisly detail, had his budget allowed or there been good Romanian FX artists handy); nor does he need to cut to the horrified faces of her pursuers, nor the shocked look on the drivers' face. Nor show an ambulance, or the bad kids' cars all scattering after the crash, before the cops come; nor the one girl who wants to confess bullied into silence; nor the weary detective yawning knowingly; nor a passing motorist calling 911 while their spouse urges them not to get involved; the hit and run driver speeding away; ye olde patient POV gurney blasting through the ER doors flanked by EMTs shot, etc. An American film chronicling this same gone-wrong prank would feel obligated to give us at least some of that hack 'continuity.' But Fulci knows we've seen those shots in other movies, so he can skip them. We instinctively breathe a sigh of relief to just go right to the artificial respirator.
Even there, the action never slows. Within seconds of the shot beginning, Kathy's EKG flatlines and a high-pitched monotone beams in over the soundtrack. Vibrating and piercing, it's as if the space between two realities is opening in the form of feedback squall. As the doctors talk next to her bed--their voices grow faint-- the camera switches to a fisheye POV hovering over her floating up and away from her bed.. up out through the window while a wave of ingenious overlapping whispers blend with hospital noises, sirens and EKGs make a disorienting soundscape. We hear amidst the muffled din, Kathy speak, saying"I don't want to die" over and over as her/our POV floats back in, out and up through the storage room above her bed, trough the roof of the building (a miniature obviously from some other movie as it looks like twin oil refinery tanks), and then over the miniature treetops and around the corner, the cardboard city line behind her aglow with 'distant' lights in the night). We begin to descend down to the school, where a new student just happens to be arriving in the school van, someone (presumably) easy to possess. Someone stunningly pretty and looking very wary. No one's going to dare set her up in a prank. Atop the steps, three stern looking matrons stand atop the steps, waiting, as if she's coming into a girl's reformatory; a few are girls looking balefully down at her from the tall windows above like ghosts.
Carrie is still crying in the girl's locker room after her tampon pelting at six minutes (I checked). But Fulci has already pulled the big prank, had the tragic result, reversed our expectations five times, drawn us into meta-textual liberation, given us out of body experience, set up the rest of the movie. All without the events feeling rushed or confusing. Everything happens naturally, one action following the other.
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 beingnotthe 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 aHappy 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).
Doctor Robert ("Don't call me Bob") Anderson (Jared Martin, an American TV and Italian movie regular) is presiding over Kathy's case, and seems rather obsessed. He also called over to start ministering to Eva after she throws all Jennie's clothes on the floor and starts flogging her with a raincoat in a weirdly cut scene with mismatched eye lines, before passing out. Ever the scrupulous ethical-minded physician, he slyly shoots her up with, presumably, some really good drugs, causing her to wake up and start making out, rather forcibly, with him. Rather than gently rebuffing her, asking for a nurse to be present, and standing out of reach, he blushes and stammers, and looks behind him to make sure no one is watching. We're watching a man wrestle with the idea that it's one thing to make a pass at your patient, and another to merely not push her away when she latches onto you with rough kisses like a foxy lamprey.
Martin does this very well --(you see his face actually redden) and doesn't really protest beyond mentioning he's not in the "habit" of kissing his patients." Hah! A lot of professional men learn a lot about themselves when a hot young girl throws herself their way and they find themselves going along with it, outvoted by the 'little man', the willful girl, and thousands of years of evolution. In short, kissing his patients has now become a 'habit.' The next day she's waiting in his convertible when he gets out of the hospital. Rather than resist, he just drives off with her. After all, no sense arguing with a damaged hottie, especially if you're still young, virile and in an Italian movie in the mid-80s. These were still the days when sex was just sex, healthy, rewarding, free of the sleazy male aggression signifiers it would carry now.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
In honor of Women's History Month, here's a list of films you may not even know about as they feature morally ambiguous / evil female supervillains that are powerful enough they may be a threat to patriarchy I can't fathom why else the below films aren't easily available on disc or (legit) streaming sites or Blu-ray; most of them haven't ever been available since the early days of VHS, many not even then. Probably because patriarchy.
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")
From the wall-size Aubsrey Beardsley-esquw illustrations at the Lizard's dark green psychedelic dance club / bar hideout--rich with red and green gel lighting, twinkling lights, day-glo drawings on the black walls, and lots of ornate iron work to pose behind--to the beautiful Bava-esque hideout, with her doll collection, preserved human displays she keeps next to her white feather fluffy bed, the settings are never less than sublime. As are Liizard's costumes, from victorian lace to black scales to white fluffy feather wraps over which her long black tresses cascade most bewitchingly.
1968 was a time when James Bond and master criminals like Kilink, Diabolik, Fantomas and Satanik, were all the high camp rage. Still, aside from Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik and maybe the 1964 French Fantomas,not many films from that era have aged well. Let the Lizard come to the front of the class! Its every moment is packed with zip and cool comic strip details, avoiding the ponderous filler, travelogue B-roll, broad scenes of frustrated cops, and overly hammed government officials demanding action, and tacky bumbling comedy, endless stripteases and cars driving around for no real reason, and smug leading men who cockily bust lame moves at the bar.
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. "
I love too that she's never held up to any Crying Game-type gender unveiling, nor are there any jokes or cryptic allusions to gender. We're never sure if she's supposed to be recognized as in drag or not. We do know that when she disguises herself as a man at one point to escape a hotel, it's then she seems like she's in drag! A man who can seem like a woman in male drag when he dresses like a man --that's the mark of a master. And stick around for the end credits which give her a big Bond-like TV movie send-off, somwherwerwe between a fashion show and the Avengers. There' nary a foot put wrong. Even Mishima himself shows up as one of the dolls, showing off his physique (lots of lean, striated muscle)
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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),
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.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
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."
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
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?
As an addendum to my previous post, let me sing the praises of one of the weirder catches in my endless trawl through the YouTube depths-- DARKTOWN STRUTTERS (1975). Written by wild George Armitage, Srutters is so weird and off-the-cuff it's hard to describe except maybe as a satire of AIP-style biker, sci-fi, blaxploitation and beach blanket movies. Set in a fantasy land Watts, it's got lots of smooth, cool r&b on the soundtrack (courtesy Stax Records) and a plot wherein a subliminally literal white devil ribs magnate has invented a black cloning machine and the whole neighborhood has to jump on their motorbikes and ride to his Tennessee plantation to stop him. Yes. How can you not be in, cautiously at first, then riotously?
Best of all, aside from its anti-white devil posturing, Strutters is free of specific social agenda, taking its crazy 1970s plumage and lots of countercultural (drugs and anti-police mostly) zeitgeist with a grain of salt, instead satirizing AIP's biker movie and blaxploitation interpretations of America, rather than America itself. Zipping along in a way that should delight fans of the fast-paced basement aesthetics of early Corman black humor comedies like Creature from the Haunted Sea and a Bucket of Blood.
In other words, if you saw Get Out and it reminded you of The Thing with Two Heads, where Ray Milland gets his head grafted onto Rosie Greer's body, and you thought to yourself, 'damn I need to see that movie again!' Then you did, and then you said, "damn, maybe I shouldn't have bothered." The movie you should have seen is Darktown Strutters!
Trina Parks stars as Syreena, leader of a gang of colorfully dressed female 'trikers' (as in on those three-wheel dragsters) called 'the Strutters.' No sooner have these Strutters rolled into town than they're rumbling with a bevy of white Marines on R&R at the hot dog stand, and then cops show up (their gigantic UFO siren really kicks the shrooms in, so to speak) to harass the ladies for no real reason, while a color-coordinated bunch of flashily-attired (probably white) bank robbers, armed with a bazooka, among other things, storm out of the bank right across the street. Figures, man. "Watts is a shooting gallery," Syreena warns "and you're the ducks!"
Arrested anyway, she tricks her way out of the precinct in high but wondrously deadpan but shockingly violent Bugs Bunny fashion-- getting the chief of police shot to death by his own men (she convinces him to dress up like a blackface drag queen and go undercover, so he's shot right in the vestibule by the men looking for her) Meanwhile she dons a cop uniform and strolls cockily out! What? Can you imagine a scene like that ever even being written today?
Then the detective story elements kick in: Syreena learns her abortionist mom has been missing for weeks and prominent black men have been abducted all over town! Incognito in her signature orange suit and a yellow feathered helmet, our heroine begins a search that leads her all over cartoon versions of the usual AIP haunts: a groovy faux-Arabian bordello; a rib shack; an igloo where the ice cream bicycle 'pot-cicle' man keeps his frozen stash (I really wanted the 50/50 LSD peyote bar, but couldn't get my money through the screen); and of course a rundown club wherein a stone-cold pimpin' detective named Philo Rasberry (Sam Laws) feels left out the kidnappers didn't try to abduct him, too ("Maybe it's like rape," Syreena suggests, "you have to ask for it").
Most of the cast (alas)) are unjustly obscure ere a few recognizable faces: Syreena's would-be suitor, the biker Mellow is played Roger E. Mosley (a name beloved by Magnum PI fans); Otis Day (of Animal House-fame) is V.D. (he carries around a spray bottle of penicillin in case anyone touches him) and Christopher Joy (the "straight from Turkey" weed dealer in Up in Smoke) is the perennially shaky "Wired" (he has a permanently wind-blown bandana around his neck). Why, the cast is just brimmin' with characters, overlapping dialogue, and little bits of business so fast and deadpan droll it takes a few viewings to appreciate it all.
Produced by Gene Corman (Roger's brother); shot from the hip by an old western serial director (William Witney). Hipster maniac George Armitage wrote it in three days and once said "the entire script is one sentence." The shocking mix of sociopolitical satire and savage comic anarchy is pure Armitage, reminiscent his work on 1970's GAS-S-S-S-s-s-, but with some changes-for-the-bette: trikes and bikes instead of dune buggies; the harmonies and deep soul of Staxx label artists instead of endless twang of Country Joe & the Fish; and set in Looney Tunes version of South LA instead of a Looney Tunes version of Palm Springs; and best of all, Trina Parks instead of that entitled little pisher Bob Corff in the lead. It's also the one and only time Armitage delves into blaxploitation (then all the rage), tweaking, broad sight gags (in the tradition of then-popular variety shows), and the satire of Terry Southern or George Axelrod but sudden violence substituting for their dated leering.
