The Blackened Face of the Glory-Bound Golem: WONDER BAR (1934)

Playing like a midnight car accident between a banned entry in Warner's Gold Digger series and a sleazy Dostoevsky-ish existential comedy, Wonder Bar was one of the last films to sneak by the Joe Breen production code jackboot and it all but dares the censors to cross the line backwards in pursuit. Occurring almost in real time over one evening at the titular Parisian nightspot, owned and emceed by Al Wonder (Al Jolson), the movie aims for wry spin on the MGM formula of 'cavalcade of stars playing an array of types at a fancy hotel or night club' ala Grand Hotel, or Paramoun'ts  International House, but its way darker than either: murders go unpunished, trysts are planned but never executed and if there's no autogyro to lift you off the roof, well, just walk home as innocuously as you can. Nazism is in der Winde!

There are several interwoven stories and emotions too strange not to unweave and examine separately:

1. The chilling exhilaration of the Russian gambler who lost his fortune gambling the night before, so he's going to kill himself tonight. Clearly hoping someone will talk him out of it since he can't shut up about the ways he might do it, his merriment in the face of being broke nonetheless recalls Dostoevsky's famous line, "a real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion." As he gives away his watch and remaining moneys to the scantily-clad chorus girls, they don't seem too troubled about his suicide threats either, since if they took him seriously they might have to give his stuff back. And so the morality of the film slips willingly into the murk like a blackened commando with a knife in its teeth. One last stab at ambivalence before the code turned every chorine saint or savage.

2. The love quintanglement between the stars of the show-within-a-show, the ballroom dancing pair of 'the Gigolo' (this is how Jolson introduces him, as if there's one in every bar) played by Ricardo Cortez and his partner, played by Dolores Del Rio, and a whole slew of their former lovers, past, present, and future: rich married woman Kay Francis is after Cortez; smitten songwriter Dick Powell, and the club owner Al Wonder are both into Del Rio (Powell 'knew' her first) who is way to obsessive over Cortez. The way these people crawl and scrape shamelessly after each other is a little worrisome, and way too adult for the code to come. 

3.  Gold Digger regulars Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert as randy old duffers trying to score on the sly with two party girls, but their matronly spouses are in tow ("There out to be a law against bringing your wife to Paris," laments Guy). But the ladies too find their matches in younger, jewelry-hungry gigolos in the dreariest, stalest sub-plot of the evening. There's some amusingly smashed interplay of old pros Kibbee and Herbert, though.

4. Busby Berkeley's usually dazzling choreography seems somewhat flea-bitten this go-round, forced to rely heavily on angled mirrors and a spinning circular stage to create most of the effects. There's also whips, knives, and double entendres but what lingers most is how Berkeley brings us to the edge of anthropomorphism and its inverse - our eye is continually shifting from seeing his overhead patterns first as people and then as abstract patterns, then back again, in a way that's truly relevant to the film's uneasy sense of self-loathing and alienation. The cast's freaky 'otherness' is played up even as they are meant to be identifiable as certain types: the foolish rich wife, the Mexican firebrand, the hicks from Indiana, etc. There's no sense of connection or belonging here, just humanity slipping in and out abstraction.

5.  Al Jolson singing "Going to Heaven on Mule," in blackface.
Yikes, here we go...

Grinning and strutting like a spastic jackanapes through these offensive stereotype settings, Jolson more than overdoes it, cavorting and twisting his face into hideous leering grimaces. One wonders how this was ever popular, though Jolson does grow on you in a trainwreck nostalgia kind of way. Notes the Museum of Family History site:

Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, actors performing in blackface were more accepted by the general public, though Jolson was the first comedian to use blackface. He did this with a great deal of energy and spirit; he felt freer and more spontaneous behind the burnt cork than he ever did in 'whiteface.' As time went on, though others may have used burnt cork, it was obvious that no one could do blackface like Jolson.

