Old Dark Capsules: THE GHOUL, CAT AND THE CANARY, THE MONSTER WALKS, THE OLD DARK HOUSE, THE BLACK RAVEN

Secret panels, stormy nights, dying heirs, hairy hands, Karloff, candles, lawyers; priceless mcguffins stolen from a dead man's watch pocket; maybe a coroner, woken up at this ungodly hour of the night; guys in ape suits for the medium shots, stock footage of a monkey for the close-ups; Bela Lugosi stuck playing a butler with barely any lines because the producers are worried about his morphine addiction; shrieking maids; bats; black cats; skulls on desks; conniving trophy wives everyone wants dead. What could be more Halloween-ish? It's the Old Dark House genre, basically forgotten today because there are no more old dark houses. Now they're either 'haunted' or long-since converted to apartments.

But if you've ever spent a weekend at a rich friend's mansion then you know how weird it can get: a late night trip to the bathroom after everyone else has gone to bed can be a terrifying, surreal nocturnal journey ala THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER river trip. The walls are so thick that if someone were screaming for help downstairs in the study you'd never even hear them, or be able to find them.

And no longer can eccentric millionaire uncles just caper down to Egypt and help themselves to whatever cursed, ancient artifacts they care to dig for. The colonialist yard sale is closed! But the films, thank Ra, remain open! Here's five I know like the back of m'hand: 

 THE GHOUL
1933 - ***
British studio Gaumont's attempt to make a 1930s Universal horror reveals just how great Universal horrors were by contrast. At any rate, GHOUL's foggy and cozy as a cup of Earl Grey at a midnight graveyard picnic. Karloff is an eccentric Egyptologist who spends 75,000 pounds on an emerald he thinks will bring him back from the dead. He dies soon after and is entombed to the strains of Wagner's immortal "Sigfried's Funeral March" but apparently without the gem. Soon thereafter a cast of skulking emerald seekers materialize out of the fog including Ernest Thesiger (Dr. Pretorious!) and a grumpy Dickensian lawyer who employs rather elaborate strings of words like "I intend to grant myself the pleasure of calling on her this evening." They're all either looking for the emerald, stealing it from someone else, having sadomasochistic fantasies (how very British!), writing notes, making peace with angry cousins, or being strangled by a Karloff back from the dead!

The grand guignol moment is when Boris carves a bloody ankh symbol on his bony chest, cut from many prints. Overall THE GHOUL would make a fine, weird double bill with the original MUMMY (1932), and possibly even stole its props, but alas, like so many British-Egyptian Museum horrors of the era all the supernatural elements must be conveniently explained away by film's end. One mustn't leave the queen's subjects thinking such things are true, you know... a gullible lot they are, I'm afraid, sir. That's not to say this jewel still isn't a little loose in its setting, if you know what I mean, guv. Say no more...

THE CAT AND THE CANARY
1939 - ****
My favorite Bob Hope movie! I've seen it 1,000 times! Dragging my canoe behind me! I taped it off 'Spotlight' in 1980 and, in some ways, I'm still watching it. Bob Hope is the perfect mix of romantic hero and scared goofball quipper as Wally Campbell. The leading lady is Paulette Godard, who turns out to be the sole heiress to her eccentric Uncle Cyrus Norman's estate, which is an old house way out on le bayou, where an escaped maniac who calls himself 'The Cat' is prowling for victims. Guest must take canoes to get to the mansion, and Hope's stoic creole paddler has already heard Hope's jokes "last year... Jack Benny Program."

George Zucco reads the will and is the first to get murdered. Gale Sondergaard is the housekeeper in tune with the mysterious chimes and 'murmurs' of the old house. The other relatives all play up the notion Paulette is insane (she keeps seeing hands come out of walls) but it's mainly so they can lay claim to the fortune, thanks to the sanity clause, and don't tell me there ain't no Sanity Clause because if there's one movie I've seen even more times than CAT it's NIGHT AT THE OPERA (I taped it off Prism).

You lucky stiffs, Uncle Cyrus' ghost must be holding bank night because CAT AND THE CANARY has been restored on DVD and glows like never before so you don't have to put up with my olde dupe which I once would have been happy to dupe for you in exchange for REMEMBER LAST NIGHT? Now it's available in that Thanks for the Memories - Bob Hope DVD set, which is a must even if you already have ROAD TO MOROCCO and GHOST BREAKERS (which everyone says is better than CAT, but I disagree. CAT is the shit!).

THE MONSTER WALKS
1932 - *1/2
An old creep in a wheelchair with a big old dark house? Check. Ape in a cage in the basement? Affirmative. Mischa Auer as the illegitimate son of the old creep in the wheelchair and the maid, angry he's denied any of the family fortune after all the hours he's slaved for that old man? Check but ick, now it's depressing in its offhand illumination of social injustice. Willie Best furthers the social injustice angle as the shuffling, uber-cowardly stereotype chauffer to the bland honky hero. Ape man hands coming out of the wall to strangle blonde poseur to the fortune are cool, but not enough. It puts the 'ugh' back in enough.

I know the Leonard Maltin review by heart: "Willie bests Mischa for laughs, but it's a close race." Lenny, you're my racist wheelchair-bound true father who taught me to write like a subliminal weisenheimer. Still, the stormy night-rattling-sheet metal makes it nice to fall asleep to as the sun comes up on another frosty November 1st, your blood levels of alcohol, ecstasy, nicotine, and candy now dwindled to a shudder no amount of coffee can allay.

