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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'Transgalactic Delta House Ebullience,' Comic Book Evolution, and Timothy Leary's Head - PAUL (2011)

Like most people I know who follow exo-politics, I thought PAUL (2011) looked grim from the outset. First off, this is supposed to be a brom-com about a surviving Roswell alien, and here his huge eyes aren't dark black. The black eye on grey aliens is, as we now know now, a kind of DNA-implanted contact lens, as if we humans decided we loved Raybans (tm) so much we had them surgically grafted. Without the dark eyes Paul looks just like a big E.T. / Close Encounters love doll - and it turns out he was the inspiration for both films (we learn this thanks to flashbacks of long chain-smoking phone calls he had with Spielberg in the 1970s) which makes perfect sense from a disinformation standpoint (if you see an alien on the street eating Reese's Pieces, you're a lot less likely to get taken seriously when you report it to the cops).

I remember well at the age of around 15-16, gazing at my surly, bald, bespectacled comic book store owner (Quality Comics in Somerville, NJ, if you were there, you know him) and thinking: 1. I'll never stop being into comics no matter that they say people grow out of them, and 2. I hope I don't end up looking and acting like this surly bald bastard. Back then 16 seemed suspiciously old to still be into comics, even if you were into the sophisticated stuff like Frank Miller's Daredevil. And now... these clowns.

In other words, seeing what I'd look like if I stayed friends with my Frost-ish pal and never discovered sex, drugs, and rock and roll is kind of crushingly weird and terrifying. And Yet -  they actually grow as characters as the film goes on, how emotionally un-arrested of them! And Kristen Wiig is adorable, as the NY Post's Paul Smith noted: 

There may come a day when I tire of Seth Rogen’s shtick but I hope it doesn’t come soon. (Yes, I loved “The Green Hornet”). His sarcastic insults and Transgalactic Delta House ebullience keep things rolling along (even if the gay jokes are a little stale) as the boys pick up more enemies and a kindly one-eyed fundamentalist Christian (the indispensable Kristen Wiig) who says of Paul, “He’s not evil. He’s just a bit rude.”
  (Read more)

"Transgalactic Delta House ebullience" - I think we can all aspire to that, both as writers and as people. The ultimate message of this cosmic trip then becomes this: stoners are the smartest of all humans. Paul's very advanced, yet he acts just like a stoner slacker crossed with a less spastic Kermit the Frog. What does that tell you if it's not that stoners rule?!! That's what got me out of being a comic book nerd, I can tell you - drugs and alcohol were my socializing and talking to hot girls without blushing and stammering spinach. And as drugs, bass, and babes became the major force in my life, all the other comics stopped for me except Love and Rockets, Dan Clowes' Eightball (below), Pete Bagge's Hate, and old Zap! reprints. I yelled excitedly when I saw this guy (below) on one of Pegg's awesome T-shirts. That's a Clowes!

It would have been cool in Paul to see examples of other aliens or humans working inside the alien vessels to further advance the notions of a global elite conspiracy but it's great the way the CGI alien interacts with the humans so flawlessly--on the level of Andy Serkis' Kong and Golum, rather than the stilted dread knots of Jar Jar Binks and SyFy channel stuff. It works so that you forget altogether he's just a CGI hallucination. So see PAUL with a bunch of friends late night after the young person's AA meeting, or while getting hammered and it will treat you right. There's a subtext in there that any dope fiend or former dope fiend will take to heart, and it's traceable back to--what else?--a comic book:

The one big genre-buster comic I know of that deals with the issues of life after death and the universe and aliens, the only truth that sets one free, is Timothy Leary's Neurocomics (Last Gasp, 1979) which describes the circular DNA arc of life with the following being indicative of where our Paul is on the evolutionary scale:

In this strata, the hippie stoner is a whole evolutionary cycle above the family man preacher (below) who is the end game on the highest level of 'terrestrial circuits' while the stoner is the lowbrow level of post-terrestrial, so a whole DNA sequence higher on the celestial step ladder.

 

(Read the full comic  here or download here)

This should be good news to the moms of stoners and trippers everywhere, and explains why the religious right considers psychedelic drugs such a threat. It's because the 17 year-old mushroom dealer is a whole circuit higher on the DNA chain than freakin' Jerry Falwell or Michelle Bachman, or even Osama Bin Barack, or whatever his post-Bohemian Grove mind control reptilian takeover name is. And that's enough that those comic book geeks Pegg and Frost should really grow up and start doing some drugs. Paul's got a great magic power where he can send you all the cosmic truths in a big rush of DMT that will take the dogma crust off any cutie pie conservative, and it makes a good point for arguing that the bible belt might come around and be less closed-off if they got a nice dose of LSD in their morning cup of joe. If you want to 'see' the truth, you know who to trust, and it's not those Bohemian Grove owl-worshiping conservatives and their masochist leatherboy slave Antichrist, but the real deal, Tim Leary! LEARYCON, now that's a comic convention worth believing in. Vote Leary's frozen head for president in 2012! 

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Bouncer at the Gates of Love: REVOLUTION (1968)

"What we're seeing is a basic change in the evolutionary progress of mankind - something only priests and monks were into until a very long time ago, and that is consciousness expansion." 

So notes an unnamed head in Jack O'Connell's REVOLUTION (1968), a crazy, narrator-free documentary about the Haight Ashbury community that still glimmers with a bid of LSD sparkle even today. And he's right. The evolutionary progress of man was changed, two steps forward and in 1968 we were yet to start stumbling back.