Darktown's bargain basement chic requires a certain surrendering of expectations to get past. If you come spoiling for something to 'cancel' and judge for its unconscious micro and macro aggressions, you are sure to find what you're looking for, but once you lock onto its goofy kinetic off-the-cuff mix of good cheer (everyone seems to having a great time), improv layered chaos, and black humor, you'll forgive its trespasses (if you can forgive Tarantino--who's a fan of this movie--you can forgive Armitage) (1) .
(literal) White devil sublimation delicately intended
Now, that's not to see he doesn't run the risk of being too hip, and all in all Darktown ain't perfect: the short running time is padded with long chase scenes (here it's an extended dirt bike chase around some vacant lot trail for five minutes), but when it works it works. Shucks, we don't get irritated if Syreena stops her dungeon escape to dig the sweet sound of act the impatient poppa as the first of "Sky Hog" rib magnate Commander Cross's artificial clone baby is about to be born!
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
The element X that makes the whole thing work is the great time Parks seems to be having/ Whether disguised as a motorcycle cop, a nun, or just her yellow Apollonian charioteer costume, Parks surfs the madness with a wry shrug, a slinky ease-in-her-own-skin luxuriance, and deadpan approach that clearly keeps the rest of the cast eager to match it. As Hal Horn puts it, Parks "has to be wonderful in order for this unpredictable hodgepodge to work and fortunately, she is." She doesn't run and dodge as she escapes, she doesn't 'shuck and jive' as they used to say, she walks like a graceful, plugged-in panther; she stays in the narrative tension without losing her sense of ease in her own skin. When she stops her prison rescue to dig the sweet sounds of The Dramatics, who woo Syreena from their tinsel-lit disco cell (with one of the few credited songs, "Whatcha See is Watcha Get") after she finds her chained-up mother, has a little moment, then forgets to unshackle her as she sashays away but it's WB cartoon funny rather than Tank Girl upsetting.
Not every actor is a good fit for Armitage's unwieldy mouthfuls of acerbic hipster counter-anarchic Laugh-In gag-spiked dialogue but Parks knows the best way is to just grab the ball and sashay away with it. With so many black films seem to feel obligated to include urban blight, poverty, the minutiae of dirty awnings, dirty streets, some kind of sermon on injustice, a screed against those that don't give a shit about everything that's wrong, those who just stop and smell the equivalent of roses, which here is the ."
Seeing this online in its rundown video transfer quality (not sure if there' an HD remaster floating around) and recognizing genius in it, well your mileage may vary especially if you have a hard time with 'jive' slang as written by white people (or, like in a Russ Meyer script, made-up ratatatat slang no one ever said in real life) or layered improv dialogue that doesn't always connect and action not always decipherable in the mucky mix (luckily whatever the platform you see it on, you can usually access subtitles, and you should), then... why did you read this far?
And coolest of all, as with Gas-s-s-s, one is free to wonder if the non-sequiturs and tripped-out combo slang are what was in the script or just jumbled together on the spot by the 'game for improv' cast (Corman and Armitage are both heavy proponents of it). Either way, no matter how much of it is accidentally offensive, accidentally brilliant, intentionally stupid, or just plain inept, you can't very well argue that it's unique, hilarious, stirring, and divinely scored with a bunch of rich Stax staple soul you'll never have heard before or since. Wherever you fall on the unconscious racism (as we've recently learned on social media, satirizing racism doesn't automatically exempt you from it), Strutters is a relic from the time when racial stereotypes and blaxploitation tropes could be affectionately kidded without fear of cancellation. It's a time that may not come again, so dig. Dig this roster of warm, larger-than-life black talent, and modestly over-the-top layered lunacy. Dig. Dig like you've never dug before.
PS - If you're wondering, of course the late, great Dick Miller shows up in this one, too -- as a cop. As always, he does it well, capturing the anarchic 3-Stooges over-the-top spazzing the role requires and cementing this to brother Corman's canon.
"Trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art" - --- Douglas Sirk
Some of us love 'bad' or trash or outsider movies for different reasons than the hooting at it with an audience at midnight, or snarking over brewskis. We find joy in the aesthetic arrest of true myth. We love the vast gaps between normally filled brickwork that let us look into the depths of our own unconscious, where archetypal myth and drive-in movies collide. We get some of that with the appeal of Drunk History on Comedy Central. But mostly we get it in very intellectual Brechtian exercises (Godard, Resnais) or very agog accidental geniuses (Ed Wood, Luigi Cozzi). Motly Would you rather be told a story by an excited ten year-old delinquent, so enthusiastic he can't keep his words straight, or some boring, well-rehearsed little mama's boy who delivers every line with emphases calculated for various emotional end points?
Yo, f--k those end points, man. In case you can't tell which side of that I fall under, rest assured I love the bad films, mainly the older ones, of course. I can't connect with the recent yen for vanity projects like The Room or Neil Breen. Even the thing Gen-Y has for 80s VHS is lost to me. I go for the stuff I saw on TV at 5 AM as a kid waiting for Saturday morning cartoons to start, sneaking around to not wake my parents, and finding something awesome like Plan Nine from Outer Space, a film I could understand every word of, even at five years old, finally!! I didn't care if it had mismatched shots or unconvincing doubles, I just loved it gave me both the classic horror pantheon (vampires staggering around creepy graveyard sets- say what you want those shots are still plenty atmospheric) and science fiction (UFOs and deflector guns, a strange UFO that's shiny and round from afar and black and square up close. And no way to get lost as there's the trilling wonderment of Criswell's narration.
It tapped into why I loved monster movies, and I still hunt that thrill, I find it mostly in little moments peppered throughout (older) bad movies, where sublime poetry and mythic realness is served, reminding us that before TV we stared hypnotized into the nighttime firem while stories were spun by elders, the radio, or our own imaginations. Without other images to saturate the brain, our imaginations were vivid, extreme - hunger-spiked paraedolia meeting the flicker of the fire, not unlike the flicker of a strip of film through the projector (with the shutter blacking out the transitional moments) creating the illusion of movement. The flicks is no idle association.
We don't realize it, perhaps, but bad films can bring us back to that, remind us that CGI and 3D and all that isn't needed if our imagintion is there to fill in the gaps. Indeed, our imagination wants gaps it can fill in. Just as our brain paints over blind spots in our field of vision, or reverses numbers for dyslexia. Our unconscious archetypal energies, from which we are cut off from communicating directly with by waking consciousness, want desperately to reach us. Like Harpo doing his charades bit with Chico, they have to get their messages across with symbols, 'sounds like' anagrams, and projection.
But then, when we're insane, sleep-deprived, tripping or enlightened, the veil parts - they finally break up through the locked cellar door and go spilling out all over our tight-ship dinner party, ranting and raving, singing, breaking plates, and carrying on. My they are an unruly bunch!
But mostly, we only occasionally get a note passed up through the floorboards. And then, since the unconscious can watch what we watch, we get a pure jolt of ecstatic delight when an archeytpal elelment below wants us to know they relate to something enough to project themselves onto it. Thus my heart soars every time I see George Barrows' post-swig shiver while they pass the bottle around in Mesa of Lost Women, or the strange nocturnal dance in Cat Women of the Moon, or Tor Johnson rising from the tomb in Plan Nine; or the titular Astounding She Monster jumping through Robert Clarke's cabin window like a big bodystocking-clad she cat; or Lou Ferigno and and Circe riding a rock-propelled chariot past the moon in the 1985 Cannon/Cozzi masterpiece Hercules, because all the elements are there. Arguine its unconvincing is like arguing against a Tarot reading for having dogeared cards. The reading is even more potent for the aging process... any sage projecting itself up onto a passing Yoda T-shirt knows that...
Something about these peak weird moments in the cheap, wild, meta-enriched films really speaks to a deep well in my soul, reflecting the cheap look of my b&w dreams. When these oasis moments happen, it's like finding a well-stocked bar on a seemingly deserted island.
Anyway, all that is the long way around to saying woe is he who comes to "Manos" The Hands of Fate (the quotation marks are part of the title),for such priceless whiskey womb moments. Do so and your happy place GPS might lead you all the way around the world rather than admit there is no "there" there. But it's so almost perfect that finding something to love within itbecomes a challenge to every outsider film fan. It's a maze that promises all sorts of gifts, but leads you only to fever dream dead ends.
Maybe you know the fever dream I mean: where you hear a snatch of some song you heard in passing or while watching TV in your bed, and it just repeats over and over on a loop in your brain (2). You will get that with the score of "Manos"which means that if--even with that score--you can enjoy "Manos,"you can enjoy hell itself. That means, to you, heaven is right here on earth.
But know ye this: the enlightened one asks for the dirtiest jobs, lives the most spartan of lives, gives up the endless chase for nirvana, even the pursuit of gettin' wasted, or living "the fine life, baby" as Snoop Dogg would say in those Corona ads. In doing so, pleasure chases him. Pain runs from him. Pain is scared, it has no power anymore. Free of all judgement, recused from the bench, such a man is to be feared only by fear itself. For him All is connection and bliss. He moves beyond duality. At last he is the one hand clapping. He is the noise of the tree falling in the woods when no ears are around.
"Manos" can deliver the final blow to the door betwixt duality and its transcendence, all you gotta do is walk on through the wall, headfirst.
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PS - SORRY FOR THE EXTREME LENGTH OF THIS PIECE. I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON IT FOR TOO LONG (and actually it used to be twice as long with a long preamble about surrealist art and the joy of paredolia and campfire stories as a kind of mental TV. - Some other time). As always, I'd suggest just scrolling around, reading any paragraph that starts interestingly, and stopping when it starts to get all Joycean. ) I'm working on it.
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People like Ed Wood are revered today because they put their heart and soul into their cheap-ass outsider films, and you can tell that they're weird people trying to make a normal, quality best film they can, but their fractured sense of reality shows through every armor chink. Ed proved he was perfectly capable of making a boring 'normal' if cheap B-movie, where the mise-en-scene could be threadbare without drawing attention to itself (as in Jail-Bait) but it was when he tried to make big personal statements while moving into horror to both help out and exploit Bela Lugosi that his imagination took wing, leaving his ability far in the dust and earning his place in the cult pantheon, making him the saint of all outsider or 'folk-art' filmmakers.