THE OLD DARK HOUSE
1932 - ****
I had such high hopes for this film, the 'lost' Universal horror of 1932. For decades it was a holy grail for Universal horror nuts like me. Old VHS copies were nth generation dupes, horrifically murky. Then Kino came to the rescue via a restored, lone surviving print, and its star Gloria Stuart even did an audio commentary for the laserdisc! I never had a laserdisc player, but James Cameron did, loved the commentary and that's how she came to narrate TITANIC! It's awesome to hear this no-nonsense 1932 starlet tell you about shooting in the rain with James Whale and Boris Karloff and putting up with a cast of intellectual thespian Brit eccentrics and their clique-ish tea rituals, as meanwhile the shots all go down smooth as a Knobb Creek skinny dip... death where is thy sting?

The stranded travelers include: Charles Laughton as a blustery captain of industry; Lillian Bond as his chorus girl traveling 'ahem' companion; Melvyn Douglas the cheerful forgotten man; Stuart and her taciturn husband Raymond Massey as Mel's sophisticated, supportive friends. The old dark's residents include: Ernest Thesiger ("Dr. Pretorious again, sir!") as the brother of the bitchy no-nonsense, no-teeth old pious Christian woman Rebecca Fem (Eva Moore), who shouts "No beds! They can't have beds!" Decent old Thesiger lets them park it by the fire anyway, and even busts out his secret stash of gin - much to his pious sister's disapproval. Karloff is a bit underused as the  violent, scarred, mute, horny, and exceedingly drunken butler ("a night like this could set him off!"), he'd have been great as Saul... not that... oops, four o-clock! Break for tea, everyone!  Sorry Gloria,  intellectual thespian Brit eccentrics only... there's a dear.

 THE BLACK RAVEN 
1943 - ***
When I'm having a travel-induced panic attack this is my go-to PRC for nonstop black-and-white storms,  muffled dialogue, and George Zucco's silken voice all serving to make things extra cozy, and it all takes place--as do all the best old dark house films--over one wild-ass crazy 'dark and stormy' night, ending as the sun comes up. Zucco plays a kind of posh Moriarty-ish version of the Dude from Big Liebowski, moving around the waterlogged cardboard sets in his robe and slippers. He's the titular Raven, a retired criminal par excellence who now runs a small inn which he uses as a front for an operation that ferries criminals over the Canadian border. No actual ravens appear in this film, but Glenn Strange is the idiot manservant and Charles "Ming" Middleton is the dour but clueless sheriff. An assortment of would-be border-jumpers check in because the bridge is washed out; a suitcase of embezzled cash changes hands, corpses accrue and if you're me, a dark part of you really responds to the killer's climactic rant against smelly garlic-eating working class bus commuters! Make sure to get the best available edition as there's lots of crappy public domain copies out there where everything is too dark and and half the dialogue is hopelessly muffled. Though if you get a little dark and muffled yourself tonight, you just may not notice... a night like this could set him off! Hmmm?
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Special shout-out to Verdoux! - it seems to contain the same eerie alchemical magick as celluloid itself!

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'Transgalactic Delta House Ebullience,' Comic Book Evolution, and Timothy Leary's Head - PAUL (2011)

Like most people I know who follow exo-politics, I thought PAUL (2011) looked grim from the outset. First off, this is supposed to be a brom-com about a surviving Roswell alien, and here his huge eyes aren't dark black. The black eye on grey aliens is, as we now know now, a kind of DNA-implanted contact lens, as if we humans decided we loved Raybans (tm) so much we had them surgically grafted. Without the dark eyes Paul looks just like a big E.T. / Close Encounters love doll - and it turns out he was the inspiration for both films (we learn this thanks to flashbacks of long chain-smoking phone calls he had with Spielberg in the 1970s) which makes perfect sense from a disinformation standpoint (if you see an alien on the street eating Reese's Pieces, you're a lot less likely to get taken seriously when you report it to the cops).

I remember well at the age of around 15-16, gazing at my surly, bald, bespectacled comic book store owner (Quality Comics in Somerville, NJ, if you were there, you know him) and thinking: 1. I'll never stop being into comics no matter that they say people grow out of them, and 2. I hope I don't end up looking and acting like this surly bald bastard. Back then 16 seemed suspiciously old to still be into comics, even if you were into the sophisticated stuff like Frank Miller's Daredevil. And now... these clowns.

