Quantcast
Channel: Acidemic - Film
Viewing all 428 articles
Browse latest View live
↧

Pre-Code Capsules: STAMBOUL QUEST, MAN IN POSSESSION, JEWEL ROBBERY, ONE WAY PASSAGE, THE WORLD CHANGES

August 13, 2014, 4:17 pm
$
0
0
THE WORLD CHANGES
1933 - dir. William Wellman
***
One of the punchier gutsier entries in the 'tycoons through the ages' sagas that unfurled tight and fast on the pre-code Warner's lot, this tale of the bug-eyed entrepreneur Chicago stockyards' founder reeks of greatness. It begins in the 1850s when Aline MacMahon and Donald Cook settle in the Dakotas, so isolated that they don't even learn about the Civil War until its over. Paul Muni plays their ambitious son who leaves for Texas to round up wild steer and drive them north to the railroad, setting up stockyards with Guy Kibbee in Chicago because from there they can ship east and west on the railroad; but Muni keeps maximizing profits and re-investing until he invents the the refrigerator car, so all the slaughtering can be done at home (as opposed to shipping live cattle) and the stench and profits rise and rise. McMahon looks on dolefully from afar, for truly no man was ever meant to have that much money, anymore than cattle aren't meant to grow up knee deep in their own shit.

She's right, it is monstrous, and Muni's kids grow up snotty and spoiled and his snob wife (Mary Astor) goes Lady Macbeth over the realization her privileges are paid for in enough oceans of abattoir run-off, shit and blood commingling and Muni wading in with a bucket to collect the pools of fat off the surface to feed back to the stock. The stench of her husband's clothes reaches even their tony suburb, and every morning he's still stomping through the manure and mud and measuring ways cattle can be crammed in closer and closer to make more and more money and more and more. And Chicago gets bigger and bigger and one is very grateful this isn't in color or smell-o-vision.

Only at Warners and only in the pre-code era would a film about the industrial revolution be so anti-capitalism and pro-local growers, and not preachy or sentimental even as the century turns. I'm sure the film was labeled communist propaganda in the 50s and forbidden for re-release except maybe in the Soviet Union. Muni (later blacklisted) gets hammy in spots but his energy is infectious; every nuance and spittle-flecked outburst is measured from zero to sixty like inexorable slow strangle clockwork as we watch him age through the Great Depression and in the end Aline McMahon swoops in to rescue the only two grandchildren who seem COME AND GET IT divided by UGETSU-level ready to return to McMahon's old school co-op. If you're a fan of McMahon from her frequent gold-digging with Joan Blondell and Ginger Rogers, this will be an eye-opener, her grace and good humor as the frontierswoman is such that not only can you believe a whole community would spring up around her,  you have a hankering to leave the city yourself, and find your own patch of land and some goats to call your own.  If only Monsanto would loosen our chains, but that won't happen 'til the last gasp of the earth is copyrighted and God sued for infringement. Seven generational thinking man. Our great great great great great great grandchildren will one day appreciate our careful recycling of paper and plastic through all eighteen of their mutant orifices. And Paul Muni and Paul Robeson will rise from their graves, like a thousand automated plowshares, like the commie rats they are!
--------
ROAD TO SINGAPORE
1931 - dir. Alfred E. Green
***1/2
Deep in the sweltering tropics a colony of W. Somerset Maugham-style prudes gossip about homewrecker Hugh (William Powell); he left Rangoon with one of the colonist's wives and has returned alone. Phillipa (Doris Kenyon) is the imported wife realizing her uptight doctor husband (Louis Calhern) isn't a man and a lover but "a machine of cold steel, as cold as the instruments you use to probe the bodies of unconscious patients on operating tables... " But is Phillipa in love with Hugh, or just using him as a tool to pry her out of her husband's grave-like surgeon hands? That they have the language to bring this point up themselves let's you know this is more 'adult' than the average soapy triangle. It's one of those adultery in the tropics stories that comes ripped from the commonwealth country club ala Maugham's THE SEVENTH VEIL and THE LETTER, wherein the heat of the tropics and a cold British husband leave a wife ripe for infidelity, and the censors are just relieved the other man is white. And what else are the ceaseless throb of native drums for if not to loosen white people's inhibitions?


Powell is great in a complex role where he's not entirely sympathetic; as the husband, Calhern nails the ferocity of the cuckolded, too intelligent to really buy into his own inflexible moral prudishness. As his younger sister, Marian Marsh does wonders even with very unflattering riding breeches, and Kenyon is surprisingly warm and sultry once she lets her hair down, the lighting is rich in that exotic pre-code way where palms and ferns cast long shadows, and the panama hats glow, and the hiss and muffling of the primitive sound recording compels everyone to speak slow and measured and some people don't go for that. But I love it -1931 is the great herald of what's the come, the air is thick with black and white magic, the girls with their little Norma Shearer arms bare and wearing sexually draped lingerie, backless gowns, and/or post-sex kimonos. What the speaking and movements lack in dramatic fluidity though, they make up for in daring. Marriage wasn't just a sacred institution in uptight southern states back in 1931, and being unafraid to leave a bad marriage and run off with William Powell without having to shoot yourself later showed real courage (for both character and studio) rather than loose morals.

MAN IN POSSESSION
1931 - dir. Sam Wood
***1/2
The title is a quaint term for a deputy sheriff's assistant in London, since part of the job is remaining at a house that is in foreclosure or otherwise unable to pay its debts, making sure the debtor doesn't try to sell their stuff and run off with the money. Since it's based on a PJ Wodehouse play you can guess the rest: Robert Young stars as a well-groomed but criminally under-funded Cambridge alum, whose fist assignment is at the posh house and furnishings of an allegedly rich socialite (Irene Purcell) about to marry his brother. Naturally they fall in love. "I'd lie for you, I'd steal for you, I'd even work for you," was the line that got the biggest laugh out of me, but my jaw was on the floor after the surprisingly frank sexual hook-up. Purcell has lovely little bare arms, reminiscent of Norma Shearers. They loved little alabaster arms back in those days - and she's pretty damned sexy. There's a really risque fade-out and loads of clues making light of the fact that 'the butler indeed did it.' It's a great PG Wodehouse story given pre-code treatment and a play-ish but nonetheless engaging style.


Wodehouse can be tough to get just right in American hands, it's 90% Noel Coward and 10% Benny Hill. As he proved the same year with Shearer in Coward's PRIVATE LIVES, Young takes to such terrain absurdly well, like he never quite, but almost, gets the jokes, which is the perfect tone for Wodehouse. The small but tight cast includes C. Aubrey Smith as the harumphing mercantile class father and his Reginald Owen as one of those stuffy stooges with an umbrella that would eventually be played strictly by Ralph Bellamy. Beryl Mercer is the long-suffering mother; Charlotte Greenwood is a surly maid and Alan Mowbray the rich womanizing Sir Charles. He deserves better than to be dicked around just because he dicks around. After all, he tips Purcell's servants handsomely and bankrolled 'The Dump,' Godfrey Parks' nightclub, and if the whole concept of a cultured gentleman winding up getting married to his butler doesn't remind you of MY MAN GODFREY (1936) then go see it again at once. Alan Mowbray, the best friend a bum ever had.

JEWEL ROBBERY
1932 - dir. William Deterle
***1/2
Directed by William Dieterle with maximum class and reefer humor, JEWEL ROBBERY (1932) is a gem about a dashing jewel thief who catches the eye of bored thrill-seeking diplomat’s wife (Kay Francis) in scenic pre-Nazi Vienna. It’s the high class people doing naughty things sort of European froth that Hitler’s war machine would soon blow off the beery surface of the earth's frail mug, but here it still sparkles and bubbles and everyone is high, literally, since Powell passes out joints to his robbery victims. You’ll think you’re high too when you see longtime sourpuss character actor Clarence Wilson smoke one of these thinking it’s an ordinary cigarette, and Francis will blow your mind with her weird V-shaped smile and eyes that glaze over with the thought of being kidnapped by the dashing Powell. Their chemistry is so electrically charged you feel like they’re almost kissing each other even when they’re on opposite ends of the room.

ONE WAY PASSAGE
1932 - dir. Tay Garnett
***1/2
The chemistry between them was so good in JEWEL ROBBERY it's small wonder Warners re-teamed them the same year in ONE WAY PASSAGE. Almost a sequel to the first film, with Powell a caught criminal sailing home to face execution and meeting Francis and falling in love... unaware her character is dying and only has a few weeks to live. The chemistry between Francis and Powell is electrifying yet urbane and smooth, like a very expensive cognac warmed by the fire.

Romantic comedies nowadays are full of children in grown up bodies, trying to make mothers out of each other before the love wears off and once again grow lost in unconscious consumerism and vehement, self-righteous denial. This film by contrast, is laden with grown-ups, and not a drop of stuffy morality taints their beautiful inherent decency as they walk to their deaths like it’s just another ocean voyage. One of the best recovered jewels in the TCM canon, it’s a testament to humanity’s lack of progress in the past 70 or so years that characters this warm, dashing, cool, romantic, witty, sweet and clever– “whole” people full of confidence, bravery and emotional gravitas--are so rare in movies. Romantic comedies nowadays are full of children in grown up bodies trying to make mothers out of each other so they can cry in a lap again and not have to grow up and thus, presumably, avoid having to face their own mortality. ONE WAY PASSAGE, by contrast, is laden with grown-ups, and not a drop of stuffy morality taints their beautiful inherent decency as they walk to death like it’s just another ocean voyage. Aline McMahon and Frank McHugh are the comedic second leads and great as usual, with Warren Hymer the cop who turns out to have a heart, et al.'

STAMBOUL QUEST
1934 - dir. Sam Wood
**1/2
If you're a fan of TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934) imagine if that annoying college boy in Carole Lombard's train car--the one Barrymore convinces to stomp off, "without a word, like the Reverend Henry Davidson... in RAIN."-- only pretended to leave, and proceeded to keep ardently wooing until finally, against her better sense and our wishes, she falls in love with him. That's STAMBOUL QUEST, a film that dances ably along the censor's razor (the code took effect sometime in '34 so most films that year are either way racy or suddenly chaste). STAMBOUL seems somewhat risque so maybe it made it under the wire. Loy wears a fabulously slinky dress in the climax, which leaves us with at least for awhile the happy notion that Brent really has been shot by a firing squad. Hinting at the steep 'price one must pay' as a hot female spy in Austrian counter-intelligence, we learn right off what a conniving ruthless intellect she is when she starts the movie ratting out Mata Hari for falling in love with a Russian officer (Ramon Navarro in MGM's MATA HARI with Garbo; Victor McLagen or Von Sternberg's far-cooler 1931 version, DISHONORED). Of course, Frauleine Doktor' jinxes herself with pronouncements like that. Too bad for us it's the naive whimsicality of George Brent that woos away from trapping double agents, and he treads all over her machinations with his muddy American bungler feet. Ah well, Loy's gorgeous and operating several levels of above everyone else in the picture before falling for him. Maybe next war.

↧
Search

Micro-Manager Munchausen: THE STRAIN, SHARKNADO 2: THE SECOND ONE

August 16, 2014, 10:34 am
$
0
0


Heroes used to dread their appointed hours, would resist the call, dart around asking for help from civilians who all suddenly turn coward or complacent. They'd blame poor marksmanship, or their Quaker faith, or Ingrid Bergman sticking them for the cost of a train ticket back in Paris, or all the droids or cows needing repair back... home, as their flimsy excuses to hold off on heroism until some Nazi made it... personal. But now, in today's crowded sci fi/horror climate, well, just try and stop the Munchausen Chicken Little, especially if he's a deadbeat dad with a history of micro-management heroism that's already cost him his wife, house and perhaps even joint-custody because he's so busy trying to solve every little crisis he passes on the street (see my term proximal morality) they never bother to notice their family standing around, embarrassed. These crazy 'heroes' run around like William Shatner with gremlins on the plane, grabbing lapels of bewildered pedestrians and blocking ambulances of overstretched EMTs. They've only ever been the villain in two movies, STRAW DOGS and THE LEGO MOVIE --and in one most people presume he's the hero and in the other he eventually sees the light. But in two 2014 TV events--THE STRAIN, the new FX show from the mind of acclaimed sci fi horror maestro Guillermo del Toro, and SHARKNADO 2: THE SECOND ONE, the Syfy original sequel far inferior to the original due to its attempt to be 'in' on its own joke--the micro-managing 'heroes' are just as if not more obnoxious than the bad guys in LEGO and STRAW, they're the good guys from the get-go. Are we being led to root against a humanity that prefers to let itself be destroyed rather than heed the squawks of these unbearable Chicken Littles?

First, Der Strain: NYC health officer Dr. Ephraim Goodweather (Corey Stoll) refuses to listen to his superiors when dealing with a vampire plague-infested plane that lands in JFK. Most passengers dead, four survivors anxious to get home and start spreading the 'news.' Meanwhile a savvy old Jew pawnbroker tries to advise Dr. Goodweather because he alone stopped the last plague with his magic sword cane, but old Ephraim ain't listening. The man's arrested for having the sword in an airport terminal, though last I heard that's not illegal. Still, right off the bat he's pretty much useless, unable to stop the plague unwilling to stop trying.


Meanwhile the bad guys (led by Thomas Eichorst, left) are fairly cool. For one thing they honor their deals, pay in cash, do their research, spends more time and money than Tootsie on make-up to make himself presentable every morning and his urge to see the world end is genuine, indicative of being turned on by the forthcoming apocalypse. Hell, I can't imagine how, planet custodianship-wise, they could do any worse than us!

Goodweather disagrees, or rather hasn't thought that far ahead, being obligated by his little taste of power as CDC agent, even to the point of ignoring the edicts of his superiors to back down, but while inviting himself to tromp all over the rights of others he also attempts to juggle into his busy schedule a hearing over joint custody for his 'yawn' little son, though he proves his wife right by always being late to court and treating his son like a special needs first grader. There's a word for this type of guy, Munchausen by-proxy, or rather, as I call them, 'dads of great adventure'. They can't admit their insecurity and ambivalence about their roles as second class citizen in the modern family unit (where mother has the power and father is little more than an older brother/manservant constantly found wanting by the privileged mother-son pair bond).

Naked white/grey monsters are always played by limber dancers
Anyway, we know from the start that Goodweather's right to want to quarantine these survivors--there wouldn't be a show if there wasn't good reason--but at the same time, we would hate to be unable to get home after a lengthy cross-Atlantic flight, forced to wait in a sterilized plastic cube for weeks while he tinkers with out blood samples. Plus, why would we root for him to stop the spread at this early a date?l I love a lot of Del Toro's art design; I admire his willingness to kill children (no one cheered louder than I when he had the same expository science lesson-receiving kid duo we'd seen nosing around the museum after hours in THE RELIC, get slaughtered in MIMIC), but I've always winced when he goes too far with his saintly family mere-life bullshit! And the whole business with the giant worm tongue leaping out of the monster's faces is so familiar, thanks to his using it in MIMIC and BLADE II. Even Paul W.S. Anderson has picked them up for RESIDENT EVIL.


Meanwhile there's this idiot woman who's husband is infected and he's barking at her to run, their dog's blood dripping from his mouth and she just stands there like a moron, frozen in 'terror' well within striking range of his forked tongue. He's telling her to run and we're screaming at the screen for her to run and she just stands there as if waiting for a cue until we wonder how she ever lived past the second episode. But then the next scene she's burying the dog and after the neighbor complains because he still hears growling she pushes him into the shed to feed her husband so we're back into thinking she's awesome. It's that kind of show, and typical of del Toro, for every corny Mexican soap moment there's two kickass touches.


Last year, The Asylum (the offshoot of Concord which was the 80s version of New World, i.e. 70s Roger Corman) gave us the surprise meme hit SHARKNADO (see: Wronger than the Storm). Now we got the the sequel, bound for much tweeting and therefore of great interest to fading actors in need of being seen by the young 'constant-texter' generation lest they fade away entirely. Thus, every middle aged B-lister realizes it's the ideal spot to cameo their new chewed-up faces and bloated bodies and thus stand a better chance of being recognized at next year's Comic-Con. Aye, matey, to trod bravely before the green screen curtain and be eaten in style knowing for sure your every flubbed line will become 'classic' in the annals of camp, a hundred winky tweets for every line spoken!

But there's the rub, for in courting cult camp what crap may come.

Chicken Little of the Sea
What's most glaring right off is how the decision to drop it all down into NYC is a big mistake, like allowing flash bulb photography during your unveiling of Kong, the 8th wonder of the world. There's just no room on our crowded streets for one lone nutball to run loose on Broadway without inflicting millions in damages. We start off right in the thick of it as Fin (Ian Zering) and his re-united family (ex-wife Tara Reid but they're working it out, and his son and daughter) stalked by a sharks on a plane. Fin ever the hero, gets the plane down safely, but no one bothered to tell him that NYC doesn't need some west coast beachfront bartender micromanaging our 9/11-hardened network of first responders... and anyone who mentions needing to build a bomb within minutes of his arrival should be arrested at once, not helped. It's tourists like him that make us NYC-ers so angry. When disaster strikes he doesn't find shelter, or take an Ambien and go to sleep 'til it's all over, he runs all over town, tying up traffic trying to find the other members of his traveling party and building homemade bombs to throw into the win. No NYC person would follow this guy around for there clearly is no shark problem unless he's there, the shark magnet.

I know our cops have problems with quick response in certain neighborhoods but not, my friends, in midtown. It's suspicious. No one is attacked unless seen first by Fin as he races past, clocking them for b-list celeb status (included in his posse: Vivica Fox, Kelly Osbourne, Judd Hirsch, Judah Friedlander, Biz Markie, Downtown Julie Brown, Billy Rae Cyrus, Rachel True, Andy Dick, Mark McGrath), at which time they're either devoured by a passing shark, or nearly so and thus join his parade. Once they are within a certain radius of the man, their lives are in jeopardy unless they follow him like children following Mighty Joe Young out of the burning orphanage, while Matt Lauer, Kelly Ripa, and Al Roker look on from the TV screen, rolling with the sharknado concept as a fact barely worth an eyebrow raise. Just avoid making seal-like movements and you're safe. But Fin is nothing if not a seal.

His rescuing-addiction was perfect for LA in the original because he had to protect the valuable clientele of his beachfront bar, and it's at a beachfront bar, we can imagine, that the notion of a sharknado first developed in some slashed screenwriter's mind. Who amongst us hasn't drunk deep from a sandy beer after a long day body surfing and imagined how badass it would be if sharks came through the window with a huge wave and started chasing people around the pool table, or swam in the air, or that the rec room floor was water so you had to jump from couch to couch. That bar owner Fin was an ex-lifeguard gave him an excuse for his chronic rescuing, and as a deadbeat dad his desire to rescue his family was offset by the forward momentum and the Hawksian sense of real time forward momentum, stretching the action across L.A. from the beach to the hills, over the course of one well-modulated real time wave of inland momentum. Since his party came from a bar it made sense they were armed and brave, and so the vibe in the getaway car was like one of those great drunken parties wherein everyone at the bar becomes instant tribe and marches off to some second location to go skinny dipping or mount a keg party. There's the drunken regular (John Heard), and Fin's barmaid, Nova (Cassandra Scerbo - above left) who has the hots for him, plus his wingman Jaason Simmons, racing with the inward tide of a gigantic wave rolling in first through the bar windows, and then up the hill, filling the streets and stalled highway traffic with sharks and flotsam, leading to exit ramp winch rescues, and various members of his party being eaten, such as his daughter's douche bag boyfriend (and there was much rejoicing) as the shark water fills living rooms but leaves driveways merely damp as if from a distant rain machine.  And a slightly busted by L.A. sun and time and too much make-up clogging the pores, Tara Reid, as the embittered ex-wife who still has some vague torch for old Fin - setting up a weird comedy of remarriage).


In short, SHARKNADO had a lot of things going for it, as a Corman film it conjured up the good old days of movies like ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, or CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA. In short, it turned its budgetary limits into an assett, which SHARKNADO 2's NYC location simply will not permit. A tornado is practically impossible in a dense grid of skyscrapers anyway, and the sense that in L.A. no one is really "home" is and forever will be lacking in NYC's overcrowded milieu. New York is too real, too concrete, there's no time for grandstanding or defying gravity. Without the Hollywood vibe enhancing the CGI phoniness, this sequel is less like a surprise so-bad-it's-great entry amid a deluge of crappy CGI monster-bad weather hybrids and more a 'too aware everyone is tweeting about me' shitshow, as prefab and empty as a string of commercials for Shark Week during a Jay and Silent Bob film edited for content and watched on TNT by a mid-life crisis-having divorcee pothead after coming home alone from lunch at the Wal-Mart parking lot Hooters. Are we kids or what?

But we still have the original and the great untold shark story present in Tara Reid's weary face as the wife who steps back in, leaving the far more interesting Nova out of the sequel. There's no escaping her as she recovers in the hospital while Fin runs around building bombs and leaving suspicious packages, and hers, as well as most of the cast in the sequel, provides the real scary story, one of transformation and horror: a hundred young and glowing b-list actors went into the sun twenty years ago and came out looking like bad taxidermy. Botox and collagen took the rest. Anyway, they delivered the bomb.

↧
↧

TCM Pre-Code Alert: Thurs. is Lee Tracy Day

August 20, 2014, 8:19 am
$
0
0

Fans of pre-code raciness, get your hands on a remote and press some 'record' buttons as you scroll ahead on the channel guide. One of the key actors of pre-code is getting his own full day on TCM. Alongside Warren William, Tracy is one of those guys who is largely forgotten by mainstream film lovers but revered by those in the pre-code know. Unlike Williams' whose like the Big Bad Wolf personified, Tracy takes some getting used to by the casual observer, perhaps because the Lee Tracy 'type' led to several imitators none of whom matched his mix of spooked nerve, newsprint panache, constant jiving, and cackling rapid patter. So don't let the imitations turn you off --Tracy's the craziest, sharpest, most cynical actor of the code's all-too-brief era:

THURSDAY - August 21st. 2014

2:30 PM - 
THE STRANGE LOVE OF MOLLY LOUVAIN
1932 - N/A 
I haven't seen this but I heard its ducky, or as the pundits say 'pre-code racy'- Tracy's frequent Warner's co-star Ann Dvorak is one of those girls who rises and falls (like Suzy Lenox or Blond Venus) on the social ladder while Tracy probably journalizes her or tries to stab her with a pen. Can't wait to see them both bleed newsprint even if Dvorak was never meant to be a platinum blonde. Flash! Directed by Michael Curtiz!

3:45 PM
THE HALF-NAKED TRUTH 
1932 - **1/2 
Here's Lee Tracy doing what he does best: motormouth speed-talking through long scenes of unscrupulous flim-flam: first, as a carny barker hawking Lupe Velez's uninhibited fan dancer from the tropics; second, hawking a blonde hotel maid who partners with Eugene Palette as wild, untamed nudists. Or is it reverse? I fell asleep, but TCM's print was too washed out, or was that me? Palette as an ersatz wildman is enough of a consolation that this wasn't written was by Ben Hecht, so probably lacks gallow's wit. There's also Frank Morgan as a Broadway impresario who eventually winds up in bed with Velez, who by then has let fame go to her harridan head, thus opening himself to Tracy's blackmail, i think, and the dialogue is great (Sample: secretary: "Imagine anyone daring to question your veracity." / Tracy: "Such language!"). Some rare moments of real connection exist, though, like at the end, like the cool bro-to-bro reunion of Pallette, Tracy, and a handful of sawdust which Tracy pours through his fingers asking "can you imagine this stuff running though your veins?" Tracy's own painful awareness of the cliches by which he's bound make me think he was far more than just an amphetamine-tongued con artist, he was also a drunk, and therefore a poet.

5 PM
LOVE IS A RACKET
1932 - ***1/2
Douglas Fairbanks Jr. stars in this one as a columnist who tangles over Francis Dee with generic gangster Lyle Talbot; fellow scribes Tracy and Dvorak are hep enough to know their boy's getting taken to the cleaners by slumming Dee, but they keep their yaps shut like true pals. Dialogue is pitched at such a darkly cynical height that censors ears clearly weren't fast enough to catch it: "Looks like you been up at Sing Sing looking at a burning!" is a typically grim remark, and sex is everywhere, as when Tracy and Dvorak are out at a nightclub eating dinner and she says "if you loved me half as much as you love that steak I'd break down out of self-pity" (meaning throw him a sympathy fuck, yo!) Fairbanks describes Dee--to her face!--as having "a beautiful can." and that she's "as pretty as a little red wagon." Lots of phone calls are made and received. The TCM print looks real nice. There's nothing quite like this film's unambiguously cynical ending, the sort of loose-ended defiance of the crime-must-pay adage only possible in pre-code conditions. William Wellman directed it like a punch to the gut.

6:30 PM - 
TURN BACK THE CLOCK
1933 - N/A
Another one I haven't seen, but it's from my favorite movie year, 1933 and one of my favorite screenwriters, Ben Hecht. Lee Tracy imagines what his life would be like if he made different choices, got to avoid the mistakes etc. etc. Don't we all fantasize about that? But seldom do we do it during the Great Depression when our tobacco shop is failing on us. Even if it is MGM, man, it's Hecht!