It's hard to imagine a moment remotely similar in the history of the human race to 1967:. LSD was still legal and becoming hugely popular, as much a middle class rage as Twitter is now, changing an entire age demographic from self-absorbed mopes into free-spirited truth seekers (Twitter would be perhaps vice versa). And not only the young kids but adventurous parents were jumping into the fire and disappearing from the 9-5 fidelity-minded spousal system. Kids began to grow up in communes instead of two car garages; LSD was everywhere--in clinical psychiatrist offices, research, and middle American homes. Owsley gave out thousands of pure 'purples' from which "Purple Haze" gets its name as free samples at Monterey Pop.

Radical new paradigms could be soaked up very easily on acid. Evolution sped up on psychedelics. It was pretty 'hip' to at least have tried LSD even if just so you might have some actual insight into the hippie movement before you condemned their lifestyle. Having tried it made you cool, like skydiving or bungee jumping in the 1980s, or ecstasy in he 90s.

The always insightful Flickhead writes:

In the free spirit of the times, O’Connell doesn’t bother with conventions like linear construction or identifying subtitles. Themes and locations shift at whim, interview subjects go unidentified. Anonymous faces provide scant commentary on David Smith’s Free Clinic, and The Diggers’ Free Store and free food program, both deserving more time and respect. As does the mystery existentialist envisioning a cash-free future run by computers necessitating the need for a pot-smoking leisure class. But these shortcomings don’t diminish some otherwise perceptive passages in Revolution, the most nostalgic of which concern the reach for a communal utopia, one the counterculture — countering greed, materialism, superficiality — believed would erase ego from the equation, to render the desire for personal reward obsolete…  (cont.)

Damn right, Flickhead. What the fuck happened to the pursuit of egolessness? Backed by music by the Steve Miller Band (freshly formed), Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, we get some ideas of how to pick up the egoless thread. The crunchy psychedelic guitars are a most welcome presence in one's living room (dig, the "living"... room) even if you're not paying full attention to the kids onscreen or the squares gawking from the sidelines at the never-ending parade  of panhandlers along the Haight.

Whoa man. I'm totally tripping after seeing it. Pupils dilated in the mirror. 20-years old and foxy, dancing like a girl who just found freedom, who done stepped out her shell like... a girl named... Today.

No man, that's like her name. She changed her name to Today, because that's all we have, that's everything there is. Her big LSD trip--captured by O'Connell from start to finish--anchors the whole second half of the film: she begs for change in a really attractive, clean looking brown and light green poncho; she climbs trees and frolics in the park; she drives up the coast to dig the old growth; there's more squiggly light shows. Flowers! Flowers! She strokes an apple --it's breathing! Someone eats a banana. Some dude paints some crazy colors. She lies in the grass with two girlfriends, giggling hysterically. Even with the 21st century's roseless, untinted glasses you can feel her whole body sigh with relief as socio-genetic programming is short-circuited and overcome with a single white pill and good set and setting.

Unfolding with one eye on the exploitation market, it could be argued REVOLUTION was--at least on some level--pitched less at the kids themselves and more at adults curious about all the free love, as in the lengthy naked dance light show to Country Joe and the Fish's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 43" (below), but prurience is addressed too: hippies interviewed include a girl from the Sexual Freedom League who explains how only couples are allowed into the orgy to keep the numbers even (so dirty old men don't capsize the boat). Ah the logistics of orgy-mongering!

As someone who's done decades of grieving for the loss of the countercultural revolutionary dream, I've always had a resolved hatred for male sexual aggression. You can't have a free utopia with members who are obsessed with sex. It's like over-eating - dude, once you have some sex, move on. But America's trained men to be hungry ghosts when it comes to sex -- I guess you need to have a lot of it before you can see the forest for the trees. Look at Siddhartha! Or Mick Jagger! But that doesn't make it any less of an issue.  No one wants to sleep with these ugly raincoat pervs, so the pervy aspect remains.

The peak moment in all this is the writhing naked theater group dancing in front of the wild psychedelic light show to Country Joe's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 42." With one eye to the bush shots, the long takes with the light show definitely have a certain magic Kenneth Anger-style power. You can feel the amount of LSD that surged through the audience, as if the black magick strength of their lysergic gaze is captured in the celluloid itself! Hey, acid is grooovy.

Decades later watching all this on our laptops we can either grin cynically at all the naive spiritual tomfoolery or we can cry in thinking what we lost. The counterculture failed, or maybe it didn't. I used to argue this point with my guitarist all the time. He said no, the counterculture was alive, it had been integrated--driven underground perhaps--but all the stronger for being more exclusive. I argued that we failed, but now of course I'm in AA and my guitarist's in Ibiza with jet-set supermodels, so there you go.

REVOLUTION keeps up the even-keeled in its discussion, even into the thick of the tripping, interviewing cocktail hour executive types relaying the pre-trip adult opinion, cops, and hospital doctors who deal with the bad trip freak-outs. Many of the adults think the  hippies are just slumming middle class college dropouts. Change the world through love and spiritual union if you can--power to the flower!--but damn get a job or stop using public bathrooms to wash your sandals! The rest of us work to pay taxes so those bathrooms can stay clean --that's the adult's message. The doctor talks about LSD casualties in the hospital, as if it's the drug's fault and not the hospital's! I wanted to scream at the screen: "Bro! the people who brought these poor kids to your gleaming white sanitary gulag are the problem. A tripping person has no place in a hospital - they belong in the garden, with the sunflowers, or on the roof deck, sunbathing in their body paint and funny hats. Being strapped in a hospital straitjacket is no way to come out of a downward spiral. Blame the youth again for though they don't pay taxes or acknowledge the relevance of the establishment, the minute something goes wrong on their acid trips they demand the hospital take their twitching friend off their hands.