In his book Dangerous Men, Mick LaSalle describes Jolson as the troll king of early sound film, the golem who segued between the handsome, effeminate lovers of the silents and the fast-talking toughs of the gangster boom. Jolson was neither lover nor tough; he was insecure and caught in a narcissistic downward spiral through the molasses air, as if being the first person to speak and sing on film had left him permanently self-conscious yet tickled to a childlike, near-Jerry Lewisian fit of jouissance over the attention: "In film after film, Jolson not only watches himself, he watches you watch him," notes LaSalle. He's a "borscht belt Pagliachi... a monster as masochistic as Chaney, but needier, most self-pitying, and, of course, louder." (18-19)

Now there are some who think two wrongs don't make a right, but this ground zero of racism has a train-wreck pull for others, maybe it's wrong to do so, but we seek reasons why we might excuse him. Does it help that Jolson was a big supporter of black entertainers and possibly felt a kinship with oppressed African Americans? A Jew who played up his own Jewishness, Jolson had to struggle with stereotypes himself, and both black and Jews had to constantly depict themselves as humble and naive to avoid racist ire. As if cementing the similarity, behold the above picture, so bizarre it almost seems culled from some Martian TV transmission. The archaic Yiddish characters on the newspaper providing an under-halo to the sunrise of loose straw from his hat, he's a blackface golem from an alternate universe. And the whole Green Pastures satire aspect is eerily soothing: the opiate promise of heading into the sunshine of eternal glory, just like the code had planned for us immediately following this last pre-code moment of a wanderin' in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

 Here's Jolson fan Glenn Kenny on the many questions surrounding Jolson's 'right' to blacken up:

The salient feature of the film, finally, is its ultimate musical number, the notorious "Going To Heaven On A Mule." A few scenes prior to this, the heady ethnic stew from which Jolson concocted his varied performing personae is underscored in a bit where he exchanged patter with "Russian count" Michael Dalmatoff before launching into a quite credible (that is, suitably schmaltzy) rendition of "Ochi chyornye" ("Dark Eyes"). For "Mule," Jolson's in full blackface, with overalls and a straw hat, talking to his little girl (a white child, also in blackface) of his dying intentions. What follows is a thoroughly outrageous parade of racial stereotypes and caricatures of the afterlife—an orchard from which pork chops hang from trees! giant watermelons! non-stop crap games! in all-singing, all-dancing glory, accompanied by one of Harry Warren's least infectious tunes... But in a way, the hands-down most bizarre image of the entire sequence is a weird double-joke on ethnic identity, which see's Jolson's blackfaced share-cropper getting a shoe-shine while engrossed in the Hebrew-language newspaper The Forward.

One of the comments on the post, from 'Karen':

And the part of the film that has always horrified me the most is just what you've emphasized: the moment that Jolson's grinning face rises over the edge of the Forvert, like the White Queen's face rising up nightmarishly over the edge of the soup tureen in the closing chapters of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Perhaps it's because I'm a Jew myself--or maybe just because I'm a human being--his expression of knowing exemption is about as heinous as it gets. As far as blackface goes, it's well-nigh impossible for a 21st-century viewer to have an adequate grasp of how objectionable it may or may not have been at the time, but that grin while reading the Yiddish news, putting paid to any sense of homage to the race he's aping, just seems like it could never have been anything but vile.

I like her comparison to the White Queen, yet Karen scratches out any notion of context, noting that the 'grin' puts paid to anything but vileness. On some level I can't agree, though of course she's right --we don't have an adequate grasp of contextual objection. However, for my money the  post-WWI Parisian setting of the film helps - for Paris became home to expat black jazz musicians for a reason: racism was largely absent there -- no Jim Crow-- and yet the spectacle of blackness, of difference, seemed heightened for an avant garde shock value in many stage productions popular there. The 'jungle music' aspect of, say, Duke Ellington, was played up in posters and set decor, or the exotica of Josephine Baker (left). And the connection of Jews and black musicians had always been vibrant and reciprocal. During the Nazi occupation 'Zionists' were suspected of underwriting jazz's hypnotic rhythms, as Screen Deco's Mathew C. Hoffman notees:

Jolson was a Russian Jew and knew something about discrimination and could draw a parallel between the suffering of blacks and his own people. He grew up in the minstrel tradition of vaudeville and used his blackface as a way of bringing black music to white audiences. It was also a way for him to immerse himself in the characterization. It’s been said Jolson used the technique as a metaphor for human suffering.