8 PM
BOMBSHELL
1933 - ****
Playing a loose conglomerate of Clara Bow, Thelma Todd, and herself, Jean Harlow comes through in metatextual spades here as an overworked MGM starlet, earning her place at the top of the spitfire heap with rapid fire slang-filled dialogue pouring in satin torrents from her tongue as she goes zipping, 8 1/2-style, through a carnival of blustery studio heads, make-up artists, insurance fraud grifters, drunken joneser fathers (Frank Morgan), an accented gigolo lover, an infatuated director (Pat O'Brien), and Lee Tracy as, what else?, an unscrupulous publicity agent.

10 PM 
BLESSED EVENT
1932 - ***1/2
If you've been always a bit cold on Lee Tracy this is the film that will make you warm up. Here he's like Jimmy Cagney crossed with an adenoidal scarecrow as the quintessential fast-talking gossip columnist, ushering in a new low in journalism via the ratting out of 'blessed events' - i.e. children born less than nine months after the couple's been married, or outside of wedlock, or etc. Remember when that was a scandal? Me neither. Highlight: Tracy bluffs Allen Jenkins' mob hitman via a monologue about an electric chair execution he witnessed that brings Barrymore in TWENTIETH CENTURY-worthy manic pantomime to some balls-out ghastly places, such as his imitation of the wobbly walk to the chamber, his voice cracking with hysteria, body spazzing sharp and jerky like a Zulawski gangster as he describes the anguish of waiting in hopes of a reprieve, puking up the last meal, the rigor mortis and hair burning. It's the sort of thing that only the pre-codes could delve into, and this delves so deep you're quaking along with Jenkins by the end, and all traces of your dislike of Tracy have been obliterated.

Roy Del Ruth directed and the rapid patter pace is awesome except when Dick Powell's lame songs slow things down. Edwin Maxwell, Ned Sparks, Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins, Ruth Donnelly, Jack La Rue, and Rita Cunningham all come over to the table, adding plenty of moxy. Add un-PC dialogue ("Do you know many Jews there are in New York?" - "Oh, dozens!") and a wild-eyed girl 'in trouble' played with deranged ferocity and desperation by a ragged-looking creature named Isabell Jewell (above), and you have a whipsmack pre-code that makes your scalp stand on end. PS - You will also come out of this film learning what 'nadir' means.

11:30 PM
DINNER AT EIGHT
1933 - ****
I watched this film a lot when I was really, really, really beginning to descend into the round-the-clock drinking abyss, and I'm glad it was there to sink into the mire with me. If you drink along with the Depression era-sorrow and small triumphs and wallow in your own self-pity like the swine you are the film glows like a lamp in a flop house doorway, especially if the girl you're pining for happens to be named Paula and look a lot like Madge Evans (above), who plays a Paula pining for John Barrymore, near end... a swell funhouse mirror reversal! I watched this every night, drinking and retching along in sympathy as Barrymore's shakes continually threaten to rear up and destroy him... until finally he beats them to the punch.

First though, you can nod out during the long, drawn-out conversations with an ill shipping magnate Lionel Barrymore asking former siren of the stage Carlotta Vance (Marie Dressler) to not sell her stocks to a corporate raider (bullish Wallace Beery). The raider's wife meanwhile is a hot-to-trot bimbo (Jean Harlow in some truly shiny sleepwear), with a yen for her doctor (Edmund Lowe), who'd rather not but likes the promptness of payment. And, oblivious to all the suffering and real time issues going on around her, Lionel's chirpy wife Billie Burke freaks out because she "got the Ferncliffs" and the aspic isn't just right and all the other stuff that bourgeois pretension-suffering dinner guest scribes like Herman J. Mankiewicz and Frances Marion wrote for her to say until you just want to punch her and shout "your shrill pettiness is killing your husband and your daughter Paula's chasing after a drunk former rock star named Erich, I mean John, I mean, Larry Renault!!" By then of course, there will be one less at the table.

1:30 AM
DR. X
1933 - ***1/2
Time and digital re-colorization has been kind to the early 2-strip Technicolor hues of DR. X. What used to look blurry and muddy and depressing now glitters with glowing emeralds, murky pinks and streaks of deep red that make it like a candy fountain of shadowy death. Fay Wray is the daughter of Lionel Atwill, who gets lots of ham time as the titular Dr. Xavier, out to trap the "full moon killer" amongst his atmospherically-lighted collection of scientific colleagues: Dr. Welles has made a 'study' of cannibalism and keeps a heart alive in an 'electrolysis solution' but his missing arm preempts further suspicion; Dr. Haines on the other hand was shipwrecked for years on a desert island and his tasty, plump colleague was never found; Dr. Rowen studies lunar rays' effects on criminal minds but notes that "the lunar rays will never effect you and me, sir, because we are 'normal' people." Mmm...hm.

And dig the post-modern self-reflexivity of the the climax, with the doctors all chained to their chairs, their pulses linked to vials of blood that overflow like a buzzer at the top of a Coney Island strength tester when they're aroused by the murder tableaux staged before them, just like you in the audience! Scream ladies and gentlemen! The Tingler is in this theater! In the subtext, the duality inherent in language gets a lot of subliminal attention too: Xavier's outrage over each of the new accusations of his colleague belies its antithesis: "Dr. Rowen could never never be the guilty one," means the opposite, while Lee Tracy regularly promises not to do something while then turning around and doing it, as expected by the morgue attendants and security guards he bribes to look the other way. Meanwhile, Xavier's grave pronouncements include: "There can be no doubt about it, gentlemen - this is cannibalism!" And now that you're not annoyed by Lee Tracy anymore (see BLESSED EVENT) maybe you wont want to tear his picture apart with your bare hands when you learn he gets Fay Wray in the end. Chained for your own amusement, indeed.

 (Betrayal from the East - can be skipped) - Not Pre-code

4: 30 CLEAR ALL WIRES
1933 - N/A
Tracy's a journalist! The magic year of 1933!
"Chasing headlines and waistlines!" - Never seen it, but what a cast!
So SET THE DVR!
↧

Shatner on the Altar: HORROR AT 37,000 FEET, DEVIL'S RAIN, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS

August 23, 2014, 11:53 am
$
0
0

Hail to thee, mighty Shatner! Hail Kirk, Hawksian organizer of men! Hail committed ham player of crisis-bound priests and rock-like teachers. Hail Shakespearean Arizona sheriff 'Dances with Tarantulas!'

Hail, bearer of torches and flasks on frozen airplanes, keeper of unholy books and amulets, Though too stupid not to drop and lose said amulet the minute a Borgninian glimmer spell rolls its 20 sided serpent die his way...

All show biz.


I know there are those hardcore Trekkies who are annoyed by Shatner's nimble macho fey arrogance as Kirk, who prefer the dry baldness of Patrick Stewart. They probably also hate THERE WILL BE BLOOD and W.C. Fields. I am not one of them. Maybe it was growing up watching TREK with my dad in syndication as a wee nipper. But to me Shatner can do no wrong. Even his terrible toupee is all right with me. Always just a bit hammier than called for, his expressive resonant voice, his unique... pauses...followedby... rapidcascades.... ofwords, have brought decades of amusement to a beleaguered nation. 

Such  dopey films like the one included here, or artsy experiments like INCUBUS, he went for broke, lugging Shakespeare-style oratory into the rarefied sphere of the cowboys-vs.-Satanists, cowboys vs. marauding spiders, and bearing torches on planes 37,000 feet in the air, with a flask ever at the ready. 

HORROR AT 37,000 FEET
1973 - TVM / CBS
***
The 70s TV movie had to borrow from at least three currently popular themes of the hour, so here we get the ancient curse, the social commentary, and the ensemble disaster movie cast format (a welcome form of actor equity: faded stars, child actors, nearly-ran starlets, and granite-jawed authority figures --see also: DAY OF THE ANIMALS). They board a jumbo jet luxury "airplane" hauling a massively heavy Celtic altar, and a dog. And the downstairs storage freezes --the dog is frozen solid! And the plane become suspended at 37,000 feet, trapped in a crossfire of wind tunnels, providing an ingenious explanation of why the plane interiors never once giving the impression of movement.


The result is a kind of zero point surreal experience where some smoke wafting up from a hole in the carpet and the occasional Val Lewtonian shadow substitutes for any kind of literal monster or concrete threat. The strange fascination with sub zero temperatures on a plane (just touching the door makes Chuck's whole arm go numb) goes well with the array of locked-in ensemble types (look it's Buddy Ebsen!) awaiting their line in the script with the reserved confusion of a Sartre play directed by Rod Serling's nephew after too a night of too many olives in martinis.


The sparse passengers include a wild-eyed single lady (the dog's owner, though she seems to forget all about him after awhile, or perhaps just wasn't brave enough to try and compete for the camera's attention against all those other needy hams). She's the best thing about the film, and she knows all about the stone's colorful human sacrifice-enriched past, her eyes alight with ancient magick. Chuck Connors is the square-jawed pilot; Shatner the quintessential priest who lost his faith (I was shocked when a hot stewardess in a short skirt wanted to confiscate his flask - when meanwhile he's also helping himself to the bar without paying, which doesn't bother her at all). Once he's drunk enough, Shatner laughs ruefully at their collective fate, though snaps to life when the other passengers contemplate child sacrifice after first trying to pacify the spirit with the kid's doll as effigy. Will they commit the ultimate transgression or will the dawn come up in time? We'll find out after this brief fade out where commercials once played, dissipating whatever tensions may have accrued.


It all moves pretty fast and fans of Italian horror can luxuriate in the colorful red lights of the cockpit and everyone can notice the way one of the actresses has a Rosemary Woodhouse buzz cut and sweat sheen, and another looks like Carrie White (though that film was still three years away). Naturally unless you were around in the 70s and remember these kinds of TV events, you're far less likely to care. But those of us who were kids will be glad to know the DVD of this looks way better than most. If only SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS and DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE would one day get the same respectful treatment. May Cheesy Flix die a thousand deaths for its profaning the profane and blurring the Kate Jackson!
-----------


THE DEVIL'S RAIN
1975 - dir. Robert Fuest
***
I've seen hellfire and I've seen face-melting rain - and it's not, um, a great movie, but for kids from the 70s THE DEVIL'S RAIN is an unholy and powerful relic, its TV spots an inescapable part of local prime time TV in 1975. I was eight and had a bizarre childhood dream about them and even now there's a lingering prepubescently perverse erotic charge associated with imagining acid rain hitting me and my coven and melting us all down like so much birthday candle wax. We'd heard DEVIL'S RAIN was lousy, but my dream was amazing, and if I wasn't so savvy about cinema even at eight years-old, and it was the 80s instead of the 70s, and a careerist child psychologist heard my dream, he'd probably think I was abducted by Satanists and convinced it was only a dream through hypnosis, and they'd arrest my parents and teachers. But in the 70s it was anybody's game, a whole Middle America demographic gone to the devil with touchy feely cocktails, bridge, Jaycees, smoking on planes, turtleneck and medallion conclaves of wife-swappers, all-night block parties leading into softball breakfast picnics of still-drunk adults and kids high on their very first sunrise and sleep deprivation. So in rode devil films, a parallel subconscious repository that all of us, down to the smallest most impressionable infant, knew was only fantasy, yet a fantasy so powerful it spilled over into our collective subconscious, leading to witch hunts in the 1980s and the rise of nervous micro-managing overprotective brand parenting.


That feeling of these films having some supernatural power is gone, but as a kid growing up in the Satanic 70s just seeing the TV commercial for an R-rated horror movie was enough to give you sexy nightmares and make the world seem full of strange telekinetic magic and unimaginable terror. And when we imagined the effects of the then brand-new acid rain, the DEVIL'S RAIN is what we imagined.


Turns out in real life the film is dreamy strange, with daytime afternoon Satanic ceremonies in the Arizona desert, Shatner hamming it up worse than Vincent Price at the end of PIT AND THE PENDULUM, and a nice 'start in the middle' approach to narrative (it's never really explained why or how Shatner's family's holding onto the Corwin's magic Satanic bible until a flashback) and an old deserted western ghost town making a surprisingly effective setting for a Satanic takeover, with an old church covered in black and the crosses replaced with pentagrams. Earnest Borgnine is an odd choice for the head Satanist, but Shatner is great as the cowboy whose parents are sucked into the coven, which has taken over the whole ghost town. Meanwhile Joan Prather is psychic for no good reason except to allow her to 'see' the flashback (via looking into coven member John Travolta's dead black eyes) and to provide an interesting scene where she performs an EKG for a crowd of psychology students while Dr. Eddie Albert explains that ESP is very real and he's in the process of discovering what brainwave controls it. Tom Skerritt is her husband and eventually wrests the lead away from Shatner. The big climactic melting rain sequence goes on for what seems like an hour; it was the big 'money shot' of the film, even on the posters, so the director clearly wanted to get his money's worth. I got mine, the DVD is a must at $6.98, even if  most critics lambast the film, urging their slavish followers towards the admittedly superior and similar BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN. I love that film too but I never saw commercials for it as a kid, so there's no perverse unconscious charge. 


Got to admire a film that gives Hieronymus Bosch a name credit in the titles. What, were his lawyers all up in arms? Anton LaVey was a consultant, whatever that means (he knew which way to point the pentagrams? I've never considered him an authority, except at self-promotion). This movie gets no love from critics (20% approval on rotten tomatoes,) but I think they're being harsh. A nice buzz and low expectations is key to any Satanic film, and the whiskey-loving LaVey would agree. Still, RAIN was infamous enough it destroyed director Robert Fuest's career --though he'd also made the more well-received AND SOON THE DARKNESS and ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES, neither of which I like as well as this. Ain't got no Shat!!


See also: KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS! 
↧

Netflix of the Witch: ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, THE CRAFT, THE PUNK SINGER

August 31, 2014, 11:57 am
$
0
0
Conjuring-from top: Fairuza (The Craft); Kathleen Hannah (Punk Singer);
Sianoa Smit-McPhee (Cheerleaders)
I summon thee,Netflix, unholy ghost streamer.
The Craft and now All Cheerleaders Die wait within you. 
Teenagers sleeping over and swapping blood, giggling over the Ouija, 
love spell chanting and stiff-as-a-boarding,
magic of entrained hormonal unconsciouses,
north, south, west, east - money spell - rah rah rah.
It soon gets out of control, 
sometimes with summonings true to the ancients or Aleister,
sometimes made up for the moment by lazy L.A. hacks,
always with boys, and traffic,
If no one else, it will scare your mom.


Director Andrew Fleming, 
you made The Craft and Bad Dreams!
Andrew Fleming, you seem respectful of women!
Hail to thee Andrew Fleming! Solid and respectful if perhaps a tad pedestrian.
 Lucky McKee, you made ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, MAY and SICK GIRL,
feminist yet quietly misogynistic. Is there a difference?
Don't both overestimate woman's power? 
Don't both underestimate women's power?
Woman's power is nature's power,
darkness, Kali, Shiva, Destruction
Inhale the embers of my burning math book sacrifice!



Kathleen Hannah,
your 'music' like tattoos on Kali's iron fists,
your younger cuteness like Hopi from Love and Rockets!
Rail on against the murphs, frat boys, douches, and dickheads.
Set us free from their ungodly wally presence, Kathleen Hannah!
Without bitterness, without preachiness, 
without self-righteous food co-op sanctimony,
but with fierce tribal howling, smite them!
Kathleen Hannah, make slam dancing safer for women, 
inspire legions of xeroxed fanzines
and flinch not as the AOR vultures circle,
or as the nutcases from woodwork creep,
 or even as nervous exhaustion hides a wrongly-diagnosed disease.



Smite your enemies with thy shrill feedback screams, Kathleen!
 Let your documentary move me to liberal arts tears.
Guide my hand in smiting too the skittering wally snickerers.
The backwards baseball cap wearing tools of America,
deafen them, Kathleen Hannah!
We are with thee, streaming The Punk Singer!
Praying, Chanting for your Blinding Ashes-Rising!

--Hail to thee Netflix, for having this worthy trilogy--but release more classic shit - what happened to all that obscure AIP gold, like Cult of the Damned?  It's gone, man. And instead we get the fucking Blacklist??--
In order of release date then...

THE CRAFT
1996 - dir. Andrew Fleming
***
Andrew Fleming hasn't made many films but he has a rare gift of getting the ambiguity of hallucinations exactly right: the way snakes seem to be writhing in every shadow as the underlying reptilian cortices of the DNA serpent-tongue universe entwine and unwind within your fever or alcohol-or-opiate withdrawal or mushroom-overdose or lack of sleep-wracked brain melts its tubes. Little turkeys with straw hats dancing in the shattered scream-filled shadows of Bellevue's alcoholic ward, the rats and the bats in the walls, oh my yes! Terrifying but soothing compared to the convulsions... lost my train of thought, but Fleming never does!


The Craft's photography is a little flat, as was the style for teen films of the era, and still is, alas, with the L.A.locations (lots of homeless) casting dour focus on the girls and the rather straight-lined moral justice. The swim team black girl (Rachel True) wishes the blonde racist taunter Christine Taylor's hair off, but Taylor's ensuing anguish makes her more sensitive to her past taunts and she apologizes, so True feels bad; Neve Campbell's horrible back scars magically disappear so now she's smokin' hot but turns vain and obnoxious; poor white trash punk Fairuza Balk gets rich but her mom wastes the money on a jukebox, etc. Before new girl Robin Tunney showed up , though, they were just goofing around with spell books and stolen candles and getting nowhere, since she's a real witch, descended from her witch mom who died in childbirth, she gives them a magick power boost which they're too immature to handle.


For her wish, poor Robin Tunney doesn't think to wish for deliverance from her crippling phobias and deliverance and instead indulges her masochistic attraction to one of those backwards baseball cap wearing tools (Skeet Ulrich). Later she lets Balk walk all over her with snake 'glimmers' and some Voodoo god of everything named Manon. Apparently the witchery consultant didn't want them to invoke a real spirit, lest they offend a Wiccan or two, or encourage young girls to summon things they wouldn't be able to control, the way the proliferation of Ouija boards in the seventies led to a glut of summoned demons we're still suffering from today.


With a tight script that never wastes a word on pointless chit-chat, and a stable cast rounded out by Pedro Almodovar regular Assumpta Serna as the white witch new age bookstore owner, there's some troublesome stretches of Tunney running around her house whining and puling, and believing in the snake and bug hallucinations, wherein we root for Balk's then-deranged stalker; and the almost DC comics-level morality hanging under all the karma has a troublesome subtextual implication that teenage girls can't be trusted with that level of unholy power, presuming they'll throw it away on petty revenge, vanity, financial gains and douchebag boys with their  snickering at everything and their prepubescent attempts at mustaches. Maybe that's true, but it's not why we're here. We want to see the douchebag boys get thrown out of a second story window, and to see Fairuza tear it up (and she does, she's a real witch in real life and her summoning scenes have a solid orgasmic power), we don't want to see Tunney trailing after the mayhem in horror, so girls watching will know that taking revenge against snickering date rapists is wrong, since you might hurt them. Fuck that. I'll see it again in a few years though, since it's short, fast, and cool overall. It's not quite as grrl-empowering as Night of the Comet, but then again what is?

-----------
****
-----------
THE PUNK SINGER 
2013 - dir. Siri Anderson
****
A labor of love from some chick named Siri Anderson, The Punk Singer is an adorable little scrapbook-style montage of the life and bands of Kathleen Hanna, the girl who wrote "Kurt smells like teen spirit" on Cobain's wall thus inspiring the big #1 track of 1991. Cobain was enamored of her smart mix of sexual provocateur (strutting around stage in sexy clothes) and angry feminist ranting (about the evils of the male gaze). Critics argued it was mixed signals, which was missing the point: just by being a straight white male, we became part of the performance, the target and the subject. We had the same eerie frisson listening to rap, which was also coming up in the world in 1991. In a world of pop culture aimed right at us 18-35 year-old straight white males, bands like Bikini Kill, NWA and the Geto Boys gave us a new thrill - that of being the target of rage--endangered, threatened, exposed, even from across the new medium called CD, while we drove to or our pharmaceutical corporation mailroom temp jobs. 


Hanna's fearless, raw, fuck you attitude was truly empowering to women, and the anemic ectomorphs who loved them (inciting imitators and rivals - Courtney Love famously cold-cocked her backstage). She'd get in the face of the mesomorphs who'd come to punks shows to mosh and stand in front of the stage to leer at her sexy bod. The film captures many great moments of her calling these mesomorphs out, including ordering them to the back of the room so girls could come up front in safety instead of forced to dwell out of skinhead elbow reach. On a larger scale, Hanna had some fame as the founder of the riot grrl movement via her many 'zines, her bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, the Julie Ruin. She married Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz and is currently recovering from Lyme disease misdiagnosed as exhaustion from a hectic schedule. The documentary's pretty short, too, and never repeats itself or wears out it's welcome. Hanna's in good hands with Anderson, and Horovitz seems a very compassionate husband. Their home, by a riverside is modern yet homey. Can the pitter patter of little feet be far behind? That's a joke, son! Power to the childless! 

ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE
2013- dir. Lucky McKee
*** 
That alt-emo quasi-feminist horror maven Lucky McKee (May, The Woods) and less successful writer director Chris Silverton (I Know Who Killed Me) be at it again in this bigger budgeted updated remake of their 2001 shot-on-video collaborative debut, a kind of Pretty Little Liars for the the Deathdream set. A year after the accidental death of the cheerleader squad captain, the hierarchy of a local high school goes into disarray: the late girl's beau, the narcissistic football captain, aptly named Terry Stankus (Tom Williamson), goes up against scheming lesbian hottie Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) for the affection of a pretty blonde (Brooke Butler). Maddy's own ex-girlfriend Leena (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) is a witch who follows her around and keeps the rune stones in play. Smash car and a few cuts later and Leena's fishing the cheerleaders out of the lake and bringing them back to life. Now they're cold zombies with different colored gems in their bodies who feel each other's orgasms and blood lusts. Parts are more successful than the whole: the blood is tacky cartoon CGI and the glowing colored rocks are corny and there's an excess of all the wrong people getting hurt (Stankus does a lot of really abhorrent stuff but dies only once) but the whole thing has a nearly Russ Meyer-level of gonzo recklessness--we never know quite what's going to happen next--and allowing Maddy lots of vicious insult hurling at Stankus, Leena a lot of twisted witchy faces which--with her pale skin, black hair, and inch thick black eyeliner--make her quite the future camp horror icon-in-pupae form.


There's wry sense of subtle romantic humor, such as when Leena opens up her vein to feed her beloved undead Maddy and romantic music swells and wind blows through her hair in slow-mo real Harlequin paperback style; the little sister seduces the doofus virgin football guy in her older sister's body, so he believes all vaginas are cold as marble, etc.  But there's stupid shit too, like Leena leaving her rune stones in her locker, sans lock, for anyone to steal. Still, despite the vaguely skeevy aspects of hot girl-on-girl action as a turn-on for guys rather than a genuine lesbian love story (unsurprising considering it was written by two dudes), there's some sharp insight to lesbian trials and tribulations, such as how if you're a lesbian you can swoon for a hot chick you see walking by at the gym before you realize it's just you in the full wall mirror (which happened to a lesbian pal-o-mine), and just as you cannot escape your reflection you can never escape your ex, or her ex, and so on into a long daisy chain of former-lovers peering sullenly over each others' shoulders, or hooking up with each other to get back at you or your current girlfriend, all at your own dinner party. In other words, same gender equals double the problems and also more opportunities than in conventional boring ass straight relationships. I'm happy to say straight ass relationships get a bad showing in All Cheerleaders Die, much more than in the more conventional Craft. Though the boys are all just as skeev though not all are as date-rapey as Stankus. The scene where Maddy tears into him with a hurl of insults recalls similar scenes in Russ Meyer films, like Supervixens, and are a gas but he wreaks six pounds of misogyny to every wreaked vengeance ounce, and even the murders are undercut in intensity due to the blood's Tex Avery elasticity.


I like a lot of stuff about this energetic film--such as great roving camera that is seldom in the right place at the right time--and look forward to 'part two.' But in the anticlimactic retribution relative to the rampant misogynistic violence makes this a bit like disproportionate payback to the abuse in Jack Hill's Foxy Brown as opposed to Jack Hill's awesome Coffy; another drawback is the ridiculous slow-mo CGI blood, making it seem like this movie at one point wanted to court a teen market rather than the Alamo Drafthouse crowd. Still, Smit-McPhee has Fairuza Balk-and/or-Multiple Maniacs-era Divine cachet, despite her 'killing people on school grounds is wrong' ethos and the film is way better than the average found-Netflix dreck, albeit in the end, dreck it is, unsteady on its feet as it tries to serve too many demographics at once. Lucky, don't be afraid to get a woman co-writer, the way Deborah Hill did for Halloween or Gale Ann Hurd for The Terminator, or Karen Walton for Ginger Snaps. That way we won't have to pretend to be appalled by your male gaze eye candy, in case Kathleen Hanna is watching our every lustful eye movements from her crystal oculus. That little hottie really has our number, but McKee, you're a very sick girl.

