All you need is holes: WONDERWALL (1968) and the Entomological Mystery Tour

Thisbe and Pyramus loved through a hole in a wall, and that made it to Midsummer Night's Dream, so surely there's room for a 1968 Britpop film called WONDERWALL that's really more about "all the lonely peepers," like Prof. Oscar Collins (Jack McGowran) at a waterworks entomologist who collects bugs and peeps through a hole in the wall at neighbor and fashion model Penny Lane (Jane Birkin). Through microscope viewer-size holes in their shared wall he can see her modeling for a photographer lad (Brian Walsh) who dresses in Apple records green, and dealing with her two-timing boyfriend (Ian Quarrier, who tries to get her into a menage a trois with Anita Pallenberg) but Birkin is so gorgeous and young, with such heavenly legs and crazy fashions- that we want to see her all the time and less of old Collins. But mostly we see her only in a round hole.

So what is going on? Is this a PEEPING TOM for the Carnaby Street dandies? Why do we spend so much dull time with Collins? When Quarrier visits him to borrow borrow ice and sugar at various times,  the professor always dressed as if hoping to be invited over and it's very, very dispiriting. The film drags on and we learn Penny's pregnant. Will Quarrier help raise his forthcoming baby. Will the professor ride to the rescue? I mean in some capacity other than cocking his head quizzically, as might a beagle trying to understand his master's command, letting us know he's more or less neutered and nothing to fear as far as midnight slashings or pantings or underwear drawer rufflings?

Whatever the motives, the soundtrack is a nonstop feast for the chemically-enhanced ear, with George Harrison's psychedelic melange of sitars, guitars, harmonica, tamboura and Indian horns howling, tinkling, and buzzing like an array of electric insects nearly nonstop. It's an entomological freakfest - a kind of mute Beavis and Butthead if they were just one guy who barely spoke but watched vintage Joi Lansing Scopitones through round holes in a wall, with only Norma Shearer in RIPTIDE (1934) and Isabella Rossellini in GREEN PORNO (2008) able to compete in the insect costume category (and no spider ala Lansing's "Web of Love" to provide a threat) and Harrison's buzzing tamboura and sitar hovering deep inside your ear ossicles.

From top: Joi Lansing, WONDERWALL, RIP TIDE, GREEN PORNO

The source story is by Gérard Brach, who wrote REPULSION and CUL-DE-SAC and THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who penned VANISHING POINT (1972). One gets the impression of Brach's earlier work that he never meant Professor Collins to be any kind of Monsieur Hulot-Chaplin type whimsy generator but a skeevy older version of Terence Stamp in THE COLLECTOR, a fellow who doesn't need to abduct a pretty young specimen for his jar because one lives right next door, and there's plenty of air holes. The idea that Collins loses himself and begins to demolish his apartment to better make a million holes in the wall to peep through is creepy in itself, but doubly so when filmmaker Joe Massott films these actions to a bouncy polka and double projection speed ala Harold Lloyd or Benny Hill. Instead of laughs, what Collins needs a good slashening by Catherine Deneuve's razor, especially once he makes it his business to break into Penny's pad and start nosing around. That's the fundamental problem, or maybe solution, to this film --that young Penny just happens to be trying to snuff it right at the same evening he busts in. Good old Collins!

