Wronger than the Storm: SHARKNADO (2013), THE REEF (2010)

November.

If the 12 month cycle was The Island of Lost Souls, November would be the house of pain. Darkness's early onset and the hushed chill of dying leaves rustling around the street like packs of shuffling Bed Stuy crackheads; you absorb their shoulder ache withdrawal and the cold in their tissue box-clad toes; the New York marathon ends on a cold Sunday evening as your wobbly friends in their reflecting mylar disposable ponchos shine against the foggy grey afternoon. Going out to a bar, sitting at a long table of celebrants with pitchers and drams of Wild Turkey, none of which you can have as you're on the wagon but you know one big slug and all that ache and misery would melt into an amber glow. Daylight savings has already begun; suddenly the couch is extra cozy nd every fibre of your being says "let's not go out tonight. Or this weekend. Or ever. Goodbye." With each missed party, another nail in the social coffin. But are you trembling? No. Why? SHARKNADO.

Apparently it was all the rage in "twitterverse" but I saw it later, on Netflix. After work. Alone. I'm not going to pretend I was in on its "trending." But I will confess I needed it. Didn't want no boring bits or glum nonsense. Lots of Brooklyn stress, the type no runner's high can allay, only feeling warm and dry while watching Los Angeles get flooded with CGI sharks, in what feels almost like real time, snapping up spoiled Beverly Hills brats and swimming along the freeway or raining from the sky with a rare-for-Syfy propulsive energy.

What else do you need to say? November. The bitterest, crushingest month demands a city fall in totem, we watch it drown in sharks the way Barleycorn huskers watch their effigies burn and family obligations rise like a prematurely buried Usher to wrest even the highest of kites back down to the beige carpets of a vacuumed earth, and football on TV, and turkey and boiling rutabaga condensation but for now darkness creeps up towards the end of lunch time and by the walk home you're snared in the trawling net of cold autumnal night.  Relationships crumble, jobs melt away, the windows are shuttered, the air conditioner taken hurriedly from the window... like a burglar. (imagine Henry Fonda in LADY EVE saying that last line).

The point is, SHARKNADO comes along, and a ferris wheel rolls into the side of a four story parking garage, a cathartic "Los Angeles thing"), Charlton Heston might drag that ferris wheel roll out to three hours, but this film rushes along like an incoming wave that never recedes. Sharks in the bar, sharks in the traffic jam, "it's like old faithful!" - "We're gonna need faith to get through that." A douchebag boyfriend of the ex who says "Even if it is the storm of the century, BEverly Hill's rescue services are second to none!" before he sees a shark in the swimming pool and then a wave crashes through and his heads bit off. If you played the game where you had to be halfway up the stairs to avoid getting eaten by a shark since the water level is rising in your kid-magination, then yes! Yes! YES! The leader of the survivors, Finn, is a typical bleeding heart L.A.-er who has to stop to help everyone, even school buses that look empty as you pass. "This is your problem, Finn!" and we kind of agree, but then Boom!

More points for trying. What a man. The real rooting interest is in his barmaid who wants to be more but he's standoffish, the loyal hardscrabble Nova (Cassie Scerbo) who spends the bulk of the movie toting a shotgun and being like "Sharks.... why did it have to be sharks" and later has her own Quint on the USS Indianapolis yarn of how she got that sexy" (but occasionally the latex flakes off) thigh scar. Sharks fly in the wind but there are no other fish nor even a shred of seaweed, and best of all, this apocalypse of sharkiness seems to follow these guys alone -- other cars continue to drive by, ignorant that the Hollywood sign is down to " Hol  o d". The bloody water gets a menstrual blood reference. And the biggest disaster of all, cell phone reception is gone. Oh, LA. Would it be half as funny anywhere else? The best aspect is this "half end of the world" weirdness -- car rental agencies are still in business, cops are cordoning off areas of downtown for no particular reason. There's no reason to panic unless you've been attacked, but meanwhile half a block down they're still waiting in line at the liquor store.

There's been a ton of similar bad films from the new AIP, the Syfy-Asylum food chain, with pay channel youtube the new independent drive-in. The films nod vaguely towards third generation Italian ripoffs of Jaws' rip-offs, which in turn reach back through cocktopus tentacles deep up into the era of the 50s bug movie. Most of them suck. Surprisingly not SHARKNADO. It's like it overheard every excited imagination of kids hanging out on the beach in 1974-78, imagining sharks attacking them even on the beach, or the highway, or flying out of the sky... and the Asylum folks said if we're going to actually try and make one of these titles halfway decent, let it be SHARKNADO. And let Tara Reid stand as a lesson against too much tanning and peroxide. Yea.

 Face it, we all love Shark Week for the name, those hard K's are so badass. It's like a running joke, "but I can't go to your parents for the weekend, it'll cut into shark week!" It it was called Whale Week, who would care? L's are never funny. And it's not just that sharks are badass killers, it's that all these decades later and we're still afraid of the water. We can project our darkest unconscious fears right into the murky dark, the ocean takes it all. Soaks it all up, like a combination stress pillow and life jacket around your albatross neck, November.

