The Slashological Strata of Fate: HALLOWEEN to THE TERMINATOR (1978-1984)

The early 80s --the dawn of and height of the slasher craze --was for many impressionable, alienated teens like myself a time of fear, paranoia, isolation and frustrated sexual awakening; it all pooled together to form a budding fascist militarism within our ranks. Slasher films were an inescapable part of the landscape even if you avoided them: TV commercials, newspaper print ads relentlessly ogling cowering or showering girls from the perspective of killers --there was no escape. And it was before internet, so we couldn't really find like-minded pre-PC people, the ones who, like me, thought women very very vulnerable and felt horrible for being too small and young to protect them and to naive to realize that women weren't turned on by guys who made themselves miserable worrying about them. We developed an anti-misogyny, a misandry. We sneered at humanity in general and how sex and booze made them sloppy and indifferent to their own self preservation. We tried to absolve ourselves by thinking well, any bitch dumb enough to sleep with so-and-so, to fall for his dumb line and drink his gauche drinks, deserves all she gets.... Jason was to us what the Monster from the Id was to Morphius in Forbidden Planet. My poor Krell...

We'd later get sloppy drunk too but for now, age circa 12-16, the borderline to forbidden knowledge was heavily patrolled by a legion of masked, silent, shambling butcher knife wielding, unkillable automatons.We who saw the line dared not cross. Instead we carefully quietly armed ourselves for future battles, stashing mom's old butcher knife under our pillow and a bat under our bed, preparing for the time when we would need to battle the shambling slasher and jock armies.

Get thee to a gunnery...

The automaton killer who won't die who comes out to suburbia and stalks kids originated in Halloween (1978). I hadn't even seen it but I was still traumatized just from the clip Siskel and Ebert showed on the special episode of Sneak Previews devoted to "Dead Teenager" movies, wherein they taught me to turn my queasy dread onto outraged feminism, where it would remain until I read Carol Clover's Men Women and Chainsaws and learned that was the whole point... I didn't have to afraid for girls, or of girls, I could be afraid through girls, the only way to fly.

Meanwhile, the main dread was that the slasher would get us in our sleep, or when we were alone, and we all thought of what we would do if he came home, as Halloween's tag line read, and the thought he was never going to die held us in a giddy grip that made it necessary to keep the TV or radio on, and a nightlight, to drown out the scrapings of trees against the house, and the creaking footsteps we couldn't be sure we heard as we tried to sleep.  My fear never stopped until I learned after watching Battle of the Bulge one night that just thinking about WW2 eased my fear. It could occupy my brain and all the armaments made me feel secure in the way armaments will, even if it was only in my imagination, that's where the monsters were too, so it worked. If that's not an encapsulation of the rise of 80s action movie militarism I don't know what is. So, retrace the steps and wonder... did Halloween indirectly cause the Iraq war?

The thing you have to remember though is that poor Laurie Strode didn't have a Laurie Strode before her to teach her to not drop the knife by the killer just because he's temporarily playing dead. Myers was the first of this type, this emerging breed of mute, indestructible automaton killers patrolling suburbia and in the first Halloween, Jamie Lee doesn't yet know he's got nine hundred lives and you need to take drastic steps like defenestration, or what I eventually determined was an unbeatable and less messy course of action: thumb removal (no thumbs, no strangling or holding weapons, all he can do is lunge and snap like a turtle).

Every kid had their own late night strategy for tackling a Michael Myers / Jason variety killer and in hindsight it's clear Laurie Strode's ignorance was the root force for the 80s action movie surge. The new heroes killed their enemies eight dozen ways at once, obliterated them. Sometimes they even tangled with indestructible psychos personally: Chuck Norris went on a round of futile karate kicks against a modified killer in Hero and the Terror (1988); Charlie Bronson tangled with a freaky psycho who kills while buck naked in Ten to Midnight (1983); Clint tangled with a kinky leather man in Tightrope (1984). We all thought The Terminator was--based on the previews--Arnold's contribution to the by-then passé formula; it looked like an low budget Italian knock-off slasher/action sci fi hybrid based on that preview. There he was, our Conan now dressed like he should be riding a scooter in Rome, using a laser sight at a phony looking 'Tech Noir' bar. We figured he had really gone off the A-list with this one, that he'd be doing dinner theater next. So we were stunned with incredulity when we read the glowing reviews and heard the record box office. Seeing the film a few weeks later I understood why: this time the opponent knew all the unstoppable killer's tricks before the movie even started, so it was like the final girl finally had a guy who understood her. There would be no more dropping butcher knives, ever.

Won't get fooled again: Blue Steel, Escape from New York, Aliens

The idea that kept us up at night was there there might be some crazy killer who has us earmarked for death for reasons beyond understanding: maybe your friend called him a creep when he drove past you on the street, but what allowed us to sleep was the idea that for every Moby Dick monster there would be an Ahab or Dr. Loomis and vice versa. In Halloween the same essential dynamic takes place, just substitute Donald Pleasance's quiver-voiced shrink for Michael Biehn.

