It's here, it's mindbending, it's Acidemic #8

This issue: Brecht-Godard-Wood, linked circlets connecting the search for freedom through 'dislodging' cinematic signifiers and turning bare soundstages into ghost ships and surrealist basements. This year's stellar line-up batted down the plate and strewn orchids on the grave of logic.

If through the issue you notice very little Godard, know this: Godard is in all things whether we speak of him or no. There is no going straight from Brecht to Wood. I tried. But my own understanding of film studies comes roundabout through Godard's dedication to Monogram Pictures (whose Return of the Ape Man is discussed) at the start of Breathless. 

Ed Wood by Mick Baltes

Also in this mighty issue: Peter K. Tyson decodes the Brechtian intertexutality of Fassbinder's Lola; teenage Molly Marie Wright rages against the empty-headed CGI of the Total Recall remake vs. the paravegan grandeur of Troll 2. Intertextual frisson erupts as Thomas Duke challenges Roger Ebert's perception of 'flaws' in Edgar G. Ulmer's poverty row classic Detour; Chris Stengl exhumes Pauline Kael's 'lost' review of Plan Nine from Outer Space, and I lament the dryness of David Sterritt's Les Carabiniers commentary track. Film historian David Del Valle discusses the joys and inaccuracies of Tim Burton's Ed Wood while acclaimed Nuyorican poet Tracie Morris expresses her misgivings over Burton's Dark Shadows and praises the original 1,000+ episode TV show. We get insightful probes into the basement surrealism of both Val Letwon's The Ghost Ship (from Ethan Spigland), and Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (from Budd Wilkins). Gregory Cwik discusses metatextual threads in horror via Cabin in the Woods, and I through Halloween.... and through the valley of the shallows of Brecht, we shall find Woodsy depth.

And we learn how Godard's Prénom Carmen explains the truth about UFOs, for, as the great Eros would say, "you didn't actually think you were the only inhabited planet in the universe? How can any race be so stupid?"

And check out Memento Mori, the staggeringly detailed historical action figure comic by our cover artist, Mick Baltes.

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The Public Domain Undead : George Romero and the Halperin Brothers vs. ze World

With the apocalypse year 2012 only a handful of days away I thought I'd prepare you with this post about zombies and creative copyright - you'll need to know about both to survive what congress and cosmic radioactivity have in store!  

The post-apocalyptic undead 'shoot 'em in the head' cannibal zombie film/TV show is now so ubiquitous that anyone with a camera feels entitled to make one --yet the way the bandwagon jumpers carry on you'd think these walking dead 'zombies' were as old and license-free as medieval folklore. Do the makers of stuff like AMC's sanctimonious glumfest THE WALKING DEAD and/or zom-coms like ZOMBIELAND and SHAUN OF THE DEAD even remember what life was like before 1968? Do they understand their huge debt to one man, the Bram Stoker of zombie-hood? Seeing WALKING DEAD try to be so soapy and self-serious, like "stop smiling, man, my son is out there, dead! And no one cares!" is for me just painful. Lighten up, guys, it's a fucking horror TV show on basic cable!

In the 1930s, 'every desire' was extra dirty.

Before NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in 1968 all zombies were in Haiti. They were tools of sugar plantation owners and voodoo chiefs, via films like 1932's WHITE ZOMBIE and REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES (both by the Halperin Brothers). When the Halperin Brothers tried to release REVOLT as a WHITE sequel they wound up in trouble with their old distributor, according to Wikipedia:

In May 1936, however, the Halperins encountered legal troubles in the form of a suit from Amusement Securities Corporation, a company that had helped finance White Zombie. Amusement Securities alleged that its contract for the earlier film gave it the exclusive right to use the world "zombie" in motion picture titles. Amusement Securities sent letters to theaters who planned to showcase Revolt of the Zombies, warning them not to show the film. As the film's premiere approached, Judge Waservogel of the New York State Supreme court ruled that screenings of the film could take place until a judgment in the suit was reached, and appointed attorney Henry Hoffman to referee the case. On June 27, 1936, Hoffman issued an opinion in favor of the plaintiffs, awarding Amusement Securities $11,500 in damages and legal fees and prohibiting the Halperins from promoting Revolt of the Zombies as a sequel to White Zombie.^[3]

Wow! All that over that one word --it's bound to make you mad when you consider what's going on now, how everyone and anyone makes zombie films as they like while the one man who invented zombies as we know them today collects not a farthing and rarely any public recognition. He brought us all the modern zombie features and there's not even a plaque (cough) or a statue of him... in that town, and meanwhile everyone with a camera is out making zombie movies, rewriting classic literature to include zombies, making faux History channel documentaries on zombies and using the ideas he invented as a 'given' of folklore. Michael, he could have been bigger than US Steel, which instead all but owns his hometown of Pittsburgh.


His name? George Romero.


 The Romero brand zombie has become 'the' zombie. Your zombie is a Romero-inspired zombie if:

1. It can only be stopped by a bullet to or strong blow to the head
2. It eats the flesh of living humans
3. Those who are killed rise up as zombies anywhere from a few seconds to a few days after death.
4.  It can somehow smell out who is dead vs. who is alive (or hear the heartbeat)
5. They're not really cannibals since they don't eat other zombies.

That's what I never understood. At what point does a dead person being eaten alive wake up a zombie and say, excuse me brother, get your damn teeth out my arm or I shall start eating thee? And why is it, even with tons of meat at their disposal, they'd rather waste an evening bashing at a front door than chow down on the corpses available and/or wrap something up for later?