But maybe it's also because this weird pro-scopophile angle that it's ultimately interesting beyond its basic function as a pretty eye-popping light show showcase for Birkin's heavenly gams. If you go in expecting it to be a dull story of a dweebish scientist shuffling around his apartment in his pajamas, a reverse-gendered REPULSION tale of mental disintegration coupled to some old nudie cutie comedy like THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS, then the pop art YELLOW SUBMARINER tangents will throw you left of field; if you go in expecting a pop art whimsy-fest be prepared to be rather unnerved by the inordinate amount of time we watch Collins "reacting" to all he peeps. Factoring in the Beatles and pop art psychedelic hipster culture elements, Collins is a Mr. Jones / Father McKenzie bowler hat type Brit in a student art film, REAR WINDOW's Jimmy Stewart if he had no friends and didn't even know Grace Kelly, but spied on her and we were somehow expected to root for this delusional creep too shy and out of it to even realize how creepy he's being, figuring a movie about him watching old Grace Kelly through a hole was enough of a movie subject, especially with his imagining having a big duel with her boyfriend for her, using as weapons things like giant oversize pens, lipsticks, and cigarettes while the lime green photographer snaps pictures, all just so she can load his hookah while he stares off into space. Really, if you're going to imagine yourself a young Turk, why not be cool? Who pictures themselves as an old square duffer trying vainly to look hip? That defeats the whole purpose. Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Collins?

Now I should preface by saying I adore Michael Powell but I'm too skeeved out by PEEPING TOM to ever see it again, ditto THE COLLECTOR, and I can't stand Monsieur Hulot and all those damned (in my mind) terrible Jacques Tati comedies. And when it comes to the Beatles I'm more a Harrison-Ringo-John fan, and find some of Paul's songs insufferably cheeky and guileless. Paul was always trying to bring in the lonely old timers and bouncy children along on the picnic, dumbing shit down so they understand, while John and George were about leading the brave into the future (and scaring the shit out of children like me in the 70s, who of course loved the Paul songs). And there's that same bouncy children vibe here -- the colorful psychedelic whirligig is seen at arm's length while the drabness of foggy London codgers is front and center, the way, say, the Beatle's MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (below, above left) tried to be cheeky fun for one and all but instead was kind of like a banal fever dream - a bus loaded with middle-aged and dowdy working class yobbos instead of lovely upper crust birds and fellas. Just look at the drab washed out image of the four of them in their animal maskies below - as creepy as the brown bear man in THE SHINING or the citizens of Summer's Isle.

From Top: MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, SHINING, WICKER MAN

It's sad that Jack MacGowran, the great Irish Beckett interpreter, a titan of the stage capable of great oratory, who was fantastic as the gut-shot bank robber in Polanski's CUL-DE-SAC, is stuck playing a silent observer peeping tom scientist role, his mellifluent orating voice for naught; his hairy face like a feral Einstein, the whimsical electric banana I-am-a-Tangerine psychedelia regularly mystifies him but his playing along on his own side of the wall has a sad quality - wearing a tux that he keeps in a jar by the door.

In short, this is a very, very timid movie - it watches the hippies at play through binoculars like a dirty old man but gussies them up in enough insect coloring to give him the out that it's 'for educational and scientific purposes only.' Even happening to be in a position to come to her rescue, he hangs way back and lets the bobby get the glory and the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (meant to resemble making out, all the better to agitate old Professor Collins with, my dear). The whole film has the queasy vibe of someone trying to paint a DayGlo PG patina of scientific inquiry on something he knows deep down is prurient, puerile, and pathetic. Penny has to almost die for the prof to have a chance to kiss her without it being creepy but even then he flitters away too scared to remember even how to use a phone.

For all that, again, WONDERWALL can't be dismissed easily -- it has a lot of British fans, like old Liam Gallagher at the band Oasis. And I imagine if you discovered the film like old Liam did, likely at two AM on BBC-4 while coming down off LSD then well then you might write a song about it, too. And seeing it all swanky with pop art colors exploding off of the screen on the blu-ray while Harrison's music flows remastered and earthy-ethereal in a gorgeous remix, there can be no doubt it has druggy pop art allure: both apartments eventually look amazing thanks to set design by art collective (and Beatle haberdashers and mural painters) The Fool, and Birkin is progressively more and more gorgeous. So on the proper chemicals I imagine it would be quite the thing, and for the rest of us can certainly provide some help in the old spatchka department.

