Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock

Surrounded by real-life gang violence during its original release, the 1979 Walter Hill film, THE WARRIORS is probably not the NYC film classic that will be shown anytime soon at the Bryant Park Outdoor Summerfest, and maybe that's why the film is still so vital and relevant, more so--now, at least-- even than the city that spawned it. 

What? How dare I, you ask? Consider that the title above is a line from Lou Reed's last great album, New York, which examined the garbage dump that was New York City at the dawn of the 1990s. For me, graduating school in 1989, moving to Seattle before finally landing on Manhattan's East Side, it was a talisman. An album of anthems about drugs and bitterness and hopelessly high rents, it made NYC cool even if "They wrote a book about / said it was like ancient Rome."

But in Rome they had a coliseum, right? Gladiators, lions, Christians, all that shit to the death, gluttony and orgies. But what kind of movies are shown at the current New York Bryant Park Summerfest? You know, ROMAN HOLIDAY, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S. Nothing to rile up the kids with.

Let me hip you to how it was in those days when outdoor summer fests in Bryant Park would have been a nightmare of crime, drugs, and rioting, since this week begins in full the dawn of the mayor's campaign to not even let us smoke cigarettes outside.

Back in 1991-1993 or so, you could still drink on the street with impunity, so long as it was in a paper bag. You could smoke pot all over the street and the street cops wouldn't bat an eye. You could blast music from your trunk and drink beers in class, and 'bridge and tunnel' didn't mean kids coming in to hang out around the multiplex on Union Square and check in with each other via constant texting, it meant coming in to get hammered. Everything below 14th Street became a block party, everything up to 49th Street, a yuppie drunk-a-thon. The Times Square area was still awash in 70s sleaze. If I walked to 1st Avenue down 50th Street to rent (non-X) videos I'd be--depending on if I was wearing jean shorts or not--solicited by various well-dressed dudes in the bushes. And of course, everyone smoked cigarettes ($2 a pack) everywhere (no age limit to smoke - cigarette machines), and danced without cabaret licenses... life was a ball.

All....gone...like tears... washed in rain.

Recently I moved out of my old 12th St. walk-up and into Brooklyn and I miss Manhattan, but even Manhattan's not Manhattan anymore. You can't do any of the stuff I just mentioned and Times Square.... it's a nightmare of WB flagships. 'Children come first' so all traces of vice must be swept away. In the 1970s when I used to drive in with my parents and grandmother to see plays on Broadway, if I'd have imagined that one day all the filth would be cleaned up so as not to traumatize my little head, I'd have--even then--been pissed off, and maybe even pissed in the street to protest. Well, maybe I would have been glad to see it go. I can't remember. But it made life dangerous and interesting. Why go to the city at all if not to see something you can't see in your own home town? Let it scare you into appreciating the simple safety of the small town!

Times Square was a real life horror movie, and we loved horror. Times Square on New Years a magnificent party.

Times Square on New Years is now a family-friendly, drug and alcohol-free zone of 'fun' and standing in the cold for upwards of six hours at a crack, for no discernible reason except to be 'part' of it, to say you were 'there.'

The origin of the ball drop celebration stems from the days when everyone drank, danced, and smoked on the street so it made a lot more sense to be outside in the cold. Imagine Dodge City, a dangerous lawless zone of sin, word gets out how authentic and cool it is, so families start coming to visit, so the new laws forbid guns, drinking, gambling, smoking, prostitution, and anything else that might alarm the provincial visitors and their kids, who bring money galore. Naturally the cowboys leave, so Dodge becomes an empty tourist trap where families can come and pay $10 to look at the chair Wyatt Earp once sat in, while paying $8 for a warm mug of warm sarsaparilla. Then of course they hire actors to play cowboys, shooting cap guns at each other in the street. Even the horses snort at it all. That's New York City under our loathsome twins of anti-evil, Giuliani and Bloomberg.



I remember when THE WARRIORS (1979) was released and the newspaper ran big scary ads with the poster at left, and gang violence was rumored to erupting at screenings. The suburbs were scared!

Here's a description of the violence from People magazine in 1979:

Critical response to The Warriors, a new $4 million movie about New York City street gangs, has ranged from mild disdain to modest praise. Audience reaction, on the other hand, has been far less restrained: Within a week of its release, three youngsters were dead and numerous incidents of violence had apparently been triggered by the film.

"If someone comes to a movie with a gun, who's at fault?" asks Warriors' film editor David Holden. Someone did just that at a drive-in showing on the night of February 12 in Palm Springs, Calif. and killed a teenager. Some 165 miles away, on the same night, an 18-year-old bled to death in a darkened theater in Oxnard, Calif. after being knifed by an unruly gang. And three nights later a Boston high school student was murdered outside a subway station, allegedly by two young men who had just come from the film.

Paramount Pictures, the movie's distributor, has scrapped its lurid advertising campaign (above) and offered to pay for extra security at any of the 670 theaters where The Warriors opened four weeks ago. Yet a mere handful of moviehouses have accepted Paramount's offer, and only about a dozen (including the two in California where the killings took place) have canceled the film. The reason is obvious: The Warriors grossed more than $10 million in its first two weeks.... People connected with The Warriors professed surprise. Co-screenwriter David Shaber says it is "like Sesame Street compared to a film by Sam Peckinpah." Paramount VP Gordon Weaver observes that the violence is "the sort of thing that happens at rock concerts, high school basketball games and any place where diverse groups meet. It could have happened anywhere."