Of course there's a long history of borrowing and co-opting in horror, stemming from legal issues over the use of DRACULA as a narrative in the 1920s, filed by Dracula author Bram Stoker's widow against Murnau's film, NOSFERATU in '22. That's just an example of the muddy battle by which the name DRACULA eventually became public domain. Now anyone can reprint that book or make a movie with a Dracula character. Free publicity - a bankable name. Ditto for FRANKENSTEIN, but the Universal monster make-up IS copyright, so your Frankenstein can't have a square head, bolts-in-neck, and so forth.

The original properties for those two are too old for renewal anyway, but NOTLD shouldn't be. (One of my pet peeves over books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is how lazy and bottom-line it is, the zombies are royalty-free, the source book is royalty-free, just Cuisnart them together and make some lazy fucker rich).

The big disaster for Romero was that the licensing rights to NIGHT fell into the public domain due to someone letting the copyright lapse, probably through the usual tangle of crooked distributors.  Then again, would the film have become so ubiquitous otherwise? Since anyone could show it, the film played endlessly at the end of drive-in triple features up until the end of drive-ins in the 80s, as well as college campuses, local TV, and cheap VHS.  Now anyone can make a movie or TV show or book with Romero-brand zombies, and adhere to the rules, or change them --it's a true myth for the ages. Maybe that's the definition of myth - public domain - once it's public domain, anyone can tell the story in their own way. And of course that's why the story gets told over and over... so letting your title lapse may lose you cash, but in insures your myth endures.

Disputes over the rights and directions, led to a branching of minds between Romero and his effects man / screenwriter John Russo who did RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD in 1985, which references NIGHT directly, wile Romero did DAY OF THE DEAD the same year. I remember seeing both in different NJ cinemas the same week! Adding to the confusion, Tom Savini remade the original film with Romero producing (?) and there was also a colorized version.

Interestingly, I'm pretty sure the word zombie never even appears in the original 1968 film. The newscasters do refer to them as 'ghouls' and 'individuals rising up and committing mass murder and cannibalism' but never as straight up 'zombies.' Unless I'm mistaken that name came from Italy. They loooooved NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD over there. And the called DAWN OF THE DEAD (imported by Dario Argento who funded it with profits from SUSPIRIA being a huge fan of Romero's original) ZOMBI, so ZOMBI 2 was their own sequel to that film, called ZOMBIE here, and a big hit, with the unforgettable tag line "They are coming to eat you."

Even if you were too young to ever go see ZOMBIE, you saw the TV ad, and you remembered that tag line and that terrifying, rotting face.

At least the imagery of hungry hordes ripping the living to shred finds a perfect meta analogy for the feeding frenzy of zombie cannibal bandwagon jumpers.

Well, that's how we got where we are. So fuck THE WALKING DEAD, that's the name of an old Karloff programmer from the 1940s anyway.


So...if you're going to make a movie about zombies, heed these words: unless you're doing it in a voodoo context, you're using Romero's ideas, his and original co-screenwriter John Russo. Give some props.

 Or better yet, go back to 1932 and respect the brothers Halperin, who brought us the amazing WHITE ZOMBIE!! This film is also in the public domain, but that's okay, fuck the Amusement Securities Corporation. Plus -- the Roan disc is pretty good quality-wise so again so go for the reliable brand! Bela Lugosi won't get a cent but.... Bela Lugosi's dead! Long live...'choke - gasp!'.. Bella Swan.

  

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"These Bad Boys Mean Business" - TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN Vs. FACING EVIL with Candice DeLong

 The real life Clarice Starling, Candice DeLong (above) was a high profile FBI profiler for 20 years. Seeing her on Investigative Discovery's Deadly Women and Facing Evil (Friday nights!) is to see a still button-cute but steely-eyed brunette whose brittle but compassionate demeanor is tried and tested in the forge of evil, poring over testimony and evidence and motives of specifically (for the shows) homicidal women. Interviewing them on Facing Evil in a style as intimate as a Barbara Walters, Delong guides their story from childhood to the moment the trigger is pulled or knife inserted; the moment sanity is left behind. Before that moment they were just normal people  but once the first shot is fired or cut is made, their whole world--and that of their victim--has now forever changed. So here they are, in jail for life. And it's all because they let a man (almost always) blur their own private line between good and evil.

Facing Evil

Their stories follow a general similarity of a vulnerable woman and a predatory, usually older schemer. On the surface, this undeniable facet of our modern mediated life validates some of the feminist concerns about the Twilight series --that it glamorizes abusive relationships, encourages dependence on older men and encourages leaving conventional reality behind for the fascist bubble that love and submission create.

In this fourth in the series, Breaking Dawn, Edward tells a story of his days hunting and drinking the blood of 'molesters.' A flashback to a screening of Bride of Frankenstein (1933) cements him to a lineage that dates back to the first Universal horror films, the dawn of dread in cinema, implying that his kind are in a sense, truly evil in that they are predatory. Whether they curb their habits, only drink bad guys (like Dexter), or only hunt deer, they're still evil -- maybe that's the true difference between staying out of jail in civilization and survival in the wilderness. Predatory instincts ensure the latter, but the sharper they are the harder it must be not to kill everyone around you, sooner or later, just because you do it so well.

A romantic fantasy demon lover like Edward in the Twilight series and a real life murderer are, based on this tenet, indistinguishable. Like sending love letters to Richard Ramirez or Ted Bundy--the thrill of bad boy danger tempered by the impossibility of their release--the saga of Bella and Edward is similarly based on thrills and danger welded to 'safety' and denial: there's no nagging wife to dispose of first, but there are... other things... that make their story conflate with the prison nurse who shot a guard to help her bad boy escape, over which comes DeLong's memorable words (approx.) about the nurse's love for hot prison guys: "You liked the bad boys. But these bad boys mean business."