In other words, seeing what I'd look like if I stayed friends with my Frost-ish pal and never discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll is kind of crushingly weird and terrifying. And Yet -  they actually grow as characters as the film goes on, how emotionally un-arrested of them! And Kristen Wiig is adorable, as the NY Post's Paul Smith noted: 

There may come a day when I tire of Seth Rogen’s shtick but I hope it doesn’t come soon. (Yes, I loved “The Green Hornet”). His sarcastic insults and Transgalactic Delta House ebullience keep things rolling along (even if the gay jokes are a little stale) as the boys pick up more enemies and a kindly one-eyed fundamentalist Christian (the indispensable Kristen Wiig) who says of Paul, “He’s not evil. He’s just a bit rude.”
  (Read more)

"Transgalactic Delta House ebullience" - I think we can all aspire to that, both as writers and as people. The ultimate message of this cosmic trip then becomes this: stoners are the smartest of all humans. Paul's very advanced, yet he acts just like a stoner slacker crossed with a less spastic Kermit the Frog. What does that tell you if it's not that stoners rule?!! That's what got me out of being a comic book nerd, I can tell you - drugs and alcohol were my socializing and talking to hot girls without blushing and stammering spinach. And as drugs, bass, and babes became the major force in my life, all the other comics stopped for me except Love and Rockets, Dan Clowes' Eightball (below), Pete Bagge's Hate, and old Zap! reprints. I yelled excitedly when I saw this guy (below) on one of Pegg's awesome T-shirts. That's a Clowes!

It would have been cool in Paul to see examples of other aliens or humans working inside the alien vessels to further advance the notions of a global elite conspiracy but it's great the way the CGI alien interacts with the humans so flawlessly--on the level of Andy Serkis' Kong and Golum, rather than the stilted dread knots of Jar Jar Binks and SyFy channel stuff. It works so that you forget altogether he's just a CGI hallucination. So see PAUL with a bunch of friends late night after the young person's AA meeting, or while getting hammered and it will treat you right. There's a subtext in there that any dope fiend or former dope fiend will take to heart, and it's traceable back to--what else?--a comic book:

The one big genre-buster comic I know of that deals with the issues of life after death and the universe and aliens, the only truth that sets one free, is Timothy Leary's Neurocomics (Last Gasp, 1979) which describes the circular DNA arc of life with the following being indicative of where our Paul is on the evolutionary scale:

In this strata, the hippie stoner is a whole evolutionary cycle above the family man preacher (below) who is the end game on the highest level of 'terrestrial circuits' while the stoner is the lowbrow level of post-terrestrial, so a whole DNA sequence higher on the celestial step ladder.

 

(Read the full comic  here or download here)

This should be good news to the moms of stoners and trippers everywhere, and explains why the religious right considers psychedelic drugs such a threat. It's because the 17 year-old mushroom dealer is a whole circuit higher on the DNA chain than freakin' Jerry Falwell or Michelle Bachman, or even Osama Bin Barack, or whatever his post-Bohemian Grove mind control reptilian takeover name is. And that's enough that those comic book geeks Pegg and Frost should really grow up and start doing some drugs. Paul's got a great magic power where he can send you all the cosmic truths in a big rush of DMT that will take the dogma crust off any cutie pie conservative, and it makes a good point for arguing that the bible belt might come around and be less closed-off if they got a nice dose of LSD in their morning cup of joe. If you want to 'see' the truth, you know who to trust, and it's not those Bohemian Grove owl-worshiping conservatives and their masochist leatherboy slave Antichrist, but the real deal, Tim Leary! LEARYCON, now that's a comic convention worth believing in. Vote Leary's frozen head for president in 2012! 

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B is for BURN, WITCH, BURN (1962)

Buried unceremoniously in amidst the 'forgotten' films avail. for streaming on Netflix is a film you must see: BURN, WITCH, BURN (1962), an AIP film from the UK, based on Fritz Lieber's perennial ghost tale, "The Conjure Wife." There was a vastly inferior adaption in the 1940s called WEIRD WOMAN, part of a B-list series of films based on the popular Inner Sanctum radio show. And there was this, which is awesome. But which of the two is available on R1 DVD? Right you are, but that's all moot now, thanks to the 'flixstream. Known in the UK as NIGHT OF THE EAGLE, it turns out BURN, WITCH, BURN is the best-kept secret in early 1960's black-and-white British horror. 

What makes this film work is its moody black and white photography and AIP talent roster, including Corman Poe screenwriters Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, who always instill 'classic' material with an edge of modern wit that does nothing to dispel the unease and terror. It's directed by Sidney Hayers, a TV director who's worked on The Avengers, and Baywatch, among others, but hey - it's all about the script and the actors, and these are top flight, even if there's nary a familiar face in the bunch: Janet Blair is the wife, Peter Wyngarde the brooding Rod Taylor-ish lead, Margeret Johnson the limping rival; Judith Stott an amazing and odd face as the charmed co-ed.

I've been shy about this film since I was afraid half of the running time would be spent with the husband condescendingly lecturing and belittling his wife about her black magic habits. He does, but she fights back with scathing wit and makes her conversion to logic something that's a result of her own self-doubt, rather than his stern paternal berating. Part and parcel to this left brain belittling the right thing is the whole code-enforced demoting of women from sexy independent thinkers to smiling slave drone Stepford wives. I love women! I think they're great / they're a solace to a world in a terrible state. What a nightmare to have no women in the world (Lou Reed). Or as B,W,B shows, it's a nightmare either way, but beautiful (Bing Crosby).

Filmed in black and white, BURN has the arty photography of the British countryside, rocky beaches, and cloudy English skies of the British new wave, and stands up against the cream of Hollywood's post-Lewton / Tourneur ambiguous shadowy horrors like THE HAUNTING, as per this delicious review from Unkle Lancifer on Kindertrauma:

Black and white film adds something unique to the movie viewing experience overall but it adds something super unique to horror films and something super special gonzo incredible unique to the supernatural horror film. How can anyone wonder if witchcraft exists? Black and white film IS witchcraft! You just can’t get this effect with color film (unless your name happens to be MARIO BAVA.)

