Greatest Acid Movies #18: THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964)

When it comes to seasonal horror movies, there are two kinds of creepy - the Jason Voorhees/zombie creepy and the Boris Karloff-Vincent Price creepy. The latter is what I prefer, for it comes with a sly wink that lets you know when the bodies are counted yours won't be one of them. Price and Karloff make the viewer an insider, a friend in the RICHARD III tradition of horror. The horror of Karloff and Price in other words, is inclusive. Part of this comes with possessing the theatrical "voice" of villainy. As I live near the the Lee Strasberg School of Acting (just north of Union Sq.) I'm daily reminded of its slogan: "We entered the theater on the wings of a dream." Price, by contrast, enters our dreams on the wings of the theater. He dispels nightmares by the force of mellifluent theatrical ham diction; an inherent giddiness in his velvet voice makes him seem always as if it's somebody's special birthday and a surprise party is imminent. 

Voice is everything in a Price film; the more he talks the less scary the film, but the more fun. Jason would lose a lot of his menace if he spoke; imagine him making dumb bon mots through his hockey mask and half the horror is lost. The silent treatment is scary, but it's a depressing kind of scary. With his faux- fiendish laugh Price really just pretends to be scary. He lets you in on the joke and in doing so eliminates "real" scariness, which is why his films are above all, delightful. The zombies of Romero and his imitators just eat you; unlike le gourmand Price, they don't give a shit how you taste. Nothing slows them down as they stagger and chomp. If you want to get Price off your scent, just toss him a piece of scenery; he'll gladly chew it in your stead.

In MASQUE especially, Price is the picture of an amazing party host. As the debauched Prince Prospero he's having a ball, albeit one with a guest list of gluttons, slavering toadies and ennui-ridden perverts. Being the only one with anything close to a genuine wit in the whole place (aside from Hop Toad), Prospero relies on his higher purpose--the serving of his dark master Satan--to keep him from getting depressed. Prospero might indulge himself with vice occasionally, but it's always for a point, a spiritual debasing as suits his dark lord's whims; his macabre jests indicate an aesthete beyond petty concerns of life and death as opposed to merely gratifying grisly whims and petty lusts (ala CALIGULA), which are embodied in the far more crass lord played by Patrick McGee (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE).

Of course, there's a hardened production code burden this Prospero must bear. For all his freedom, he can't show us any nudity or open wounds. And all McGee has to do is suggest there's "other things" to be done in the name of evil besides silky talk and he's basically marked for death. And what a death! When you find Hop Toad give him ten gold pieces as reward for his magnificent jest!


In short this is the movie that THE PARTY and THE WILD PARTY and THE WILD ANGELS (Corman, 1966) try to be. MASQUE's Prospero and ANGEL's Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda) actually have a lot in common: each is a charismatic natural leader (a stand-in for Corman himself?) forced to endure the uncouthness of their worshipful minions, bound to lead packs of dimwitted trogs who've mistaken their gluttonous earthly lusts for true freedom. Compare the hilariously disturbing scene wherein Prospero orders his guests to roll around on the floor (like the filthy animals they are) to the climax of ANGELS where the gang trashes a church in a drunken orgy of destruction. Heavenly's admonition to the priest, "We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man... and we wanna get loaded... and we wanna have a good time." is not dissimilar to Prospero's decrees, such as: "If a God of love and light ever did exist, He is long since dead. Someone... some...thing rules in his place."

We like Prospero the same way we like Heavenly Blues: we relish their graceful power and admire their lack of insecurity, their ability to be beyond good and evil rather than just spouting hipster credos to brave souls are, like us, caught between the dull conformity of good (Zzzz) and the banal destructiveness of evil (zzzz), aching for amusement, and too jaded to be satisfied with the gauche pleasures indulged in by their pack.

I say these things because I was the same way in my band. For me and some of us in the group, sex, drugs and rock and roll were a way to expand the mind and get loaded and not be hassled by the man. For a lot of our hairy fans it was a chance to get heheheh fucked up! Wooo! Mexican Mud! Yeah! In that sense, Prospero prefigures Timothy Leary, the acid generation, and the later 'e' generation. And thus MASQUE is one of the most legit psychedelic horror movies until THE TRIP! Do you doubt it? Can you not look at Corman's MASQUE and not think of some far away rave or acid test of your dreams?