Netlfix told me to watch THE REEF next, so I did. Hmmm not as fun. Maybe it's something in their accents and cheery disposition but it's hard to distance oneself from an Aussie in distress as easily as it is to laugh at a Los Angelysean. The money shots in THE REEF are not the attacks so much as the sight of great whites slowly materializing out of the crystal blue below the surface. Like a distant rider in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, they circle and you can't tell if they see you or not, their dead eyes betray no sudden interest. They just orbit lazily, then Bam! But there's only so many times you can do that and have the same groovy effect. After awhile all you have is a lot of anxiety even if you're glad to be relatively dry.

The other problem is the sheer stupidity of the outdoorsman boat dude. Why if you're sailing in a really remote area wouldn't you have some kind of radio or distress signal? Or goddamned lifejackets!  Australia is crawling with sharks, so wouldn't you have shark repellent? Life vests!! Why if you are all in the water and completely vulnerable would you swim towards the friend of yours being eaten? What are you going to do to help?

I doubt even SHARKNADO would argue that THE REEF is a better film quality-wise. But aside from the stark natural beauty scenery, it's a wee bit of a bummer, with wayyyyy too much acting. Do we see shark movies to get bummed out? No, SHARKNADO understands this. Your actors need to be either good enough to understand that too much screaming and hyperventilating in irrational panic can sink a shark film, but just the right amount of ballsy courage (ala the awesome Liam Neeson in THE GREY) can turn a grim situation into something like Howard Hawks.. or they just have to be bad actors, but game for a good time. The Aussies have a great advantage when it comes to monster movies as their country is lousy with great white sharks and giant crocodiles. There's a baller Aussie croc film called ROGUE (2007) with the new queen of B-movie monsterdom, Rhada Mitchell, for example, that works a similar territory and is better. Based on a true story, in the end REEF is just blue and screaming. SHARKNADO, on the other hand, is made for you and me.

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Thurs. the Looking Glass: NIGHT OF THE COMET, LIQUID SKY + Mary Woronov

INTRO:

Thurs. the Looking Glass: a new series covering 1980s science fiction and horror films which may have crept through the myriad mirror mazes of time and eluded deserving viewers. Many are being rediscovered now, thanks in large part to the stunning work of Shout Factory's new Scream! offshoot (see my praise piece on Bright Lights) which has been giving these half-forgotten treasures snazzy hand-painted new covers and the kind of film-specific attention to detail only a fan could bring, conceive, and appreciate. Scream Factory, we hail thee.

Preface: To be a teenager in the 1980s was a terrible nightmare of dwindling freedom and choking sameness. We started out the decade as children running wild, puffing our Winston Lights and Marlboro Reds at the designated junior high school smoking area, engaging in unprotected everything, wiling away the hours at Spaceport or just driving around in our inherited Ford Mavericks looking for empty parking lots to cry or try to have sex in, or talk seriously about our relationships. We got busted by over-eager cops for so much as drinking a beer in our own backyard. Someone we know got busted for drugs, even. Metal heads only told us he'd laced the joint with PCP until it was too late to say no. We wouldn't anyway, fuck Nancy Reagan. Watching our freedoms dwindle one by one in the name the angry distraught mothers of MADD, and etc. There was nothing to do but go to the mall... again.

1982 ad for Montgomeryville PA drive-in, where I saw too much. 

But we had the movies. Horror and science fiction films in the 80s didn't have to shell out zillions to even break even. They could launch a few local TV spots and just ease on into one independently-owned theater or all-night triple feature drive-in, slowly moving down in font size on the marquee as other titles rolled in. Enough oddball films had become huge hits-- Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, Road Warrior, Conan, Halloween --that producers were willing to roll the dice. Some we didn't like then but love now and vice versa. Looking back through the Thurs. looking glass, they're of different value according to their facets, but all are gems.

What's most to love is that there was no CGI in the 1980s: no rules, no format. Compare that to now, where everything is just the same old zombies and torture chambers, and wince for today's lost teenagers - who never have to leave their rooms to see things that would turn our aged blood cold.

NIGHT OF THE COMET

1984 - ***1/2

One of the stealth 80s heroines, Catherine Mary Stewart (top) looks like a tougher teen version of Linda Hamilton, and plays a total 80s nerd dream girl who works at a local theater, dominates the high score list at the lobby Galaga-imitation, eats Twizzlers for breakfast, and sleeps with the projectionist more out of boredom and not wanting to go home and deal with her stepmom's comet party, and kicks ass and shoots straight thanks to a Special Ops father who taught her and her sister self defense before heading off to deep tactical cover in Nicaragua. It doesn't. Apocalypse occurs. And the survivors are the ones who for some reason didn't bother seeing the comet; who missed the show, and kept safe behind metal walls (like a projection room). The partially exposed are devolving into homicidal mutants and/or Omega Man style crumbling vampire zombies, stock boys turned new wave machine gun killers, and a cadre of underground bunker scientists racing for a cure.

The empty LA orange and red skies and streets (since movies like this usually steal shots at dawn) have a mysterious, lonesome; a few zombies and evil scientists putter around (this is not a film that can afford zombie crowd shots). But there's cozy use of an automated radio station (probably the real sound studio where the overdubs were done), the local theater, lots of 80s neon. Eating Raoul's Mary Woronov is a good scientist and Robert Beltran a truck driver. Beltran gets top billing credits but it's clearly Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney who carry the weight as the sisters, displaying a believable rapport that includes cool banter, rivalry, shared laughter, commiseration, sororal support, petty bickering, and Mac 10 target practice.