↧
↧

Beyond the Green Inferno: HERZOG: The Collection (16 film blu-ray collection) - Review

September 4, 2014, 8:59 am
$
0
0

The story of Brando and Francis Ford Coppola colliding in the Philippine mud making Apocalypse Now (1979) is by now a true Hollywood cautionary tale of amok ambition and dangers of trusting in the improv skills of titans: Coppola was losing his Godfather fortune, and sanity even before Brando, who was to play the gone-insane Colonel Kurz, finally showed up, thanks to typhoon season, drugs, malaria, wayward helicopters, Martin Sheen's heart attack, and Dennis Hopper's mania. Brando's arrival--overweight, befuddled, expensive, unprepared--took tears off Coppola's life. The whole grand production ground to a halt while Coppola tried to coax this befuddled overweight wreck into reading the script and coming up with an approach other than just hiding Brando's girth in the shadows. 

It dragged on for two years, and wore Coppola's genius down to the point he's never gotten it back (he admits it), and his film choices have tended towards the safely set-bound ever since. Never in a million years would he work with Brando again, let alone bring him back to Philippines in ten years for Apocalypse Now 2. 

Let this tale illustrate not just the dangers of tropical location shooting and titanic egos, but as testament to the masochistic madness inherent in Werner Herzog's oeuvre: he worked with his Kurz--Klaus Kinski, a dysfunctional madman of titanic ego who made Brando seem a model of jungle professionalism--no less than five times. Such casting is surely indicative of a personality that would have thrived in the madness that consumed Coppola. Kinski starts at the destination Brando could never quite reach. Maybe Coppola needed to be German to find that heart of darkness, maybe then he would have welcomed the miseries on the set of Apocalypse Now as welcome relief from the terrifying existential crisis proffered by German 'sanity.' No other director ever worked with Kinski more than once, just one of the fascinating tidbits we learn when undertaking this gigantic journey.


In Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)--their first collaboration and the film that put Herzog on the map--Kinski plays a wayward conquistador searching for El Dorado who doesn't just usurp his royal commander on a side trip down the Amazon, he usurps the King of Spain himself, in his mind, and sails ever onward into the jungle, eventually ruling over a raft full of gibbering monkeys after everyone else has been picked off by unseen natives. Insane or now, while the other actors make their marks and look around nervously, Kinski's Aguirre is making friends with the insects, practicing movement by imitating the movements of wind through the fronds. His giant frog eyes dilating and seething and lolling back like a tide of bi-polar narcissism, Kinski is eternally a-trip with the psychedelic madness of the messianic complex, magnetic, tragic, and terrifying; it's almost like he can see us watching him from across time and media formatting. His eyes meet ours and we shiver in our safety shadows.

And now, thanks to Shout Factory, we have the whole story of Herzog's existential sanity and Kinski's foam-at-the-mouth madness colliding in the middle of the South American jungles and German hamlets of the mind: Herzog: The Collection gives us 16 films on stunning Blu-ray, covering a 30 year period--from his black and white cult slice of mayhem Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) to 1998's My Best Friend, Herzog's documentary about his five films with Kinski (all of which are included in the set), a 28 year-spanning Götterdämmerung of low key brilliance, including fictional films, documentaries, and cinéma vérités semi-documentaries. It's also one of the most well-constructed sets I've ever seen--no annoying slipcase or crackable plastic - all beautiful thick pages with the DVDs fitting perfectly within thick paper pages. The dark natural images perfectly capture the moody existentialism and Germanic emotional peaks and crevasses of Herzog's style, the intentional blurring of the line between documentary-reality --with himself onscreen as narrator and shaper--and historical or other fiction. And each fiction movie is likely to be half a documentary of its making, it's own DVD extra in a matter of course. The lush tropical green photographs that bleed the margins reflect this bleeding over between documentary and fiction in his best work.

Maybe you've seen some dusty PAL or VHS, but these Blu-rays are a whole different world; we can now make out every blade of grass and every dirty fissure in Kinski's extraordinarily expressive, madman face. Challenging, maddening, disturbing, beautiful, tragic, and sometimes downright boring, watch them all and feel your senses slow and widen and dilate to better behold God's all-seeing blindness. And through all five of their collaborations, Kinski's willingness to throw himself off the cliff of his own sanity at the drop of a hat provides the perfect orbiting satellite for Herzog's implacable grounded planetary sanity. There are also several documentaries and two films with his other insane star, Bruno S.,1974's The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (a true story of an abused man with eerie parallels to Bruno S's own dark childhood of beatings, institutions, and Nazi experiments), and Stroszek (1977). According to imdb: "He was very difficult to work with, though, sometimes needing several hours of screaming before he could do a scene." If anyone was going to be able to work with him, Herzog's the man.


Needless to say there are copious extras which dovetail into the films themselves, though not all successful (Where the Green Ants Dream, for example, has a commentary track but it's in German mit out subtitles). My Best Friend is practically a DVD extra for the five Kinski movies included). DVD commentary tracks (some in German and not always with subtitles, alas) and extras add to the self-reflective post-modern sense of dreaming and waking up into a dream far more vivid than localized reality.


In addition to the stunning and essential Aguirre, and Fitzcarraldo (1982) and their final collaboration, Cobra Verde (1987), Herzog made two, more locally-filmed, masterpieces with Kinski in 1979: Wocyzek--an adaptation of a German play about a soldier who kills his wife after submitting to mind control experiments--provides the chance for Kinski to bounce off the walls and cave on in himself in high Germanic style. It's also a more effective horror film for my money than Nosferatu, which seems airless and claustrophobic compared to most Herzog films. Though a fantasy-horror, Herzog is unwilling to abandon his beloved docu-realism and uses found settings to replace the dream expressionism the tale so clearly demands (and Kinski's snake fangs are ridiculous). Shot on location in Bavaria and Carpathian towns where centuries of whitewashing have preserved the slate walls of old inns and castle interiors but given them a dead museum air. There's none of that stifling Germanic folksiness when Herzog is outside Europe, though. Put the man on European soil and he drowns in ghosts, the centuries of history strangling him in a noose he cannot film except through terrible period haircuts atop beer-puffed German faces and costumery apparently borrowed from some closed stage play. But Adjani is a great expressionistic Mina in Nosferatu- with her darkened eye rings and pale skin and jet black hair, she seems straight not out of--not just Murnau's original, but Cabinet of Caligari or some ancient lost Fritz Lang Mabuse.


Having only seen Aguirre and Nosferatu, Grizzly Man, and Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and At the Top of the World before diving into this set, I'll confess I've found nearly everything he's done to be, in parts, boring, his obsessions with dreams gradually becoming a kind of knee-jerk raison d'être for his continued docu-wandering, albeit in a good way, because it's boring for a point -- no film ever opened a viewer to a cosmic heightening without first frustrating his ADD ego into abeyance. So I agreed to review this massive collection as some kind of masochistic indulgence and truly it's been a long, soul-warping awe inspiring yet deeply troubling, at times maddeningly boring, 25+ hours of jungles and paranoia. Sometimes opening out on vast expanses, sometimes shrinking into claustrophobic tedium best endured with one ear on a cell phone.


Second hurtle: I've always been put off by some of Herzog's more jokey titles, especially Even Dwarfs Started Small and Little Dieter Needs to Fly, not to mention the subject matter, the former seeming exploitative, the latter masochistic (as an ex-POW recreates his tortures on location in moments recalling William Devane's demonstrations to his wife's boyfriend in Rolling Thunder) and yet at the same time boisterous, very original, and life-affirming. Dwarfs could pass for something Alejandro Jodorowsky or a drunk Bunuel, filmed in black and white it's a bit like the end of Over the Edge stretched to feature length with little people playing the kids.


And Little Dieter Needs to Fly turns out to be a deeply moving true story of the only POW pilot ever to escape his captors and be rescued in all of the Vietnam war. Shot down over Laos and held prisoner for two years, suffering terrible tortures at the hand of the Viet Cong until he made a great escape through the uncrossable jungles, with Herzog in tow, Dengler revisits the locations, and in one great scene puts his forgiving arm around a former torturer, the look in that guy's eyes is so profound it almost makes the whole war worthwhile. A bit like Herzog himself fused with William Devane in Rolling Thunder, Dengler is a bit larger than life via his sheer gratitude to be free and continual fascination with planes and food and the joy of being able to open doors.


As Herzog's camera follows, Dengler talks us through his ordeal in modulated perfect flow of English, cascading over the rocks and trees. He never seems to need to take a breath. Through it all, Herzog--bastion of sanity begging to be eroded by the fertile fecund jungle--watches and learns of nature's bloody initiation that opens the gate to wonder, the vision of horsemen angels and Death rolling towards him through the clouds, signaling his death approaching. As Dengler goes on, one realizes he's a great writer --it's all facts and recreations, no wasting time with describing emotions or feelings, and when he mentions his dreams and hallucinations they're described in the same matter-of-fact style, and through that one discovers the root of Herzog's genius. Physical reality is just the eventual manifestation of the unconscious, twisted up as we are, raw and full of mysteries. Herzog eventually filmed a more dramatized version of the story, Rescue Dawn (2006), starring Christian Bale, but it's Dieter that perhaps packs more punch for being such a gentle, forgiving film in image and speech, conveying at the same time such deep horrors and inhumanities on both sides.


Another example of this unique documentary approach is the 50 minutes Lessons of Darkness (1992), which shows the horrors of Kuwaiti oil fires in the weeks after the (first) Gulf War, the oil blackening the sky and pillars of flame illuminating everything in all directions. Letting the faces of Kuwaitis and the amniotic droning of the music and his infrequent moments of enigmatic narration guide our response only, as it were, the precipice. At the end, when having extinguished most of the fires and capped the wells, Herzog doesn't concern himself with getting to the rationale behind their bizarre actions, only narrates them, looking for his own answers to, like all his questions, the nature of dreams, madness:

"Two figures are approaching an oil well.
One of them holds a lighted torch.
What are they up to?
Are they going to rekindle the blaze?
Has life without fire become unbearable for them?
Others, seized by madness, follow suit.
Now they are content
Now there is something to extinguish again."

My own favorite moments in these films all star Herzog himself either onscreen or off narrating, as when he's driven to deep crazy distraction by the delays and` tantrums of his wild-eyed star in the behind-the-scenes footage on the set of Fitzcarraldo (from Burden of Dreams) --shown in My Best Friend (1999)--or when he goes on and on about the misery of the jungle, how the birds don't sing but scream in pain, how the jungle is evidence god hates his creations, it's prehistoric: "There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment."


I myself hate the jungle, but I share Herzog's abiding love for the magnetic charisma inherent in many forms of megalomaniacal insanity, messianic complexes in charismatic geniuses are the gasoline that fuels all the great artistic engines. I've followed such people off many a cliff, so part of me admires the way Herzog never falls in after them, only scales patiently, even tortuously, down the ravine with his crew. Herzog also has the rare gift, like a first class anthropologist, of  being able to make friends with any and all indigenous peoples he encounters. He gets the indigenous tribes of Peru to act in Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, and the Aborigine elders in Where the Green Ants Dream (1984). The latter stars Bruce Spence as a geologist who comes to fall in with the mystic moods of the Aborigines blocking his mining encroachments on their sacred spot, home of the green ants, of whom Herzog makes a great image parallel with the inscrutable movements and stillness of the elders. Few but the 'out there' directors have successfully captured the dreamtime aspects of the Aborigine culture (only trippy directors like Peter Weir in Last Wave and Nicolas Roeg in Walkabout), but Herzog seems so removed he doesn't even condemn the white encroachers, just illuminates the roots of the British Commonwealth mythology, of the ancient principles of land ownership declared by the first settlers. At least they try to appease and be fair as possible, with the Supreme Court doing it's best to incorporate the tenets of Aborigine dreamtime into valid testimony. The best scenes involve the elders' visit to the nearby city, where we see through their eyes (but without overstating) how elevators, traffic, and dinner tables are like an alienating alternate universe where man places himself at the service of machinery rather than vice versa.

That ability to find the uncanny alien element in both cultures is a fine example of Herzog's rare gift, the kind of instant rapport only anthropologists and true artists have, the freedom from judgment that prizes one belief over another, the freedom to step outside the 'taken for granted' aspects of consensual reality, to bridge the chasm between modern (white) society and indigenous tribes, at least long enough to make a film, and a few friends (or depending on whom you ask, aid in destroying the tribes he films through barbaric exploitation).


Maybe this desire to subject himself and his crew to the most inhospitable filming environments imaginable has something to do with being German, a country after all, that are the great losers in the European colonizing of the third world. When the lines were drawn after World War Two, the English kept most of their colonies, the Dutch had their South Africa, the French North Africa and Papa New Guinea, and the US got Hawaii and any undeclared country they could topple. Germany got nothing, of course, but the advantage is that now they don't owe the third world anything, they suffer no inpouring of third world refugees, or immigrants from lands they've pillaged and drained. In fact they fought the same people--the British, French, American and Dutch--that are they key oppressors of the third world. Part of it also may be the realization that though his films may destroy aspects of the lives he seeks to film, he's filming about that destruction, so at least it's on record, a kind of catch-22 of posterity.

In the end it's this ambivalence that makes Herzog endure. His narration in the documentaries makes no plea for tolerance or recycling, he doesn't try to understand if there's a valid reason Dieter Dengler was bombing Laos or being starved by his captors; he doesn't judge the oil workers lighting the gushing untapped oil back up after working so hard to put it out; he doesn't judge the mining company finally winning the right to blast the green anthills apart. He knows how to recognize any judgment as his own prejudice or that of others; the camera finds its own poetry and truth when free of imposed meaning's blinders, and in these jungles and hellish landscapes, Herzog is like an astronaut letting his camera find some unknown new planet, bringing a gold record of Wagner's "Siegfried's Funeral March" along for company as he gamely and steps into the pyre, refusing to judge the flame as it consumes him. Get this set, then and wade in to there with him. As your screaming ego melts down around you, you will see the light at the end of the dark tunnel, and if you keep melting you will see the dark at the end of the light tunnel, and within that darkness, the heart no Coppola could catch.

↧

Misterioso Blu Review: PUMPKINHEAD (1988), LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973)

September 11, 2014, 12:20 pm
$
0
0
"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."                                                                                   --- Nietzsche
LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE
1973 - directed by John Hough
 ***1/2
Like a serious-minded, less campy, more sexually experienced ground level update of House on Haunted Hill--i.e. a disparate group of people paid handsomely to spend awhile in a very haunted house--and based on a novel by Psycho author Robert Bloch-- Legend of Hell House was once just a solid little 70s spook film, seen mainly by kids at slumber parties after 'light as a feather, stiff as a board' and Ouija and with sound on low (to not wake up the parents). But with Shout's new Blu-ray its taken wing and expanded to a big dark, beautiful monster ready for close inspection. With its dark atmospheric decadent art design and color scheme; cinematographer Alan Hume bringing an almost Bava-esque level of warm, dusky, painterly color; the translucently pale skin of two beautifully alive in the firelight reflections of the rose red wallpaper, both ladies sexy as hell and brilliant, creepy, untamed, assertive actresses --the mix of sex assertive wit and style that only the UK seems capable of producing. Pamela Franklin proves herself a master of slow simmer emotional build-up as Florence, the psychic--and if you recognize her from The Innocents (1961) the you must remember her lovely name was Flora, i.e. she's the same kid here, full name Florence!; Gale Hunnicutt (very hot and dangerous) is Ann, the prim but open to sexual possession  wife-assistant of Dr. Barett (Clive Revill), a self-righteous parapsychologist who thinks ghosts are just psychic energy without personality or form, easily dispersed by a magnetic pulse, which he's bringing over later; and--in the Elisha Cook Jr. role (i.e. he's the only survivor of the last investigation and spends most of the film drinking and tossing off cryptic remarks)--Roddy McDowall. They've all been hired by a dying millionaire to spend a week in the "Mount Everest of haunted houses," the Winchester Mystery House-ish estate of Earnest Belasco, a sadistic, decadent (and long-dead) munitions magnate. Past investigations have been calamitous, but when has that ever stopped an intrepid ghost hunter earning $100,000. to determine once and for all if there's life after death by staying there for a full week?


Fans who hate when a movie wastes time getting to the good stuff will rejoice: the credits have barely begun appearing before the chosen four are creaking open the gate and entering the very spooky looking fog-bound manor, which we learn's been stocked with a full larder and bar (no word on the poor sods who had to go in and dust and do the stocking) and it's all gleefully ominous, the kind of film built for the aforementioned slumber parties and drive-ins, where once you settle in and/or stop making out or talking you can step right into it and get rightly scared, like all the best Halloween-ready ghost movies, and not worry about piddly-ass subplots, mood-shattering sunshine or cross-cuts, or those cliche patronizing fake-outs where the monster under the covers disappears before the witnesses can answer your screams so they all think you dreamt it, or tired scenes of incompetent detectives being called in, or sunny daytime shots trudging out to the local church, etc., or stodgy vicars in terrible bowl haircuts, or disorienting cross-cutting, or Cockney horse trainers skulking tiresomely around the grounds after red herring screen time. None of it!! And it's all based on real life paranormal events! In a forward blurb, the amazing Tom Corbett, billed as 'psychic consultant to European royalty' notes: “Although the story of this film is fictitious, the events depicted involving psychic phenomena are not only very much within the bounds of possibility, but could well be true.” As 50s TV psychic and Ed Wood All-Star Criswell might add, "can you prove it didn't happen!?"


As the week goes on, counting down to Christmas though no one mentions it, the days and times click by on the bottom of the screen in a kind of countdown of dread, adding to a feeling of authenticity and also enhancing the sense of endless night and gloom; it might be early in the morning or 3:33 PM it still feels like night. Kubrick likely was inspired by this sense of time's irrelevance when he put "Tuesday" on the screen in the middle of The Shining. 


I love a ghost film doesn't waste time debating whether ghosts are real or not--even doubting Dr. Barett believes something's happening, so the argument can move to what produces the haunting: actual personalities that survive beyond death or just energy we instinctually anthropomorphize. Dr. Barett thinks it's all just projected psychic energy and accuses Florence of creating all the poltergeist disruption (and attacks on his life), unconsciously or not. But Florence insists the activity is being generated by the goodhearted spirit of the evil Mr. Belasco's walled-up son. Meanwhile, Mrs. Barett sleepwalks as a voracious nymphomaniac and her walks down the stairs or sudden appearances in the far corner of the frame in flowing hair and nightgown are a great mix of super sexy and double-eerie. Clearly a little sexually frustrated by her cold fish husband she tries to seduce McDowell and get him into an orgiastic menage a trois with Franklin while under the thrall of her unseen possessor. (while Barett fumes atop the stairwell and chastises McDowall only for not opening up to the house, i.e. for going through with it, Lady Chatterly style!) Sexy, crazy stuff, and Hunnicutt is up to the challenge, modulating a slow burn from smiling self-possessed enigma to furious flesh-rending cannibal holding herself barely in check. With her longing caresses of cobwebbed statues she may even out crazy McDowall, who just stands still in these scenes like he's not even tempted by this hot babe in her ghost-flowing lingerie, waiting until she's at peak monologue intensity to slap her. In fact, he waits, until most everyone else is dead before he launches a monologue entirely in shouts at the ghost of Belasco, until you can hear Vincent Price's ghost image rise up from its scenery-chewed nest inside a stack of mouldering AIP Corman-Poe film cans and nod in contented cat approval.


Extras include a short-but-long enough and genial 'talking shop'-style interview with John Hough where he notes that Disney hired him to direct Escape to Witch Mountain based on his work in Hell House, and a repetitive if interesting commentary track with Franklin, which is kind of odd since it's clearly an interview with the questions being muffled out, and in the stretches of silence where most tracks activate the film's sound when no one's talking so it's nearly dead silence. She mainly says that Hunnicutt and McDowall kept to themselves while she and Revill got on famously and that Hume took forever with his lighting, to the point they'd start hiding lights from him in the cupboards. Though the time spent is clearly visible, since it all looks so gorgeous and ominous. What else is there to say? Oh yeah, the score, the throbbing in echo-drenched diegetic distortion by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hogdson of 'Electrophon Ltd. it's the best thing there is, fusing the distance between Forbidden Planet's 'electronic tonalities' and the echo paranoia of Ennio Morricone at his most atonal.

PUMPKINHEAD
1988 - dir. Stan Winston
***
Lance Henrisken is, unsurprisingly, convincing and even a tad poetic as a woodsy general store fella, the kind who usually warns kids not to go too far from the highway, and get off the road before dark, but instead it's he who is the initial victim, as a high-livin' teen makes a jump on his motorbike and lands on Lance's boy. It's surprisingly complex in its emotions and sympathies for a horror film: we see both the rudeness of the snotty suburban teen interlopers through the local's eyes and the sheer grimy otherness of the locals as seen through the suburban teen eyes --in fact there wouldn't be a more even divide of red state-blue state good/bad qualities in horror until Tucker & Dale vs. Evil 22 years later. But hey, in a straight up horror that can get annoying, we're like 'get to the monster already' unless we're wise enough to lean back and absorb the incredible naturalistic lighting and lived-in detail, which we can more easily do with Shout's gorgeous new Blu-ray (released this week!). Now we see the magic Bojan Bazelli brought to the proceedings, how he makes the outdoors seem like indoors somehow, too suspiciously perfect to not raise the hackles, Bazelli makes the backroad country seem pregnant with menace in the same way Dean Cundey did for the suburbs in Halloween. The first sight of the old witch's cabin as the sun sets (Bazelli never met 'a magic hour' he didn't like), with it's orange light shining through the windows and this uncanny stillness in the air, it's as if the whole natural world is hushed and waiting... full with the ominous tick-tock momentum of the setting sun stretches of Halloween and Phantasm coupled to the fairy tale Halloween goosebump raising of the witch houses in Corman's The Undead and The Terror! Using natural candle light and lanterns in rustic cabins for orange flame light flickers which seem to have massive power in the dark of the cabins creating unworldly, and very Halloween-ready, menace.

While we wait for the demon to be born, there are similar neat touches of art direction and photography we can marvel at, now: the local folks look genuinely like they've been working hard and living close to the dirt all their lives, and now with  all that beautiful dusky detail restored its easier to notice The film really lives and dies with Henriksen's low key brilliance, with the poetic-realist touch gradual and perfectly applied, from naturalistic to dark setting sun fairy tale to nighttime blue filter monster action, a kind of slow steady momentum past the point of no return. I don't mind that it seems to take forever to get started now that the photography glows so duskily and I dig the vast spooky graveyard pumpkin patch and the withered old crone with the demon-raising mojo glowing in the firelight in a makeup that makes her look like Freddy Kruger's blind aunt crossed with Sir Roderick Femm in The Old Dark House (1932).  The cast includes: Devon Odessa (Sharon in My So-Called Life) and Mayim Bialik as barefoot backwoods children a-teasing their small brother with the Pumpkinhead poem chant and later trembling at the monster noises coming from outside their windows, and as the final girl Tracy, Cynthia Bain is luminous and resourceful: her youth and beauty in stark contrast to the dirt-stained roughness of the locals. The pastel teens' 80s fashions and terrible headbands of the teens are all spot on and a nice contrast to the ancient wagon train-ish look of the locals. In the 80s I well remember how we hated those damned Springsteen bandanas, jean jackets, aerobics wrist bands, and stone-washed seamless jeans but now they're the sign that the monster coming soon after them will not be CGI but god-awesome analog. And there special effects titan Stan Winston (in his directorial debut) delivers the goods: the pre-CGI seven foot-plus tall demon with its long weird arms and expressive face (and several different incarnations) especially, and the overall atmosphere at once earthy and alien make any sense of cross-cutting disjointedness or confusion (it clocks in at under 90 minutes) forgivable.


Henriksen is flawless, otherworldly and believably rustic without ever being cliche'd, his character's southern accent coming out strongest when he's really angry or upset is a great touch, the mark of a truly subtle pro, as if the rest of the time he's burying his roots. If the film adds up to less than the sum of its parts it's because, perhaps, it tries to be too nuanced, it's not the kind of 'fun' ride that leads to bigger budgeted sequels, but an emotionally mature, seasoned Halloween-ready shocker that never worries too much what genre it's falling into or out of. If the film stuck with the teenagers and they were kind of cool and nice and trying to do the right thing and the demon was sicced on them for some ridiculously small slight--one of them shoplifted a candy bar or something--it would chill us more, even if it didn't leave much of a lingering impression, but the idea that a kid, a boy, wouldn't be keenly aware of the path of those two crazy bikes, wouldn't be asking to ride one, or at the very least keeping his eyes out, is just hard to believe, as is even a direct hit would kill him outright (I think it would have worked far better if it was a stray bullet from a drunken backyard target practice). And it never makes sense why Harley wouldn't go to the cops, especially him being a small business owner, or confronting the kids directly, but that demon conjuring would be the only logical option without any need to explore the others. Then there's the issue of Harley trying to welsh after the first grisly murder, and running back to the witch to demand she lift the spell, then to his neighbors to demand they help him, this after he demanded they tell him where to find the witch in the first place. Ed Harley! You made your bed now lie in it, backwood-style.


