Bitches Be Trippin': TOAD ROAD, A FIELD IN ENGLAND

I've always taken a hard line stance that idiots (and minors, of course) shouldn't use drugs. Drugs should only be taken by artists, truth-seekers, visionaries and never for dumb burn-out kicks... Seeing all the great drugs wasted on the snickering young in the 2012 indie Toad Road made me remember back to the young age when I could only get high, or even get hold of a beer, by driving around with metalhead Central Jersey burn-outs. Cool as some of them were I could have done without the snickering idiot who lit us up a joint, first I'd seen in weeks, and only when it was too late announce it was laced with PCP. Driving the 20 miles home from that encounter took approximately three years of amok time trapped in a blue-light and white fog prism (or prison), wherein, among other things, I could dim or brighten street lights with my mind. And I hated the music. I'd bring Velvet Underground's "Sister Ray" thinking they'd dig it but for them it was Maiden, Dio, and Ozzy. End of discussion.

 I ditched them senior year when I discovered the Clash and punk rock - which was all about cocaine, whiskey, and slam-dancing at the Trenton club City Gardens' all-ages punk shows: The Ramones, Iggy Pop, X, the Replacements, and Husker Du. But still I wasn't satisfied. My freshman year punk contingent were scared of acid, tried to warn me off it, but I felt the calling of a higher power, a spirit was beckoning, so I ditched the punks as abruptly as I'd ditched the metalheads, and became a hippie, and there, enduring endless Dead concert tapes, the LSD and shrooms ran wild and free. I was cured, all right.

But what a burnout-and-lightweight-strewn path I left behind --so many people who never should have tried drugs at all or at least not until college but they never went; they were just too damn stoned. Seeing Jason Banker's 2012 film Toad Road recently reminded me that the blithe openness about psychedelics on this site might do more harm than good in the short term and worse, expose a truth hidden even from myself, that my whole holy enlightenment shortcut-seeking trip masks just another garden variety waste case burn-out, because you see, I'm one of those idiots.

But all through my travels I've seen people, especially the very young and Piscean, get way into psychedelics far too fast, too deep, chasing some white rabbit truth through twisting trails right into rehab, jail, or the slab.  It reminds me of that question posed to Anne Wiazemski in Godard's Sympathy for the Devil (1967) "Do you consider drugs a form of spiritual gambling?" ("oui"). Spiritual seekers never listen to advice from anyone who's already chased that rainbow and maybe they shouldn't (the "I did acid and it changed my life but you shouldn't because I already did so you're welcome"). One such doomed truth-seeker, in Toad Road, is Sarah (Sarah Anne Jones), a young wastrel way cute to be wasting time with the scruffy band of marauders she's chosen. An older member, James (James Davidson) meanwhile is getting counseling and shortly turns into a preachy buzzkill, which is too bad, as Davidson isn't the usual mumblecore anemic smarm merchant. He could go do something grand, but he's too in love with Sarah, he thinks, and that's his excuse.. to follow her down that hole, lecturing that she doesn't have to do drugs to have a good time, but he'll still hang out because he has to 'protect' her.

Sarah will have none of it. She wants to go the Fulci distance, tripping her way through the seven gates of Hell via the legendary PA haunted mile, Toad Road, where one might, as they say in The Beyond, "face the sea of darkness, and all therein that may be explored."

Sadly, the real Sarah Anne Jones died in real life shortly after the film's premiere, though I got the sense of a fractured kind of ghoulish 'coming true' of the storyline that hints-- even if she died after the film was completed---that she was MIA on set a lot, ala Marilyn Monroe during the never-completed  Something's Got to Give (1962). Maybe this was just exactly as Banker envisioned or maybe I missed something. Like so many trips I got talked into taking by the Village Voice, Toad Road feels like it had a chance to do something wild and blew it. Maybe that's her fault, or his, or mine. Maybe it's just my whole idea of something wild is warped. 

But the music is good, the photography tight and clever, and when it all hinges on the frail Sarah, her insanely tiny legs hugged by tight hipster pants, things are good, if sad. She has a great way with throwing her shoulders around, and her thick long hair coupled to her waif thinness makes her seem like a willowy older sister to the title character in Valerie's Week of Wonders. If you know the druggie scene you know this type of girl and probably fell in love with her at some point. Her damaged sweetness and her unrelenting drive to explore the void were a haunting combination. and wrote a poetry book, or album about her, like that girl Holly for Craig Finn (of the Hold Steady): "Holly's inconsolable / unhinged and uncontrollable / cuz we can't get as high as we got / on that first night." If you know the type you shiver when you hear that song, shiver with her memory and the chill of never getting that first night glow back, the torture of being in love with someone you are powerless to save, and all the more in love with them for it. I would have enjoyed the Toad more if they had maybe gone a little meta about that kind of memory, shooting-wise, as without it the Picnic at Hanging Rock element never really gels with the muted realism (imagine if the girls really did disappear during filming but they didn't want to admit it so they changed the film to hide their absence). Still it's a promising feature film start for former documentarian of the youth music and 'culture' scene, Jason Banker, and I love the dark and beguiling poster series:

