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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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 Alice trades in coy innocence for guns and high kicks. She deals with undead monsters AND a corrupt post-apocalyptic government, and death not ends it. She is both fully mature and unborn, sexy but essentially genderless - mired in the quicksand of shifting animus relations, doomed to spend the rest of her life wrestling with the sticky shreds of her cocoon, a dream from which one awakens only into another level of the same endless game.

We can see the reverse of this stagnation in the mama's boy phenomenon, the PSYCHO Norman Bates unable to sever the hydra-like apron strings of a domineering mother. While the girls with bad animus relations may simultaneously revere and fear their fathers, the boys simultaneously resent and "represent" their mothers.In order to blast loose the Self from this repressive quagmire of unassimilated archetypal energies, some real force is required. Death--real or symbolic--is often not even a viable solution. But the egocide of acid works, baby: you don't have to die, just let go of your gun and submit to an alien frisking, with looove.

'Twas the psychedelic drug explosion of the late 1960s that first caused a drastic and much needed push in this direction. Women were shown a different way forward than just copying or condemning men, or buying into their narrow view of what constituted ladylike behavior. When the scholars, artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers got a hold of LSD, the whole pop culture burst at the seams, adding a revisionist slant towards like-minded artists of the past - the Marx brothers, Humphrey Bogart, Dali, and of course Lewis Carroll's Alice. The "Go Ask Alices" are indicative of this as bump up a notch as well. Girls who would have aged into light blue/gray beehive hairdos and terrible dress sense became instead goddesses of eternal coolness and debauched vengeance, and/or O.D-ed. But even demonizing drugs opens up a discourse, just talking about altering one's mind has a tendency to alter it, so it makes sense that in the 21st century it's not even polite to talk about why you don't want to talk about it. It's the pink elephant in the room and once you dare to actually behold it, reality itself begins to loosen and slip away. Pretty soon the elephant is right there, bigger than life, getting more tangible by the second, and within minutes you don't even remember a time it wasn't always there; reality bends and folds and now you remember the elephant from when you were four years old and it just came home from safari. Sounds messy and costly in the long run and yes, you do get stomped on, but hey, you got to see an elephant!

Psychedelic drugs have their own animistic shadow in the "gifts" that help the heroine on her mythic journey. Before acid, the mythic jewels bequeathed on Alice by her hippy caterpillar animus figures were mere signifiers. LSD was the white rabbit-shaped booster rocket. Millions made the journey before the door was locked shut by police and bad karma. Now these opportunities are crippled by media-perpetuated fear, urban legends, and draconian drug laws. But for a stretch of time 40 years ago or so, the doors of perception were blasted open. For a nominal fee anyone could buy a round trip into the recesses of their own forests, where boyfriends were revealed to be wolves and woodsmen rolled together, and fathers were revealed to be slackjawed televisual zombies. Lit up in a brilliant flash, the lines dividing light and shadow in the soul vanished and you were free.

One of the places this sense of awakening and possibility really flourished was in the Czech new wave cinema which brought such avant garde weirdness as DAISIES (1970) and VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (1970). This last is especially fascinating, a truly complex "adult" fairy tale, fragmented through the psycho-sexual looking glass of vampire imagery, straight out of a storybook you remember from childhood that may not have existed in this reality.

A young girl, Valerie, lives in a small Czech town that's being visited by a circus/carnival. While surveying the clowns and jugglers from her window above, Valerie spots a mysterious vampire figure--The "Weasel"--and from then on its a mad masquerade, as he menaces her and vampirizes her grandmother (her mom is--as is usual in fairy tales--absent) and later the Weasel turns out to be Valerie's father, maybe even her son. Meanwhile Valerie's grandmother regresses in age, and there's near-incest galore. Valerie is given a pair of magic earrings that cause her to teleport through time and space.  In one of the most beautiful and bizarre scenes, Valerie is implicated as the devil and fastened to a pole in the center of a bonfire by the hostile townsfolk. Yet she merely smiles down at them in a warm, absolving way, and uses her earrings to vanish at the last possible second. The end finds her walking through what seems to be a post-production picnic orgy, that same enigmatic Mona Lisa smile on Valerie's face, grown now to bewitchingly mythic proportions. At one point she even looks right into the camera and smiles warmly. Anyone, male, female, straight, gay, old, young, is bound to be bewitched by this young actress's preternatural serenity and auburn beauty, causing a vast frisson of potentially impure thoughts mixed with the urge to protect and nurture her already impressive intelligence. We might flip back and forth from good to evil a dozen times as spectators all in that one moment, and she's already seen it happen with her own Weasel father. She's beyond it all; to paraphrase a metaphor from part one, she's already hugged her werewolf. It may not be quite a prince yet, but for the nonce she's just fine with having an attack dog at her side.