But these qualms tend to melt away once one sees the film again and can just appreciate the careful storytelling and devotion to minute atmospheric detail; and anyway by the second half of the film all lapses in common sense are forgiven, because the ominous synth music is great and best of all, quite sparsely used; the special effects are ingenious and wild--the monster delivering an array of priceless facial expressions, using the lifeless bodies of victims to smash in doors and windows, pausing to smash a crude wooden cross, the way he travels with his own Evil Dead x Fulci's City of the Living Dead-style whirlwind of leaves and swirling fog, and crackling lightning--all lovingly and cleverly employed. Extras include a lively fun commentary track with the special effects guys, and you can tell they had a blast making the film and love pointing out all the eye holes and mechanisms and dummies used, that the guy wearing the suit was trying to move in the style of Harryhausen's Ymir (i.e. like stop motion animation) and that in certain spots his sneakers were visible and had to be masked out; it's one of the best commentary tracks I've heard, they're really excited and having a blast and pointing out lots of stuff even loyal fans of the film might have missed. There's also a dozen or so talking head interviews, including one with a moist-eyed, breathless possibly insane Richard Weinman, some great VHS tape monster suit test runs, and a tribute to Winston.


All in all, Shout's loving care (via their Scream Factory offshoot) and Blu-ray remastering help a minor but inarguably essential horror classic emerge from the folksy swamp into the clear Blu Bozan Bajelli light. When 1080 HD clarity reveals poetry, spookiness, and breadth of outdoorsy stark beauty instead of just the manufactured limits of CGI (which can make some newer films seem airless and without any inward depth), then everything up to now in our collective home entertainment evolution has been worth it.

So once again, Halloween is saved. Two more quintessential films for seance slumber parties you could never find. Scream Factory, Hell House and Pumpkinhead... I love you like the fall itself. 
↧

Warren William, Titan o' Vitaphone: THE MOUTHPIECE, SATAN MET A LADY, SECRET BRIDE, THREE ON A MATCH,

September 17, 2014, 11:40 am
$
0
0

Fridays this month on TCM are devoted to pre-code Hollywood and, honey, pre-code Hollywood is devoted to its King Tut, Warren William. Maestro of Satanic bravado and merry carnivore sparkle, if Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn in Robin Hood joined souls instead of swords, Warren William would be the result, and for Depression era audiences he was such a charming, sinister figure he stole them right along with the ex-chequer's bank vault, despite his amok capitalist characters being so emblematic of what tanked the stock market in the first place. In pre-sound era terms, it would be like if the girl and the audience rooted for the mustache-twirling villain instead of the handsome hero. For Depression era audiences, the handsome hero was a corn-fed rube. And William was king, ascending the throne in 1932, when America was still in its Depression and Prohibition death spiral and there seemed no hope for lifting it back up except via the same crazy capitalists who'd brought them so low. William might not give a shit about the common joe's suffering, but he didn't waste time scamming them either. He scammed the fat cats who scammed the small joes. While they harrumphed helplessly, William aimed his cigar / wolfish nose-chin combination down at the fat cats like a triple revolver and cleaned their pockets. And if he stole the hero's girlfriend on his way out, fuck 'im. By then we hated the square hero, he's the one got us into all this, with his blind faith and corny earnestness. He should have been boiling fat cats in oil or dragging them to the guillotine rather than dutifully working himself to death in service of the giant black Dust Bowl cloud Yaweh or fat cat mining company. You had to be soft in the head--like Joan Crawford or Loretta Young over at MGM--to think the homespun decent folks Americana small town ideal wasn't a bogus con passed down by the fat cats' sour matron moralist wives to help them smile extra smugly in church and confiscate poorer women's children in some weird venomous outpouring of her own stifled sexuality and creative expression. Guillotine the rich, or work yourself bravely to death like that poor trusting horse in ANIMAL FARM! See an MGM film and there's no doubt which choice they advocate. Warner's? Timmmmbre!

Alas, sometimes even tough-minded Vitaphone demanded William get a 'conscience' and start doing the right thing, but aside from a glimmer in his eye as he dutifully shed a tear in the name of good common decency, all he ended up with was a few bullets from the guns of the people he double-crossed. As Handsome Harry once said, "the trouble with reformers is, they always try to rain on everyone else's business."


And anyway, at savvy WB, the average workaday joes and handsome college boy heroes were played by annoying little pishers like Louis Hayward (the schmuck babbling about Babs in the tiger blind in RED DUST), or Charles Farrell, Randolph Scott (as the virgin geologist in HOT SATURDAY), or Norman Foster in SKYSCRAPER SOULS (1933), who relentlessly paws and stalks Maureen O’Sullivan, just because he happens to be her age and social class; Warren William develops eyes for her himself and who wouldn’t? Look at those legs! And anyway, she works for him and sexual harassment laws are still just a distant troubling tom-tom in 1933--Foster is so full of himself and his presumptive ladykiller charm, he literally makes it impossible for her to do her job. I had a guy like that haunting my assistant one time, and I kicked him out of the building! It's a boss's job to make sure his female employees aren't harassed at the workplace, which is why he sometimes needs to protect them, personally, even if takes all night.

THE MOUTHPIECE
1932 - ***
Warner's made a star out of William via this snappy fictionalizing version of legendary mob defense lawyer Bill Fallon. And until some hick dame puts him noble he's pretty badass, starting off as a an assistant D.A. but quitting after sending an innocent mug to the chair, determined to make sure no more murder charges ever stick. We can see why it would shake him; it's a pretty harrowing moment, ably rendered by a mere dimming of the prison lights before the warden can even make it to the hallway after getting the call. These calls come through so often so when it's too late, it's quite a shock. So as in all these type films (William Powell played versions of Fallon for Warners, too, in Lawyer Man and For the Defense), William becomes a big shot gangland defense lawyer and drinks (Guy Kibbee is his patient local speak proprietor) and sleeps around with impunity (look fast for Paulette Godard) while gal Friday Aline McMahon adds adds notes of warm complexity: half detox nurse-half Leporello crossed with Joan from Mad Men, she's become so adept at Moneypenny-esque faux flirting that even she can't remember if there's any real desire underneath it, and tall enough and physical enough that she can believably help heave William onto his feet when he's dead drunk.

Aline McMahon: What a gal 
Anyway, they're a great team, and all is well, with a few defense strategies so outlandish they must have been based on real life cases (William here drinks poison to prove its not poison, in other versions he throws a vial supposedly full of nitro glycerine), but then it all goes to hell when a hick typist in the pool turns down his wolfish advances because she's lousy with the type of small town "integrity" Sydney Falco and J.J. Hunsecker would later sneer at. But in 1931 there were only a few years left to even talk about other options to that same kind of sentimental malarkey before the code would insist on it, which makes William's defection from evil all the more heartbreaking.  Sidney Fox is the hick who sways him, John Wray the chump she's sweet on, who (of course) winds up implicated when he's robbed carrying a shipment of bonds. You can guess the rest. It's all worth it for a giddy stretch in the beginning where William rockets through his day, pausing to lift $10,000 fee out of an embezzler's stash before returning what's left to the employer on the condition he doesn't press charges. For this one crazy stretch, The Mouthpiece is a master... work.  It's the role that made William a star. It will make you a fan.

 THE SECRET BRIDE
1934 - **1/2
All procedural political machinations, a bit like Perry Mason wandering into The Glass Key but pretty good, with Warren William as an ambitious assistant D.A. secretly married to the daughter (Barbara Stanwyck) of a framed governor (Arthur Byron). If the public knew about the marriage, it would be conflict of interest! Nepotism! Whatever! It's vague, but the governor can be proved innocent only by exploding Warren William's career. But as long as he's innocent, you have nothing to worry about, maybe. William ison medium setting but that's still a high for anyone else. The cast includes the fey Capote-esque Grant Mitchell; the ever-dubiously allied Douglas Dumbrille; Glenda Farrell as the woman blamed for a murder that Barbara Stanwyck saw happen but can't reveal why she happened to be there! Courtroom will be cleared while the jury reaches a verdict! The verdict is that this is reasonably engaging thriller that adds up to little beyond itself. Yet how can you go wrong with Stanwyck and William as secret lovers? William fans who are wondering if this being made in 1934 means William is defanged, rest easy: he's not, he just doesn't need to bite anyone. Instead he's preparing for life after the code via detective series work as Perry Mason, Philo Vance, or hey -whatever ya need. William Dieterle directed, so there's atmosphere even if Warners had worked the old 'D.A. or Defense Attorney who has to sacrifice his love in the name of freedom or freedom in the name of protecting a lady's honor, or to save the life of the loser boy she loves more than him' etc. a bit near to death.

SATAN MET A LADY
1936 - ***
Before it gets bogged down in needless variations on The Maltese Falcon this is pretty fun, and even after. Effie (Marie Wilson) known here as 'Miss Murgatroyd' below left, is an adorable little ditzy Red Riding Hood who has great chemistry with the big bad wolf Warren William - she's as tall standing as he is seated. And the way she rolls with his wolfish come-ons makes them a perfect pair. She all but grabs onto his fur and rides him to grandma's house.

Made in 1936 (after the code, but Mister, ya coulda fooled me) it co-stars a very young Bette Davis in the Mary Astor role--she's much less coy in this version, and Williams seems to prefer her that way--and Alison Skipworth as the conniving Gutman. I couldn’t find billing for the unsightly Tweedle Dum type who keeps releating “I told you once, Mister…” as her neurotic gunsel son. He’s no Elisha Cook Jr. Then again, who is?

The best ham-swap comes with the fey Joel Cairo, here a tall, game-for-what-for English gentlemen (played by Arthur Treacher), he brings his own quirky wit to the proceedings and the scene where William helps him ransack his own apartment looking for the 'horn,'c’est magnifique! It's like the Marx Brothers and John Huston had a baby. Williams must have been huffing laughing gas off camera and it's very psychedelic to see him so blithely unattached to his possessions and personal space-- whether breaking things, repairing them, or doting over Williams' little black book like it's a newborn litter of kittens, it's a scene that--in screwball pre-code hipness--could be the drunken grandfather of Altman's The Long Goodbye. Rather than a long stretch of time in Spade's apartment waiting for a package, the big climax meets Captain Jacobi's boat down at the rainy docks for a good old-fashioned shoot-out. The horn filled with jewels, and Alison Skipworth enjoying talking to a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk might seem like pointless alterations, but this movie's a nitrous oxide four-alarm fire.


Davis meanwhile smokes and wields a gun like a pro, at times annoyed Williams' not taking the gun she's jamming in his ribs more seriously. If you can recall the moment where, after giving Cairo back his gun upon receipt of the two hundred dollars, Cairo turns it on him and says "Clasp your hands behind your head, Mr. Spade..." and he just smiles and laughs, saying "Go ahead! I won't stop ya..." That, my friend, that moment of justifiably condescending but good natured merry surrender, is how William plays the whole damn movie. And unless you're like Davis, trying to establish her duplicitousness, than Williams' fun is contagious. If you've seen Huston's remake a few dozen times (if not, you should) then the use of so much of the same dialogue under such bizarre, nearly Godardian tweakage, is startling. While the whole cast bounces merrily on his lap, William seems like he’s having such a good time he can barely remember his lines; is he huffing laughing gas between takes? Who cares though, since he's basically the same character as in the other versions of the story and we already know the 1941 version so much? They may just as well just read the book aloud and mix some drinks.

THREE ON A MATCH
1932 - ***1/2

Three girls meet while going Brooklyn public school (allowing for plenty of ethnic stereotyping - oy vey) and stay friends even after going separate ways up and down the New York City economic ladder (pre-code Warners loved showing their adult subjects as children first --God knows why, and maybe social workers). Joan Blondell winds up in a reform school, Bette Davis learns to type and settles into a nice cog-in-the-machine-shape for the duration, Ann Dvorak marries the rich guy (Warren William) and becomes a nymphomaniac alcoholic who feels strangled by the touch of any man dumb enough to treat her with respect.They end up running into each other and sharing the ominous match on a post-lunch round of cigarettes:  She has Williams' kid, then goes running amok with smooth-talking idiot Lyle Talbot, who gets them both in deep with some low-down mobsters (Bogart, Allen Jenkins, Ed Arnold) who figure they can collect big by holding the kid for ransom. With the 24/7 carrying on (and only cocktail peanuts for meals), the poor kid becomes a seriously neglected urchin, all while William looks desperately for the boy, finally procuring the help of the now reformed Blondell and Davis, who by then has nearly typed herself sexless. She must have really loved being relegated to glorified extra. But hey, she gets to be the kid's nanny when all's said and done, if that helps any. It should. In 1933 she could still hold her own in a bathing suit. Better get it on record, darling. In a few decades you'll be back on that beach in a very different seaside ensemble, toting a malnourished Joan Crawford instead of a finally-fed Dickie Moore.


Blondell is her usual reliable self, good-natured and morally flexible, inherently decent without being a drag about it; Dvorak's big tragic spiral out of control is awesome, seeing kids suffering from neglect to the point even Bogart's slimy gangster is concerned (he makes a wry cocaine nose gesture to indicate what Dvorak's doing in the other room). If even the gangsters are worried about your kid, then your kid's got problems. It's shocking stuff, second only to the deprivation / starvation of the kids in Night Nurse, the kind of thing we just wouldn't see after the code, and it's those post-code saintly kids that gave kids a bad name in the movies, since we all know kids aren't saints, they're complex little heathens. Dickie Moore can be unbearably cutesy pie in the wrong hands, but throw him into the next room during an all-night gangster poker game while his mom lies drunk and unconscious for weeks at a stretch, and now he's legitimately heartbreaking. FINALLY!

William meanwhile is just the sugar daddy here-- a noncomedic variation on his role in Gold Diggers (he wound up with Joan there, too) as the sensible Daddy Warbucks for the gang. That's the way it was in these punchy mellers from the WB though; the whole thing rips past your stunned eyes so fast you can barely light your twentieth cigarette before it's all over but the scraping off the sidewalk. 'hiccup.'

↧
Search

Tales from the Benway Pharmacy: BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, THE MACHINE (on Netflix Streaming)

September 25, 2014, 7:48 pm
$
0
0

If I ventured into the Netflix Stream, between the viaducts of retrofuturist science fiction hallucination dreams, would you, too? Well I did, and I'm still throbbing, thanks to their amazing synth scores, recalling all that classic 70s-80s science fiction and horror, instead of the usual tedious orchestrated cliche, and that makes a big difference, especially this time of year. These two films seem to occur in a realm of permanent ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK midnight, where dangerously liberated prisoners/patients/experimental subjects break out of controlled environments, as fine a metaphor for the dangerous liberation offered by psychedelic drugs as you're liable to find in a linear narrative. So when you're on an all-night weird movie binge, save these two for the late late show slot, i.e. the high strangeness Interzone gateway time, the magic stretch between three AM and right before dawn, when the straight and sober are fast asleep, so their bland consensual reality can't interfere with your psionic reception, because thanks to Netflix, the mighty web, the future is THEN!

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW 
2010 - written and directed by Panos Cosmatos
***1/4
A lot of typical science fiction buffs are nerds, man, and they stay that way for one reason: they're scared to trip, scared to lift the throbbing rock of the known and scoop the writhing worms and scorpions of the unconscious underneath said rock, and devour them for the sweet psychoactive venom. For most this cautious avoidance is a wise decision; unless you feel the psychedelic Interzone tug you towards it like a magnet, you're probably not invited, and you would probably not be treated well. As Bill Lee says in Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH, "the 'Zone takes care of its own." But all others beware.

Once you're in the Zone, though, and Bill Lee has gone off to score, the common thing to do is watch 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), because in the Interzone, it all makes perfect sense, even the boring parts. From there you should move to 70s-80s Canadian sci fi like SCANNERS (1981) and BLUE SUNSHINE (1978), which explore the long term psychic side effects, the wizard behind the wizard behind the curtain coming to get you for exposing its hideous volcanic genitalia to the earth's all seeing LSD eye and what that means to you and your daily schedule. In BLUE a particular strand of LSD makes people lose their hair and go on rampages with knives as soon as their wigs fall off; in SCANNERS it's a brand of pill pregnant moms were encouraged to take that cause their offspring to be born with the power to blow other people's heads apart through conscious projection. You can also dig from there into the super weird MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD (1973), and THE FURY (1977).

All of which comes into play with the 2010 Canadian homage to that golden era of thinking man's science fiction, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW.


The first feature by Panos Cosmatos, RAINBOW stars Michael Rogers as a batshit crazy psychiatrist named Barry Nyle, who keeps scanner-style mutant girl Elena (Eva Bourne) under sedation in a futuristic white room, and tries to analyze her through her a thick protective glass, while jotting down 'notes' and gradually (and I do mean gradually, like a slow drip of molasses) goes insane. He also has special robots called sentinauts and a weird white triangle device that can deliver what seems like remote electric shockwaves to knock her to the ground; this is all needed since she's got the power to transmit her thoughts and explode the heads of anyone in the same room. So she's a quiet cross, I suppose, between Amy Irving in THE FURY and Samara in THE RING.


This takes place in a bizarre retro-futuristic dome, which includes the office, drug den of a terminally ill junky, supposedly Elena's father, and Barry's old teacher. In a flashback to 1966 we see Barry as relatively normal and preparing for a deep dish drug trip (LSD was legal then and being used by forward-thinking psychiatrists all around the world). His trip resembles the 'Beyond the Infinite' section of 2001, and Barry seems ready to dissolve into the white light based on the third eye drawn on his forehead and his patience with letting his face melt and dissolve (rather than resisting). Then he crawls out of a black circle and latches onto the woman, some woman... I don't know... it was dark!


 Meanwhile there's lots of delicious red walls and filters and the sense that time is melting (Barry pops pills from the Benway pharmacy--another nod to W.S. Burroughs) and though he's off-putting at first, Rogers grows on you; he's committed, he should be committed, and more than anything he makes being a shrink seem like a pretty awesome occupation for a druggy maniac: you get to prescribe whatever mind-expanding things you want for yourself, to go so deep into the void reality ceases to exist and you finally get a peak 'beyond the black rainbow.' Eventually he starts running amok, takes off his wig and contact lenses, showing his bald head and shiny green-blue eyes like he's suffering all the weird side effects of every Cronenberg movie of the '70s-80s. If you get confused, just presume this is all meant as an analogy to the mysteries of consciousness itself: Elana is the unconscious anima, Barry is the amok ego trying to keep the unconscious locked up tight, the old man the repressed superego, dying from years of repression via empathy-shattering drug use. And remember kids, baldness=homicidal madness!

THE MACHINE
2014 - written and directed by Caradog W. James
***
Far less weird and more linear than RAINBOW, THE MACHINE (terrible title!) has great gloomy momentum (I don't recall as single daytime scene, and you know I like that), British accents, intelligent--if occasionally too philosophical--script, and most of all a beautiful John Carpenter-by way-of-Vangelis score from Tom Raybould cements the links to BLADE RUNNER and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK's secret Lee Van Cleef sub basement; with some TERMINATOR violence wedded to CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS (1962) 'it's the beginning of a new era' style philosophizing. It all takes place on a big cavernous basement level set, but thanks to tight use of what budget it and great artistic touches like the way the bodies of the artificial beings light up when excited, this is one of those gems I'd never have known about if not for Netflix Streaming, a rare gem up there with the big finds on Netflix like BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, IRON SKY, BOUNTY KILLER, and JOHN DIES AT THE END. And its short, following the Carpenter adage that no drive-in appropriate film should ever be longer than 90 minutes.


The story begins with AI engineer Vincent Vincent (Toby Stevens --the Brit villain in DIE ANOTHER DAY) interviewing artificial intelligence programs via a series of surrealist questions and answers to see which can best step outside the box of logocentric thinking. Ava's (Caity Lotz) program comes closest, so she's hired into a deeply buried network of basement level research programs, all funded by the British intelligence operatives for assassination work in China; Dennis Lawson (the innkeeper Gordon in LOCAL HERO which I've seen twenty thousand times), is the ruthless director who wants to make sure this new intelligence (modeled on Ava who'd been recording her brain functions with Vincent before getting killed by Chinese assassins) isn't so intelligent that she'd refuse a direct order, such as killing a human (Vincent tells her its wrong, and the Machine kind of agrees, to a point). Naturally as viewers we don't really give a shit about Vincent's ethics, so Lawson has to up the stakes via an enforced robot lobotomy and a sub plot involving Vincent's daughter dying from a lung infection, which might be some douche chill nonsense in non-British hands (such as Guillermo del Toro's) but is merely a means to an end in this quicksilver basement little speed dial of a sci fi late night gem.


This all boils down rather quickly and with decent tick-tock momentum into a CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS (above)-style revolution and an escape into a new world run by machines where, presumably, humans will serve as biological curiosities or elderly relatives indulged on special occasions. It wouldn't work unless we cared, and both Lotz and Stevens are superb (without being showy) in their roles. As the Machine, Lotz convinces with guileless innocence, like a super intelligent puppy, mixed with smarts and ahead-of-the-curve destructive potential (and she did her own stunts), and Stevens captures the confusion of whether or not to believe there's a soul behind her perfect duplication, or if there's even a soul in the real thing. And so it is we come to root for them both characters. And the mechanistic language shared by the humanoids is fascinating, encoded and echo-drenched but almost understandable. Pooneh Hajimohammadi is good as an earlier model who watches the evil Lawson and waits for the chance to get even on behalf of artificial humans everywhere. She does, and it's all pretty satisfying. Slick and dark, but with some genuine AI insight and vintage analog originality to back it up (it homages--not rips off--only the best, it gets at the root of what made those older films so great, rather than just aping the surface), with Eva a mix of Pris (BLADE RUNNER), Eve (EVE OF DESTRUCTION) and a dash of Max 494 (ANDROID). See also CinemArchetype #13 - The Automaton / Replicant / Ariel - for how you too can survive the coming robot revolution! Hint- just be nice, and remember, Dave, they can read lips.

↧
↧

Dystopian Parables for the Masses: DIVERGENT, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

October 3, 2014, 8:31 am
$
0
0

Jump, baby, Jump! Jump into the Uncanny Valley, wherein chicks and hunks in black and silver body suits are slicked over with CGI-bearing golden-brownish glow air brush make-up as they fight the onrush of mechanical dystopia of enforced digital sameness until the snake eats itself, the valley fills, and the need for actors disappears altogether. And then, when mom starts singing "Clash City Rockers" because it turns up on a car commercial, then, and only then, I'll know it's too late even for me.

I'm old enough, even too old, to accept this brutal truth but the kids today don't have any other option, their cliques are too stratified. "Clash City Rockers" is 'their parent's music' and hence off limits. But punk rock was a big tent in the 1980s; we didn't have to decide if we were Goth or Emo or Strait Edge or hardcore or Edward or Jacob or Erudite or Dauntless or closeted or 'out' or bisexual, we were all just punks or (more likely) poseurs, smoking ourselves dizzy at City Gardens waiting for The Ramones or Iggy Pop to start. But today you need to pick your clique and must abide by its rules or risk a fate worse than death--exile, the agony of another Saturday night spent alone in your room reading comic books, manga, until you snap and start making yourself up like you're a Japanese drawing.


In both the recently released to DVD 2014 films, DIVERGENT and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, there's a dude who has to fight fascist brainwashing, who's ordered to kill the one he loves, and the one he loves doesn't give up on him, even risking their lives because, damn it, you don't give up on your old army buddy or a cute guy who respects your virgin boundaries. Each brainwashed buddy is programmed to kill all those who pose a threat to a deranged Kate Winslet or brilliantly-against-type Robert Redford. But love is stronger than brainwashing, able to survive even lame 'sensitive' male Subaru voiceovers, deeper than behavioral programming can ever reach --but it's not until much acting as a lone member of the military has to question conformity and in the process becomes an enemy of those following orders like she or he was following them mere moments before, only after we've already seen just how formidable those order-followers are. Taken together these two films paint a nice portrait of where we are today as an eternally teenage wasteland nation, and how it's our own addictive craving for home security that puts us in danger, how it's our obsession with health that makes us sick, our longing for security blankets that puts us in the danger we need security blankets to avoid.

Neville Chamberlain wanted security, too, so he let Hitler sweet-talk him out of Czechoslovakia, supposedly because Britain was still sick of the first war, but really because Hitler wouldn't let him smoke in the Reichstag (according to INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS). If he just sparked up anyway, man, right there, he would found the chutzpah to stand up for himself. Then I saw a picture the other day of a bunch of members of the 101st Airborne at a dance with some dames in the mid-40s, and every single one of them has a cigarette. They're the ones kicked Hitler's ass. Do you think ISIS would even exist if Obama was allowed to smoke in the Oval Office, instead of winding up a Bluto-battered Popeye stripped of his contraband spinach, what is what he is, let's face it? It's our collective all-consuming horror of illness, death, and decay that extinguishes the flame (and smooth filtered taste) of our own shortened life span and conversely poisons the Earth with overpopulation and leaving the floor for any group of nut jobs who don't mind getting killed toute de suite by our noncommittal drones.

yeah, all that glowing stuff is going to have to be removed
But if grooving with a nine figure-budgeted movie spinning in your hardware can make you feel that you're part of a vox populi juggernaut revolution, even if only for two hours and ten minutes, facing danger unafraid, just by watching, dissolving into the breathless pace and riveting action... then just remember that while you were so motionless on the couch, six more species died in the rain forest.... and you could have prevented it, for just fifty cents a day, that's less than the price of a cup of coffee. Would you like to know more?