In an excellent piece on Django Reinhart in the 1940s, From the Barrelhouse quotes a tract on 'Nazifying Jazz' -

“Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit – so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc – as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl – so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.” -- Step 5 in Nazifing Jazz, as recalled in Josef Skvorecky’s Bass Saxophone

None of this forgives the litany of stereotypes, even to me who grew up gazing mistrustfully at the cover Little Black Sambo (on thick 78s I inherited from a relative) and watching blackface cartoons like Coal Black and the Sebbin Dwarfs on local television, even seeing Song of the South in the theater, and never thinking anything was wrong about it except that it was boring as fuck and I wanted to get on to Treasure of the Matacumbe, which came on after Song in a 1976 double feature revival, though that sucked too.

Perhaps abjectification precedes awareness, but it forgives nothing. More than anything now, minstrelry is our shame, not Jolson's or anyone else's, but an example of the White-Christian compulsion to smite or mock all difference, a need still prevalent underneath the skin of so much news rhetoric.

A word on Dolores Del Rio (above) as the dancer who has Jolson and Dick Powell mooning over her, but who loves only disinterested gigolo Ricardo Cortez, her beautiful but weirdly taut face creeps me out: the sunken skull eyes, tiny bump of a nose, razor cheekbones. She's like death incarnate... at least in this film.

In fact, and I hope the photo above bears me out, she's halfway to looking like Allida Valli in Les yeux sans visage (below). And the very fact that Jolson is still clinging to this hoary old Lon Chaney-style masochist cinema, where the ugly deformed performer (him) sacrifices himself so the plasticine dish can run away with the spoon shows a terminal example of self-directed racism that's an illuminating mirror into the self-hatred of one's own image as 'other' even as one clings to it like a life raft. In a way he'd be ideal as the evil plastic surgeon in visage... slowly reducing his love's face to a featureless taut skin skull...

This aspect, apologizing for one's unforgivable ethnicity and/or bad teeth or big nose or wrinkles or thin lips is mostly gone now. If someone wants surgery they have it, but we're intolerant of all hate crimes, even self-hate crimes...

Thus we need to watch the veiled racial hierarchy of whiteness with a grain of tolerance  in 1934, a decade or so before the founding of the State of Israel and 30 odd years before the death of Martin Luther King. Here we have whiter-than-white Dick Powell winning the Mexican beauty while the best Jolson's Russian Jewishness can do is eliminate Cortez's Latin lover and then step nobly aside, just as Del Rio would step into a volcano at the end of her 1932 break-out, Bird of Paradise (so Joel McRae could go back home to his white fiancee).

And the freak otherness doesn't begin to end there, for in addition to Del Rio's oddly skeletal features, there's Kay Francis at her most eerily caricature-like: her alabaster skin, triangle mouth and round fleshy head making her seem like 1930s Warner Brothers cartoon. I don't mean that as a jab either (I'm a huge Francis fan), but just trying to corral all the jarring elements of this extraordinarily bizarre melange, trying to nail down the amorphous wrongness floating through the film, the International House anti-matter, the feeling that the foundations of Hollywood personae are crumbling right and left as Breen's brown-shirt inquisitors are kicking down the door.

But it's all okay, all bizarro world substitutes are welcome, because it's Paris, in every sense of the word, and so there's a tolerance for aberration: we see a pair of men dancing, and Jolson making a bug-eyed effeminate exclamation of feigned surprise as he sees them,  (below), the way he might whistle at an older matron like she's still got it. Jolson is, above all, a caricature of his own self, running around from table to table his hands floating in front of him as if he's being lifted on a Nerf ball through the deep end of a pool. A user review on imdb, sums his character up best, as a cross between Rufus T. Firefly and an early blueprint for Bogart's Rick in CASABLANCA (he owns a club, he fixes everybody's problems, he's hopelessly in love with a woman (del Rio) who's attached to somebody else...) I would add a metatextual furtherance to his comparison--just replace Nazis with Joseph Breen and his Catholic Legions.