Indeed. It is hard to think of who other than Bava could ever get this chilled in color, and harder to think who other than Lewton could sneak so much genuinely intelligent female characters into a black and white horror film The evil witch has great lines, mocking our hero's 'desperate stretching of logic' to continually deny that which he knows to be true. Meanwhile a whole litany of superstition rolls by: charms, spells and obscene phone calls, all topped off by some wild ass NIGHT OF THE DEMON-style monsterizing. So while the world knows to bow for the stealth-intellect and shadow-shelved soul of the Lewton box and the CURSE OF THE DEMON and HORROR HOTEL DVDs, no one, at least here in the states, knows that BURN, WITCH, BURN deserves not only bowing, but scraping, and more scraping, until the very celluloid below your finger nails is engulfed in black and white flame.

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Let England Take: Pregnant Portman Vs. THE KING'S SPEECH (2010)

There will always be an England, taking... our Oscars. The U.S.A's imperialist academy voters of a certain age with their ensconced sense of drawing room pomp get all weak in the knees at the thought of having tea with the wife of King George VIII, especially if she's embodied by saucy Helena Bonham Carter, and said king's played by dear old Collin Firth. If the film's lit artsy (lit like a Romantic period painting) and crafty (stripped down so every word of dialogue is a fractal composite of the whole), in English (upper crusted accents), and has a happy ending. I've seen them, with their jewels and haughty laughs, and I know what they like! 

I'm rooting for the BLACK SWAN, the defiant Mozart that unnerves the Academy's Salieri-voting block, SWAN is divisive by the very nature of its 'Yellow Wallpaper' feminist-hall-of-mirrors Icarus-ian iconography... it dares to melt the mythic archetypal into the personal and meta until its soul bleeds into its body like Ahab. It's basically an admonishment to the elderly artist, and old is what everyone who votes in the Academy is, or will inevitably be (dead stars get no vote). Yesterday's royalty, Winona Ryder lurks like the Phantom of the Opera in the shadowed wings of SWAN, a film that chooses death, drugs and hot mess madness over respectability; the Academy needless to picked the latter. KING trumped SWAN for me in just one way: Geoffrey Rush as the unorthodox teacher who must cut past "Bertie's" repression-- part of a long, illustrious line of Oscar-snatching, unorthodox teachers who must cut through repression--social and personal--stretching back through Robin Williams in THE DEAD POET'S SOCIETY.  BLACK SWAN's unorthodox teacher--Vincent Cassel-- pushing the star past repression is much younger and cinematically aerodynamic than Rush, and thus seems more like the son of a ballet master than the thing itself. He does a great job, but Rush does a masterful one. 

Rush's teacher feels lived-in, uniquely British in his blend of fiery eccentric lordliness and deeply humble focus. Firth was great too, making us feel every attempt at speaking as a truly heroic force of strength and English will, but if you compare his crumbling speech student to Portman's banshee ballet breakdown it's like comparing life and death, salt and salt-free.  THE KING'S SPEECH is so A+ in every nook and cranny of its white elephant hide it defies description. But oh for a termite.

 SWAN might die at Oscar time because its lack of a clear reality is interpreted, felt, lived, in a way that makes the bourgeoisie nervous: they don't like high art to bite them in their feeding hand. In locating the crux of Tchaikovsky's music and the myth it embodies within the personal life of a repressed ballet star, Aronofsky peels back the yellow wallpaper between texts and makes the myth personal -- it swallows you whole, sucks you down like the Pequod. The viewer of THE KING'S SPEECH is not implicated the way he or she is in SWAN. In SWAN, the metatextual chain of interpretation and performance (i.e. the fact that this is Natlie Portman's break-out picture as a creased, non-gamin actress, and Winona's presence is the grim future for non-gamins), lunges for the jugular and bitch slaps the viewer with their own mortality.  KING'S just causes us minor bumpy traffic jam stress and relief as all the antsy waits as upper crust fortifications are breached and every coherent sentence is like a dream, but the whole effect becomes as calculated as another Geoffrey Rush picture, QUILLS. The movie becomes like a therapist presenting the viewer with ink blot puzzles to solve, with no other solution but the correct one possible. SWAN is more like the therapist that burns down their own office and then makes out with you in their car, then reads you your DSM-IV in bed. 

That said BLACK SWAN has Oscar plusses: stodgy art, tight binding of young girl's feet, Svengali-esque puppeteers and wounded doe Trilbies high on ecstasy; it also has a big Oscar minus: Natalie Portman's character is rude to--and directly disobeys--her long-suffering Mrs. Bates-ish stage mother (Barbara Hershey) and isn't directly punished for it! As the academy is chock full of hard-working stage mothers, such disobedience is usually Oscar death. The scandal of Mila Kunis not being nominated indicates a secret law Nathan R pointed out in in a post I can't find at the moment: giving oral sex to Natalie Portman in SWAN ensured Kunis' lack of a nomination and that 'tis better to receive than give in olde Hollywood, and new as well. 