But when normal people make films that are intentionally trying to be weird or bad, it's only ever 'quirky' in that blando calrissian tradition.
"Manos" is a little different from both. Its director is a normal person but he isn't trying to be weird. He isn't trying period. First/last-time director, full-time Texas fertilizer salesman Hal Warren barely achieves the rudiments of what a feature film should be--but he won the bet he made with fellow Texan and renowned screenwriter Stirling Silliphant (it probably went along the lines of: " Making a film is easy, Stirling, slinging fertilizer is way harder." / "If it's so easy, Hal, I bet you can't make one!" / "Yer on!"). In the end, Warren proves himself a master of slinging fertilizer, no matter what he does.
Yessir, Hal Warren shows just how easy it can't be.
Being contemptuous of shit-slinging is one thing, but does contempt for the craft of filmmaking alone make a film interesting or rewarding? It depends, I guess, on who you invite over for your "beer and pizza night" to watch it. That's apparently the best way to enjoy "Manos" --with buds, brews, and pizzas, according to the comments on imdb. If you're sober and alone though, "Manos" is perfect for being tripped out on SSRIs, at 4 AM, alone, in the dark. Wondering if life in the simulation is really like this movie - a kind of fly in amber trap in which all movement circles back to itself.
What Warren hath wrought is as a God making a world in one night, only to later realize it doesn't revolve, and therefor has no gravity, so all the shit on it is just floating away. And mighty glad of it it is.
But despite that whiskey womb happy place GPS pointing us far from "Manos'" reach as we can get, there just might be a happy place gold mine in this thar abyss.
As Teleport City says, "When you dedicate a portion of your life to the pursuit of obscure cinema existing beyond the limits of mainstream film, a movie like "Manos" is both exactly what you’ve been looking for as well as the ultimate instrument of your destruction." Bill Gordon at Worst Movies Ever Made summed up its (lack of) appeal thus: "Give it any amount of stars you wish, or don’t give any (...) they are all accurate."
Manos" lives on the tape splice of the bad movie Möbius strip, a zone where infinite plentitude and absolute absence connect. With "Manos," emptiness at last has a mirror to behold itself,
If you stare back at yourself through the mirror long enough, zooming right into your own pupils, you just may realize that, when the black of your pupils zooms in on the blackness of their reflection for long enough, you're gazing into two empty black holes through which you can peak into the abyss of non-being. Such is "Manos," an empty void, with some nice 16mm color photography now that it's been restored for Blu-ray.
The plot could not be simpler or more familiar: a family road trip gone awry. The difference: the car is lost in the empty scrubland of nowhere Texas instead of the usual Jason woods or Eyes-hilled desert. It seems easy and yet impossible to get lost out there, but with dad at the wheel, anything's not only possible but inevitable. His MILF wife riding shotgun; daughter (the only good actor) in the backseat, oblivious to the mounting tension, distracted continually by her doll and puppy They're driving around in circles, not thinking to ask directions from the cops they pass, or the couple making out by the side of the road. They eventually find a hand-made sign that points the way to a lodge where dad hopes they can stay the night. A sinister, obviously chemically impaired confederate uniform-sporting goatish caretaker named Torgo stands in front of the door (we never really see the building behind him), squinting and staggering under the magic hour glow. He tells them-- in a kind of drunken hiccup-style--and like all the voices, dubbed in after the fact, that they can't come in. The owner won't like it and they're closed. But the dad, afraid of driving under all that afternoon sun, bullies his way in.
Things are pretty weird in the lodge. It's not even a lodge. There is a room with a couch and a big wet painting and a small ratty bedroom--replete with double bed against a wall and a footlocker for furnishing--leading to a small ratty kitchen--replete with small ratty sink--leading to a giant back porch--replete with floodlights and yard spreading off into the open desert). After the wife pleads and nags for an hour or so and the child's dog is mysteriously killed (off camera), dad finally decides to leave. But they never do get to leave. Somehow, the car won't start. Or something. The dad can't fix it, nor make decent life decisions (at least he's armed, not that it will do much good). Though Torgo is apparently hobbled and suffering from St. Vitus's Dance, the hale and hearty dad keeps insisting the poor guy bring their bags in, then out, in, then out. It's pretty funny to imagine would it would be like if some random family barged into your small house and demanded you load and unload their luggage while complaining every minute about your furnishings.
And then, out back, night falls and... the 'Master' awakens. He's a pale ectomorph whose only masterful quality is a fierce stare and thick black eyebrows. He does a lot of standing, spreading out his crazy 'red hand on a black background' cape/shawl a lot--rightly proud of it. A thick black smoke, rising from a small fire pit at his feet, surrounds him, as if he's outlined in black sharpie drawn onto each frame. "Manos," he screeches, "must be served."
Just to be 'clear,' though he is the "Master" he serves "Manos." But what or who "Manos" is never does get explained. The difference between them seems uncertain from scene to scene. We do know this cult likes hand sculptures. And hand symbolism. Did you know manos means 'hands'? So the title translated is: "Hands: Hand of Fate?"
As the film spins on, Torgo has taken a shine to the wife after watching her undress in the mirror (down to her slip), and asks the Master if he can keep her for himself. But the Master wants her to join his own harem of undead-style brides, all of them wearing wayyy too much cheap make-up, and these iill-fitting diaphanous gowns. Most of the time, they're rolling around in the sand in endless catfights while the Master sits there, vexed... but obviously used to it.
Needless to say, things don't end well.
They didn't begin well either.
Still, all the elements for a schlectesklassisch are there: the fractured pacing, the dream logic, the loopy editing; the canned post-sync dialogue seemingly beamed in from beyond the grave; the dead space before and after the lines (which should have been snipped off by an editor rather than someone who only knows how to tape strips of film together); the unhinged performances, the almost passive-aggressively threadbare sets. The actor who plays the dad. Oh wait, that's Hal himself! A real hack of all trades.
SCORING THE BARREL
But there is one very important element for successful bad film bliss missing though: a good score. Post-sync sound cheapjack movies like "Manos" usually have royalty-free music playing almost nonstop to help excuse the lack of dialogue and sound effects. BUT for that not to suck (in a genuinely bad way) we need either the right (or totally wrong) kind of music-such as that ominous, bombastic library music used for Astounding She-Monster, Plan Nine, andBeast of Yucca Flats)- and/or totally crocked narration (Criswell being the ultimate example). Warren waives both of these easily procured things, perhaps afraid of their power. He post-syncs the dialogue fairly well for such a cheap suit production...
But then, for music, we're treated to the magical lite jazz of Russ Huddleson and Robert Smith, Jr. (Soundtrack available on Spotify!) a duet of modern piano and flute (or sometimes alto sax) that is the height of mood-killer. Jazz is perfectly fine in its way, even elevator jazz like this, but no, no, no, nothere. Imagine if Kenny G. did the score for Suspiria or Halloween! Think, Hal Warren! Think what "Manos" could have meant to the world had you pumped it up with low- end ominous dread or pounding bombast! Even those piano mashes and frenzied Spanish guitar moments in Mesa of Lost Women and Jail Bait would have been perfect.
Hal, come clean: did you just grab the closest, most royalty-free-looking stock jazz album from your grandma's attic?
Actually, the music is fine... for awhile. It casts a nice languid, slightly melancholy, almost romantic summer's idyll kind of mood when the family is just driving around, but then, when the menace should be building, ye olde flute keeps going. Songs and riffs repeat as if Warren merely started the record over again, utterly unaware it's permissible to actually edit to the music rather than just using it as wallpaper. Did he think that was cheating? As it is, the space between tracks on the album occur right in the middle of suspenseful actions, it doesn't bother old Hal.
But us? Oh yeah. Just try to hear the whole movie all the way through in one sitting and that recurring, melodic little refrain will drive you nuts. It repeats and repeats, goes away and comes back again, pausing only so Hal can flip the record over, and eventually grows so irritating it will make you either surrender to it or go totally insane. Things like that are what keep me disengaged from so many of those 1960s black-and-white nudist and softcore Wishman style movies touted by Something Weird / Vinegar Syndrome / AFGA. If the library music the editor uses is good, like the robust Germanic jazz of Horror of Spider Island, or the retro-futurist loungecore or Nude on the Moon, it's something to cherish in the bad/weird movie desert island collection, the 'falling asleep or coming down from panic' section. If it's bad, like the royalty-free Phillip Sousa marches and Joplin ragtime traditionals in things like The Monster of Camp Sunshine, it gets alarmingly tedious.
And yet. With some effort, can a happy place still be found in the hands of "Manos", lite jazz flute be damned? Or celebrated? Can we make a heaven out of muzak hell?
Maybe. But succumbing to the anti-charms of "Manos" requires an embrace of that eerie feeling of when you feel a banal dream slowly turns into a nightmare the harder you try to wake up and you realize you're catching the flu. You're trapped in some restaurant foyer, waiting for your parents to pick you up, but they never come. Eventually you get stuck to the floor, time stops. Resistance to the miasma just gets you more and more stuck, like a mammoth in a tar pit, or Miriam Hopkins stuck in a bootlegger's shack in The Story of Temple Drake.
Actually you should see them both as a double feature as they're alike in weird refractive ways. While Drake is about a terrified rich girl trapped in a bootlegger's disheveled farmhouse in the middle of a swamp, unable to get a lift or walk thanks to the lateness of the hour, the pouring rain, and her date's drunken stupor; in "Manos" we have a mom trapped at a 'lodge' (i.e. three dog-eared rooms) in the middle of the Texas scrub, by the late afternoon sun and her husband's dim bulb thinking. Instead of the pull of dangerous roughie sexuality that is Jack La Rue's hooded eyes, it's the angular jet black eyebrows and furious glaring of Tom Neyman and his big black dog, enveloped by black smoke from a small fire pit. Instead of a well-meaning idiot man child handyman getting shot trying (and failing) to protect Temple Drake from being raped, in "Manos" we have an idiot man child having his hand burnt off for molesting the wives and ogling the mom. Instead of the Trigger bringing the in-shock Temple back with him and setting her up in a brothel, here we have the Master enfolding the wife and even daughter into his harem of sleeping undead. Instead of a solid eerie pre-code drama about deep south class prejudice and sexual violence, we have a shitty mid-60s 'horror' film endeavoring to be about the danger of letting your husband make important decisions. Both movies show how a probably smart, sexually alive, good, sexy woman might wind up trapped in no-exit patriarchal purgatory thanks to a dysfunctional male companion, become unsuccessfully protected by a useless idiot man-child handyman, and bent to the will of an unsavory dark-haired stranger with piercing eyes looking to expand his stable, so to speak. It's like a procession of male dysfunction, from the merely weak, to the mentally disabled, to the truly villainous.