To help lay all this out I've assembled the following horror strata map Most crap horror film directors never get past the topography, while a few get all the way down to the bottom, which is the universal top, for this pyramid:

Topographical: Mise en scene; iconography: The mask. axe, chainsaw, screaming woman, corridors advanced down stealthily, shocks around the corners, cowering, rising up, sudden face in the bathroom mirror, closet doors being peered through. A killer presumably killed sitting slowly up and turning his head,
Textual: Condemnation of lustful behavior; warning to never take your security for granted; taking the 'safety bars' of our first world social order consumerist entitlement for granted  (i.e. Marie Antoinette letting them eat cake).
Subtextual: Feminism; homophobia; collapse of the American Family; critique of sexual repression; man's inherent savagery; castration anxiety; Marxist ideology, psychosexual pre-genital jouissance
Structural: The uncanny rhythm of slowed down time and sense of danger erupting from even normal things as they exist in an unsteady relation to language and perception, closet doors, darkened laundry rooms, cars, darkness, bushes outside the house, staircases, mirrors, telephones, porches, windows
Core: Death Drive; initiation from child to adult through endurance and conquering of fear; the learning of aggression; rise to violence / fascism inherent; the encouragement of militarism; distrust of neighbors and people walking past your house (i.e. itchy trigger-finger neighborhood watches)

It's in this last one we see how, in its way, The Terminator, Rambo, and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, are all illegitimate sequels to the slasher movie craze, and just maybe so is our modern trend of abducted daughters, torture porn, and NRA zealotry.

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

So that was the first half of the 80s. Maybe we never had a midnight visitor with a laser sight or a knife but it hardly matters now. I still can't sleep in dead silence. I need a white noise machine, old radio shows, a whirring AC, the TV left on all night on low volume, or all of the above; I moved to the city that never sleeps--which after seeing The Warriors and Escape from New York I vowed to never do--but the crime of the 70s was my boon, because dead bolts, steel doors, small apartments on high floors all made one's safety from outside monsters easily secured. Meanwhile my "little" brother has a gun locker and lives in a city that encourages concealed weapons permits. Is this all the fault of Michael and Jason?

I would say, maybe.

The personal freedom of the 70s ended coincidentally the same time slasher movies were widely available on video where moms and little kids could see them despite the R-rating. Most of the violence was innocuous, even laughable, but the cumulative effect--the sheer number of R-rated violence available, even just looking at a shelf of the covers--was traumatizing. I could be traumatized by catching the end of Looking for Mr. Goodbar on The Movie Channel thinking it was Annie Hall one year, and get refused admittance to see Creepshow (1982) at the local cinema the next. Funny how fucked things are.... maybe it's in our nature to destroy oah-selves, but it's also in our nature to then get preachy about how destructive we are, and refuse admittance to teenagers for films perfectly suited to sick children.

At least one good thing came of all that fear and mistrust: Woman got a gun and learned to be her own Dr. Loomis. She kept watching the dark, and would never fall for a killer playing possum ever again. By Terminator 2, she had arsenals stashed away in Mexico just waiting... the fan was shit-caked and the Blockbusters were busted. There was nothing left now to scare us... not even the bomb.
----

For further reading on the Tick-Tock Momentum and the Halloween: A Clockwork Darkness: Hawks, Subjectivity, Halloween

Mr. Sandman (Slight Return): Halloween II

The Tick Tock Initiation: Phantasm

Friday the 13th Killed my Childhood

Read More

Tick-Tock Momentum: PHANTASM (1979)

Tick-Tockality: (i.e. tick-tock momentum) The sense of dread created in a horror film through use of prolonged real time (or slower) narrative pacing, originally created in westerns by John Ford and Howard Hawks and used first in horror by Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton in The Leopard Man, and perfected in the early films of John Carpenter. The ideal tick-tockalism begins anywhere from 24 hours to the late afternoon before the climactic anticipatory moment that night, i.e. Halloween or Carrie's Prom. The desired effect is a sense of inescapable existential dread of what's coming at the onset of the darkness. (Named from the Silence of the Lambs quote, "Pity about poor Catherine, though. Tick-Tock")

Maybe you need to have been an impressionable, easily-spooked kid in the age of drive-in 70s-80s to resonate to the setting sun's weird power, the anticipation of scares, and of being able to say you'd seen it. Parents opening their coolers of beer and lawn chairs as the sun's last rays streaked away over head; shaky summaries of other horror movies whispered about by the swing set; the unsurmountable escape wall of white screen overhead, a magnet for the white of our eyes; the booming dim echo of the speakerboxes. A child's imagination can be more real, more vivid, than an adult's reality, especially if that child grows up before cell phones or VCRs. The films of the drive-in era seemed to understand this, to know their stories would be embellished a thousandfold as recess gossip, so the special effects needed only suggest things. We filled in the blanks and in the process merged them into our own nightmares. Such a movie was Phantasm; no one had seen it, but none of us could stop talking about how scary it was.

Ruscha gets it

Anyway, we had seen the trailer.


I mention this because prior to directing and writing Phantasm (1979), Don Coscarelli was shooting kid movies, like Kenny and Co, in which he showed a real knack for connecting with 70s-style sci fi fan reproabates -- the ones like me, who would have punched you in the face rather than admit they cried at E.T. 

Phantasm's genesis began when Don wanted to adapt Something Wicked This Way Comes but then Disney snagged the rights. So Coscarelli made his own tale about a tall strange visitor who comes to town and steals souls. Rated R as Phantasm may be, it's clearly a kid's nightmare, macabre as Burton or Roald Dahl, but with more genuine Grimm Brothers menace and garage lab goo and gore than either. It's Over the Edge meets It Came from Outer Space. Here children run, hide, and fire shotguns through the sun roof of their older brother's Barracuda, and wonder about where the adults are. The weird secrets of the other dimension and dead soul enslavement makes a fine metaphor for not just where people go when they die but where they work, the void they disappear into for most of the week, before they come back beaten and bowed low. We dread having to get a job out there in that mysterious void, the way an old person dreads death, a slow but inexorable escalator into the abyss. And in its way, death is no more or less permanent or terrifying in its uncertainty than the first day of employment.

