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...

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To become a shroomer: MATANGO: AKA Attack of the Mushroom People (1963)

A bunch of Japanese libertines on a yacht get lost in a freak storm (ala Gilligan's Island) and wind up marooned on a strange island populated only by a derelict cargo ship run aground along the rocky coast and.. a population of growing, giggling, intelligent super-fungi. The derelict ship's log reveals the mushroom in question has harmful "nerve" effects, but man, is it filling and delicious! Those who take a nibble soon go insane and like to frolic...

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BAD ACID 70s-80s, Part III: Drive-In Dream Logic, Italian-style!

(For the HUGO STIGLITZ MAKES MOVIES BLOGATHON) By the 1970s the drive-in had become synonymous with two things: teenage sex in cars and Italian horror movies. Lord knows how many young women lost their virginity while Dario Argento movie Goblin-soundtrack cues echoed tinnily from the ominous gray speakerbox on their car window, and onscreen, far away, some nubile victim getting opened up like a can of screaming sardines. She's just a dead girl,...

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

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

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Surf the Maelstrom: POSSESSION (1981)

One of the cool things about Europe as opposed to the states is that if they like a trend, they keep it, and so even as late as the 1980s there were still sexy, druggy, fucked-up movies coming out, long after America had switched over to conservative backlash fear mode, VHS profits swelling it full of cheap gore and bad hair. A truly disturbing film like Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION was only released here, apparently, in a severely truncated, nearly...

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Killing diese Kindern: TRICK 'R TREAT (2007)

With its ingeniously interlocked multiple story narrative and eliptical framework, TRICK-R-TREAT is the CRASH, or even PULP FICTION of horror films: Dylan Baker rocks his HAPPINESS cred as the sort of dad who packs razors into candy bars, then "does things" with the dead fat kid on the doorstep. His next-door neighbor is a hilariously game (and putty nosed) Brian Cox, who has to tangle with the crazy little demon child, Sam (seen on the posters),...

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Bad Acid's Greatest: 70s Paranoid Feminism Edition

"White guys take acid. White guys take acid and go see the Exorcist." -- Richard Pryor (Saturday Night Live, season 1, Dec. 1975)I was just eight years old when Pryor said that on my new favorite show, Saturday Night Live. Even then I "got it" - white guys were sick thrill seekers for whom extreme horror (and THE EXORCIST was considered the ne plus ultra extremis for the time) wasn't enough, we had to boost it up with this dangerous mind-melting...

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Great Acid Docs: SALVADOR DALI: A SOFT SELF-PORTRAIT (1972)

A timeless made-for-70s TV classic of countercultural madness - this shoe captures a crazy "happening" of Dali's, which Orson Welles narrates with bemused awe. Old Dali is kind of what Welles would like to be, a complete nut, but Welles always had the dual edge of being a rampant hedonist. Still he makes it seem like Dali just snaps his fingers and a huge crowd of attractive, barely dressed local hippie children come a runnin' to sing and dance and...

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Acid's Greatest #19: Brother Sun Sister Moon (1972)

In 1968 one of the key films of the budding counterculture was Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of Shakespeare's ROMEO AND JULIET. Featuring genuinely hot young actors--as opposed to established stars like the 1936 Leslie Howard-Norma Shearer version. In Zeffirelli's '68 edition, the tale of love destroyed by violent family feuding proved a zeitgeist-snatching analogy for our Vietnam state of mind, one filled with beautiful photography and beautiful...

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