Laureate of the Laid: Terry Southern, CANDY (1968)

Life is a latticework of coincidence whether we see it or not. Usually we don't want to see it, worried we'd go crazy if we did. With our blinders up, the coincidence matrix is less a pineal gland-buzzing latticework and more just white noise --the odd splotch of identifiable pattern--a word lining up with a word you're reading or writing or saying at the same second someone on TV is saying it--then back to white noise background before the meaning can be sussed; but dig, when you're 'alight with manic magic' or 'awakened' or 'enlightened' or 'tripping balls' or schizophrenic, or a genius -- then you might be able to behold how every single goddamn moment of conscious existence holds a hundred thousand such linkages, stretching from your mind into the screen and out to America and into biology and macro and micro fractal-ing out and in.Whether or not we can handle it, interconnectivity exists like vast and unknowable tendrils betwixt our eyes, ears, TV, film, music (only what is currently playing in that moment of our perception of course) and the outermost limits of one's living room and mind, connected to the point of Rubik's Cube inextricability; the retinal screen tattoos the wind and the DVD is a mere shard of a windmill, a record of our mind's ability to perceive shapes, faces, voices, targets. Every single element of perceived external and internal reality is an interconnected latticework 'other' staring back at you -- we block it out because otherwise we will go mad - and then art gives us the Perseus Medusa mirror shield by which to cautiously glimpse that which our soul cannot bear.

Mandrake, isn't it true that on no account will a commie ever take a drink of water?

And not without good reason!

When these latticework lightbulbs are flashing atop each pylon neuron 'round the pineal car wreck, that is (presuming fluoridation hasn't crusted it over) one turns naturally to Terry Southern, America's dirty Swift, the Texas Voltaire, the Watergate Lubitsch, The Lenny Bruce of Lauded Literariness, the acidhead Brecht. Southern took the ball from randy sordid men like Nabokov, Poe and Henry Miller and threw it straight through the Cuban Missile Crisis' shattering the speed of the three martini lunch glass bottom end zone and into the many Hindu deity arms of free love mind game psychedelic put-ons for an unbidden id touchdown. The true anarchy of spirit finds full flower of expression in his R-rated Marx Brothers, protozoic chest-thumping. His scripts and/or original novels for films like Barbarella, Candy, The Loved One, The End of the Road, and Dr. Strangelove, mix jet black humor with guilt-free sex, bawdy anarchy and trenchant satire, anti-Vietnam rants and un-PC skirt chasing, grim apocalypse and slapstick, in ways that may or may not seem dated today, but one can't deny that it makes the relative harmlessness and inanity of today's sexual satire seem woefully anemic.   

Southern dispatches from an era before The Rules refettered our once-unfettered naked lunches, before feel-bad skeeve was restored to sex, before the heavy price tag was re-affixed to free love, and when 'adult' cinema was adult--by adults for adults--and not the sole purview of 'endearingly' foul-mouthed but really sweet nerdy boys, who could be considered men only by sods who'd never seen Mad Men or any film made before 1982. This putsch of maturity and learnedness from the realm of animal sex may have seemed to the easily deluded PC snobs like a victory (1), but they were never good at spotting coincidence latticework anyway, their pineals being so calcified over from pollution of the precious bodily fluids that they're blind to even the idea they might be blind. They've forgotten that when intellectual satire is volleyed at sacred institutions, exposing the truth of the latticework to all our awakened horror it destroys only the dead cells within, leaving the rest vibrant and now hip enough to incorporate its own critique; meanwhile the potty-mouthed prattle of  today's grown infants is never a threat to the status quo and can indeed be yoked to the patriarchy's repressive practices. So it is WRITTED! Not one dead cell shall slough!

Jane Fonda - Barbarella

Thus Southern, the Alvarado Swinburne, the rabid hetero Wilde, was obscene only to illuminate the truer obscenities of religion, Washington, the pertrochemical industry, the funeral industry, the American military, Wall Street, academia, the Western Medical Association, even the gurus and hippie new agers of the counterculture, and especially himself. His was the the voice of the savage American expatriate id grounded in literature and art (Sorbonne, Paris Review  et al) full of unbeatable Bugs Bunny trickster tactics and willing to look deep into the horrifically obscene gluttony and madness of human civilization without blinking, or even judging. The kind of adult humor he spearheaded into existence wasn't aimed at naughty boys of fifteen, but real live adults, with deep smoker's voices and a level of maturity we no longer see today (think Johnny Carson vs. Jimmy Fallon, or even Animal House vs. The Bunny -- AND WEEP for tomorrow's America that will one day make even Jonah Hill seem a stalwart fount of manly gravitas).