Consider the Satanic initiation of Hazel Court in the film: desperate to regain Prospero's favor after the arrival of lovely Jane Asher, Court undergoes a private ceremony where she is "stabbed" by a series of shamanic figures from throughout the ages: there's an Egyptian, Japanese, African, and Russian shaman/ghost, all waving their scythes and knives over her prostrate immobile heaving buxom figure, distorted through sheet metal reflection and green tinting. With it's thumping Rite of Spring-y Les Baxter score (later ripped by John Williams -- see if you recognize it!), this scene should be familiar to anyone whose ever dropped hardcore psychedelics (or had a really bad fever) and had to undergo similar life/death blurring at the hands of "the threshold dwellers" before they could be free. And once you face those grinning demon dervishes and are ripped to shreds symbolically (but it sure feels real to you) then you are free...for awhile, anyway.

Similarly, anyone whose ever tried to have a cultivated evening of psychedelically enhanced dancing, talking and group sex only to have the vibe ruined by the late-inning arrival of pinks, townies, burnouts, jonesers and/or wallies will cheer when Patrick McGee's (left) beady-eyed little ballerina molester receives grisly retribution at the hands of Hop Toad (Skip Martin). And who can fail to notice how Charles Beaumont's clever screenplay casts the humble Christians of the village as dull whiners while Prospero remains ever-complex and witty? Like Richard III, Prospero may be "evil" but he's the one taking the trouble to invite you along and to keep the film you're watching full of interesting bits of business. That is, until death comes for him and he has to face the ultimate threshold dwellers all by himself, covered in red paint and forced to participate in modern expressionist dance!

If you still doubt the lysergic glory of this movie, remember three things: 1. It's got one of the best scores ever from Les Baxter / 2. It's genuine Poe - which means you can smell the absinthe from across the sea of time / 3) Nicholas Roeg does the cinematography (lots of great camera movement); and 4) Jane Asher was once engaged to Paul McCartney.

Asher is pretty good as the girl who feels her morality gradually crumble in the thrall of Prospero's seduction strategies. In real life, she broke off her and Paul's engagement when she realized Prospero, I mean Paul, was way too much of a libertine. She wanted something more old-fashioned and monogamous. Somehow it's very apropo to the film, don't you think? As she says early on, "I have no learning!"

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The Great Acid Movies #30: TRACK 29 (1988)

Nicholas Roeg is a far-out dude, and TRACK 29 was so far out that few, apparently, were hearty enough to be able to get on board before its train left the station. For my hippie house it was lucky enough to show up at the end of a 6-hour tape that saw heavy rotation (Persona - Night of the Living Dead- Track 29) and we ended up watching it dozens more times than we normally would have, just because we were unable to change the channel or press "stop." Sheer coincidence? Not where TRACK 29 is concerned.

The story follows an alcoholic pillhead housewife played by Theresa Russell. Her husband (Christopher Lloyd) is a doctor having an affair with his nurse (Sandra Bernhard) and ignores her. His home time is spent obsessing over a sprawling electric train set that winds through the whole upstairs. Russell finds her own obsession when she meets Gary Oldman at a roadside dinner; he acts as if he's her long lost son given up for adoption and for years he's been tracking her down. Only she never had, lost or gave up a son, she had an abortion, maybe... who really knows? It's that kind of movie, and in lesser hands it would be a mess of irritating Sundance quirks. Here it's a foggy indictment of the middle class and a meditation on the thin line between motherhood and cougardom, and a tragic tale of incest and redemption, or just a big mess, or something else altogether, depending on the viewer and their frame of mind.

There's been few post-1970s films with the guts to really, really take it on a limb -- not the quirky Diablo Cody kind of "faux-limb"-- I mean fifth martini of the morning, the milkman disappeared into your carpet, you need to find your keys because you left something... burning... somewhere and the TV is giving you secret messages kind of limb... the kind way high on the tree and too flexible to merely break off and fall, that would be too easy. It's the forced to endure a life of constant waving in the breeze, with all the drugs you can get your hands on and a spouse having an affair with Sandra Bernhardt kind of limb, and Theresa Russell rides it like a hurricane. The TV really does talk to her, in that background subconscious kind of way only Roeg and Alex Cox have ever got just right (as we'll soon see when Great Acid Movies continues after this commercial).