Here is a report on three places where it did:

Admission was only $1 at the Esplanade triplex in Oxnard, Calif. the night Tim Gitchel, his brother and two friends drove 10 miles from Ventura to catch the 10:10 showing. Just as The Warriors came on, the four youths suddenly found themselves battling at least 15 blacks who were suspected of drinking and smoking grass during the previous show. The fracas spilled into a walkway while Ed Treiberg, a patron who has worked with juveniles, looked on in horror. "They were caught up in a battle fever," says Treiberg of the assailants. "They just had the look of crazy in their eyes." Two of young Gitchel's companions were stabbed and Tim died from a knife wound to the heart. An 18-year-old construction worker, he was ambitious and hard-working and planned to attend college to study law. "Tim didn't hate anybody," recalls his mother. "He loved life." His family plans to file a civil suit against Paramount and the theater complex.

Four hours before Gitchel died, Marvin Kenneth Eller and several friends drove into the Palm Springs Drive-In to see The Warriors. At the movie, 19-year-old Kenny argued with a youth who blocked the way to the bathroom. Garbage cans flew; several shots were fired from a small-caliber handgun. A bullet went through Eller's skull, and after four days on the critical list he died. The unmarried father of a one-year-old son, Kenny worked for his father as a roofer.

Martin Yakubowicz, 16, a high school sophomore, left his $2.90-an-hour job in Back Bay Boston—putting bindings on skis—half an hour early that Thursday so he could be home in Dorchester in time to bring his mother a surprise gift. He boarded the subway near Symphony Hall and changed trains at a transfer point, where he encountered six youths—two of whom were friends—who had just seen The Warriors. They left the subway together, and, as Marty headed for a bus, a fight broke out and he was fatally stabbed.

The Warriors is still going strong at Boston's Saxon Theatre, which, says the assistant manager, "hasn't done such good business since My Fair Lady."(3/12/79)

In 1981, John Carpenter's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK was released and though the film hods up extremely well today, it paled at the time in comparison to THE WARRIORS, which has defied all odds to become one of the best action films of the 1970s.

My mom rented both films for us one Halloween in 1981 when I was around 12 or so and living in Central NJ suburbs. It's hard to believe now, but my friends and I were scared to watch them! Can you dig? Being 15 and scared to watch films like THE WARRIORS and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK? But that's what life pre-cable did to you. It was hard to see stuff with gore and nudity so you grew up kind of intimidated by it.

We saw THE WARRIORS again and again after that, but if you told me I'd ever move to NYC or Brooklyn I would have laughed in disbelief while quietly pissing my pants. This was the place that SNL was introducing as "the murder capital of the world." This was where Sliwa's Guardian Angels protected innocent locals from murderous psychos and muggers; where garbage strikes and unregulated health codes led to a stench unimaginable; drugs, prostitutes, X-rated book stores, drunken drag queens and raincoat-wearing perverts the norm; cinemas were crumbling edifices with grisly triple bills of films often shot in the same neighborhood, carrying their violence outside into cartoonish arias of serial murder, brutal rape and cathartic, insane revenge. It was a place where humanity's basest instincts dissolved into oily messes of profit and pain, and the films from there carried a queasy cachet.

Who would ever want to move there? One went by train for a Saturday afternoon, to drink underage, score some oregano, see a rock show at the Ritz, go into grindhouses on a dare, well-armed with a buzz and friends, and then when the novelty and drinks wore off one got back on the train,  fast. That was New York in the 70s-early 80s, its sleazy magnetism well-captured in dozens of films from TAXI DRIVER to EYES OF LAURA MARS, but none of them quite appealed to us younger teens, not like THE WARRIORS.

We tried to love ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) as much but there's something about it never quite clicks. All the ingredients are there, it trades on New York City's mystique at the time of being a dangerous place overrun by crime and strutting gang youths, like a grim sequel, imagining Cyrus didn't die and gangs took over. Like THE WARRIORS its grim facade portends much traumatic violence and grit, makes it seem like you would be taking your life in your hands even to dare to go see it, then says ah I was only kidding, grab a brew. I revere Carpenter's films for that brew, but ESCAPE never quite takes off.  It gets hung up on details, locations, the technicalities of landing a glider on top of the World Trade Center. It loses the NYC dread factor.

 It does however only get better with repeat viewings. It's the perfect post-WARRIORS film, when the expectations are down and the buzz is coming on fast. They're the ideal double feature to take a break from all the bare life nanny state supervision this fun summer, and to remember a time when Manhattan was so grungy it was almost condemned and turned into a maximum security prison run by Lee Van Cleef. As Snake Plissken put it to Harry Dean Stanton, "Keys! Map of the bridge! Hey! Hey! Hey!"

 

And remember, when you're at that outdoor screening of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S this summer, you may be having fun and earning points with your rom-com other but you're a disgrace to your uniform; warum schläfst du? Put down that book and start a gang. Spike that Snapple with a slug of bourbon! Smoke cigars and blow the smoke in the face of a child in a stroller! All tends towards chaos and this little sneeze of righteous nanny-state micromanaging we're mired in too shall pass... just as the ex-meek have inherited the earth, so too will the noveu-meek re-inherit, and the summer will be electric... and the city shall be sleazy.... and crime-ridden once more. Til then, boppers, I guess all we can do is play you a song.

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Favorite Film Critics: Joseph A. Ziemba & Dan Budnik (Bleeding Skull)

When I was around 12-16 I made a lot of super 8mm films with my friend Alan: lots of stalking and combat and little kids from the neighborhood outfitted in my dad's giant worn out suits, and fireworks special effects. I drew the explosions in with a pin on the emulsion, the old fashioned FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE way! On my super 8 projector you could do overdubs onto the finished celluloid. I'd que up the right section of CAT PEOPLE (1982) in the background as I banged pots to get the perfect Giorgio Moroder score. Alan's job was the guns, the casting, the dummies to throw off the roofs. We filmed for a week at his grandparents. His grandparents loved our movies, unconditionally. We could have shown them home movies from Mars and they would have adored them. We showed them over and over and they never wearied.

