Prepare for the Coming of the Hillary Matriarchy with these 5 Psychotronic films on Hulu Plus

From fish god cults to a cockeyed MAD MAX: FURY ROAD premake to maternal body horror so unseemly no one's dared try anything remotely like it in 30 years, these five psychotronic films predict the the new world orderless matriarchy of the Scorpio Sun / Pisces rising goddess Hulu-Ree Klinn-Tohn as handily as if they washed ashore with campaign bumper stickers in their fetid claw like hands, and hammers to smash down the crosses from Middle America's fearful Christian churches.

To help the future happen, mira los hazardous collection of films evoking the coming liberal dystopia that can only result when woman is or isn't elected president. My Five Psychotronic Films on Amazon Prime for a new TRUMPMERICA post was such a hit I felt I had to balance the scale, so here it is. There's less apocalypse and more matriarchy to worry about this time, and all in all a more inspiring future of liberal awareness, higher taxation of the rich, and massive un-deployment.  With every new dead or symbolically neutered old white male voter we'll be sliding one step closer to socialism, until we'll be so like Canada we'll forget we ever weren't. Hence this list's heavy reliance on Cronenberg, Roddy Piper, and Ginger Snaps.

PS - Dear Hulu: Hulu is a terrible name for a movie site. Don't try to scan as playful! Be badass. Change it to... FROGTOWN, and not just 'cuz there's so many wearyingly French films on there, but because you carry the one.. the only....



The lithe and lovely Sandahl Bergman, and pleasingly self-effacing wrestler Roddy Piper roam the post-war wasteland looking for wild women to impregnate in the name of the cause (war has left most men dead or sterile). He's one of the few men still able to produce viable sperm; she's a health official in charge of helping him liberate, and then do his duty upon, a harem of fertile 'passives' currently held captive in a frog mutant warlord's stronghold. Since both sides need manpower more than nukes, 'our' side's future depends on "potent young men in the field, who can perform in difficult conditions."

Anyway, off they go across the border and into the wasteland to Frogtown, a combination abandoned oil refinery and R-rated version of a STAR WARS cantina. If your misogynist radar hadn't already gone off for the scene where Spangle (Bergman) drugs a wild fertile woman they gather up en route and compels Hell (Piper) to mount her, it will when she goes undercover as a bondage slave Hell's allegedly selling to the Frog warlord.  BUT your feminist senses might tingle too, since the women are for the most part super capable and assertive, more physically agile and gutsier than Hell, and though they drive in a pink 'Medtech' station wagon (ala KILL BILL!) there's a badass chick (Cec Verrell) on a .50 calibre sunroof mounted machine as his 'bodyguard.' In other words, rather than affirm male dominance, the film deconstructs sadomasochistic ritual, dominance, harem-keeping, the "dance! dance!" warlord cup banging, as pathetic attempts to reclaim the phallus from the women. Hell's junk is kept in a chastity belt with a built-in taser wired to Spangle's earrings and he's expected to 'perform' while his two captors/guardian women watch with detached curiosity, for in a neat twist of our current deal with an all male panel discussing women's health issues, here we have an all female team considering his phallus literally state property.
Luckily it's played relatively straight. Even that semi-twee title is no obscurantist whimsy but strictest present tense fact: Piper's character is named Hell, and Frogtown is 'ribbit'occupied by real frog mutants ("created as the by-product of your germ warfare") and the frog makeups are pretty damned good. Bergman is still as gorgeous and lithe as she was six years earlier in Conan; Piper is surprisingly sweet and tender in his softer scenes, and if, when he's expected to play the sexist dingus, he comes off a bit broad, it's not easy conveying a character who feels he's 'too good for this shit' without coming off like an actor who feels he's too good for the film, so I don't blame him if he falls into the latter camp at times. The frog with a fez doing the Sidney Greenstreet schtick at the requisite strip club frog bar? That's a little twee. But ain't squat twee about Rory Calhoun, wearing his good store teeth as a uranium minor supplying the frogs with fuel for a bomb. When he's dying with his head in the laps of one of the young liberated pacifist concubines in the backseat as they're pursued by the frog warlord in his armored car you realize suddenly - holy shit! This scene was lifted wholesale for last year's Mad Max: Fury Road!! Considering Frogtown's one of those post-Road Warrior 80s apocalypse movies, the inspirations come full circle!



Why Hillary: One look at the face of the odious frog king and you'll be reminded of a certain second runner behind Trump. Sandahl is Hillary being sold to the Middle States  ('can she dance?' asks the Frog Prince in he fez before voting/purchasing); the harem are the women voters of swing states looking askance at the brutalizing Handmaid's Tale future awaiting them under The Fog mutant's sway. (one grand dame frog lady takes a shine to Piper and frees him though it means her death -- she'd be the swing state female voting bloc). Scruffy Roddy stands for the American midwest, reckoning the pros and cons between giving a woman control of the national balls, or else letting real amphibious monster gun nuts run riot over all our civil liberties.