As the little sister, Maroney shreds every line wavering from girly cheerleader one minute, telling off the stepmom the next, realizing slowly and believably the world's over, and coming to terms with grief over her dead friends and blown possible lover opportunities, yet still able to rock an amok consumer post-apocalyptic department store montage set to "Girls just want to have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper. But hey, it had just come out the year before, and shopping montages set to it did not yet exist.

Unfortunately for us, that montage has become inescapable while super cool and self-reliant girls like these are almost impossible to find in any film, Hollywood or other. They can have a bubbly sisterly reunion deep in an evil scientist bunker and never take their guns off their prisoners or let down their guard; they're emotional and sometimes frivolous without being flighty or whimpering. They're like Hawks heroines as teenagers in the 80s: Maroney the Martha Vickers /Marilyn Monroe type, Stewart the Lauren Bacall/Jane Russell. They'll steal your gun, knock you off the high score list, jack your whip and kick you in the nuts if you sass back, but if you're cool...

The weirdest part of the film is that nowhere in the credits is there a sign of Paul Bartel or Penelope Spheeris or Joe Dante or Alan Arkush, all of whom worked for Corman and inherited his flair for feminist but sexy dialogue, racial equality, beatnik wit, and knack for conveying their films are part of a larger film world, almost like connectors between other, bigger-budgeted films  (i.e. Cameron's Terminator was what connected Blade Runner to Halloween). If no Corman or Bartel connection, why are there two leads from Eating Raoul, and a conspicuous movie poster for Death Race 2000 on the theater door?

Oh well, the film has a genial mellowness is all its own, or writer-director Thom E. Eberhardt's, or maybe the cast's. Before this film Eberhart only did one film, Sole Survivor which prefigures the Final Destination films by 20 years with the same plot (I hear), and afterwards a film called The Night Before, starring Keanu Reeves. This tells us nothing, having no way to see them. Maybe we can just chalk it up to something intangible made flesh by the mere presence of Mary Woronov, the Patti Smith of the quasi-mainstream neo-underground horror-sci fi-comedy genre, and chance.

LIQUID SKY

1982 - ****

This is a rarity, a genuinely great performance art science fiction hybrid  experimental 16mm oddity from the downtown NYC heroin chic fashion poseur scene, what Bowie probably hoped The Man who Fell to Earth would be like. Russian ex-pat Slava Tsukerman co-wrote with the star, Anna Carlisle, who plays both Margaret (a sleepwalking model with a fondness for bizarro face paint) and a perennially sneering male model in the Ziggy mode named Jimmy. If this was a guy playing both roles it might just be the usual camp drag theatricality, but Carlisle brings a depth of wry sadness that's almost Germanic, belying her being just 26 years-old at the time, though she announces she's from Connecticut ("Pilgrim stock!") in one of the film's key and classic scenes. She crushes it! She takes both roles over the edge, even going down on herself while fashionistas (before there was such a phrase) jeer jadedly.

Man, those effete women and manly men who spend their nights milling around tiny black box apartments and boutiques, engaging in never ending private fashion shows in vain attempts to stand out from a stable of similarly face-painted and ennui-and-withdrawal-driven wild clotheshorses. Meanwhile a German scientist named Johann (Otto Von Wernher) has followed a tiny spacecraft about the size a closed George Foreman grill to the roof above the East Village penthouse flat Margaret shares with her knife wielding Valerie Solanis-style performance artist heroin dealer lesbian girlfriend Adrian (Paula E. Shepherd, below).

The plot follows Margaret as she tries to do some coke, but winds up raped by a sleazy goombah who force feeds her goofballs --it's not a traumatic scene like some because she fights back and engages but at the same time barely gives a fuck --she knows she'll get him back eventually and she's patient as a cobra; Jimmy meanwhile is withdrawing from heroin but has no money and Adrian won't front; a fashion designer promises Jimmy some if he shows up to model the next night at a shoot on Margaret's roof. Meanwhile the alien is floating his giant solarized color style eye thing around, observing all like a mix of the aliens in It Came from Outer Space and ourselves as viewers. It maybe hides behind the white mask in the center of Margaret's weird neon hula hooped painting. When her lovers have their selfish orgasm, a cigarette burn in the celluloid behind their head sucks them right out of the film, leaving her free to resume high fashion moping. Good deal! Her own inability to have an orgasm saves her life, and allows her to notice her little alien guardian. Though she never sees it (them?) she falls in love with it and forms a bond as touching as that between the disembodied Virginia Leith and her unseen closet monster in The Brain that Wouldn't Die!