Good movie criticism then is about being a grandparent, not a snark. One should arm their reader with the insight/angle of vision by which you did enjoy or possibly could have enjoyed the film, for it becomes your job as a critic to enjoy films, to have a base-line to your rating curve that rests on your uninhibited enjoyment of all types of films (unless it's your job to warn your narrowed demographic of readers what not to waste money on at the multiplex that weekend, ala local paper journalists). If the film is a dumb sex comedy you could applaud that "for whole lengths of time the image is gloriously in focus," for example, and get laughs and applause where if you mentioned parts were not in focus, you'd stir butterfly tsunamis of bad karma.
But when the films get so bad that not even Alan's grandparents could love them... then you are in trouble.

That's when Joseph A. Ziemba and Dan Budnik come in.

No one seems to embody that beautiful gandparent truth in their film criticism more than Joseph A. Ziemba, in whose eyes the most appalling, haphazardly-shot cheapo horror pic can finally become the CITIZEN KANE it was meant to be. Ziemba's all about pulling away from any sort of expectation, beyond even the Brechtian meta-textual realms of Godard at his dullest, beyond Stan Brakhage abstraction and beyond even EXORCIST 2 level odiousness and into something Ziemba calls "grating, sub-arthouse anti-entertainment."

He'll still be there, til the last of the credits have rolled.

Bleeding Skull  started in 2004, had a hiatus, and is now back. I'm still digging around their archives, so might not even have yet found their recent stuff.  I particularly like their old VHS reviews, with their relishing of horrible blurred, faded color and unholy contrast levels, blurry tracking, and muffled sound. For Bleeding Skull, it is all part of the artistic meta-experience.

More matter-of-fact but just as insane, Skull's co-creator Dan Budnik focuses what you should actually bother to see rather than just read about. Budnik isn't afraid to tangent off on the step-by-step process of falling back in love with the final girl in HE KNOWS YOUR ALONE. Budnik is the Jon Stewart to Ziemba's Stephen Colbert, the Paul to his John, the Wyatt Earp to his Doc Holliday.

I didn't even go into their flawless choices in screenshots, and the dryly hilarious captions... Hell, y'all need to just go there with me now, to the source of some random quotes, first from Ziemba :

The Incredibly Strange Creatures that Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies...

What's that spell? Imagine Serge Gainsbourg meeting up with The Chordettes at a showing of The Weird World Of LSD, then stopping off for sno-cones at Coney Island before heading off to sleep." 

 Dark Night of the Scarecrow:

Although the template-driven plot and extended runtime can't match the taught anxiety of Bad Ronald, Scarecrow still consumes you. Performances? Definitely flawless. Imagery? Repeatedly frightening. Fat guys running through a field? Slightly humorous. The Halloween party and warbling synths enriched the Autumn aura and paved the way for a cryptic climax that could only leave a smile in its wake. 

Satan's Storybook (1989): (image atop)

A small void exists between "Super Mario Brothers On Ice" and an evening at Medieval Times. Consider it filled. Satan's Storybook is meant to be taken seriously. I think. Therefore, by the power vested in thine camcorder, the defective structure, theatrics, and presentation run tantamount with that sincerity. This unlikely collaboration leads to an experience that originates on Mother Earth, but clearly ends up in galaxies unknown. And that's what we want. While SS is nothing compared to the prodigious sweat-psych of Boarding House, the constant close-ups, grim tone, and ambitious-yet-crappy costumes resonate with that familiar stench. Even when you're half-asleep.

Blood and Lace (1971)

Ellie, the lovely mod. Tom, the drunken handyman. Colby, the horny cop. And, of course, "Old Man Mask", the burly hammer-killer.

I think I'm in the right place.

That's what it's all about, isn't it? The right place. The right time. The right feeling. Collectively, that's what we search for. A perfect B.L.T. at lunch, an evening headphone session with "Nilsson Sings Newman", a late-nite tryst with The David Steinberg Show; they all pave the road to many Rights and very few Wrongs. Of course, that depends on who you are. Do you have a thing for hammer POVs and rubber-limb gore?

Blood And Lace knows the answer. Welcome to the right place.

 Sinthia, the Devil's Doll (1970)

So there's the gist. When you add the frequent triple-exposures, warbled easy listening LP music cues, and a reliance on confined spaces, Sinthia reveals itself fully. Aimless. Dumb. Pretty boring. It's a superb example of grating, sub-arthouse anti-entertainment. Of course, that's the very reason why it's worth experiencing.

---------------------------------------------------------------- 

And Now, Dan Budnik... who blew my mind with this:

Demons of Ludlow:

"A haunted piano is delivered to the town of Ludlow just in time for their bicentennial. Of course, when the men deliver it, they don't say "Here's your haunted piano. Where do you want it?" The haunted part is a surprise. It's a gift from the man who founded the town. And that man was a jerk."

The Hungan

I mean, here's a beautiful example: the guy throwing the party introduces Cry Wolf. They start playing a song, pure-80's hair band. The camera sits on the other side of the room pointed at them. The song starts and folks begin to dance. In front of the camera. They all move in front of the camera. You can barely see the band. This goes on for two minutes. The great thing about the film's length is that this scene will not preclude something like this happening again in ten minutes. It does not mean that we won't get a long scene where the campers chat amongst themselves (sometimes incoherently) as they stroll to the campgrounds, with a strong whiff of Blood Lake  mixed in. It does not mean that we won't get a long scene where some waitresses' chat about a date one of them had. It means we get it all. 

And, it's all great. 