If you need a map through this genuinely strange, disturbing picture then I'd say watch SCANNERS first. That's a zippy mind-expander with solid acting, exploding heads, Michael Ironside in his best role (his facial expressions when he's scanning are off the hook); and--with a voice so deep it opens up a hole in the floor--Patrick McGoohan as a revolutionary pharmacologist. Here in BROOD-land it's a little less bouncy and a lot more strange and horrible. No drugs this time, just a kind of gestalt externalized therapy at a strange clinic for 'psychoplasmics,' a method of externalizing rage that involves causing the body to break out in spots... or worse. Oliver Reed is Dr. Raglan, the mastermind psychiatrist who runs the place. Working deep into strange therapies with his patients, including a very unhinged Samantha Eggar, whose deep into regressive therapy and the doc won't let his concerned husband see her. Their child, on the other hand, is brought in for weekends, but comes home traumatized and bruised. I don't want to spoil the thing, but there's a kind of post-feminist version of the Monster from the Id going on. The hair weird hirsute sissy actor in the beginning demonstration is very unsightly - he's the most disturbing part of the film for me. In fact, hey, man, if it's too much, watch SCANNERS instead. Yeah, maybe you should just watch SCANNERS. The scene where a cute possible love interest Ruth Mayer (Susan Hogan with a great 70s elfin hair cut) is hammered to death by two of the monster kids right in front of her horrified kindergarten class is the most outrageous and deeply disturbing scene in all of 70s horror. Dude, there's always SCANNERS.




PS - My new favorite stealth character actor, Robert A. Silverman, the Dick Miller to Cronenberg's Corman, is great as a previous patient of the clinic preparing a lawsuit, wearing a white towel on his neck to cover an awful mutating psychoplasmic affliction. He's so good here and as Hans in NAKED LUNCH (above), and the artist in SCANNERS well, he just knocks them all up a notch. Why only Cronenberg seems to know of his genius is beyond me. Is it that he doesn't want to leave Canada? He should just go to Vancouver, the B-movie capital of the world!
Why Hillary: It is foretold in ancient texts that amok liberalism ushered in by a woman prez shall lead to the return of the 70s encounter group / est craze; the nuclear family unit will be broken apart by charlatan shrinks, who won't let the husband see his own wife. The human body itself is America: "Raglan encouraged my body to revolt against me," notes Silverman, "and it did." Asking why he's suing when he can't possibly prove Raglan's methods gave him cancer, he says he's doing it for revenge! So people will know from the press that "psychoplasmics cause cancer." -i.e., global warming. The Brood are the protestors disrupting Trump rallies. As with the Trump supporters themselves, it's not important whether or not he's a threat, it's enough that they get angry thinking about it, and the anger justifies the reprisal. Imagine if all the rage spewed on internet comment sections was able to manifest itself... we'd all be hammered.

Shot through a haze of red and blue with just the right amount of imagination (neither whimsical nor grungy), this Satanic daughter love story is like THE LITTLE MERMAID x SPECIES with a refreshing lack of qualms about killing evildoers. The story begins in Hell, a mix of the long lines of Old Testament-style marching lines of desert laborers from STARGATE x PHANTASM, but with deep red and blue filters; a lot of care and love went into these early scenes, and it shows. Angela Featherstone stars as the demoness Veronica who dreams of seeing the surface of the earth, though it is forbidden by her abusive sputtering over-acting demon father (he makes Divine seem mumblecore). Once above she tears the spines and hearts out of evil doers and feeds their hearts to her dog Hellraiser (like Osiris tossing the heavier-than-a-feather hearts to Ahmet for you of the ancient faith) and presenting his spine to the near-rape victim with the words "look upon this to allay the memory of this night." Oh man that's awesome. Shacking up with a doctor, Max, she wanders by night while he's on ER duty, kills and shows any cop who stands in her way her true nature via her glowing eyes.

It might not be for all tastes, but I dig Featherstone's low-key performance and find the dreamlike grungy fairytale threadbare quality endearing in a Guy Maddin meets Val Lewton in Ed Wood's basement kind of way. Featherstone isn't the greatest actor in the world but what she lacks anyone can learn; what she has is unteachable, a rare and precious gift: the ability to project complete confidence and emotional vacancy at the same time while delivering classic lines like "I've always wanted to witness people coupling, Max, but I never thought it would move me so much." Better (or worse) actresses would never be able to deliver that line right. They'd either try and be sexy (and come off campy) or imperious (and come off bitchy), or mean or tough (and come off laughable), but Featherstone just announces it with relentless assertive confidence that's still sexy. The way she delivers lines like "I don't require the blessing of the one true church to engage in sexual relations, Max" is so good I wish I had it as a ringtone. Even her sex scene with Max is tasteful, and I love when she unfolds her true form--wings, horn, tail--after orgasm and he's like "hey, it's all right." He's cool with it but in a low key way, like if she turned out to have a penis or something. The lighting is all uniformly good (as in effectively masking the low budget) and her matter of fact way with wrapping human hearts in newspaper to feed her dog is endlessly reassuring. I've only ever seen that level of skill at commanding both adoration and fearful respect in in East German science fiction film female characters from ELEOMA and IM STAUB DER STERNE.

Why Hillary: One of her first assignments down in Hell is to come up with creative ways to punish the lawyers and bankers, mirroring every democrat's promise to clean up Wall Street. On the surface she kills two racist cops after they beat up on a black guy (i.e. she's pro Black Lives Matter); she launches a one-woman vendetta against crooked politicians and cannot enter a church as she "would surely combust.'
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All in all it's my favorite of the Charles Band Full Moon label, it's also the only one that doesn't have like four sequels, though as the title indicates it's clearly built for theme. Figures we'd get eight snickery dickery GINGERDEAD MAN and EVIL BONG sequels instead, proving the fuckin' castration anxiety never dies, which brings me to...