Another saving grace of some other bad movies: charmingly bankrupt art direction. Outdoing them all to the point of absurdity are the weird random set decorations in "Manos," so spartan and run-down they become like a passive aggressive jab by or at the director (who, by all accounts, was an incompetent tyrant - but hey, it's for art). There are some cool "manos" sculptures and a painting of The Master and his dog that looks like it's still wet; there's a single empty beer bottle; a yard of rope hanging on the wall; a random white gown hung up like a curtain; a ratty trunk; a shitty couch; a small twin bed in the corner. We spend a lot of time looking at "all" these things, since nothing else is going on. We get to know them pretty well. It's not the kind of place anyone in their right mind would want to stay in. But what can you do? It's still light outside so dad is afraid to keep driving. And it's not like mom ever even tries to take over. Well, she could demand the keys and drive away with the child.... but not her. She's too conditioned by the mores of the day.
Yes, "Manos"slides you a stealth-feminist critique of bland nuclear family patriarchy, maybe right in under Warren's own nose. Despite its worst efforts, a sub-basement subtext is there for the digging. While still in the car Margaret (Diane Adelson - who is quite lovely and well-photographed --left) keeps insisting they don't stay, but it falls on husband's deaf ears:
Torgo: "You can't stay"
Mike: Well Torgo, are we coming in or not!?
Margaret: Mike! I don't want to stay here!
Torgo: You can't come in."
Mike: Well, Torgo? In or out?
Margaret: Mike!
Is that how you sell fertilizer, Hal?
I imagine the patented Hall Warren sales pitch goes something like this:
Hal: So what do ya think, I send over six bags of this fertilizer to start with?
Store owner: I don't think so, our shelves are already stocked.
Hal: Well, do we have a deal or not? The six?
Store Owner: I said NO.
Hal: Make up your mind, do I leave the six bags or not?
Store owner: Get out of here!
Hal: I have other places to be so please let me know about the six. I have them right here.
Store owner: Get out!
Hal: Come on, just make up your mind. You won't regret it.
Store owner: Ugh, fine! Just leave them and go.
Hal: OK, come get them out of my car.
There's a nice meta-parallel between Margaret's sense of futility--unable to prevent her own looming doom due to gender codes that require him to do the decision-making--mirrored in the anxiety an actress like Adelson might feel being in a film with a director like Warren. Here she is, finally landing a starring role in a film, only to discover it's being directed by an artistically-challenged 'idiot manchild' incompetent, who's sooner or later going to ask hwe to take her dress off. Whatever performance you turn in, his wrongheaded judgments are going to ensure your name is forever blighted (or, more usually, forgotten) as the film is either booed off the screen or shelved. Tainted by its bad rep, you'll never work again, or you will be back where you started, unknown.
Young married women of the era would find this same trap at home: totally dependent on some man to provide money and lodging from now until the end of time; a man she maybe barely knows, as it turns out, once the flower of love and sexual attraction begins to fade. (The moral codes of the day being what they were, you had to buy before you could try). Adelson, perhaps unknowingly, seems to tap into this frustration, she uses her actorly misgivings to convey the sense of "too-late" realization that her keen sense of danger--her feminine instinct--will always be dismissed as nonsense by the logical, blinders-on men around her.
Meanwhile dad is struggling in his own gender straitjacket--the awful responsibility of calling all the shots producing judgement-impairing stress--almost as much as she is from having none. He's conditioned to ignore her intuition and she's conditioned to only try and influence her husband's decisions, rather than taking the direct action herself, seizing the reins of her own destiny (i.e. leaving dad at the lodge if he so badly wants to stay and driving away without him).
Thus the subtext: adherence to outmoded gender norms expose the entire family to cult machinations. He's obligated to take charge whether he knows what to do or not; she's obligated to never take charge even though she does. She only has an "I told you so" locked and loaded in her heart by way of protection when the shit inevitably flies through the fan; but is it all the man's fault for being wishy-washy or hers for not being more assertive?
Blame their parents' parents' parents' parents'! They should have done more rebelling!
Considering the era this movie was made in, we can hardly be surprised at how much the patriarchy is creaking and groaning with the pressure that will soon explode it from within. Movies like The Cracker Factory and An Unmarried Womanwere still a decade away, but their nucleus had been forming and throwing the horrors of this gender slavery into sharp relief/
This Temple Drake nightmare, this "the guy who brought you is passed out or otherwise unable to accurately assess the looming danger to your honor' sense of dread, the forlorn gender-specific nightmare endangerment that opens up the broken heteronormative pair bond to outside influences and makes these movies 'scary' on at least some horror movie level. So to escape the situation her husband has put her in, she has to change masters, so to speak. She latches onto the first strong male or group that comes along that offers security, and that's usually either the church, a cult, a commune or a pyramid scheme (and really, what's the difference?). It's all MANOS.
Aside from Adelson, feminist subtext continues into the date rapey accusations of the Master re: Torgo's presumable molesting of the Master's brides during the day while they are asleep / immobilized; ("The women remember everything you say to them, Torgo. And they remember everything you do to them.").
Of course we only ever see them sleeping at night, which makes the 'dream logic' or 'inconsistency' even more palpable, since they presumably are awake at night but sleep in the day. (The whole movie goes down basically from dusk to dawn in a single nigh--at least that's in its favor). On the other hand, it's less spooky to imagine them all immobilized like dead statues all through the afternoon Texas sun, (what do the neighbors think? It's like if Karloff in The Black Cat kept all his dead wife trophy cases out by the mailbox) it makes sense on a tactile if not logical level that we only ever see them sleeping at night.
As for the brides of Manos, there is at least some unity going on with their embracing of new female blood--the argument being whether to kill the child or prep her for a life as a (hopefully future only) bride of the Master. They all agree the man should die. There is an "us" with the wives that speaks of a common consensus ("jealousy is not part of us.") On that level, at least, there is a strong matriarchal current. At most the "Master" seems rather fey kind of shrieking totem, a mix of Franklin Pangborn, Nick Cave, Tom Skerritt if he was playing the dept. store clerk on the Jack Benny Show (and drunk), and Lux Interior (from The Cramps).
WRAP IT UP
All that aside, there isn't anything compelling going on in "Manos": The Hands of Fate. There isn't a whole lot going on, period. And maybe that lack of things going on is, in the end, what is, in fact, going on. Like "the Black Lodge" in Twin Peaks, this Manos "lodge" is allegedly somewhere in a dirt road maze of Texas scrubland, probably where a nuclear test ripped a hole in the membrane that separates dream and reality. There is no sign-in desk here, no food or drink service, no keys, hallways, or more than one ratty looking twin bed. The expansive luxury of the columned back porch and its weird Giacometti ash tray-kind / brazier kind of thing for an open flame make a pointed and surreal contrast with the impoverished rooms of the lodge itself, as if a Gone with the Wind slave shack had the Tara's wraparound veranda.
Once it's so dark out it's time to wake, the Master (Tom Neyman) with his thick black eyebrows, groovy black mustache, pale skin, thin frame and ultra-groovy "Manos" cape/robe/gown/ outfit " must be served"! With toxic-looking black smoke enshrouding him, he lets loose with a lot of spontaneous praying and orating in the name of Manos. The black smoke is interesting as it's so dark it becomes like black magic marker rectangular halo, obscuring his pale face and those jet red fingers from us like he's being "X"-ed out with a black crayon by a frenzied ADD toddler. It accentuates his uncanny stare straight into--and through-- the camera, as if he's about to call you by name through the veil of time and meta-textual distance. In the one moment we know is supposed to be funny, his dozen wives awake and immediately start bickering about whether or not to kill both the man and the child or just the man, and of course to indoctrinate the wife as one of them of if there are already enough wives for the coven all while he sits on the slab, looking down at them balefully, used to it, like having a nagging wife x 12, am I right, fellas?
"Manos" may not be much but it is good for when you are really high or otherwise out of it, if you want to be totally confused and a little amused, made aware of the mechanics of film narrative now that they are not being obeyed. The usual signifier chains are disrupted, the cinematic language reduced to a cosmic slur pitched somewhere between the mescaline high notes of nightmare logic (part Bunuel / part Fulci) and the agape jaw/droopy eyelid/post-sync Remeron cushion lows (part Doris Wishman / part Coleman Francis). Actors stand around before going into action, as if waiting for a cue that never comes; 60s period photography (appreciable thanks to a recent upgrade) captures a nostalgia for your parent's (or grandparent's) home movies, vacations in purgatory; occasional bouts of intentional humor (the bickering, brawling brides, rolling around forever on white sand as swirling alto sax plays); constant surreal bits (the back and forth of the luggage); strange dead-end reaction shots, all cohere to get you past the first soothing, then irritating score, and the long driving scenes, pointless go-nowhere cuts. Nothing really connects or makes sense, but then again, neither do a lot of things in life, bro. Actions are repeated over and over as if the director is saying "again! again" to the actor without stopping the camera (the way directors sometimes do to save time, repeating a line or action inside a single take, planning to only use the best one and cut the rest out, but sometimes --as in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, keeping the repetitions). It's as if Warren shot ninety minutes of film and used it all, letting intentional and accidental comedic incompetency occur naturally. Since it's all post-synced it doesn't seem to matter as much. People make some some movement or say something as if presuming--not unreasonably perhaps-- the ends of their shot will be scissored, as they would be in normal hands. So we get moments of stillness before or after movements, the actor all but looking at the camera man after the action and waiting to hear 'cut.'