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I also like the art and posters for Ben Wheatley's A Field in England (2013), a much more psychedelic recall-shiver-inducing film, in gorgeous black and white, which draws from old woodcuts and psychedelic posters from mid-60s Britain, correctly recognizing their common psilocybe cubensis roots, the mushroom common to cosmic alchemists of the 17th century and Zen hipsters tripping at outdoor music fests in this one, possibly in the very same field, merging with each other's future and past ghosts.

The film chronicles the manly transformation of a wussy assistant alchemist, Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) from his cowering point during a furious offscreen battle to his ultimate triumphant return from the land beyond. During the time between he pals with a savvy deserter Trower (Julian Barrett), a dimwitted wanderer (Richard Glover), a fourth man (Peter Fernando) with a mysterious agenda, and this quartet set off in a series of fascinating tableaux across one of the huge rolling hedgerow-crossed fields of England. Set sometime during the English Civil War of the late 1600s, Wheatley does right what most historical dramatists do wrong: the clothes look like they fit the actors and that they've been wearing them for about twenty years without a bath --as was the fashion-- and the pistols and muskets all need to be patiently reloaded with powder and ball after every shot, which is how it was, but here it seems to be an actual reality they're used to rather than a constant surprise as it is in most films set in the era. This results in some hilarious shouted exchanges as warring men hide in the grass to reload during lengthy gunfights. Digging for treasure is involved, and a shady Irish bastard of an alchemist, O'Neil (Michael Smiley), his assistant Cutler (Ryan Pope), a psilocybe mushroom circle, a black sun, and some of the best use of sudden wind gusts since, um, 1925's The Wind, or ever. The acting is uniformly pointed, Amy Smart's dialogue rich in period slang, robust expletives, hilarious asides and tangents, forgotten alchemical science, sly deadpan joke illustrations of the way men befriend one another in times of trouble, and lastly the way a mouthful of the right mushroom can turn a meek scholar into a lion!

The men never leave the field, are never seen indoors, and there's almost no one in the cast but these five men (no women), but Field in England never feels dull or Jarmusch idle. And there's H=Jim White's slowly building score moving from a single, sturdy military drum beat into a full blown sonic mind-melting reminiscent of Bobby Beausoleil's score for Lucifer Rising. There's an invigorating kind of mortality-sneering masculinity vibe ala Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Interesting than that Field was written by a woman! Aye, and lensed by a woman (Laurie Rose) and produced by two women (Anna Higgs, Claire Jones) and a man...

Great as the existential Sartre-Godot-Aristophanes-style robust gallows humor is, and the weird mystical angles with ropes into the alternate realities, etc., the peak aspect comes from a unique recreation of a ground zero time-distilled psilocybin freak-out wherein, buzzing and soaring in and around its droning center, the score sirens out across a series of overlapping strobes and mirror splitting, and you might say yeah yeah, that mirror effect hasn't been fresh since Led Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same, (I even used it in Queen of Disks) but you're wrong! Shit is fresh! And the strobe cutting is so seizure-inducing it comes with a warning lable, but 'tis no stoner fucking about but a calculated specific effect. Wheatley and Jump, who co-edited the film, alternate split second imagery until new shapes emerge that breathe and pulse. On one hand it's nothing too different than what one might shoot with their friends on mushrooms in the graveyard as I did (and Syd Barrett before me) in the early fall of 1987 - there's no unusual sight or diegetic sound (I was thinking for sure they'd switch film stock to color for the tripping parts, ala Wizard of Oz or Awakening of the Beast, but the strobing overlapping images create a truly psychedelic effect, the two or more images cohering into one buzzing throbbing molecular NOW waiting for us all just outside the veil, ala William Blake or the old school alchemist woodcuts. And the fine fiberoptic line between waking life and the collective archetypal unconscious is frayed for a moment rare, and the black hole sun overlap between waking and dreaming is exposed afresh, and the union of birth and death, past and future, real and unreal, speeds up our perceptions fast enough they slow way down and death's hidden-from-the-sober-living flag unfurls for all three of your agog eyes and the psychedelic peak across linear time's usually uncrossable river is at last crossed... by a film no less. And when one returns to the other, sane bank of sanity one is renewed a third eye Popeye coming back from the dead and now completely made of atomic spinach.