I love the first three Twilight films (well, let's just say, I'm 'fascinated' by them) but Breaking Dawn is a huge let-down, like what might happen if Ramirez finally got out of jail to marry one of his pen pals, and he turned out to be old and bald and fat and safe. The problems with Breaking Dawn aren't those, but herewith are summed up in the three M's: Maturity, Martyrdom, and Music, and the one saving grace, Disillusionment:

1. Music: Instead of the nearly nonstop flow of emotional sadcore songs that ran like a nightmare chorus through the first three films we get a lot of listless minor key piano that occasionally breaks for tired croons from Christina Perri and Bruno Mars. Blechh. Part of what drew me to the first three films was, in fact, the sad music which actually seemed to be what Bella Swan the character would actually listen to while moping around in her bedroom. When the pop songs finally sneak into this fourth installment they all sound the same--lots of flat male neo-folk harmonies-- and lack any kind of legitimate sadness, except in the most perfunctory of Urban Outfitters Americana hipster harmony kind of way.

 2. Maturity: Whenever a teen series moves into a big marriage or out of high school you know you're headed for trouble and that's why I maybe forgive Dawn a little bit more than I forgave, say, season four of Buffy. The theater I saw Dawn in was freezing cold (broken heater) and that made the extended, strange marriage ceremony both better and worse: time slowed, half the ceiling was dripping and exposed, presumably from a burst pipe; the cherry blossoms onscreen seemed made of ice, and the dream of the 'death-size' wedding cake froze my blood, literally. For a second I had a sense of overwhelming fear that Bella was already dead and marrying Edward be like the scary climax of Psychomania!

The intervening year/s since the last film have been kind to Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner: posture and facial feature definition and a sense of gravitas are theirs by right. Pattinson meanwhile just seems extra bleached and CGI washed out until he looks a bit like he's being airbrushed, like Courtney Cox in Scream IV.

Still, in general they have all avoided the pasty hungover look that dogged the aging Harry Potter gang, and I loved the awesome selection of fully sketched-out 'relatives' of the Cullen clan, all gorgeous and interesting and probably worthy of spin-off films. Checking out those glowing eyes and Goth-but not too Goth- dresses made me desperately want to be at that wedding, and made me think I already had in weird teenage dreams I still remember fondly. PS - My favorite Cullen is the nurturing but still badass 'older sister/advisor' psychic vampire, Alice, played by Ashley Greene. But of course, I'm not alone in that.

Break: If you're still unclear why/how this series is so popular, let's examine the still below:

Note the purple and violet color coordination that's been the key luscious art design since the first film, and the way these two cute vampires fuss, with their centuries of beauty tip expertise, over this 18 year-old slacker with her hunched over posture and vaguely mannish profile. As a viewer you're identification locus moves in three directions if you study the picture, mirroring the three components of consciousness:

   1) Bella: cute but frail and human, easily-led (ego)
   2) Vampire helpers: examining our human weakness from their superior position (super ego)
   3) The Gaze / mirroring / metatextual subjective position : the unborn child's free-floating ghost, eying Bela's womb like a tired wanderer eyes a warm, toasty Motel 6 (id)

In a sense, it's perfect just as it is, this preparations for the wedding. There's nowhere to go but down. After a certain point no amount of stalling and pretty baubles and nice scenery will help when it's down to you, it all comes down / to you / in your nakedness; facing the end point of desire's long trip down the river Niagara, when the three aspects of consciousness are forced to face the three unconscious aspects, the sides of self you never even knew were there, the ones hiding at the bottom of the lake, evil sea wolves!

3. Disillusionment: That said, Jacob (Taylor Lautner) shows up and steals the film halfway through the wedding reception, bursting with lycanthropic life, sweeping Bella off her feet and right away from the paler-than-the-wedding-cake groom. Jacob's derisive scoffing that her and Edward's honeymoon will be a sad sick joke-- his incredulity that Edward 'hasn't told her yet,' --implies some massive sterile impotence on the part of all vampires that makes the 'waiting til they're married to have sex' aspect suddenly seem like a sad con job. Once that ring is on her finger, the fact that this Ken doll has only a plastic absence in his pants will no longer be something she can protest about.


Sure enough, after this long beautiful wedding scene and lengthy travelogue to this exotic secret honeymoon location we in the audience are as as jet-lagged as Bella (and frozen to death in an unheated cineplex). We'd been expecting some serious fireworks, and instead Edward drags her down to the middle of nowhere, just to be by the beach, and feebly tries to humiliate her because she's not mad enough at him for leaving her bruised up from the roughness of his, how you say? lovemaking? Ah yesss. In the film's best scene she looks down at him while he sits on the smashed up marital bed, not a gentlemen of vamping anymore but a self-sabotaging undead toad, a loser with weird teeth who's spent three films postponing this inevitable de-pantsing because he is, 'ow you say? A fraud, like all Kens!

 Thus we come to the realization that those people who wait to get married before fucking are perhaps either terrified they'll be terrible at it or else completely oblivious to the tenets of Lacanian psychoanalysis and/or Buddhism. Having sex before marriage is like getting your head out of the clouds and into the dust and grime of who's turn it is to do the dishes; the longer you stay in the virgin white clouds the more you're sink fills up until the dishes are so dirty and so numerous that you can't even find the sink, or the soap... and you run from that sink, don't you, Bella? But now you're chained to it!