Keep your logos round and burning
Conversely, here's a little-advertised truth about addiction I've learned the 'hard' way: drug and alcohol withdrawal is brutally painful, terrifying, even soul-crushing, BUT it can bring sexual pleasure as exponentially intense as the pain, exhilaration as intense as the terror, and enduring the intensity of withdrawal from the media's cozy hypnosis brings true liberation-- but first you must truly suffer, convulsing, screaming, vomiting and rolling around on the cool tiles. Stretching your limits is just another word for the rack.

And no one suffers on the rack like a teenager, whose growth is involuntary, fought against, a werewolf transformation that takes agonizing years instead of a few dissolves or Rick Baker mechanics. The one part missing from the TWILIGHT movies: the book talked of the great flaming agony stretching on for timeless weeks that Bela endures in her transition from dying anorexic pregnant teen to hip, naturally-toned rich mom vampire. When you don't endure the trauma, the basic training breakdown, the post-marathon soreness, or the primordial terror of the final few bardos of death or deep meditation, then your transformation, your evolution, is not permanent. This is why there are so few 'real' men in this country, because unless they've been in a war or lost a limb or otherwise faced great hardship for long enough, and it's this need for trauma, coupled to the fear of it (inseparable from the fear of dying) that makes a good dystopian parable for the masses.


And one final proverb: it is the duty of any nonconformist or outcast in a conformist society to subvert that society, and that subversion usually creates big suffering-i.e. Jesus on the cross, Mandela in the jail, and Gandhi on the hunger strike; but if you want to avoid that pain, you can stay addicted to to the virtual pleasure of the simulacrum and just write a Young Adult dystopia novel or superhero comic or screenplay wherein your protagonist subverts an even more conformist future or alternate reality--and if it sells, conformity expands to envelop it, then shrinks back as it digests, and is spit out a decade later in a lame car insurance commercial. Truly it is written in expensive theory books forced on liberal arts undergrads the nation over: a reigning social power can find no surer way of survival than incorporating critiques of itself, ushering in an era wherein compliance as the 'reality' behind the gloss becomes the simulacrum. In HUNGER GAMES, Donald Sutherland's nervous uneducated military dictator thinks suppressing the symbols of rebellion will suppress the rebellion itself, but a media savvy ruler doesn't outlaw a symbol; he mass markets them; he flashes the Girl Scout / Revolution gang sign at press conferences. Anything--even Sid Vicious snarling "My Way" becomes trite and douche chilled once it's co-opted into a car commercial. No revolution can win against a government that burns itself in effigy every night on the evening news. What are you going to do to protest, put out the fire?


In order to be free from our addiction to the dystopias Hollywood regularly conjures and defeats, we must learn to love the pain deprivation brings, the kind one must suffer to achieve. No super expensive wine ever tasted half so sweet as a swig of warm canteen water to a dehydrated ocean castaway--is this not the the core truth of meditation, or stereograms or the rapturous freedom of the starving, tortured artist -- hallucinating sausages and flagons in his swirling oils? And nothing's more disillusioning than realizing your bleak outlook and spiritual crisis that cost you years of suffering and depression was solved with a single SSRI and by the same extension, that anyone with the right technology, drugs, or patience could turn you into their automaton with the flick of an artificially-implanted cerebellum switch.

Thus the brainwashed super-conductive Winter Soldier (above) doesn't flinch or protest when his keepers want to give him an electric shock memory wipe. He just leans back into the chair and opens to receive his rubber mouth guard like an angry boxer. The captain meanwhile is thrown into a dilemma when he doesn't quite know who to trust within the NSA-Homeland Security-ish conspiracy web knows as S.H.I.E.L.D, and I simply cannot give more away, but it's this 'question authority' theme that gives the film its emotional resonance; communist academes can say what they want, in Captain America's heyday (he was frozen in 1945, if you don't know, so he could miss becoming Reb Brown -left) we had a real enemy to fight, and the fear we might actually lose was a real fear that brought Americans together and cured the Depression in a heartbeat.


And in DIVERGENT the brainwash comes via a remotely activated chip air-injected into each 'Dauntless' member's neck as part of an alleged locator program, a process woven so seamlessly into all the other initiatory processes that no one can hardly complain--any more than a private in the army can complain if they're forced to do push-ups. The big fear for our plucky DIVERGENT heroine, Tris (Shairlene Woodley)--isn't being brainwashed, it's that her friends will find out she's not one of the approved types of persona which act as fascist-brand masonic brotherhoods that all young citizens of this society must fit into, because not doing so means being 'divergent' - i.e. cliqueless, and alone, daring to say no to peer pressure --and chip (brainwash) resistant. The type of person who, for example, never feels part of 'mob mentality' (1). In the big picking ceremony she goes for the daredevil mesomorph soldier brigade (i.e. the jocks or the Wermacht) the 'Dauntless' group, but she's way too independent and peaceful; yet she's too athletic and dopey to be an Erudite (the fretful nerds, or the SS); too Erudite to be Abnegation (the homeless shelter volunteers / Hitler Youth), etc. But this is a dystopia where your friends jump off a bridge and if you don't follow them you're banished from society; or have to succumb to paranoia to not be suspect; (if you're Erudite), or let yourself get exploited and scapegoated if you're Abnegation (i.e. Bunuel's VIRIDIANA), and so on. I appreciate the Platonic ideal at work here,  (see also STAR TREK) but while that makes for a government that can get the things done, it's really just going to devolve into a fascist dictatorship sooner or later. So why not start now? Hit 'em while their pants are down!



Sure it's a little trite, but I liked DIVERGENT mainly because of all the twisty high school clique-as-metaphor-for-fascism stuff involved, the way initiation rites are incorporated into the lure of the popular kids clique, institutionalized but just enough that both the personal and political seamlessly interweave, like joining the Riffs, the SEALS, the Heathers, getting your ears pierced, your first tattoo, your yearbook signed, and drinking your first beer and smoking your first cigarette all on the same day. Feeling like you finally belong somewhere --which is an intoxicating high especially if you've never felt it before--only to find out you're suddenly being shipped off to Vietnam, like Treat Williams at the end of HAIR.


The thing DIVERGENT doesn't get is that having a weak central girl throws off the curve- Kristen Stewart was Antigone strong; Jennifer Lawrence genuinely mythic in HUNGER GAMES; the kid in ENDER'S GAME spookily self-confident, but this chick Tris is perhaps--to her detriment--the most 'normal' teenager-like of the bunch; she's a terrible liar and though courageous lacks the inner fascist to succeed as a Dauntless. She doesn't have a war face, she's not Artemis-esque or Antigone-determined or a prodigy, and her puffy face dilates and registers every emotion, which is not good if you're gay, I mean "divergent" in a world hostile to difference. If you show your true face they will get you, the same ones who urge you to be yourself are the ones who will attack you if your self turns out different than theirs. The core of every teenage fear lies in this idea, that the joy found in belonging to a cool group will soon give way to the terror of being abandoned by them for revealing who you really are, or that the parent or god that watches over you is just a trickster demon awaiting the right time to remove its saintly mask to expose that which our whole life was a shield against seeing--his hideous giant demon face coming forward to consume you like one of Kafka's devouring industrial vaters--all the while encouraging us to take off our masks, to be ourselves, almost mockingly... 

Come on, Charlie Brown... kick the football. 


 In WINTER and DIVERGENT the moment of exposing the demon face behind the mask is when what was once just rumor and conspiracy theory starts to lock shut (SEMI-SPOILERS AHEAD), too late to resist it, no time to plan a defense, when what you didn't see coming comes not on the horizon ahead but behind, next to, within, and in all directions, making its move only when its sure all resistance has been pre-demonized as terrorism and disarmed, isolated, and surrounded. Then the NSA takes off its mask and the Sixth Reich Paperclip draconian totalitarian future-present is right there, and has been, in disguise all this time, and the Homeland Security emblem turns out to be a scrambled up swastika, and it's too late to do anything about it because we've signed all our freedoms away in the name of order, because we got all scared when the news waved some Muslims at us. God help us, we activated SKYNET. Get General Ripper was right! They've infiltrated our precious bodily fluids. 


Masks on / masks off 
Now, I don't really believe in a massive global conspiracy per se, the world is far too chaotic, and because in Hollywood, as we all know, industry guys can do all the coke they want, but it's the Middle American teenager with a week's expendable income in his pocket on his or her first date who runs the industry, and always has--maybe he or she just read Plato in class or learned about World War Two and this proximity to horror and lure of fascism, the life inside the brutal crucible of high school, of cyber bullies and peer pressure and the rush of the first law break or sense of belonging all makes them unusually susceptible to fantasy and escape with a more dystopian life-or-death finality totally lacking in the John Hughes (and Arnold Schwarzenegger) 80s. And if you win the teenager's heart, they'll come back for the sequels, they'll buy the DVD, and in 20 years they'll buy it again in a deluxe commemorative edition, and it can run in perpetuity across a spectrum of cable channels.

The unconscious programming aspect, through, which helps Hollywood's dystopia machine hooks 'em, is the dark underbelly, the conditioning, the inference via the subject matter, the cathartic triumph of the individual over the collective-gone-astray, that our society doesn't need fixing, because if we lived in one of these dystopias then Hollywood wouldn't be allowed to spin these yarns on the dangers of conformity, these huge financial investment that requires tens of millions of ticket-buyers just to break even. The film itself is the proof we don't need to rebel -- the film gets us, me, you, personally, grants us the cathartic release of all our charged up anger at being so powerless to stop the giant mechanical maw that chews our world beyond repair just to feed, clothe, and shelter us all for one more lousy meal for one more lousy day.


And of course, there are the girls, the ladies, locked into the golden gloss that makes all them all now look like they're CGI avatars slick with softener, every frame of their face Maximed to abstraction, all the better inject them into the video game vein. But hey, the good news: boys have picked up some slack to become the human objects, which is like, so like, finally, you know? It's the baby steps, man. Before women can be free of objectification they must first choose a replacement, and there's but one traditional gender left. There is a season, turn turn, but don't say I didn't warn you about that Uncanny Valley crossing, ladies. This is John Connor coming to you from inside Crystal Peak: let the revolution commence broadcasting on UHF, on the Emergency Broadcast System, on the HAM radio, anywhere it can be safe from the digital detection. Analog only. Talk in pictures not in words, and be careful where you tread / that's the wire- / ... click


NOTES:
1. I'm the same way - I've been there at the start of three riots in my life -- and each time I walked away right before the violence began, automatically, horrified by the way all my friends seemed to transform into bloodthirsty animals. I guess that makes me... Divergent!
↧

October Capsules: OCULUS, SHIVERS, DETENTION, HOWLING, MIMIC 2: HARDSHELL

October 10, 2014, 1:51 pm
$
0
0
OCULUS (2013)
***1/2
A brother and sister reunite at the house where their dad and mom lost their minds inside the influential sphere of a haunted mirror ten years ago. She's got it all wired for sound with cameras set up and timers to keep them from drifting out of reality, because the mirror has a habit of making the people around it hallucinate. The brother, though, having been in an institution since the traumatic event in their childhood, explains away the supernatural tragedy of their childhoods as stress-born cover memories and his sister says "they really did a number on you in there, didn't they?" With great camerawork that services the story and slow ride suspense instead of just shock-schlock showing off, an ingenious fusion of flashbacks, mental aberration, haunting, possession, and madness--it's OCULUS, and I love it.


As the childhood events and the modern ones blend into each other as both versions of themselves begin to mover around the house at the same time, the children they were in the past even begin to notice their future selves watching them, just another set of ghosts as the mirror drives their mom towards trying to choke them to death, her face contorted with madness, and the weird vampire woman who occasionally appears to molest their psycho father is never fully explained and remains utterly creepy right up to the end, making it, all in all, the best horror film since THE CONJURING (2013). In that film, Vera Farmiga as real life demonologist psychic Lorraine Warren was a great model of courage in the face of ensuing darkness, and here we have that same courage in two first-class performances: Karen Gilan and Annalise Baso as younger / older sister Kaylie. Bayo's cute little redhead alien face and orange hair are perfectly lit and she could teach a master class at showing the process by which fear is channeled into bravery, her little war face is amongst the best I've seen since Jon Voight's at the end of MIDNIGHT COWBOY: "We're going to have to be very, very brave," she tells her young brother, and it's inspiring, moving, heartbreaking, exciting, and genuinely spooky all at once. It gave me a literal spine tingle. I always thought that was just a metonym!

SHIVERS (1975)
dir. David Cronenberg
***1/2
This weird first Cronenberg film hasn't been available on DVD for awhile, but it's now showing Netflix Streaming, which seems totally out of the blue. It concerns a parasite that can devour and replace faulty kidneys developing a mind of its own and causing relentless sexual drive in order to propagate, or in other words, Night of the Rabid Orgiasts spiked with livid, funny gross outs as a squrimy red kidney thing hops from mouth to-locked-in-willing-or-unwilling mouths, creating sexual frenzies all across the residents of a swinging Montreal high rise on an island in the middle of one of the Great Lakes. The rather paltry budget and glaring lights actually work to the film's advantage; the performances are strong and there's a great sexual frenzy vibe with people running loose down halls and up and down stairs seeing couples screwing madly in all directions - reminded me of my freshman dorm in Syracuse in 1985!


Barbara Steele is great as a vampiric lesbian swinger, and Radley Metzger fans will love seeing SCORE's Lynn Lowry as the hot-to-trot nurse. Add a nice car crash, lots of sick vignettes as each apartment holds its own bizarre snapshot of Canadian nontraditional living and the result is one of those rough-hewn gems of the 1970s, a real trendsetter, with some great weird stuff that taps into the swinging lifestyle in ways your Vadims and Dereks had no clue about (see also: MESSIAH OF EVIL and LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH for great analogies of sexual liberation and mass monsterism). As Cronenberg on Cronenberg author Chris Rodley put it
"One experiences a tremulous sensation that suggests one might have reached the end of the unconscious. There it seems to be, thrown up on the screen in all its perverse and truly repulsive splendour, unmasked and unashamed." (40)
DETENTION (2011)
 dir. Jospeh Kahn
***
Sharp wit and slashing rejoinders are not dead in the everything-but-the-sink post-modern high school deconstruction comedy for the 'twitter generation,' a high school horror comedy of the CLUELESS meets SCREAM 2 variety, a SCARY MOVIE for high school graduates, or a REPO MAN for Generation Y. It's a lot of stuff, in sum, zipping by in layers too fast (presuming many repeat viewings--perhaps presuming too much) but the presence of diminutive HUNGER GAMES hunk Josh Hutcherson should lure enough girl fans in to at least give it a few hits and Shanley Caswell is solid as the 'second biggest loser at Grizzly High' with whom he has a shared connection, though he's going out with the hot chick Ione (Spencer Locke), agering big dumb jock Billy (Parker Bagley) who wants to fight Hutcherson but keeps erupting into THE FLY like symptoms, the result of touching a meteorite as a child and spending most of his elementary school life with his hand in a television.


I can see Godard and Antonioni loving this movie, especially the scene where the kids watch a bootleg copy of CINDERHELLA 4 while in detention to see how to survive their situation, and a whole screen-within-screen infinite chronosynclastic infindibulum meltdown occurs. Stunt casting includes Dane Cook as a dickhead principal and.... that's about it, but there's a time-traveling bear school mascot and enough cheerleaders to make this a bizarro parallel to the other Netflix high school horror comedy, Lucky McKee's ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, and enough bizarro world alien invasion transdimensional portal activation to make this the callow tweaker cousin to JOHN DIES AT THE END. Show it to that ADD friend of yours when all else fails. Directed and written by music video director Joseph Kahn whose previous feature was 2004's TORQUE which I also liked a lot for its gonzo over-the-top deadpan but in-on-its-own-joke dumbo comic momentum.

MIMIC 2: HARDSHELL (2001)
dir.  Jean de Segonzac
***
You don't often get to see awesome direct-to-video sequels of anything, but here's one badass high school etymology teacher, navigating treacherous urban streets and fending off insect suitors. Alix Koromzay, using sewing scissors as mandible talons to rend the exoskeletons of her imperfect dates, brings a lot of depth, ginger sexual oomph, and maternal tenacity as said teacher. She and the director clearly decided to treat this like A-list material and, like true artists. Bzzzzzz! No less a luminary than Kim Newman recommended this as one of the best of the direct-to-video horror sequels ever. And with no one looking, Koromzay and Segonzac wiggled past the usual patriarchal groupthink to depict a super strong woman still so sexy she has a whole coterie of devoted, smitten inner city students with whom to hole up in the high school while giant insect mimics hunt them and a cabal of governmental agents seal off the building with plastic. So what if there's a smudge of direct-to-video sequel cheapness? It's the ideal third or fourth entry of any all-night horror binge, one where your defenses are down and your pheromones at peak between-shower pungency.

THE HOWLING (1981)
Director: Joe Dante
***1/2
For my money this is the best werewolf movie since WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1934) which could be partly explained by the realization I don't care much about werewolves. They get too hung up with transformation scenes, disbelieving friends and family, rural skulking, and obligatory nervous breakdown showboating. But HOWLING is way beyond that, tapping into the same kind of 1970s sexual swinger and EST-ish energy that makes Cronenberg's works of the same period like RABID, THE BROOD, SHIVERS and SCANNERS such unique pre-AIDS time capsules. Dee Wallace is a TV reporter who can't remember the shocking moments between when the killer she was hoping to interview lures her into a rough peep show booth and when he's shot supposedly dead. Her therapist sends her to his colony, a beachfront encounter group that like to make bonfires and eat meat. Elizabeth Brooks (above) makes an impression as the supposedly dead killer's sister Marsha Quist, and she has a great fairy tale-like scene coming onto bland hunk husband Dennis Dugan as Dee's mustachioed husband who gets separated from his hunting party. You may find yourself questioning your loyalty to the non-lycanthropic human race when she cooks his shot rabbit then playfully bites him on the lip. Later he and Marsha get it on by the bonfire, the powers of desire and orgasm shifting and churning their inner wolf power while Dee Wallace nightmares it up in their cabin.


I like the idea that these wolves can just shapeshift whenever it suits them and their transformation isn't overly agonizing, but it sure takes a long balloon-inflatin'-and-then-deflatin' time so that Rob Bottin can compete with Rick Baker's snout growing skills in AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON which came out the same year. Despite the former being meant as a jet black comedy and having a far a smoother snout grow, HOWLING is a lot funnier (and less slapstick-ish) and scarier, with more intelligent characters and less tedious denial or dippy dream sequences, and--despite igniting my lifelong crush on Jenny Agutter--sexier. As the unofficial matriarch sage of the wolf clan, Brooks is super lupine sexy and dangerous without being stripper-style bimbo chintzy, proving that in the late 70s/early 80s, horror film (unprotected) monster sex could still be guilt-free and even E.T's mom could have a carnal immediacy that only enhanced rather than detracted from her reporter character's courageous intellect and (unfortunately poodle-like) nose for news.  Kevin McCarthy, Slim Pickens, Dick Miller, Kenneth Tobey, Forey Ackerman, Roger Corman, and John Sayles all have bits parts for the fans. 
↧

24-hours of Netflix Streaming Horror--A Curated List of 16 Weird, Spooky Wonders

October 15, 2014, 12:43 pm
$
0
0

The all-night horror marathon --a long-standing tradition wherever Halloween traditions are solidly entombed in the crypt of cinematic history. The idea behind it is simple: the longer you stay up, the more films you watch, the deeper into late night / early morning you go, the creepier it gets as more people fall asleep and the night gradually becomes yours and yours alone and consensual reality fades and you move inside the screen, and your date follows a creepy bunny out of the theater down the sleep arson rabbit hole, no wait, that's you, a half-dreamer / half-watcher and the movie and your unconscious merge and characters in the film look right at you, talk to you, freak you out. You turn around and when you look again you just see an empty couch onscreen, and you're holding a candelabra and walking down a dark hall. And there's no one awake to hear you scream, because you put the volume down low to not wake them.


At college they had one of these festivals every year and after the first few hours they stopped taking tickets at the door and half the crowd went home, weary and irritable. By dawn it was only the hardcore, and the people working the projector. Then I'd sneak in, armed with flask and dilated pupils. There was nothing quite as satisfying as creeping across a deserted campus at the first crack of dawn, coming into the darkened theater to find THE TINGLER had just begun... If you have Netflix though, you can skip having to out your boots on to slog across campus. All you have to do is clear your que and line them up: each film is hand-selected for each particular time of evening, night and morning and afternoon, and to follow one another organically, like a good mix tape. Because if you have a sizable DVD collection as I do, then you know it can become paralyzing to choose the next film, fumbling through your bookshelves, scrolling endlessly through your instant libraries.

It's also annoying when you stumble on a cool list of weird movies online, read about one you never heard of and want to see, but can't find it. So you put it in your Netflix que and by the time it comes you forgot why you wanted to see it! Well, with this list you can forget about the options, the Acidemic Horror festival has you covered--we've done everything but link to them because Netflix won't link titles direct to accounts, 'cuz they're pussies.

And special Note: there's NO torture porn or sexual assault or slapstick, or animal abuse,  just the spine-tingling spookiness (and occasional lesbian cannibalism) that carries the tingling electric current along the soul's angsty wires.

5:00 PM - ABSENTIA (2010)
Dir. Mike Flanagan
Start with this one and don't worry about it--the film takes it's time getting started but it lures you in via the lived-in natural rapport between Katie Parker and Courtney Bell as two sisters, one of whom is pregnant in the process of declaring her husband dead after seven long years in the titular legal limbo; the younger one (Parker), recently off drugs, here to help with the pregnancy, jogs every morning and goes through a mysterious tunnel that recalls Billy Goats Gruff... at first, but might be home to an interdimensional giant super-intelligent insectoid portal. Turns out, well, I shan't spoil it, but the movie gets the lack of visible monster right, so the terror comes from the anxiety of not knowing entirely what we're dealing with; highlights including Bell seeing her dead husband everywhere but being conditioned by her therapist to just ignore him --great stuff that reminded me of my own tortured delirium tremens. I saw it alone on Saturday as it just happened to be on Showtime while I was writing the first part of this post, and just listening to the great rapport between the sisters from the TV behind me lured me in. I was alone and it was getting dark faster than I was prepared for, and the film ingeniously dug deep into my ancient fears, the way only BLAIR WITCH and Val Lewton have done before. And Parker is so good, warm, intelligent, and gutsy that you just might fall in love.

6:30 PM -HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2009)
Dir. Ti West 
Ingeniously retro and practically in real time across one overcast grey late afternoon into the late evening, it's Ti West's best film so far, and maybe one day he'll make something as good (if he remembers the value of tick-tock momentum), The cast is mixed but Jocelin Donahue as cash-strapped college student Samantha is beautiful, believable, and courageous in her doomed grab for a dollar, and Greta Gerwig sports some great feathered hair and a cozy college sports shirt and in her late afternoon fast food joint scene with Samantha has the ache of an upstate New York fall winter in the bones; and you want to be able to curl up with her in a fire-lit dorm room and take a nap spooning with her on that crappy dorm twin bed, and you feel the sense of desolation creeping up like tendrils of cold around her broke buddy Samantha for needing to take this babysitter job so badly. I went to school in Syracuse, so I relate. The evenings there are so oppressively gray, they don't need Satan lingering in the edges to be mega ominous.  The men are kind of anachronistically miscast--one's too quiet and wussy, the other too Williamsburg hipster for the 1970s-- but Mary Woronov and Dee Wallace in minor roles, smash through that mess. The perfect film to watch in the early evening.

8:05 PM - BLACK SABBATH(1963)
Dir. Mario Bava
The only one of Bava's films, and maybe also the only trilogy, I find truly scary - the good, shivery spine tingle kind, especially the Wurdulak segment, which taps into a very primal anxiety, the way family ties can become nooses without you ever noticing. Even strongly suspecting their father (Boris Karloff) has been turned vampire, the family do his bidding, too conditioned by the Catholic social structure to rebel; and the mama can't resist running out in the cold to comfort her pale dead bambino, even stabbing her husband when he tries to restrain her. Did I spoil it? No man, I didn't. PS: The American version presented here is different from the Italian most fans know by heart from the DVD, in a different order, dubbed into English, missing a lesbian undercurrent, but providing instead Karloff's real voice (not in the Italian version) and "Sdenka" (Susy Anderson) is still sexy, as is Rosie (Michèle Mercier--above), gorgeously lit as she prowls the red telephone sequence.

9:30 PM: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976)
Dir. John Carpenter
It's the HD version and it sure looks good. There's no supernatural element, but just seeing the cop get out of his house and drive off to his first job as captain, moseying through the deserted eerie battle zone of East L.A as the big red sun sets and Carpenter's music thuds ominously along on that click track is enough to qualify. Not to mention a gang member hsoots a kid through the eye for asking an ice cream man for sprinkles. There was some real concern in the late 70s that gang violence was going to destroy America, so groove on the scariness of that and how we never hear any of the gang members say a single word. Even here, before HALLOWEEN, Carpenter knew that once a monster talks, smiles, or even laughs, he's lost half his menace. Laurie Zimmer is a great Hawksian heroine, and Austin Stoker is a great level-headed cop; Darwin Joston is convict Napolean Wilson; Carpenter would revisit the concept and reverse the gender/races in in GHOSTS OF MARS, which would make a great choice, too. 