If there's still an author with 'adult' intellect left standing after the PC putsch, who can be lusty without merely lapsing into unconscious misogyny through the sheer 'trying' of not to be, he is well-hidden, and would never dare write a book that could bring us out of this maturity death spiral, or could be made into a film like Candy, which seems to condone molestation, drugging women without their consent, borderline rape, and so forth. Seems being the secret word. Men now feel so bad if we say no to a relationship after saying yes to sex we'd just as soon say no to the whole bloody business, but back then no one was meant to feel bad at all, even for chasing a girl young enough to be one's daughter around the room with one's tongue hanging out. Well, if you neuter your satiric dog, he may stop humping your leg and peeing in the corners, but he's also apt to hide when the burglars of phony morality and 'sacred' patriarchy show up, thus making his entire existence rather pointless. And those burglars he let in are actually squatters who, once ensconced within your walls, shall not leave but proceed to eat your masculine drive down to a mawkish enfeebled little nub, to the point the only sense of power you have comes Cialis for daytime use.

You know what I'm trying to say, the institutional targets most deserving of take-down sit smug behind walls of standards and practice policies while writers are sent scurrying after mundane consensual love affairs, bawdiness relegated to teenagers at band camp or softcore augmentation puerility, and anyone who texts the wrong person at the wrong hour winds up shamed by the nation. And yet did we think we would shame nature? Knowing how little it did for us, sex-wise, would we 80s liberal undergrads have ever gone along willingly with our PC symbolic collective castration if we knew chicks would still pick the brutish lothario's casual lay over our sensitive pledge driving? What's the point of being a feminist if it doesn't get you laid?

The vanishing of Southern's ilk is a reminder perhaps that writers are not allowed groupies anymore. Comedy writers now must lament their loserdom, their failure with women, their small dicks. Dying in the desert of the modern masculine they turn back to their buddies for support: bromance, and gay jokes, whistling in the hetero foxhole dark as women become more and more unapproachable, let alone molestable (Jody Hill's Observe and Report a rare, glorious exception). When we do see a famous comic in a standard groupie hook-up its presented in the most mutually demeaning manner possible (ala Adam Sandler in Funny People). In France and England (or Argentina) on the other hand, writers can be pot-bellied and balding, and too drunk to even make it to the party plane, but as long as they've produced books or filmed scripts, they're allowed sex, groupies, and lovely ladies on each arm with no reason to brag or feel bad or be made to look sleazy or pathetic.

Southern, centered

This is actually quite a luxury since writers must retreat from the social groove in order to write about the social groove, so in fact may only very lightly tread therein, but the three times said writer went out drinking with other luminaries are well recorded in their respective historical annals - making it seem like they went out all the time. The truth is, we writers are all in the head, the noggin, the throat of the soul, so when we seduce it's in an awkward half-paralyzed lurching movement. That's why we tend to do our boondoggling in frenzied bursts, getting as many women mad at us as possible, then running off and settle with the one girl willing to do all the heavy lifting, and who won't mind when we jump out of bed to write about the experience before it's even over.

Southern may have been a little sneaky getting some bird into bed but it was under the rubric that both of them would have a good time, that free love was just that - especially if you were a friend of the Beatles and worked with Kubrick. So the high-functioning gropers of Candy may come from Southern perhaps witnessing blokes gone instantly from birdless to beflocked statue status with a single hit record and noted the accompanying changes in their sexual drive and finesse or lack thereof, for 'tis easy to be a stud when you're not actually putting out --once the pants come off all sorts of embarrassing equipment failures can manifest, Cialis for daily use still decades away, uncut coke dust in the wind and groupies impatiently waiting, their plaster cast a-drying as we speak.

All of which is an elaborate, rambling set-up for the discussion of Candy because even in contemporary America's chilly intolerant climb we wouldn't dream of calling Ringo Starr or Marlon Brando a dirty womanizer, or Richard Burton or James Coburn a pathetic joyless bathroom groupie humper -- which is one of the reasons their characters' over-the-top sexual harassment, abuse of patriarchal authority, even medical malpractice, flourishes into full subversive flower in ways that would be to unappetizing if ugly hairy-backed plebeians were doing it. That Brando, Coburn and Burton, particularly, lampoon themselves and their status' and profession's own most private (dirty) groupie-trawling here should brook no scolding. Indeed, should be celebrated!

Especially when juxtaposed with modern stuff like HBO's use of graphic rutting which stresses the more mutually demeaning and bestial aspects of sex, Southern's brand of erotica is positively life-affirming. Southern takes the Voltaire hint and presents the sex drive, and the naked body with all its hairs and gasses, as incorruptible. Ultimately, what is being satirized is the sexual repression that forces men to strike comically affected postures before becoming slavering beasts when within striking distance of some hottie naif with blonde hair and a pink mini dress, and the way all their strutting and hot air just makes them all the more ridiculous when their trousers are off, for no amount of hot air can smooth the awkward transition from civilized gentleman to a spastically humping mastiff. One look at conservative hysteria over birth control on one end, or the PC lockstep of the other in today's sexual clime, and the once de rigueur Joy of Sex deflates to a pleasant moment before acres of guilt and anxiety and as far as movies are concerned, the kind of ravishment women like to read about in some of the more disreputable Harlequin offshoots is completely out. One false step and you wind up on Lifetime. 