Another interesting moment comes when a hippie leader (the one discussed by Flickhead above) discusses the rise of "cybernation," or the increased use of computers, resulting in something called: "massive compulsory leisure." The realization that "this job could be better done by a machine" becomes the prelude to dropping out: "Many, I think, need to learn to do nothing."

He also thinks "LSD should be used to reveal the divine, it's no accident that it entered the world right at the time nuclear fission did." He adds, "If you deny yourself access to that kind of experience, to that kind of energy, then you are simply a fool!" Word, brother. But what about if you continue to take it, over and over, every day, until you're a gibbering mess sitting in a puddle behind the stage at a Phish show? Don't say it can't happen.

I remember feeling all lysergically connected to this kind of youthful hippie revolutionary moment, back in 1987 when I lucked into an instant loving relationship with my future bandmates and a cadre of beautiful, brilliant, blazing hippie chicks, and I feel deeply sorry for kids who many not have had such a 'trip,' - it truly changed my life forever. But after awhile I realized LSD was like reading the same travel brochure over and over. Eventually you have to try and get there, like, permanently, the hard way, via meditation and good deeds, and AA meetings. My gorgeous Connecticut hippies got married and had mutant kids and I got sober and then stopped going to AA and now I white knuckle in an antisocial rapture like Max Von Sydow in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS. The revolution never quite happened for me, no matter how many trips I took. "But we have the music," and the hopes for a next generation of snotty youth to latch onto something bigger than themselves even if the adults tell them its dangerous.

Hopefully, this time, they'll figure out a way to shut out the pervs, tourists, and freeloaders who inevitably cohere around such a righteous fire like metal shavings to a beautiful magnet.

That's the ultimate problem with utopias... to really do them right you need to have brutal ways to keep the scum out of the garden - or you need to keep evolving so fast the losers can't catch up. Exclusivity and a high vantage point are needed, as is a bouncer, a gate-keeper, otherwise, forget it. And if you need a gate-keeper, what kind of utopia is that? It may look a lot like 2012.

There was sequel made to check up on Today Malone and see where those hippies are now, it's called THE HIPPIE REVOLUTION, from 1996. Avoid it! Who wants to see a flower child get old? If you must witness such tragedy, check out my tale of time traveling psychedelic gumshoes and the desire to return to that high water mark when LSD almost changed the entire world overnight for the better -- HIPPY IN A HELLBASKET.



Not available on DVD but 'out there' if you know where to look--like everything, man, it streams, dig?--REVOLUTION is from a different time, one where the word "revolution" hadn't been co-opted by the media to sell shows. I bet now even the word 'revolution' is trademarked by The Beatles-Macintosh Inc. What can you do about it? Capitalism controls the very words out of our mouths. No way to fight it, that's what we say today, no way to stop the corporate leeches. They're already in our bloodstream. But the hippies didn't know that, and in 1967-8 they did something about it, until they got sleepy, and strung out. And they forgot what they were supposed to be fighting against. And needed to go home and get money from their corporate dads so they could buy Dead tickets and red feather boas. This is their story

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In the Windmills of SKIDOO (1968)

"it is part of you - you are part of it.
Remember the final reality - 

the all good, the all peaceful, the light, the radiant - 

let mind and body separate." 

Dig, man. Dig.

Jackie Gleason took acid and, thanks to a lifelong interest in aliens and a friendship with Nixon, may have been granted authorization to view top secret alien dead bodies, as UFO author Jim Mars notes:

According to Gleason's second wife, Beverly McKittrick, he returned home visibly shaken one night in 1973. Gleason, who was known to have an avid interest in UFOs, said his friend President Richard Nixon had arranged for him to visit Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, where he viewed the remains of small alien beings under tight security. This story was confirmed by Larry Warren. who said Gleason met with him in May 1986 to hear Warren's account of a UFO experience in England. During their conversation, Gleason related the Nixon aliens story and said the experience traumatized him for weeks. "You could tell he was very sincere," said Warren. "He took the whole affair very seriously and I could that he wanted to get the matter of his chest, and this was why he was telling me all this." Before his death in 1987, Gleason was asked about the incident but declined to comment, a most interesting circumstance, since it was an opportunity to refute the story if it was false. (1) 

Here in SKIDOO Gleason sees no aliens on his big LSD trip, just hallucinates twisting machine guns and overlapping bullet numbers--"I see mathematics!" he roars at one point, to the top of his bunk. But that doesn't mean the aliens and the LSD are not connected. Why else would I have mentioned it? Traumatizing as it must be to actually see dead aliens and learn the shocking truth about the alien reality, spectral hallucinations of Mickey Rooney dancing is worse. Of course paranoia is going to result, leading to Gleason's wondering if his daughter is his 'own' as he looks into the mirror. "She's got my ears! She's got my ears," he claps hands to his head as if wondering if she'll ever them give them back.