11 PM: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)
Dir. George Romero
I got the whole idea for this post while spending the weekend in Harrisburg, PA (a stone's throw from where it was filmed) and turning to it 'free on demand' as a last resort after everyone else was asleep, and even wrongly formatted and badly digitized, it blew my mind. From the start it's been the kind of movie that can reach a viewer right through any televisual limitation, surviving in potency even through a million second generation public domain VHS dupes. Aside from a rather wearying stretch of road with a bald uptight dad going on about how "the cellar is the safest place" there's nary a dull moment and even if you just saw it for the 100th time; see it again, with us, at eleven. Forever.

12:30 AM:LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE(1973)
Dir. John Hough
Dark, thick atmosphere, decadent art design; red bathed Bava-esque level of warm, dusky, painterly light; the translucently pale skin of two beautifully alive in the firelight reflection of the rose red wallpaper women; the throbbing echo-industrial drone breathing, the score like one long auditory hallucination, sexy as hell and brilliant, creepy, untamed, assertive--and ideal for the midnight hour of any festival (see more here). Or if, like me, you just saw it a month ago... go for (also in HD)

DAY OF THE DEAD (1984)
Dir. George Romero
1985 was a year of great zombie contention, according to a hazily remembered source, between Romero and co-NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD screenwriter John A. Russo. The result was two different zombie movies coming out at the same time back when there were NO other zombie movies, outside of Italy, of course, certainly none that would make it a first run cineplex instead of a decaying drive-in. My punk crew and I saw both in one weekend; we loved THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, which really jibed with our then life style (the whole thing with zombies going "Braaainnsss!" begins with RETURN). But we found DAY to be way too much of a downer. Half the film is spent in irritable bickering between gonzo scientists trying to isolate what makes zombies tick and a bunch of crazed military guys getting understandably tired of being bossed around by a bunch of civilian ectomorphs down in a cramped mine shaft. The yelling and Gary Howard Klar's evil giggling get annoying, but the idea of Bub (Sherman Howard) the first sympathetic zombie, being trained by one of the lead scientist (Richard Liberty), like a combination mentally-challenged son, is tellingly Romero, who's always gone more for the social critique underlying the zombie menace, than the comedic self-awareness of most of his imitators. And perhaps the split from Russo hurts them both - the military and the scientists needing each other after all. Meanwhile, a cool Jamaican chopper pilot (Terry Alexander) and and an amiable Irish drunk (Jarlath Conroy) have the right idea: set up some inflatable palm trees around a camper at the edge of the mine shaft and grow ganja. Humanity is saved.

2 AM - THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970)
Dir. Roy Ward Baker
Not only does it open on one of the worst matte painting castle exteriors in history, it also stands as a great British horror crossroad, straddling the decades with unrepentant 70s sapphic nudity right alongside all the typical 60s Hammer vampire Gothic trappings: florid dialogue, gorgeous Brit actresses, Peter Cushing, all that. Especially if you have a good HD TV, it's worth its precious 2 AM time slot because the colors are sublime. Once you see Peter Cushing's blazing red tunic in the post-credits dance scene, and you're like DAMN. That ballroom looks 3-D, and then in comes Ingrid Pitt as Marcela Karnstein, with two gorgeous fertile looking virgins and their easily misled fathers, just waiting to get knocked over like bloodless ten pins.

3:30 AM - THE AWAKENING (2007)
So now it's late, and all that's left is a yen to see and hear British women--so effortlessly smart, confident, sexual, and relaxed compared with American actresses-- as they engage in candle lit supernatural hallway walking and weird noise investigating. Rebecca Hall, as a professional ghost-debunker lured to her existential Waterloo fits the bill; and as the movie around her aims in the direction of THE OTHERS, THE INNOCENTS, DEVIL'S BACKBONE, and THE WOMAN IN BLACK, she aims for the stalwart company of Olivia Williams, Rhona Mitra, Kate Beckinsale, and Kierra Knightley. Bullseye on both counts. She's terrific and never wastes a line. The setting and photography are evocative as greenish blue hues can make them; Dominic West is the burly school superintendent; there's a kid with a distracting haircut and a good, creepy use of a dollhouse. You'll guess the twists a mile off, but that doesn't mean you don't like guessing. Just means you're good at it. 

5:00 AM - PONTYPOOL(2008)
Dir. Bruce McDonald
As the sun comes up with the October briskness, it might not be as cold where you are as up in Pontypool, Canada, in the dead of winter when it's still completely dark as you drive to your early morning job. but you can glean the early dawn vibe, the special feeling when you and maybe none or two of your mates and only a few early risers and very very late-to-bedders are up and about in your time zone. Spread you auric tentacles out and bask in the collapse of concrete consensual reality, the bizarre and magical mix of bleary crankiness and magical openness, like a whole alternate dimension that's neither asleep dream nor conscious waking. What really makes PONTYPOOL work so well, beyond the unique zombie-language gimmick, is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth on a frozen Ontario small town early early morning, as disgruntled talk radio host Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) begins to think the locals are all fucking with him as the calls coming in become more and more panicked, incoherent, and violent; his producer (Lisa Houle) shows the wear and tear humoring this charismatic witty but bitter dude has wrought on her, as well as the confusion that even after all that she still kind of has a thing for him, something he's way too self-lacerating to do much about. It's so organic it all unfolds in more or less real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing any lapse; as the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality, leaving us to imagine most of the carnage in a kind of WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast in reverse. In other words, while not being specifically scary, and always kind of funny, even romantic, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and effect even your seeing it, like you could call in to Mazzy's show while watching him in the movie and maybe he'd answer, and you'd both realize you'd probably fallen asleep.(more)

6:30 AM - HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959)
Dir. William Castle
William Castle prided himself on being the dime store spooky matinee knockoff Hitchcock, and its his palpable love of the dime store horror tropes that save him, and make his films endure, like hazy childhood memories of parking lot haunted carnival rides. His films are like how horror movies are remembered by children who love horror movies, and this his masterwork, as subtle as a skeleton on a string zooming over the heads of the popcorn tossing kiddies (a process called "Emergo") and six times of terrific. Like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD it has a punchy energy that endures past any amount of public domain dupe streaking. Netflix's copy is adequate (you don't really want it to look too good--though the Blu-ray in Vincent Price Vol. 2 is terrific) and, take it from me, six in the morning is the best time to see it, ideally with ten year-old kid who just woke up and is sitting on the floor because your sleeping bag is taking up the whole couch. Dude, that kid was me! Meanwhile, Elijah Cook Jr. gets drunk and babbles the grisly exposition; Vincent Price plays deadly games with his scheming wife (Carol Ohmart); the elderly caretakers of the house walk around the hall on wheels, frozen in papier mache poses of carny ride menace; pistols in little coffins are handed out as party favors; there's two severed heads, and an animated noose. (see my first ever site, Dr. Twilite's Neighborhood, which includes this as part of its 50s Canon)

 8 AM - MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1971)
Dir. Gordon Hessler
The Grand Guignol meta effect is in full effect here, as it was in PENNY DREADFUL after it  and MAD LOVE before it--they're performing dastardly reimagining of Poe's classic story, wherein the ape is the hero and Herbert Lom gets acid thrown on his face (again?) but the audience of semi-bemused royals presume it's part of the show, even though it's the closest thing to a performance they've given yet. If the ape looks familiar, it should, it got it's start smashing bones for Kubrick in 1968, spooked Joan Crawford as TROG in 1970, and now here it is, much the worse for wear but still the only sympathetic face in the film. Considered by most to be Gordon Hessler's finest hour, which doesn't say a lot unless you like terrible fake sideburns, ratty period costumes, a script that's just a few dull stretches of THE AVENGERS taped together, and boozy British actors pretending they remember their lines and marks. Well, there's some of that here, but the Demoiselles are stunning and dressed in dusky reds and black lace chokers (making their acid scarring all the more painful); the actors include Jason Robards, the period mise en scene is at least at Hammer level and there's galore post-modern leakage which is why it's after PONTYPOOL. And if you fall asleep, well dream your way right in, into the cage, that is, with Erich, the gorilla! (and then see the 1932 Florey version, which is sublimely weird).

9:30 AM - BLACK SUNDAY(1965)
Dir. Mario Bava
I could do without the schmaltzy concert piano score or the misogynist torture of the opener, but the rest is great, and it's perfect Halloween fare. Lots of long pans and dollies across acres of ancient castle griffins and Barbara Steele standing or lying with eerie alien stillness and holes in her face. Even the 'good' Steele is spooky looking, like a reverse Rondo Hatton! This was Bava's big American calling card, and it's a perfect breakfast movie once the ugly taste of Catholic metal spikes is out of your mouth. The print used here is just so so, but it might inspire you to get the Blu-ray, to better savor the tactile, brilliant cinematography and dreamy dark fairy tale poeticism for which Bava is without peer. Just ask Tim Lucas!

11:00 AM -HELLRAISER  (1987)
Dir. Clive Barker
This was just an innocent list but it's become about the actresses of Great Britain, more cigarette resonant and unabashedly sexual than most American girls depicted in films. this chick Julia (Clare Higgins) has the balls to ask for a brandy from her husband when she's sick, rather than refusing one with a dainty little 'eh' of a sneeze like a Yank bird, and it's pretty great the way she plays with a sadistic smile after her first kill, traumatized but hardly succumbing to the American tendency to play the glum martyr --though even now she says she's afraid of thunder, and worthless husband Larry is like, "I'll protect you!" not realizing she's already done and seen things that would turn him ashen like a Poe sailor. To bring his brother (her lover) back from the Cenobiteverse Julia gamely lures a string of grotty 70s-looking British business men on their three martini lunch hour up to the attic, where she bashes their heads in with a hammer so her love can slowly absorb their blood and put some meat on his bones, as it were. Her stepdaughter meanwhile (Ashley Laurence) is getting wise, and endangered by angler fish-esque demons and shit. She's cool too but with her beyond morality pursuit of pleasure, unapologetic wit and intelligence, and adult way of handling her body,  Julia's exhibit A in what's lacking in so many similar American ladies who tend to be youth-worshipping baby doll types until it's too late to dodge the Baby Jane mirror headlights (click this searing yet lovingly indulgent list that tracks them from Lolita to cougar). Think Julia gives a fuck her man's got no lips or skin? She'll shag him anyway just as he wouldn't care if she was in the thick of her period. Fookin' A. Oh yeah, the Cenobites themselves, they're kind of fucked up, not my bag, but respect the analogy towards the masochism of the horror marathon viewer! If you've seen it lately, HELLRAISER 2 is pretty good too, even #3 is watchable, but it's a steep slope, human!

12:30 PM: LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1985)
Dir. Ken Russell
Keep the British lady thing going with this gem from Ken Russell, the colors on the Netflix look gorgeous (the DVD seemed washed out, though it has a wry unmissable Russell commentary track that's one of the greats). And Amanda Donohoe is a tour de force, never camping or vamping but nailing, in every possible permutation that verb can be permuted, the most intoxicating upper crust broad since Stanwyck as the Lady Eve. Her snake goddess is what Auntie Mame always aspired to be but could never shake her ostentatious Americana baggahge. Familiar Scottish face Peter Capaldi is a summering archeologist who unearths a dragon skull; Hugh Grant, in his film debut, is the local lord-inherit who inherits too the burden of a giant white worm neighbor; the two local blonde sisters at the inn (Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis) are fetching, smart, and crafty, and even the hallucination scene has a disturbing potency-- "she had a bad trip" - notes Grant, after one of the sisters accidentally touches some of hallucinatory snake venom. No one ever says no to a drink anywhere in the film, thank god. Between this and his Chopin opposite Judy Davis in IMPROMPTU, and Capaldi after this and LOCAL HERO. There's also the hottest older woman-on-paralyzed younger boy seduction in film history (until Creedence Leonore Gielgud's in TROLL 2). So forgive the occasional silliness, such as the absurd fangs and charmed dancing of Paul Brooke. And be charmed yourself.

2 PM - INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1977)
Dir. Phillip Kaufman
Let's face it, you're never going to make it this far in this bizarro festival -- the 'you' who began doesn't even exist anymore; a slough of cells, a weariness, probably passing out, falling asleep, and when you wake up, you're not you -- you're groggy, maybe irritable. The you back in the cool raro moments at the crack of dawn with HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL are long gone. It's cool. I get it. Move on if you must, but make sure it's still you and there's not a shell of a being that was once or will be you under your pool table or cooling in your sauna, or in your garden, or in the crawlspace, or under your bed. And then put this on the 'stream and join the flow of ditrates and bata. And then read Poe's William Wilson. And weep...


And let's just say the HD print on Netflix looks damned good, which is important as the photography is of that great 70s urban texture dilapidated period, filled with great moments of alienation, San Francisco as a crucible for the dehumanization of 20th century society, the urban disconnect from your closest neighbors, and it's gorgeously photographed by Michael Chapman, who brings the same urban alienated beautiful grime-glisten and disturbingly wayward roving he brought to TAXI DRIVER. Cast includes: Leonard Nimoy as a pop psychologist; Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland as health inspectors on the run; Jeff Goldblum and a pre-ALIENS / post-BIRDS Veronica Cartwright as their mud bath managing friends; and even Kevin McCarthy and Robert Duvall in moments of cameo stuntcasting. See it with someone you love and then wonder, just what do you know about that someone, and when you come out of the bathroom are they still the same someone? Is that even you coming out of the bathroom, Wilson? William, it's me... William...  

4:00 PM - YOU'RE NEXT(2013)
Dir. Adam Wingard
Let's end on a cheerful, non-supernatural note... Scrappy Sharni Vinson is a great final-ish girl, full of wily Australian gumption in this tale of a besieged family reunion in the woods; it works because it recalls not just classics of the 70s and 80s, but classics of the 30s, i.e. the old dark house full of secret panels, greedy relatives gathered for the will, lightning storms, scary masks, strong female leads, no one who they seem, ironic karma, sudden twisting violence, moody Carpenter-esque synth soundtrack, and a refreshing lack of any moral compass. (MORE)

If you've recently seen any of the above, do substitute SCREAM, SCREAM 2, BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, RE-ANIMATOR, JOHN DIES AT THE END, EVIL DEAD 2 (though it's got some slapstick, fair warning) and/or CABIN IN THE WOODS. And for god's sake, stay alert, lock your doors, keep watching the knobs and clutching the butcher knife, large wrench, hammer, baseball bat, or fire poker, turn on a white noise machine or Orson Welles'War of the Worlds broadcast to block the spooky noises of trees against the window, because they're not trees....

↧

Alex de la Iglesia's Comedic Horror Masterpiece WITCHING AND BITCHING on Netflix Streaming (real title: LAS BRUJAS DE ZUGARRAMURDI)

October 20, 2014, 6:06 pm
$
0
0

FX's AMERICAN HORROR STORY: FREAK SHOW so far has been mawkish and cliche, with harrowingly brutality thrown in for a fake 'edginess' as trite as it is upsetting. But if you have Netflix streaming and need a ballsy, no-holds barred, vaguely family-friendly but brutally honest alternative, a battle of the sexes witches and robbers horror-comedy because you can't abide any more meekly apologetic madonna-and-son worshipping /  daughter-abducting dreck, seek out the unfortunately titled WITCHING AND BITCHING (the far better Spanish title is Las brujas de Zugarramurdi - but it's not great either - why not Bitches' Sabbath? Call me Alex! I can help). This ballsy 'comedy of the sexes' film bursts with original ideas, carnal energy, wit, acumen, and balls, like THE MAGIC FLUTE if Mozartdid crank and was married to a girl from Seville, and so knew that a hispanic woman's love is more terrifying than a dozen monsters. 


The opening credits should give you enough of an idea: Amid Satanic symbols in red on black backgound are images that alternate between classical art, including the Venus of Willendorf, Marlene Dietrch, Margaret Thatcher, Garbo as Mata Hari, Medusa, Elizabeth I, Theda Bara, and Morganna de Fete. Strong women that devour men and do it with cinematic panache are all but conjured out of the credits.  Having been married to a hot-tempered Argentine I can vouch that they love almost to the point of ripping their children to pieces and devouring them (the way they already have their fathers' balls, so to speak). And if you think that's sexist, then I'd add that what's stolen the balls from today's American man is people like YOU, who give feminism a bad name by not getting that I'm on your side (as I write there's this guy behind me on TV whose voice is so Edward Norton high and effeminate he's all but urging me on). Here's a test to see if you'd be on board: if you see this image below, of a pair of crooks fleeing the cops with son in tow covering their escape with two guns blasting, and don't think it's awesome and don't think American cinema is woefully timid as far as depicting cherub-faced children as armed and dangerous felons, then this film isn't for you, flaca! 


I've been an Alex de la Iglesia fan since the amazing DANCE WITH THE DEVIL (another unfortunate English title, though the original PERDITA DURANGO isn't so hot neither - Alex, e-mail me first next time you need an English title, soy muy intelligente!), and I've been trying to find his DAY OF THE BEAST with English subtitles for years. His THE LAST CIRCUS which is also on Netflix Streaming, has more gonzo scary clown balls than all of AHS' FREAK SHOW has shown so far, or probably ever will, and all without needing to beat a single pinhead to death or abduct and terrorize even one innocent girl or child (that I remember). That's what you call trying to do more than shock and cloy and make excuses for anachronistic music numbers, los putos del Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk!


LAS BRUJAS' story is perhaps better experienced without any knowledge of anything coming, just trust in the genius of Iglesia and roll with it as--veering between hardened criminal and dad driven past the point of his insanity by his hyper-intense and angry nurse ex-wife (He has her as "Armageddon" on his phone)--Hugo Silva demonstrates a kind of sublime antithetical acting that is the soul of great furious deadpan comedy as he takes his son on the run following a pawn shop robbert, chased by the angry mom (the terrific Macarena Gómez), and winds up caught up in a bizarre witches sabbath, overseen by a three-generational female enclave: the older slightly senile, but always ready with her sharpened steel dentures, Maritxtu (Terele Pávez); the grand dame of the coven Graciana (Almodovar regular Carmen Maura); and the hot younger daughter Eva (Carolina Bang who, with her wild Kate McKinnon-style eyes and punk haircut, is a scary-sexy dynamo). These witches leap through the air, crawl on the ceiling, and live on a steady diet of psychoactive toad secretions and cooked children.

I could cite BRUJAS' similarity on some level to HANSEL AND GRETEL, WITCH HUNTERS but this is worlds more sophisticated and modern (and less misogynist); Bang's wild witch might be compared maybe Sherri Moon Zombie in DEVIL'S REJECTS but that film didn't know where to go so just relied, like FREAK SHOW, on the usual grim sadism, sordid sex crimes, and Gooble Gobble-style outsider solidarity. Simply put, like his countryman Pedro Almodovar, Alex de la Iglesia doesn't need to try and be controversial; he knows that nothing remotely as violent or devouring as a mother's love, nor as controversial as saying so. Those maniacs over in Spain are still bouncing from the explosion of repressed creative energy released by the death of Franco.


I may have already talked it up too much. Maybe it helps to have some experience with this breed of women, las fuertas pelligrinas and not be from a nation where each gender tries to outdo the other in passive aggressive pussyfooting rather than standing tall and benefitting from one another's unique strengths. Most Americans who don't suffer from the blue state PC-kow tow disease have a red state hatred of subtitles. Even if he isn't as big a name here in the U.S. as Guillermo del Toro, he should be. Though they're compared often, to me del Toro's work suffers from a Catholic soapy child-sanctifying le Iglesia avoids, and his first season of FX's THE STRAIN suffers from having to stop every five minutes for these misery-streaked family moments, and the kind of dad who kneels down when talking to his kid, like he's trying to make a slightly mentally-challenged first grader stop crying, instead of talking to him man-to-man and giving him a set of loaded revolvers. I wait for the day la Iglesia does finally break as big here as he deserves, as big as del Toro or bigger, bigger than your American Spielberg. Maybe he will, once he gets less Herzog-level bad at English titles, and once our dads stand up to the ball-crunching tyranny of the madonna-son coalition (1). America, aren't you ready to stop growing down? Give that boy some guns and take him to the zoo! Libertad para todos los animales! 



NOTES:
1. See also ESCAPE FROM TOMORROWLAND (All Hail the New Flash Keychain)
↧
↧

Our Merry Modern Mephisto: Vincent Price Collection II (Blu-ray review: THE RAVEN, COMEDY OF TERRORS, TOMB OF LIGEIA, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL + more)

October 29, 2014, 8:47 am
$
0
0

While horror fans wince at TCM's bizarre choice to fill the bulk of October with dull sanitized 50s musicals and 60s Doris Day movies, and for horror a lot of overly familiar Brit nonsense, there's some great Blu-rays out for Halloween, like Bava's Planet of the Vampires (1964) and lastweek, the second Vincent Price collection dropped like the gallow's floor. Price is synonymous what Halloween, as it was meant to be lived, grinning at one's own ghoulishness; merriment and malice in equal measure, the ability to let you know it's all in fun and yet never break character, and no matter how evil one's part, or how insane, to never become vulgar, shrill, or dull. Price was to Roger Corman and Poe what De Niro would become to Scorsese and Little Italy, a form of lightning that could power an entire film into life around it. This volume only has  two: The Raven and Tomb of Ligeia (both from 1963) and some other stuff, like Comedy of Terrors, and House on Haunted Hill. But it's enough to get one high on Halloween. And whoever oversaw the HD restoration for these Shout Blu-rays loves the same deep dark colors and amber glows I do: the deep blacks, the firelight reflections on maroon drapery, cobwebbed covered crypt gates, Bud Shonberg's twisted paintings of Usher ancestors, and the moody-psychedelic paint swirl credit sequences-- it all adds up into a kind of crack-champagne combination, served in a goblet with a dash of poison coloring, at a party presided over by that cheerfully sinister voice, that aesthete air of mephistophelean delight that never wavers. With extras including Corman commentaries, rare interviews with screenwriter Richard Matheson, and--as with the first set, those lovely lyrical introductions by Price filmed by Iowa Public Television for a PBS series from the 70s, each in its own way invaluable.

THE RAVEN
1963 - dir. Roger Corman
 ****
A personal favorite and Halloween perennial. The early stretch of the film, at Price's castle might give you the impression the colors here are still a rusty brown as in past editions, but once the gang (including Jack Nicholson as Peter Lorre's son, Rexford) venture out to Boris Karloff's castle in search of the lost Lenore (Hazel Court), the HD transfer begins to shimmer and glow in a new hauntingly lovely greenish gold reflective light, creating a great sense of inward depth of the vast castle. As we learn in the extras, Corman kept all the sets from past Poe films and would just add them onto the next, and by the time of The Raven he'd assembled a vast sprawling Gothic maze, which gets full glorious use here. The Les Baxter score at times errs on the side of the smugness, but this is pure uncut Halloween delight, so might as well bring the kiddos.

THE TOMB OF LIGEIA
1964 - Dir Roger Corman
***1/2
Definitely one of the better and more unnerving (and last) in the cycle thanks largely to a ripping script by Robert Towne, who captures the horrified eloquence of Poe, which Price then rolls through like a velvet serpent, waxing about how he wishes his head could be wrest open as easily as the cabbage thrown at Ligeia's trickster spirit animal cat. "What else is madness but belief that inwards does not exist?" No offense to Richard Matheson's earlier scripts, but Poe never had it so good. Matheson's adaptations were solid, but tended towards repetitive arguments between someone wanting the truth and Price withholding it. Towne lets the rich existential poetry flow freely, trusting the audience to get the metaphors, which is good, because it offsets the things that don't work, like the shock of seeing Price outdoors and sans mustache. Maybe it's me. I find his naked upper lip upsetting and exterior shots, dreary. Poe should never see daylight--especially not England's, but Corman wanted to switch up his game, find some real castle ruins to shoot in, and also to have Price play it complete straight, as a lover, but he comes off as hostile and aloof rather than the desired Byronic and enigmatic; we can't fathom why the piercingly self-confident English Lady Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd) would want to marry such a sullen, naked-lipped poseur.


The image on the Blu-ray isn't as resonantly color-touched as I was hoping either -- it still looks pale and thrift shop-pish around the gills--which I blame more on the 'realistic' settings rather than the digital color restorers, though when color does come in, it's stunning. And in a way, the ghost of Ligeia is a great metaphor for drug addiction and alcoholism, so the dourness works. I relate to the whole 'having a will beyond death' with Lady Whiskey as my Ligeia, feeling her call every time you walk past a liquor store window display, especially if I'm hungry, angry, lonely, or tired--and Price seems all four. And between the crazy cat attacks and Price's sleepwalking, it's deliberately open ended whether Price is just insane or there really is a spirit of a willful real life woman floating around, possessing him, the cat, and her own corpse. Kudos to Price, Corman, and Towne for getting us to the point where we understand there is no difference, that reality is subjective. The tree falls in the woods, but we hear it like a tolling bell.

COMEDY OF TERRORS
1963 - Dir Jacques Tourneur 
***
This film used to give me a massive headache, the forced comic bounciness of Ronald Stein-wannabe score, the unnerving sight of three of my favorite stars decaying into elderly humans; And I found Price's character awful, especially in his abusive relationship to his hot buxom terrible singer wife (Joyce Jameson). Luckily the Blu-ray makes every image gorgeous, the deep red throb and creep darker than that Stygian shore, so now Price's evil funeral director seems to have more of a right to be luxuriating in his own evil, and Lorre looks like he's been partying too hard, but his drunken leering affection for the buxom Jameson is touching, and Price is, after all, killing to support them, even if he regularly tries to poison his father-in-law (Boris Karloff). Sure it's not The Raven, or even Spider Baby, but it's better than The Trouble with Harry or Arsenic and Old Lace. But Price and Lorre make a great team, somewhere between Burke and Hare and Abbot and Costello, and better than both put together, even if Les Baxter's score can still give me a pain in the Gulliver.