 Though only based on Southern's original novel (written with Southern's fellow Parisian ex-pat and Olympia Press dirty-lit writer Mason Hoffenberg), adapted for the film by American satirist Buck Henry (coming hot off The Graduate), directed by Christian Marquand (a French actor, as odd and illogical a choice for an American satire as Mike Sarne for Myra Breckinridge [1970]) and filmed by a French-Italian crew, Candy seems, in large part, based on what it has in common with Dr. Strangelove, quintessentially Southern. Both films are savagely honest critiques of America's noisemaker patriotism and paranoia and the sexual puritanism that underwrites it. Kicking things off, Burton is mind-blowingly grandly spectacularly pathetic and hilarious as McPhisto, a grandiose 'dirty-minded' poet making a grand appearance, wind in the hair, electric rock blaring, at a student assembly, brilliantly modulating a cascade of punch lines in a cue card rhythm  - "I wrote that," he says after his first poem, long hair and scarf blowing, "laying near death... in a hospital bed...  in the Congo"  (pause for political righteousness).. after being...savagely beaten... by a horde of outraged Belgian tourists." His fluid Welsh wit makes great rolling use of pauses and accented words as he orates, speaking in Latin only to admit he's not quite sure if it means anything, mentioning his books have been "banned or burned in over 20 countries... and fourteen... developing nations." Shifting from famous genius posing to hangdog contrition as he mentions his book is available, signed by the author for three dollars in cash or money order, even bringing Welsh florid anguish to the mailing address, culminating in "Lemmington, New Jersey." It's a great performance not least for the wry way Burton satirizes himself, and actors in general - the psychosis that can result when one is carried away too firmly by one's own booming mellifluence.

Burton, orating with creepy alien hybrid

Candy: "Oh my gosh, (watching Burton fall out of the car, soaked in whiskey) he's a mess!
Zero: "Well man, that's the story of love."

Moments later MacPhisto has Candy in the back of his Benz (indeed there's the idea he came there expressly to pick out a co-ed) while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) drives, though there seems to be a kind of understanding that they share the automobile and get into sexual adventures together ala Don Juan and Leporello (switching roles nightly, perhaps). "Candy - beautiful name," he says as prelim to his attack, "it has the spirit and the sound of the old testament." A Scotch spigot in his glass bottom Benz gets turned on by accident, and McPhisto winds up crawling around, booming about his 'giant, throbbing need' making a play for Candy but winding up pathetically (truly surreal) lapping spilled Scotch off the floor, getting it on his trousers, and ending up in Candy's basement with his pants off, heroically making love to a doll that looks eerily like abductee descriptions of alien-human hybrids while reciting random verses and sobbing heroically as Ringo Starr as a Mexican gardener (terrible enough with his half-assed Alfonso "Stinking Badges" Bedoya-by-way-of-Speedy-Gonzalez accent to be a real adult film actor) paws at Candy on the pool table, all while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) helps himself to the basement bar dispensing bon mots ("Quo Vadis, baby!") and beaming so approvingly at the crazy scene methinks I was in the kind of hetero-camp heaven I once believed the sole province of Russ Meyer!

Now, alas, the MacPhisto adventure is the the best part of the entire film and even that is marred inn the second part by Ringo's terrible accent and 1/4-assed performance.  Luckily John "Gomez" Astin kicks it back into some sort of gear as Candy's swinger uncle, setting up a nice contrast to his square twin brother (Candy's father); the uncle's nymphomaniac swinger-in-furs quipster wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli) tells Candy she'll like New York, where kids "aren't afraid to scratch when it itches" but a drive to the airport finds them all accosted by Ringo's three sisters riding up on motorcycles like banshee harpy wicked witch Jezebel Humongous' gang debs, their long black veils fluttering behind them for a brilliant wicked witch of the west / harpy / Valkyrie / flying nun effect --another high point though once the whips and brass knuckles come out the film starts to just hang there, leading to another mixed segment: Walter Matthau, miscast as a deranged Albanian-hating airborne paratroop general (it should have been George C. Scott or Lee Marvin -- who ever heard of a New York pinko Jew general?) and since when would a general waste his time in the air in control of only a planeload of shock troops? Though he does know how to keep deadpan when mocking military patriotism, Matthau's cadence as he rambles on about having a kid with Candy and sending him to military school lacks the kind of deranged jingoistic ring that Scott brought to both Patton and Turgidson or Hayden to Ripper, it's just depressing to imagine his scenario coming true, that poor kid, the both of them!