This scene is fairly great, but SKIDDOO starts real rough. The beginning is a drawn-out joyless critique of televisual advertising, as a remote control war erupts between retired gangster named Tough Tony and wife, Carol Channing. But his uneventful misery is interrupted when an old mob crony (Cesar Romero) orders Tony to get himself arrested and hauled into jail in order to 'kiss' (kill) "Blue Chips" (Mickey Rooney) who's about to turn state's evidence.

Nothing goes according to plan: Gleason licks the wrong envelope while in prison, gets a conscience ("Gimme a flower") and hallucinates various smoky images, most notably God's, i.e. Groucho Marx's, head on a turning screw. Meanwhile Gleason's lovely daughter and her hippy boyfriend head off to God's yacht and Carol inherits the rest of the hippies and starts washing their hair in her kitchen.

The plot after that involves a plan to bust out of jail by putting all the remaining blotter pages in a vat of mashed potatoes, thus drugging the prison population so they can sail past the prison walls in a balloon, after first hypnotizing the guards with an electric rainbow colored trash can dance. Carol Channing follows her daughter out to God's yacht meanwhile, hippies in tow. When Gleason fails to kiss Blue Chips, God orders her daughter's death but by then everyone is tripping way too hard to load a gun without hallucinating smiley faces on the bullets. Channing boards the yacht like a British admiral and sings the drecky/catchy theme song.

I can't imagine how unpleasant tripping while locked in a jail cell would be but having to endure listening to Nilsson singing all of the closing credits in his precious little high voice is surely worse. Nilsson also plays a guard at the jail alongside Fred "Slow Burn" Clark.

Hey, some aspects of this film are less cool than others, but one thing that is cool? Groucho Marx... on acid!

"... I was hanging around with friends from the Hog Farm, who were extras in the movie. Skidoo was pro-acid propaganda thinly disguised as a comedy adventure ... One of the characters in Skidoo was a Mafia chieftain named God. Screenwriter Bill Cannon had suggested Groucho Marx for the part ... [Groucho] was concerned about the script of Skidoo because it pretty much advocated LSD which he had never tried, but he was curious. Moreover, he felt a certain responsibility to his young audience not to steer them wrong, so could I possibly get him some pure stuff and would I care to accompany him on a trip. I did not play hard to get. We arranged to ingest those little white tablets one afternoon at the home of an actress in Beverly Hills ...

... Groucho was holding on to his cigar for a long time, but he never smoked it, he only sniffed it occasionally. 'Everybody has their own Laurel and Hardy,' he mused. 'A miniature Laurel and Hardy, one on each shoulder. Your little Oliver Hardy bawls you out - he says, 'Well this is a fine mess you've gotten us into.' And your little Stan Laurel gets all weepy - 'Oh, Ollie. I couldn't help it. I'm sorry, I did the best I could ...'

... Later, when Groucho started chuckling to himself, I hesitated to interrupt his reverie, but I had to ask, 'What struck you funny?' 'I was thinking about this movie, Skidoo,' he said. 'I mean some of it is just plain ridiculous. This kid puts his stationery, which is soaked in LSD, into the water supply of the prison, and suddenly everybody gets completely reformed. There's a prisoner who says, 'Oh, gosh, now I don't have to be a rapist anymore!' ... But I'm getting a big kick out of playing somebody named God like a dirty old man. You wanna know why ... it's because - do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?'

... He recalled Otto Preminger telling him about his own response to taking LSD and then he mimicked Preminger's accent: "I saw tings, bot I did not zee myself.' Groucho was looking in a mirror on the dining room wall, and he said, 'Well, I can see myself but I still don't understand what the hell I'm doing here ... A week later, Groucho told me that the Hog Farm had turned him on with marijuana on the set of Skidoo. When Skidoo was released, Tim Leary saw it, and he cheerfully admitted, 'I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He's much hipper than me ...' Posted by Kliph Nesteroff - Classic Television Showbiz 

Gut Gott! If I didn't know from cinema history that Preminger did acid I never would have believed it because SKIDOO is so damn square. I've never taken LSD on a film set but one thing I do know is that drugs can make things seem a lot funnier than they 'really' are at the time. The thought of Groucho as a mobster named God sounds so appetizing I longed to see this film for decades, hardly daring to believe it could be as bad as those who had seen it claimed. Right there you have an inkling: what looks good on paper to a tripping fool may not be good onscreen, lest said viewer drops tabs aforehand but then again nearly anything can be hilarious thus. It ain't no HEAD.... Of course the people making that film were far younger.

HEAD (above), which came out the same year - genius!! 

But I also know from way, way too much personal experience, that after awhile the awesome visuals of LSD can get redundant, like being thrown up against the same glass barrier time and time again, able to see paradise in passing, on a Disney ride that can neither be slowed nor speeded, with paranoid Hell and surreal whimsy other tableaux just as inescapable and un-speed-pastable. The paranoia gradually lessens as you get the hang of not fighting it, but the surrealism ends too soon and the paradise where you long to say is still--and always will be--just a stop on the ride, and you end up forced to confront the fact that all was revealed to you years ago the first time you dropped and you haven't used that knowledge to do much of anything. You were bestowed with the will and energy to make those changes, and no, you never did finish any of those projects or self-improvements your heightened creative inspiration laid out--you were too burnt out at the time, coming down off of the acid that showed you what to do once you were not still tripping--and now the list of things you must do to be free from ego's headlock has doubled and that goal is so far away it's no brighter than the candle at the far end of the room, dancing like a cigarette tip in the hand of the night. Your once promising future is now like the Johnny Cash museum in that "Hurt" video, the cracked glass for some forgotten gold record... that just... wont... stop... playing! And this all happens over the course of four hours.

