As John Carpenter ages into his RED LINE 7000 phase, a horror genius named Don Coscarelli has quietly stolen the title of the new Hawksian Drive-in fuzzy horror guru. What is fuzzy horror? I can only tell you it encompasses all of Coscarelli's films, the early Sam Raimi, some Cronenberg, John Carpenter til he started doing cable TV, Quentin Tarantino if he ever made a horror movie. It's a loosey goosey termite art digging and goofing around - simultaneously mind-expanding and brain-addling. It never has to rely on vicious sexual violence, it understands normal healthy adult sex is the creepiest most uncanny thing ever, once you can finally see it clearly for what it is, stripped of all its alluring-in-the-heat-of-the-moment bark.
Who loves fuzzy horror? Any one who suddenly found themselves cheering watching BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA just because it happened to be the 80s and never looked back, and has seen both THINGs more than a dozen times each. Why is it Hawksian? Because it's still scary even though it tends towards humor. It transcends genre and is based on character interaction, a droll shared language, the gallow's wit of RIO BRAVO, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE THING, THE BIG SLEEP, and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. And having interesting things to say and do because there's so much less pointless twisting and random acts of shock designed solely to get bad (better than no) publicity and it understands the two bros being cool language of deadpan calm and running jokes. Why fuzzy? Because it can get pretty sloppy, best to watch late at night, feeling good. Fuzzy horror rewards fuzzy viewing... and the films only get better with each new fuzzy view, cuz the earlier fuzzy has made you forget most of it anyway.
I won't go too much into JOHN DIES plot - you can just mosey over to Netflix streaming and watch it, and then come back to this scintillating post. But let's just say this - that dude up in that picture with the sunglasses and mysterious device? He played the infantry trainer ("Medic!") in STARSHIP TROOPERS, another fuzzy horror masterpiece.
I will say also that time looping is involved but I liked this film way way better than LOOPER. And I believe in time travel, if only via one's third eye, and when a movie makes the third eye hallucinations real instead of as dreams it works, because it's a movie and so exists totally on the hallucinatory level. Unfuzzy directors feel compelled to separate the two - what is just a dream and what is real - like we'll upend the apple cart if not brought safely back to the rut. An example of this unfuzziness is AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, wherein the wolf must come out of David through grand physical agony or it won't be 'believable' --and the welcome eruption of Nazi werewolves with machine guns is revealed to be a dream. If John Landis made the dream the real and focused on those Nazi werewolves for the whole film, than hot damn, that would be hardcore fuzzy, and also a bit like the opening of THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME.
What mainstream science still can't quite admit, but which leading edge scientists are realizing to their amazement, is that the universe is totally subjective. If we can move past notions of size, perspective, relation, and spatial relativity, then space/time travel is possible regardless of the distances between solar systems. As humans with limited ESP ability (or, as with most scientists, none at all) we can't imagine space travel any other way except by carting our bodies from point A to point B, in a vessel relative to own size, but that doesn't mean we all won't one day be long past that limited conception of ourselves. If space itself is a vacuum, the idea of needing to travel a certain amount of miles to get there is foolishly short-sighted. Why not just collapse the vacuum? Why not merely shrink the space?
The closest we have to ESP as a legitimate science today is the cell phone and wireless router, but we take those things for granted the way in the 70s we took ESP for granted and would have laughed at the idea of cell phones being universal. Now we take for granted the sound waves that beam all over the globe constantly, billions of voices soaring up and down like ping pong balls between humans and satellite paddles, and yet we scoff at alien abductions. Is an alien abduction so different? How can anyone be so stupid?
Perhaps this is why what was absurd fiction a mere century ago is taken for granted today and yet no one dares broach the subject of dimensional travel's validity as a scientific fact! It is! And it's because the subjective experience of hardcore psychedelic drug trippers would then be valuable and science fears this. Fiction is truer than reality! Lovecraft was tapping into some really groovy shit, man. He knew the tentacles from the fifth dimensional rift were ever pulling that gate open between thought waves, sound waves, and the spontaneous materialization of physical matter.
All of which serves as a flawed introduction to my praise of Don Coscarelli, a man who I've written of in the past as being suspiciously like myself in extrasensory speculation, to the point that one of my pet intervention metaphors, self-performed eye surgery. Check out this exchange in the film after Dave calls a priest because John seems possessed.