In the Spielbergian make-over of children's horror films in the 80s, kids lost that edge of looming responsibility and being faced with inescapable due dates with destiny. But in the 70s we knew we weren't safe, and felt exposed to the dangers around us, but it made us sharp. All the joys of life were outdoors, ideally at night. When we had to sleep we clutched toy guns the way priests clutch crosses in the thick of an exorcism. Today's parents think any kid with a gun is going to cause a Columbine, anything too scary will give them nightmares. So fucking what if they do?! They should have nightmares! Kids are already scared, if they have any brains. Shit is scary out there. Spooky movies just remind them to stay on their guard, to not let the sameness of modern life trick them into slackening their grip.  Let the adults take the facade of death, the mausoleums and funerals, at face value, as kids we saw deeper, we noticed the little details, and we knew nothing was ever as safe as it seems.

Halloween (1978), which was still circling drive-ins as a second feature in '79, may have launched a thousand slasher film imitators, but few of them caught how to make a movie scary on this 'seeing deeper' tick-tock momentum aspect. They got the topography right--knives, teenagers, blood, masks--and never bothered to capture the 'deeper' vision --the inexorable pacing Carpenter mastered, i.e. the deeper perception of being fully in the moment, and playing eerie synthesizer music during a slowed down suburban idyll until the unease and anxiety of nightmares formed out of thin air.

In its fuzzy horror glory, Coscarelli's Phantasm's mythos is totally unified even its freeform reversals and misdirections. Once can connect it to Lovecraft as well more recent 'nonfiction' writers like David Icke, Nigel Kerner, who theorize that after death our newly separated souls might be intercepted by a demonic force before we reach the white light, and then used as fuel for UFOs, or ground up for experiments and recycling. Our souls could be picked over like the bloodless cattle mutilations. The main Phantasm bad guy (Angus Scrimm) known only as The Tall Man turns souls into weapons (the spiked, silver balls) and stores the crushed down bodies into kegs for easy shipping home to his dimension through a tuning fork gateway --the use of sound vibrations to transfer between dimensions is also legitimate weird theory, 'acoustic levitation' which ascribes the building of pyramids by using sound vibration to convert huge stones to weightless floating states. 

A great example of a real case near-death experience (NDE) that fits this bill pretty well can be found in Nick Redfern's Final Events. "(Paul) Garratt said that he was confronted by a never-ending, light blue, sandy landscape that was dominated by a writhing mass of an untold number of naked human beings, screaming in what sounded like torturous agony" the sky was filled with pulsing flying saucer crafts, he watched them stop above the people

"then bathed each and every one of them in a green, sickly glow.... small balls of light seemed to fly from the bodies of the people... which were then sucked up into the flying saucers."

"At this point, an eerie and deafening silence overcame the huge mass of people, who duly rose to their feet as one and collectively stumbled and shuffled in hundreds of thousands across the barren landscape--like in a George Romero zombie film--towards a large black-hole that now materialized in the distance." (99)

I don't know if Coscarelli has read up on NDEs or not; perhaps his vision originated in a zone of his unconscious where the dark (but subjectively interpreted), coupled to some direct film references, which to his credit Coscarelli doesn't deign to hide: the tall man's evil minions look like jawas (Star Wars was only three years old); the way darkness laps at the edges of the screen and the tick-tock score echo Halloween (the year before); an old lady fortune teller works one of those hand-in-the-box Dune fear-control tests on Mike. What Coscarelli does achieve all on his own is the way he removes any sense of inequality between waking and dreaming life: Mike's sudden wake-ups from nightmares don't carry the feeling of a cheap scare for no reason like they do in American Werewolf in London or Cat People (1982), for example. With Coscarelli, like Lovecraft, Lynch, or Bunuel, dreams are just as valid as the waking life, maybe even more 'true.' He's not just sticking this references in there to try and cover all his bases and provide weird trailer moments; Coscarelli's mythos is more paranormally cohesive than any of his predecessors' and more brave. They don't dare answer the big, final curtain question, the one children ask and adults never answer.

Coscarelli answers it, and he goes all the way.

Now, you don't need all that parapsychological theorizing to dig the mortal coil dread going on in the Phantasm series, in fact you can just dig the rapid aging of the cast, because the four main principles from the first film -- the kid, A. Michael Baldwin (as Mike, though he's played as older by a different actor in part 2, a decision probably made due to Baldwin's non-movie star face and the bigger budget allowing the hiring of James Le Gros in the role), Bill Thornbury as his older brother Jody, Reggie Bannister, and as the sinister tall man, Angus Scrimm -- all stick around for the subsequent installments, which were released over a 20 year period but within the narrative span only a few weeks or months. These actors don't ever appear in much else, so it's a shock to see what is supposed to be merely a few days or hours later within the overarching narrative take such a massive toll on their faces and body language. Myriad worry lines drain Reggie's Jeremy Piven-style charimsa until all that remains is a sad guy trying to get laid in a world full of yellow blood vomit hell cops. He looks beaten but still fixing up sheds to look like seduction zones, moseying up to strange women in ghost towns, and wearily quipping after kills foes of various sizes. Quips were stale by the later films, but Reggie didn't get that memo, but that's part of the series' charms, the Phantasm series never gets any memo.