----
Dude, BLEEDING SKULL is all great! Even if (like myself) your natural decency doesn't permit you to enjoy these sorts of films, you owe it to yourself to be informed. May Cry Wolf and Sinthia have mercy on us all in the future. Goodnight Mrs. Calabash, Just drop by when it's convenient too, be sure to call before you do (read that sung by Nilsson) and goodbye burdensome sanity.

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Favorite Film Critics: Michael Weldon

It's hard to remember a time when the internet was still over a decade away; VHS rentals were mostly found in backrooms of local appliance shops, and books mostly at mall chains like Waldenbooks and B. Dalton. As far as film guides, well, there was Leonard Maltin, period. But then, in 1983, as if smuggled into B. Dalton from some strange alternate universe, was this weird thick, expensive ($25!) silver book called the Psychotronic Encylopedia of Film. Life as we knew it would never be the same again... is a cliche Weldon would never use.

Back then please recall, Quentin Tarantino was under the legal drinking age, and the Times Square grindhouse era was only beginning to die. I was 16 and my few grindhouse experiences had been traumatic: boredom trumped good sense and we NJ teenagers would take the train to Times Square the way farmers used to go to freak shows, to soak up the depravity from behind the protective barrier of our teenage alienation and sense of suburban invulnerability. All I remember is the awful stench of this one, the Roxy, showing films in at least three different shoebox size second floor holes, we came in at the end RUBY and left 1/3 into some Jackie Chan thing -- all on projector video: a mix of really cheap weed, freebase coke, urinal cigars, homelessness, unclean sex, and god knows what else in the air. I can still smell it after 25 years.

But my morbid acuteness of the olfactory senses didn't stop me from relishing the experience, and continuing to soak up the seediness from the safety of my beige wall papered tract home bedroom, and no one was better at conveying the lurid trashy glory of the unseen cinema than Michael Weldon. Psychotronic became my bible, my source book, my security blanket. I still have my original copy--bought with money begged from mom--and the page edges are black with my endless thumbing.

The best is the brevity of his prose. Most of the time there's not really an inkling of if the movie's good, sometimes he confesses he hasn't seen it. Most of it was written from memory, before the advent of home video. Instead of sitting around in the suburbs, Weldon was in two punk bands. He still writes but it seems to be more along the lines of pop culture criticism as in this editorial essay I found online:

"Some people have been complaining about pop songs being used as commercials since the 70s. I always loved The Beach Boys’ “Fun Fun Fun,” especially for the brilliant falsetto harmony ending and Sly And The Family Stone’s “Hot Fun In the Summertime.” And the intro of Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life” (featuring the drumming of Soupy Sales son) has become the new “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (or the 2001, Elvis intro theme) of TV ads. Key parts of all three are now being used for cruise ship TV spots. Music from an LSD casualty, a coke casualty, and a long time heroin addict to attract mostly retired couples to take overpriced vacations on ocean polluting ships that a record number of people have been puking their guts out on. Brilliant!  (Psychotronic #38)

No, Mr. Weldon. It's you who are brilliant for spinning it that way! I don't think Weldon comes by these observations via some Guy Debord détournement-recuperation angle, and that's why he's so cool. Well one of the reasons. His sense of the absurd is poker-faced in a way that would make Bunuel drop a woman's shoe in salute.

In 1998 I got one of my first steady freelance film criticism jobs, working on search engine entries for a vast director canon project, condensing all these classic films (given out by director) into 200-250 word capsule reviews, up to 20 a week. Some--like D.W. Griffith and Edmund Goulding--had over 30 or 40 films to cover; they taught me a lot about film history. Others, like Roger Corman, Jess Franco, and Edgar Ulmer had even more titles and taught me how to bullshit. Who would have imagined that my endless obsessing over Michael Weldon's tight-lipped style in Pyschotronic would come in so handy? His deadpan stressing of random details and gift for collapsing mountains of impressions and factoids into one smooth, hilarious, joke-free punchline was my boilerplate. I had absorbed some of his style, like the blob!

Here's some random samples: For his review of THE FLESH EATERS (1964, above): "... (Kolsek) was a bottom of the barrel villain at Universal during the '40s and played Joseph Paul Goebbels at least three times. The film's other standout performance is Ray Tudor as the jive-talking, shipwrecked beatnik Omar." (p. 246)

What makes that pair of sentences such sublime poetry? Note the inclusion of Goebbel's middle name or the way Omar's whole groovy hipster shtick is collapsed into a three adjectives. And you could trust Weldon to understate, so if he says "the film's other stand-out" that means Kolsek and Tudor are better than the rest of the cast, but since it's Weldon you know it means more than that, Omar is AWESOME, and the rest of the cast isn't bad.

Then there's his quiet meta-statements, made all the more powerful by their rarity, as in his capsule for I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF: 

"Young Michael Landon (real name Eugene Horowitz) will never be forgotten as the troubled high school student turned into a snarling drooling hairy monster by Whit Bissell. No full moons or crucifixes are involved. Hypnotism causes the retrogressive transformation whenever Landon is startled." (p. 355).

Again, nothing jaw-dropping first-off, but note the way he just drops a weird word like 'retrogressive' in there, like it's no big deal, or the anachronistic mention of crucifixes (for werewolves?), or the lack of commas for 'snarling drooling hairy.' Savor the deadpan solemnity that's wittily undermined by the inclusion of Landon's goofy real name in the opening sentence.

