From my grave to yours: PENNY DREADFUL (Showtime), FROM DUSK TIL DAWN (El Rey)

Two new horror series are worth checking out, presuming you have the patience, the cajones, and the channels on your cable. The Robert Rodriguez-backed new cable channle El Rey (read my shuddering praise here) launched a month or so ago with the From Dusk Til Dawn series, a 10 episode-long retelling/elaboration of the RR-QT 1999 film, adding the full measure of hallucinations and replacing Tarantino in the part of psycho brother Richie Gecko with a much more mesmerizing lad named Zane Holz. As Richie's brother and fellow bank robber Seth, D.J. Cotrana diffuses Clooney's terminal charm with hothead overreactions, so now the two feel like real brothers who actually grew up together, rather than the charismatically mismatched Quentin and Clooney. And the queen Mayan reptilian hottie Santanica Pandimonium (Selma Hayek in the original) has a much more integral part with lots of dialogue and empowering femme fatale inscrutability, embodied by Mexican TV actress/pop singing star and staggering beauty Eiza Gonzalez (above, below). And there's Robert Patrick as the disillusioned preacher, and Don Johnson in the Michael Parks part, and a cast of handsome well-spoken Mexican-Americans with either admirable swagger or furrowed brow intensity. The ten part series all occurs over the course of one 24-hour period, from dusk to dawn more or less, which slows things way down with that old tick-tockality and a novelistic attention to detail.

Eiza on the street! 

It all works because it's not that the performances are all that great, but that they are all of a piece, as is so essential for a good horror to work (i.e. John Carpenter's best), they play it deadpan straight while never overdoing it and driving the ordeals into bummer territory. I mention all that because in Showtime's new horror series, Penny Dreadful that level of solid team player dynamics vanishes to be replaced with a bunch of breathing exercise-prepared actors all fighting over every syllable like it's their last chance at an Emmy, only dimly aware there's other actors across the dark expanses.

I'll confess I desperately wanted to like Penny Dreadful, being a huge fan of American Horror Story, this is certainly the British version (and a chronic disciple of Eva Green, especially in Dark Shadows), but the show simultaneously tries too hard and not hard enough. Cramming in all the famous literary characters from the Victorian era's (and earlier) literary mythology it never seems to know what to do with them, other then send them walking in ornate garments through gloomy cavernous sets, or into bed for joylessly graphic sex scenes. One missed opp I'm hoping they rectify is the absence of any characters or monsters actually from the real penny dreadfuls, as seen above in my hand-made collage. Instead of the same old Dracula (here a Drac-mummy hybrid) or Jack the Ripper (and no doubt Burke and Hare also soon to shamble forth), or Frankenstein, where's Spring-Heeled Jack? Varney the Vampire? Just because Dorian Gray's an immortal bunburying Sadean doesn't make him a monster, just an aesthete. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned this young fellow playing him, Reeve Carney, has the whole show sowed up in his pocket. While the other characters rant and rave and underplay, Carney's Gray seems genuinely entranced, not in any effusive way but in a delicate, eerily jaded without malice way, and graced with an in-the-moment openness that makes him seem to me one of the few young actors around who seems to understand the importance of seeing as much as being seen and who seems to fully inhale the atmosphere. (the only other one I can think of offhand is, believe it or not, Kristen Stewart).

Meanwhile the murky dim brown Victorian London craftsmaship often runs the risk of choking any life out of things (though the darkness can be very very dark, almost 3-D and it seems thrillingly real, like life before electricity was one long SILENCE OF THE LAMBS climax) and the writers are so busy paraphrasing the eloquent flights of 19th century authors, that the British thesps run unsupervised over actorly monologues until every syllable sings with overly spellbinding oratory. In other words, it's very gay, in its way, especially with Frankenstein and his moist-eyed perfect specimen, though not in a giddy, delightful Tim Curry or Udo Kier way, more a Sal from Mad Men kind of way. And the handful of character must play many parts: Eva Green is a vampire hunter who is also a trance medium, easily possessed by demons and departed angry daughters; Timothy Dalton is the Qatermain / Dr. Ven Helsing / Seward who just wants his daughter back;  Mina, the daughter who's already gone to vamp in presumably Dracula arms; Josh Harntett a Wild Bill Hicock who may also be Jack the Ripper; a brilliant young Frankenstein who is probably going to be Jekyll and Hyde later on (his monster doubles as the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, and The Crow); the vampires also seem to be mummies. I have no doubt Drac will turn out to be another hunky British monologuist impeccably attired in elegantly distressed Victorian fashion who says things like "the burden of eternal life wears me down like a slow watch, like the taste of withered dying opium addicts, their narcotic blood crawling time to a standstill...." Penny, you can use that if you want. That's a-free.

Second Episode is a big improvement - it gets more down to a set of reversals and twists and seems less about getting its lighting as painterly and haunted - the purplish blue mist of London coal fog in gorgeous compositions of ships in harbor and snug waterfronts is impressive, but the centerpiece Eva Green possession monologue, while a brilliant showcase for a brilliant, nervy performer (Green's voice sails up and down octaves while her body writhes and contorts and eyes glare with unholy fire) goes on for like twenty minutes, long past our patience or its own effectiveness, until one forgets even where they are or what's going on. AMERICAN HORROR STORY might pick up and abandon story threads like an impatient schoolkid with a box full of monster toys, but it understands momentum as key, and transgression as a locomotive, and above all it doesn't take itself a tenth as seriously. It even introduces a second female character (Billie Piper), a kind of de facto heroine streetwalker in that she's coughing up blood like a Poe heroine but doesn't complain and not only that, has large measures of bar whiskey for breakfast with Josh Hartnett, who lounges with ease in the saloon window like he's Eugene Goddamned O'Neill waiting for Hickey.