In short, a beautiful time is had by all, especially if you don't mind repetitive synthesizer percussion that resounds on high decibel pitch-shifted soundwaves like an angry filmmaker is just learning his first and only melody on his first and only Korgi synthesizer. Highlights include Adrian's inspired spontaneous poetry rant delivered while beating Margaret's dead naked acting teacher as a bongo drum; the odd but natural way two people hanging out in bed can devolve into attempted rape and/or stabbing without either one particularly feeling the need to get up; and Margaret's inspired final monologue, delivered as she applies intense glow-in-the-dark face paint in pitch darkness, like Kali, Warhol, and a stoned Annette Haven wrapped up into one tall WASP fashionista **** But there's also the coolness that is Susan Doukas as Jimmy's sex-starved mother, who seduces--or tries to--Johann when he uses her apartment (its opposite Margaret's) to spy on the craft and check out all the deaths and sexes. He continually ducks out on her, maybe saving both their lives in the process though frustrating her to no end, which caused me the most discomfort in the film, as I hate to see a lady go hungry and Doukas does a hell of a job at conveying the homey warmth and welcome forwardness (even if its tinged with desperation) one hopes for from sex-starved middle-aged Manhattan foxes with big apartments in the 70s--80s, the type who know their Chinese food deliverer by name and with whom you can probably crash for a few weeks while you pretend to look for an apartment. Dude, I'm grateful to dames like that and they deserve to have their needs gratified if for no other reason that they are bold enough to admit they have them and to pursue their quarry and this film is a gem.

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Mary Woronov, with the Velvet Underground and her co-whip dancer, Gerard Malanga

Lastly, a shout out to the beautiful and tall and cool Mary Woronov, the living link between the great 70s-80s rock and roll sci fi-New Wave-Punk-Corman-Canon cineworld and the Warhol Velvet Underground joint. Check her above, snuggled up with mighty Lou! Edie Sedgwick may be the one everyone gushes over but its Woronov, more than any of them, who's a true rock and roll survivor. She's still got it! She sheds some insight on why she's seldom left the niche cult market and taken parts in big Hollywood films: 

"Let's face it: women's parts are gone ­ women are gone. They've disappeared from the movie screens! You know when I was working with Warhol there was no problem because it was a homosexual atmosphere. But in Hollywood it's a heterosexual atmosphere, and they do not like to see strong women. So instead of actresses we've got hostesses. 'May I show you to your seat, Mr. Schwarzenegger?' So that's why I keep doing...these other movies." (1990 Cornell Cinemas)

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Damn girl, it's their fucking loss and the gain of all weird movie lovers... 

Postscript: I wasn't sure why I put these two films together for this inaugural Thurs. the Looking Glass entry, but Woronov is the key. Sure she's not in Sky but her girl strength and Warholian style is, and both films are rare in that they star women with boys way, way to the side. In fact the genders are almost reversed - the women are in charge in both films, recalling in their way Star Maidens and Norman Fell's almost-forgotten All that Glitters! Release them! (See my article about them in Acidemic's Nordics issue)

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Sandahl Bergman Vs. the Helots: SHE (1982)

I don't care what the haters say, BATTLESHIP (2012) is awesome. Maybe it's because I stayed home sick the day I saw it, so was both more relaxed and delirious than usual, or because I had a tolerance for the awesomely named Taylor Kitsch but I haven't seen a junk film with a greater sense of how to rock this cocktiquely since GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA (my praise here). But I didn't come to talk about expensive junk cinema. I'm here to talk about SHE. Not the 1935 SHE starring Randolph Scott as a dull Arctic explorer resisting the alleged charms of a future Nixon opponent named Helen Gahagan and I don't mean the Hammer SHE starring a genuinely charm-packed Ursula Andress dealing with a flock of snooty Brit interlopers. I mean the Italian 1982 (1985 in America) SHE, the one you've probably drifted past a dozen times on Netflix's streaming list, with poor Sandahl looking up from a dingy corner of the cover, clad in brown calfskin, as if pleading to be helicoptered into a better film. Well, drift past no more! The helicopter stops here. This is the SHE for me.

Like BATTLESHIP, SHE is a great mishmash of styles and eras, a post-apocalyptic post-modern meltdown of leftover World War Two ordinance, a lavish and modern producer's mansion play room and various swaths of backyard wasteland. Anachronistic sights include a bunch of youthful aesthetes listening to an old-fashioned gramophone and having a big Roman orgy, then waking up in the middle of the night with plastic fangs to eat their guests; a swimming pool with beach balls, swords, women in cages, a giant in a tutu and feather boa, flagellants, fog machines, robots, human bird cages, tuxedos, gladiatorial combat, great dialogue:

Shandra: "This doesn't make sense"

Aisha: "Shandra, this has nothing to do with sense."

I know I'm not alone in my "appreciation" for SHE. On the trenchant lurple.com, DF Dresden says: "Like me, you’ll be wondering how much LSD was dropped during the writing of this cheap, crazy post apocalyptic production.’"

Indeed, for in addition to its borrowings from just about every corner of the prop department, SHE has a countercultural vibe that recalls another post-apocalyptic sci fi film, GAS-S-S-S (1971), it was the last thing Roger Corman directed before he left AIP to form New World, which later produced a bucketload of films like SHE in the wake of CONAN's success, all with a nicely deadpan hip tone, including DEATHSTALKER (above) and DEATHSTALKER 2, both great for late night "wait, did he really just say that?" kind of moments with Robotripper friends. And there's hot chicks from the era before plastic 'enhancements' turned every New World rack the same, if you'll forgive the impression.

What SHE of course lacks that GAS-S-s-S had in spades are long stretches of music by Country Joe and the Fish, but that's a good thing. Instead there's Motörhead and lots of fuzzed-out Rick Wakeman synths.  GAS-S-s-S would make a good double bill with SHE, though, and Godard's WEEKEND (1967). All three have that episodic anachronistic structure, where heroes wander the post-apocalyptic landscape encountering various seriocomic factions and anachronistic historical characters they must battle or get held prisoner by, or fall in love with, terrorized or tortured by, or lectured to by... about communism.