But Candy's next adventure involving James Coburn's toreador Hackenbush-ish brain surgeon Dr. Krankheit ("This is a human life we're tinkering with here, man, not a course in remedial reading!") is a most definite second peak. His histrionic operating theatrics might seem a bit Benway-esque but Burroughs was a friend and Coburn has the spirit of the thing in the way, say, David Niven never did in Casino Royale. Like Burton, Coburn modulates Shakespearian antithesis and masculine actorly power, seizing the chance to let his sacral chakras vibrate and hum; aside from Burton he's the only other star in the film's luminary cast to recognize the covert brilliance buried in even the most seemingly mundane lines (which Matthau breezed right over) and to let each word ring like freedom (from sanity). Amping up his patented actorly mannerisms to conjure a physician as liberated but completely insane Wellesian titan-- accusing the audience of thinking what he was a moment ago just saying--throwing his scalpel to the floor and just sticking his curse fingers right into the comatose Astin's brain (one slip and the patient "will be utterly incapable of digit dialing") saluting the crowd with his bloody middle finger in triumph, Coburn is MAGNIFICENT!

And just when it can't get any better, Anita Pallenberg (alas, dubbed, as she was in Barbarella) attacks as Krankheit's number one nurse; Buck Henry cameos as a mental patient in a straitjacket trying to attack Candy in the elevator; John Huston as a prurient administrator who seems to get off and trying to shame Candy in front of the entire post-op party after she's caught being molested by her uncle; and what a party! Krankheit dispenses B12-amphetamine cocktail shots in the ass like party favors, and the pink-clad nurses wait around like beholden nuns in some religious spectacle for their master to wave his hand. Coburn's medical innovations include a 'female' electrical socket affixed to the back of Candy's father's head, so he can drain off the excess wattage and power a small radio. Again, the kind of thing that modern films would not approve of, i.e. How dare you satirize a litigious, lawyered and humorless institution like the AMA, sir!? For another the president of John Hopkins is a friend of the studio!

Candy - w/ James Coburn and Anita Pallenbeg

There's still good things to come, but the next adventure, involving a trio of groping Mafioso and a crazy wop filmmaker, is just crude, pointless and skippable; ditto the shocked cops playing up their blue collar bewilderment at all the preversions (shades of Col. Bat Guano) as they bash frugging drag queens, crack nightsticks down on colorful hippies, and wind up crashing the squad car because they can't help leering down Candy's dress. As usual, the dialogue is interesting but the targets too easily lampooned, like yeah we know cops are jerks, man. Why not branch out, have the cops be groovy. Hell they were the best part of Superbad! But it being 1968 I guess these things were still new. Now, though, the police brutality angle is pretty dated and also closest moment the film comes to out and out hostility toward its satirized, and so the film begins its slow wandering downhill. Candy hides out in Central Park where she hooks up with a criminal mastermind hunchback played by Charles Aznavour, who can climb up walls and jump into watery windows ("an old stereoscopic trick" says the unimpressed cops), all well and good but Aznavour's aggressively twitchy rat-like Benigni-Feldman-style behavior is another soul-deadening stretch, centered around a gag you'll see coming a mile off (if you've seen Godfather 2 - which admittedly came after).

Candy finally winds up in the holy water-flooded mobile ashram of the guru Grindl --played by Marlon Brando -- funny if not quite at the level of Burton or Coburn and stuck in a limbo between sounding strangely like modern Johnny Depp, with an Indian accent that starts out high and fast but quickly unravels into 'Abie the fish peddler' Jewish territory, mining the rhythm of Lenny Bruce as Groucho or Sky Masterson as Peter Sellers in The Party. Brando's way too internalized for Grindl to reach the egotistic grandeur of McPhisto or Krankheit but for fans of old pre-code WB and Paramount comedies it's a gas linking his accents to the ancient Vaudeville rhythms. When he says you 'must travel beyond thirst, beyond hunger" he's noshing on a sausage and sounds like Hugh Herbert, which is great, but it's such a dick move it's hard to feel anything by a sympathy headache for poor Candy if one doesn't have one by then anyway. Once the fake white snow comes down through the open top, Grindl now hopelessly congested and spent after a scant six 'levels' of enlightenment utters his last lines like "you muss fine da sacred boid" with a seeming mouthful of borscht and Godfather cotton. Shocking and racist as it might be to find an actor of Brando's caliber in Indian garb trying to be as downtown hip as Lenny Bruce, and hanging in the sixties equivalent of a shag carpet lined party van, just remember Brando (and Burton) liked working in adult film Europe at the time (when adult meant adult, remember) making things like (the X-rated) Last Tango in Paris, and Bluebeard (both 1972) where they could be in the company of vast acres of underdressed starlets, dining with jet set Italian millionaires who knew the good life in ways Hollywood could never duplicate and free to drink and smoke and screw to excess in a country that understood the joy of the finer things vs. America's globe-destructing pressure cooker of Vietnam and post-Puritan repression.