To "get" this movie, qualified doctors recommend you take a bunch of acid then when really freaked out, start drinking yourself back to normal, keep drinking for three straight days and then, on the second day of calling in sick from work, put this on while you putter about the house in the morning after not sleeping, with your tumbler of gin and juice and three cigarettes going in different rooms, robe splayed open, burns and bruises you don't know what from. Then and only then... maybe.

The dosed goodness here really hinges Gary Oldman's ability to be both real and imaginary at the same time, all the time, a mix of returned repressed moma you had me howl of primal John Lennon "Mother" on the soundtrack scream therapy via David Cronenberg's THE BROOD, a psychoplasmic-alcoholic miasma of sexual frustration and resentment against her closed-off train fanatic doctor husband manifesting in a Satanic visitation. Oldman manages to embody all this stuff at once and still be sexually potent (capturing the same woozy sense of intimacy-enhanced altered reality he and Ryder pulled off in the otherwise mega-crappy Coppola's Dracula). What a man! What an actor!



DISCLAIMER: Neither the author nor most qualified doctors actually recommend you take a bunch of acid then when really freaked out, start drinking yourself back to normal, keep drinking for three straight days and then, on the second day of calling in sick from work, etc. Sic transit gloria, bitchez!

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Great Acid Movies #2: PERFORMANCE (1968)

In Marianne Faithfull's highly recommended autobiography, she discusses the germination (in 1968) of the film PERFORMANCE (directed by Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell), recounting a particularly LSD-drenched evening with Mick, James Fox and Fox's androgynous girlfriend, Andee:

The carpets undulated in little ripples of apricot and ivory. Andee and I were slave girls of the great pharaoh languidly reclining on the royal barge [Mick's huge bed]. The pharaoh was fondling James. (It was going to be a very tactile trip...)

Later she describes vibrating beyond sex and duality in what might be described in lesser hands as 'tripping your face off' -- for what are faces if not masks?

I was in love with everybody. Actually, I was everybody... it was such a blissful state that you could easily fall in love with a chair, with your own shoes. What an absurd thought, someone belonging to someone else! God, and to think they started the Trojan War over stupidity such as that!

Sooner or later something was going to take place on this bed and tonight was evidently going to be the night. It was raison d'etre for the bed --- if Mick couldn't get Keith into bed, this (James) was the next best thing... No one knew about our little evening, of course, not a soul. But somewhere out in the drab, damp London night, the chief Dracula of this scene, director Donald Cammell, opened up his window and snatched it out of the air....

By which she means, PERFORMANCE --  a movie that was then shelved for two years (released in 1970) and is still way, way ahead of its time.

it was a "seething cauldron of diabolical ingredients: drugs, sexual relationships, role reversals, art and life all whipped together in a bitches' brew (147-8)

The cast of the film mirrored this menage a quatre to a T: Faithfull's bosom chum Anita Pallenberg played her part; the adrogynous Michele Breton played James Fox's androgynous real-life girlfriend, Andee. James Fox and Mick Jagger played more or less themselves -- chameleons.. Cammell-ions, if you will.

Some of the opening half of PERFORMANCE gets a little tedious, with all the thick gangster slang, crosscuts, and seething leatherboy power plays. Until we get to Mick and Anita's house, the beauty is in short supply, and what there is gets uglied up pretty fast, such as a long scene of Chaz (Fox) pouring acid (wrong kind!) on a Rolls Royce and shaving the chauffeur's head, with Roeg cutting back and forth to Parliament in session. Whoa! But cross cutting like that is annoying sometimes, especially now when it's been done to death and even ruined a potentially great James Bond movie (QUANTUM OF SOLACE). It was new enough then, one supposes, to be cutting edge, but it's still overly jarring--a cheap way to cover mismatched shots rather than to effectively convey any sort of "statement" (as in, wow, parliament is just gangsters in wigs! Who'd a thunk it?)