Like so many comedies of the era's studios, SKIDOO is packed with old timers looking for a few days work, and they mirror in their confusion an audience made far too easily amused and passive due to their own smuggled-into-the-theater chemical stash. In Hollywood I guess if word gets out you're making a big-budget boondoggle your set fills to overflowing weird old character actors looking for a walk-on and free craft services. Look at all the old fogey greats racing around the AIP beach party movies--Boris Karloff, Don Rickles, Buster Keaton, Peter Lorre--none of those cats made it to SKIDOO, but there is Slim ""Major Kong" Pickens as a radio operator, George Raft as a sea captain, Peter Lawford as a senator, Frank Gorshin as a hipster capo who insists Gleason kill Mickey Rooney. Oh, man, if only. If only we could go back in time and prevent him from playing Puck in Max Reinhardt's adaptation of MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, like the Terminatah of Shakespeare. I'd have loved to see Billy Barty in there instead! Think about it...

Still mugging after all these years

Frank Gorshin probably looks the worst. His capo is not looking like prison agrees with him, but factoring the presence Cesar "the Joker" Romero and Burgess "Penguin" Meredith (as the warden) there are no less than three villains from the Batman TV show in here! John Phillips Law is the beautiful white hippy version of Sidney Poitier in GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER, i.e. tall, and engaged to Alexandra Hay--she who us born to knock your socks off in a mod miniskirt, and bound to unnerve her father whomever she marries. In the end, SKIDOO is really the addled fantasy of the middle-aged dude who gets reborn by smoking government-grown marijuana. Proving this is a very expensive major studio version of an AIP beach movie, Frankie Avalon even plays Romero's playboy son. He's the reminder that 'youth' can still be square, the last gasp reminder of pre-hippie cool. Hippies is stolen yo girls, Frank! Frank you old! Stop hawkin'...

It's worth noting how genuinely revolutionary, relative to today's inclement times, it is that Groucho Marx and Otto Preminger did LSD as preparation for making the movie. The former, as we've learned, did it expressly so he could be sure he wasn't leading the kids down a wrong path, as the movie was considered an advocation of LSD use (which may have something to do with its being so hard to see until lately); Preminger took it because he was originally scheduled to direct an anti-LSD movie and decided contempt prior to investigation was wrong! That a 78 year-old man like Groucho and a 63 year-old man like Otto would decide to take LSD before either advocating or condemning it is so rare! Today's demonizers wouldn't dare touch any of that stuff. It affirms my theory that everyone who thinks drugs should be illegal have never tried any, or probably been offered any. Has lack of investigation prior to contempt EVER stopped our lawmakers and neo-conservative knee-jerk hysterics? As Preminger might say, People.... zey used to be so awesome.

One of SKID's biggest promoters is Christian Divine, who lays out some backstory:

Based on a more satirical, whimsical script by rebel scribe Doran William Cannon (Brewster McCloud; Hex), Skidoo was to be Preminger's first real comedy since 1954's The Moon Is Blue, which caused a scandal by using the verboten word, "virgin" and led to the destruction of the prohibitive Production Code. Preminger invited controversy all through his career, often battling the forces of political censorship to tackle now issues in his films. Par for the course, he had originally planned to direct John Hersey's LSD cautionary novel, Too Far To Walk, but after meeting with counter-culture impressario Tom Law -- whose brother John Phillip Law had appeared in Preminger's Hurry Sundown (1966) -- the director had a change of heart. Tom Law explained, "When I met Otto, he told me he was making an anti-LSD film. I asked him why and tried to explain he wasn't being truthful to the subject, that I knew many people who had positive experiences and he was contributing to stereotypes. He listened and agreed. He was cool."

Although Bill Cannon had been brought in to adapt Too Far To Walk, Preminger impulsively decided to buy his sample script Skidoo. Francis Ford Coppola urged the wary Cannon to sell his screenplay, advising him that this would be a perfect entry into Hollywood. He sold it for 75,000 dollars and Otto Preminger immersed himself in the world of the hippies with a paisley vengeance. As a genuinely progressive soul, he hung out with Tom and John Phillip Law, who owned the legendary 60s rock mansion, The Castle, high in the Hollywood Hills. Bob Dylan composed on a typewriter while Nico lounged and Harrison Ford did carpentry. (Christian Divine, Six Degrees of Skidoo - Huffington Post)

I'm very happy this film has a champion in Christian Divine. I don't think SKIDOO's anywhere near as engaging as some of the best acid musicals like HEAD, YELLOW SUBMARINE and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, but it holds its own against the similar bloated spectacles of the old and young trying to trip together and meet halfway (ala CASINO ROYALE, any Bob Hope movie of the approx. same time); it imagines a bright, truly deranged future for all concerned, outside the limitations of cultural difference like the differences between inside jail and out, crime and the law, straight and zonked or alien and human. While AIP movies like THE TRIP had to show Peter Fonda's head crack open in the final freeze frame and run disclaimers to appease nervous producers, SKIDOO sets sail with God on a candy-colored sailboat tab on tongue... pro-LSD down to its prison-striped socks.