Due to higher education being available based on merit and interest as opposed to wealth, more of the working class in socialized countries like GB seem to possess a genuine interest in 'high art' than here in the States, where tenured professors, teacher's unions and old women in expensive jewelry make 'classical' and 'boring' inextricably entwined. The journey from US government education board lesson planning (they should all have to read Anna Karinina!) to hungover, underpaid educator ("pay attention! this woman was Russian!") to ADD sugar-addict child mind twisting in and out of wooden desk/chair torture combo unit, ensures a kind of tedious base-line conformity that discourages passionate interest. In London, if a man has no love for literature, he's allowed to stay in shop class fixing engines... all his life, on a nice stipend. So it is that a working class taxi driver may love Bartok and Handel, and a prince may jam to the Clash without irony. Since they 'know their place' neither can be accused of slumming or class-climbing as they would here, thus art and education are free to fly and be living and vital. 

By this of course I mean--and again no offense meant to the films or filmmakers--the unquestioned embrace of all things British by our bourgeoisie is not the fault of these highly trained artisans and keepers of the classical flame, but just that the nature of grants means they mustn't travel too far, darlings. And if there is some Shakespeare, or something legitimately powerful and poetic, it has to be watered down and steamed ala SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (above) or welded to a single cheering moment, like a speech, a stage show (TOPSY TURVEY) or sports event (CHARIOTS OF FIRE - below) in order to stop it from spilling out into the streets and starting a riot.

The average English person understands this issue of tish-toshy, royalty-suck-up-to glimmer glammer, even more than we do, this tendency of critics to fall on their knees as soon as Collin Firth picks up an expensive period pen, or Helena Bonham Carter emerges, high heels and white gloves first, from a period Bentley pulled up before a flower-and-footman-bestrewn mansion. They're a droll bunch the Brits, keenly aware of their country's faults and foibles through their hitherto discussed vibrant relation to the arts. Americans have their 'Super Bowl,' Britain has its theater, and films like THE RULING CLASS and TV shows like THE AVENGERS. which come chock full of wry self-deprecating Britishness. America isn't quite ready for that level of self-satire. The only film that maybe comes close is Richard Kelly's unappreciated SOUTHLAND TALES, and our collective lack of arts education is, and gentlemen I say this without hesitation, the reason for us not loving it.

Still - I don't really see anything new or alive or chance-taking, nothing fresh, in the KING'S SPEECH compared to the wacky attempt to fuse 800 levels of intertextual operatics into 90 minutes of the BLACK SWAN's tightening gyre. Yet by any standard you care to name, THE KING'S SPEECH is stunning - even the music manages to sidestep the kind of corny orchestral bombast someone like John "Excuse me while I rip Les Baxter" Williams would have brought to it. The photography of all the royal landmark interiors is breathtakingly romanticist. The acting jaw-dropping in its perfection; the script one of those perfect little traps wherein everything from the speech therapist's pedantic audition to play Richard III in an amateur theater troupe, to the threat of Nazism (seen by the King as a kind of proletariat revolutionary threat, a class war), to the meteoric all-pervasiveness of the wireless; to Prince Albert's abdication to run off with a married woman; to the leavening of true distance between royalty and commoners, all congeals like a completed puzzle that operates on every textual level there is, all into one halting final speech/broadcast that involves two middle-aged men, alone together, in a room, with a sheets hung from the ceiling, and there's nothing gay about it.

 In the end it proves that little has changed since the nouveau riche Texas oil wives were lugging home British butlers and kissing up to European nobility in the early 20s, while Charlie Ruggles and W.C. Fields looked on aghast before slinking to the bar. There's a still a contingent of these 'cultured' elite, most of them of Oscar voting-age, for whom soft-spoken women who know their place, and men who'd rather die than cut loose on camera aren't even required to prove themselves...  America just hands over its most precious award show trinkets like they've forgotten all about the 'art' of genuine revolution, you know, like the war?  That we won? From them?

POST NOTE: As so often happens, my crush on Natalie Portman is gone now that she's all proudly pregnant. Knocked up by a commoner--a dance instructor, no less---and showing off her budding oven like it's by Jean Paul Gautier, that's doing the whole 'king becoming friends with his commoner speech therapist' thing one worse -- as painful to see for me as my own creeping gray hairedness. I'll admit for me it's that old unsnaswered question: Why? Why was I born just to have to go to school and brussel sprouts? Is that all there is... to a circus? Then let's keep / dancing-- but with Millipedes?

 So for me, seeing Portman knocked up is like what seeing Justin Bieber with beer bloat, dilated pupils, and mussed hair in a future DUI mugshot will be for legions of reticently aging Bieber fans now freshly married with children of their own. Can't we keep our icons in some pressurized chamber that turns counter to the earth's rotation so they never age, or menstruate? Or worse, meet some some rare straight French dance instructor and leave us all alone to our dreadful mortal thoughts?

IN OTHER BRITISH NEWS: PJ Harvey's new album is out, LET ENGLAND SHAKE. And it's awesome, and all about England.  PJ Harvey is one of those eternally gutsy artist with the cajones to not only address her nation's slaughtering ways, but to dab herself in the blood like its stage make-up in a Bertolt Brecht pageant number. And Polly Jean's using her "White Chalk" falsetto still, making those of us who remember the awesome, deep, full-bodied sexuality with which she once sang lines like "Aaaaa Aaaah Eee /and you believe me!" Still it's pretty awesome and I spent the walk over here listening to it and imagining political cartoons comparing the States' fucked-up healthcare and education systems with England's far more advanced socialist network. America's fur-wrapped Academy voters may still be dreaming of tea with the queen and voting accordingly, but at least they got one thing right: England Ruled. Now we're ruled by someone called Mark Zuckerberg. THE SOCIAL NETWORK's theme will, I think, be lost on the Academy, who regard the internet as something devoutly to be feared, up there with all the other things that might symbolize handing over the keys to the Twilight generation.