But this guy Prof. Oscar Collins is half the show and that's 100% the trouble. If we come to the blu-ray, we come for a psychedelic plasmatic gorgeous pop art happening, presumably, not a kitchen sink Benny Hill, and that we do end up with one addresses the lingering need of British counterculture to address the problem of the judgmental old duffer. We just shush them away now, but in sixties Swinging London, there was only the BBC and cinema --and British cinema has always been a mixed collar bag, with a socialist streak, a hard-lost sense of propriety and a penchant for turning nearly ever genre of film dishwater dull. And if an older fella really wanted to know what was going on in the swinging bird's pad, there was not yet media to let him know he was letting his bourgeois prurience get him in a stiff upper liplock. He might feel he has a right to move in and arrest them all if things look suspiciously salacious through the keyhole (and he can't admit to himself he too wanted to smoke hash with a naked Marianne Faithful on a bearskin rug). And he never doubts we'd love to see him seeing it all - that is to say WONDERWALL continually thrusts forward the idea of the audience needing to see who we're seeing through.

For all his faults, an American filmmaker like Woody Allen at least understood how that works, that basic truth of viewer psychology. Woody's going after girls young enough to actually be his daughters isn't something he feels we'd root for, yet he at least is honest about it and that's the very core of art, an elaborate disguise for something too twisted to convey any other way. In real life, Polanski is on the run, but Allen strides free, and WONDERWALL is somehow convinced it's Allen when it's Polanski, the way Michael Jackson was convinced he was Peter Pan instead of John Wayne Gacy on a short leash; each believing that their artistic drive is coming from somewhere other than the drive to create enough distracting noises to cover up the hideous heartbeat under the Poe floorboards. Allen's years of analysis have given him enough awareness to understand that it is the beating of his own hideous heart, his guilty conscience, and so his distracting noises are conveyed as self-aware comedy. And Polanski's awareness comes from feeling the need to film the heart directly, that the heart is all he can see and so forgive him if he doesn't even deign to make distracting noises. But Joe Massot's WONDERWALL is so distracted by his own distracting noises it forgets all about the heart, and so mistakes its beating as the sound of butterfly wings, and so he never asks himself the tough sordid Flannery O'Connor question: isn't every butterfly collector more liable to sniff through his prey's old cocoon drawer than save her from self-immolating?

By the end of the film we more or less resolve this episode in Collins' life, but for the rest of us we can't help but feel like Woody Allen trapped on that sad sack train at the start of STARDUST MEMORIES if the entire movie was spent with him watching Sharon Stone blow kisses through a window. But hey - it was 1968! The director, Joe Massot, had one more trick up his sleeve. In 1976, he was hired to make Led Zeppelin's SONG REMAINS THE SAME. He was Page's neighbor and had been pestering him and manager Peter Grant about it and they'd all knew WONDERWALL, his only other film, had Beatles mystique behind it (and they hadn't seen it, which would have been a dealbreaker). And so they hired him work unseen for SONG (and then fired him halfway through). I saw SONG for the first time on TV after a wild party, with no expectations, and a bunch of friends of some girl I was halfway hooked up with (a tale for a different post-here!), and tripping on too much acid to find fault with it, and I loved it. So set and setting are everything, but most importantly, no Professor Collins, no Monsieur Hulot, are present in SONG, just the crazy, violent, talented, dangerous, beautiful young adults of the Zeppelin. And while WONDERWALL is a worthy curio for Beatles fans and Britpop lovers, I'd rather not be reminded how long ago that wild party was -and that I'm now just a peeper, a spy in the house of love, a fool on on the hill. So take your concern for the bowler hat chaps and shove it where no one comes near. All the lonely people hate looking at images of lonely people looking at images. Cut out the mediary who'd pin Jane Birkin's wings to the wall so you can pay him for a glimpse, and free her with thine own electric eyes! If she never comes back, you never really saw her to begin with, and so, Monsieur Collins, adieu! J'snooze!

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American Grievers, Part Two: THE FOUNTAIN

"Death is the road to awe."