In short, A Field in England shows us the reverberating core that tripping outdoors should unveil. It all but illuminates Oberon and Titania watching gamely from their transdimensional bower, laughing with at the flower-eyed revelry. Even though Wheatley's film leaves plenty of room to doubt the reality of these visions, Field also shows what we've missed by denigrating the ancient arts. Maybe one day we'll learn knocking on wood grounds the body's accumulated current, or that salt tossed over the shoulder dissipates negative ions and that disembodied intelligences might be dispelled through these tactics. One day western science will seem vain in its denial of the existence of things beyond its ability to measure. If we want to wait for the modern science to catch up to our ancient past version we'll be sitting in the waiting room 'til we're cobwebbed skeletons. Any science not up to the task must be left behind in completion of that task. There are many sciences for many realities.

Alas, this is also why it falls to the psychedelic warrior braves to sometimes party with the burn-outs just to get high enough to learn how to escape them. Psychedelics would have immense benefits to the human race if used in rites of passage both into adulthood and out of life. Just the briefest voyage beyond the ego is sometimes enough to help one's whole outlook and life transform. A Field in England shows that before the ridiculous illegality of certain kinds of mushrooms, their presence in a field was enough to make reality's fabric at least partially transparent to even the simplest of metalheads. 

Alas, Toad Road shows the downside of all that, that such threading can rip weaker fabric long before it endows them with zippers, especially with some lovestruck moths chewing away its once stout fibre. So fuck off, James, you make bad trips happen by hanging around talking about how drugs are bad mmmkay. The depths of the Beyond accommodates no kibbitzers. Just point your camera down into the dark sea if you want to know our destination, but don't expect to see the disappearing Sarah, the one life your sad raft won't let you follow save: so let the lens flare as she falls down to the beautiful swamps of black socket blankness, down the toad-secretive road, through the bottleneck beautiful empty, the big sleep that will not come without first hours of almost-sex, cottonmouth kissing, rummaging through drawers and under couches for any dropped pills, scraping resins from bongs and Nyquil dried on a baking sheet and snorted (a trick told me by the PCP joint guy), guzzling mom's vanilla extract to stop the shakes after all else was gone, and hours of lying in bed trying to sleep with buzzing in the ears, hallucinating mom's scolding voice in the sound of running water, and black and white patterns inside-of-the-eyelids: roses, skulls, hearts, then finally...

We wake ever presuming we're the same person as the night before but with Oberon's flower nectar off our eyes we're just toast crumbling beneath the spread bullshit butter of sanity, threaded through god's breakfast mandible sprockets in a 35mm scream.

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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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I know why the entombed mummy sings...

In the late 50's-early 70's there was a deluge of marvelously British horror films from Hammer Studios, you probably already know that. But did you know that while they sucked on UHF TV with their washed out prints and bad editing and pan and scanning, they look damned great on DVD? And did you know also that being British and smart as paint the filmmakers often enriched these pics with colonial and class issue subtext, including a sub-subtext linking buxom beauty co-stars with pre-Christian paganism? Jolly brave and true of this upstart little studio, and damned British. When I read the words Pinewood Studios in end credits now I get all tingly... be it early James Bond, The Avengers, or lovely Hammer.

Many of the Hammer films have aged well; maybe it's that the DVD spit and polish really brings out the deep reds, maybe it's the pre-Christian roots and rigid class system creating far more sparks than would similar situations in the States; Britain's longer history of international third world exploiting and economic inequality makes their horror films--which after all deal with the 'return of the repressed'--- so much more "rich" than ours of the same period. For weird old America we have Edgar Allen Poe ("the divine Edgar") and maybe Ambrose Bierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and then we run into a wall. But England has a whole Victorian era to plunder; the monsters generally come from the wealthy class, and the peasant girls are the first to get it, the nobility last to be suspected and by far the most decadent. Hammer horrors invariably include a cozy tavern scene full of comic relief hypocrite doctors and priests, agitated innkeepers who won't let their daughters divulge information ("Hush up, girl!"), witnesses who no one believes because they're tipplers, and a cowardly populace who bar their door at night.