Tomorrow Breen marches into Warners, but for tonight, all these things that the code would put an end to are here at the Wonder Bar, assembled here as if by a mysterious blackmail letter. The most glaring even to the novice will be how Jolson gets away with covering up his lover's crime of passion by letting another man make good on his suicide threats, a bit of opportunist sleight-of-hand so slippery it's still shocking even for a pre-code. Was it someone's idea of a sick joke, the last one they'd be able to play for almost 30 years? Even the name of the bar, a play on the German word 'wunderbar' seems to foreshadow an end to what used to be mere innocent decadence--the Weimar era and the jazz age--and the arrival of corrupt, racist, sexist, colonialist  'morality' of the both the Nazis and Joseph Breen's Catholic Legion of "decency." Some joke. If you can take it, and like it, get this movie anyway you can't. And when we go back in time to kill Hitler, let's take out Breen too. In the meantime. Shall we run?

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"If only all of Rome had just one neck" - CALIGULA (1979) and Guccione's Goombah Grandiosity

If you were alive in 1979 maybe you remember the avalanche of seedy press for CALIGULA, Penthouse mogul Bob Guccione's rose garden funeral of sores: tales of the countless bored and abused extras; the rants of unfair treatment by inserted porn stars; furious British stage thespians; and writer Gore Vidal. It all trickled down into your local newspaper, which you read after your dad tossed it down by his feet, where you crouched reading the funnies and looking for bra ads. It seemed like a neo-pagan bacchanal was going on, drowning all concerned in flames of sin and aggravation.

Now that DVD, internet and--'choke'-- sobriety are here, we have a model for this situation -- CONTEMPT (1966): Guccione would be Jack Palance; Tinto Brass would be Fritz Lang; Gore Vidal would be Homer. But then you would need to stretch the shooting and reshooting schedule of the diegetic Odyssey to around two years, and add a lot of sensationalistic excess, far more lurid than Lang's topless mermaids. It was the sex and violence entwined that made CALIGULA stick out amidst the legion of past gaudy Roman spectacles of vile excess and pretentious overblown grandeur like SATYRICON and SIGN OF THE CROSS (and later PASSION OF THE CHRIST). It was trying to be genuinely dirty, not just titillating but unapologetically irredeemable --to capture the genuine decadent excesses of the time.  It carried a queasy anticipation that shockmeisters like Peter Greenaway and Michael Haneke would spend their lives trying to instill, only to fall back in the waves of pretentiousness so many critics mistake for art.

Playboy, for all its 'dirtiness,' couldn't really expand past Hef's limited-if-larger-than-most idea of sexuality; the magazine's idea of sexual content was frozen at the bawdy. But Guccione liked to smash taboos, his own sexual preferences be damned. If it turned him off, if it made him sick, well that was his problem, throw it in anyhow. Print the legend. That took guts! And guts like that can only come from Roma or Italian New York City. Oh if only there was someone other than Donald Trump (and the Grand Prospect Hall commercials, "we make-a your dreams come true!") to represent that kind of goombah grandiosity in today's world!

Let's set the scene: 70s New York City was not unlike the Rome of Nero, of Caligula, with the then-legendary Plato's Retreat, the then-beginning to boom rise of VHS rental, Giorgio Moroder, disco, glitter, cocaine, perms, shoulder pads, Sylvester Stallone, Travolta's chest hair, it all congealed into CALIGULA. Chances are it wouldn't even make it to our local theaters but we knew it had some sick, gaudy mojo working, beyond good and evil, beyond taste and vulgarity, into some ultra violent energy expenditure and grand guignol excess as a generator for black magic cine-alchemy.