So while Bella and Edward's flatline honeymoon is not what we want to see it's what needs to be seen for the film to have a larger meaning than just button-nosed girl promise ring erotica. Rather than giving us the trite softcore displays of conspicuous enjoyment we only think we want to see and which would, in the Lacanian sense, collapse both Bella's and our own identification construct, they give us the truth, the awareness, the realization that the whole grand mythic aspect of their love would be lost if a happy-ever-after truly arrived. As long as she's miserable we can still safely identify with Bella and enjoy her squirming from our hidden masochistic perspective. Once she's 'well laid' as it were, she becomes no longer our misery-loving company but a threat to our enjoyment.

 A key moment is at the Rio airport where Edward makes arrangements with a Brazilian pilot for a private jet home because she's pregnant... with a demon baby! The impression Edward creates as such a hip, rich, happenin' dude in his cargo shorts (he can speak fluent Portuguese!) is denuded by the nonplussed way Bella regards the whole thing from her passenger window in the nearby cab. By now, Edward's brand of 'I'll take care of everything' is recognized by her, finally, as mollycoddling. His Victorian/compulsive need to keep her co-dependent is based more on his own insecurity and self-loathing than on any truly chivalrous impulse. So, like the women interviewed by Candice DeLong in Facing Evil, Bella is waking up out of a brainwash by a bad boy.

The thing is, the real time-serving inmates interviewed by Candice are 'made' into killers through this same brainwashing technique. And Bella technically will let Edward make her into a killer (a vampire) but she has chosen it in advance of all his brainwashing; she is drawn to the darkness, and her bad boy actually tries to keep her out of it. It's not the sex of the honeymoon she really wants, for without death, what do you have? Sans petite mort? Vous n'avez rien!

4) Martyrdom - Bela indirectly uses martyrdom--the oppressed feminine's ultimate trump card-- to force Edward into finally letting her become the undead wraith she's always longed to be; like Steel Magnolias in reverse! The only way to get Edward to finally turn her, to 'kill her,' is via the pretext of a pro-life sacrifice, rather than a personal and morbid self interest. Of course it's annoying that this all has to be in service of a pro-life subtext, but, if you follow the 3rd wave feminism all the way down to the twisted roots you'll see it drinking heavily from the abject underground stream of pregnancy and rough sex--the twin magnets of darkness no amount of feminist rationale can brighten.

So let me ask you this: If a woman starts out independent and chooses to be overwhelmed by the male other  is she betraying her gender, even if its by her own choice? Is she allowed to examine the paradox of being free through surrender? Is she allowed to choose a deeper darkness than even death or prison can contain?

Steel survivor: Won't get fooled again.

Accusations of Twilight being pro-life as a whole are evaded by Edward being so pro-abortion, hating his own semi-dead child (as opposed to the doofus husband from Steel Magnolias for whom his wife seems little more than a baby wrapper). Meanwhile Bela's refusal to give up her half-vamp infant even as it's killing her is seen as foolhardy by everyone but herself... and part of it isn't just her connection with the child but her wish to die and be reborn as a vampire, which Edward would clearly postpone indefinitely (naturally since once she's turned he will lose his power over her). In other words, her choice is based on her own desire to die, and her connection to her baby, sans any desire to please or obey her man's selfish edicts. So in the end, feminists and pro-choice types alike go snarling back to the Exit of this film, both ill-served by the myth they cautiously hoped to adopt. And those of us who seek genuine subversion recognize it in this very sly Antigone-like renouncement.

It is, after all, only a myth...

But... that's not quite right. Something can be 'only' life, but never 'only' a myth. The danger of ignoring the true nature of the mythic archetypal unconscious--of presuming the mythic dimension has no power other than cheap entertainment--is that you leave your unconscious with  no avenue of conscious expression, so it festers in your pressure cooker subconscious until it explodes in sudden violence or bad boy brainwash submission.

 This is a sad, Freudian truth seen all too well through the steel blue eyes of Candice DeLong on Facing Evil. Without an archetypal context by which to recognize the big bad wolf when it came pawing up at her basket, the Red Riding Hoods DeLong interviews were easy prey. Maybe they never learned to read, or their dads were fundamentalist zealots who refused to let them hear the story (Red Riding Hood shouldn't be allowed out without a male escort, and the hood should cover her whole face like a burkah!), and now they've paid the price. Haters can sneer at it, feminists can rear back and bare fangs, but girls currently immersed in the Twilight world will all grow up knowing how to recognize wolves when they see them. The bad boys they meet will just seem 'sooo fifth grade', only slightly less outre than ponies, or those phallus-free Ken dolls.

But those who don't have a wolf to chase them in their youth can never grow out of the need for one, the wild-eyed deer in  the headlights longing the bad boy wolves can spot from a mile off at any bus depot. Instead of knowing a devil when they see one they are instead themselves are only seen, and sucked... first through lupine head trips, then into murder, then through Candice DeLong's steely blue vampire eyes and back out into the hell paved by Christendom's good intentions.

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"Law no more!" - Kindergarten Consciousness in ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1933)

Thanks to Criterion's fancy restoration the ships and shipping in the pre-code horror Island of Lost Souls--long absent from DVD--have extra foggy resonance. Finally. My dream request that Criterion release this title at last has been answered. I feel like the dream king of a remote Skull-shaped island, who can see deep into the shadows of the studio jungle and make out the grim black beast faces that before were just vague VHS-streaks.

It makes all the difference. This time Criterion's burned all the artifacts out of her!