Was it an accident I watched THE FOUNTAIN (2006) the very next night after INCEPTION (see Grievers part one here)? There are no accidents in cinema when its imagery is way more high-def than your foggy day-to-day 'reality.' There's a handful of differences twixt the two: DiCaprio's brooding dreamweaver in INCEPTION becomes FOUNTAIN's Hugh Jackman, but they're really the same -- one bends time through dream-invasion, the other through past-life recollection.

THE FOUNTAIN's American Griever, Jackman, claims to love his wife but he dismisses her attempts to show him the wonders of the stars as mere imbecilic prattle. 

As a concerned neurochemist trying to cure his terminal wife (Rachel Weisz) via ancient tree of life scrapings, Jackman's many lives-one master hero is even more dour and dull than Leo. Poor Rachel just wants to find peace and die but  Hugh us too busy being ridden with angst and posturing grief to give a shit what she wants. We flash forward and back through time (via her calligraphy hand-written journal) like we're skimming a glossy-paged graphic novel: a shadowed inquisitor is self-flagellating and plotting against a golden-hued queen and her champion (Jackman again), a seething conquistador who sets off to South America in search of the same mystic tree.

All well and good but what makes FOUNTAIN such a classic American Griever saga is Jackman's blindness to Weisz herself. He loves only the thought her dying, like hurry up and die so I can drink to escape the pain and you can haunt my fringes, like all of Leo's dead wives. Weisz has seen the light but Jackman buries himself in sunless jungles so he can create an eternal light. All this when the deathlessness of light already is eternal! Right? You can float like a Buddha all you want, Hugh. It's as phony as a tree dolla bill. The parts in the beginning where he seems to die and be reborn into another aspect of self are very cool, but turn out to be kind of misrepresentin'. When and if he dies, he demands the whole earth shake and dissolve in admiration. He may meditate and look as self-righteously enlightened as Richard Gere, but the ego is a cunning focus-puller.

Personally, if I ever lost a parent as a child, or vice versa, my attitude might be more conventionally 'oh death, I'm mad at you! Instead I  have a great grandmother who lived to 107, and her daughter, my granny, alive and bored at 95 and put on suicide watch at her home if she even jokes about going out in a bang not a whimper. So I'm a represent, for her sake, that under-represented, pro-death voice: If your eyes are truly open, and life appears as it really is, infinite, then you know death is just the brief dream-filled sleep to life's 3-D space-time waking --living in the moment is impossible without feeling this to be true, of facing and making peace with your own mortality--and so when you hear this 'life is still life even if that life is less than lovely' jazz, you understand why our medical system is so fucked up. We'd outlaw death if we could, jamming a crowbar into the wheel and wondering where that grinding sound is coming from, and why the lines at Epcot are so long, and why so many people are being born with such cheap knock-off souls.

I know it's a touchy issue and I don't mean to sound all-knowing or callous, but in not even daring to touch on it, we're killing quality at the expense of quantity. I've known people who've pissed away their life savings keeping a vegetable relative hooked to a machine. And I've waited in lines. At Epcot. And I've seen the limitless expanses of trash dumps, and mass production, and stockyards, and phone books... and suburban sprawl. Know who benefits from our fearful overpopulation? The soul-eaters, the reptillian overlords, and CEOs of giant conglomerates.

What makes THE FOUNTAIN all the more troubling is actually its most interesting aspects: the way death is viewed as a form of public transportation; if you surrender to death in the right spirit you never really die. So in a way this tree of life is a sister to the mind altering South American plant concoctions like ayahuasca. But these elements aren't explored so much as passed like ship-shaped phantoms in the on the way to another tearful tantrum. I stood up a few times and yelled at the screen: "Hugh. we may already be immortal, soul-wise, so why cling to one body forever rather than find out?" It may well be that radiation treatments may prolong your life if your body has cancer, but at the cost of warping the electromagnetic weave of your immortal soul, which is an electromagnetic field that can become permanently damaged by radiation, hence William S. Burroughs' description of the atomic bomb as a soul killer:

Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast? If human and animal souls are seen as electromagnetic force fields, such fields could be totally disrupted by a nuclear explosion. The mummy's nightmare: disintegration of souls, and this is precisely the ultrasecret and supersensitive function of the atom bomb: a Soul Killer, to alleviate an escalating soul glut.