Which brings me to my final thought bubble --the idea central to Candy's Christian value - which begins with what MacPhisto says in the beginning about being willing to giving oneself freely as the height of human grace. Sure it's a line men use to try and get women into bed but if they didn't try, where would humanity be, and as Lenny Bruce would say, that's the difference between obscenity and humanity. The truth of our 'huge, throbbing need' is unendurable any other way except as a joke that paradoxically lets us save face and free ourselves of it at the same time. It's the last bastion of the healthy human body's societal failings, the hairy gorilla reality that won't ever totally hide underneath the expensive's suit and polished air. We need a forgiving tolerance of this gorilla, because if you denude the beast in the suit only to sneer at him or deliver some drab lecture on morals or objectification, all you do is bum out the world, not enlighten it. Instead, Southern proves 'nothing sacred' is itself the most sacred of philosophies, that there's nothing bad about the human biological system, from sex to eating to shitting to dying ---in Southern's satire human biology, with all its hair and noises and needs, is celebrated, satirized, and forgiven its uncanny otherness, while the moral hypocrisy, the judgment and denial of these bodily inescapabilities, is attacked without mercy and it is these hypocrisies that create the situations wherein men are consistently unable to behave courteously towards the provocation of Candy's nubile wide-eyed innocence.

"We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals." - KR, in deposition

Macroscoping out to that first paragraph coincidence latticework now -- Southern comes from a time when intellectual men were still allowed to be men, and hipsters were not pale smirking skinny jeans wallies crossing the street to avoid second hand smoke and arguing in a mawkish voice about using plastic bags at the food co-op. Southern's era had more repression and obscenity laws to reckon with, but they had the artistic clout to bash into them with dicks swinging and fists helicoptering. If Southern and friends had been at that food-co-op meeting they would be hurling the organic produce at that anemic hipster, bellowing like a lion, inhaling every kind of smoke presented. Back in their own time all they could do instead was rage against the dying of their pre-Viagra erections, and then die for real, as nature intended, either in Vietnam or that Norman Maine surf rather than clinging to bare life like today's greedy octogenarians bankrupting Medicare so they can eke out one more month past their due date, the impatient specter waiting in the reception area, rereading that old Us Weekly for the eleven hundredth time while doctors stall out the clock since they're paid by the nanosecond. Real hipsters, having faced death abroad or within, heroically dodged the draft, or leapt into the waiting arms of the angry fuzz, or served jail time for a single joint--earned their aliveness and their stash of army amphetamine; they were able to dig on and understand out-there modern jazz, and to smoke anywhere without complaint. They lingered at the moveable feast of expat Paris, armed with coffee, whiskey, hashish from the Arab quarter, mushrooms from Mexico, burgundy from California, hep-C from New York and, if they pilgrimaged south, the holy yage. Today we're lucky if we can afford a single Sex on the Beach and there's no smoking, sir... sir.... no smoking (and in NYC no dancing either).

Perhaps in revisiting Candy we can, as a nation, whisper "Rosebud" for our lost sleddy balls and re-discover how well-read intellectual weight might once again benefit from rabid id-driven boosters in trying to make it through the zipper of hypocrisy and into the stratosphere. Southern was the first to climb up on the A-bomb of sexual freedom in lettres and ride the New Journalism (which he arguably invented) to the primary target, which is your face, and he had the chops to turn on your electric lattice of coincidence-detectors. America was still strong enough to handle any amount of MASH-style shower tent unveiling. America knew that facing its own monstrous extinction with a joke rather than cloaking it all in rhetoric and duck-and-cover exercises was noble, that working through the terror that strikes when a hot blonde girl with no discernible income lands in your lap is heroic, that being able to accept and engage in casual sex with a random girl on your commuter train is brave, while refusing waving a defensive wedding ring and racing out at the next stop is not noble, but shameful indeed (and lord knows I am ashamed for doing it). Gentlemen, we cannot allow a NYMPHOMANIAC gap!

From Left: Burroughs, Southern, Ginsberg, Genet

NOTES:
1. Southern's mincing gay stereotypes (espec. in The Magic Christian and The Loved One)

Read More

Monster Capsules: BAD DREAMS, THE ROOST, DAMNATION ALLEY, AFTER MIDNIGHT, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

 

 BAD DREAMS

1988 - directed by Andrew Fleming - ***

This is a film that took a long hard look at the Nightmare on Elm Street box office receipts and said me too, even going so far as to cast the same final girl of Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, Jennifer Rubin, to play basically the same role in basically the same mental hospital. Instead of a Freddie there's Harris, a scarred cult leader played by real life burn victim Richard Lynch. In the 70s prologue he coaxes his hippie flock, "Unity Field" to burn themselves alive in order to unify their souls. Rubin is the only survivor, pulled from the roaring flames, full head of hair intact, and in a coma. When she awakens its 13 years later and she's stuck in a mental ward and, in the 80s. Jeffrey (Reanimator) Combs is the strange, handsome shrink who brings her to group therapy in order to introduce us to a rapidly bumped-off set of characters. A stressed Rubin sees Harris before each murder. The unified soul thing apparently worked, and he's recruiting new acolytes from the therapy group, but try explaining that to hospital staff, and cops who just think they all committed suicide 'cuz they're crazy.