Weldon's magazine has gone out of print, and so has the original Psychotronic Encyclopedia. His 1996 follow-up, the Psychotronic Video Guide is also essential reading, though by then internet and endless film guides had made it hard to stand-out as starkly as the original had 13 years previously. DVD has polished up a lot of these films poor Weldon had to see on streaky fuzzy faded dupes or in sticky Deuce seating, so that we could be free. It's up to us now to keep his flame alive, just as he dedicated his second book to 42nd Street, meaning "the" 42nd Street, as it used to be," so too should we dedicate ourselves to Weldon. I really need to rediscover this book, now that it's sitting in my lap, and order some of the magazine's back issues (at cover price, still!) from the Psychotronic website. Check it out here.

In the end, Michael Weldon is a bit like the Velvet Underground in that he never became super popular so much as hugely influential; every kid who read Psychotronic apparently became a writer or filmmaker. Weldon taught half-suffocated, tragically bored mid-1980s suburban punks and poseurs how to see deeply into even the most opaque 42nd Street garbage and find the shining gems within.

For the 25th anniversary of Weldon's landmark original Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Hollywood Bitchslap's Ron Gonsalves noted:

A note on the back of Psychotronic Encyclopedia reads, "Warning: The author of this book has been watching these movies obsessively since the age of 6. He is now unfit for conventional employment." Well, conventional employment's loss was our gain. I ache for a third volume of psychotronic angel-dust — maybe you do, too. (It's been twelve years, almost as long as the gap between the first two books.) But for now, we can simply raise a toast to the original gray brick's 25th birthday, perhaps take it off the shelf and swim around in it all over again, and give props to the man who was there before everyone else, without whom there wouldn't have been a Grindhouse or a Tarantino or a Film Threat... (10/08)

Writers, filmmakers, and artists can go to school all they want but in the end they learn by reading other writers. In other words, we're sponges. Many fiction writers spend a year or so trying to write like Hemingway or Raymond Carver, so do we film critics of a certain age and interest range spend a lifetime trying to capsulize like Michael Weldon.

But Michael Weldon is not just another big brother guide who led us from passive to active, from viewer to maker, from reader to writer. In his dry unobtrusive way he's also the grinder of the lens through which all the sleaze of yesteryear is re-evaluated as art today. So thank you, thank you, Michael Weldon!  In transforming schlock appreciation into a literary art form (of brevity and wit) you not only supplied expert guidance for our strange viewing interests, you taught us to how to fucking see jewels in the trashy street.

(See also Favorite Film Critics: Kim Morgan)

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Blades in the Apple: LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR, The Village People, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER & WINDOWS (When the Rainbow is Enuff)

It's easy to come across a "torn from today's swinging singles nightmare" headline movie like LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977) or CRUISING (1980) and think they're just exploitation fearmongering "scare" films that just kind of appeared at the side of 70s mainstream cinema like mutant babies left to die (as IT'S ALIVE, PROPHECY and THE MANITOU), but you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. And those of us who vaguely remember the thrilling danger of local drive-in movie and newspaper ads in the 1970s have a wide-eyed respect for the potent sexual menace of pre-GIULIANI Manhattan - it was scarier than Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolfman combined, and sexier than Barbarella with torn stockings.

From the safety of drunken wife-swap American suburbia, the weird mix of leather, queerness, and something called "a singles bar" seemed to be a provocation, almost a challenge. The sex in the suburbs was 'safe' but the "city" brand was cinematic. 70's Manhattan was a nightmare, a tourist freak show that was fine to pass by and gawk at but you just didn't want to dive right in and actually rescue a teenage prostitute or get mugged. Just as now tourists come to go to gawk at vast displays of WB and Disney goods, in the 1970's tourists would go to gawk at X-rated marquees and a street theater ballet melange of strutting pimps, jittery winos, wobbly hookers, and shifty-eyed junkies. As we got older, the idea was to sneak up there and find Plato's Retreat, a club where apparently everyone walked around naked and had sex in the open. My mom even helped us look for it, that will give you an idea of the weird sexual permissiveness of the era. By the time we were even older and actively looking for the "sleazy theater experience" ( if the word grindhouse was popular then, I don't remember) it was all winding down, way down... but I still remember the grisly, soul-stunning smell of the Roxy.

I remember, too, going in to see "a Broadway show" in scary old Times Square as a kid with my family, and waiting in the big outdoor, middle-of-42nd Street Cheap Tickets line and getting permission to run off by myself and get a coke from a nearby deli, weaving my way past shocking X-ray marquees and tons of depressing urban dirt, trash, grime, and decay. I was horrified, traumatized, turned-on, and nauseated.

 Letting a nine year-old kid run loose through that sort of neighborhood would be considered negligence today, but back then sleazy sex had a detached aura; we were exempt from harm by virtue of our disaffected stances. We weren't saints like kids are today, so there was less to despoil, a shorter distance to fall.  But I was still plenty scared going to get that Coke, but that just heightened my senses: cigars and asphalt tar for the olfactory; the roar of jackhammers and the groans and blaringly loud Kung Fu kicks coming from loops playing on a television in the marquis windows for the auditory; an overabundance of naked female flesh and twisted title marquis for the eyes, and it all swirled together and coalesced into the faded sadness of the woman's face on the pre-dirty and pre-faded Subway-style poster advertising For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuff. As I walked I ran through the giant black and long-haired figures, it seemed locals seeing me, all alight and bug-eyed, began performing bizarre street scenes for my amusement, demanding only my feigned nonchalance and thinly feigned disinterest as payment.

Safely back in the suburbs, films like TAXI DRIVER (1976), MEAN STREETS (1973) and MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) provided the artsy boilerplates for not just our tourist perceptions, but a whole genre of 1970's films that used the vice-gripped city as a backdrop, from early 1980s video rentals like MS. 45 through to bigger budget mainstream grindhouse that capitalized on the 1970's suburban yen for singles bars and "aren't we glad we moved to the suburbs and had kids instead of staying single in the city" cautionary tales like DEATH WISH (1974), LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (both 1977). All you had to do was point a camera in New York and you had a movie about grime and vice, from graffiti-covered trains to wino-drenched stoops and turned-over, Ocarless garbage pails, it was all there without any need for set designers.