Yeah but then Nilsson sings those credits and suddenly even the squarest cats shudder with douche chills. So you get a little and you pay a little - two for five, ten for twenty. At least this movie's out of the mothballs and ready to be discovered, at home, where no one will see your jet-black alien  dilated pupils.
---

1. Mars, Jim - Alien Agenda, p. 122 (Harper, NY, 1997)

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Screw any Man under 30: ARIZONA DREAM (1993, dir. Emir Kusturica)

"Why must you screw any man under 30?"
"Because it's normal... in Papua New Guinea!"

The above lines of dialogue give you some insight into the hysterical weirdness of Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica's first English language film, ARIZONA DREAM (1993). Don't let it get confused with other ARIZONA movies, or quirky ensemble films too numerous to name (BENNY AND JOON springs to mind, but I've never seen it). Yes, it's got a post-structuralist's fascination with desert roadside attractions, and yes it's got a whimsical voiceover (from Depp) and whimsy involving Eskimos, a hypnotist sled dog; a fish with two eyes on the same side of his face, a balloon; an airplane propeller mounted to the chandelier for a ceiling fan; Depp acting like a chicken "buck buck buckcock!"; fish swimming through the sky whenever someone dies; ambulances going up to the moon; pet turtles at the dinner table, but none of it done in a corny 'faux-centric" way like a Sundance workshop "about family... about hope"  nor is it done in an 'aren't common folk delightful?' Capra style. Instead this has enough 'hysterics' to land it amongst films like Zulawski's 1985  L'AMOR BRAQUE (my piece here) or 80's Godard like DETECTIVE and CODE NAME: CARMEN. In short, it's genuinely nuts, not nuts-lite.

The story unfolds with nature conservationist Depp being lured by brother Vince Gallo out to Arizona to attend his uncle's wedding. Jerry Lewis is the uncle, a car dealer with a thing for pink Cadillacs. He's marrying--wait for it--noted supermodel Paulina Porizkova! So far so good. Yet that whole set-up is dropped once Lili Taylor as a rich heiress and Faye Dunaway as her hot mess stepmom show up at the dealership and Depp and Gallo start falling all over themselves like the Marx Brothers over Thelma Todd. Depp quickly moves in to the ladies' remote Arizona mansion, to shag Dunaway and help her realize her dream of building a fantasmastical flying machine. Kudos to any film where Faye Dunaway out crazies Jerry Lewis (I generally cringe watching Lewis' schtick, but he's restrained and excellent here).

Fans of Vincent Gallo should note there's early signs of his BROWN BUNNY austerity, when he performs the crop dusting scene from Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST at a talent show. Later during a pivotal scene of bedroom hopping upstairs, Gallo is down on the couch, watching GODFATHER II and reciting the whole Fredo bit "Don't you think I'm smaht?!" These scenes, immortal as they come, seems to be metaphors for middle America to the European cinephile mind, a place of endless expanse and emotional voidness, where space, time, and family cease to have any meaning, and we find ourselves hiding and dodging and hiding like a scarecrow at an airport. Gallo also quotes the Cowardly Lion ("I didn't bite hm!") and dances around when things get weird, which they do.

Lili Taylor has perhaps never looked sexier or seemed more relaxed, as the stepdaughter, even as she commits bungee jumping pseudo-suicide, and dreams of coming back as a turtle, but--like Lewis--she lets Dunaway--sexy cougar-style in country frock, pale denim jacket and beauty contest hair-- out-crazy her. The cast clearly has affection for each other and the chops to improv and ham it up without moving out of character or grandstanding. Thanks to his endless Tim Burton movies, Depp's quirkiness isn't quite as fresh as it may have been back in 1993, but Kusturica is no Burton, and the film never loses its giddy, mystical edge. Actors tend to talk a lot about the friends and collaborative energy they experienced on the set of whatever film they're plugging, but here none of that friendly collaboration feels like it needs to be mentioned. It's there, for real, so there's no need to talk about it. Let the Iggy Pop songs on the soundtrack (written by Kusturica for the film) tell what needs telling, and leave it at that.

After this, Kusturica would make his definitive politico-black comedy UNDERGROUND (1995) and you can see some of the ideas in that later film born in DREAM's scattered, hypertextual framework. Long unavailable on DVD or VHS, it's a delight to find ARIZONA DREAM on Netflix streaming! Fans of acid cinema are obliged to, if not plunge, at least wade tentatively in... before it vanishes into the fishnet ether from which it came.

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Apocalypse-Dependent: SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)

"It is the business of the future to be dangerous."
  ----Alfred N. Whitehead (1925)

"Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted." --- Krista Now

Watching THE SOUTHLAND TALES (2006) followed by the Little Ice Age and UFO documentaries (only on the History Channel) and preceded by Libyan unrest on the news; as Portlandia and The Onion News Network make amok globalization and conservative paranoia funny again, all I can think is my knees hurt from the weird solar weather outside and how it's all going according to plan, but it's not my plan.

12/21/12 is coming, the solar storms are moving in, MONSTERS patrol the widening contamination zone between the US and Mexico; "Cyberspace is placed under federal control, formed under the protection of the patriot act," says Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake), narrating from the vantage point of his California beachside gun turret, where he watches like a cross between Charles Starkweather and Bela Lugosi in GLEN OR GLENDA. Pull zee trigger!

This is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but with a bang, so TS, TS!