Of course the age war is nothing new for Academy Award choices, and the British mix of conqueror and civilization, reserve and madness, inbreeding, tea, crumpets, assault and apology, Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper, jolly good quips and oppression is everything that 'youth' is not. THE KING'S SPEECH is adult... as adult as dull lectures, as decaffeinated tea, as not the sudden glorious death of Icarus but the slow, rotting flesh decay of the elderly statesman.

In that movie THE RULING CLASS for example, Peter O'Toole (above) is cured of of his Christ complex which had him loving all creatures and thinking himself God--and transformed into a draconian Jack the Ripper-type conservative, advocating the return of public flogging in the House of Lords -- in other words, he grows 'English' old boy, like Clockwork Alex in verso. Our Oscar voter may not have enough therapy under their belts to realize it, and it's too late because no one in the Ameristocracy attended Marxism 101 in college, just got automatic A's thanks to their dad's donation. Then again, maybe it's someone else that rigs the world... just what in the world is a Rothschild Zionist and who do I have to sacrifice to become one?

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This Sweet Cesspool: PSYCHOMANIA (1971)

This month Severin releases the seminal entry in the once ubiquitous zombie biker genre, PSYCHOMANIA (1971) a British production in which Hammer's sometime director/writer Don Sharp made sure the cuts matched and the pacing didn't lag. Alas, somewhere along the line the negative of this amazing film was lost, so we'll never get to see this in super duper high... def. On the other hand, who needs it? The story of bikers who commit suicide and return as zombies who look and act exactly like they did when they were alive, PSYCHOMANIA is a film best seen with your glasses off, the image refracted through rows of empty bottles, and one eye covered so you don't see double. I mean that in the best of all possible ways. Apparently this film scored a cult following in spots where it played a lot on late night TV. I can imagine stumbling on this at three AM and getting that super giddy Columbus kinda feeling.

What strikes me as super strange about this film first off is the notion that a bunch of birds and laddies on motorbikes can ride through workaday British shoppers and harass the locals and only one bobby e'er shows up to stop 'em. Special note to bakery delivery guys: don't try to walk across the lane with a stack of freshly baked bread while bikers are roaring their engines around, terrorizing the populace right outside your shop. And if you're up on a ladder in the middle of the lane, get down! Then again, reality is not high on the menu in PSYCHOMANIA. Instead it flatters the palate of the sugar-addicted adolescent, making up in vandalism and chipper death cult romance what it lacks in meat, fiber, and coherence.

And it still begs the question: if our pale redheaded heroine Abby is so worried about her leader of the pack late boyfriend being back from the grave and urging the gang to kill themselves so they can come back immortal and indestructible and all, why does she too participate in all the hooligan destruction? She's a 'good' girl! Aye... And since when do hippies terrorize locals and/or punk rockers sing like Donovan at the Renaissance Faire? What is wrong with these kids today? Only the toad in the mirror knows..."ribbit."

"Lick me and see the world."

Through the unholy power of said 100-year old graveyard toad--plucked at the gang's Stonehenge-ish graveyard hang-out spot--and the tutelage of his family's Satanic butler (a post-stroke George Sanders), Tom is able to rise up from his grave on his motorcycle and run down a passing pedestrian on his way to bigger slaughters, all beautifully rendered in bloodless offscreen violence. You would think being covered in dirt and decaying for awhile, possibly even filled with formaldehyde (aye, there's many a hundred-year old froggy's suffered that fate more'n once) his white scarf might at least be weensy bit dirty. Or, were the make-up man to e'er stir from his slumbers, Tom's face might evince a ghastly pallor. But this isn't that kind of zombie movie. In fact, without everybody saying so, you'd have no idea Tom has been dead at all or anywhere but to his tailors to get his leather pants tightened.

Not only in this but countless other areas does Sharp's vision betray a semi-refreshing lack of familiarity with actual bikers, mods/rockers rivalry, Satanists, zombies, or hippies, whether in films, books, or real life. He does know solid British TV detective thriller pacing, so there's competent camera, interesting plot twists, and quite a bit of panning over craftily posed but decidedly unmangled or overly bloody corpses, making PSYCHOMANIA kid-friendly, at least in this lone surviving print, if you don't mind your kids beholding super fake deaths, and you shouldn't.

That's another thing: a motorcycle, a relatively small one especially, is not a particularly good murder device. I doubt that baby in the carriage about to get run into in the grocery store invasion (above) will do anything but scream in delight over being slammed against the meat and dairy aisle. Any idiot with a little toreador experience can just step to the side, hold out the arm and smack these upstarts right in the helmeted kisser and send them cartwheeling into the frozen foods. Instead they cower and scream; then again, realism has no place in the world of PSYCHOMANIA. It rides to its own destination. No... wait, now it wants to go somewhere else. Brummm BrumMM!