Director Earle C. Kenton eschewed mere stock footage rear screen projections, and the enormity of the ships and their lines and cables strung in the fog really hits you on blu-ray - you can practically smell the salt-sprayed animals and you feel bad for them and anyone who has to smell it, like a waterlogged zoo. There are lovely shots of bright spot light and pitch deep black coming through chiaroscuro latticework, pond reflections reflecting potential lovers dissolving back into DNA sequences ripe for halving; the subtle changes of distressed expression on Leila Hyam's face as the windows facing her at dinner teem with lewd, grinning, probably jacking-off donkey men; the character of Oran ("Him.. tell me... spill blood!") now standing out more from the foliage as every feature of his black on black Caliban face is restored with the Criterion glow and every obscene pustule on Moreau's hopelessly phallic Sebastian's garden-variety prehistoric plants glistens in the moonlight.

One would feel better about it all if the old man had some opiates or Ketamine on hand to knock out his animals before all the painful glandular surgery, but that would undo the grisly satisfaction of the ending. Still, there's a lot of pain in this movie. Due to Laughton's portly sadistic toad-like elan, his Moreau becomes something like the younger brother of his other two main early 30s sadists: Cap'n Bligh in MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY (1935) and 'bullyin' Barrett in THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET (1934). Those mythic British connections are perhaps intended, as a satire of such types, the English sadist using the strict codes of conduct of the age as tools for abuse (apparently England's brutal school system will do that). We learn from my old Scarlet Street buddy David J. Skal in the extras that HG Welles meant the original version to be a kind of Swiftian meta-satire on the Victorian fad for social evolution and science and disregard for the suffering of lab animals, but my reading of the film this time before seeing his extra harkened back farther, as far back as ye can Goethe - to the Annunaki in the old tablets of the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia. Look at the picture below and tell me it doesn't look like this ancient god is feeding the animals at a zoo (mmm, strawberries, or pine cone pineal glands!)

Him tell me... spill blood!

If you don't know your ancient alien theory, Lord Enki came here and made humans from a mixture of Annunaki and resident ape /animal DNA so that they could be taught to mine for gold which was then shipped off-world. Enki got soft on his critters and gave them some tips on the use of fire and language against strict orders. He even taught them to eat.. meat.

Maybe the end of most mad scientist movies-- when the monsters run amok and kill their maker-- are really a kind of very long-belated revenge against lord Enki for fucking us up - making us part god, part beast -a  hideous still-beating THING! We've been simmering all these eons in our ancestral memory, resentful of ever being dragged from our Edenic animal sleep and thrown into the cold logical light of reason, pain, spelling, kindergarten; being forced to walk on two legs instead of comfortable crawling, and all that other serpentine-mammalian hybrid consciousness duality - both herd animal and solo predator --all just to satisfy the morbid curiosity of a well-heeled reptilian alien madman who's angry at the world 'cuz he's too deep in the closet to have a sex life of his own. Moreau could also be in that sense an early accidental ringer for J. Edgar Hoover (more on that to come)!

The big highlight in ISLAND is the climactic showdown between the two biggest hams of horror at that time: Bela Lugosi as the keeper of the law going against the whip-snapping Charles Laughton. Lugosi's ranting--after being beaten down, forced to endure untold hours of daily make-up application, brought to heel by bad deals from Universal and morphine addiction--brings several lifetimes worth of rage to bear; Laughton's hamming--no need for studio beat-downs when his homosexuality is beaten into the closet by the intolerant age itself--matches Lugoisi's floridity with a gradually eroding bed of fearlessness. 

It's a great moment in classic horror, worthy of any Karloff-Lugosi pairing. And perfectly cast. I can't see Karloff playing either Moreau or Lugosi's beast man; he was never much of an ego-mad tantrum-raving screamer-- his is more the creepy mellifluousness of his Satanist in THE BLACK CAT--and in the end this showdown is all about tantrums --the bratty older child wreaking havoc on the younger ones until they band together and wreak their vengeance. When we see the 'faithful dog' die to save his master, we're suddenly ashamed we've been dressing our pets up in little butler outfits all these years.

Another cool aspect of SOULS is its ahead-of-it's time approach to liberal empathy. Perhaps the fall from Eden wasn't the serpent's DNA-diddling after all but the sneering condemnation of a moral crusader like Richard Arlen. The outrage of his Mr. Parker towards the vivisection of these creatures makes him a kind of early representative for PETA. On learning Lota was once a panther, note Parker's choice of language - "These others I can maybe overlook, Moreau," he says, "but to make a woman, with a woman's suffering! That I can't forgive."

In other words, his empathetic response is manageable with the grunting, tough manly beasts, but a woman is, as Carol Clover noted, man's sensitive springboard, his mental frame for absorbing a more acute form of projected punishment via the masochistic gaze.

In other words, the gaze is a holy thing that must be guarded from trauma. Hence you can serve a bunch of pork, steak, and chicken at the craft services table during a film shoot, but if you kill a pig, chicken or cow onscreen you are 'cruel' and in violation of "the law" - What is the law? To protect the stomach of squeamish animal and woman lovers --are we not men? There's no way you can possibly kill a creature 'more' cruelly than at a freakin' stockyard or under a doctor's scalpel, so it's not the animal's suffering the laws protect but our own squeamish gaze. We want to be assured no suffering we see onscreen is ever real; it might upset us. If only Moreau had given vocal chords to the meat on the craft services table! Their ghostly yowls might haunt the entire world into veganism!  And what argument could Mr. Parker have then, that wouldn't make him sound like a hypocrite as he reaches for another plate of veal?

Of course while on his island--Moreau insists on it in his laws--everyone is a vegetarian, just like Hitler!
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Final note: I generally don't groove on DVD menus, but the Criterion one sets a new awesome standard, expanding on the cover art, with overlaid medical drawings spliced together and music from the film playing over, cool and menacing.  Dig. I love it. DVD of the year.