Young Mike (top); Old Mike (bottom) - IV

Phantasm would be too wild and weird to truly scare like Halloween were it not for Coscarelli's absorption of Carpenter's method as opposed to his madness. They both are auteurs able to understand what 95% of horror filmmakers never do, how to create the sense of something being at stake, which most filmmakers presume means flashbacks, boring breakfasts with the cliche collection of family, etc. Coscarelli and Carpenter know that we need to see whole uninterrupted minutes elapse in their presence, to synchronize ourselves with their rhythms, rather than jumping around in eight different directions like so many horror movies today. No one would ever make a movie like Halloween now because so little actually happens. Carpenter and co-screenwriter Debra Hill spend a lot of time establishing what girl is picking up what guy to come over to whomever's house once it's free free of parents (with Hill taking the time to provide accurate, real life girl dialogue) at which time, checking in on the phone with each other-- that's the tick-tock momentum. Imagine how much less scary it would be if they showed other random people getting knocked off, stressing the blood and body count over character... then you'd have crap like Halloweens 2-21.

Maybe all children have to learn to be masochists just to survive, so small and helpless are they, and part of that may come from our ancient use of male initiation ceremonies to demarcate the line between manhood and boyziness: girls don't need one since nature has menstruation to traumatize them with, tribal ceremonies understood the psychological need for such trauma in boys as well. It only survives today in the form of, alas, hazing. But in the 70s our archaic need for initiation was gratified by the dread associated with our first R-rated movie. We who trembled at the coming drive-in night were unique in that respect: R-rated films didn't even exist when our parents were kids, and then video arrived during our teenage years, making it suddenly possible for us to rent Clockwork Orange and Dawn of the Dead and watch them over breakfast with our moms. Nowadays nothing can scare kids except absence.

But in the window right before then, just knowing  hard stuff was only out there, at theaters that we couldn't get into, launched a vertigo body drop dread in our spines.

The ad that scorched my 6 year-old mind

The most terrifying commercial ever for me in that regard was Torso (1973). The raspy male voice that used to hiss "Rated R...." after shocking 2-3 second snippets of scenes---like this sexy girl pleading and crawling through the mud in her nightgown while a masked killer advances on her with a hacksaw-- burned into my soul, and I'd get that sickly sexual twisting feeling, the type I only get now from looking over a dangerous ledge or plunging down a log flume.

But with VHS, that giddy terror gave way (for me at least) into depression from watching too many bloody horror movies instead of being outside playing, and from a kind of negative misogynistic osmosis, as well as a crushing disappointment that no amount of pan and scan TV room horror could ever compete with what we had imagined. And yet we had already seen too much and our faith in our fellow man and the feeling of being safe in our suburban houses at night. It had really begun, probably with renting A Clockwork Orange, and seeing the violent videos Alex sees, all raw and shocking yet dull and flat, they seemed like, real, as if a fake movie within a fictional film somehow created a double negative, and so these films played real. (the way they do with the snuff films found in the film, Vacancy [4])

So yeah, I attribute the rise in overprotective parental hysteria and nanny state fascism to the arrival of video rentals. We gained overexposure to imaginary danger at the expense of exposure to actual physical kind; in the process we also lost the rite of initiation. If the minute after hearing about some gruesome scene in a movie you can watch it on your phone in class, well, you don't have time to get scared, so there's nothing to have to use courage to overcome. It's just a lot of fake blood and acting. There's no initiatory fear and catharsis. You might be building a tolerance for violent images, but that's not going to help with the initiation need that's stifling your soul; there's no ceremony to mark your courage. The first one I saw? Outland (1981), at 14. We heard guys exploded from exposure to space sans suits, and that's where the dread came from. It was something to boast of.

Now of course anything even approaching some sort of hazing as a passage to becoming a man is considered a crime, but even the shockmeisters knew that engendering the fear of what was coming was more important than the thing itself. Generating fear helps us realize there was never nothing there to fear in the first place. Facing it, our older cooler friends feel obligated to be nice to us, to let us into the cool world. (see Dazed and Confused.) Running away from the fear stifles you and earns contempt. Seeing Mike and Jody roaring down the road in their '71 'Cuda (below) brings that back. This was a time when life was dangerous, and most importantly, so were we. (See also my analysis of the best movie about being a kid in that era, Over the Edge).

This. This you can trust. 

Awash in desolate suburban blight, dark, twisting woods, empty plains, fire-damaged barns, cobwebs trailing down from street signs, Phantasm leaves us with the feeling one has crossed somewhere back from banal day reality into unreal nightmare. These landscapes do exist, even more so now. I saw this desolation most in western Oregon. Every storefront along the road closed and boarded up and not a soul for miles and miles, yet you feel your car is being followed some tall shadow you try to tell yourself is only a tree in the dark of your rearview. Your tank's been on 'E' for an hour and when you see that white light in the distance you know it's a 24-hour Exxon station dropped from the sky by God's Jesus's own flying saucer. Every fellow traveler you meet smiles at you, for they too have survived the swallowed darkness of the empty expanses of highway and the feeling the world has ended and together you are grateful in a profound deep way only spooked lost travelers riding on empty through abandoned countryside know, or people leaving a very scary movie as one quivering mass edging towards their cars.

To get back to that frame of mind, where the setting sun strikes you with giddy drive-in terror and you long for the woodsman Exxon deliverer, first you have to surrender your 80s guns and your 90s disaffection and your 00s sincerity, back before VHS and Betamax and cable. Return to the time horror movies created far more dread with a single modulating synthesizer than any John Williams-ish overthought orchestra, when R-rated movie storytellers worked each other into frenzies of fear, describing events from films they'd seen or heard about, lingering over the traumatic scenes and embellishing on what they heard as needed for petrifying effect. (2) This is what Phantasm is all about, the fractured but impelling rantings of an imaginative child's mind as he hears the scraping of the branches on the window and tries to sleep; it comes to us as a half-dream hybrid myth, already re-spun by a telephone game's worth of spooky child imagination, it's fiction for the boy seeking initiation. It's fiction, yet it still feels truer than anything adulthood has to offer.