The whole biker film genre has always ranked fairly low in my esteem, just above the bottom rung of WIP (Women in Prison) films and 1980s sex comedies. I never understood the appeal of watching a bunch of motorcycles ride this way and that, hearing them make loud nosies as their riders set about harassing innocent beachgoers, sexually assaulting housewives and driving Cameron Mitchell to retaliatory violence (I'm referring naturally to 1970's THE REBEL ROUSERS). I got nothing against motorcycles other than they're too loud and if I'm riding on one I can't stop thinking about what would happen to my lovely skin if I crashed. The bike culture is too metallic for my morbid acuteness of the senses, smells too much like leather and axle grease, reminds me of my brother, Fred, who has two, plus a jeep, and three other cars. That's his world, and I leave it alone; he's got it covered. I mean it would be different if these Living Dead lads were realistic bikers. Real bikers work on their bikes, like all the time, covered in motor oil stains and signs of hard living. These Living Dead yobs all have clean fingernails, maybe even manicures. They don't get soot on their white scarves from riding around without a windshield. Their little skull eye visors (at right) are cool but clearly a detriment to peripheral vision, something usually all important for any self-preserving motorist, or if they're already dead they might at least select better targets for their rampage if they were able to see...

And where you gonna go with it? Most biker films end when the bikers all go 'too far' and someone is dead, and it's your fault, Society! The friend of the leader is usually shot by the cops or killed by the leader himself in a heroic last-minute rejection of his gang's sadistic credo. Well, PSYCHOMANIA decides to go way past that marker, crashing through the black magic looking glass windshield into places only Jimmy Page, Aleister Crowley, and Kenneth Anger know of, and since none of these guys are in, or were involved with, the film, you could say that yes, it doesn't know where it's going. The body count is probably around 60 by the end of the film, but we don't see a single death, or moment of Zen maintenance.

Luckily there are more than a few saving grace elements at work here: Sanders' old butler makes the youth-age divide less a factor in who's cool vs. uncool, since even at 64--slurring from his debilitating stroke and deeply depressed--he's still twice the badass of any of these young 'Living Dead' louts. Sanders was so badass in fact he actually committed suicide a year after finishing the film. That's meta, baby, meta. And he left the second best note in all of Hollywood:

Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.

Thanks George, we'll need it. And your last film seems to prefigure your sad end as it is all about suicide being painless, and considerable celluloid is unspooled happily detailing the methods of each member: One jumps out of a high rise window; another fails to link up his parachute; the annoying red-haired stepkid jumps off a bridge into oncoming highway traffic; Abby uses pills, and has the most psychedelic and scary of interludes after she's overdosed and suddenly can't tell if she's dead, dreaming, or has come back from the dead, is awake or asleep, and meanwhile George raiseth a sacrificial knife over her heart, while she stands to the side, two places at once! She's being replaced, or will being killed while undead return her to the living? Or was it all a scam cooperated by the devil to steal her soul? Is she going to be buried alive with only a smiling George Sanders to know the undead Abby is not the real undead one? Dude, that is so Salvia!

So there is  some great druggy subtextual stuff at work here, including a nice if derivative rock score (70's cop show funk rumbling in the garage with sitar-tinged fairy folk revivalism) and interesting, almost Buffy-esque, twists that tie the horror in with social anxiety, i.e. what if your suicide doesn't work and you get left behind by your gang of undead biker friends?

Tied to Kenneth Anger by Hollywood Babylon suicide, biker subculture, and black magic, PSYCHOMANIA would be good on a bill with both LUCIFER and SCORPIO RISING. In its alchemical melting pot a triple feature like that might get the mods, rockers, spacers, heads, kids, wankers, punters and snottabies together like only Cyrus (the one and only) could have in the Bronx in 1979, if goddamned David Patrick Kelly hadn't shot him, and then blamed it on another cross-pollinated sub-cultural outfit, THE WARRIORS.  

The 'Living Dead' gang beats out the Warriors however as the most glaringly guilty of voting 'undecided' on its sub-cult policy, especially during Tom's wake, presided over by barefoot hippies and a barefoot minstrel warbling a little tune about a mighty hero who went too fast too soon for this uncaring world. Hippie-o, you freak, Tom was, on every level, a grade-A dickaholic, and now you sing his praises like he was James Muthufuggin' Dean?  Put down that guitar and pick up a meat cleaver! Kill some random pedestrians like a real zombie biker, instead of just kind of brushing by the cliche'd establishment signifiers with your scooter and hoping they'll kindly pretend to fall over dead. What do I pay you kids for? Most of these actors aren't going to kill themselves! Chop! Chop!

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Head Under Heels: GIRLY (1970)

Much as I love grindhouse cinema, I'll confess some of the themes--the rape-revenge and WIP sub-genres in particular--often leave me feeling soiled and soured on humanity, walking the streets adrift like a Tennessee Williams heroine, pining for dead ideals and sensing only brusque, licentious hostility all around. As an English major at Syracuse during the mid-to-late 1980s, I was caught up in a time of great liberal backlash/sexual hysteria--Satanic panic and the dawn of PC thuggery--wherein sensitive new age guys like me were conditioned to feel guilty for every impure thought. I've since been protective of women to the point where I forget to be aggressive; moves go un-busted for years and years.