These kind of character-based critiques don't concern FROM DUSK TIL DAWN, though as Santinico, Eiza Gonzalez is no Eva Green she's got a certain cold allure, even naked but for a golden bronze tan, brown bikini and Aztec shaman blood queen headdress she's always holding her own, in charge, using her body to seduce and ensnare men, to believably conjure ancient Mayan deities, to pit brothers against each other, and she's no ham. Even big tearful farewells or life and death anxieties are nicely underplayed in the American Carpenter-Hawks tradition, rather than being underplayed in the British style of PENNY. I wish to god PENNY's writers were up to the challenge, rather than confusing graphic sex and death with what being truly dreadful entails.

POST SCRIPT (6/2/14) - Just saw the fourth Penny Dreadful episode and things are picking up, with a detailed evening at La Grand Guignol that managed to weave together nearly all the disparate characters, as well as a climactic absinthe scene that allows the series' hitherto locked closet door to finally burst open. Can't spoil it of course... but I'm in. 

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Rise, SORCERER! The lost masterpiece of 1977 comes to blu-ray.

It's been a long time on its jungle creep but William Friedkin's much anticipated blu-ray SORCERER (1977) has emerged into the clearing and into the flaming oil fire of our American hypocrisy. Distance, time, and the the totality of Friedkin's stunning attention to vivid, lived-in widescreen detail are now revealed in staggeringly beautiful shots: the monstrous grins of the trucks moving through the mist like Travis Bickels through a Kubrick rainstorm; flooding rivers lifting flimsy bridges up off their moorings; crowded Tel Aviv streets rocking from a bomb and the quick soldier reprisal; an assortment of hard-looking Catholic priests counting money in the backroom of a church during a wedding; a white collar Frenchman ducking out on his wife as a swanky Parisian cafe to avoid prison for embezzlement --each character gets their origin exposition, their reason for escaping to the anonymity and weak extradition practices of some nameless South or Central American one-horse town, and each origin packs enough real  hustle and bustle for a film of their own (such as Friedkin's surreal Egyptology opener in EXORCIST); when they wind up in the surreal and savage beauty of some unnamed Central American jungle one horse town depending on nearby oil pipe for survival, the jungle adventure comprising the bulk of the film, and being the kind of thing Warner Herzog seems to go for in his own work but sometimes errs on the side of decency; he perhaps lqacks the insane drive and egotistic bullying needed to smash the world apart in order to capture its plummy essence, which is why he needed Kinski, or a Cage. Friedkin, however, is his own Kinski. We all know the horror anecdotes of the film's troubled shoot, with Friedkin harassing the locals and crew in the paranoid, foamy-at-the-mouth way of the coke head rich Anglo filmmaker from the 70s, but my friend. It was worth it.

What's most interesting is the contrast between the hostile nature of these male characters and the deeply human story (which I mean as the opposite of Fordian sentimentality - human as in 'true' human, bestial, full of long-standing grudges, fears, greed and guts - and sometimes fear, greed and guts is enough). Taking a page from Peckinpah, these men are dangerous lowdown scoundrels who are, in a sense, the only characters tough enough to handle an almost suicidal task - hauling very unstable explosives through 200 miles of rough dirt roads and jungles in the middle of Bolivia, Ecuador or some such remote rain forest outpost.

There are almost no women in the story - the one who gets actual billing in the cast is Anne Marie-Deschodt as the Frenchman's rich wife. As an ironic commentary to Clouzot's original, an elderly barkeep who never speaks but who earns a soft spot in the mens' hearts, like an unofficial den mother (contrasted by Clouzot's firey temptress played by Clouszot's then-wife Véra). It works because this is a movie that is not about desire, but survival. No time for soft stuff.  It's like THE THING or THE GREY. This is not a movie for flowers and song, it's about struggling through the mud, man. It's about the kind of men who are, as we learn in Hollywood, the nasty necessity of the western world. I like it way better than Clouzot's original because the jungle is realer. Clouzot has no interest in capturing the vivid textures of nature, of wheels and dashboards and the rumbling of trucks full of soldiers sent in to quell a riot.

The Tangerine Dream SORCERER score has been some of my favorite soundtrack for awhile and in the blu-ray mix it pulses and throbs like if John Carpenter and Klaus Schulze got together for the score of THERE WILL BE BLOOD, like the best synth scores of the era it never micro-manages our emotional state, the way, say, John Williams or Howard Shore do with their flourishing orchestras, rather the pulsating amniotic eerie music just sets the chilly, nerve-shredding tone and as such is ahead of its time, at least for Hollywood. Don't forget Carpenter's groundbreaking HALLOWEEN score was a year or so away. As far as great scores in America we only knew Ennio Morricone through the handful of films that wound up on TV or the drive-in. The movie scores we kids talked about on the playground (excluding those of GREASE and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER) were strictly micro-managerial and orchestral - Nino Rota's melancholic GODFATHER, and above all the pompous thunder majesty of John Williams' scores for JAWS (sure he has the famous shark approach music but he also sticks in pirate jauntiness that deflates all the suspense when the Orca sets out to sea) and STAR WARS (much of it ripped from Holst the way JAWS was ripped from Stravinsky). Tangerine Dream's SORCERER score by contrast never tells us what to feel, it just gives us a way to feel it, a way to mystically transfer this rainy wet misery we see onscreen into an atmospheric alien buzz.