---------

NOTES:
1. The 'blanks' --such as the fate of the captured girls (Reggie just says he found them and released them but we never see it) were probably a result of drastic cuts made by Don himself. According to the trivia notes on imdb: "This film's original running time was more than three hours, but writer/ director Don Coscarelli decided that that was far too long for it to hold people's attention and made numerous cuts to the film. Some of the unused footage was located in the late 1990s and became the framework for Phantasm IV: Oblivion. The rest of the footage is believed to be lost. " -Now that'a a damn shame, even if the unused footage is brilliantly mixed into IV and does save it from the edge of crappiness.
2. I'm still finding movies I remember hearing about from other kids, like Five Million Years to Earth, movies I was sure were made up. 
4. See: 2004: Collateral Torture (Bright Lights After Dark)

Read More

Angels of Death: 10 Favorites

I love chicks that are truly crazy, not the faux bad-assedness of poseurs like Winona Ryder in Heathers (who express remorse for their murders as if mom and censor are waiting just off camera) but those who are truly liberated, in a way that terrifies even the bourgeois tenured profs who presume themselves beyond knee-jerk anti-feminist patriarchal reactions. It's payback time for the Inquisition with these devilish damsels on the screen.

People come to horror movies to see their deepest, unresolved, pre-empathic infantile anger expressed and cathartically exorcised. Bela Lugosi embodied this rage for my generation, the egomaniacal genius who scorned society and its unconscious banality appeared to us through the fuzzy UHF signal like an alien ruler. We rooted for him even unto the closing credit flames. In his honor I praise the chthonic bitchez in these films, for they stomp all over 'safe' characterizations and trust the audience not to start killing everyone the moment the film's over. They use their claws.

I only wish I could mention the great female killers from certain gialli, but that would be giving away the plots and I would never....

Yoko Mimimada

HOUSE

1977

I need to see this film about a dozen more times before I'll be able to write about it, but whatever... it's paisley psychedelic strangeness with incessant, nerve-grating piano melody stopping and starting until it becomes torture. Minimada plays demonic doppelganger auntie to a gaggle of schoolgirls who are all devoured by her deadly... house. She's old and in a wheelchair but as the girls are consumed she becomes younger and more empowered until in a final showdown she's a picture perfect soap commercial model. This film may be too out there even for an 'enhanced' audience, but is the kind of thing you can freak out people of all ages with.

If you need to come down afterwards, try AUDITION!

Sue Lyon

MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD 

1973

Three things I'm crazy for: nurses, Sue Lyon, and mercy killing; all three are wrapped up in this piece where Lyon is a homicidal nurse who kills patients so they don't have to spend their lives crippled, old, or boring. Meanwhile a bunch of douchebags with tacky helmets, whips, and dune buggys pull some of the old surprise party ultra-violence on random families who are usually watching Clockwork Orange-related programming. You get the impression this Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia really loves his Kubrick (Sue was, of course, Stanley's LOLITA). She's aged well and if doing cheap Italian horror movies to pay the bills was a common thing for American actresses of the era, she's younger than most all of them, and still hot, especially in white, and red.

The incredible Kimberly Lindbergs champions the film over at TCM's Movie Morlocks thus:

...by making Sue Lyon his muse, Eloy de la Iglesia hijacks Kubrick’s LOLITA and leaves the audience questioning their voyeuristic relationship with the cinema and its effect on our own sexual impulses. Eloy de la Iglesia‘s Lolita isn’t a fictional ideal of feminine beauty or a hapless victim of the male ego and Sue Lyon seems to get a kick out of exploiting her character. By the end of MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD it becomes apparent that Stanley Kubrick’s films have been thoroughly deconstructed and put back together in such an unusual way that Sue Lyon is able to completely redefine her celebrated ’60s role.

Priscilla Lawson

FLASH GORDON

1936

People remember the monsters and Flash's wrestling tights from the brilliant original 1936 serial but not everyone remembers that at the core of all the derring-do was a hot love quadrangle: Ming's kinky daughter, Princess Aura, lusts uninhibitedly after the earth man, who stays true to Dale (Jean Rogers), the long-suffering earth woman who is desired by Ming (and Prince Baron longs for Aura). Dale is often thrown into very revealing gowns and pawed by hawk men and the a crab-clawed dragon monster while Aura arches her wicked eyebrows and pulls strings behind her father's throne like the Fah Lo Suee of Mongo. It was Princess Aura I had the hots for as a kid and Lawson is pretty solid and awfully kinky. I guess it was okay as far as the code was concerned to lust uninhibitedly in a 1930s serial if you never get your man.  If you can see the whole serial, see it. If you can't, see the edited together feature SPACE SOLDIERS. Either way, keep your eye on Priscilla at all times.

Allison Hayes

ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU 

1958

The best parts of this film are not even the hilarious underwater fights (slow motion with a bubble machine and blurry filter to hide the fact it's all shot on dry land) but the scenes with Allison Hayes as the bitchy trophy wife of the rich fat cat behind the seafaring gold hunt in them thar voodoo islands. In case you forgot, Hayes is the 50 FOOT WOMAN and a honey for the ages, always looking like she just slithered off the cover of a 1930s pulp magazine. And she turns into a zombie, in this film, and the idiot non-zombie people just won't even... well, let me turn you over to Day of the Woman's Britney-Jade Colangelo, who notes that Hayes, sports quite possibly the GREATEST bra that man has ever known. The hottest moment is when Hayes talks her rich fatcat into letting her kiss the handsome hunk hero! Right in front of him! Fatcat even has to insist!!