The always trenchant Michael Atkinson sums up LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL in a Village Voice article:

Richard Blackburn's long-fabled Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (also 1972, obviously a key year) exists in a suffocating, ur-Southern Gothic nightscape all its own. Unashamedly shoestring, Blackburn's dream odyssey through pubertal agony drips with Freudian syrup, but it's also a fervidly physical film—the midnight back alleys of Old South ghost towns are not places you'll be longing to revisit. More so even than Carnival of Souls and Night of the Living Dead, this mysterious phantasm plays like a visit to the underworld.....

The "unashamedly shoestring" element, as is the case with fellow indie cult hits CARNIVAL OF SOULS and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (both 1968), is part of the creepy affect, the feeling one is adrift in a flea-bitten midnight zone between intentional Brechtian distancing for a post-modern aesthetic arrest and the cheap carny spookshow thrills of schlock. Like all good Alice tales, LEMORA involves a plucky young heroine, Lila (Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith). leaving her kindly but clueless preacher guardian in the middle of the night to seek out the wild dangers of her "real" father, a presumed weasel (i.e. gangster werewolf).

The poverty row emptiness gives LEMORA the eerie frisson of a childhood nightmare. Lila's journey begins when she stows away in a car of a sleazy couple to get to town, which turns out to be a few cardboard storefronts in a small, darkly lit, empty soundstage. Rather than making the film laughable, this "unashamedly shoestring" quality adds to the dreamy disconnect - our own dreams have this same cardboard two-dimensionality. All the extras and actors she encounters are grotesque parodies of sexual adults as seen through the eyes of a child, a drunken pair of brawling lovers, a creepy bus ticket cashier, etc. The more cheapjack and surreal it gets, the creepier, the more uncanny.

But the "Alice effect" in LEMORA actually comes not from the usual stock of menacing males, but from the coven-like peer pressure of the older women. Lemora herself is a succubus-type who gets Lila eating raw meat and drinking blood and possibly dabbling in lesbianism--and there's an old hag who sings an eerie nursery rhyme while walking slowly in circles around Lila while she's imprisoned in a shed. There wouldn't be another matriarchy this creepy until Neil La Bute's WICKER MAN remake! And here we realize why:  the Bruckheimer bottom dollar feeders of Hollywood have a frat boy's fear of castration and so there's no powerful women like these in our modern Hollywood myths - only arm candy and maybe a syrupy old grandmom for Peter Parker. And LEMORA has all the things big money boys are still struggling in their inner female's sticky webs to get away from; they'd rather not be reminded, like Jimmy Stewart in VERTIGO, that they're not ever going to escape. Ain't no amount of bullets and bromance gonna change that, Jimmy. You got to let go.

They say the soul of every old man is a young girl, and vice versa, that all the ages and genders ultimately even out in BENJAMIN BUTTON-style criss-crosses, I believe that's so, and when we grow weak and elderly our soul thins out until it's barely born. Old interests return, part of the reason why children and old people get along so well. The key to discovery of self then is the brave meeting with these inner figures of your past and present and shadow; the magnetism between genders and generations is then sublimated into art and myth, not repressed, banned or condemned. Drugs like LSD should be regulated and dispensed gingerly, but never suppressed or demonized. With research and proper set and setting, they could change the world overnight for the better. The real dangers to our future, as LEMORA indicates, are the preachers and moralists and hysterics, the ironic distancers and the ego-blinded. The addictive nature of repression is the real dark power at work in our communities, censoring with violence what it can't control, never admitting to itself that without darkness, light itself becomes dark, to compensate, and bad things happen. The outlawed darkness is forced to become light just to go in there and save the day. Balance--not triumph--is key. That's why John Lennon knew he had to invite the defeated Blue Meanie to come hang out at the end of YELLOW SUBMARINE. Alice would have done the same for you. would you arrest her just for that?

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