The only natural performance comes from the little daughter, who at least seems genuinely into her doggy and then her little doll. The rest of them seem like aliens from some drug-drenched cosmic waiting room, the kind of dead in-between zone that used to haunt my dreams when I had a bad fever as a child. Trapped in loops, groped by demonic giant mental patients and creepy old women while the parents dismissed my fears as nonsense. The actors feel trapped too, perhaps hoping, reel after reel, for something in the script to come along and give them a cue as to what to do with their hands (of fate) until it's finally time to go home.
Special mention too to Reynolds, who was allegedly on acid throughout the shoot (this was 1966 when it was still quasi-legal). He seems legitimately out of it, but at least that's a direction. He acts like I did when I had the DTs, back in 2016, shaking and moving with a kind of panicky wobble as if every time one of his feet left the ground his body tensed as if he was about to fly upwards or blow away. Whether suffering from either alcoholic, opiate or methamphetamine withdrawal, or all three at once, he definitely has 'the look.' The legend goes his character was supposed to be half-goat at one point, so he put braces on his legs to give him a goat-like walk. Warren never asked him to do that, nor bothered to tell him the goat idea was nixed. In some scenes he even shows up with drawn-on angry eyebrows (upper left). What a character! He seems to be doing an impression of Dennis Weaver's "night man" in Touch of Evil crossed with Walter Brennan's rummy in To Have and Have Not.
I guess, in the end, we're all Torgos on this bus. We can only endeavor to not have someone draw devilish eyebrows on us before someone burns off one of our hands and we exeunt into the desert night--an endeavor Reynolds' Torgo has clearly failed at. He's doomed for many reasons, this Torgo, but the most egregious, where he crosses to Torgo line, is molesting the wives while they sleep. Manos decrees his wives "Keel! Keel!" him. This consists of kind of grabbing him around the shoulders and fake slapping him around 100 times. Not even worn out by his slapping, he finally has his hand held over the fire until it becomes a crispy skeleton hand, then he staggers out in the desert. Presumably never to return. But the Master doesn't need to worry, as he shouts to no one in particular, "I am permanent! Manos has made me permanent!"
Permanent is right. Over too quickly yet seeming to last years, "Manos" has earned its wings in the long haul as some rare artifact both uncanny and tediously banal at the same time. And on a personal level, that sense of being trapped in the amber of strange nothing jibs perfectly with nightmares I remember from childhood, wherein my parents would leave me in a restaurant foyer, me unable to get through the revolving door, and being stuck waiting for them for years and years, in total isolation, to the point even an evil witch moving slowly towards me across the empty restaurant, is a welcome reprieve.
Take for example the side plot with a harassed couple necking in a convertible nearby, hidden in the emptiness of the scrubland. They just want to park and make out, but the cops have nothing better to do than drive all over a series of winding desert dirt paths in the middle of nowhere just to repeatedly harass them. Who was there to complain? A committee of jackrabbits? At least the cops don't even care that they've been drinking. How did the cops even find them? If there's nothing going out out there, why are the cops even patrolling? And just how did the cops know the family car had its tail light out, since it's the middle of the day?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.You can ask these questions, but just like that fever dream, you're not going to get answers. Nothing adds up in the equation of the unconscious.
But even in dreams, alcohol and drugs can provide relief. The lover have a pint of something or other, and--a big credit in my book--when they drink they wince and shiver like one does when actually drinking liquor straight from the bottle (but one seldom sees in films, Barrows' shiver in Mesa of Lost Women accepted).
The strange mix of inconsistent logic and deep-rooted malaise keep the film constantly intriguing, reminding us of the million common sense decisions most of us don't even notice have been made in the finishing of a feature film. The vintage metal hand sculptures are actually cool, they use for a fire out on the back veranda, a kind of giant brazier/ash tray/sculpture, lit ablaze with a burning kinda Giacometti-esque man in the dead center, like a giant hardened slag icicle in reverse. Even though it's clear there's no answer other than this film has not been thought through. Hal Warren probably lifted the hackneyed 'twist' at the end from a stray copy DC's House of Secrets, but had no idea how to stretch it out to feature length. Unfazed, he came up with an economical solution. Point the camera. Shoot. Never say action. Never say cut. Keep all the dead moments before or after action in the final cut. It's good enough for Warhol, it's good enough for Texas.
Manos writer-director-star Harold P. Warren may be guilty of a lot of things, but cheating with 'day-for-night' exposure tricks? Sometimes. Not even the script knows what time it is when the family first pulls up in front of the "lodge" and meets Torgo. In the shots of Torgo swaying indecisively there, decked out like a Confederate officer of the Salvation Army, it's clearly twilight: the setting sun beams in his eyes, turning his face a healthy orange. Thus the needing to stay there rather than driving in circles makes some kind of sense. But in reverse shots of the family it's clearly mid-afternoon. A smart no-budget filmmaker gets around these types of issues by shooting mostly in-doors or by just moving the camera around in a single take, or just being real fast. Despite the ridiculous convention that it's too late to keep driving and they need to stop for the night even though it's clearly the middle of the afternoon, night does eventually come and to his credit it's real night, an inky all-consuming blackness,. And unlike Grefé's core competency with Tartu, Warren's Manos never exhibit for a moment anything that feels remotely conventional or coherent.It glides like an eagle straight through the sliding door of its own set of limitations, sending a whirl of glass and feathers into the ratty living room of conceptual art. Come to it naked of expectations, alone, and thou wilt be astonished, mildly amused, maybe even relaxed. And Manos will be pleased you finally shuckered loose from your snarky robot "friends."
2. On a tragic note, Reynolds killed himself a month after filming this, I hope not because of some weird acid-fueled voice in his head told him to. He should have tried alcohol first! That's what worked for me, for awhile. And in 1966 Prozac was still 22 years away. God knows how many live that saved, for awhile.
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?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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.
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.
After a few dozen viewings of each of the three films, after age and insight and the human mind's need to find meaning even in random coincidence, it all makes sense as if some GRE series of associative thinking questions:
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 parallelclear:
MODULE 1: THE SHOT OVERHEAD LOOKING DOWN ON BODEGA BAY AFTER THE GAS STATION EXPLODES.
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
It's like the explosion knocks our POV into the sky. After all the noise and action below, up here in the sky it's quiet and peaceful. We feel strangely safe for a moment. It's as if we just joined the winning side so all our worries are over
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?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.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?.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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!!
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")
We're in a rocket that looks like a garden shack cum amateur radio operator's man cave, replete with several hammocks, set up for his buddies. The crew seems culled together from a neighborhood personal ad: Doug, a callow radio operator; Walt (Douglas Fowley), the capitalist hustler engineer, whose every line of dialogue is related to monetization (he's thinking of bottling moon mist, plugging motor oil on spec, stamping letters from the moon--he's out of control!); there's a woman navigator, Helen (saucer eyed Marie Windsor), and clo-pilot Kip (our boy of the moment, VJ); Laird (Sunny Tufts) is their cranky commander, and he's Helen's boyfriend; and--sulking peevishly for one reason or the other, Kip can't help but go for her in a big way, passive-aggressively one-upping the commander every step of the way. Questioning his orders, refusing to leave his .45 automatic in the ship, sneering at Laird's weak assertion that everything be done "by the book" and coming onto Helen every chance he gets, Kip is kind of a jerk but he's our hero, and Tufts--a drunken 'star by wartime default' he seems tailor-made for dupe status, even before he started to pass out on sidewalks and bite ladies on the thigh, and be really excoriated by the Medveds in the needlessly snide but undeniably influential Golden Turkey Awards.
Yes, yes it's CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON: a movie too cheap to wake up to its own absurdity, which is why it rules the outlier places wherein self-conscious camp imitations like Queen of Outer Space can't even get past the doorman. Though it casts a soothing spell, the occasional presence of a giant horned spider on strings pops up to wake you if you fall asleep. You could laugh at the spider's strings, but why? As Louise Bourgeois proved, big spiders is ART. Sure it's shitty, but there's something poetic too, something that comes from some cavern of unconsciousness far deeper than even your wildest dreams can reach, aided no end by the moody music of a then-just-starting-out Elmer Bernstein.
Yeah, it's all about Jory here, like it was in Midsummer. He can be just a supporting player but--like any one of us--his characters act like it's their movie regardless. Note: this is not the same as hamming. Someone like Mickey Rooney or Jerry Lewis try to steal their scenes, radiating the kind of neediness that can't stand to see anyone else getting applause, but Jory just inhabits his character to the point that character just becomes interesting, even if the character is just sulking in a corner.Very few people live their lives like they're supporting players. It's their life after all, and that what Jory does--his Kip is so beside himself with love over Marie Windsor he reacts with the news the cat women are out to kill them like a sarcastic school boy. Then he remembers that literally twisting her arm breaks the cat women's spell sos she finally tells the truth! "Don't let go, Kip!" Once again macho domination breaks the sisterhood qua-lesbian spell (I can only imagine the excited spit-takes if this film is ever shown in a feminist film studies class).
Hilariously, one truth he gets out of her is more important (to him) than any news about Alpha's (Carol Brewster) grand plan to kill them all: whom does she really love? It's you, Kip! Then he uses the opportunity to make out with Helen passionately, right in front of Laird, even as the cat women are making their move--as if determined to make Laird's humiliation complete. It's so unimportant to him by then he kills them all offscreen and just shouts earth's victory from off camera. Oh that Kip!
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)
Jimmy Cagney and Joan Blondell do their Warner Brothers grifter schtick in this half-good WB drama. It's pretty familiar stuff: hustling and flowing from the Turkish baths of NYC, to the running afoul of mobsters in Chicago, to hiding out on the shores of Marina Del Rey, to the seeking safe harbor in a small Portuguese immigrant fishing community (the kind of Podunk town that "showgirls" go for their second chances in countless Warner commodities). One wonders what the censors had to do with Blondell turning respectable to marry some terminally decent, slow-witted townie (see also: Tiger Shark, Anna Christie, The Wedding Night, and The Purchase Price, to name merely a few) whose lunkheadedness is almost like one last dig at the sanctity of--as Blondell's heart-of-gold whore puts i--"good honest decent hardworking people, which you wouldn't know anything about, Dick Jordan!"
Eventually screwball comedies would poke fun at this kind of thing, using the censor's own dopey creed against him, but for now, with the Breen office settling in to ruin movies for everyone but the kind of stern frowning women who run Dallas out of town at the start of Stagecoach, the good honest guy gets the girl. She's reformed, Dick Jordan!