Dave: What do you think it's like, Father?
Father Shellnut: What's what like?
Dave: Being crazy, mentally ill.
Father Shellnut: Well, they never know they're ill, do they? I mean, you can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can't see your own eyeball. I suppose you just feel regular, and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.
Now check this from an old post of mine in the C-Influence:
Eyewitness testimony can be considered “fact” in a court of law but means nothing to science, which cripples itself through its dismissal of everything “subjective” as if there was something that wasn’t (...) Our collective disbelief about things beyond our comprehension is itself beyond comprehension, revealing the fundamental impossibility of trying to think about nature objectively from inside an organic brain (sort of like trying to perform eye surgery on yourself without a mirror) (5/27/11)I have no choice, therefore--considering the film's avalanche of uncanny coincidence-- to believe the film was written by me in the future.
I mean this as no disrespect to JOHN DIES' creators, Coscarelli and author James Wong (a pseudonym so they say), and of course all three of us are clearly inspired by Lovecraft, William S. (and Edgar Rice) Burroughs, Alan Moore, and Hunter S. Thompson, so who knows who I really am? I always hoped Lovecraft might read my work one day in a time travel loop and be inspired to write the Cthulu mythos based on my own August Derleth-based fiction. That's probably not in our immediate 'future' as I haven't written any but two things I do know, I once meant to, and if time is elastic and we are all one, then we are all one right now, connected through an elastic time tentacle, everyone of us, back and forth through time in order to play not just many parts ala Shakespeare but every part, right down to Vishnu, Indra and the former Indra ants in the Brahmavaivarta Purana. In other words, if you weren't me before, you are now, or will be. This is how we become our own great-grandmothers, and why Ramboona never fails.
Such weird collapse-of-time distortions in JOHN DIES AT THE END are only one of the great side effects of a black ooze-style drug dubbed 'soy sauce,' a mix of the black ooze from the X-FILES and the black centipede meat of the NAKED LUNCH, and the Black Sheep Dip from my own unpublished novel... and of course, probably, some real naturally amazing drugs like psilocybe mushrooms and Salvia Divinorum. Aside from time dilation, this soy sauce allows one a Zen-like calm as well as the ability to read minds and to astral travel, which includes visiting an interzone-style alternate reality to invest in biotech that was a literal fusion of biological material into technology, to have computers and Lovecraftian mutli-tentacled horrors fused into one entity that sucks and intellect and experience of the entire world through its crab-claw-tentacles, ala Corman's ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (or David Cross in FUTURAMA: BEAST WITH A MILLION BACKS - see my 08 post, and More Tentacles from the 5th dimensional Rift). Or if SKYNET was a giant octopus. That's not even forgetting the tiny nanobyte brainputating spores that take over bodies ala THE THING (1982), GHOSTS OF MARS (2001), and the ones that just dissolve humans from the inside out, like those pinpricks in THE FLESH EATERS (1968), all super fuzzy.
And of course we can't not mention Don's own previous films, including the definitive fuzzy, the PHANTASM series, which depicts post-death Archon soul harvesting procedures, and the zany melancholy of BUBBA HO TEP, wherein the real Elvis and the Ossie Davis as a wheelchair bound JFK battle a mummy from the old west.
Pay close attention to the banners hanging on either side of the church pulpit in the above still, as I get ready to lay down more of the massive flood of similarities to my own work that will bear out the theory I shall become John Wong in the distant future or have already been in the distant past. Note that the phone Dave uses in the scene depicted on the far left banner is a hot dog, similar to the banana and Marlboro phones in my QUEEN OF DISKS! (2007)
What's that you say? Everyone does the old banana phone gag? Well not when addressing psychedelic transdimensional time slippage! Another similarity is that the 'Mall of the Dead' is similar to my 'Mall of Time' from an old unpublished short story about a guy looking for a special cigarette in the distant past (based on a time when I briefly lived in the head of a Chinese baker) at a conceptual mall. Here's an excerpt:
The mall of time had been designed to appeal to the tactile senses to lure the net-dazed shopper back in. The theme was an evolution of history with spacey gadgets on one end and gradually decades receding as you walked down the aisles until you past the dawn of man and into some weird cannabalistic pagan wordlessness. Eighties clothes and jewelry down to seventies retro, flapper prom tuxedo shops, Cowboy Dan's, and then farther back still… through pre-Columbian dining room sets, a series of moving sidewalk exhibitions with tinsel rain and roaring plastic volcanoes and the voice of Christian Bale narrating your trip through time. The roar of a dinosaur as we reach the kid's robot dinosaur displays, and, if you are a tripper, looking for the special cigarettes, back farther still...