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Kimberly Linn - "The Sparks" (video)

"The Sparks" - song by Kimberly Linn / Video from "The Devil Bat" (1941) PRC Bela Lugosi classic, edited by Erich Kuersten - 4 mins - the story of a love between a bat and a mad scientist, and the power of the sparks to set them free.

"For Bela, and for madmen everywhere, the misunderstood, the unappreciated and the tyrants with no subjects who rage in their secret laboratories, creating their atomic supermen, and their music, and writing, and their art. And Kimberly, come out of hiding and continue your awesome music! Like Bela, and like Poe, you are and shall be.... avenged! "

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VOODOO MAN: Patron Saint of Megalomaniacal Children and Torpor!

Notoriously absent from the world of DVD... until now, comes VOODOO MAN (1944). The missing link in the chain of strange, boring, inept but irresistibly fascinating, Brechtian and hilarious horror films from poverty row studio Monogram, usually starring John Carradine, George Zucco, Bela Lugosi or in rare and precious instances such as this, all three. 

The wartime era was a lean one for horror films, with the war overseas far more horrific than anything that could be imagined blah blah blah---meanwhile the poverty row studios like Monogram snuck in when the lights were out and filled the bill, the "second feature" bill, and in the process tapped into the undernourished unconscious of the home front, the women and children left behind while the men all went to Europe and Asia and dreamed demons of their own. 

I first encountered VOODOO MAN as a bored child in the 1970s. It was on UHF TV almost all the time, along with other Monogram Lugosi 'classics': THE APE MAN, GHOSTS ON THE LOOSE, THE CORPSE VANISHES, BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT and THE INVISIBLE GHOST... all could barely register against the constant attacks of static and "ghosting" on UHF channels, and in retrospect, that made them seem better - like maybe we missed something.  We bad-at-sports children had to watch these titles over and over again in our forlorn pre-VHS  hope of catching a view of a real frickin' monster. The "Voodoo" title of this one made us think that, maybe, there'd be, I don't know, a zombie? Anything? But Noooo! Just hypnotized chicks in robes, and Bela Lugosi and George Zucco in a crazy headdress, all seeming to have been filmed on a single dirty staircase with a ratty old camera, and as full of dull adult talk as any crappy film one's parents watched. But still... when Bela was on, we were transported!

To really appreciate VOODOO MAN as a key 20th century work of art, you need to vibe with the lonesome beauty of Edward Hopper's paintings, as in the gas station scene above. It's hard to tell if the VOODOO MAN gas station (above, below the Hopper) is indoors on a set or outside at a real gas station. But the resemblance is uncanny for other reasons then the shape of the pumps; the same lonesome quality of Hopper's gas station--the dusk approaching, darkening the forest down the road so it seems like a black devouring sadness is creeping up the road towards the man working outside. He seems endangered like he doesn't know he's in HILLS HAVE EYES VII. Similarly, the drivers who pass by George Zucco's gas station don't realize he's the bad guy! And the station's where he chooses his victims, not unlike many a street wandering roughie. In bigger budgeted films you might see a long shot of the gas station along the road, but Monogram's aesthetic afforded no non-stock footage exteriors. So the Zucco station demands close framing all the time, giving the film a cramped feeling as if the road is only around 4 miles total in length, and then the world just ends.

World War Two saw, among other things, men going off to fight battles who, before they left for Europe, got married so they could have sanctioned sex, i,e, not die a virgin, and maybe even leave a kid behind as a legacy. For a nation of these young women and young men, the sexual relation was hot and short, leaving them with a whetted appetite and little else. Their erotic awakening froze in early bloom. The soldier’s bride especially, having had only the faintest taste of marital relations before being left behind, surely felt as if she was married to a nonexistent entity (perhaps she even sets the table in case he comes home, in shades of Lugosi’s first Monogram pic, THE LIVING GHOST). Not only is her man not around, but his next letter may arrive weeks after he is already dead. These sorts of things were probably swilling around the collective unconscious like a plague of ghost G.I.s and seductive traveling salesman Hitlers. Like the Voodoo Man, in fact. 

And of course, through it all, that horrendous ache, the lonesome sadness, the same sadness a boy in the early 1970s like myself was feeling from staying indoors on a sunny day, unable to leave Bela's side in his hour of woe, sighing over his Charlie's Angels bubblegum cards in prepubescent longing all the more tortuous for the fact that Kate Jackson was so out of reach, yet right there - in ephemeral mirage form. Life.... to death. Image... to life, and each side greener than the other.

Thus to appreciate the beauty of VOODOO MAN without the background of having seen it ad nausea as a child in the 1970s, or as a wartime lover,  you must first understand true suffering: romantic longing, unfair parents, stupid little brothers, annoying teachers. You should be a mad genius trapped in the mundane reality of normal suburbia. For like such a mad genius, VOODOO MAN suffers from disrespect and the hostile derision of lesser mortals. For indeed, the poverty row horrors of the 1940s were dissed by everyone, even  their own makers; a sad state of affairs when the director and writer admit throughout the film that they don't give a damn about what they're doing and you shouldn't either. But we were used to being told stuff we liked was crap. And we raged against boredom and against every bedtime and in this refusal to kowtow to life's petty rules we really found a kinsman in Lugosi. It didn't matter how bad everyone else was in front of and behind the camera, Bela was the star and he gave it 120 proof.