Believe it or not, the big surprise here is Victor Jory as the chump. With his deep voice, looming height, the stoic poise of a stock company Sitting Bull, and gravitas that belies his then-lean years, he might have a bizarre accent and mangled fisherman syntax, and Cagney might talk faster and hustle more but Jory's tortoise wins the race, legitimately, and we don't roll our eyes the way we would at Ralph Bellamy in years to come. While such a result certainly pleased the censors (then looming ever closer), the film's subtext never sides with the forces of small town decency: the sanctity of marriage may prevail, but as Cagney walks off into the sunset, arm-in-arm with his killers, it's him we follow, even if that means going straight off the certain death that is the credits. ---
"Sex is nostalgia for when you used to want it... Sex is nostalgia for sex." - Andy Warhol
“The male has to will his sexual authority before the woman who is a shadow of his mother and of all women. Failure and humiliation constantly wait in the wings. No woman has to prove herself a woman in the grim way a man has to prove himself a man. He must perform, or the show does not go on. Social convention is irrelevant. A flop is a flop.” -- Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae
"War does something to a man, (it) takes away the gloss." - (film-within-film dialogue overheard while a sadistic sax player shocks his girlfriend by getting fellatio from his fey music producer in a Venice Cinema)-The Devil's Honey
Can only an emotion as strong as grief wake you up to the emptiness of a love based on debasement and humiliation---even if that sex is super hot (and takes away your usual baseline suicidal ideation), in the way only sex with a crazy sadistic-abusive super freak can be? Lucio Fulci knows. And he's using a distributor's brief to deliver another 9 1/2 Weeks (a big-ass hit in Europe) to answer the kind of tough questions9 1/2 director Adrian Lyne would pee himself in fear if you ever asked him. In short, if 9 1/2 Weeks is a naughty couples-only dip into Sandal's 'bondage night' (safe word posted on the wall in case you forget), Fulci's The Devil's Honey is a hard pistol butt thwacked in your face, followed by a little waterboarding in the romantic beach side surf. And not a lifeguard or a safe word for 5 kilometers in any direction.
Don't say 'it's just sex' like you'd say "it's just leprosy.' Sex is serious.
Our sex drive, it seems is itself a crazy sadistic-abusive super freak, demanding ever greater risks of safety, self-esteem and sanity just to get the same old rocks off. Safe words kill the fantasy as sure as condoms kill our 'sweet sensations.' With the intrusion of 'sanity', it's just play-acting. like sooner or later an opiate addict needs too much for his body to handle, stranding him on the shrinking sandbar between the overdose abyss and the encroaching tide of withdrawal, so too the sex addict thrill seeker has to resort to Hellraiser- style "Jesus Wept"-style agonies for the same old kicks. Our common sense kicking and scream to be let off the ride, even as our subconscious paralyzes us with aroused excitement with every clank up the ramp. The alternative in each case is the hell of boredom, of safe healthy relationships and responsible bed times, wherein every life-affirming smile of your boring ass spouse, their big box of prophylactics and safe word rolodex ever at the ready, makes me want to rip your own genitals out and nail them to the front door.
But wait, is that danger seeker even really us, or have we been taken advantage of by some sadistic lover who allies with our unconscious sex/death drive against our ego's judgement? On some level we know a lot of this abuse is all being done to please us. We forget how quickly our comfort zones shrink to noose size if left unassailed. And so we learn to hitch ourselves to loose canons, only to then complain when they roll all over our decks, crashing into mizzenmasts and crushing our toes?
In other words, is it still rape if you call them for another date the next night? That question has been legally answered since the 80s, thank god, but there's a whole other line of moral questioning, posed only in brave films like Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Duke of Burgundy, Belle du Jour and The Devil is a Woman -- films which carry a lot of Criterion cred, that go all the way around to the back door of the same thorny issue, and are all considered art. But add a Lucio Fulci film like The Devil's Honey to their midst and those film snobs start sneakin' away, quietly striking your name from their bourgeois opening invite lists. AND I'M FINE WITH THAT! You can take those lists and stick 'em in your undiscovered country.
Yes Honey, like much of Fulci's work,is too tawdry to the bourgeois types to give the same leeway they give to Bunuel or Fassbinder. And yes, it's a film where a saxophone solo is blown between a sexually supercharged girl's naked thighs in a red sound booth while his producer and engineer are out having lunch. And yes it's guilty of things that were having a last gasp back in the mid-80s, when every European filmmaker was chasing the elusive butterfly of 60 Shades of Grey, 9 1/2 Week$ but it's Fulci, not some perfume ad-music video hack. His genius stretches deep no matter what the assignment. He started out in dated sex comedies of the sort America has been largely spared (it has plenty of its own). And I think after cranking them out for the first Promise them Fatal Attraction, give them Guantanomo Beach.
If Bunuel or Von Sternberg were around today, would they know what to do without the heavy breathing hypocrisy of the censors lending their every cryptic gesture a portent at once sophomoric and heroic? When forced to bury sex under mountains of respectability, that you get sex through somehow anyway is heroic, the way drinking during prohibition was considered patriotic by many of the writing class ('hic') I have the same problem now with marijuana, when you could go to jail for having a single joint, being part of the in-crowd carried outlaw cachet. Now, you're just another consumer, so who cares? A Fulci special isn't going to shock with sex when sex isn't shocking. He's too 'gone' for that- he'd rather bypass sex altogether, to get at the ugly truths not of love but of 'what it takes to keep your partner's interest, and your own' - the sex drive is, as Camille Paglia point out, very un-PC. Nature observes no moral code aside from might makes right, it's the whole reptilian cortex kind of shit, domination and sublimation. The only way out is through awareness, real Lacanian confrontation with the hideous staring eye at the center of horror of raw, undiluted existence, where Kali rips heads off of soldiers with one set of arms, and screaming babies out of bloody wombs with the others. So. much screaming and yelling - the only way to drown it out is to scream yourself. Fucli says, hey - go ahead.
Because you see, gore and eyeball mutilation are the specialty of la Casa Fulci. Sex is something for Jess Franco or Jean Rollin, or even Joe D'Amato. Fulci wants no part of it. You can call some of his films misogynist, but he never fetshizes female suffering or the female body (beautiful faces and hair, yes, shapely figures, no) he presumes instead upon a Carol Clover kind of "Her Body Himself" projection. There's no objectification of the female form with Fulci since in nightmare logic there can. be no 'satisfaction' or cuddling. Lust is a prison where the only release from your cell is enough gratification to stop the biological belittling for a little while, it buys you some time, like a $10 tray that at least takes your gorilla jones away, to paraphrase Girl Scout Heroin Gil Scott-Heron It's sex as a hungry ghost pining for the time before it mattered.
For Fulci it's all just a dead end to the path of the 'stare' - not the 'gaze' but the 'stare' back at the gazer. Someone like De Palma emulates Hitchcock but Fulci 'one ups' that kind of scopophilia by emulating Dali instead - i.e. going right for the eye. Like Oedipus, Fulci knows that that the smallest of return stares can snowball into the murder of children (Don't Torture the Duckling) or lesbian neighbors (Lizard in a Woman's Skin). So the safe move for all humanity is if we just gouge those offenders out right now. Ah, but what movie do you see when that cloud editor's knife ravages your one good moon like a Melies rocket? You already know the answer.
Fulci makes movies for the post-envisioned, forging a detour through the dream pineal pipeline, the dreamer's magic box, wherein we can behold our own blindness with rueful amusement, fully aware of the paradox but just not giving a shit.
WITHOUT CENSORSHIP, SMUT IS NOT SEXY.
For someone like Hitchcock, the handcuffs and short leash of censorship and his own Catholic guilt, keep him 'peeping' through keyholes to the end. For him and his disciples, Catholic repression is the ultimate aphrodesiac. Hitch could funnel acres of sex into a single drag on a cigarette. With Fulci, the funnel spills out on the ground, the soggy cigarette explodes and the smoker vomiting ever last acre of sex back up and all over the floor. For Fulci, if a naked woman is presented for our gaze it's scary because she's looking back at us--to use Rear Window parlance, it's as if "Ms. Torso" suddenly whirls around and stares back up through Scotty's zoom lens in a way that would make Lars Thorwald pee his big boy pants.
"There isn't any reason, and I wouldn't want you to go around thinking that there was." - Ned Beaumont to the DA, The Glass Key (Dashiell Hammett)
In the sordid psycho-sexual chamber piece that is The Devil's Honey, the two male characters in the film straddle the disinterested whore of time, as if two aspects of the same man - one the tired, middle-aged male surgeon (Brett Halsey) with the stricken look of men my age when we finally see what lies at the bottom of the hill we're finally over (and we realize the car we're locked in has no brakes, or reverse, or door, or seatbelt, or steering wheel), and the younger, sadistic adrenaline junky colossus of the lite jazz saxophone scene who flies into a rage if his girlfriend ever wants to cuddle. In other words, he's on the upside of the hill, where the top is all he can see. He considers himself immortal, a god. Sex has made him into an ogre, the sadist, but is he like that because he 'gets' his girlfriend, knows how she sexually responds to being a 'piece of meat' to him?
On the other side there's no doubt the burnt-out (Fulci-stand in?) surgeon played almost too well by Halsey, is trying to treat his hooker like a piece of meat (1t) , or at any rate she treats him like a temporary annoyance that's over before she can figure out if she even likes it, peeling her still-warm chewing gum off the mirror on her way out - no sense wasting it, and he treats her roughly the way a crippled kitten might play at being a lion for a few seconds before shrinking back into a world of consumptive coughing. His wife meanwhile longs for some sexual contact, wishing he'd man up. She's forced to say embarrassing things like: "Treat me like a whore," and, after she leaves him: "There's no use coming back unless you take me to bed," He'd rather mope, and never thinks to take his phone off the hook long enough to get her where she needs to be.