Imagine if in doing chemo we are prolonging our current life at the expense of mutating our immortal soul, like the Bridey Murphy medieval witch in Roger Corman's THE UNDEAD? Now that is an awesome movie.

My point with 'American Grievers' is not to be controversial for attention but to illuminate a gap between romantic male characters in today's cinema and those of old Hollywood, when men relating to their female partners in a direct and tender manner while remaining tough (not falling into rom-com territory) was not a forgotten art. Think of the rapport between William Powell and Myrna Loy in THE THIN MAN or William Powell and Kay Francis in ONE WAY PASSAGE and JEWEL ROBBERY. Think of Bogie and Bacall; Newman and Woodward; Taylor and Burton; Gable and Lombard; Gable and Scarlett --all instances of actors able to be both masculine and tender, deep and badass but also sexually healthy compared to the anguished loners of post-'82 American dramatic cinema, who were never supposed to become role models. Aside from Russell Crowe--an Australian--who can still do this?

I must be preaching to the choir in the case of Aronofsky. in his last two films, THE BLACK SWAN and THE WRESTLER, death is practically advocated as the one truly badass artistic climax of performance. I would hope we're meant to side with Rachel Weisz's right to die vs. Jackman's tiresome "you're not gonna die!" tirades. This keen and subtle critique of America's blase' closed-mindedness towards any talk of death with dignity or eternal life as a reason to let go of a dying body is a subtextual touchstone for Aronofsky's last two films. The characters Jackman resembles in THE WRESTLER and BLACK SWAN are SWAN's Barbara Hershey as a micro-managing stage mom WRESTLER's Marisa Tomei as a single stripper mom wary of ex-client Mickey's headlock.  The trouble is, Jackman's the main character in THE FOUNTAIN. He's supposed to be the good guy.Would you want to see THE BLACK SWAN if Hershey's character was the lead, and Portman just an ungrateful daughter?

In the end Jackman may or may not get wise to the joys of nonexistence, but either way his life as a lotus-posin' baldhead taking care of an outer space yum yum tree doesn't seem real, doesn't seem "earned" based on his record of glum tantrums. Meditation is where one goes to find the truth of what lies beyond our current mortality, what survives when the rest is burned away, what is eternal and true vs. what is ephemeral. What makes Aronofsky's later films much better is the introduction of art to that equation, to mean art = a very cool death, regardless of your clocked meditation tree-time. As a doctor, Jackman's whole Hippocratic Oath thing stops him from being true to Mickey and Natalie's ideal of deathless fierceness --but truly good doctors know when to stop torturing the patient with painful, temporary stave-off measures and endless spinal taps and start encouraging them to enjoy their last remaining moments. Don't they?

That said, the visuals of THE FOUTNATIN are quite impressive, but again you can have acres of trippy hallucination and it's no more than eye candy for something that never seems to really happen, i.e. the transcendence of the duality of life and death into one eternal deathless state. In the words, psychedelic. If you're going to be that deep, it's cool to not show self-righteous American grievers getting rewarded by the cosmic good fairy as if spiritual points are given just for self-importance. There's more to Zen than baldness and Jason Patric-style sanctimony! Look at Jack and Rose on THE TITANIC! They loved a lifetime worth in a few hours, but ole Hugh doesn't care about a few hours, and that's the very definition of un-Zen. Imagine for example, Leo spending his last moments with Rose just lecturing her about how stupid it was she jumped out of the lifeboat to be with him... that's THE FOUNTAIN.