So yeah, the director William "One Shot" Beaudine shot the film with his usual adherence to the lazy tenets of his nickname, though like the lazy he occasionally lurches into inspired brilliance. "Romantic" lead Tod Andrews plays Ralph, the most unimaginative and dull screenwriter in Hollywood, though his existential suggestion that Bela Lugosi star in the film he has just written and/or lived, does in fact come true, Moebius strip style. Still, in Ralph's own words, "Zombies are a scenario writers worst nightmare. I should know, I wrote one once.” 

Hmm, so zombie and horror films are for morons, and Monogram's writers should know, because they write them? That's rather self-defeating and dubious logic, yet no one can argue that here the picture is, soaring through time and cobweb covered wings long after the lame writer has been forgotten. Such self-defeating and dubious logic abounds all through the film, as as when the sheriff refuses the hero's help in finding the ever increasing roster of missing women: "Me and Elmer've done all right looking for them ourselves, I guess we can look for one more." The self-defeating and dubious logic in action once more! Not that they've found any clues, or leads, or women, but they're doing "all right by themselves." That's something a child says when they're too shy to ask for help. Such blatant contempt for the intellect of an audience borders on the pathological, even further, until it loops back around to crest the pinnacle of high art.

This meta-logic ties into the practice of voodoo itself, in both in the contempt it inspires in the western "white man," and the way trances actually can be induced to universal benefit and cosmic aura enhancement. The voodoo spells performed are just contempuous mumbo jumbo but the actors are game and Lugosi and Zucco both intone like skilled hypnotists or bass players, and their mojo robs the reasoning powers of nearly everyone in the crew, the cast and the mise en scene, leaving our true antihero-- the insane, grieving hypnotist Dr. Marlowe (Bela Lugosi)--to treat the landscape of the film as his own tyrant sandbox, outwitting the sluggish sheriff, berating his cringing dingbat servant Toby (John Carradine) and leaving hypnotized women shambling around his whole world backyard. It fits the mindset of any frustrated kid who (often rightly) feels the adults in charge are raving idiots and/or cocktail-dazed bullies. The only other 'real' person he knows- - his long-gone wife--is dead, or in kid terms, his best friend moved away, or Kate Jackson exists only on the cover of Bananas, in WW2 terms it's that girl back home re-reading the letters written by her MIA husband until they're sogged. 

In case you don't have a drunken father or son or me to make snide comments as you watch the film, the VOODOO MAN DVD comes with the comic stylings of Rifftrax, hence the cover that makes this look like some frat boy Tiki party video: Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, ala Mystery Science Theater, are the comics and rather than robot silhouettes there's thankfully just a hilarious audio commentary option. I'm certainly grateful to them for getting the film out on DVD, in a nice transfer, and for keeping their comments on a separate track so I can enjoy the purity of the original and refer to their company only when I want to make sure they caught some ridiculous moment which is often, and they catch them all. Keep 'em coming, buckos!

 
So now that I've trashed the film and everyone, let's concentrate on the brilliance beneath: Lugosi, naturally. His  restrained, melancholic performance reflects, as I've said, that he always brought his "A" game (check his "handy" robe above), no matter how contemptuously the actors around him treated the story. As grieving husbands trying to resurrect their lost Lenores he could pull you right into the screen by the throat just by welling up his eyes with tears and spacing out his words in the right way... "Life... to... death!" And the sense of despair and dejected madness is again totally metatextual, for he was a classically trained toast of Romanian theater who had come to Hollywood and rose to iconic fame and just as quickly fell off big studio favor for being too much a prima donna, and now here he was at some flea-bitten old and probably cold Monogram studio, with William "One Shot" Beaudine, kind of like Klaus Kinski in AGUIRRE: WRATH OF GOD, ending up the king of a gaggle of unimpressed monkeys.


Bela's megalomania and devotion to the eternal "play" of acting, then, earns our love despite and because of the dregs surrounding him. Children still at that pre-compassion stage could easily identify with that kind of protective madness, the insanity that prevents true genius from succumbing to despair at the mundanity all around.” 

I also like how the film adheres to the spirit of a child’s sense of play, where no one really dies or escapes fake death. All must pretend to die and thus live forever. In all these Monograms there was seldom any actual harm done to these young frozen brides. They usually snapped out of whatever trance they happened to by the picture’s end (presumably unmolested -- coded into the 'child-like' nature of her keepers), while Bela inevitably died in his burning lab, usually with his hands happily locked around the neck of a gorilla. Every kid knows that, in war games, the only true winner is the one with the final, longest most dramatic death scene. Even the last man standing knows that to truly win one is the last person killed, not standing - for the last man alive is always shot by someone already dead, as a kind of final exhale of life and bullets: in death there are no losers. After all, what is the difference between a living soldier and an emotionless zombie if not that he is seen, and heard from, and missed. Come home, soldier. Andy, come home.

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Coming Down in Style: INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933)

When Hollywood decides to dump cavalcades of stars into one comedy, the results can be over-baked. Paramount's ALICE IN WONDERLAND was a disaster but INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (both 1933) on the other hand, is half-baked, which is just right. I love it so much if I had only one film for a desert island, it would be this. It's my safety net, my life preserver. My drinking companion.... one of the few non-Hawks movies to earn that admittedly dubious privilege.

Just so just so.