It's bizarre to think that William Friedkin was ever given a budget to make something like CRUISING (1980),  as the sadomasochistic homosexual environment of the West Village couldn't possibly turn on straight America and gay America was protesting it even before it was finished. The suits must have presumed the mainstream's penchant for inner-city sleaze extended to gawking at homosexuals, but they didn't factor that for all it's swinging medallion-on-the open chested liberalism, white middle class suburbia was still pretty provincial, and being very frank and open about your hatred and fear of gayness was how we knew you weren't gay, because there was so much loosey-goosey touchy-feely swinging going on, you needed to be clear up front, if only to yourself.

To give you an example, none of us knew The Village People singing "Macho Man" was at all gay. We thought it was, you know, Burt Reynolds-style cowboys and Indians... for the kids. If we'd have known the truth, "Macho Man" wouldn't have been the first .45 single I ever bought, that's for sure. I would have been afraid of reprisals and dints on my manly armor. We learned instead about the 'gay agenda in our midst' via Anita Bryant, who was always on the news, ranting and raving about gays corrupting our kids' morality, until even the starchiest parents figured that if an obviously evil old broad like this (the Sarah Palin of her era) was so anti-gay, then homosexuals must be all right... wherever they were. Thanks to Bryant we were guided from hating them as straw dogs to fearing they were amongst us to siding with them against the real menace, rabidly intolerant orange juice shills

Even so, at the pre-AIDS awareness moment of Friedkin's CRUISING (1980), gays were still pretty reviled outside city limits. The only "out" celeb of the day was Elton John, and he was British and already covered in so many feathers it made tarring redundant. Lesbians were a slightly different matter: sexy as long as they weren't too butch, we were fascinated by them and by another now almost impossible to find film about homicidal queerness called WINDOWS (1980), starring Talia Shire as the victim of an obsessive dyke stalker.

WINDOWS got terrible reviews, caught gay rights flak, and everyone seems glad to have forgotten it today. Everyone, that is... but old Erich, who's still traumatized by seeing it reviewed on some local Philadelphia news show back in 1980 (they called it depressing and hateful - I was instantly thrilled).

I guess it's easy to sum up a decade as being sinful or doomed by its propensity to abuse newly found freedoms--especially in the US., where even the backlashes have backlashes--so for every starry-eyed examination of the polyester scene there's going to be three pieces of nihilistic dread-mongering like Richard Brooks' LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR (1977).

Out of circulation for a long while (presumably over music rights) there's no denying the power of a film that dares to star Diane Keaton and Tuesday Weld--two of the most brilliant comedic actresses of the era--only to proceed to throw them to the wolves with no regard for audience emotional endurance, making every single guy in their lives an unrepentant sleazy jerk, including dad and brothers-in-law, and leaving the girls no place to turn but between the sheets with any poisonous ogre who cuts them a line.

GOODBAR's best scenes involve Keaton getting off over her fear and ambivalence towards Richard Gere as a coked-up rentboy mix of ROCKY (1976) and John Travolta in SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977). But for all his kinetic air-punches, Gere's character is still a stereotype of Vinnie Barbarino barbarousness. Meanwhile, Keaton's so good you want to abduct her in a white van and drive her over to a better film. But you can't, and the only glimmer of light is an in-joke scene where she picks up Richard Gere via small talk about Mario Puzo's The Godfather (which of course, Keaton co-starred in as Pacino's wife).

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER  is a film that too many people--including my mom who took us to see it as children at the drive-in--thought was a dancing rags-to-self discovering class hero epic like ROCKY or BAD NEWS BEARS (1976) and instead turned out to be depressing and way-too-sleazy for children, no matter how many kids birthday parties had danced to the album.

The main drag is Travolta's posse of youthful Italian-American hoodlums hanging out under the Verrazano bridge, balling their collective whore/gang deb played achingly well by Donna Pescow, and generally fuming with working class self-loathing and thick New Yoahkka accents. I haven't seen FEVER since that night with mom at the drive-in but I remember how much I hated all the characters and shuddered in sympathetic horror at the sad sexual desperation and abuse of poor Donna Pescow... and I remember only one line "Ah, they're spics, they're greasin' up the floah." a remark made against a competing Latin dance couple. Now what does that tell you about the power of evil to endure in an innocent child's memory? We all grew up wanting to be DAMIEN: OMEN II (1978) or have Patty Duke for our mother in LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY (1976), but we didn't want to do it in fucking Brooklyn, especially goddamned Bay Ridge! Yeeeeesh. I still hate Brooklyn, even though I'm sitting in it right now! At least it's Greenpoint, or Fort Greene, I can never tell them apart, but not because of reasons you think, playa. That's racist.

Of course by now you know I'm a sensitive soul, so please sympathize when I tell you that one lazy Sunday in the very early 1980's I caught the last 30 minutes of MR. GOODBAR by accident at a friend's house.  I was around 13 or so, and I was alone (my buddy was out mowing a lawn), I thought it was ANNIE HALL at first, recognizing Keaton, which I'd never seen but heard was great. Of course it was not the case.

I was so traumatized I couldn't even look at a Playboy for six months.