Of course I wouldn't see it until eight years later or so, when I was reasonably bloated and debauched (from being in a rock band) myself. It was the wintry Halloween of 1988 in ancient Syracuse, where wind freezes the snot while it's still in your brain. My band was playing a Halloween party at some dismal frat house. The cold was in our bones no matter how many flat kegs we suckled, or windows we covered with plastic tarps, we were freezing down to our souls. We had to sharpen up, get mean, get psychedelic. So we rented a VHS camera and CALIGULA to you know, do some VCR-on-VCR butt-leg action, because cameras back then came attached to VHS tape recorders in strap on bags that you slung around your shoulder while you recorded, or trusted the equipment to some shaky friend to film your band for you.

Even in 1988, after years of wide XXX availability, CALIGULA had a rough reputation. Sick shit like that wasn't just floating around youtubes for all the world to slowly grow jaded via. It still had currency beyond merely making you depressed for all humanity and sick in the pit of your stomach; there was an extra, sexually-charged frisson to the old ultra-violence. None of us had seen it, but we knew CALIGULA had a big budget and real name actors in a historically accurate but soul disparaging world where somehow ancient Rome has neon lights and the entire world was like some end-of-the-night Studio 54 bathroom. As writes Cinema de Merde's CdM.Scott:

"...the story already includes a lot of sex, and to include all that sex, making the film disreputable porn, means that it can go in any direction, explore any topic, without having to tiptoe around it. And the result is a movie that maintains an excitement throughout, because we are acutely aware that ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN."

Dude! I totally remember feeling this watching the film for the first time

So we begin with a title telling us it’s Pagan Rome, 37-41 AD. We see Caligula and his sister Drusilla cavorting... He is called to see Tiberius, the current ruler and Caligua’s adoptive grandfather, played by Peter O’Toole. He’s all pale and his face has bloody sores, seriously such a horrifying figure I was really hoping he would die sooner than later, because his presence made me so uncomfortable. He forces Caligula to “do your dance, boy” which Caligula resists. Tiberius makes him do it, and it’s this highly-stylized military thing that you can tell he’s been doing since he was five and finds horribly humiliating. However, we see the first glimmers of Caligula’s character when he snaps into this almost psychotic wide-eyed smile, seems to turn his mind off, and throws himself into his performance with maniacal glee

 Dude, that's about as good a description of this film as I can get...

not only is it difficult to understand what’s going on and who all these characters are, but the whole alien world of Ancient Rome, which results in the pleasant moviewatching experience of truly having no idea what you’re going to see next.

That's right, bro... so anyway, the gig at the dismal frat house over, we come home and, lo and behold, it didn't record. We wasted the whole 3 hour stretch of our initial viewing for nothing; so we had to try again. It was painful enough the first time and we were too busy with pre-show jitters to pay close attention, but now... well.... and to make matters 'worse,' someone had relieved my nervous anxiety of playing in this crowded frathouse basement about five hours earlier with a chunk of a beer coaster that had been dipped in liquid acid, which had kicked my brain into lightshow nirvana in a BIG way right as we started playing Pink Floyd's "Echoes." I needed a roadie/keeper just to help me out of my rig at the end I just stood there, dumbfounded as my face melted onto the beer-soaked wooden plank stage and my girlfriend, in full lizard girl makeup, beckoned, hideously, the sweat and makeup congealing in swirls of muddy desire so terrible that even now in writing of it I cringe like a sailor in Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom."

So now dawn is coming up and our duping of CALIGULA is still slogging away, and I'm feeling guilty and scared of my girl upstairs in my room, beckoning even through her snores, her lizard makeup off, exposing her alabaster perfection (she was Italian-American, from Carmel, NY, the type with pale blue eyes and perfect white skin) and finally I see the infamous death wall scene...and Caligula throwing the tomato at his foe, who is buried with his little head waiting in the dirt like a single cabbage for the approaching blades. And Caligula's immortal line, "If only all of Rome had just one neck!"