I remember this film when it came out in 1977, being intrigued by the title of this film when it came out around the same time as STAR WARS, thinking it might involve wizards and armies of the dead and so forth - and instead, what, trucks? Good lord, that's false advertising! But now that ignition is thrown in reverse. Victory is thine, you crazy coked-up sonofabitch! So drive!

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Collage Portrait of Melanie Daniels + Pre-Raphaelite Portrait of Famke Janssen

Melanie Daniels in the throes of Laudanum
2014 - collage with pre-raphaelite elements by Erich Kuersten 

Decadence Lost
(Collage-Surrealist-Portrait of Famke Jannsen in GoldenEye watching Eyes Wide Shut
post pre-raphaelite exhibition party). - by Erich Kuersten

Melanie Daniels - first layers (ed. XXIV)

Kristen Stewart finds her place in horror (Acidemic Special Issue BXV)

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Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

"The movie appeared at a moment of optimum spiritual chaos in American life. Rosemary’s Baby remains an iconic memory trace of a time when anything seemed possible, including the birth of the Anti-Christ”. -- Gary Indiana, “Bedeviled”, Village Voice

"The creepy nature of the film is not in its special effects, but in its realistic premise. The story takes place in a real apartment building (the Dakota) that has a real reputation of attracting eccentric elements of New York’s high society. The evil coven is not composed of stereotypical, pointy-nose witches but of friendly neighbors, prestigious doctors and distinguished individuals. They are elegant, rational and intelligent and are connected to important people. The realism of the movie forces the viewers to ponder on the existence of such groups, to a point that some feared that the movie, after its release would cause an all-out witch hunt.” (Vigilante Citizen)

“This is no dream, this is really happening!” - Rosemary Woodhouse

The first film perhaps ever to exploit our deep dread of, old folks, 1968's Rosemary's Baby gazes deep and diabolically into the murky waters wherefrom reach the skeletal hands of grandparents reaching up from the tar pit of fundamentalism to pat their captive breeders' kicking bellies. From these waters crawl real life abominations like the 2012 male-only hearing on women's reproductive freedom,  and the stoning to death of women whose hair is accidentally exposed at the fundamentalist Muslim market. At a certain depth, Christianity and Satanism become indistinguishable, especially once Asherah, Mrs. God, Yaweh's female counterpart, is banned from the Christian bible and patriarchy squashes women's rights like a bug underfoot. A million witch burnings later and who can blame the devil worshippers for being so well-hidden from the public eye, or so resentful of Christianity? To the persecuted Asherah-worshipping earth mother witch, Christianity is as the KKK is to African-Americans, or Nazis to the Jews, or modern conservatives towards everyone outside their race, religion, gender and age.

A typical early Christian demolishing an Asherah pole (by Dakota O'Leary)

Rise out from that murky water gazing with me now, into modern 1968 and we have the fall-out of all the persecution and secrecy around Asherah, Gaia, Saturn, Pan, the Angel Lucifer, in that Christianity is left to its own devices and so slowly becomes its opposite. In Polanski's best films, like RB, come the paranoid angle of feeling left out of some shared secret, tapping into the unconscious memory of when we were children and any "sh-the adults are talking" moments seemed fraught with mystery and dread as our future and bedtime were out of our hands, and it wasn't fair. And we could sense evil around us always, and empathy had yet to kick in (all children are born sociopaths).

We see the entirety of the film from Rosemary's point of view we're never privy to what's going on, we have to guess, just as she does, until the very end, where she in a sense finds out where babies come from, or rather where her baby's father is. The entirety of the film is absent direct visualization of any devil practices (the paintings at the Castavets are removed when Rosemary and Guy first come to visit). Strangely enough, that paranoid angle was jettisoned for most of Rosemary's imitators, to be replaced by robes, horns, pentagrams, possession, smoke and mirrors and screaming naked virgins. The imitators got the surface iconography right but missed the paranoiac angle, 1974's The Exorcist included. .

Polanski knew to never show such iconography, or if one must, to do it in surreal dream sequences, or in paintings on the Castavet's walls. Polanski knew a Satanist with a gentle smile and a natty bow-tie could be far scarier than one that 'looked' scary, i.e. with a goat horn cowl and black cloak. We never see Rosemary's unholy baby, or the molesting devil (a hand and yellow eyes aside); the old people chanting around her in the dream are naked, no robes, and no horns or forked tail can compare in uncanny dead to the mystery and horror of the human reproductive system or a flock of naked old folks around your bed while your writhing in a drugged stupor. If you know this blog you know I've had my own drugged demon visitations (see here) -- I believe in them, to a certain extent. I believe the boundary line between the real and the vividly imagined is traversable in ways our minds as yet cannot consciously grasp.  For instance just last night on Late Night with Craig Ferguson he was talking with an author about how characters sometimes break away from you when you're writing them - they show up in places and do things you don't consciously expect as you're writing - as if they notice you writing about them; I had that happen to me writing my first novel wherein my character realizes some people he met the other night at a coke party are Yaqui crow trickster shamen, and right at that moment I could feel real Yaqui crow trickster shamen sensing me writing about them, and they began to begin to stir in their far-off nests, sending psychic representations forth through the gossamer tubeways of thought to climb out of the page to get me, like they could blind me or destroy me with their unified field of chant/thought just as the coven had done to Tony Curtis in RB. It didn't happen but man were my neck hairs standing up.