...there's unofficial links in SOUTHLAND that are surely to make film fans recall other films about the nature of cult film viewing, like BUCKAROO BANZAI, but at times Kelly's presumption we're going to watch SOUTHLAND over and over and compare obscure clues with each other seems presumptuous in an age where an infinite amount of films and TV are available at every moment and we can barely sit still for a film once. Pre-fab camp never works, well sometimes.... and I admire the abstract crossword puzzle association to films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Boxer passes and pockets a blinking plastic orange while Ludwig Van's 9th plays in the background), MADAME SATAN (crazy Zeppelin party), THE BIG LIEBOWSKI (dancers in the skee-ball lanes) and MULHOLLAND DRIVE (Rebekah "Llorando" Del Rio, singing the Star Spangled Banner, clashing against droning John Cale strings). Moby does the rest of the music and it's a perfect fit for Kelly's mood - it's the end of the world and everybody's fine with that, acting to stop it only in the most perfunctory of ways

"---Science is harnessing... wormholes... light speed.... time travel..."

I'm inserting random history channel quotes as I write to add some post-cinematic affect; the voice intoning scientific advancement playing behind my head on TV; listening to a radio in a separate room at the same time; I'm deliberately screwing with notions of actor vs. character in this essay; everything I say is a lie but this. Buffy's actress's porn stars' TV show's theme: "Quantum teleportation, teen horniness, and war."

 ----"what caused the abrupt climate shift that doomed the Vikings?"

The Nostradamus History Channel TV show proves what Kelly's SOUTHLAND TALES hints at: Americans are excited for the apocalypse. I'd even argue our whole culture is apocalypse-dependent. Without the fantasy of a global reset button, we'd be stuck with the guilt, hangover, and debt of seven generations. If 'nothing' happens on 12/21/12, man we'll be pissed, let's not kid ourselves (unless we have kids of course, as it's dad's fault). In my childhood during the still cold-70s, it was the sudden threat of nuclear war that kept us edgy and smoking without excess guilt; kept us screwing (the expression at the time) and burning out. We secretly hoped it would come so we could go out on the roof and watch Philadelphia get it first, and even the kids would get gin and tonics to celebrate.

But what I can't understand is why Nostradamus and--apparently--every ancient civilization with star savvy was so anxious to encode everything on earth with the date that is now rapidly approaching. In the new century, if we heard the world was gonna end 'exactly' five hundred years from now, would we care? Seven generations is a crap in the bucket when you're thinking about Egyptians and Mayans... who themselves were wiped out long before getting close to within seven generations of 2012. So why did they inscribe our date with destiny in secret code all around their architecture. Why did they care about us?!!! What about the fast food and the banks and power plants that might fall a mere 7,000 years from now!?

I think it was, in the end, they had no television, no internet; nothing else to do.

That problem is answered in SOUTHLAND by completely collapsing any notion of linear time. Even the bad guys who monitor everything on IDENT are secretly enthralled by the notion of the end, and are all rebelling from one program or another to ensure that end arrives. Good guys and bad all want the same thing in an age when amnesia is inducible via an easily acquired drug. Anyone can be abducted and turned loose without being able to identify one's abductees. The Rock (Boxer Santeros), starts the film with amnesia and the first thing his wife (Mandy Moore) notes when seeing him--with some disgust--is that he has it again -- do reprobates pop an amnesia pill after cheating on their spouses so they can't get trapped in a lie? She notes it with the repulsion one might notice the reek of stale booze and cigarettes or ring around the collar. He denies his amnesia on instinct as if its something to be ashamed of. The game of it all becomes what the Buddha calls "joyful participation in the sorrows of the world," or what Joseph Campbell deciphers it to mean: "When you're falling, dive." When the world finally adapts that marvelous strategy, owning up to amnesia is the same as confessing to Satanism, and pressing the button because even Def-Con 5 needs love.

What Kelly also understands is the nature of drugs and the weird habit alcoholics and drug addicts have of watching the same movie over and over again because... I forget why. Or for that matter endless repeat seasons of reality TV shows, where our knowledge of what is going to happen, who will win, who will die, is granted us like benign rulers, or our own inner Pilot Abilenes. Revelation 6.8 and behold a pale horse and the name that sat on it was repeat business. Of if you've ever edited footage on Final Cut until it loses all meaning... or if you've ever conducted experiments on soldiers, or called him Ronald Taverner, or sniffed paint fumes from a spray can, or had amnesia... if you're happy and you know it, hit the squib, and act shocked when you die, for the kids!

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Great Acid Cinema: ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO (AKA Cult of the Damned, 1969)

"Screw anyone who hates killing!"

Netflix streaming has just delivered unto its subscribers a vast wealth of MGM-owned AIP and independent horror/sci fi titles from the 1960s-90s (many unavailable on DVD at all) just in time for the trippiest of all seasons, autumn, as in fall.. as in fall down and down we.....go.... If you have Netflix, drop everything and stream CULT OF THE DAMNED! No Jim Jones (but there is still some Kool-Aid floating around, if you know what I mean).

In fact, CULT turns out to be a counterculture 1969 AIP gas(ss) filmed in Los Angeles, California that might even be better than PSYCH-OUT, almost as good as HEAD. So whether you're an AIP fan or just a cinematic "experience seeker," take the CULT trip and instead of pinching yourself to see if you're dreaming, you'll be pinching your mom, shouting obscenities at passing pigeons, and howling; your lips frothing, your pupils wildly dilated, meaning to say hello but instead just laughing insanely. You will definitely have, as they say, totally lost it, and then you'll know, Bogart's mad vision of an America that's eaten itself down to the overweight health crisis bone has come to pass. The man is a prophet.