Seeing the film in full for the first time last night--some 30 years later--made me realize it's still way too shocking for my poor system. Sexual violence is something much better digested when unrealistic, as in bad, as in fake-looking.  Little winks of Brechtian narrative disruption do much to relieve anxiety in the viewer, or at least me, but when full-on Hollywood muscle is applied to giving you a strobe-light asphyxiation panic attack then Mr. Brooks, you should be ashamed! This nasty little ending traumatized me in 1981 and it traumatizes me now, worse than REQUIEM FOR A DREAM which used a similar eye-rape strobe technique and left me feeling similarly in need of a Xanax, which I didn't have. Where's the cinematic Xanax for our come-down for this daring but misogynistic and undeserved ending, Mr. Brooks?  Even Buck had a Ratzo! Give Keaton a break, like a sympathetic girlfriend who isn't a knife-wielding psychotic. Why not give her a friendly, protective dog? She's a beloved saint at her school for the deaf, but the one time she fails to show up on time, all the kids instantly hate her. The minute the one good guy in her life starts to seem human enough to waken her from her nympho slumber, he starts acting as shady as Jackie Earle Haley in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006). It's like Brooks was still angry the censors wouldn't let him castrate Paul Newman at the end of SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1963) and he's been castrating us all by proxy ever since.

At any rate, back in the day, as I well recall, GOODBAR was on everyone's lips (adults had all read the book) as the cautionary buzzword that kept 70's singles ever alert for signs of derangement in their take-home projects, razors in their Halloween apples if you will. A Goodbar was slang for a dangerous date ("watch out for the Goodbars!") that we kids didn't understand, associating it with the candy bar and wondering if it had something to do with getting in cars with strangers or accepting opened candy bars (before the Tylenol scare of 1982 for example, there were very few protective coverings on bottles). But that was the attitude of the time: safety and security took a backseat to getting your kicks and rocks off. There were no 24/7 hall monitors, no racing to pick the kids up from school rather than letting them walk home alone through the spooky park. The complete reverse of how it is now, when all our liberties are slowly stripped away and we're glad to get rid of them, tightening our security systems until we choke on boredom and claustrophobic anxiety.

Long unavailable on DVD, GOODBAR is currently on Netflix streaming and see it if you can, before they yank it down again, but just remember that this film really should have a tag like LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, "it's only a movie, it's only a movie," or in this case, only the first sparks of the early 1980's anti-sexual backlash hysteria. What it's not is what the ads and stills all promise, a dramedy where a girl runs with a dangerous crowd in pursuit of herself, and then probably winds up with Gerard Butler or some nice Jewish boy, and her klutzy best friend cries at her wedding and winds up with a caterer.

 In 1977 things were still good. The coke was flowing and the hospitals had yet to fill up with heart murmurs. We still had some time to sleep around and not fear the AIDS reaper. But when the change finally came, we were ready. We were exhausted. We were sorry. We  learned to be politically correct and gay-friendly at first just because we hated the haters more than the hated, and because America naturally sticks up for the underdog. We also cleaned up Times Square. Now we can't dance or smoke in NYC bars, and we can't drink outside in brown paper bags or smoke cigars in the theater lobby. Everyone's 'happy.' And no matter how hard we looked--and still look--through the trash of 42nd Street, we never did, and never will, find Plato's Retreat. When I finally did stumble into that orgy I'd always wanted it was Halloween night of 2003, and before I could strip off my tie I mumbled an excuse and ran outside to smoke a cigarette, panicky, hand shaking as I lit in a way that would have made a Corleone wince, then ran home on shaky legs to call my sponsor. Vomiting guidos in shitty costumes splayed before me like a gauntlet, I leapt over them and ran from it all.

God help me, I ran to "freedom."

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For Sizzle: AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE (2010)

 

I considered myself a sleaze merchant know-it-all prior to entering AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE, but still had to see it if only for my idol, Kim Morgan's presence (below) as a talking head. Turns out it's pretty cool and I learned new stuff. In addition to the "sinsational" Ms. Morgan there's: "Czar of Noir" Eddie Muller (good), John Landis (fun), Jack Hill (Zen), and Joe Dante (tres cool), not to mention people I was sure I'd be annoyed by but turned out to love, like Herschell Gordon Lewis (sage-like), of whom Landis says, "I don't particularly like his films, but I love his posters!" Hey, that's a compliment in exploitation land and you can tell Landis means every word of it. Despite the crushing despair I experienced covering the SW double feature of Lewis' JUST FOR THE HELL OF IT/BLAST-OFF GIRLS (for the now defunct DVD Angle), I must admit Lewis seems like a helluva nice, smart, relaxed guy - and even a squeamish feminist like myself has to doff his hat to the man who made 2,000 MANIACS - in the words of Michael Weldon: "YEE-HAW!".

Producer/director/editor Elijah Drenner keeps it all humming along at a nice clip through the decades, starting around the dawn of cinema and ending with recent tributes like Tarantino and Rodriguez's GRINDHOUSE. There's elements I would have put in (the rise of the VCR and Disneyfication of Times Square) and others I may have left out (THE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT) but you'll never squeeze the whole history into a single film, and Drenner keeps it all from being too flashy or too slow, too normal or too head-spinningly weird --and does not spare the adult content: bare breasts, sexual assault and horrific gore are all here, with many of the most disturbing clips from the most disturbing films: ILSA: SHE-WOLF OF THE SS and the works of HG Lewis (pictured below), such as BLOOD FEAST, for example. And the clips all look really, really good. It's very strange that this stuff was once so shocking you could only see it as a legal adult in a sleazy theater at the stroke of midnight, and now it's nostalgia and much less traumatic, and yet - the times are if anything more conservative and morally regressive than ever.