But there's more to the story of Rosemary's Baby than just combined creative unconscious drives commingling to blind God long enough that a dream lover spawn might sneak across the uterine expanse of Mother Gaia unburnt-at-stake dimensional dividers (after all, souls of even non-devil babies have to come from somewhere). 

It wasn't just Polanski's film, and he wasn't the only life it allegedly destroyed. It had as a producer the legendary master of ballyhoo, William Castle, and by 1968, Castle's patented gimmicks like skeletons on strings and tingling seats were passe. So I'm not saying right off he made up a Macbeth curse-style paranoid linking of strange on-set accidents and tragedies. But did he link them all together so it sounded like the devil had woken up and took notice his unholy name was being invoked? Castle's creative drive in this case might be said to have come true - the unconscious trickster shamen noticed him weaving a paranoid associative rumor nexus for Rosemary's ballyhoo --and sent their Satanic kidney stone calling card across the gossamer web that connects myth, dream, mind, soul, and nerve endings.

David Parkinson writes about the hate mail Castle received for the film, the curses leveled at him, and he and composer Krystof Komeda being struck down with crippling, painful ailments shortly after the film premiered, as well as the later murder of Polanski's wife Sharon Tate (who co-starred in Eye of the Devil in 1966 (see: The Blonde Devils of '66) and who Polanski wanted in the part of Roesemary) and their unborn baby; he omits the eerie similarity to the violation of Rosemary in the film and Polanski's own rape charges, to end with a link to John Lennon's death in 1980:

John Lennon had spent the spring of 1968 with Mia Farrow at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India. During their stay, Lennon had written "Dear Prudence" for Farrow's sister (who shared a name with Sharon Tate's Yorkshire terrier) and it featured on The Beatles' White Album that November. Charles Manson claimed that the LP contained coded messages about the impending race war he hoped to provoke with the Cielo Drive slayings. Lennon himself met a violent end in December 1980 when he was gunned down in New York — outside the Dakota apartments." (more) 

For Polanski, a child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, the coven aspect of the tale surely tapped into both the paranoia, as well as a kind of Stockholm syndrome flip side of being constantly in danger. Part of the Nazi's rationale was that Jews had a mystical black magic Protocols of the Elders of Zion cabal themselves, and just as devil worshippers had to lay low for centuries lest they be burned at stake. In America we can't imagine what it's like to be invaded, to have an openly evil and oppressive system turn human compassion and morality upside down, to obliterate all traces of rhyme and reason, to be persecuted for our heritage. But for Polanski this is a formative year reality. He knows all we see and hear of 'reality' is only the tip of a deep ink black iceberg. Behind closed doors, who knows what monsters still dwell?

In 1930s America, the Nazi-fleeing Jews, gays, artists, geniuses, flew our way, bringing their strange customs, and after the war, America turned to atomic age anxiety and away from the occult, with giant bugs and rockets instead of ghosts and demons. America became a place where junior could play catch in the back yard and old people with rakes smiled from cross the street. Occasionally a dad could go insane (as in Nicolas Ray's Bigger than Life) or kids could grow up into spoiled brats (as in Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows), but childbirth was holy and above all, babies, housewives, and old people could never be, you know, evil. A few exceptions came and went, there was The Bad Seed, and a spate of crazy old broad movies launched by the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But Jane and Rhoda were psychotic, flash-frozen before their brains developed an empathetic response --we knew this from the get-go. But what about the sane, gentle sweethearts bringing you vitamin shakes to help your pregnancy, or the 'no arguments young lady' condescension of top shelf pediatricians played by stalwart salts like Ralph Bellamy as Dr. Sapirstein who tells Rosemary "And please don't read books. Don't listen to your friends either." Sapirstein could be espousing the Muslin fundamentalist sexist line; he might add "and please don't vote, get a job, or wear pants." Rosemary's only form of revolt against this trap is her short hair-cut, which Guy thinks is tantamount to her drawing on the wall in crayon.

But what really makes it all work is the way Polanski exploits our willingness to grant power to unseen forces, and to see the link between paranoia and pregnancy, and how the patriarchal condescension in the big city can completely dominate even a free spirited young woman from Iowa whose determination to be hip is both her saving grace and undoing. Taken in total, her story has devils of both the psychoanalytical interpretation variety (paranoia brought on by hormonal surges due to pregnancy) and the physical arrival after passing through from the subconscious realm, of a devil ("Hail Satan!"), in other words, Rosemary's Baby is the opposite of a film like Inception - which is a story about people invading other people's dreams. Baby is a dream lover incarnated into living tissue.

When we sense something is being kept from us, whatever it is gains in power as our fears project onto it and projection is exactly how the coven operates: they chant together and use combined mind projection to astral travel along an associative interdimensional curve via an item belonging to the victim into that victim's optic nerves. This is the same 'reality' that paranoid schizophrenics and remote viewing agents live in; it's an ocean really, the Satanist sail on the surface (hence Rosemary's dream of being on a boat and seduced by a navy man, a mirror to Nicole Kidman's fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut - see Make-Up Your Mind Control)  while the dreamers bob in the waves and the schizophrenics drown. Rosemary's dream begins on the ship and winds up bobbing, then sinking, before clawing her way back to land (finding the secret passage between the apartments). In the end she joins the cult because her maternal instinct is too strong to resist. "What have you done to its eyes?!" she asks, horrified. "He has his father's eyes." And its the eyes of Guy's rival for his coveted part that are affected by the telepathic sabotage of the coven. . 