The love story began when I was fourteen years old in the early days of VHS, scouring the pre-cable days of TV Guide for things to videotape and ease my lonesome adolescence. I had a thing for 50s monsters and 30s old dark houses. I loved the secret panels, and furry suits of the Lugosi Monograms, which were always on when I was very young. I taped INTERNATIONAL HOUSE because Lenny Maltin's guide (my bible back then) gave it ***1/2, and it had my main monster man, Bela Lugosi, in the credits. I was desperate for something new, down to try anything since I had exhausted my Marx Brothers movies (I know their first six almost by heart) and was scraping bottom with things like THE GORILLA (the awful Ritz Brothers --identical triplets nursing the same half-baked overacting schtick, now well-forgotten), and ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY (with a horrible fake Martin and Lewis, as if Lewis wasn't bad enough - and poor Lugosi so old and shattered he could barely keep up with them). Even so, INTERNATIONAL HOUSE was a risk. It came on at three AM, my VHS timer was hit or miss. But a miracle happened. It actually worked. And I fell instantly in love with W.C. Fields, Cab Calloway, and the whole pre-code saucy comedy genre in one collective cupid arrow burst.

A few years later, I brought it of it to college and my drummer and I watched it nightly while pounding bourbon and ginger ale. Decades later and we still have long conversations set to the vaudeville rhythm of Burns and Allen ("You had a raffle for poor old woman!?" / "You wouldn't say he has flew!") And of course there's W.C. Fields at his most insane; to drink along with him in this movie is to know a rare anarchic joy, and then to pass out.

Waking to a job well done

A lot of the early Fields pictures can get exasperating, even IT'S A GIFT, because of his weird need to play henpecked small town husbands, but not so his marvelous Professor Quail in INTERNATIONAL HOUSE, perhaps due to not having to carry the film by himself, he finally lets go completely and plays a drunken autogyro pilot and reckless adventurer, who lands on the roof deck of the Wu Hu, China Grand hotel, sneaks into gold digger supreme Peggy Hopkins Joyce's boudoir, scrounges everyone's leftover floorshow bottles and trashes the front desk, all while swirling about him a veritable cape of American arrogance; gathered guests are bemused but hotel manager Franklin Pangborn throws a hissy fit (and tells Quail, "I suggest you get back into that flying windmill of yours and depart!" Pangborn, always marvelous.

Bela Lugosi as the Soviet ambassador suspects Professor Quail of being the American representative. He's also one of the ex-husbands of Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Like mealy Tommy Nash (Stu Erwin), whose imagined measles puts the hotel under quarantine, Lugosi's in Wu-Hu to buy Professor Wong's radioscope; Wong will only accept sealed bids for the rights to his invention, and his demonstrations of the radioscope include Cab Calloway singing "Reefer Man" replete with zombified bassman: "Why look at that cat, he looks like he done lost his mind," notes Cab. "He's high!" shouts the band. "What do you mean he's high?"/ "Full of weed!" they shout. "Full of weed!?" And there's Baby Rose Marie, a little girl belting the down and dirty blues with the voice of a 50-year old smoker on her fifth whiskey, and dancing in a dirty frock who is undoubtedly the inspiration for the dancing moppet singing the "Reefer Song" in Day of the Locust. 

No doubt West loved this movie!

As per most 1930s movies, the more illegal drugs are done under the table (we never see Cab's bassist actually take a puff), but there's plenty of drinking above board, with Professor Quail dropping his empty Muerto Blanco beer bottles onto people's heads as he flees his massive Mexican bar tab, and there's wry gay references ("don't let the posey fool ya"), one shot of a Chinese drag king, and Fields' bravado is heartening: "Is this Kansas City, Kansas, or Kansas City, Missouri?" When Pangborn tells him he's lost, Fields decrees: "Kansas City is lost. I am here!" This reminds me of what the Sufi mystic Bahauddin once wrote: "A candle has been lit inside me / for which the sun is a moth." It's small wonder that Firesign Theater dubbed their satire of the 1960s counterculture "W.C. Fields Forever."

Hell yeah the Firesign loved this movie!

Like the Paramount Marx Brothers movies, INTERNATIONAL HOUSE is especially good for coming down off acid, since the behavior of every character is so "off" - there's no one to bring you down with bad vibes. There's even exotic fan dancers in faux-Ziegfield number, "The China Tea Cup and the American Mug," with Sterling Holloway as the mug, bouncing around on a wire after Lona Andre in full exotica headdress. And there's simply nothing better to hallucinate onto than a shimmering exotica headdress, skimpy pre-code spangles, and Holloway flying around on wires dressed as a sailor.

That's because on psychedelics many 'normal' forms of human interaction--such as registering for a hotel room-- become suddenly absurd and even frightening, while the spontaneous "outside the box" actions of free-spirit surrealists--such as boldly walking along the registration desk and kicking over the mail slots--are a breath of "normalcy." It's the difference between seeing sleeping souls shambling through habitual rituals and running loose with living, breathing, awake people. Such is the effect in INTERNATIONAL HOUSE, which has just enough normal dull "Grand Hotel" style characters to keep the more dysfunctional ones looking even cooler. And casting Peggy Hopkins Joyce seals the deal: Margaret Dumont and Thelma Todd rolled into one, the Paris Hilton or Zsa Zsa Gabor or Charro of her day, decency prevents my showing her here.

One of my favorite moments: After getting kicked out of Joyce's bed, Fields winds up sleeping with Dr. Wong, who's mistaken him for the American representative. "I feel like the whole Chinese army's been marching across my tongue with muddy feet," Fields laments the following morn.

The houseboy asks: "Shall I get you some water?"

"A little on the side," Fields replies.

That's how I roll with INTERNATIONAL HOUSE. I want to steal the whole bottle and throw chaser to the wind, just a blast of soda in a gigantic highball of whiskey. There's never been another like it. Woo-Hoo! As a fourteen year-old besotted with the whole fractured business, I knew my fate. Four years later I'd be introducing it as the perfect post-show come-down chillout drug -- one glance at the spoon lady, or that crazy autogyro, and burdensome morning would fade into cozy blackout.

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