I crawled up to sleep around dawn, with the girlfriend waiting, asleep but sexually hungry as always, even in sleep, her lips reaching up from the warm earth like a flower in search of the sun on a foggy day, but everything about her was too beautiful, her alabaster Roman skin and jet black hair now swathed in my deep red sheets in what looked like endless permutations of still-beating hearts. When I closed my eyes all I could see was bright bands of red, the heart patterns forming from rushing blood in my ears and the sounds of dozens of televised screaming executions echoing from tinnitus feedback and her yearning with every breath, her pulling me towards her, her big legs grinding me up like a sticky Venus fly trap snapping shut, its perfume not beguiling but freaking me out. I close my eyes and melt into her arms and there are these big mower blades coming for me, the wall of death... the blades, the black blood-stained earth, the red wall, the jeering, the light rain, the mist, if all of Rome had just one neck..

It's never stopped, that LSD-vision of death whilst wrapped in sleepy white arms and red sheets on a cold Sunday morning... it's my VERTIGO cliff ledge, my Joe Black chess game on the beach from which no Spassky goes unfunneled... it's there like the guardian at the gates of my coveted guest list hell. I don't want to go but there I am in line... and there that wall is... now it's even closer.

Because a week later, Max rented the 'other' edition. We apparently had got the wrong edition of CALIGULA, it had been re-edited and stuff added and other stuff removed and either way we hated it but it just... would... not stop. That "just one neck" line made it into our daily parlance to express nearly anything we hated or wished to devour --it summed up perfectly our LSD-addled desire to crush our enemies and hear da lamentations of der wimmen, to devour and encompass, to rule them all, or at least ourselves, or at least keep warm against the coming upstate NY winter, to reclaim some modicum of glorious and even arrogant power over our own lives, to not get old, and swollen, and engorged like a snake eating our own selves. It was too la--

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THE BIG CUBE (1969) - Lana Turner and the Unscrupulous Doser

Acid has long been considered a safe, healthy, happy, spiritually freeing drug  --at least by me in the late 1980s. But even then, as a mere sprat, I was conscientious and careful, ever aware of the mind-bending, never-ending roller coaster of terror that results from taking even a quarter-tab too much. This is not to mention the left-out feeling of boredom and missed opportunity that results from taking too little, which can lead to taking more before the first ones have kicked all the way in, bringing you from an enervating semi-glow to a terrifying descent in a flash.

A very, very powerful substance is our friend LSD: one drop can set your soul free to caper through inter-dimensional levels beyond time and space; two can make you god-like. Five drops and you better get sloppy drunk... fast --or, if no one can spare a Valium, you can always chug some Nyquil before the demons get you.

Imagine then, the danger, when sending someone to heaven or hell all depends on the whims of an unscrupulous doser! The difference between 1-3 or 4-6 drops from a dropper, dispensed at a crowded beatnik bar, when the person with the dropper is drunk, malicious, and mad at you for stealing his girl and knocking over his bong! He could send you to the psych ward just by squeezing a hair harder than usual.

Chakris advises his ant client on proper dosage

The CIA did some notorious experiments in that regard, and much clawing out of eyes and off of faces ensued. Even if you know what you're getting into (which the CIA test subject did not) you're liable to claw your way through your face before you make it to the ER and its waiting drip of sweet, sweet Thorazine.

Still, even the face-clawing demons can be 'an experience.' The equivalent of cutting or anorexia in my crowd, was, I remember, taking like half a sheet of blotter in a last ditch effort to break through the veil before the depression made you do something even more desperate (this being long before Prozac's popularity). Most who did this wound up hospitalized. Not me, though! I ended up watching Nightline on a goddamned crappy TV all night, no other channel tune-innable (we didn't have cable), trapped in a black and white nightmare hell.. oh god, I can't even think about it. Save me, Pamela Rogers!

Pamela Rogers (left) almost saves Lisa from being a stone drag 

A similar thing occurs with the maligned Roper, i.e. Rohipynol. Today it's stigmatized as 'the date rape drug,' in the context of--as assumed by the average anxious suburban parent--vicious frat boy parties. Yes, with too high a dosage it can knock you out and leave you to the mercy of horny misogynists, but if the dose is right it merely removes all inhibitions and hang-ups, while only mildly impairing memory and motor coordination. Starting an orgy without some in this day and age is all but unheard of.