It's interesting to note that in both this film and Friedkin's The Exorcist, there is a woman with her child / innocence and an absentee father for her child (since the devil only shows up in her vision) dealing with another man and his older mentor - in Exorcist they are two priests, one young and one old, in Baby, the worthless husband and the older Roman Castavet. There's nary a Christian in the place. Is God Dead? so trumpets Time Magazine!

The last proper dad we see in the film, played by Maurice Evens, is the proper authority figure of the old school of monster movies, the enlightening scientist, or in the Hammer films, the merry fire-toasted Van Helsing type, outlying some grim history. "Adrian Marcata lived there, so did the Trent sisters." It turns out of course that Marcata / Mocata, it's all one - the same old man in the painting above the mantle in the Castavet home. The name Adrian Marcata should of course remind Hammer fans of The Devil Rides Out and its villain Bob Adrian Mocata, played by Charles Gray (below left), which came out the exact same year, but compared the resonant contemporary realism of Polanski's film it seems to be from years earlier, Rides is a fun, goofy deadpan classic, but Rosemary's Baby is still ahead of its time. Even Rosemary's utterance "Hey, let's make love," while they're eating dinner on the floor in their empty apartment, is straight out of the 70s.

Mocata, Marcata

The first time we see Roman Castavet AKA Steven Marcata, he's wearing a Satanic dark red velour shit that contrasts sharply (especially in the recent brilliant hi-def version) with the dark surroundings, when we see him talk he's off by himself a very far distance away it seems because he seems very small. Rosemary, Guy, and Minnie are squeezed together on the couch by contrast and just his talk about having been all around, every town on earth makes him seem ageless, omnipresent; his ability to seem familiar with Guy's work is standard suggestive manipulation ala fortune tellers at the carnival. 

The cynical self-serving unconscious bluster of Guy is apparently sensed by the Castavets, which is why he's brought in to their fold and not Rosemary. They sense in her a deep goodness that he--self serving prick that he is--lacks. When the news announces "Pope Paul VI arrived at 9:47 AM" - he excitedly shouts, "that's a great spot for my Yamaha commercial!" as if as a paltry actor he has some say in media buying. We later hear some of his true vitriol come out while he's rehearsing with his crutch, shouting the line "I'm in love with no one, especially not your goddamned fat wife!" as if anticipating Rosemary's swollen belly. He would almost be forgiven just because he's so bad at hiding things, he can't even act the part of a concerned doting husband convincingly, though a part of him thinks he can - because he's so vain. It's a part that also shows Cassavettes limits as an artist and actor - he was always better playing a charmless swine who genuinely thought we were awed by his charm. I personally can't stand his own improvisational, misogynistic movies. I find them painful and self-indulgent and amateurish - and Polanski nails all that down around Guy so all Cassavettes can do is squirm and pace the room and seem utterly confused by the fact that Rosemary's not charmed into submission by his patronizing grin.

Coming as it does so buried within the more 'normal' surfaces of Polanski's mise-en-scene, the lengthy dream sequence centerpiece to the film is a revelation as to how such sequences can enhance the story rather than diminish it. Most of the time in films dream sequences are cop-outs, places to dump the sexy weird shots or artsy ideas that don't fit the story but which the producers want so they can use them in the poster and coming attractions. Directors can do whatever they want in a dream sequence, get full weird, but it doesn't 'matter' - there are no consequences - the dream isn't 'real' - just an artsy diversion. Only great surrealists like David Lynch or Luis Bunuel understand that dreams are the real part, it's life that's the artsy diversion. When Rosemary momentarily comes out of her trance to note that 'this is really happening' it's terrifying, because we can't really fathom which parts of what we see and hear are the dreams and which reality. Polanski's film knows the power of the mind and the flexible nature of space and time - and in these areas lurk real horrors; the blue laser eyes and telekenetic devil children of later films are the opposite - in externalizing and literalizing the threat, it is actually less frightening. With no monster in sight, no 'seen murders' (Tony Curtis is only blinded after all, not beheaded by stray sheet glass), there's actually a crisper sense of dread. Of all the horror films of the last 20 years, only The Blair Witch Project understood this power. 

"This is no dream..." 

The conspiracy theories of authors like David Icke re: the Illuminati and Zionist banking cabals, works on a similar level. Irregardless of its authenticity, it's a vibrant, fascinating myth. There is no insurmountable line between truth and fiction once one enters these worlds, only a series of stages, mirror reflections, - "the mind can't distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." And this is the power and importance of ritual initiation ceremonies in indigenous tribes (and why Satanists and CIA programmers allegedly use inflicted trauma to create dissociative states and split personalities in their subjects, one might also add Lamaze to this list). I myself noticed this with unbearable pain in my life, like when I dislocated my knee cap. The extreme sensory pain launched my perspective into a split distance, on the one side me in agony on the other me standing slightly back, impassive, the white hot pain in a sense knocking me into a contemplative serenity; the later shot of morphine at the hospital brought me deeper into this calm detachment.

Theories about giving birth and Stockholm Syndrome align with this; the agony of childbirth shifts the consciousness of a woman into that of a mother, the pain of ritual initiation for boys, of menstruation for girls, all coincides with the journey from mythic third eye visualization to of the five senses in a recoil motion, vomiting of the soul up into the mythic outsider "observer" position, the subject moving from being an honored child guest kept out of the adult swim, to being initiated into a cosmic truth too ambivalent and full of surface hostility and danger (such as Christian persecution) for children and innocent Iowa girls to grasp unaccompanied.