Fortunately, Aronofsky learned the lesson from its failure at the box office and with critics.  THE WRESTLER and THE BLACK SWAN would keep the best elements of THE FOUNTAIN--the even-keeled examination of mortality-- and sideline the blind clingers. Aronofsky learned in THE FOUNTAIN that the best way to make a point about art and the death drive is by portraying artists in physically masochistic fields like wrestling or ballet. Without some true artistic pain, these greenscreened actors are as lost in the winds as Jar Jar off his meds.

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Tony Curtis makes THE MANITOU (1978), Shire a PROPHECY (1979)

When I was growing up in the 70s,  back in Lansdale, PA, if I used my kid's telescope out my bedroom window on a dark clear night I could see the glow from the Montgomeryville Drive-In, down the hill, the bottom of the screen partially obstructed by tall fir trees. Without access to sound or any firm idea what was happening in each film, I nonetheless--or maybe because of--was spooked, especially by THE MANITOU, a film that promised via the newspaper reviews and TV ads: demons, shamans, Indian ghosts growing on shoulders, and people getting skinned alive!

I was also riveted by the commercials, ads, and reviews for PROPHECY, starring Talia Shire and more Native Americans. The crying PSA chief (left) on the litter-strewn highway was a cultural icon of the hour; conscientious adults still threw their fast food trash out their car window and left picnic grounds awash in litter. A single tear from a single Native American almost single-handedly changed that. Combine that single tear with the amok nature angle of JAWS and it all congeals into the late 1970s horror cinema landscape. White industrialists cut corners and end up mutating the wild life via mercury poisoning, the shaman sees it all, and shakes his rattle... the monsters come, like tears in rain...

Alas, every review I read at the time about either PROPHECY or THE MANITOU said they were pretty bad, and that's what kept me waiting all this time, over 30 years, to see them. It took the death of Tony Curtis to finally get my off my ass and into the cheap seats. Man, I'm glad I waited for digital widescreen, where the full glory shines through.

In MANITOU, Curtis plays a free-spirited Love Boat-style example of one of those semi-phony 'frisco spiritualists who've been fleecing gullible lonely Nob Hill widows since the days of Samuel Spade license number 596. Older perhaps, with a weird buzz cut, Curtis sports a cool robe and a hard-won devil-may-care demeanor. In fact if he had more hair and a K-Mart Scarface loungewear ensemble, he'd dress and cavort a lot like me. In fact, we both have ex-wives with growths in their backs that are slowly forming dwarf Native American medicine men coming back from a 400 year sleep to wreak havoc on the white man's world. And we both have cool stereo systems. And we dance with a hard-won sense of existential jubilation, the way Jean Paul Belmondo dances in PIERROT LE FOU.

As the plot matures, the western doctors try and cut off his ex-wife's growth. It fights back by making the doctor cut his own wrist instead. The doctors next try to use lasers, but the laser goes Star Wars nutso -- unfortunately beheading no one. Finally Curtis sends for a cool Native American medicine man, John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara, who underplays beautifully).

Now, maybe it was because my expectations were so rock bottom, but I really liked the laid-back edge of THE MANITOU. It's almost like an extended episode of Kolchak the Night Stalker. Most of all I dig the way there's remarkably little antagonism between the Native shaman and western medicinal cultures. You can tell in the above shot the suspicion and vague interest from the white doctor as he gives up the reigns of treatment to John Singing Rock. But it's a cool instance of flexibility and inter-cultural communication as western medicine must bow down and admit Native American magic knows more about the lands beyond beyond. As for the fiery climax, they'll have to work together, like Deepak Chopra, or a medicinal version of THE DEFIANT ONES. 

Giving the film some staunch method cred, Susan Strasberg (of PSYCH-OUT and THE TRIP/ daughter of Lee) plays the afflicted ex-wife, spending the bulk of the film in bed with an oxygen tube but returning in time to go topless for the finale, grinning like a maniac at the most inappropriate of times, and of course she rides the far-out visuals that PSYCH-OUT so sadly failed to deliver.