That's why, perhaps, I've always long been in love with dangerous women, the type who kick ass, smoke, drink, dose, wear fur coats over nothing but jeans and a torn t-shirt, carry guns and laugh at the cosmic joke and can beat a frat boy to death with a champagne bottle all at the same time. Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted is my guru. Yes, I know, that's a pretty bad choice for a guru.

And yet, look at America; it's got some bad taste in gurus. I'm right with the times digging psycho bitches since the poster girl for the era is Sarah Palin. I love her tan and form-fitted bright red raincoat and MILF glasses, standing on a podium surrounded by crisp Alaskan snow; her hot breath steaming the microphone, spouting enough fear-inducing fascist rhetoric to make Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate wince. In that film Lansbury used her husband as the dummy while Palin is her own dummy and I dig that. I dig when girls rise up and use their sexual super powers for evil instead of good, and if they can't have their revenge on Seattle like Francis Farmer in that Nirvana song, then let them destroy all the side-burned swingers, angry lawyers, priests, parents, and homeless they can get their claws on! Hence my deep love for: Spider Baby,  Don't Deliver Us From Evil,  Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!, Vampyres, Mesa of Lost Women, Daughter of Darkness, and so on (if you know any others, do let me know).

Thank heaven, then, for little Girly. The film's treacly decor (lots of dolls and paneling) could have been too much to handle, but director Freddie Francis does the impossible and makes the whole dreary Brit tackiness thing seem actually cozy-- the real thing--instead of soap opera imitation. Girly possesses a sense of giddy feral freedom. There's a remote broken down castle in the Shire, some delusional family members and a hot young maniac, what's not to love, even as the axe comes roaring down? The insanity of the matriarchy resembles Grey Gardens at times, but it comes by it naturally: dolls, pre-empathic (latent) sadism, games like 'grocery store' and cowboys and Indians are all part of a devolution brought on by incest and trust funds. They have no father to initiate the children into the social order; it all comes down to lots of finger sucking, macabre nursery rhymes and chants, strange "rules" of the house, and the way, as it ever does, sex destroys everything.

A knock-out of the Sue Lyon as Lolita /Jill Banner as Virginia (aka Spider Baby) / Carroll Baker as Baby Doll / Darryl Hannah as California Mountain Snake in Kill Bill variety, Vanessa Howard captures the spirit of wicked evil as only young girlies can. Her eyes are alight with unholy mischief, and then -- later, the guilty pangs of blossoming womanhood--and all the drag that implies. And she's got lovely legs. They're always on display in mod skirts, including a beech-skin cowboy costume. Her straight blonde hair demarks a princesses and her simmering red schoolgirl uniform is like a pomegranate-squeezed hallucination against the perennial grey garden fog of the green, brown and stone English countryside.  She bites into her character with such a cunning glee that you want to lick the juice off her chin. 

The other cast members are smashing as well: we especially adored the droll restraint of Ursula Howells as Mumsy (the original title is Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly) and the slow burn of Pat Heywood as the sexually frustrated Nanny. The interloper who wisely seduces the lot is Michael Bryant, who kind of looks like James Coburn and he does a good job in a difficult role even if he's not; Imogen Hassall is his fur and white-dress clad Italian-ish girlfriend; she's excellent at being bored and unaware of immanent danger. Francis's camerawork is imaginative and rich, replete with some good crane shots, though some of the interiors seem flatly lit and the palette is very mushy even if there are plenty of dark greens and maroon reds. Bernard Ebbinghouse's score is a nicely subversive mix of bouncy elevator and nursery school maniacal, but in a good way.  It's a favorite film of its director, who won the Oscars for cinematography in The Elephant Man and Glory.

Man, this film's got my number. I'm trying to less subjective here but if I love a film I take it very personally. Love kills everything it touches, including objectivity. As Burt Lancaster said in Visconti's The Leopard: "Marriage is six months of fire and forty years of ashes." If you ever were a swinger, you might use that line to justify a lifestyle that includes occasionally waking up from a two-day benders on a stranger's couch, snuggled against a snoring pit bull with a severed hand in its mouth, like a cigar. In the words of our celestial Desi: Wha happen?! I still don't know, but you've chosen the swinging path over that of the spouse and ungrey garden and that's your life, and you'll probably do it again. Such is our hero's lot in life,  the male version of Looking for Mr. Goodbar.\

Man, I'm off topic!  Let me pull in some help from one of 60s-70s-era British cinema's best friends, Cinebeat's amazing Kimberly Lindbergs:

Before Freddie Francis started directing horror films he worked as a cinematographer on celebrated British dramas such as Room at the Top (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). His unique talents helped give birth to the British New Wave and he was partially responsible for ushering in a new era of British cinema. Francis considered Girly to be one of his best films and I think it’s fascinating to view the movie as an extension of his previous work as a cinematographer. In some ways Girly could be seen as a seamless blend of Francis’ early beginnings as a member of the British New Wave combined with his bleak sense of humor and macabre sensibilities.

Speaking of stingers, I dedicate this blog entry to my favorite new show: Investigative Discovery Channel's TV crime doc series, DEADLY WOMEN! And on that note, free Brenda Wiley!

And strange coincidence, almost all my own films have the same Venus Flytrap / Vagina Dentata theme, particularly QUEEN OF DIC/SKS.

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