Most devil movies end with the coven being swallowed up in flames (ala Suspiria, Inferno, The Devil's Rain, etc.) which is why the burning church painting Rosemary finds when she finally breaks through the hidden door into the Castavet's apartment is so wry. There are no flames for the devils, the fiery climax is frozen in amber and it's the Christian church that burns down, safely contained in oils on the wall of the devil's domicile. When Marcata declares that God is dead you feel that he just might be right. The party Rosemary bursts  in on is, after all, hardly the typical cliched evil power mongers - they're eccentrics - they're funny - such as the miffed old lady trying to rock the cradle. They're bizarros. In finally solving the mystery Rosemary doesn't trigger the inferno that burns down the house - the house was God's and it's been burned down for years, just she didn't know it. Rosemary's enlightenment isn't a matter of  restoring patriarchal supremacy or conquering evil on behalf of good, or even the power of maternal instinct to trump Christian values, it's about solving the mystery at the core of 20th century existence, finally telling your husband to fuck off, gluing that Asherah pole back together and birthing your way into the know. 

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Texas Time Out... for EL REY - Roberto Rodriguez' gonzo new cable channel

If you have cable, and love cool shit, you must seek out the EL REY network (if you have Time Warner, its channel 797, at least in Brooklyn). The man who gave the world some of my favorite post-modern grindhouse epics - including PLANET TERROR is behind it, Roberto Rodriguez. The big series being launched is a TV version of FROM DUSK TIL DAWN, which has a great pace, spreading the events of one night into the entire season, with hallucinations, ancient curses, Spanish conquistador heritage, reptillian blood lines, Mayan sacrifice, a snake cult hierarchy that connects forever CURSE OF THE SNAKE WOMAN to the writing of David Icke and even a dash of inverted SNOW WHITE and the poster art below is beguiling as is the actress in the much more fleshed-out role of Santanico Pandemonium (Eiza González Reyna), the queen of the whatever (dig the subliminal resemblance of her neck blood to some ornate Aztec queen frill color - but also the way it looks like rather than blood drippings, it looks like flesh colored paint is dripping down her blood-colored neck). A second season is in the works, and it's all just the beginning for El Rey, which has channel ads that are smash cut vintage grindhouse images all layered with celluloid stresses, lines, cigarette burns, emulsion scratches, and bright, flashy colors. Between this channel and the Alamo Drafthouse, Texas is officially becoming the last bastion of the drive-in.

One of my pet fantasies is having my own cable channel, wherein I could just show all my favorite stuff, and I love that one man, whose taste in trash is impeccable, basically has such control over a channel, so we have cherry-picked shit stretching back to the 70s through to now: reruns of STARSKY AND HUTCH, X-FILES, and DARK ANGEL to name a few (he's tight with the hot Latina American goddess Jessica Alba, and fellow indie auteur Cameron, presumably). Not that I'm a fan of all them, but look at the overarching theme - badassitude!

For example, right as I write this he's interviewing Carpenter, showing some of the best of his early stuff (not HALLOWEEN or THE THING interestingly): THE FOG, ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA. Damn right. I can hardly wait to see who's next! His choices for Grinhouse Fridays show a definite familiarity with the good stuff vs. the dross: NIGHT OF THE COMET, SHAFT, HEAVY METAL, FROM BEYOND, DAY OF THE DEAD... the kind of cherry picked greatness only one familiar with the genre would know, and one with a keen eye would appreciate. In short, it's a fan's dream. Then there's the kung fu, shown in English but with quality sound effects and dub jobs, which somehow makes it all right, especially as they're all in widescreen, from the Dragon Dynasty versions released by Miramax a few years ago, shit like FIVE ELEMENTS NINJAS and EIGHT-DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER. Again, it's the fan's eye view. But it's clear that like me Rodriguez is a Hawksian to his core. HAWKSIAN!

My new hero, the 21st century's JC

What's been so strange is the way the press junkets Rodriguez has been on focus the channel's name and 'Hispanic' or 'Latino' aspect, as if the show's Telemundo or something. It's in goddamned English, and its Mexican-American aspect exists only via Roberto's chosen filmic locations and the multi-racial, Tex-Mex-American slant of el casto. It's way off the mark, this is simply a cool channel, reflecting--which is rare even in our allegedly post-racist age--an accurate depiction of America. With programming that reflects what Rodriguez would put on when his drinking buddies come over for a party weekend. The channel's still pretty young --the advertising is mostly junk like those scrunchy hoses, Flex-Seal, and Rosetta Stone, but I couldn't be more excited for this gonzo channel's future, or devoted to the great Robert Rodriguez for this ambitious move. And I've never been happier to see car commercials, the first sign El Rey rides... to victory!

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Not with a Wimp but a Banger: KICK-ASS 2, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, ENDER'S GAME

Look deep into the screen, my children. Any screen, all screens --this is your new reality: screens in the classroom -- a big one instead of a blackboard, a laptop on your desk, the phone on which you secretly watch movies with a well-concealed earbud; screens on the way home on the bus (your phone) or car (DVD player above the dash); screens at home, the big flatscreen in the living room, the small one in your room, your laptop and phone still flickering as well... wake, and repeat. How many more minutes of life can the screen co-opt? There aren't many left. 