CULT OF THE DAMNED originally had the much more sensible (relatively) title, ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO, referring to one of the psychedelic rock songs performed by said prophet for the gone generation, the skydiving rock impresario, Bogart "as in the real Humphrey!" Peter Stuyvesant (Jordan Christopher). He's thinking of calling his new group 'Rabbit Habbit,' a trio consisting of skydiving hipster freaks: stone cool Lou Rawls ("Everybody knows black is better, baby!"), a cute blonde flower child ("Birth control can be controlled by the mind!") and Roddy McDowell! ("I heard alcohol is coming back!") The songs are full of groovy organ and funky but non-slapped bass lines I could totally play if my bass wasn't so far away, and written by the ISHTAR-ish song-writing team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, clearly aping the oft-aped style of the musical 'HAIR.'  Since the lead is obsessed about her weight issues and there's an uber bitch-control freak pill-head former glamor girl mom, it becomes a kind of HAIRSPRAY/HAIR mind-meld, sans the terrible smell of permanents, but with the pungent incense of the Manson killings to come ("My mom always told me the next war would be between the blacks and the whites!")

The film begins, still trying to make me think it's about GUYANA (it was originally mixed up under the GUYANA image above on Netflix, so I spent a good hour wondering when these hippies were going to move to Guyana). There are lots of jungle noises in the beginning to bear out the assumption that we're watching the right movie (at least for me, who always thought Guyana was in Africa). But as it goes on it gets very Joan Collins plays Mommy Dearest as written by Valerie Solanis channeling Oscar Wilde. There's first person-narrated childhood of debutante, Tara Nicole Steele (Holly Near) who hallucinates disturbing collages of her riches-to-riches life story, where "everyone dies on schedule, beautifully." Jennifer Jones is the faded mom, who shouts at Tara: "You are a fat girl, you idiot! I don't know why anyone would even touch you!!" When she throws Tara Nicole a coming-out party it's like a champagne bottle missile... aimed straight at the head. Yo, that's poetry.

All through the film, I presumed Tara Nicole was going to go off to Guyana and join Jim Jones to escape her mom's cold clutches, or something, and that an angry reel of camp atrocity footage would be tacked on at the end, intercut with Tara Nicole freaking out in close-up so you couldn't tell she wasn't really there. But then, left turns start and go, baby, go, until you're freaking out in the best free love acid flashback kind of way, with just a little dab of Manson-esque foreshadowing to keep everything from getting too Partridge Family.

Bogart lays Tara by the lake; she fantasizes weird Freudian melt-down bloody Bluebeard forbidden stained-key-style. Bogart's friends show up and sweep her into their world of forbidden pleasure and love, love, freedom, mama angel! Pillows and purple gel accent lighting and a groovy old LP player and reel-to-reel. He even records a song to his new love about how "growing high and going wide gives you lots of 'room' inside." Tara gets confident with all this attention and learns to dance free and easy like Mama Cass and tease her mom about her obsession with expensive jewelry. With a little research Tara learns that fat used to be the height of beauty and that "Twiggy only dates back to Buchenwald."  When Bogart decides to get with Tara's pillhead mama ("maybe you'll adopt me, maybe I'll adopt you, but oh crazy lady crazy lady!") Tara freaks out and starts crying up on the ceiling. Mom hangs by the pool and notes: "He is the sort that makes you take all sorts of tranquilizers before breakfast, isn't he? And wash them down with bloodys." Cheers, Mrs. S.! "You drive, I dive! We all die!" With Bogart around, bloody's always for breakfast.

Needless to say, Mom gets her own song, too:, in a slow grinding bluesy vamp:

I just met a mother -
ain't gonna tell you her name.
I just met a mother
she puts us all to shame.
Well the bigger that they are,
the harder they fall.
Looka here, what do we got?
the biggest mother
of them all!

Bogart can just magically come up with some cool thing to sing and instantly move the whole cast in and out of his recording studio to belt it out, sometimes with the pre-recorded version, then actually singing it, then just listening to it, then having it play in the background as they drive around in his groovy car, all within the course of a three minute song. Meanwhile, photos everywhere, on all the walls, keep it all weird, man, like below:

So, if you haven't seen ANGEL AKA CULT on Netflix (where it's mislabeled GUYANA) streaming, you haven't seen it. See this stone groove motherlover timeless remembrance of the days of cults and parental anxiety about drugged-out rebels that talked too fast and sang too much.

For Squaresville adults it was like looking right into Medusa's hazel blue eyes. Mother Lover!

Perhaps this film isn't as well-known as its other AIP psychedelic brethren due to bad timing, i.e. the Manson murders. That little event broke up negotiations between the generations like a bomb at Middle East peace conference. Suddenly an innocent film--full of song, freak, and flag that just happened to be about killing your parents--was seen as something very dark, which the film's satirical tone was maybe just too frazzled to support; so they changed the name to CULT OF THE DAMNED. If four people count as a cult then oh, crazy lady crazy lady. So stuck in a limbo where BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLL fans can't find it (they'd love it), the film's been rolling around in a time warp obscurity ever since, ever since now, crazylady crazylady!!

So remember, the only way to find this film is to look for another film on Netflix under the similar title, GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED -- and somehow, that makes the actual film even better, for even if they never actually get to Guyana, this damned cult's Kool-Aid still packs a 'Lovely Sort of Death' in every sip, so drink up, tune in, and dive, cannibal America, dive!

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