Alice Part 2.2: The Looking Glass Dolls

The once innocent figure of Alice grows warped by time's fun house looking glass to become a token of phallic empowerment coupled to amnesia as embodied by the lovely Milla Jovovich in the RESIDENT EVIL series. Regularly waking up in a strange shower and working her way past sterile booby traps down poisoned Raccoon (City) holes, Alice's wonderland is a video game version of hell - nonstop threats and very little love. From a mythic standpoint, Milla's...

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Why don't we Go ASK ALICE?

The reverberating mythic chord struck by Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" are the grand signifier for the "girl you'll be a woman / soon"-style myth of sexual awakening and of course, dropping acid. Alice was a catch-all signifier, not just a woman or a girl but any and all cute blond chicks on acid. The "anonymously" published memoir "Go Ask Alice" became a bestseller in 1972, it's "true" story of a runaway who...

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Great Acid Movies #21: UNDER THE VOLCANO (1980)

What it Gets Right:"Theresh nothing betterr.. to sober one uhpp... than beer!" that's a line my friends and I would quote amongst ourselves when surrendering to the grim alcoholic gallows humor of this John Huston adaptation of the "towering" Malcolm Lowery novel (which I've never been able to get more than 5-8 pages into) about the last day in the life of a British consul in Mexico in the 1930s. We'd talk in Albert Finney's eloquent slur for days...

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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...

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Great Acid Cinema 13: PSYCH-OUT (1968)

This non-Corman AIP classic has awesome doc footage of the Haight-Asbury scene while it was at its zenith, with shocked squares rubbernecking by like a parade in reverse. As for the characters, they're pretty damn authentic, if my own memories of playing in psychedelic rock band are correct, which is doubtful. There's the Dean Stockwell pseudo-shaman (that was totally me), carrying STP-laced fruit punch around like its just another drink and arguing...

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MADE IN USA: Someone left a Maoist in the Rain

AKA: BITCHES OF '66"We were in a political movie, which means Walt Disney with blood."It's exciting times for Godard lovers as two of his 1966 films: 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her and Made in the USA make their way to the few remaining stores next week. Set in "Year Zero" at some Alphaville-esque locale called "Atlantic City," (apparently Suburban France), Made in USA is a great little road marker connecting the dots of Godard's earlier and later...

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So close to Heaven..: MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1952)

Spider women, Angelo Rossitto, Dolores Fuller, and Uncle Fester: add them together with random disregard for audience sanity and whadda you got? The Mesa of Lost Women! A film by the amazing Ron Ormond, whose tentacles, the Astounding B-Monster notes: "tap into everything from 'adult' sex-dramas, like Please Don't Touch Me, to a string of Lash LaRue westerns released by PRC in the late forties." I've seen Mesa millions of times and don't remember...

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"Yes! I am Here!" DEMENTIA: DAUGHTER OF HORROR

It's not by Ed Wood, but John Parker's 1955 surrealist grade Z nightmare, DEMENTIA (AKA DAUGHTER OF HORROR), is full of poverty row trimmings, with Ed's same weird love for all the seedier elements of late 1950s life as a closeted schizophrenic beatnik prostitute. It's like a cross-dress between the crazy dream scenes in GLEN OR GLENDA and Polanski if he was a crackhead and making REPULSION in a dingy basement with a young Mercedes McCambridge instead...

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The Patron Saint of UHF

(Part of the Ed Wood Blogathon). Like many of the older Ed Wood fans out there, I first came to him via those weird circular UHF antennae that existed long before cable and VHS. Back then you had to tune in the UHF channels -- local channels that showed the news, the local TV shows, and lots and lots of great old black and white horror movies -- like you would a radio station. Sometimes the picture was bad, sometimes it was worse, and standing there...

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