 

The thing is, we know Corman's funny, clever, hip and Godard is all those things and more, but the makers of SHE are an unknown quantity. GAS-S-S-S has Edgar Allen Poe on a chopper, referencing Corman's biker films and Poe films in a image, but SHE has a sailor-suit wearing bridge guard with an eye patch, yellow bandana, and the word 'Texas' written on his forehead, doing impressions of (I wrote them all down, impressed and aghast): Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields, Popeye, Mortimer Snerd, Adolph Hitler, Walter Winchell, Jackie Mason, Harry Von Zell, Senator Cleghorn (from the Fred Allen Show!), James Cagney, the Black Knight (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail!), and of course a whole chorus line, because he keeps multiplying. Oh yeah, and he sings a snatch of the theme from "Green Acres." And he looks like Paul Thomas in stage hair.

"Great" as all that is, without Bergman, wearing an array of sexy and cool costumes, showing off all the sword skills she learned for CONAN and generally making you sometimes believe she's in a better movie. As I wrote in my praise of CONAN, she was the love of my adolescent life, and if you were like me then--a Bergman fan who made super 8mm CONAN-inspired movies very similar in found object aesthetic to SHE--then it's SHE you I will. That's a Yoda impression. Where are you going?!

SHE came out in Italy the same year as CONAN did, which on its own shows you 1) no one makes imitations of successful films faster than the Italians, and 2) There's no real 'market' for excellent dancers in genre movies, and 3) Bergman's typecasting as a sword and sandal type served her in rapidly diminishing returns. But even diminished she shines. Heroines like Xena, Buffy, and Beatrix Kiddo today just get stunt woman Zoe Bell to do their more dangerous work, but Bergman did all her own fighting in CONAN, and it made a huge difference --and Bergman snakes through the whole film with such a lithe grace that we get mighty, mighty mad when she's killed. The vengeance is sweet in the way it seldom is when normal girls die in the most prefunctory of revenge excuse scenarios. To see her so quickly typecast and forgotten as someone who doesn't really have a future outside of the 80s sword and sorcery bubble is just tragic. Oh Sandahl, why why WHY did you choose to play the boring villainness Queen Gedren instead of the (also boring, but more active) lead in RED SONJA? Was this your version of Lugosi refusing to do FRANKENSTEIN and thus forever marking him in producer's secret ledgers as 'obstinate' and ensuring a long downward spiral of crappy parts in crappy pictures? You left that movie like a snake without a head.

On the other hand, SHE is world's better than RED SONJA (1985), no matter which role Bergman would have played. SHE's sense of agape jaw aesthetic arrest is helped not hurt by the backyard junk post-apocalypse post -modern cheapness. The relatively big budgeted ($18M) Richard Fleischer-directed RED SONJA on the other hand is unwatchable no matter what your viewer context.

For example, consider the helot. I'm referring of course to Frank Capra's MEET JOHN DOE and Walter Brennan's rant about the helots when trying to convince Gary Cooper to give away the fifty dollar bill he's received. As you read the upcoming quote (spoken with great gumption by old Walter), imagine he's talking about the freedom of making a low budget no-CGI early 80s Brechtian free-for-all like SHE , vs. enduring the producer interference and studio pressures that come with all the millions it takes to craft bigger budgeted junk action movies out today, like TRANSFORMERS or THE AVENGERS or MCGRUBER:

"All right. You're walking along, not a nickel in your jeans, your free as the wind, nobody bothers ya. Hundreds of people pass you by in every line of business: shoes, hats, automobiles, radios, everything, and there all nice lovable people and they lets you alone, is that right? Then you get a hold of some dough and what happens, all those nice sweet lovable people become helots, a lotta heels. They begin to creep up on ya, trying to sell ya something: they get long claws and they get a stranglehold on ya, and you squirm and you duck and you holler and you try to push them away but you haven't got the chance. They gots ya. First thing ya know you own things, a car for instance, now your whole life is messed up with a lot more stuff: you get license fees and number plates and gas and oil and taxes and insurance and identification cards and letters and bills and flat tires and dents and traffic tickets and motorcycle cops and tickets and courtrooms and lawyers and fines and... a million and one other things. What happens? You're not the free and happy guy you used to be. You need to have money to pay for all those things, so you go after what the other fellas got. There you are, you're a helot yourself."

Were SHE made today it would no doubt have endless CGI dragons and some fresh-out-of-helot-school rich man's son producer who would insist director Avi Nesher pick an aesthetic - make it ancient or post-apocalyptic, but not this weird limbo where WW2, hippie counterculture, the Inquisition, and ancient Rome all live side by side. But it was made 1982 (the height of my own post-apocalyptic barbarian moviemaking career) and so the tactile delights of using actual props and monster makeup are just baller enough to steer SHE into the timeless, anti-establishment, no-CGI forbidden zone where films which kill careers and get no love anywhere are suddenly aged into anti-helot relevance. With an American star, Israeli director and mostly Italian crew, SHE is one of those rare international productions that turns its tower of Babel culture-drain into an advantage. When your movie is going in six different directions at once, don't reign it all in, shoot for twelve more!