Beatrice Dalle

TROUBLE EVERY DAY
2001

"TROUBLE fulfills the promise of CAT PEOPLE, which told of a race of humans who would turn into black leopards after making love and could turn human again only after taking a life. However in Paul Schrader's 1982 version these killings were kind of tepid, with the panther striking while the victim is lolling around in a post-coitus haze. None of that waiting around for Denis! The way Dalle continues to obliviously whisper and coo in her now dead lovers' ears for example, links to her a real cat, toying with her prey long after its dead. Such scenes are few and far between (a similar one was apparently edited from later cuts of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT), they make producers uncomfortable because they threaten the safety of their model of the cinemagoer as one already dead and presumed therefore impervious to attack, as if the image and the eye are tectonic plates and the idea of cinema is to promise contact yet prevent any actual buckling. Dalle's sexuality buckles it and triggers a simulacratic melt-down; the covetous eye is torn out in a fit of enjoyment that transcends all textual boundaries. "(cont. reading here)

 Mariclare Costello

LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH

1971

It's tough being a paranoid schizophrenic when everyone really is out to get you. This is what Jessica learns when she and her husband and some meathead move to an island off New England to get away from the big Apple's 70s crime. They find a squatter named Emily (Costello) living in their big manse, and are about to kick her out, but she's kind of cute and Meathead takes a shine to her. Jessica is just pumped that she didn't hallucinate Emily -- she really is there! And she plays the lute. And her picture is in an old frame in the attic dated in the 1800s. Uh oh... There's a really terrifying scene where Emily makes a pass at Jessica, and then kind of --- well, it's freaky, quiet, fucked up beyond rational thought, and awesome.

All the Ladies on the Isle

THE WICKER MAN 

2007

"Many critics label LaBute a misogynist but his remake of WICKER MAN allows him to portray plenty of very powerful, frightening, intelligent women going up against a coarse, unconscious, ineffectual male cop and that's the opposite of what a misogynist would do. A truly liberated, sexually aggressive, snarling female is one of the most terrifying creatures ever conceived of by - and I hesitate to say God because God is suddenly not even a "He" when they're around, and everything gets dark and scary and one's balls shrink and release hormones of queasy dread that hit us like an extra dose of gravity. And without the people of Summers' Isle kowtowing to his manly whims, Nic Cage's "A Child is Missing, damn you!" righteousness is revealed as the macho bullying it's always has been.  Cage here is like the sister's boorish boyfriend in REPULSION or the sleazy neighbor in CARNIVAL OF SOULS, only here he's outnumbered and roaring like an old pervert crushed to death under the headlights of a Russ Meyer supervixen. (Where the Wild Wicker Lieutenants Are, 1/7/10)

 Ruth Gordon

ROSEMARY'S BABY

1968

What Polanski dredges out of Ruth Gordon’s clown-cake make-upped old lady smile is an evil against which there is no rational defense if you've been socially conditioned --as a woman in the 20th century--to be nice and decent to friendly elderly neighbors. Since Minnie Castavet is old and perky and adorable there is no defense against her prying, manipulating, and ensnaring because according to the social doctrine old ladies must be obeyed while women Rosemary's age are treated like children too incompetent to know what's best for their own wombs.

Marki Bey

SUGAR HILL

1974

"It's great to be rooting for a murderous voodoo priestess and not have to worry she's going to develop a conscience or let love weaken her resolve for deadly reprisal-making via a series of comic book-style death traps involving zombie massages ("Treat me easy, easy,"), a severed chicken foot that hops around on a string (a peak AIP moment), voodoo dolls ("When the doll is enflamed you will pick up the knife and use it on yourself!"), leg cramps, and hungry pigs ("Hope they like white trash!"). When the 'good' guys are the zombies, the bad guys don't have a chance in hell... and I'm in psychotronic heaven."(9/9/10)

 Lesley Tapin

LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL

1973

Sweet Lila Lee (Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith) escapes her creepy preacher foster parent and catches a midnight bus to Spookville in this low budget and all the more eerie for it thriller. If you ever used to catch those bizarre, faded color, cheap puppet and bad dubbing-infused German and Swedish 'kid's film' K. Gordon Murray imported on TV or in the local matinees in the 60s-70s then the threadbare theatricality of LEMORA will be like remembering a childhood nightmare. There's some vague lesbian resonance between the evil Lemora and Rainbeux as Lemora introduces her to a lot of weird perverse blood-drinking style shit, and I cannot reveal the awesome ending!

 For another great women in horror top ten, check out this from last February's Women in Horror Month.

Read More

Bad Acid's Greatest part 2: The 70s Savagery Switchpoint

Every time I see a horror film with besieged campers or cowerers in closets as slashers hack away at Venetian blinds, I instinctively and fervently hope that these clingers to civilized trappings will work up the nerve to shed their veneers and get physical, to fight back against their assailants and not pule and snivel as they do so. Usually these snivelers eventually pick up a crowbar and fight back and pretty soon instead of seeing the victims react to scary noises we see the killer react to scary noises! The worm has turned! The hunter has become the hunted.

But how long until that 'switchpoint' in the 'good' character's de-evolution? How much endless whining and waiting for the cavalry must we endure before the fighting back can begin? Is this some kind of a metaphor or subtextual neo-con brainwashing or liberal artsy rationalization for lurid thrills, or what?