With their action figure and video game readiness, their graphic novel and teenage sci fi novel roots, a batch of films recently regurgitated up onto blu-ray and prove, to my 'grown-up' eyes, to be great examples of what Guy Debord called recuperation, which is to say using the trappings of subversion in service of the institutions you're subverting (i.e. the Che Guevara emblem used on a Budweiser label: "Viva l'revolution... responsibly."). I saw them all over the weekend so I feel, however falsely, plugged into product placement pulse of teen fantasy nerd America and all the synergy and branding that implies! Piggyback on, Jackie! Wonder Twin Powers Activate! Form of Coors Lite Ice! 

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KICK-ASS 2 (2013) nearly drowns here and there in coming-of-age platitudes about being yourself and collecting 'wherever outlaws rule the west' merit badges come sailing down the Donkey Kong ladders of your life, but if that justifies dressing up in goofy costumes and sticking your pretty face harm's way in the name of a safe America, then Yog Soggoth bless, because if like me you loathe the bloodless PG endless ammo expenditure and zero body count of the old A-TEAM show (or T2: "Casualties Zero"), then its very realistic damage done to property, life, and limb makes KICK-ASS a priceless precious thing, as gleeful in its sociopathy as Wendy Kroy or Mr. Blonde.

Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse is the supervillain again, hiring cop-killing badasses from the dregs of his late father's mob business to kill, pummel, strangle, gut and maul Kick-Ass and all his friends and family. Meanwhile witless cop Morris Chestnut doesn't want his orphaned ward Hit Girl (the still-glorious Chloe Grace Moretz) doing any more killing. He wants her to experience the 'beauty' of a childhood (where the hell did he grow up, Shangri-La? Normal suburban life is about the worst thing you can inflict on a fifteen year-old!) I kept praying Chestnut was one of the cops to be killed during the massive slaughter inflicted by 'Mother Russia' - a gigantic female ex-KGB assassin, just so Hit Girl could get out from under his buzzkill sanctimony.

That's the real lesson here: just because you promise something to an adult doesn't mean you have to deliver on it. Parents are clueless. And don't hide anything in your room. Searching your kids drawers for drugs seems to be the in thing these days. Kids acting weird? Search the drawers. So hide your drugs outside your window, on a string, like Don Birnim's bottle in THE LOST WEEKEND!

Complain all you want, and some have, even co-star Jim Carey (I think he took his kids to the premiere, and was shocked at all the beheading), but to me the film's absurdist brutality-- its gleefully 'real' cartoon violence-- is a long sigh of relief after an eternity of teen-friendly action movie hypocrisy. That said, the romantic / sexual elements are sexist and cliche'd. Though Night Bitch (Lindy Booth) has a great midriff, she's subjected to a strange rape gag, which I did not care for. I also don't like that Carey's character would be so stupid as to crate his attack dog upon realizing he's under attack. Someone breaks in your house you don't lock up your attack dog!!

But the rest of it is sublimely subversive, whether in a deliberate STARSHIP TROOPERS crypto-fascist way or just unconsciously it doesn't matter. In short, I dig the cut of Hit Girl's jib. With Hit Girl + her awesome vampire in LET ME IN and as Jack's nemesis Callie Hooper in the much-missed 30 ROCK, Chloe Grace Moretz is the promise of Angelina Jolie's Lisa in GIRL INTERRUPTED fulfilled. She's alive, and an artist, which means (in the movies) not being squeamish about ripping someone's throat out with your teeth. Viva la revolution... irresponsibly, as Thanatos intendeth!

Speaking of revolution, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) isn't fun or romantic or at all pleasant, but after a grueling angry week of work (or school) it's certainly cathartic. Snide observers might dismiss Katniss' (Jennifer Lawrence) as just another morose girl who likes hunky boys to fight over her, but we barely explore that by-now dulled triangle (except as an oblique analogy to Hollywood's lavender marriages) in order to nail down the nerve-shredding implications of 24/7 media coverage, wherein celebrity hinges on survival and failure to smile with casual joie de vivre for the cameras or failure to adequately pretend to be in love with some short dude is enough to ensure your family is killed and your village fire-bombed.

The concept is ingenious, because HUNGER GAMES is a cottage industry at its own throat, equating its dystopia with the ceaseless flash of paparazzi, make-up chairs, TV promo circuits endless award shows, and high pressure to be smile that is the grueling regimen of our modern starlets. I can only think of three other films to explore this: the slow torture of a dance marathon in THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY (1969)- here; the sexual enslavement in a neoconservative dystopia of 1990's A HANDMAID'S TALE) and the very similar to HUNGER GAMES, (almost too similar) the Japanese BATTLE ROYALE (2000).

Perhaps to metatextualize these implications, Jennifer Lawrence spends most of the movie caked in enough bronzed make-up to weigh down three Cleopatras on a death march backwards through the uncanny valley. Her glum face beneath this load would get too much to bear without some of her old spark, so thank god Jena Malone shows up, the Night Bitch if you will, of one of the other districts. Malone looks great in her black and silver uniform, or naked in an elevator, or spattered in blood. While Lawrence sulks in her gold pancake make-up, Katniss schemes and writhes and comes onto the big-jawed lap dog whose supposed to be Katniss' boyfriend.