On that note you might make an all night anti-Helot Netflix stream festival with Nesher's SHE as the middle feature between GAS-S-S-S and the amazing Caroline Munro-starring sci fi (Italian Star Wars ripoff) STARCRASH (1979), and top it all off with a GHOSTS OF MARS or THE WARRIORS chaser, and at last you will know that the aesthetic of super 8mm backyard cinema lives on, as Big Daddy Mars, or a Baseball Fury, or a Joe Spinell, or any other kind of gaudy patter-spewing, scary make-up sporting thug ensemble...so don't fuck around with us Nork, and keep your pecker dry and the world will turn, turn away from the sterile, helot incarnate W.S. Anderson GGI action film (ala RESIDENT EVIL)  into a post-modern/apocalyptic thrift store prop wasteland.

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X is for Xanax, that's good enough for X: THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963)

 Nat: Mister Birnam, this is the mornin'...
Don: That's when you need it most, in the morning. Haven't you learned that yet? At night this stuff's just a drink... but in the morning it's medicine! --LOST WEEKEND (1945)

 

Science has proven our sensory organs and neurons capable of far more than the limited strata and spectra of processed information we know as collective reality. Like radios tuned to one station our whole lives, we may want to turn the dial to find other stations, but if we do we're soon deafened and blinded by the holy static. What's worse, we may never find our way back to our clear, normal starting point. To paraphrase William Blake, if the doors of perception were cleansed the world would appear as it really is, infinite... but then after the initial beauty wore off, you better hope the 'finite' illusion comes back quick, or you may wind up strapped to a gurney, screaming your eyes out, begging the nurse for a sweet, sweet Xanax.

You need to be insane and/or holier than hell to live with X-ray eyes. And you need to know that I didn't even have to look up the above quote from LOST WEEKEND, because I know those lines by my drunken black X-ray heart, which makes me uniquely qualified to discuss X... for like Don Birnim in WEEKEND and Dr. Xavier in X (both played by Ray Milland), I see too much, feel too deeply, and sometimes have the power to see through my own eyelids. Anything to numb the mind, to shrink the aperture, is welcome, but it never works for long, leaving me eventually a twitching, hungover mess on fire with thirst and delirium tremens.

1963's X (AKA- THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES) prefigures the psychedelic explosion of 1966-68 by a good four years, putting it way ahead of its time, as if Roger Corman could himself see far into the future. As grumpy as Don Birnam on Yom Kippur, Dr. X is pretty skittish about the experimental eye drops he's invented, which he tries and which enable him to see through everything from women's skirts to, eventually, the chewy tootsie roll center of the universe. The film still blows the mind with its psychedelic metaphors, but is so cheap-looking under Roger Corman's economic hand that it can be hard to tell whether it's a nouvelle vague deconstruction (the French flag colored light bulb/balloons in the photo atop would fit right at home in MADE IN THE USA) or a brilliant metaphysical inquiry into the 'gaze,' buffeted by waves of cheapness.

Then again, there's hot chicks scattered all over, so hey -- just dig that crazy looking girl in the photo below, with that awesome Cyd Charisse-style black gown! Note the swingin' way Milland has with a martini! Oh, he knows his way around a cocktail party.

Attractive Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diana Van Der Vlis, below) is Xavier's love interest, though he doesn't pay her much attention. In fact he tries to hide from her once he's wanted for murder, but she follows him around like that girl with the leopard coat. But hey, give him a break, Nat. Poor Xavier is so busy seeing through things that he can't even sleep! He can see through his own eyelids! It is never dark for such a man. Have you ever woke up and not known whether it's six at night or six in the morning? That's the devil of it, Nat! Without a bottle of Nyquil you're finished! And Nyquil hasn't even been invented in 1963! Why, Why Nat?!

Luckily for every wanted-by-the-cops freak like Dr. X there's a sleazy sideshow barker who'll hide him in a fortune teller costume in exchange for a bottle a day and a place to sleep it off in, and lucky for us that sleazy barker is Don Rickles (below). As with past Corman carny films (remember CARNIVAL ROCK!?), there's very little attempt to convince that the interior threadbare sound stage sets are anything but sketches meant to conjure carnivals only in the very imaginative viewer, but Don Rickles--an AIP regular over at the studio's endless slew of Beach Party films--is a natural impresario of see-throughitiveness.

Diane and Xavier later have to split for the glitzy neon exteriors and the threadbare casino-set interior of Las Vegas, where his see-through card abilities parlay into a small fortune, but 'crowds' are attracted by his luck, leading to casino scrutiny, and Xavier's a surly sod who doesn't take his huge sunglasses off even in the dark of the casino. Ere long a police helicopter is chasing them through the desert. He crashes because he can see through the road; he runs around the desert, and well... I shan't spoil the shock ending... I will say that the low-key, moody Les Baxter score sees it all through passing window of an evening train.

Truth be told, X is a hard film to love; Milland's just not the well-meaning nutcase he was as Don Birnam, but the film is impressive and balls-out original in the way Corman just goes for it, and by it I mean the infinite trip -- pre-2001.

Milland's career was off the rails by the 1960s, due to his own penchant for mood-altering substances... he was taking whatever he could get, even if it meant his head had to be sewn on the the ample frame of sensitive linebacker Rosie Greer (THE THING WITH TWO HEADS) for a post-op recovery shot of Demerol. But even straining to appear less hungover than he was, Milland is never less than compelling and Dr. X as a character benefits from his peevishness.