In other words, MANITOU is a low budget yet ambitious hack job that leans on Tony Curtis to carry it the way the Monogram horror films of the 1940s used to lean on Bela Lugosi. In both instances they made a good choice. Curtis plays it like an Italian working class Bob Hope in sufficiently serious CAT AND THE CANARY mode and carries the ball just as well as Darren McGavin in THE NIGHT STALKER, and that's no faint praise. 

PROPHECY is much better as far as photography and music, maybe even acting... but it's nowhere near the ditzy fun of MANITOUS, with its ALTERED STATES-cum-2001 hallucinations of one-eyed Godsquatches, lizard demons, STAR WARS-ish hand laser tag, a hospital room floating in outer space, Native American 'old' magic vs. medicine / machine age magic ("the typewriter has its own manitou!") all the way to decapitation and oh yes, the torn flesh of Strasberg's back (presumably) makes it looks like she's wearing a pink shower curtain liner. That's just fine with me.

PROPHECY meanwhile is too busy looking scared and preaching to remember if and when it should be scary or funny or anything else monster movies are supposed to be. Oscars are strove for in scenes involving pregnant Talia Shire listening to her EPA doctor husband express outrage at the poverty of the ghetto he visits early in the film, and then double outrage up in Vermont at the mercury leakage that's made tadpoles grow two feet long and an old medicine man go blind. So no, he doesn't want to bring a child into this fucked-up world! She hears all this while waiting to tell him the 'good' news of her pregnancy as he plays back his tape elaborating on all the horrible mutations that afflict fetuses subjected to mercury poisoned salmon, which of course they ate only the night before.This is a pretty great scene, full of unspoken dread and drama, but it drags on forever.

Supplying the Native American voice of crying-at-litter enviro-reason, Armand Assante smolders his way through a turn as the local 'Original People' chief. Rather than a real Native American he reminds us of , how you say? Ah yes. Antonio Banderas. In a good... way? Reminding us that method acting, somber mood and low key lighting reigned supreme in the 1970s, PROPHECY broods like it wants to be the method Coppola horror film of the era, reminding us even THE GODFATHER started out just another adaptation of a drugstore best seller.

So while THE MANITOU is gaudy like those great early Marvel monster comics, PROPHECY is more 70s gravitas, more the R-rated side, the GRIZZLY meets TAXI DRIVER side, the older kids side... with gloomy photography; children thrown and shattered against trees while still in their star-shaped sleeping bags; heads bitten off; some truly effective scenes of terrified humans waiting and listening in tunnels as the monster trashes the camp above, and detailed tours through the paper milling process at a factory downriver of an unseen Maine lumber camp.  However, after about the third self-righteous tantrum of our EPA doctor, and the endless caterwauling of the eventually forgotten mutant baby (not Shire's), you just want to press the button on all of humanity and get it over with.

Kind of uncertain about how to balance its interests, PROPHECY operates the way someone boring you with long-winded sermons at a bar suddenly remembers they're late for dinner and races out the door, forgetting their hat, gloves and coat and not even giving you time for rebuttal. Compared to the merry inconsistencies and everything-but-the kitchen sink Space Exorcist Rosemary Odyssey psychedelia nonchalance of THE MANITOU, PROPHECY's solemn messages about man's polluting the wilderness with his toxic runoff seems way too bleak. The monster crossing the lake scene, though, is damned awesome.

The difference between the two is like the difference between life in AA and life if you stay in the bar and wind up passed out underneath the stools. Do you want to clean up the mess of your polluted life, give the forest back to the Native Americans and ask the mountains for forgiveness? Or do you want to throw typewriters at dwarf medicine men and watch your ex-wife shoot lasers at giant space eyeballs?

I thought so.

Then again, you could do like I did, and not make a choice at all, make 'em a double (feature that is). Just remember to keep that nonjudgmental childhood telescope trained on the partially obstructed drive-in screen of bemused tolerance and low expectations. Sometimes sound, a clear view, and a full understanding of the plot can be downright detrimental.

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