The film hits its high "now its kicking in!" moment about 1/3 of the way through, when Turner (Mick) calls Chaz (Fox) up from his basement room, planning to kick the bugger out. Chaz is desperate to stay, and Turner is artistically blocked enough to feel him out like a character study, or just too f*cked up to figure out how to get rid of him. (If you've ever had to kick a jonesing townie out of your hippie house, or vice versa, while tripping on acid, you'll relate.) As Turner tries different weird passive-aggressive intimidation tactics, Chaz defends himself with feigned stupidity and music hall clownery. Whatever Chaz does in his defense, Turner may not buy it, but he files it into his own bag of tricks. He decides to keep him in a kind of jaded rock star "slumming" way, as when Joe Buck and Ratzo get invited to the psychedelic party in MIDNIGHT COWBOY. 

Chaz is initially so clueless about the current entertainment world that he bills himself as a juggler--which is a very easy lie to get caught in (if you can't juggle, which he certainly can't). From there Anita decides to feed Chaz psychedelic mushrooms and soon he's hallucinating into a table ("I'll buy it from you!") and Turner and Anita start teasing the lad, breaking down his psyche, stripping off the learned layers of rude boyishness, dolling him up in a hippy wig and various flashy Carnaby Street outfits, and in the end he shacks up with Breton, finally opening up and resembling a real person. And the peak keeps climbing and overflowing all the way to the tragic and confusing ending. I read an interview with Cammell where he talks about the shot of the limo driving away suddenly turning and being in New York City! But I didn't see New York, man. So what's up with the ending?

Flaws don't matter with a film as subversively noble as this one. I quoted Faithfull at length above because I value her openness and clarity on drugs and the shifting locus of perception and subjectivity that is required to be truly that free. It isn't just "LSD talk" or "perversion" or "oooh ooooh Mick wanted to sleep with Keith." It's deeper, man, a scissor slash at the very fabric of our society, a challenge not just to the whole idea of "ownership" in sexuality and set gender identity but to the notion of identity in and of itself. In the trysts at play on both sides of the mirror--Faithfull's encounter with Fox and Jagger and Co., and the film version of same, wherein Faithfull swaps places with her best friend Anita Pallenberg.

Anita herself is already a mirror twin of a Stone - the dearly departed Brian Jones (see their matching mouths above left), elaborating the whole strange psycho-sexual link with Mick who at times switches places with Breton (who has Mick-length hair and a similarly skinny, androgynous body). It can be read as a call for everyone to be openly bisexual and loose-masked. But it's even more than that... it blows the lid off all notions of personae, racing clear past mere granolification and into the dark recesses of the void beyond identity and duality, the realm of madness, "the only performance that really makes it".

Bergman had tread into this realm with PERSONA (1966) and HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968), but no one took it as deep and clear-eyed druggy as PERFORMANCE. Bergman approached it from a more Nordically removed, intellectual angle (though I'm sure he at least 'dabbled'), while Cammell and Co. plunged headfirst into the madness, and never fully returned (Fox, they say, took years to recover, Breton never made another film, Cammell's career was destroyed, Mick was traumatized, Keith was furious, and so on.)

Jack Nitzsche's score is worth getting on CD even if you also get the DVD, which you must. This is a music movie and even contains what may be the first MTV-ready video (MTV from Hell), for "Memo from Turner." In that photo below you can see how Jagger taps the vein of homoerotic sadism that runs under the "chip chip cheerio" surface of British Imperialism and then trickles down to the Harry Flowers underclasses. It would make a damned good triple bill with DELIVERANCE and GUNGA DIN!


Lastly, there's Mick himself as Turner. Always an interesting screen presence, here Mick relishes the chance to play a darker, more genuinely Satanic version of himself. According to Faithfull, Jagger really wasn't into Satanism and black magic per se, he just liked to pose in the clothes and do shamanic gyrations. Under the warlock-ish spell of Cammell however, Jagger lets loose into some terrifying and funny places. At one point just shaking a stick to one of Jack ("The Lonely Surfer") Nitzsche's instrumental tracks (which Turner is supposed to have written), you get a sense of how truly sublime and mind-altering Mick's snake charmer dancing is. Later he even plays guitar and sings Robert Johnson's "Come on in my Kitchen," and if you never understood what Johnson's blues had to do with the devil, now you know. Mick may not be the devil, but he's a hell of a good recruiting officer. There's got to be some sinister reason he and Keith are still alive, kicking, and even in their withered shells, super sexy.

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