The creepiest aspect here is surely Richard Lynch as the cult leader. It looks like he insisted on having a textured flame retardant gel around his face at all times which seems wise considering the amount of flame he's exposed to (and his real life burns). This Lee Strasberg-trained and scary-funny as all hell actor makes a greet creepy villain, but he's not a convincing cult leader. Look at that picture above, would you want to follow him? A cult leader needs to be seductive as well as creepy. Could you imagine Robert Englund running a cult? It's hard not to imagine a more nuanced cobra-hypnotic figure of menace like Lance Henriksen or Michael Ironside (the heavy over on the Shout blu-ray companion film Visiting Hours) in the role. No offense to Lynch meant. Maybe I'm jealous because I've always felt I'd make a great cult leader, and my dad was always urging it on me, saying that's where the real money is. In other words, I want my own Unified Field!

The rest of the cast is also very good in that 80s teen horror sort of way. Sharp-eyed punk rock fans will feel strangely drawn to Susan Barnes (Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, Repo Man) and the terrifying Dean Cameron will linger in your mind thanks to his amok basement leaping high in the air and punching out light bulbs. As Pauline Kael might say, he all but smashes his way through a hole in the picture. Rubin is very good at wearing her emotions on her sleeve and the Shout blu-ray reveals how good the DP is at capturing the glisten in her eyes So yeah, it grows on you, separating itself from Freddie Krueger comparisons as it matures. A lot of that probably has to do with its incomparable pedigree: Gale Ann Terminator Hurd produced, and Andrew The Craft Fleming directed.

THE ROOST

2005 - directed by Ti West - ***

Ti West's first film, hampered only by his inability apparently to motivate actors into a state of wakefulness, The Roost is a surprisingly engaging work of horror retro minimalism. Even the carload of mumblecore hipsters are bearable, thanks to their low-key dialogue delivery, their voices low so as not to disrupt our fading attention span. Taking mid shortcut along a mysterious road on their way to a wedding, a bat flies into the windshield causing a crash! Cue a kind of Jim Jarmusch version of Planet Terror on a Plan Nine budget. Which means of course that I loved it.

The acting is pretty bland (with the exception of great newcomer Vanessa Horneff) It's hard not to be awed by West's unshakable grasp of what makes horror work, doing as little as possible: his minimalist tendencies are so poetically integrated he can confidently throw most of the usual horror symbols and dross away and rewrite some of what does. Close-ups of doors slowly opening, for example, are presented completely out of context (we have no idea whose opening the door or from whose perspective is watching the door open) and for some reason is scary because we don't even know who's opening the door or who's not answering it. He also makes great use of tick-tock momentum, 16mm grain, droning ambient score, remote location (the same barn used in Marnie!), diegetic (headlights, porch, dashboard) light that makes the swallowing all-consuming darkness of a lonely rural shortcut palpable, and when the score's not overburdened with overdone cello music there's great, Avant Carpenter atonal drones. That doesn't sound like much on 'paper' but it's all the spookier for being so 'found art.' Too bad there's dull stretches of horror host filler with Tom Noonan underplaying to the point of sad distraction. If nothing else, it contextualizes the inner film proper, adding a whole new chill by association.

TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

1990 - Directed by John Harrison - **1/2

Michael "Ajax" Remar is a struggling artist whose life is spared by an inner city gargoyle and falls for Rae Dawn Chong on the same night and has never seen Kwaidan (1964), so never puts two and two together; a young Christian Slater, young Julianne Moore, and young Steve Buscemi encounter a shambling mummy (from an Arthur Conan Doyle story); Deborah Harryis a Hansel-baking Martha Stewart in the framing device; David Johansen is a cat assassin hired by wheelchair bound William Hickey (the unforgettable old don in Prizzi's Honor) in a segment conceived by Stephen King and scripted by George Romero. It all comes together to no avail in this odd horror anthology.

I've never been a fan of horror anthologies (except Kwaidan), too many get hung up on the tired old EC supernatural comeuppance bit and I have the same problems with Darkside. Even Debbie Harry is surprisingly flavorless as the cannibal gourmet. Haha! The script's loaded with that kind of thing, but there's so many essential cult actor favorites (I always imagine how great James Remar would have been in The Terminator) and future stars that it's still essential viewing, even if only while drunk, half-asleep, stoned out of your gourd, and/or in a half-distracted haze.