So I saw WRONG TURN (2003) a by-the-numbers hillbilly horrorshow with Middle Earth connotations (the scenery is beautifully photoshopped and one of the mutant inbred killers even looks a bit like the Gollum) and plenty of endearing character development. Or so somebody thought. Our handsome, straight toothed heroes run and cover a good deal of attractive West Virginia mountain country before they decide to stand up and slug it out with their mutant cannibal assailants, and at that point the picture changes to a out and out smack-down, replete with Eliza Dushku barb-wired to the bed while our square-jawed Desmond punches mutant latex with his bare knucks. Don't forget to steal the shotgun! Oops, they forgot. Too bad the editor can't just trust a shot to play out for more than half a second, and has to endlessly cut back and forth between a bunch of different fight scenes all going on at once, something that always cuts tension down to a guitar pick. D.W. Griffith would rise from his grave if he knew how inescapable crosscutting has become!

A good editor knows that it's much harder to edit within the real time of a single scene with multiple shots and perspectives--some of which may not match or otherwise suck--than it is to match one good shot in one scene right over to a shot from another scene and back again, a strategy that eliminates any need to match shots. Some might say that's pretty sloppy. But I say to err is human, to forgive divine. Right, Spats?


I took a long time seeing THE HILLS HAVE EYES remake because I despised the implied sexual subjugation in the poster art--(above) which I had to walk past to and from my train to work every day for a month or so.  It reminded me of the sleazy detective magazine covers from the 1960s-70s that have since disappeared but were genuinely misogynistic and disturbing (lots of photos of half-naked females in bondage, their eyes wide with genuine fear, a male hand with a knife at their throat, etc. For examples, take a deep breath, be over 18 and click here).

I remember the 1974 Wes Craven original HILLS from a midnight screening in the late 1980s and I remember it displaying a kind of contempt for violence in its manic-eyed freeze frame fade-out when the civilized father turns savage to defend his family with a hammer. It's a phony contempt; director Wes Craven displays it like a pretentious art student rationalizing his misogyny. If you show cathartic revenge that gets the audience cheering every slice and crunch, it's exploitation. But, if you then make the audience feel bad about it, it's art. Craven thinks such conetmpt shows he's cognizant of Vietnam when he makes a broken down camper suburban dad howl like a lunatic as he's bashing a mutant to death with a hammer! As they said to the Germans at Bastogne: Nuts.

We lost Vietnam because we were afraid to go all the way--as in insane, like Colonel Kurz. He went all the way. Never get out of the boat, absolutely goddamn right, unless you were going all the way. And going all the way--accessing the inner savage--is something every man must do occasionally, lest he get all soft and fearful like Tobey McGuire in SPIDERMAN or dear, dear Master Frodo. The kingdom gets weak and they have to send Willard upriver to seek the holy grail. Kurz would have impaled those hobbits on stakes and used them as tiger bait. As Mrs. Zombie said in THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, "it's all mental!"

And let's think for a minute of the simple cannibals who are just hunting for food and when all is said and done are truer capitalists and therefore more American than their soft suburban prey. I love this reach out to the mutant cannibal community from James Rocci (Cinematical):

The hill-dwelling radioactive mutant cannibal community has never – really – gotten a fair, nuanced portrayal in film; it's just the stereotypes you see in the movies coming out of Hollywood. ...

While the plight of the mutant cannibal community leaves me relatively unmoved, I do feel personally connected to this "switch" button point of which I speak, and the liberal need to condemn it as savage. When civilized trappings and fear -- the "waiting for mom or the cavalry to come" passivity in the face of danger -- finally disappears and is replaced by lunatic ferocity and animal cunning you actually become more mature, vs. remaining dependent on the police department like a little bitch. As a kid who grew up terrified of slashers in the slasher-filled  early 1980s (see my FRIDAY THE 13TH Blogathon entry), I always had knives and blunt instruments handy when I was alone in the house. My inner savage was ready, bro!

The trick with self-defense, I knew even then, is a swift offense. If someone comes at you with a whip, for example, don't strive to stay at exact cracking distance like all the simperers in horror cinema; if you run at them, close the distance, and get right up in their face, then a whip is useless. It's the same with crowbars, sticks, pipes and axes. Ever try to chop off a head with an axe when the person is two inches from your nose? Impossible, you need swinging room, yet what do these civilized victims do when confronted by a crazy killer with an axe? They run away or stand still at good swinging distance. No my friends, you need to run RIGHT AT THE KILLER! Then you kick him square in the nutz; then you cut off his thumbs. No thumbs = no weapons, no strangling, no threat. Break his kneecaps so he can't walk and then call the sheriff! If the sheriff is also an inbred cannibal, well, you know what you have to do.

On the other hand, if you'd rather cower away in the corner, you will just remind me of the NYU kid buying beer at my bodega the other night. This kid started crying like a little bitch when a cop confiscated his fake ID, which he was dumb enough to flash right while the cop as at the register!  "Call my dad! Talk to my dad! He'll tell you! He's a lawyer!" the kid screamed in fear, trying to shove his cell phone at the cop. Can you imagine? Yet that's what these slasher and cannibal movie victims do: they crawl to the phone or radio and plead and whine to the confused operator for help. They can't give coordinates where they are, or explain what's going on; they can only cry and moan and plead for the Big Mom in the sky to come and rescue them. (See my review of THE STRANGERS on Bright Lights for more of my A-list ranting on victim mentality). Honeys, Big momma ain't coming. Stop sniveling and pick up that crowbar! Our nation is doomed unless these kids realize they can't kill people for shit once the electricity cuts out and they can no longer play Xbox 7. They need to start practicing... now.

If I had more time I would clock the exact amount of crawling and screaming done by our sidetracked normies in all these movies, and how each movie handles the bridge between this wimpering and finally hacking back with a lusty howl. How much torture must be delivered before their inner Burt Reynolds shows up with his bow and arrow ala the original hillbilly rapist movie, DELIVERANCE (1972)?