Though he's extra stricken by her departure, he's stricken like Florence Pugh's boyfriend in Midsommar, cowed by some ego ideal he feels he needs to embody even while every fibre of his being is struggling to rid himself of her. After she leaves and Halsey's eyes say it all - he'd rather be abducted and brutalized by an unhinged hottie than deal with Corinne Clery and her big haunted pleading eyes. Needless to say, he never goes home after this,
Fans of YOR! (and who isn't?) know exactly how this feels; Clery does the insecure possessive clinging GF almost too well. She's got all the goods in all the right areas, but there's something about her that makes you want to chew off your own arm rather than wake her up and there's no clear reason why other than her neediness. Halsey is maybe a little too adept at seeming world weary and flaccid to the point we viewers long for his delivery from feeling obligated to feel bad about her wanting out. Nothing is more tiresome in a movie than a character halfheartedly trying to stop a girl from leaving him that you feel deep down he wants her gone too, but can't admit it, because he's told himself he's not that kind of a guy. We saw this most recently in Midsommar, but it goes back to the start of Antonioni's L'Eclisse (1961) where we watch the morning after some apparent all-night breakup, as some lame dude lopes miserably after Monica Vitti, until we finally rejoice when she closes the gate on him. Antonioni knows we hate this guy on principle, just like we hate the guy in Midsommar, that he drags us through it all anyway shows us that, like Fucli, he's a sadist in ways not quite associated with pain or mastery. Above all he plays against expectations, and every camera move or line is 'off' in a telling way. There's the absurd idea that there could ever be a lite-jazz sax player with a groupie (in the US especially). Eve shot of Jessica walking outside, mourning him by wearing his sweater, seems unreal. A long tracking shot as she glides down a line of white fencing on her way to the doctor's car, in the rain, is given a surreal gleam, as we seem to be gliding along after her. And when she pulls out a knife to threaten our abducted doctor - the music doesn't get predictably ominous but surges into big guitar stings and jangly 80s air rock.
It would be nice if we saw any change in Halsey's tired demeanor after this drastic turn of events. But aside from the dog scaring him so much he pees his pants, or when he watches her smash up his car with a hatchet, there's not much he offers in the way of reaction-- his eyes have that stricken sad guy look, the kind of mid-age crisis where you're over and start going down the hill - and see the spikes at the end, and there's no brakes or steering wheel, no way to unfasten your safety belt. All you can do is stare in that stricken way - and let it come.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.I tell you what though, Blanca Marsillach is rather amazing as Jessica. Singing and laughing to herself, eyes wide, staring - staring at him saying "Why did you let him die?" over and over, smiling gleefully - laughing ("so the great surgeon has peed in his pants."), Marsillach, you're one for the ages!!
"I can look straight into your eyes," she says
As she walks around the beach house, moments from her past with Johnny seem to be happening at the same time. He seems always around the corner, coming down the stairs or out from the beach; the only difference is in lighting filters. When he says "You know I always come back," we wonder if he's a ghost, until he says "I can't live without you." Dude, I wouldn't worry.
Unless we've seen some Argento movies we may find it strange she's made so violent by the death of the man who treated he so meanly. But we who've seen The Stendahl Syndrome, Bird with the Crystal Plumage, etc., we know better. We also may know if we found ourselves adopting some of our ex-lover's habits after we separate from them, drinking their brand of whiskey, etc. We unconsciously move our habits around to accommodate for the sudden absence. Here it's forcing the doctor to eat dog food. Forcing him to operate on a doll she got from Johnny that he later broke in a violent rage. ("I love you I love you. Can't you say anything else?" he shouts, as if her string is broken). Eventually her memories stray from the house into Venice, made Don't Look Now uncanny, with Fulci once again making things super weird without half trying, through the simplest of close-ups - such as the sudden appearance of a smiling Nicky.
I won't spoil the end. But of course they are in a Venice cinema, with a movie in English playing (we never see it only hear its stilted "WW1 vet coming home to find wife with another man' kind of British drawing room drama.
As someone who's suffered from depression all my life, in one way or another, and had a lot of bad psychedelic trips as well as good ones, I can vouch that nothing snaps you out of a funk and into the moment like pain and fear. Thus masochism is often a remedy for depression, and the pain of one thing can be transmuted to ease the pain of the other, a kind of focusing/exorcism. And no pain is worse than severe depression --cutting, etc. is a relief. And if all it takes to forget your marital and malpractice troubles is to suffer a massive head wound, or wake up in some strange house with a naked psycho hottie named Jessica giving you the full Guantanamo, then hey where do I sign?
And if you're Jessica, suffering to the point of madness because your now dead thrill-seeking dom boyfriend kept you constantly in that state of the "now" through abuse alternating with love and affection (like how Fulci treats the viewer), how natural it would be to spread the love/anti-love by subjecting the doctor--whose depression indirectly killed the man who was killing her depression (because the doctor was failing to cure his wife's depression he couldn't concentrate)--to an even more violent and domineering extended session of abuse.
Is this Fulci's way of looking for some kind oar artistic underpinning to his life's work, as if his art itself is waking up to the absusivness of its 'total' self? A kind of apology by way of Italian art as espoused by Camille Paglia
By the end, the meat treating will be almost completely purged from both grieving objectified girlfriend (sifting through her memories of his behavior and gradually realizing which came first, the chicken d'Sade or l'ouvo de Masoch) and the ennui-crippled midlife crisis special called Halsey-- whose wife shouted she'd rather he let his patient die in the OR than miss date night (in the end he does both)--will find himself still caught in his premature ejaculation problem (never mentioned but c'mon- you can count the amount of thrusts he gets --pants still on--with one hand, so to speak --at his age there's no excuse for that) but maybe at last - he'll have some idea how to enjoy sex without all the sub/dom booolshit..
That's really the point though of Fulci's feminine orgasm, perhaps and a sick kind of capstone. The outrage, the onus is on the woman and the complex web of her attraction and repulsion to the constant forcing of anal sex, thrusting at her from behind while she fumes and fusses as if always ready to try and surrender ("no, please, it hurts!") but determined to resist and fume. The idea of whether a masochistic part of her responds - they really need a safe word, but what are you going to do?-- feeds into the eroticism is, in Fulci's clever handling, always open to interpretation (does even he know?) Either way you can tell this lite jazz colossus doesn't really give a shit about her orgasms. He can't afford to, if he's to keep 'em coming. What a delicate dance, if that's what it is.
And maybe it is, since the moment he's not pushing or pulling, she sulks. She sulks if he abuses her and she sulks if he doesn't. She's sulking even on the ferris wheel. When he tries to be nice she pouts and fumes, angry that she had to leave him even just so he could finish recording his album. If he does anything to please her, she'll lose all interest, like the secretary in Fassbinder's Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
By the end, the cycle of abuse will be almost completely purged from both grieving objectified girlfriend (sifting through her memories of his behavior and gradually realizing which came first, the chicken al l'abuse or l'ouvo de Masoch) and Halsey's ennui-crippled midlife crisis special. As if any doubt is still in your mind, when his needy wife shouted she'd rather he let his patient die in the OR than him miss date night (in the end he does both) she loses all sympathy (get that lady a pool so she can have a pool boy, bro). Free of both of their misguided guilt (Halsey's real guilt comes from refusing to admit every fibre of his being is screaming to escape Clery's claws; and Johnny's girl's guilt over accidentally killing her animus projection before any closure can be attained), maybe they stay together out of a kind of shared post-traumatic paralysis. Maybe they've burned out each other's mopes, both realized they don't even really want the heavy trip of their previous love's insecure brutality. If abuse overrides depression, then maybe exhausted release of past self-perceptions overrides the need for any kind of resistance to the initial depression in the first place. Few negative emotions live for long when you no longer fight them.
And yet, our poor doctor will still find himself still caught in his premature ejaculation problem (it's never mentioned but c'mon) and at his age there's no excuse for that. Physician, heal thyself!
Facebook reminded me I posted the above collage 10 years ago--they must really want me to write about it. I made it, and many others, after being bowled over by Rodney Ascher's ROOM 237, for my gushing and very paranoid review of same (here) and my unconscious drive really admired it -- I was like "wow, I really get where the artist is coming from, what a perfect amalgam of the overriding themes of Kubrick's oeuvre- as filtered through mine own warped perceptions. 'The Ultimate Trip" is the realization that when you no longer have eyes, you cannot shut them. The twins are the last thing reflected as the 'I AM' - the Egyptian 'Ka' that remains as the rest is burned and devoured back into raw 'is-ness' after you are brought before Anubis by our murdered twin psychopomps.
I started collecting all my best Stanley Kubrick pieces over the years (note: any conspiracy theory stuff--please note the dates--precede the Q-Anon phenomenon - I'd never write about that stuff now, so as not to enflame the already out of control fire.)
"I think for a movie or play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so obliquely, so you avoid all pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas." .... When you tell people what things mean, they don't mean anything anymore... As a member of the audience I particularly enjoy those subtle discoveries where I wonder whether the filmmaker himself was even aware they were in the film" - Kubrick
I posit the above quote as an introduction to my first piece on this list, a praiseful awe for ROOM 237. I was going to add some quotes that counter Kubrick's, all of the 'if the filmmaker didn't intend the message to be there, then it's wrong" kind of thing. Those people who think meaning is based solely on authorial intent, what can be done with them?
(original post title: Room 237 Ripped Off Little Danny's Decal --Oct. 3, 2013)
Call the critics and theorists in ROOM 237 paranoid, overreaching, seeing too deeply, perhaps paranoid schizophrenic on some level. Go ahead! But don't mind me if I leave with them to a second location (We Pisces adore a lucid crackpot) and vamoose from your presence (we loathe a reductionist bore and the internet seems to be giving them quite a backlash to this effect). I don't have to think they're 'right' if I don't see what they're talking about. But that's art, man. I prefer an engaging crazy theory over a dry Bordwell-ian ' analysis any day. To the average bore, perhaps filmmaker Rodney Ascher is making fun of these lunatics, or worse (they think) encouraging them to die on dangerous hills. But they are so wrong. The film would just be a snarky bore if they weren't. What they illuminate in that critique is just how narrow-minded sane can be....