AFTER MIDNIGHT

1995 - dir. the Wheat Brothers - ***

At last, a trilogy free of 'supernatural comeuppance.' Underrated fringe weirdo Ramy Zada goes for distance as the psychology teacher who pulls a gun out a snickering jock to teach his class about fear. Said jock is pissed (literally) and later breaks in to the teacher's house to kill him. But Zada's upstairs conducting a ghost story round robin with some of his cutest student because hey, it's a dark and stormy night. And hey, one of the students is a psychic who senses something wicked's coming up from the basement...

I dug the middle segment best, with its looney tunes midnight warehouse dog attack a riveting centerpiece. Most critics prefer the final story, wherein a stalker goes after a celebrity's answering service operator, played by the always worthwhile Marg Helgenberger. Make sure you stick around for the bizarre conclusion of Ramy Zada's framing device round robin, wherein a burnt skeleton chases the psychic girl with an axe through all the other sets in a vague nod to the climax of The Terminator.  It's all just more proof that less is more when it comes to horror: Darkside (above)has the money but can't venture out of its predictable DC Comics House of Mystery vibe, while After Midnight quits all sense of consensual reality, throws its meager budget at the screen as a distraction and lunges straight for the nightmare logic jugular.

DAMNATION ALLEY

1977 - Directed by Jack Smight - ** 

(for male viewers who were kids in the 70s - ****)

Not an easy film to love but, for some of us, loving Damnation Alley is a challenge that beckons like Everest. We really want, even need, to love it, but the film goes out of its way to suck. Still, if you were a boy in the 70s and read Famous Monsters of Filmland, chances are you longed to take that climb, to escape your parents in that cool armored cruiser (above) and set out across a nuclear landscape populated by almost nothing except giant scorpions, massive deluges of not-quite-giant man-eating ants, psychotic rednecks, and cool shit to jump over on the attached motor bike. After the bombs fall there shall be no driving or drinking ages, no need for money, no homework, and no girls gumming up the works (if there is a girl let her be an easygoing French Hawksian rather than a bossy, overprotective Fordian). It's a boy's life fantasy of being taught to fire rooftop rocket launchers as soon as you're old enough to see over the steering column.

Directed by Jack Smight, who gave us such other awful bit irresistible films as Midway and Airport 1975, Damnation Alley is a film as wholesome in its fashion as reading Boy's Life magazine at a cub scouts meeting before going out back to light fireworks and shoot bb guns. George Peppard is the 'dad' character - identifiable via his terrible fake mustache; Jan Michael Vincent is the starry-eyed older brother who gets the girl and lets you ride his cool motorbike; the girl is a young Meryl Streep-style French beauty (Dominique Sanda) picked up in a deserted sand-swept ant-infested Vegas; Paul Winfield is the black guy, eaten early as was, and sadly still is, the custom.

The film begins in one of the best nuclear war recreations in film history: no drama, no hand-wringing, just by-the-book monitoring of screens at a remote missile silo deep in the American southwest; no women or bleeding hearts, no morality or ethics or drama. A few years go by and a chain reaction at their remote facility makes sticking around inadvisable, as well as trimming the survivors down to a handful, who take to the road in two big armored party vans (the budget only allows for one, so we seldom see them together without a mirror).

Myriad technical difficulties aside, this has to overall be the mellowest post-nuclear war movie of the 70s or ever - mostly driving through psychedelic electric storms, a strange flood (luckily these vehicles float, too) and across endless deserts. Even the arrival of a kid isn't cause for alarm, since he's played by the perennially feral Jackie Earle Haley.

I almost never find anything disparaging to say about Shout Factory, who have been cleaning up and releasing to blu-ray a vast host of sci fi and horror titles from the 70s and 80s that would likely be forgotten or bungled otherwise. The blu-ray of Damnation Alley is amazing overall, with groovy deep blacks. But some of the outdoor scenes don't stack up to the Amazon streaming instant video version, wherein the sky is a sark almost psychedelic green-blue. In the Shout version the sky has been cleaned up to a 'normal' sickly pale normal sky color that's just not as cool. Did the restorers think the intense colors of the original sky (and the action all blurry like your looking through seriously dark shades) was some kind of mistake? Did they not get that the world is over and the outdoors is fucked?

Otherwise I can't complain; and having it on blu-ray is a 70s boyhood dream come true for a once-lost generation.