... and as we took the escalators down and down and ran giddy but full of dread along the black tiles, our shoes echoing amid the cacophony of music and the crowd thinning down to only us, and Bale’s voice on the loudspeaker as it discussed the mating habits of the terandadon, that flying dinosaur that was the missing link between birds and reptiles. Down where we were heading the music got quieter and the lights got lower, and the animatronic dinosaurs became lower to the ground, hiding in the shadows and in the coin fountain now bubbling with fake moss and plastic sludge. Blood and mud filled the air, like a slaughterhouse zoo.Right? Coscarelli's film is a little different, but the idea of a mall being associated with interdimensional time travel is the same, and and James Wong writes really bizarre, perceptive stuff for Cracked. Am I totally comfortable in saying that Wong is me in the distant future or distant past or in an alternate reality where we come from the same persona-stalk in the blazing fire of souls? Yes. Do I 100% believe it? Well, that can best be described in a line from the film, espoused by the Arkham University-style detective in the film:
Detective Lawrence 'Morgan Freeman' Appleton: I'm an old school Catholic. I believe in hell. I believe it's more than just murderers and rapists down there. I believe in demons and worms, and vile shit in the grease trap of the universe. And the more I think about it, the more I think that it's not just some place down there. Oh no, that it's right here with us. We just can't perceive it. It's kinda like the country music radio station. It's out there in the air, even if you don't tune into it.
So what does that tell you? That, for a fuzzy horror filmmaker, Don Coscarelli is amazingly prescient about the realities of post-death alternate dimensional enslavement, forging a direct link with theories espoused by everything from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the writings of Nigel Kerner, Phillip K. Dick, Nick Redfern, and David Icke. He understands the collapse of reality that comes from opening up past mainstream science and Christianity's tight-ass gates and stretching one's tentacles out into the slimy levels where just entertaining crazy ideas taps one into the mythic.
The heavens and hells of the bibles are all around us; the future, present, and past exists simultaneously. The heaven and hell we create for ourselves is created with each breath and karma is so instant that retribution precedes the crime, and this also explains the lucky in love unlucky at cards truth, and if this time travel is possible than people from the future have already manipulated our past to suit their own ends. The Hassidic Jewish community has mastered this which is why they continue to dress the same as they did before the stock market crash, to as not draw attention to themselves. Do I believe they caused the crash? No. Do I believe they knew about in advance? Not really, yet it was revealed to me by the alien intelligence, with an image of a Hassidic scholar reverse screwing himself into existence out of the pages of a giant, opened book.
The other is a little younger and less austere -- the cool hippie teacher instead of the stern egocidal gardener, a space jockey who moves in like that fun kid from college, who blows through the town of your soul, sweeps the crap off the floor of your life, and sneaks you into all the coolest wildest clubs and teaches you how to see the spirits between the cracks of reality. After awhile he starts to get on your nerves. It takes hours and hours for him pack up his duffel. Each minute passes like hours and you're like it was great having you around but now you're getting on my nerves, bro; and you're still seeing his shadow a week after he's allegedly gone home. By then you miss him, terribly.
So as you can see, these 'poison path' pen pals do take a bite before they go. Your mileage and enlightenment may vary, and only holy fools, madmen, and artists would be insane enough to ever go it alone.
If this rambling 'review' has been more about me than JOHN DIES AT THE END I apologize. All you really need to know is where it exists in the family tree of midnight cult goofball fuzzy: it's to the soft side of THE EVIL DEAD, a more deadpan sci fi TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL and REPO MAN up the street from Don's PHANTASMs, and sitting at the same table as NAKED LUNCH, BUCKAROO BANZAI, NIGHT OF THE COMET, and HAUSU. With even maybe a smattering of HELLBOY and CONSTANTINE waiting in the corner. It's ANTS IN YOUR PLANTS OF 1939 meets 80s John Carpenter. That should be enough for you, or indeed any man, woman, Indra, or ant. As long as you're fuzzy.
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