HGL and some of his 2,000 Maniacs

The best praise I could give for something like this is that it reminded me of when I was a kid in the 70s and actually scared of the TV commercials and newspaper ads for a lot of these movies. I could also see a portion of a drive-in screen, far in the distance, from my bedroom window, if I used my kid telescope - I watched THE MANITOU that way! I still haven't seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (from fear of post-rape viewing trauma more than anything else) but if I could be assured the actual DVD transfers of these films looked as good as they cleaned-up clips here, I'd be all over it. Plus, Drenner leavens any unease about the film by showing lots of outtakes: LAST HOUSE seems less foreboding now that I've seen David Hess shooting the breeze with his onscreen victims between shots.

It must have been a difficult choice to leave out the European imports that had a huge effect on grindhouse distribution patterns (I asked Drenner about that: "We had to make a clear line down the middle and decide what to cover and what to leave out.") On the other hand, who needs a complete picture? That's what Michael Weldon's Psychotronic Cinema Guide The Psychotronic Video Guide To Film is for! What we have here in AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE is a nice little summary of 100% American film output, a carny's insider view of Yankee hooplah and pitchman ballyhoo, with art and culture pushed way to the side until it's off the table -- and lands with a lowbrow splat.

There's stuff here I didn't know about, which shocked me. I had no idea the film THE CORPSE GRINDERS was a huge hit for Ted V. Mikels. The grinding of corpses carries no appeal for me, personally, but I always kind of subconsciously associated it with the term grindhouse (or the shredding of old film in a cheap projector, grinding the sprockets). When I learned the name's taken from "Bump and grind" as a mark of when the country's once plentiful burlesque houses were turned into theaters to show films of girls stripping (cheaper that way), you coulda knocked me over with a feather from a rhinestone pastie. Imagine if it was called 'bumphouse' instead? Why just grind, man? 

The whole stripper genre was a bit of a blind spot in my sleaze-education prior to this film but apparently there were an awful (in both senses) lot of them. Ed Wood fans still recovering from trying to stay awake through ORGY OF THE DEAD might be glad to know it's not anyone's fault that they failed. LSD fans who tried and failed to watch more than ten minutes of MANTIS IN LACE can also relax for the same reason. Apparently there was a time when looooong dull stationary camera striptease scenes (as with burlesque queen, Blaze Starr, atop with drum) were considered the height of decadence. Fascinating, yet tame and tedious in our age of readily ubiquitous nudity and XXX-rated websites.
 

I've got minor quibbles with AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE as a whole, of course: we'd be so much better off with more of the witty Kim Morgan, though when she's put on the spot for saying women like to see other women naked ("They do!" she exclaims in reaction to Drenner's apparent offscreen incredulity) it seems a bit of a weird inclusion; if you're going to leave it in the film, don't doubt the woman! She's trying to help Travis Bickle get Cybil Shepherd to go with him to see SOMETIMES SWEET SUSAN (see way below).  I always thought Travis was being rather passive aggressive, the pressure to be charming and get Cybil into bed leading him to this massive act of self-sabotage. But Kim says different. I believe her.

On that note, no review of a movie on a topic like this would be complete without the word misogyny, so there it is. Surprisingly, the most feminist-friendly guy on the show seems to be HG Lewis! There's ample time devoted to his feminist-fave, SHE-DEVILS ON WHEELS, but where's Russ Meyer's FASTER PUSSYCAT, Abel Ferrara's MS. 45, that Hemingway sister joint, LIPSTICK, and the whole rape-revenge cycle? For that matter, where's the Satanic possession and the EXORCIST / ROSEMARY'S BABY knockoffs? Where's TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE? ERASERHEAD? Bette Davis' BABY JANE microgenre, and 70s telekinesis? BLACULA? And ballyhoo meister David Friedman's classic quote about how his movies were "all sizzle and no steak," and pornography gave people the steak, so the sizzle was out, and that's how grindhouse essentially died and became pornography?

Not to kvetch of course, just to flaunt my own expansive knowledge and hide my terror. Because not only am I afraid to see LAST HOUSE, I'm afraid to see PASSION OF THE CHRIST (above), which Landis astutely points out is "the last real grindhouse film!"

Speaking of passion, I've got a soft spot for New York accents, so I got a real kick out of sleaze director Don Edmonds alternately justifying, apologizing for, and boasting of, the excesses of his ILSA: SHE-WOLF OF THE SS, a film I rented back in 1990 in Seattle (from Scarecrow Video!) and which made me see red, literally, when I closed my eyes during sex for the next three years!  But one must admire the relative care that went into ILSA, vs., say, most other Nazisploitation (called "Nazi Exploitation" here, for some reason) with their use of Lewis' patented nail-the-camera-to-the floor, yell-action-and-sneak-off-for-a-nap style framing. But what about the other period sleaze auteurs that aren't mentioned (unless they were mentioned whilst I was in the bathroom, or mixing drinks, or smoking crack, or rolling johns in the men's room), shouldn't there be a sequel? Eurosleazeonomicon, or something cool like that?

AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE never reaches much of a conclusion beyond confirming that Americans will always make films with both eyes on the ticket window and just a toe brushing up against the edge of art, and thus our baser instincts will always be catered to. It's a comforting but disturbing thought about the value of prurience and the way always getting exactly what you want to see can make you a perverse mess just like the anti-porn crusaders have always harangued it would. But at a brisk under-90 minute running time (it would be a perfect part of any exploitation double feature), AMERICAN GRINDHOUSE moves fast enough there's nary a dull moment. For casual fans you can really get an idea of what avenues you may want to explore. Just be prepared to be shocked, amazed, and... most of all, flabbergasted! Grind yourself deep into your seat as you enjoy a splice-ridden slice of film history, one bedecked with sound, fury, and sizzle. In the words of Pam Grier in COFFY (below) when her cop boyfriend tells her she can't just go around just killing everyone: "Why not?"

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