All the old cast is back as well, including Donald Sutherland as the evil emperor, whose failure to grasp fundamental tenets of social psychology makes his tenure as leader the most unrealistic thing about the film, since he genuinely believes he can quell a revolution by publicly executing and flogging anyone who makes a Girl Scout sign. A man whose reign hinges on TV propaganda should know enough to mass produce that verboten mockingjay symbol as a keychain, and have his jackass TV host (played by Stanley Tucci) greet the TV audience with it (in short, comrade, to employ recuperation), the way MTV has done to every underground music movement since its inception. Draconian brutality never works in quelling revolution --it all but ensures it. And so it is the evil Sutherland's preference for bloodthirsty draconian brutality is off-kilter, as if he's trying to throw us off the scent of the film's own ingenious use of recuperation by showing his obliviousness towards such a practice, for I have no doubt those 'mockingjay' pendants are on sale just a few stores down from the multiplex at Forever 21, and if the evil emperor endorses them to help pacify the gum-chewing masses, real-time sales might drop.

Other signifiers are probably not going to be sold at the multiplex, such as the garish fashions worn by the hoi poloi, thank god. With their frills and pouffiness drawing obvious parallels to both the Reagan 80s and the French Revolution, the series offers enough hammering on the dividing wall between the champagne and canapés of the sophistos up top and the peasants starving and flogged below to make even D.W. Griffith's ORPHANS OF THE STORM seems subtle. That said, there are moments when Elizabeth Banks as the agent-PR maven looks mad hot in her gold and this go-round she gets a few scenes to act other than as a shrill mouthpiece for plot exposition.

Then there's a rare treat lacking in the other films discussed, a genuine drunk hip older dude, one of the few 'understandable' adult characters in this or any of the series currently marketing themselves to teens: Woody Harrelson. Advising Katniss how to blend in, make friends, and learn to think outside her box, he also eats when food is offered and gamely drinks this wretched dystopia out of focus, freeing himself for better things than validating Katniss' useless sulking. Another priceless factor is bizarro twist of having to imagine spending all your time with the dude you don't like yet must pretend to love, and he's shorter than you, and how his being so sweet and staid and supportive only makes it worse. That tweens are swooning for him only shows there's still hope for short guys and hope is a dangerous thing. 

(check out this great paranoid rant about the Girl Scout / Katniss salute on the Dismantle the Beam Project!)

ENDER'S GAME (2013) is a little removed from the love nonsense, but there's a lot of care and time spent getting the glistening eyes of the space bug exactly right. And Asa Butterfield as Ender is himself is a kind of fourteen year-old Hannibal Lector-for-good recruited by Harrison Ford via the old LAST STARFIGHTER tactics and put in charge of a drone armada to fight a bunch of STARSHIP TROOPER-esque space locusts.

I hated LAST STARFIGHTER and its bland 'every lad' though I didn't mind the hunky ciphers in STARSHIP because we were supposed to think of them as delusional caricatures, not 'ourselves' not as 'normal suburban teens' as imagined by guys who haven't seen a normal suburban kid in 30 years. Ender is different, he can defend himself and underneath his nervous ecotmorphology and liberal guilt lurks the heart of a carnivorous killer. His nebulous doubts about the rightness of his mission are played up but we never really get the full HEARTS AND MINDS story before the reverse of the climactic battle of BREAKING DAWN smashes through our screens and from there they start setting up the hoped-for sequels. The film's structure ingeniously keeps the space war stuff on the screens within the screens (knowing we've seen it all before) and secondary to the Enterprise-ish minutiae of commanding a row of similarly young and gifted kids sitting at drone computer screens, in other words, what the military is doing right now! THE LAST STARFIGHTER really is coming true!

Real life drone pilots at their gaming consoles

The last thing any kid wants is to see an 'average' kid like them in a sci fi movie.
We go to sci fi to get AWAY from ourselves!

As in CATCHING FIRE, ENDER wants you to want the sequels, to get the DVD, see it again on the IMAX, in 3-D, commit to it, for it only earned, so far, a paltry sixty million, little more than half its budget. I wish my interest in seeing sequels to under-performers like JOHN CARTER and THE GOLDEN COMPASS could bring them forth through sheer will, but then again I don't have either on DVD. I know I should buy them, like an indirect post-production Kickstarter, but... you know -- it's a lot of emotional baggage to deal with, a lot of responsibility befriending the nerd no one else likes. You can never shake them off once you do.

I feel like I should defend JOHN CARTER in particular because I read all the original Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs novels as a kid, as well as Burroughs' Tarzans and Carson of Venus, Robert E. Howard's Conan, Moorcock's Elrik; and Fritz Lieber's Fafhr and the Gray Mouser. 

from 1946! I got it for cover price
at the Lansdale PA Bookswap!

The best part about all of those books? No fucking kids! No 'average teen' hero for us to 'identify' with. No 'Boy' in the Tarzans ('Boy' ruined the later movies), no boys at all. In those books we were still allowed to identify with the badass adults, the ones who could kill the oppressors of their conscience without PC moral hand-wringing. We need those adult heroes back! Imagine STAR WARS if Han Solo never showed up, replaced instead by a 12 year-old boy with really normal hair and a nagging mom?! Horrible!

We must fight Morris Chestnut's call to safety and fight with all our strengths their glorification of 'being a kid.' Already the Chestnuts in Hollywood have gone back and digitally removed all the cigarettes, replaced the guns with flashlights, removed the nudity and much of the cursing, from our cinema heritage. The Chestnut is out of control and he will not stop until everyone wears safety helmets even to bed. Stop him before he jabs his safety-first overhead florescent light even into the darkest recesses of our most secret-sacred heart. Because you know he intends to try. I say roast him on the open fire of aimless youth rebellion! Richie in OVER THE EDGE, thou shalt not have died in vain! Now which way to Forever 21?

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