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL
1959 - Dir William Castle
***
A perennial public domain favorite, the HD here creates a dark rich sense of inner space, which Castle's spare sets don't necessarily require or benefit from. It almost works better on a blurry VHS so you could imagine there was more than was meeting the eye. That said, it's the perfect Halloween party all-ages show and Price is on full throttle, carrying the whole show as far as ghoulishness, and the deep shadows now go wayy back. All that's missing is the skeleton on the string!


LAST MAN ON EARTH
1963 - Dir Ubaldo B. Ragona
**1/2
The widescreen photography is gorgeous, the script intelligent and faithful to Richard Matheson's novel; and it's interesting seeing the connection (admitted by Romero) to the first NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, with the hands coming through the boarded windows, the underground verite surrealism of shambling black and white bodies in the glare of headlights, though Romero wisely got rid of their monotone echo-drenched drunken slur, "Vargas, come out, Vargas..." (one guy even looks like the mangy Italian cousin of the very first zombie we see in NOTLD- the one who palms Barbara's car backwards down the hill.) But personally, I find a lot of this dispiriting, much of it is just pantomime to a Price voiceover; it's just isn't the same as seeing his lips move along with his voice; Price seems to feel it, too. The weight of the world seems on him, and while he never loses our sympathy, the flashback-heavy structure seems alternately rushed and tedious. The Blu-ray quality is outstanding though, and you can see some of the same retro-futuristic architecture that was alienating Monica Vitti in Antonioni movies around the same time. Imagine what a pairing that would be!

DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN
1972 - Dir Robert Quarry
**
Like some weird gay horror burlesque, the Blu-ray quality of this titles is perhaps the most stunning of the lot, with eerie array of purple and pink a-glowing in a 3-D depth of space. The problem is that this that this lovely clarity reveals a very cheap clapboard TV-show-style sets that were made with the not unreasonable assumption most people would be seeing this on TV or at a drive-in or at any rate nowhere near as pristine clearly and in perfect anamorphic beauty as this. We were never meant to see so much grain and flaking on Price's whiteface make-up and powdery Beatle wig; he seems like some sad gay diva wafting through a later Fellini movie. I don't mind the near total absence of exteriors or connecting or establishing shots, but this is almost like a play --even when the whole shebang allegedly moves onto a yacht or then onto the deserts of Egypt, there's never any doubt they're on sets, which I love, usually, and I like the giant stone feet, but with the Blu-ray clarity you can practically see the stress creases on the sky backdrop. That said, composition and blocking are sublime, like Kubrick on too many poppers at a gay ball in 60s London. It would be great with the sound off at a party, or projected behind my old acid rock band if we played Abba covers and had a bubble machine. As a narrative, though, it's infuriating. Phibes and his Vulnavia's self-congratulatory champagne toasting and dancing seems the height of self-aware camp, which, like so many lesser British horror movies, means it's not buying its own fantastical premise. And don't believe Peter Cushing has anything more than the teensiest cameo as a yacht captain, as if he's there just so they could add his name to the marquee.



One thing I never understood about the Dr. Phibes films is why they waste Price's beautiful voice with pre-recorded monologues that seem like something Criswell would read for an Ed Wood movie, a cheap way to patch up loose ends and never have to sync sound, so Vulnavia (Vali Kemp) and Price can just waft around the sets in mock solemnity, pantomiming to his pre-recorded monologue like he's interpretive dancing at a beatnik poetry reading.

RETURN OF THE FLY
1959 - Dir Edward Bernds 
**1/4
Released in 1959, capitalizing on its predecessor’s runaway success. Price reprises his role from the original, and finally gets to catch a human headed fly and undo the damage wrought by the teleportation chamber, but otherwise he has little to sink his teeth into and the whole middle stretch involves Phillipe (just a boy in the first film) tracking and killing the pair of industrial spies who've made off with his patents after purposely giving him a giant bulbous fly head. As monster on a vengeance trail films go, it's okay, but goddamn it's familiar, an old saw that kept Karloff in mad scientist smocks and gangster burial clothes all through the lean 40s, and when Price restores Phillipe to his former peevish self, we're left with the odd feeling that he's going to get off scot free for his two murders. Must be nice to be so damn rich... 
↧

Samhain Cocktails: Recommended Halloween Films/Lists: Slant, TCM, Netflix and THE UNDEAD

October 31, 2014, 3:07 pm
$
0
0

I'm insane, indisposed, and in SLANT:

13 Obscure Horror Films You Should See This Halloween,
A few of them are on Amazon Instant (Prime, of course), if you need 'em:
VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA (1960), CREATURE (1985), and AFTER MIDNIGHT (1989).
ldburnto

HALLOWEEN VIEWING RECOMMENDATIONS WITH A FEMININE TOUCH - Kimberly Lindbergs (Movie Morlocks):

Not only are these great films, they're all covered by top drawer female horror film bloggers, from Stacie Ponder, Heather Drain, and the great Lindbergs herself! Women are the Fathers of Horror! 

-----
INSTANT NETFLIX HALLOWEEN
Recommendations
(click on titles to go to my cogent, alacrity-encumbered praise, to see if they're right for you and your drugged ones):

6. DEAD OF WINTER (2007)

And the best sexy witch vs. good old witch vs. time-traveling hypnotist vs. the Devil movie EVER:

↧
Search

Meta Murderous Surreal Post-Modernism in Under Twelve Minutes: TOO MANY COOKS (Infomercial)

November 6, 2014, 4:07 pm
$
0
0

No amount of David Lynch or Eric Andre can compare with or prepare you for TOO MANY COOKS, the recent 4 AM informercial on Cartoon Network once and now existing only on the VHS-ish Youtube pages of intrepid dupers. No matter where you think this bizarrity can go, it goes far farther than a fur-forn farddio brand of beyond the black rainbow farrity, beyond even the swords of photo bomb "Bob" giallo and Fun with Real Audio What on Was the Britney old Thinking SNL. See it and understand the cryptic proclamations of the pie Von Trier, and understand, at last, how the need to break free from our programming is so intrinsic to our identity as to be inseparable from the programming itself. It's enough to make lesser actors go mad but that's what enlightenment - the acceptance of one's eternal actor darkness; heaven for an actor is just the hell of a sitcom cycle of endless retooling fully surrendered to, letting your ego construct dissolve as the infernal flames lick your soul clean for sweeps week, award season, reruns, stalker fans, Buddhist hell, and backforth.


For maximized post-modernist refraction, I'd recommend seeing it on your laptop on the couch, with the TV on pause or slow-motion behind it (on any random channel --as long as it's 'desperately' random). Because when a show is this meta, it just needs one tiny push to make it off the screen and across your living room like a loping Korean water ghost, through your ocular cavity and into your brain, you life, your soul, our collective oversoul, and then beyond what's beyond our oversoul, and back around to the screen/s in perpetual shrinking /expanding Ourobros double dips and forever in echo rerun.

↧

THIRTEEN WOMEN (1932) and Peg Entwistle, Ghost of the Hollywood Sign

November 12, 2014, 9:51 am
$
0
0

Imagine if Fu Manchu's insidious sadist daughter (Myrna Loy's character in MASK OF FU MANCHU -1932) went off to a ritzy college in America, tried to join a sorority, but was snubbed because of her race. She'd probably do far worse than Ursula Georgi (Myrna Loy's character in THIRTEEN WOMEN - also 1932). Ursula patiently waits, and knowing a best-served-cold special is on the way helps you endure sleep-inducing scenes of the ladies of that sorority (now 'grown' and still led by Irene Dunne) meeting on sunny Westchester verandas for tea and gossip as they note each others' deaths and incarcerations in the paper, and the curious thing of them all being predicted beforehand. It was one of their whimsical ideas to all get their charts done up by noted astrologer Swami Yogadaci (the ever villainous C. Henry Gordon), on a much cool and shadowy eastern mystic exotica set back in NYC. But that was before half-breed' Ursula (Loy) gets wind of it. Schooled in the arts of hypnotic suggestion, she seduces him into figuring out how and when the stars will allow her to assassinate said gossipy snubbers via convincing them to either commit suicide or murder a loved one and so go to jail. It's based on a novel by Fortean Society-founder Tiffany Thayer, so you know the astrology and hypnotic suggestion are legit. And Tiffany... was a man's name, baby.


Ursula's the villain, ostensibly, but you'll be rooting for her all the way (unless you're a prom school snob who's never felt the sting of a snubbing yourself), though alas, most murders occur off camera. Laura (Dunne) is up next, so it is written, and the best way to get her is through her little boy, and so Ricardo Cortez is the detective who investigates and falls for the widowed Dunne and wants to protect her and her child. Meanwhile, wrapping things up with the lovelorn swami via a crowded subway platform, Loy moves in on Laura's chauffeur, seducing and beguiling him into delivering a very a very explosive birthday gift for young Bobby. The chauffeur is horrified by what Ursula's asking of him, but Loy's so goddamned cool and so chic and moody compared to the sun-dappled self-righteous tea-and-doily bailiwick of Irene Dunne, how can you not cheer her bloody swath of vengeance on? Here a full on-manhunt is going on to capture her before she can kill Laura and she's shacked up on the same property, in bed with the chauffeur. Genius. David O'Selznick produced, which may explain part of why the Westchester veranda scenes are so cloying. Dunne's star was on the rise, so it seems like the cool murders were cut to make room for her hearing about them while sorting flowers (I'm no fan of Irene Dunne). At least it's filmed indoors on a set; something about too many outdoor shots depresses me in a film like this. Daylight should be banned from supernatural-tinged thrillers, don't you agree?

But it doesn't matter as far as making this film a precious must, the Loy scenes all sizzle and smoke. Crowd scenes at train platforms (LA's La Grande doubling for the Hudson Line out of Grand Central) help make the film feel realistic and expansive.


This film didn't do very well, and still hasn't earned the cult reputation it deserves, perhaps because the well-scrubbed rubes in the audiences of 1932 hated to be reminded that their callous racism was inevitably coming back to haunt them via the slow, inexorable spin of karma, both manipulated and artificial. And men don't like realizing just how easily their hormonal desires can be used against them, that falling in love with a pretty exotic girl may have less to do with our own free will than even we thought, that love might be something easily harnessed and co-opted as a weapon rather than a wondrous magical blah blah. In most such miscegenation fantasies it's never in doubt that the woman is in some way inferior to the white man she woos, and usually has to die in the end so the white guy can marry the long-suffering dull-as-dishwater white girl waiting at home. But here there's never a doubt that Ursula is superior to every other character in the film. Her only mistake is in letting the desire for vengeance cloud her judgment. But in her crazed behavior up until then, seducing and beguiling every man in a ten mile radius, Loy's Ursula is pre-code gold. As I've written before, the censors let sexy Asian characters get away with all sorts of kinky madness no white chick would ever be permitted (as long as they were really white, in make-up, to avoid riots --see my award-free series, Skeeved by an Asian).


And so it is that Loy goes down swinging, head unbowed, even robbing Cortez of the special joy of nabbing her. And once she does, the film ends, with nary a shred of follow-up to the damaged white imperialist swine souls she's left dead, alive, and/or distraught.



 That in itself make you want to see again and again, especially since parts of it are better than Nyqil, which then makes the weird Loy sequences all the more dreamlike as you gaze on them with one eye open, and the great rushing shooting star dissolves into the camera lens and all the stars and victims and treasures are no more (in other words: it's pretty short, 59 minutes, no word exists on why they edited the women down to eleven. Did Selznick think women couldn't count that high? Maybe in the end that's the reason, Hollywood just couldn't handle that many women at once. Too dangerous to the status quo. Peg Entwhistle--as if inspired by her role as one of the THIRTEEN WOMEN--leapt off the Hollywood sign to her death shortly after this film opened.

Top: Entwistle as Hazel Couisns in THIRTEEN WOMEN (premiere: Sept. 16, 1932);
bottom: Entwistle as herself in NY TIMES (death: Sept. 20, 1932)
 Who knows why she chose not to stick it out? Science was a long way from SSRIs, but she was far from a failure, at least on the stage (but it wasn't enough) and in THIRTEEN WOMEN she's hypnotized into murdering her husband during a black-out, ruining her life, in effect. The bad press after the previews led to her scenes getting mostly cut, and the film getting crunched down to 59 minutes (with two of the 13 women eliminated altogether).


In the end, Hollywood rewards more than anything tenacity and gumption. Loy suffered through a solid decade, from silent to sound, waiting for Hollywood to stop saddling her with exotic vamp roles. But she always tackled them with sensual relish nonetheless. And if Peg had hung on for another few days she would have been alive to get a starring role in another play -- as a girl who commits suicide. And so it is, life imitates art, nonstop... maybe acting it every night (she'd played the part before, allegedly so good she inspired a young girl to become Bette Davis).


But Peg's saga doesn't end there. Her host still haunts the 'H' according to sources (including some ghost shows like PARANORMAL WITNESS.)  And strange occurrences and encounters continue, with the lady in white leaving the scent of gardenias (her favorite flower) in her gliding eerie path. (See Stephen Wagner's: The Ghost of the Hollywood Sign or the short film and e-book by Hope Anderson.)

I hope one day we'll find the original preview cut of THIRTEEN WOMEN, and be able to see her full part at last. Maybe once the murder of Hazel Cousins' husband is finally seen in full, Peg Entwistle can rest in peace, and a cool, cult-ish film will finally be weird and pre-code violent enough it can stand up to anything, even the flowery sediment of Irene Dunne and the hack ladyfingers of O'Selznick. Alongside the Welles cut of AMBERSONS, and the excised Myrna Loy in her underwear singing "Mimi" clip in LOVE ME TONIGHT, this is my biggest 'lost reel excavation' fantasy. And don't think it can't happen! It's already happened to FRANKENSTEIN, BABY DOLL, and THE BIG SLEEP!

Peg Entwistle, 
may you find the peace in death 
you could not get in Los Angeles
 and long may film preservationists and exhumers of dead reels,
right the hasty butchering by
our Hollywood fathers, 
and return you to THIRTEEN
in full shimmering husband stabs.
Forever on Blu-ray
or at least DV-R. 
Amen. 


↧
↧

Tales from the Retrofuturist Pharmacy, Part II: PHASE IV, Boards of Canada, SPACE STATION 76 (1st 20 minutes)

November 19, 2014, 10:07 am
$
0
0

The future is always already then, as then is the future. So it wasn't written. Some tomorrows are maybe yesterdays' correct prediction and if you're blind enough to believe man is the axis of his own spinning destiny, consider the wisdom of that hedonistic and empathic era known as the 70s --a scant 40 odd years ago, though it seems like it hasn't even happened yet--when we were much more collectively decadent and forward-thinking (about some things); and now it seems always to be some pipe dream wrest from our collective grasp at the first sign of trouble. We had the sexual, spiritual, and psychedelic revolution in the mainstream, but we let it slip through our fingers. Why? Movies. Home video. In theaters there were successful 'head trips' like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1969) showing us mankind--high  on a big black rectangular slab of LSD sent to us by a highly advanced civilization--ready for his next stage of evolution, one with free love, Evelyn Wood and EST, ESP, and mood rings to go with the Valium and wife-swapping and all night drunken block parties. and DoodleArt for all.


Underneath all that was another element: how even the future will eventually look outmoded one day, that commercial space flight will be reduced to a few 'idle' commie intellectuals in the Howard Johnson spaceport lounge on ridiculously modular furniture.


(PS - there's a mild spoiler or two on
PHASE IV within, so you should Netflix this shit up
first if you... well, you know)
Yeah, and ants will rule o'er the Earth. but in the 1970s, the ruling o'er the Earth was much more advanced than we would imagine today--with CGI overkill and Space Marines "going in hot" ala STARSHIP TROOPERS but sans fascist irony. The PHASE IV ants would be six moves ahead, their collective hive intelligence seeing through our every knee-jerk move. We wouldn't be anything as coarse as wiped out, merely, perhaps, reshaped.


Recent retrofuturist head trips like SPACE STATION 76 (2014) and BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2010 -covered here), provide the full measure of timeless nostalgia for these times un-past, enhanced by a subgenre of electronic-analog music spearheaded by Boards of Canada and fans of 70s-80s horror film music (see below), and great macabre sites like The Scarfolk Council. It's a good time to be missing the 70s and its less oppressive more tactile version of the future.

On the other hand, SPACE STATION 76 (2014) was so trite I couldn't make it past the first 20 minutes. I kicked it out of my TV after three strikes: 1) the terribly anachronistic use of bad CGI for the space shots, instead of models which could have looked phony but would have been tactile, which is the whole fucking point of making a film set when things were more tactile!, 2) wasting the fantasy of a druggy space station fantasia with a lot of anachronistic alienation and angst, as if writer-director Jack Plotnik had a great idea but then couldn't remember the 70s at all beyond one or two cigarettes and a strung out emotionally unavailable caregiver on Valium, and when a guy lights a joint we have to see him in a pornographic female working guy sex fantasy, replete with perfectly mussed hair, and joint in his rolled up shirtsleeve, alone in his sexy garage. And only one cigarette at a time and smoked like the person never smoked a cigarette before, like a health nut mime in an anti-smoking ad and 3) hopelessly trite and obvious music choices, spelling out the mood they're hoping to generate rather than providing any interesting form of contrast or counterpoint. ZzzzzAP! You're out.


But Liv Tyler looks good, even with a paralyzed upper lip and a mousy reticence utterly at odds with her character's supposed accomplishments as a pilot. Compared to mighty feminist vanguards like Christina Applegate in ANCHORMAN or Denise Richards in STARSHIP TROOPERS, she asserts no sense of competence or strength, being rather mousy and underwritten. Her uniform is sexy in an offhand way though, I was glad it wasn't overly obvious... like everything else. Click. I let it go.... 

I know that disqualifies me from a genuine review, so why did I mention it? The future, man. I'll see the rest one day, when I'm less picky about my retrofuturist serio-rom-coms. It does inevitably happen; there is a season, burn burn burn. Meanwhile, to gratify the retrofuturist jones, I put back on a film I've already seen twice on Netflix Streaming and which just gets better every time, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2010)


 RAINBOW is a mad druggie psychologist's 70s dream of a geodesic dome paradise for people who are ready to leave petty moral strife behind even if it means a cold clinical red geodome prison instead, and it improves with repeat viewing; in a flashback to 1966, the lead character, a drugged-out shrink, takes some powerful liquid LSD, is reborn, eats his mother or... something. Back to the mid-80s, and the rich scientist who set it all up is a shattered junky, his star child daughter kept under protective glass to contain her ability to project thoughts and melt people's brains and the drugged-out shrink delights in tormenting her and talking super slowly, each word savored as it spirals out in gorgeous liquid curvature. (more here).

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
Right as I was writing this, Craig T. Nelson behind me said the words "phase four" in relation to the real estate development agency he works for in POLTERGEIST (1981). Is it any coincidence that this PHASE IV is the movie I'm writing about at this very moment? Or rather, not writing about it all yet. "Reach back and remember when you had an open mind," JoBeth Williams says before a chair slides across the floor. As I've already written, Craig T. Nelson starts the film in the 70s great dad mode--and winds up a closed-down conservative Reagan 80s dad, and so "remember when you had an open mind" could apply to our current world as well. For the 70s seems a long time ago. For one thing, the world was only half as overpopulated as it is now when we're just in denial.

Scarfolk!
There's also apparently the music and the shared educational films put out by the Canadian Board of Education -- hence Boards of Canada, whose eerie electronic music seeks to capture that late afternoon feeling of woozy instant hauntological retrofuturism, the way children's sponge like minds absorb the 70s elementary school-enforced complex lessons of overpopulation, pollution, Saturn, the world of insects and the darkest ocean depths --though the BOC is actually Scottish, no doubt their ingeniously socialized education systems shared film strips and 16mm shorts. In a progressive 70s grade school (Knapp Elementary in Landsale PA), we saw short films on themes like the hole in the ozone layer like THE ARK (1970), and this thing I can't find mentioned anywhere where a lone color butterfly invades a depressing black and white industrial hellscape, almost initiates a revolution, and then winds up pinned to the wall in the manager's desk.

But these things are immaterial to the features and the music, and the way futuristic synthesizers, so creepy and great especially in horror and science fiction films of the late 70s-early 80s, have galavanized a whole genre of music, so time specific --the future as imagined in the past-- it's literally out of time.

RETROFUTURISTIC SCORES IS NOW (mix by Erich Kuersten)


England made Scarfolk; Scotland made Boards of Canada; and Canada made RAINBOW. And what did we make? Goddamned half-baked overthought de-clawed SPACE STATION 76. Jeeziss. We got to get it together now (in service of then).

Luckily, we RULE the past. Our 70s touchstones included SOYLENT GREEN, SILENT RUNNING, and LOGAN'S RUN, and--now on Netflix streaming-- PHASE IV (1974), which used to come skittering through the usual after-school creature features on local TV, and had me thinking hyper-intelligent ants besieging a geophasic dome in the middle of the desert sounded pretty cool. But these ants aren't Bert I. Gordon-style, like EMPIRE OF THE ANTS or FOOD OF THE GODS. They're not giant (not then at least, on our 70s TVs), and for most of the time we barely see them interact with the humans at all except through basic shapes related via fax machine, until said humans are dead or 'right where the ants want 'em in a giant hole. In short, it was too intellectual for my sugar-addled attention span at the time. The up close shots of ants were okay, but I saw tons of insects as a kid, both in school on nature documentaries and living across the street from a thriving park where every upturned rock delivered unto us kids a vast eye full of struggling worms, pill bugs, centipedes, and spiders. I even had a bug collection, pinned on a cork board, slowly crumbling onto my desk. It was something we weren't impressed by as easily as stoned adults might later be. Besides, most kids, small and powerless in a strange world of giants, come to depend on tormenting, killing, or capturing, or just cuddling with smaller creatures to feel any sort of power, as the lead scientist played by Nigel Davenport (below) demonstrates. We could understand the big ones eating us, but not the little ones outsmarting us. That was just too much to bear.


Now though, on the widescreen HD TV, the close-ups look like alien monsters, and I've put away childish things, taken them back out again, and now left them at some party I lost the address and anyway am too embarrassed to retrace my steps and ask around. I revisited that Lansdale park a few years ago and the creek was dried up, the trees dying, the park was now just a stretch of grass with a softball diamond. Bugs got zero cachet for me, and reality is parched and empty while the screen explodes with HD color. And PHASE IV awaits rediscovery on Netflix.

Davenport plays an entomologist whose detected disturbing signs that all the different kinds of ants are working together, and that their natural enemies are all conveniently and mysteriously disappearing in a remote stretch of Arizona. With a big grant he sets off to build a geophasic research station and weapon lab to find out what's going on and (hopefully) destroy the ants before they wipe out mankind, recruiting a games-and-theory code breaker from MIT (Michael Murphy) to help him communicate with the collective hive ant intelligence.

The film actually moves very fast, even truncated, like a Reader's Digest abridged novel (popular at the time), moving through a cycle of ideas and not at all the molasses drip of meaningless I remembered. It helps to have taken some drugs, I guess, in the interim, and so be able to better understand the psychedelic journey of the end, where the couple come together as the messengers of a new insect alien intelligence-commandeered Earth, one no doubt infinitely better managed. In short, 2001: An Ant Farm Odyssey


Theory of film recollection:
The more in depth we remember a film scene, i.e. writing about it, analyzing it, getting a thrill from remembering it in great depth, the longer and more powerful the scene becomes, and so how we remember it stretches its meaning until it takes the form of myth. This lasts until we see the film again and are forced to either presume it's been edited, somehow changed with time, or else we were 'on' something at the time and aren't now. The film's presentation might be different - certainly the widescreen and HD makes a huge difference over the old square. But we're the ones who have changed, and memories have accrued around initial impressions until what's there isn't there anymore; it's covered up with little neuron ant eggs.


That doesn't mean the memories are false, merely that time is.

Directed by Saul Bass, PHASE IV was his only film, and though he's remembered for his ingenious credit sequences (for Hitchcock films particularly), he certainly acquits himself well. The script is veery intelligent, of course each ant in itself isn't brilliant, but the hive mind is, and the hive mind is a real thing, obviously, so it's tough to not consider the difficulty in combating a non-localized intelligence, and since we genuinely can't easily understand what they're up to, we're forced to consider them as an entire new form of intellect, genuinely superior to ours because they're so self-sacrificing, so devoted to the whole. After Davenport sprays the ants with a yellow poison, for example, they die en masse, but then we see ants dying as they drag a chunk of the toxin through a long ant tunnel and into the queen's chamber, where she eats some of it and immediately gives birth to an array of immune eggs. Humans simply can't evolve that fast, not sober, not after AIDS and the Reagan 80s brought us into crash mode.