At the same time, spiking anyone's drink with it (or anything else) without their consent should be a crime in and of itself. However, in small doses, taken intentionally, with a consensual partner, it can be rather liberating. A half a pill makes for a dynamite Halloween party; a whole pill, however, makes it suddenly three days later, and you check your phone - there's 30 angry messages from your boss.

All of which is a preface to the candy-colored opus of bargain basement glitz and 'now generation' posing known as THE BIG CUBE. An underrated camp classic from '69, year of Manson, and starring Lana Turner as a former Broadway star living the high life in a Mexico-L.A. hybrid with her new wealthy industrialist husband (Dan O'Herlihy) and his sheltered 'pure' stepdaughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg), who dresses like she's still 12 and heading to her first church social.

Lisa reacts not well to the new step-mom, and in a passive-aggressive moment of naivete even takes up with a smooth-talking med student played by George 'you came with your mouth / open' Chakris and his gang of former lovers, hairy clowns, and hipster pallies, including Bibi (Pamela Rogers). The blog by Captive Wild Woman (from whom I cribbed many of these screenshots) loves Pamela Rogers in this film, and I totally dig she digs it:

Saving it all from becoming a big snore-fest is Pamela Rodgers as Bibi... I could never convey the fantastic bubble-brained delivery she strives to deliver so expertly. I LOVE all scenes featuring Bibi and only wish the entire movie revolved around her. (more)

 Alas, Bibi is only on the periphery, as the story has places to go, and people to drive crazy. Chakris' med student status apparently means he has unlimited access to commercial grade LSD and, since he uses it for evil, he's a dangerous mix of Manson and a SHAMPOO-style gigolo. LSD wasn't even officially illegal until around '68 and was used all over for psychiatric treatments (with great effect, making its banning the true crime), so at the time of the film it was no harder to get than, say, 4-Loco. And when the dad conveniently dies in an off-camera yachting accident the stage is set for the unscrupulous doser and Lisa to drive the already shaken Lana over the edge via a massive LSD infusion into her bedside Valium bottle.

An interesting comparison can be made between this film and the AIP title ANGEL, ANGEL DOWN WE GO! (1968), which also concerns a sheltered heiress getting too involved with the now generation and letting a charismatic young cult leader type convince her to arrange the death of her rich parents (Jennifer Jones fills the fading trophy / absentee mom role in ANGEL) and let his gang move into her mansion. ANGEL kind of loses momentum by the time it decides to critique materialism; CUBE ends up going the self-reflexive meta-epiphany Freud route (the only way to 'cure' Lana of her "strange affliction" is to write a play about her boating accident so she can make peace with her drowned husband).

The moments with Lana on acid are freaky enough, but the really scary moment is when Chakris spikes the drink of a guy he's annoyed with at the club--a big brawling bearded guy--who freaks out, starts tearing up the joint and is thrown out on the street raving like a foam-mouthed, face-clawing lunatic. As someone whose been there I had a lot of sympathy for this clown, though he was awfully annoying he didn't deserve that. No one does. If you've been there, good lord, you know what I mean. As I said earlier, taking the right dosage can be like being lifted up the ladder of your own evolution, while too much is like having the ladder shoved down your throat while Hell's full roster of demons climb up from it and peel your skin off and every kid who ever hurt you in grade school materializes like accusatory ghosts to laugh at your extreme skinless nakedness.

Acid in CUBE is, unfortunately, employed almost purely as a weapon, but like firearms maybe these drugs are too dangerous to be left to criminals. Legal, it could be diluted to the point where overdose would prove a difficult task. In the twilight world of schedule-one substances, however, it's a risk in the best of times. So... know your dealer, stay away from sleazy gigolo med students, and err on the side of prudence til your batch's strength is tested. Or you could just say no, but don't you want to see what Hell looks like before, you know... you have to move there?

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