 The film's Richard Matheson-like script was penned by Ray Russell, whose credits are not otherwise impressive (MR. SARDONICUS? Yeeesh!) and Robert Dillon (FRENCH CONNECTION II). But it's so Matheson-like it compares well with THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN in its gutsy exploration of the yawning abyss of the fourth dimensional existence, or going beyond the illusory atomic structures of our life - leaving sanity behind and having a cameraman brave and cheap enough to keep you in the center frame at all times, and let the subjective universe prove its inherent flimsiness.

"I just do eyes!"

I'll share two personal anecdotes at this juncture:

1) I once had a huge electro-magnetic freakstorm crown chakra lightning strike which enabled me--albeit briefly-- to see the same image with my eyes closed or open (the electric bands behind my eyelids had come into perfect alignment with the 'real' world before me). It was a moment both terrifying, exhilarating, liberating and mercifully brief.

2) I once was talked into taking two when a half would have been too much. I found myself walking down the middle of the street, clutching my hair and screaming and laughing at my own terror at the same time; if you can imagine being on a terrifying rollercoaster plunging straight down, nonstop for hour after hour, getting faster exponentially but never hitting bottom, maybe you can get an inkling. I was hoping a car would run me over and free my twisted soul from its melting shell. I saw through everything and I saw the skin cells flaking off all the bodies of the world; I felt the breathing of every living thing; my breath was the murderous exhaust of cars and my thoughts the howling jackal-like yelps of playing children cutting through the once sacred cake of my mind with their chainsaw joy. With everyone's ape faces dissolving and aging in spiral movements I could barely even dare to look at my shoes.

It took a long time, but in each example of my own experience -- the good and the terrifying-- I got back to normal's soft gray field of blandness blanket. So I can feel Dr. X's pain at never being able to get back to thet. It's the inability to turn it off that makes the schizophrenic seek the shelter of madness, and cigarettes. You can try to get drunk, but your senses are so heightened that even water tastes too strong for your senses. It's Roderick Usher-style morbid acuteness of the senses!

I first saw this film in the early 1970s, with one of my first babysitters, 'Toots,' a blue jean-jacket and straight blonde hair 16-year old runaway from the shelter where my mom volunteered. Ten minutes after mom left, Toots's boyfriend was over, the TV was on, and though they made out between commercials, they snapped back for the film, and between the three of us, me with my mad  nine year-old's crush on her and awe of him, and them just these cool hippie types, THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES became mythic, intense. They explained the best they could what was going on in ways no other parent or babysitter ever had. It stuck with me. It seemed strange, savage, like an episode of BATMAN beamed in from a much more inhospitable, terrifying adult reality. I loved it, but was anxious to retreat to the safety of mom's oblivious tunnel vision.

So in short, X is a film that needs Xanax. It's the raw truth of God's eye staring you down through the center of all things. A Lacanian like Slavoj Zizek could have a field day with it. But it's over, it's gone. The magic and mystique of being able to 'crack it wide open' has been lost in our simulacratic age. No parent in their right mind would let a hippy runaway chick babysit their nine year-old today, or probably even allow them to watch a film like X. Now the TV eye has seen through us, not vice versa, and if anything it is the characters on the TV who will one day squirm in horror at the awful truth when their vision is no longer blocked by the fourth wall and they can finally peer out of their hole in the screen; dodge the swooping bats, look over and see us, our God-like camera lens eye staring mutely back at them through the plasma flatness, and reaching through, choke us with their waterlogged hands. (1)

All fine, all good, until we wake up at Bellevue, surrounded by little turkeys in straw hats, and Bim. His friends call him Bim.

You can call him Bim.

 NOTES:

1. That's totally a reference to THE RING, so for further reading check out my 2005 opus, Mecha-Medusa and the Otherless Child from Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #3

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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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Great Acid Movies #4: The TRIP (1967)

Boy meets boy meets pill meets Death!

The first boy in the above bizarre and inaccurate tag line is a disillusioned TV commercial director (Peter Fonda) in the midst of a divorce from a hot girl in a pink coat (Susan Strasberg). The boy he meets, the "guide" played by Bruce Dern, arranges the meeting with pill, for Fonda's first lysergic play date, bringing him to dealer Dennis Hopper's hippie pad to score ("Let's make it upstairs, man") and then up to Dern's place high in the Hollywood hills, which has been 'proofed' and bedecked with odd toys, and a book ofAllen Ginsberg poetry, so Fonda can drop and safely frolic. But Dern ends up hovering over poor Fonda, creeping him the fuck out. As Michael Weldon wrote "Would you trust Bruce Dern as a guide?"



Fonda then hallucinates a couple making love under a blanket of patterned light, 'dies' symbolically in a Big Sur cave stocked with leftover props from Corman's Poe films (and a dwarf, of course), tips out on an orange ("the energy is dripping all over my hand, man!") all while Dern tries to get him to touch his fingers.

Fonda eventually escapes Dern's clutches and the film picks up the pace; his nocturnal wanderings as he makes it down to the Strip are another psychedelic highlight - including breaking into a neighbor's house to watch TV, and freaking out a girl at the laundromat, all while (he imagines?) the cops are after him. Finally he makes it back to Hopper's pad and the hot blonde who came onto him whilst there.