But the one I want to single out as exemplary in its completely Britishness and gutsy approach to monsterness is Hammer's THE MUMMY (1959), expanded from the 1932 original to include the Victorian equivalent of a Middle Eastern terrorist, an Egyptian Egyptologist (the nerve!) named Mehemet Bay (George Pastell) who dares suggest that ancient burial relics should stay where they are, undisturbed, or the very least stay in Egypt and not become mere curiosities for the swaths of unwashed gawkers at the British Museum. How dare this fez-wearing heathen even suggest such a thing?! But the even-keeled screenplay lets this Mehemet Bay off with plenty of sympathy; he even prays to Karnak, the god of said mummy, to release said mummy's spirit at the end of his vengeance spree. And his house is pretty nice-looking. I'd rather live there than in Cushing's wearily formal mansion. The two actors play well of each other, and their climactic battle of wits--- with Cushing blithely baiting the Egyptian into a confession by dismissing Karnak as a second-rate deity-- is truly a unique sociologically ambiguous moment in horror.

Of course it's not perfect, unless you believe Brits have way too much faith in guns over supernatural juggernauts. Every night he gets a visit from a seven foot-tall mummy who smashes doors apart and barges through rooms like a freight train, and--even after two shots from his revolver did nothing the night before-- Cushing's sure his shotgun will do the trick. What saved him the night before was the late inning presence of his worried wife, as usual the spittin' image of the mummy's dead love. And of course, Cushing insists on sending her away during the mummy attacks, so she'll be "safe." Ah so brave! So blind. So British.

Feminist-wise the film fares little better: the beautiful, cat-eyed Yvonne Furneaux (Carole's sister in REPULSION,  Marcello's clingy girlfriend in LA DOLCE VITA) is the 'living image' of the dead high priestess, the point where if Cushing had a brain he'd just ask his wife to tell the mummy to go back and kill Mehemet. Instead, even after she saves her fey and disinterested husband's life once already, Cushing sends her upstairs, "like a good little girl." Even more brainlessly, at the climax, he has her wait out in the bushes with the inspector so "she'll be safe." And of course, the cops stationed outside fall like dominoes and she's spirited off, as we all know she must. Then again, we don't watch these films to see how to smartly deal with the undead, we watch them to see heavy-breathing beauties walk down dark corridors in their foxy Victorian era negligees, and then get carried into bogs by lovesick corpses.

And man, what a girl. Slim old Peter Cushing looks like he'd be crushed in the sack with her, frankly - she's like twice his weight in this film, and he seems to be implying his characters' secretly queer by the way in which he coldly dismisses her affection; he'd much rather wrestle with a manly mummy! Oh those lads of British theater! Christopher Lee is great as the bandaged (and in flashback unbandaged) high priest, getting to use only his expressive eyes and lumbering gait; you can feel all the horror and anger of being entombed alive for centuries in his sad, lovelorn expression. Hey, if I had been buried all those centuries, I'd try to carry Yvonne Furneaux off to my swampy lair too. If I was unable to speak my love (since the cats back in my home epoch cut out my tongue) or write her sonnets (since my heiroglyphic-writing hand was paralyzed) I'd have to demonstrate it in other ways, like obeying her commands with a shambling wordless courtesy.

I love Cushing! I love this mummy more than all the Universal sequels to the Karl Freund original combined. Which says exactly nothing. Is there anyone in monster fandom who loves the mummy over other monsters? Who is like a 'mummy' fan? To me, the mummy is right at the level of the Wolfman, who leaves me kind of nonplussed, though WEREWOLF OF LONDON has great atmosphere. I love DRACULA (1931) the most, and the Hammer vampire films--with a few tedious exceptions--are my favorites. Still, Hammer's MUMMY is a mummy to be reckoned with, a juggernaut that wastes little time in moving from the door to your throat. Even the lengthy flashback to Egypt is creepy, with long ceremonies of death, death and more death, the strange props that make it associatively linked with Kenneth Anger's unforgettable LUCIFER RISING (1972).

And lastly, one can't ignore the vein of rich critique to be found in exploring the fey way Brits claim Egyptology as their own little playground in these films, seeing Egyptians themselves as having little to no right to their own artifacts, and also even after it's clear Karnak is a badass god who can help mummies live through untold centuries, he's still considered a pagan superstition compared to the god of these fey British scientists, and Mehemet Bey's way cooler and sexier than Cushing in the film. (coming off the best, actually is the American accented Eddie Byrne as the inspector). When the white patriarchal reps see this giant mummy resist bullets and crush larynxes with ease, they still refuse to believe in him, even when he walks off with their girl! I root for the mummy every time! Go mummy! This time you shall be free, shall be free. Even if freedom means a mucky swamp grave, there to float and dream until Jimmy Sangster writes you into life once more. Kharis, you magnificent bastard, I read your scroll!

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