Not everyone flips the switch. A lot of characters just stand there and cry and shake, and/or squeal like a pig until they're killed or rescued. This flummoxes any self-respecting killer since it's basically committing suicide because you're so afraid to die. It takes some of the fun away when they go so quietly. But the ones who fight back, how long does it take for them to transform, to shake off the dust and remember their hunter-killer roots? Half the movie? Can you imagine if you were bleeding to death in the street and rather than help you, your friend screamed and shook and went into shock at the sight of your blood? What good are friends like that, except, perhaps, as a pot roast for a needy family?

We all must learn to fight together, and to be kind and generous to our opponents, understanding that all battles are inner ones, and there is no death. We are all as actors in a flashy remake of C.H.U.D. Let us see beyond duality and false morality, let us be as Bruce Willis in PULP FICTION, picking up the samurai sword going back down into the basement. No matter what our disagreements, we can all come together when it comes to wreaking bloody vengeance on inbred yokels.


The bottom line is this, and it's something that LSD always illuminates: The true American is free of both civilization AND savagery, he can just as easily peel off someone's face as eat a peach --his is an America where the discordant blue and red state halves are finally aligned. I am American WARRIOR! Safety and civilization is hard won for you by an active military, home militia border patrols, cops and firemen and the coast guard. But when the shit hits the fan, those guys will all be busy battling the tentacled demons leaking out of the trans-dimensional rifts. You're going to have to battle the mutant cannibals of your township all on your own. Are you ready? Do you have pepper spray and a meat cleaver in your "go bag"? May I recommend a night of rural mutant cannibal movies to encourage just this sort of preparation? Zombie defense prep won't work: they're dead... they're all messed up. They can't hunt with bows and shotguns like our inbred cannibal brethren. After the apocalypse you'll want to seem tough so you can join the roving gang of mutant scavengers that initially accosts you. Service Equals Citizenship! But for now, when you see the cannibals coming, go for the whites of their eyes and don't stop swinging til all you see is red and your arm frozen in mid-blow behind rolling credits. If Wes Craven gives you any shit, tell him he's next. In the name of Kitty Genovese, he's next...

RELATED POSTS:

Collateral Torture: Vacancy
Tonight: On a very special episode of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT
The Brave One

Read More

Killing diese Kindern: TRICK 'R TREAT (2007)

With its ingeniously interlocked multiple story narrative and eliptical framework, TRICK-R-TREAT is the CRASH, or even PULP FICTION of horror films: Dylan Baker rocks his HAPPINESS cred as the sort of dad who packs razors into candy bars, then "does things" with the dead fat kid on the doorstep. His next-door neighbor is a hilariously game (and putty nosed) Brian Cox, who has to tangle with the crazy little demon child, Sam (seen on the posters), and that's not all: there's innocent virgin little Red Riding Hood Anna Paquin and her crazy buxom friends out looking to "score" while a vampire works his way towards them, and meanwhile a group of kids is headed off to the fog enshrouded quarry where a busload of Lechter-esque psycho-children did plummet years ago. It's all given the comic book framing and gorily ironic climaxes we've come to expect from horror anthology films, but a lot more besides, at times maybe even too much. The movie studios do many baffling things, but no worse in recent memory is their shelving of this dynamo Halloween insta-classic! Why did it get shelved? Probably because, um, they kill a lot of kids in it? Awww! HAW HAW!

I love anything that makes studio heads "uncomfortable" and slaughtering children in horror films is supposed to do just that. Meanwhile of course, torture adults for hours in tedious scenarios and the ratings board barely bothers to slap an R on you. Why are the SAW movies always so successful on Halloween? They have nothing to do with fall, as far as I know. It's because they have the field all to themselves, since the other studios are chumps. I've never actually seen any of the SAW movies, but I've been forced to endure their dispiriting trailers and soul-crushing subway posters. I remember when anti-porn activists would put up pictures of violent torture porn in front of their tables on the street and I always thought it was so horrific, it's like, great, children walking by can see this, and they can't really otherwise, so you crazy ladies are actually spreading the very thing you seek to condemn.

Meanwhile TRICK 'R TREAT is a life (and death) affirming gas with almost no torture porn, just lots of fun, crazy, Halloween-empowering spookshow ghoulshit! So what if it's a little overstuffed with elaborate pumpkins and set decor and adds up to less than the sum of its parts, and leaves the fate of a poor doggy all but forgotten? That last part does bug me, but you can't ever perfect everything to have.

I mean, let's face facts: a lot of anthology horror films suck, and why? In my opinion they don't invest much care on the sometimes lengthy set ups for the shock twist endings. In other words, they're not in the moment: they presume no one is paying attention to the character development and just waiting for the pay off, so why bother crafting good shots or decor or characters? TRICK 'R TREAT is a film where every moment counts. Writer-director Michael Dougherty (he wrote X-MEN 2) makes it the kind of thing that can turn you completely around on Halloween and horror films, the way THE WARRIORS can turn you around on urban grime!


The good news is that all this shelving and sitting on it has helped the film turn into something of a cause celebre with the geek circuit (it screened at a lot of horror and monster conventions), and apparently the DVD pre-sold well enough that a sequel is in the works, or at least running through Dougherty's mind.

So if you really wanted to love CREEPSHOW but just couldn't shake the feeling that it was all too trashy and predictable (aside from the "I want my cake, Bedelia!" opener), then ; take off your mask and lie down. Dougherty has a comfortable coffin all warmed up for you, and idling...

Read More