It’s only madness when you lack the self awareness necessary to distrust your senses.As the immortal Yogi Claude Dukenfield said, more or less: any man who believes only in what he sees should be fleeced immediately. Never give a sucker an even break. (full)
Anyone who's been to the psychedelic mountaintop (achieved the 'Absolute' as per the Gateway Process) will surely have some chills of recognition as to what happens in room 237. The room itself has cabin fever. It's slipped loose from the bonds of linear time, warping the perceptions of those who enter like an innocent needle finding itself on a skipping record, and--without a 'majority' rule of perception (during the tourist season) to block the infinite with their tunnel vision reality. It's as if the Overlook is a galaxy and 237 bathroom is a black hole, through which one is flushed down the pipes of Aboriginal 'dream-time' into the sub-basement of the sleeping anima mundi. One moves through the pipe and comes out of Marian Crane's open dilated pupil in PSYCHO, or out of the pistol barrel fired into the camera of Mick Jagger's brain at the end of PERFORMANCE and there you are, in some other movie, reacting to someone else's bloodstains. This small black hole slows down the world around it in an inescapable clockwork pentameter hypnotic in its steady unwavering mechanical rhythm. It is the earth, the sun, and the wheels within wheels revolving in Ezekiel's or 2001 spaceship. The vocalizing drones on the soundtrack work to achieve this revolving sense of hypnosis, as does the slow, dreamlike movement of the camera and actors. The whole film up to that point has--as it so often seems to be with Kubrick---a hypnotic spell: beginning with the banal pleasantries of the beginning ("that's quite a story," Jack tells the Overlook manager, a parallel to Heywood Floyd's "looks like you fellas really found something" in 2001)--notice the way Jack continually winces at his wife's banal pleasantries throughout the film--for her language is just a thing to say to make sure the other person knows you're there--the words have no meaning. But with the repetition of certain words over "gimme the bat!" or "Danny! Danny, boy!" or "my responsibilities!"Jack uses language as a tool towards some kind of catharsis --what an un-dull writer he is!! And what a good student is little Danny - chanting "Redrum!" over and over until his Jack magically comes out of the box. (full)
It might seem like I'm saying the Monarch 7 and SRA conspiracies don't exist, but to me it goes beyond something so trivial as 'reality.' The tribal initiation, the paranoid schizophrenic fantasy, the Salem Sabbath, and the the Illuminati mind control conspiracy are, in my proposed theory, all part of the same collective subconscious--which it takes self-awareness to realize isn't the same as 'reality' since it feels even more authentic than reality itself. There is a vast wilderness beyond what our ego and mainstream liner science allows as 'fact' (a term the ego doesn't even like to examine, as like HAL 9000, it refuses to see itself as it truly is --an illusory construct).
If you saw the screen you're reading this on 'as it really is' for example, solid matter would just be low frequency light-energy emanating from closely interwoven buzzing atoms. And that's no way to go through life. Our ego is our blinders that lets us avoid distraction from all the pretty sparks, but we shouldn't kid ourselves which side of the blinders lurks 'hallucination'.
Seeing ROOM 237 last week (review) is what set me off on this tangent. If you see that film you naturally have to see THE SHINING right afterwards, and then keep going, applying the paranoid deconstructions from 237 to Kubrick's other films. But I warn you, keep out of EYES WIDE SHUT with your ray of paranoid layer uncovering! Just stay out! A few luridly detailed 'recovered memories' of trauma-based ritual programming later and--whether they're true or just paranoid fantasies-- you might be wishing you could put those blinders back on and get back to your relatively Edenic cud-chaw pasture. (full)
...Pollack is brave and focused as an actor, especially for his willingness to play with moral ambiguity, to use his own aging, hairy bourgeois Zionist paranoia-engendering monstrous 'anal father'-ism as an example of what William Burroughs once described as "the cold, dead look of heavy power." Tapping into a common racist/classisct/ageist phobia that rich old (semitic) Svengalis are stealing off our shiksa Trilbys through the use of their gypsy magic. Like Christophe Waltz in BASTERDS, Pollack uses deep, relaxed but heavy nasal breathing to make you feel very close to him, as if he's leaning over your shoulder, and you don't want him to be; you feel like he's stealing something from you and you're afraid to ask for it back, or even what it is. There's something incestuous about the way we're conditioned to accept him as a "good guy" via his ease with signifiers of wealth. He seems to turn the viewer into a prostitute through his nostrils and through his use of anonymous but gorgeous younger women for sex, the way most people wearily order pizza, "again" for a dull dinner. (contrast with him talking about a prostitute "with a mouth like velvet" and dating a younger woman (!) in Woody Allen's (!) Husband's and Wives - coincidence? Not to conspiracy paranoiacs (who might be 'right') like David Icke!
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.But with that heavy serpentine weariness comes the knowledge that as a representative of the power elite (the modern equivalent of the monstrous cannibal incest father of old, killed by Zeus, wiped out by the flood), it's his job to posit himself as "the one who enjoys," to situate the rest of us as outsiders in the fantasy realm so that we can keep ourselves in a distracted orbit around the real and thus preserve the gravitational field by which society functions (Slavoj Zizek.... will explain). This is a man who lives his pleasures close to the hairy surface; he's tactile. He forces us to imagine him having sex via his physical looseness, his hairy chest exposed. Cruise by contrast is repressed, i.e. 'normal' - he's not used to being touched unless it's in a mundane sexual way by his wife (and really he just wants an excuse to get off to himself in the mirror and have it not be gay or narcissistic), and like us, he worries the whole world is a continual orgy the moment his back is turned. He can't help but feel that he, and he, alone, is the odd man out, the one everyone hides their stash of libidinal enjoyment from, even when they're fully undressed in his doctor's office. The truth is, he keeps getting offers to go 'over the rainbow' but he continually chickens out., (full)
"... A key aspect of the fantasy-traversing orbit is the desire to 'retrace one's steps,' to find the fork where you and your fantasy parted ways (for we always feel that we were once living within the fantasy rather than orbiting outside it, even though we never really have, nor can we, no matter how convincing our maskies). In EYES, this is what Cruise's Dr. Bill does the next day after his orgy dismissal; the return is always built into any orbit, with the illusion of linear time transcended. Danny retraces his steps in the Overlook maze snow; the star child returns to earth, presumably to drop down into the lap of the very same ape who had tossed the bone up at the start of 2001; Alex re-encounters all the people he hurt in the first part of the film; Humbert's visit to the pregnant, bespectacled, de-sexualized Lolita mirrors his visit to her mother in the beginning, and the shooting of Quilty both opens and closes the film. Kubrick loves a long orbit.
This is why the ultimate realization scene for Dr. Bill is when the odious Ziegler begins to back up over his 'charade' story and he realizes he's met a man even more of a fake than he is. That's what nails him, more than the mask, which is just another reminder of these rich elite's powerful omnipresence, but that it could be Ziegler himself who is the mastermind of all the things, right down to the call girl O.D, which may be fake anyway to scare him off. Is anything real at all? In clouding the issue Ziegler shows Dr. Bill the very painting of his fear, the refractions created by falseness and the empty cold of his cocksure grin, which its smug wearer presumes sweetens any amount of evasive bullshit. (Full)
Like most of Kubrick’s work, Lolita (1962) reflects this gradual rotation ever further into the simulacrum but from an earlier epoch; going from the refinements and closeted perversities of old Europe to the postmodern “no tell” motels of modern America. There are three levels of time passing in our filmic discussion: the span of time since Lolita the film was released, the span of time of the actual movie (2 ½ hours) and the time spanned in the movie’s mise en scene (as in “3 years later”). Kubrick in this case ingeniously unites all three. As the film progresses, it moves from shrill bedroom farce to tense Freudian scenes of insane jealousy, the film gets darker, moodier. The progression is similar actually to another of Mason’s roles, that of the cortisone-maniac dad in Bigger Than Life. The monstrousness of his actions becomes apparent only later, when he’s struggling to keep his mask on in the face of all the subterfuge and self-fulfilling jealousy. Simultaneously, Lolita the film heralds our movement as a world into a sexual revolution, using its heavy bourgeois rep to smash through weakened small town idealism, and rockieting the male libido into a simulacrum fog.
Over the passing decades this film's been many things to me, but this last viewing it seemed to be about art vs. censorship and the way the promoters of 'childhood wonderment' and the Peter Pan 'if you can dream' aesthetic--the Norman Rockwell fishing boy logo of Dreamworks and the mouth agape wonderment of E.T.-- are the both the exploiters of children and culprits who bring us the hyper-awareness of the dangers of pedophilia. The two are entwined, a double exposure of exposing, like a cobra with the head of a tail-eating mongoose. The more you pine for and prize a 'perfect nuclear family' the more pressure-cooker force you put on those latent incestuous, pedophile dark desires. Pedophilia is the ultimate evil, after all, the one crime that makes you an instant target in prison. It goes deeper than Oedipus, down into the murky swamp behind the Bates Motel, and it is embedded in the fabric of our modern trend towards the deification of children and their 'innocence.' Is it any accident that the two main architects of this hypocritical saintly children-izing in the early 1980s were Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg? (full... of something )
My granny is cruising through her 90s in a warp that sucks me in by number. All through the long visits I felt death pull me like gravity, like time pulls the meat off a chicken bone, like it pulls the planets along behind it as it sucks and roars along, like stringed tin cans on a baptism-cum prom-cum wedding-cum-funeral car, or a chained together lineage on a pirate ship, condemned and chained in order of age, with the eldest thrown overboard, their children watching the disappearing link of chain, powerless to stop its disappearing.
and then all just raw conscious thoughtlessness - a dull roar of white static, in which you may at times think you hear the ocean, or vice versa... all voices that you hear are your own, you realize, in this 2001-Kubrick room of the self [you knew I had to shoehorn that in here-EK 2023], and outside that, the serpent swimming through the blue veins of your aging relations, swimming both towards you and away, towards you and away...
I've been unable to leave the house, no matter where I go. (EK - 2008)
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 everythingI 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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:
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!
Getting into the pagan dark magic of the earth, air, fire, and water is as easy as doing almost nothing.... and as hard as doing less. Just like the truth about alien involvement in our evolution is--despite the mountains of evidence (19 seasons of the History Channel's Ancient Aliens and counting--is almost impossible to fully accept consciously, our do nothing unconscious won't let go of it. That's because our unconscious--the basement of our mind--has connections... to the anima mundi.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
And hey -- the 20th century brought us new eleements to personify, most notable HEDORAH, the pollution elemental, and
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. 
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? 
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.
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. 
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. 
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