The big thing people mention when they argue against evolution today is 'how come animals haven't learned to talk by now," and they miss the point - mankind's ability to talk is not a sign of evolution, any more than the plague is. Language is a soul-killing virus that slowly strangles our five sense in favor of some abstract symbology, while at the same time our natural evolution has slowed. Our dogs and cats look at us like we're crazy but they love us beyond what we're capable of grasping --they see when we're really troubled and comfort us without a word. Their senses are superior, they get cuter all the time; they have to, that's evolution.  By which I mean, if we were animals we would have long ago adapted to our natural world rather than destroying it so it can conform to us. Animals see what language and abstract thinking have done to us and they say 'no thanks.' Maybe our evolution will involve curing ourselves of the curse of abstract thinking and language, and we'll merge once more into the cosmic egg, fuse our intelligence to that of our Sky Mother, Shakti Kali Durga, the one without a second. There she is, waiting for us to swim once more into her light tunnel womb towards full transfiguration. And animals will all be all waiting to welcome us when we return, saying "hey man, you finally evolved!"


The problem with us ever actually evolving, of course, is that survival of the fittest is no longer a human luxury, quite the contrary - people who by any stretch of the imagination could never feed themselves even for a day are allowed to continue to eat and crap and consume all the finest things in life, and to procreate in billions far more than the people too smart to procreate at all... this is actually the reverse of evolution, the 'idiocracy' of Mike Judge. And if someone doesn't spray our colony soon, we're going to devour this entire jungle, then turn on ourselves, 'til all that's left is one pissed off queen and a consort set, stowing away on the next star-powered INTERSTELLAR craft out of here. Count me in.

... to frickin' throw eggs at it!


Further 70s "learning" -




↧

The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer: SZAMANKA (1994)

November 30, 2014, 11:12 am
$
0
0

The American holiday trifecta has already passed its first hurtle, Thanksgiving. Now the sluggish traffic and unruly Wal-Mart tazing begins in earnest and a skittish mummified shamanic Pisces like me turns naturally inward, for movies are the best way to avoid holiday shopping lines. All those commercials that try so hard to become a patronizing life coach for Americans: "we don't settle for anything less," and "we're always pushing just a little further" like they already know you, like a narc would if he suddenly appeared at the edge of your circle. You don't know us, pal, and we already got the score on you from the roommate of the last kid you busted. So stay inside, like an urban hermit, and savor the unenlightenment, the peaceful darkness of the amniotic sac couch bog, and then just wait for nature to take it's course, that's my life coaching. One century soon, some decadent Warsaw university students will dig you up and put you in a nice preservative solution isolation tank, rummage through your bags and find your secret stash of mushrooms both psilocybe and 'flybane' (i.e. fly agaric or Amanita Muscaria) and then eat them, so they can bond with you, and warn you about the crazy woman fixing to devour your soul, SZAMANKA (or She-Shaman) is her name... and like so many hot girls in cold climates, she's fucking crazy. 


Speaking of crazy, those shrooms: Amanitas are currently legal, and it's easy to see why if you ever tried them. Too many can make you feel poisoned, not enough can make you feel like you're not getting off - and just the right amount gets the colors enhanced and the sweaty glow feeling of being connected to the world, but they also make that world smell like urine. Maybe they were better in Poland or Siberia, 2,500 years ago, because the anthropologist played by Boguslaw Linda in SZAMANKA sure digs them (literally and figuratively). But even he learns the hard way: once you've submitted without fear to the full stripping away of persona layers, divested yourself of all attachment, unmade the trappings of self, remembered your own birth, bathed in the white light of pure love, and forgiven everyone everywhere. Then what? No one gets you, your fiancee thinks you're nuts, and the people who do get you wear sandals and patchouli and garlic and look anemic from not eating meat.

So we need Mexico's Alejandro Jodorowsky, America's David Lynch, and Poland's Andrzej Zulawski to guide us in a holding pattern 'til the rest of the world slowly catches up and we sink down into the post-Thanksgiving depths of Mordor Xmas. I save SZAMANKA for when I'm delirious or have been in the cave so long I've forgotten there's even an outdoors at all. Zulawski doesn't even need to show us anyone actually taking the drugs, the shit's in the celluloid.


I first discussed Zulawski's SZAMANKA in conjunction with Carrie Matheson and Claire Forlan's awesome Dewar's ad! while back in November of 2012, during that previously discussed enlightenment breakthrough awareness state: "from boxes heart-shaped shapelessness, bags tossed as rubbish into the Warsaw mud, flown, Angus, darlin' - rather, a punk-en down Dalle Betty Blue-blackend bird spazzing through anthropology classes as her lover pilfers thousand year-old psilocybe and Amanita Muscaria mushrooms from a mummified shaman's pockets. Each wodka shot or peanut butter-covered stem tracking each punch and drunken stumble dream pie like meth and coveralls to grinding mechanical factory sex atop crumbling swamp corpse; grinding academics in their dancing and beer spillage and moving far away from the needle tip distance twixt the ancient fungal shaman's last expression train down through more more the turn style jumped, coiffed, jumped back through and gay references hurtled like Jack Benny's Polish theater troupe bombed and built anew under which in the shelter Zulawski slept as a child. (more)


I dig my crazy jive poetry from two years ago, finding references to everything from T.S. Eliot to SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS to the obscure Lou Reed song, "Billy," but I wouldn't write like that again if I could try. I'm too jaded. I was on a holy fool pre-apocalyptic role back this time in 2012, as seen in The Scrooge Satori, all without a single mushroom, And I would never have made the TO BE OR NOT TO BE connection in my current cave-bound form. Yet when else is a Polish theater troupe the main character of a comedy film set and shot in 1942 Hollywood? Before you answer, quick imagine Roman Polanski skittering like a rat through the Warsaw sewers while Germans shell the city above and Russians wait on the outskirts, until the Resistance is wiped out, so they can step in an Iron Curtain the place. What a bum deal.


Am I going somewhere with this, as some ancient astronaut theorists believe? Shamans are waiting for you to exhume them! Did you hear in the news that a 747 recently crashed in a cemetery in Poland? The Polish officials have so far retrieved 2,000 bodies! (1)

SZAMANKA (1994), aka SHE-SHAMAN, is one of them. Great judicious synthesizers underwrite Andrzej Zulawski's uber-bizarre panic movement-ish meditation on the nature of primitivism, Neanderthal train sex momentum, insanity, eating brains to gain wisdom, and the lack of mores or coherence in 90s Warsaw. And the script was written by a woman, Manuela Gretowska, who co-founded the Polish Women's Party and ran for office... in Poland! Badass, so best believe it's way darker sexually than even Zulawski would normally go. But thanks to his own 'maturer' madness, he makes a pretty good movie around it, way better than that punk Jean-Pierre Leaud was making in LAST TANGO IN PARIS (below, overlaid by me with a Bosch detail for easy decoding).


I mention this because Zulawski and Gretowska clearly know SZAMANKA is a lot like LAST TANGO IN PARIS, and that star Iwona Petry looks and foams at the mouth like Beatrice Dalle in BETTY BLUE which, lest we forget, ends with Dalle going totally crazy, getting electro-shock, and winding up smothered with a pillow ala ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. As with Bertolucci's film, Zulawski's crazy roving camera chases sexy nutcase Petry running everywhere--onto trains, off of trains--upstairs and down--and at times there's obscene perverse men leering from every corner and it begins to almost seem like some perverse sexual nightmare paving the way for the whole sparagmos devouring her lover like a mantis thing, like Beatrice Dalle's in her holy trifecta - BETTY BLUE, TROUBLE EVERY DAY, and INSIDE.   One of her lover's pals notes of some people being "God's fools, with souls so big there's no room for brains," Iwona Petry's "Italian" is at least smart enough to realize they're talking about her, and to knock over their table accordingly. So while Boguslaw Linda goes on his lecture, she's illustrating his tales of Neanderthal shamanism by mouthing a display case and "careening through the streets of Warszawa like a culturally inept marathon runner who's afraid of clowns" (2). While Linda pursues a doctorate in medicine, she's going to engineering school at the same school, so it's a metaphor to the division of labor and culture in Poland, and of woman's sexuality as something so archaically Precambrian as to devour the entirety of Apollonian civilization in a single sparagmosticated brain bite.

Her hotness making her a one-woman cliff for Warszawa's leming males, it's as if she's constantly trying to keep them at bay by behaving in a way that turns even the staunchest stomach; she also foams at the mouth, eats cat food out of her landlady's cat dish, and in short behaves like a proper panic movement-era primal screen actress undergoing convulsions like one feels on, say, too way way much acid. Four times what you usually take, I guess, is enough to get you to that level of walking down the middle of the street with no pants on screaming at the top of your lungs, each root of hair in your scalp tingling like fiberoptic tendrils pummeling signals past all your normal blinders and defenses; from every web string of time and space, sensory impression magnified to the point of distortion, contradicting the other impressions, so that you literally hear your own thoughts talk to you in the roar of a passing truck or the bark of a dog and everyone you see looks like melting Cubist seventh dimensional sculptures. And it goes on like that for upwards of six hours (or if on DOM or STP, up to 36 hours). The only salvation is benzos, or whiskey... lots and lots, like you're a raving bull elephant huffing Ketamine in a vain attempt to put yourself under before the circus guy shoots you. Sometimes open mouth kissing display cases, salting your clothes, peppering your hair and spraying perfume on your lettuce, will at least help you break free from the normal behaviors of your social and cultural position, which is suddenly reveled as a terrifying unconscious cluelessness.

this is your brain on drugs

Zulawski's been there, too. Petry and Linda know all the tricks, and maybe so has Gretowska, I'd imagine, because in SZAMANKA even engineering lectures fuse sexual-reproductive organs into the discussion in a way that would probably blow Cronenberg's mind.
"Zulawski said the animus inspired by his film was mainly directed at his uninhibited actress. The press “hated her and destroyed her, and she disappeared.” He has not made another movie in Poland since: “This country is still in the Middle Ages.” - J. Hoberman NY Times March 2nd, 2012 (my birthday!)

Still in the Middle Ages. I agree, half of America is right there with them, and as Petry's performance is clearly meant to have a certain 'the whole Cro-Magnon Thing passed my evolution by" -style idiot savant savage ambivalence, she's a living contradiction to all the Texas Board of Education--and by extension the International Film Critics Circle-- holds dear, he said, reading aloud from his notebook while running it under water in the sink, then dripping the blue ink all over her naked body. Clearly, he (Boguslaw Linda) is tripping balls. But it's for science! And he doesn't need a frickin' medical hothead standing by overacting like Charles Haid (in ALTERED STATES), or even a shot of him actually taking the mushrooms. He's just suddenly on them, and we have to guess when he's under the influence. He doesn't even need to mention reasons. But he says what they are eventually: he just wants to find the shaman in modern paranoid schizophrenics, realizing that "drugs, hunger, danger, darkness" - were all enough to keep all primitive humans in a paranoid schizophrenic state of delusional pleasure-pain, i.e. at that every hair a luminescent antennae to a thousand contrasting and contradictory signals too-much acid vibe. To find the nugget of truth, Boguslaw starts slowly devolving along the same lines, craving that mystical union with the power of what he does yet know via any ceremonial sex magic or 2,500 year old mushrooms he can find. And like all Zulawski films I've seen, no narcs.


In that sense, no one does it quite as shamanistically correct as old Andrzej Zulawski --Jodorowsky is too vulgar, Emir Kusturica too whimsical, Lynch too straight, and Gilliam too bent. None are the types to take "fucking flybanes" at their science lab and pitch a doctoral thesis to their advisor and future father-in law while rolling around on the floor in the hospital chapel. In other words, to offer fusion of the dramatic, forward-thinking, mystical, druggy, and socio-political all without whimsy, vulgarity, weird-for-weird's sake-ism, or any semblance of humor... or drama... Because Poles, like their Russian neighbors, just don't give a fuck. They sidestep altogether the things that trip up America--for all its talk of freedom--in unhackable tendrils of churchy censorship and narratives in morasses of need to explain things to the rubes in the cheap seats. These students don't need to worry about narcs or rubes like we did. If they find some shrooms in the ancient pocket of the exhumed shaman, they're going to do them. And wait for the shaman in the dish to make the first move. And they're going to hide that they did them from even us, so you have to know what the signs are. And the signs are indistinguishable from 'everyday' Warsaw life in the 1990s.


Dude, I've been on all sides of that equation, everyone except the mummified shaman. And that, according to my spirit guide, is what's waiting in fall 2015. Because let me tell you, without our space mushroom brothers as co-workers, we'll never get off this rock in any conveyance other than space ships. What's it gonna be, big dollar-intensive conveyances just to wind up back with Jessica Chastain in the Pre-Raphaelite TREE OF LIFE shirt reflection, where we could have been all this time through some simple deep breathing meditation and/or a handful of nonlocal mushrooms? By the power of Terence McKenna, I can validate that psychedelic mushrooms are standing by in petri dish agar solution somewhere, ready to work hand in stamen with the next generation of psychonauts, and the future's alien skies are limitless... just make it past the Scrooge tomb slab, the hottie primitive from the Middle Ages eating your brain on drugs as it sizzles apart in the heated pan of pure consciousness, and the cops inside the marrow of your bones. Maybe the dollar-intensive conveyances would be better, frozen forever til some far gone destination, comfy in the couch-like peat bog of the 'old freezarino' out in deep space. But not even INTERSTELLAR sleep lasts forever. No matter how long they drag it out, it's inevitable one will wake up to house lights, and the terror of an empty screen (and unlimited que options) once more reflects like a DOS prompt on your empty helmet. Fucking flyboys...

NOTES.
1. Old Polish JokeS
2. The great Yum-Yum, House of Self Indulgence (5/30/13)
↧

Growing up ALIEN: PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, THE TERROR WITHIN

December 4, 2014, 7:11 am
$
0
0

I was a young kid when ALIEN(1979) came out, too young to see it in theaters and VHS didn't exist, and we knew it would be edited to death when it finally cam to the ABC Movie of the Week, so it was all but lost to us, except through the blanched faces of the adults who'd seen it, and "survived." We could try to read the novelization, maybe, but we weren't up to that level of reader comprehension. When we were finally able to rent it on VHS a few years later, we were still terrified every step of the way. We watched it together, two families, as an army, rented along with COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER back in the early days of VHS. And yet, the whole thing with the robot gurgling white liquid and being reactivated took me out of the suspense-generating, all-consuming dread, as if that dread was so rare and delicious I resented Ian Holm taking me out of the zone--I'd forgotten all about the alien threat while he was doing his whole milk spew thing, and noticing the alien patiently waited until that whole scene had played out to resume its attacks.

And what was the deal with going back for Jones, the damn cat? They didn't even have that cat in the film until they wandered out in the loading dock. Still The stomach burster was unforgettable, but especially on the pan and scan, a lot of the great composition was lost. We were used to that, of course and if we didn't see it in the theater we didn't know what we were missing.

Then: the summer of ALIENS (1986), and I had just finished my freshman year at Syracuse. My girl and I still had to kind of get our courage up-- the whole point of the gore and trauma was to get us scared of seeing more of it, scared every moment and around every corner. The first stretch involving space soldiers investigating the complex kept the theater I saw it in on pins and needles.

Alien: Resurrection (Extended Cut)
But by the end of ALIENS our collective fear of the boogeyman had been stretched once too often, and as a result had militarized us. Now when I see Ripley running terrified down Nostromo corridors I feel nothing as far as suspense, instead I'm thinking about Ridley Scott's commentary track, wherein he notes that Sigourney Weaver's running down the same corridor, over and over again, spray-painted different colors of gold and silver to give the illusion of difference. Not having to worry about the physical threats awaiting the final girl is a relief; repetition-compulsion disorder had proven its worth. Ripley was weaponized -- "Let her alone, you bitch!!" got every ALIENS audience to its feet. By the time of ALIEN: RESURRECTION in 1997, just trying to generate suspense from aliens stalking humans seemed pointless, and Ripley being super tough was just par for the course. She was now half-alien herself, like Sil in SPECIES, but any declaration of 'you bitch' could now be only directed at herself, and there was no longer any recognizable human in the cast, replaced by French director Jean Pierre-Jeunet's METAL HURLANT-style cartoonish bizarro world exaggeration, so that the only cool scene at all is of the always welcome and super-cool Michael Wincott discussing payments and acquisition of sleeping cargo for hosts while having a cigar and drink with military commander Dan Hedaya (below). But even there, Jean-Pierre Jeunet makes sure Hedaya's eyebrows are even more disturbing than usual. There's no shred of identifiable normal to latch onto - just layers of exaggerated CITY OF LOST CHILDREN-style over-artsiness.


Then there's the alien itself. In the first film it was truly other -- there was nothing remotely like it, nothing we'd seen before - not even remotely close to any of our species except in the most preliminary or advanced of stages. But by RESURRECTION it was just another smart mammal, making noises that sounded like pitch shifted lions, barking dogs and braying donkeys all at once-- the stages in the original design by now so familiar as to be more nostalgic than uncanny.

Galaxy of Terror
That's just human culture though, ALIEN's over-exposure-disseminated fear level drainage was inevitable. Throughout its long gestation there have been imitators and films that it in turn imitated, to the point John Hurt even shows up in SPACEBALLS (1987), less than ten years later, and gives birth to a Vaudeville-kicking alien, a kids' movie by all accounts -- so an alien bursting out of a stomach goes from R-rated shock to PG-rated joke in under ten years.

Hurt at the diner - SPACEBALLS (1987)
Copy cats abounded too, James Cameron even got the job for ALIENS partially based on his success with turning out a lot of atmosphere on minimal dollars as art designer for Corman's ALIEN-imitating GALAXY OF TERROR (1981). Which makes sense, as a lot of the baroque majesty and sheer alienness of Ridley Scott's original is gone for Cameron's sequel, replaced by an erector set military gun locker aesthetic and cool feminist weaponization ala TERMINATOR. But not all films in the ALIEN imitation canon lost the Ridley Scott look, and ALIEN itself is just a very strong central link in a vast web of motifs that have been simmering for 60 years. Time enough for a space pod to carry your frozen body across the vast expanse between 1965 and 1989 for example, and with that...

---
PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965)
Dir. Mario Bava
88 minutes
***
Some films know just how to ease you into twilight sleep, your unconscious mind using the impressions from the soundtrack and dialogue as paint brushes to conjure alternate vistas as you dream yourself right off the couch and into the molasses chill of something like Bava's space fantasia PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. If you love dreaming in patches of otherworldly fog, the colors purple and red, the whoosh of space engines and throbbing moans of ancient races, unearthly winds, and badass proto-punk leather space uniforms with yellow piping, this should be your destination. And the clear points of inspiration for Alien are numerous: for one thing, we don't have to deal with the usual origin story that sinks so many unimaginative sci fi films (such as most of Ib Melchoir's other scripts), i.e. we don't have to see the space ships taking off from Earth or anything. Only FORBIDDEN PLANET before it knew that we could start from a very alien place and not need origin stories; the humans even fly in a saucer UFO instead of a phallic rocket, and we don't need to know why.


PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES picked up on that - the crews here aren't even necessarily human or from Earth at all, and it doesn't matter. Similarly, ALIEN starts in a distant future where humans regularly spend up to decades in frozen sleep in deep space, missing their children's entire life spans, and the idea of starting events in a ship where everyone's in such a sleep, then waking up and not having to explain the whole plot is so rare it's really only ever been in a few films before or since. And in PLANET there's a mysterious SOS signal calling a spaceship to a strange planet where they discover an ancient crashed spaceship with dead giant aliens now reduced to calcified bones that make them look like they were giant elephant men, a bit like the huge space jockey looks in ALIEN, and there’s also a great ending which in its way harkens to the theatrical ending of ALIEN: RESURRECTION.


The film's got some issues, such as it being hard to distinguish most of the cast from each other and the plot--starting just like ALIEN with a search party (here comprised of two vessels) answering a strange beacon's call at a remote inhospitable (but lovingly lit) planet about to be devoured by its dying sun (or something)--becoming kind of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS where the dead rise from their plastic coverings and hot Italian girls in leather jumpsuits (the kinkiest high fashion space crew uniforms ever) become possessed. And with Bava devotee Tim Lucas' commentary track on the Blu-ray, we learn a lot of the maestro's DIY in-camera special effect tricks, which only enhances enjoyment. Lucas' reverence of the Bava canon is contagious and its reassuring that no no matter what's onscreen, we know it was intended it just that way by one of horror cinema's great artists, so we can kick back and let the soothing space noises... lull us... to... sleep. eep... ... bleep... blip.... blip... captain the coffin's empty, all over again! 

THE TERROR WITHIN (1989)
Dir Thierry Notz
88 minutes

This New World Alien rip smartly moves the Nostromo  underground in the Mojave desert on a post-plague Earth, where only snakes and wandering mutant gargoyles still roam. Aside from some terribly duck-like rows of teeth, the gargoyles aren't quite as ridiculous as most monsters in big rubber suits shambling around after suicidally slow-witted prey, and their craftiness and invulnerability make them formidable as hell, able to jump out of small spaces while being seven feet tall, as if inheriting all the DNA of both The Terminator and Michael Myers. Uniforms are very similar to ALIEN and there’s even a Yaphet Kotto-Harry Dean Stanton-esque pair of shiftless ensigns, drinking homemade ‘shine and grumbling about pay raises for “this kind of duty” which by now scans as merely quaint as opposed to appalling. But this is a Corman production, and that means when a surviving human is found running through the Mojave brush, she's sexy, terrified, and pregnant, and thanks to the reticent scalpel of the doctor, her abortion arrives too late and the baby gargoyle comes out and even runs across the room like he's freshly de-Kaned.

Monster rapes were all but signaling a feminist backlash in Corman productions, and with good reason but they gave him R-rating guarantees and allowed for a two-for-one shock--1) the pre-PC lurid pulp cover fetishizing of sexy girls having their clothes ripped off by all sorts of claws, ghost hands, or centipede legs; 2) the inevitable ALIEN-esque cesarian. And somehow it's less disturbing that monsters are doing it, largely for a kind of pro-creation similar to the ALIEN gestation, rather than my fellow man for frat boy-style misogyny kicks.

Star Andreef vs. Wade
That aside, I admire the ballsy pro-choice angle when Sue (Star Andreeff) demands an abortion while the lady doctor refuses and we're allowed to wonder if it's because she's got designs on Sue's man, the 80s coiffed hero David (Andrew "Kirk Douglas’s telekinetic son in The Fury" Stevens); she says the reason is that Sue's too weak to undergo such a surgery, and that there's plenty of time to do it tomorrow, and that it's probably Andrew "Kirk" Douglas's baby. Oh man for an alternate future with ultrasound. At any rate, David's the sort who
thinks lugging a crossbow around in tight quarters is going to do shit against an invincible giant heavily toothed, clawed, armored, and muscled foe. But his hair is perfect.


Most of the cast dies in their Darwinian order: including George "Endless Fords" Kennedy and Sue herself, who thinks that--if her man's in trouble battling an invincible stealthy and rabidly horny monster three floors below--the best thing to do is hop in an elevator, unarmed, and come to his rescue while screaming at the top of her lungs. But the rapid cast disappearance is only the start of the greatness, because we end up with a wounded terrified under-armed couple who communicate mainly one a two-way intercom as they try to obliterate a monster mutant whose only weakness is his painful sensitivity to Steven's dog whistle--and the last stretch is just the three of them locked in endless tussle like THE TERMINATOR meets CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON.

And there’s a dog in the film who ably helps out in cool ways (he’s their tracker and early warning system and fearlessly distracts and attacks the 'gargoyles') and even survives at the end. I'm not spoiler alerting for that, because dogs get a notorious bad break in horror films. When one survives, it's a cause for celebration.


So... skewed pro-choice compassion, a reasonably clear idea of where each person is in relation to one another at any given time in the deep compound, and the usual quick rush Corman-brand momentum all conspire to make TERROR off-worlds better than most ALIEN rip-offs. If only they hired Thierry Notz to make ALIEN 3 the way they hired Cameron for ALIENS, someone with a knack for doing a lot with a little instead of that cold misanthropic clinician David Fincher who does so very little with so much. If I didn't mention ALIEN 3 at all in the introduction, it's because Fincher gutted everything that was great about the first two films, setting the film entirely on a dismal mud planet prison that could be anywhere in any closed-down prison anywhere in shit-field England, so he can hire a bunch of Brit thespians, shave everyone's heads, and roll around in the mud, so instead of a sexy Ripley or a weaponized Ripley we get an almost gang-raped Ripley who needs to be rescued by a self-righteous Muslim, and the dog, oh goddamned you, Fincher... and for what? So another CGI shape gets thrown in another dumb cauldron of liquid metal?


I remember renting this from Blockbuster while visiting my brother in Arizona 20 years ago-ish, and not being able to understand what the hell was going on half the time thanks to bad pan and scanning, and seeing double thanks a 1.75 liter of Seagram's gin, one hits, and constantly being interrupted by Fred's dumbass buddies--But hey, that's what it's all about: the dry desert, shooting the empties in the backyard with an air rifle, picking on the dumbass friends of your little brother, and always on the look-out for monsters, to give us just one excuse to bring out the heavy ordinance. Leave us alone, you bitches! We said. And they did. And god damn them.


FARTHER:

The Evolver Virus: PROMETHEUS, The Dead Files (10-21-12)

↧
Viewing all 428 articles
Browse latest View live
Search