Peter Fonda's bug-eyed, spot-on performance as the tripper has some great moments. My pal Lucy's dad, Michael Blodgett (Lance in BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS) appears during one of Fonda's guilty/jealous hallucinations in bed with his wife Susan Strasberg. Fonda watches them, horrified but ambivalent at the same time. Jack Nicholson did the script, and ain't no doubt he did his research!

In his big LSD peak moment, Fonda hallucinates his way into a plastic fantastic merry-go-round set filled with the carnival props leftover from Corman's films Carnival Rock and X-THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (reviewed here); Hopper and the dwarf preside over things and they all watch clips from Fonda's advertising reel so that Fonda can realize he's guilty... guilty...of poisoning the well of myth with his bland imagery. "Guilty... guilty," Fonda keeps saying. "Yeah, but don't wallow in it," Hopper chides, "because it's weak and pathetic!"



Susan Strasberg is only around in little bits here and there as the wife Fonda's about to divorce, but she's a maze of kittenish yearning and aching feminine sincerity and she makes you feel guilty and sad that you prefer LSD and painted go-go dancers to her simple charms. Anyone who ever broke a heart will feel Fonda's pangs and LSD really does amp up that feeling of you can't go home again, and you want to reach out to her --you can feel the sexual yearning and pink vibrations of nurturing maternal warmth emanating out at you in waves that turn your leg muscles to jelly.

And then there's all those hot, zonke- out love-vibing chicks, especially Salli Sachse as Glenn, a free-love far-out kitten who wanted originally to hang with Fonda back at the start of the film (it all occurs over the course of an afternoon and night) because she loves being around the energy of acid first-timers. She finds him at a bar and takes him home and when he mentions the police are looking for him she dismisses it, "I don't believe in police!" Hey far out, Glennn. Far out!

 So it's free love central, but it's not free love in some grimy Ratzo Rizzo / Herschell Gordon Lewis way; it's free love in a cool pretty Fonda hipster next-stop EASY RIDER way, with serious acting and a real sense of drugged interconnectivity. If you were tall, young, successful, good-looking and free, paisley LA was yours. With her iron-blonde hair and nice car she whisks Fonda away to her swanky pad to cap off a perfect evening with some fading light-show sex, all set, unbearably, to stock recording-ish New Orleans jazz.

Yeah the music is super lame, from the oddly named "American Music Band." Some songs sound like something Corman fished out of the trash at a high school pep rally. It's the sort of thing Otto Preminger might put in SKIDOO. The absolute worst musical moment is that Dixieland jazz when Fonda's coming down, the kind of stuff Kevin Spacey might play to torture prisoners in THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS. I love Dixieland jazz, don't get me wrong, but not when it's so generic. My guess is Corman grabbed it from a royalty-free sound library where it was used as the score for Harold Loyd silents that used to be on TV with 'BOinggg!'-style sound effects added.

There's also some other dull stretches of (silent, scored the AMB) SEVENTH SEAL-y footage which Dennis Hopper apparently shot on weekends out at Big Sur with Peter Fonda, a horse, and some props left over from THE RAVEN. They enact Fonda's trips of dying and being reborn in a coffin in a cave in a haze of medieval costumery... which would be fine if the music was interesting, like Pink Floyd or "Dark Star" or something... but not roller rink organ and kazoos. I mean it's 'psychedelic' but there's a thick, wavy line between a band that takes the ingredients of the jug band and makes something truly awesome like Country Joe and the Fish's "Section 43" and American Music Band's 'trippy' SF sound.

The peak moment for me, in ALL FILM, is when the spooked Fonda hides in an all-night automated laundry and starts opening all the washers, as if he feels they need to breathe. Barbara Mouris, in curlers, is reading a magazine and waiting for her dryer to finish. She has been watching him and once he notices her he starts slowly closing the lids in fear, like he's trying to hide the secrets inside from her prying eyes. They start talking ("Let's, you know, really try and connect") but then Fonda sees a prettier girl trapped in her dryer and tries to free her, freaking out Barbara so she yells for help, which sends him on the run again.

It's telling that Bruce Dern never actually took acid before or after this film, and in the talking head interviews that accompany THE TRIP on DVD he alone seems really out of it, kind of unfocused and cranky, as be badmouths psychedelics. One day, not far from now, cooler heads in medicine will discover just how important a good acid trip is for preventing Alzheimers and countless other maladies and problems but back then it was considered a big risk and Dern bowed out because he was marathon runner. But considering the futility of living for longevity as opposed to the brief sprint to the flaming finish line of lysergic glory, especially in the show business, I would say he should have gone for it. Those who did are still going strong--coherence wise--and he's, quite frankly, a mess (at least in the documentary).

See, what the anti-drug ads don't tell you is that contempt prior to investigation is easy (with eyes closed). It takes guts to say yes and open up to the unknown. In the end no artist should abandon the pursuit of knowledge, the discovery of the depths of self, the furthering of craft in favor of mere longevity and health. Anything is worth the risk, for, as John Lennon sang, "all I can tell you is, it's all / show / biz."And if you believe that old lie about it mutating your genes, then you probably believe we won Vietnam.

See also my 2003 Popmatters review of the double feature with Psych-Out

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