Top: Amazon Instant Video / Bottom: Shout blu-ray

Read More

Leslie of the Heretics: DAY OF THE ANIMALS (1977)

"Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. " - Ahab

But to paraphrase Slim in To Have and Have Not, "what happens if it slaps you back?" The answer is that the undying savage beneath the hotty toddy veneer of Leslie Nielsen emerges, an Ahab born anew for a Moby Dick spread across ozone-depleted sunshine into the minds of the beasts of the American mountains. The entirety, the Beast with a Million Eyes, slaps him back. But first, a little background:

There was another leviathan that splashed the nation in the mid-70s: Jaws, which itself came initially as part of a seventies eco-awareness trend, i.e. whaling was out, and even sharks could only be killed in self-defense. The ozone layer hole had been discovered, aerosol cans were banned; a Native American was crying by the side of the highway; the tab on soda and beer cans was changed to stay attached rather than be tossed into the bay to cut up the feet of pelicans. We kids were keen on Cub Scouts and 'Indian Guides;' TV had Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, Grizzly Adams and The Waltons, Apple's Way, and Little House on the Prarie; in school we read My Side of the Mountain; at home a magazine called Ranger Rick. Mom took us to see matinees like The Adventures of the Wilderness Family. We were in the wilderness. All we needed was a beast to fear, a bad grizzly, to make the good grizzly seem even nicer.

This was still before VHS or cable, so if an exploitation pioneer wanted to get funding from the major networks in advance of production, he had to entertain the entire family, all at once, in the same room, looking at the same screen. PG didn't just mean kids can come with the adults, it meant grandparents too. And Hollywood was dealing with a surplus of stars who had drawn huge salaries 30-50 years earlier and would now work for scale in just about anything ---so ensemble cast disaster films sprang up, with casts of older stars, younger newcomers, and Charlton Heston or some other granite jaw bringing up the rear. Meanwhile, the American western outdoors beckoned as a cheap, union-free locale for monster movies. The great west spoke: "Hell, we got dozens of unemployed western stuntmen and character actors out here all ready, and hell you don't even need a fake monster on account of we got trainers with grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions." And if you want vermin (Kingdom of the Spiders, Empire of the Ants, Food of the Gods, Damnation Alley, Night of the Lepus) which could be rear projected to look freakishly large, that was easy too. We kids never ratted out the fakeness of the effects and there was no way to rewind or repeat play since DVRs and VHS were still a ways off. As long as it was attacking folks of all ages, and it was big, nothing else really mattered. It was the seventies, man, even the monsters were au naturale. 

There was nothing else to worry about --no blue state / red state divide, we were all purple, like the mountain majesties. And into these mountains strode an eagle-eyed copycat director named William Girdler, a mountain man whose monster films were mountain man-made. He saw there was a way to make a PG monster movie that could combine the children's nature film craze's fondness for grizzly attacks and the monster craze's fondness for shark attacks, and he made that movie. And it was Grizzly (1976), a huge hit. He could now afford an ensemble cast and to empty the cages at the Hollywood animal trainer park, for 1977's Day of the Animals.

Up until the blu-ray that just came out I thought Day of the Animals was a TV movie. Thanks to Scorpion Releasing though, a gorgeous 'Walden Filter' widescreen vista of an anamorphic aspect ratio has appeared, majestically dwarfing the relatively incompetent action we're used to on the small square screen of the earlier DVD. Did I mention I love this dumb movie? You want to know the plot? There's humans on a hike high in the mountains, and then there's animals and they fight each other. The end. There's one hawk, three vultures, a carload o' rattlesnakes, a tarantula, wuxia mice, a wolf, three panthers, a gang of German shepherds presumably fresh out of a hole in the K9 Academy fence, and Leslie Nielsen, shirtless, as nature intended. It's all because of the ozone hole. Can you prove it didn't happen?

Like all its devotees, I remember the night Day premiered on CBS' Friday Night Movie, but I missed their whole dog attack climax because it came after my bedtime. Sometimes I wonder if this blog's real origin story lies in my dad's declaration of kids' bedtimes, a strict law which he enforced regardless of how riveting the movie we were watching was. I missed the end of a horde of great films that way: The Poseidon Adventure, Telefon, Day of the Dolphin, Orca, The Cassandra Crossing --I still don't know how some of them end. I would be in bed furious and crushed, but I dreamt my own wilder crazier endings. For Day of the Animals when I heard at next Monday's recess that the humans had survived by riding a raft down the rapids with rabid dogs snapping at their hands every yard of the way I envisioned a pretty wild ride.

Naturally it's not that wild in reality, but 'naturally' is the key word here, that's what saves it. Animals was filmed as far away from the age of CGI, mentally and spiritually, as film would ever get. Girdler feels his way along in real time, you see, in real nature, with semi-real actors, one foot in front of the other, and the key signifiers of amok nature horror movies, such as animal mauling, really can't be shown unless you're a dickhead whose going to really kill animals for his movie in which case fuck you, Ruggero! Girdler doesn't do such things, I presume, and that's where the juice is. Quick edits between what is clearly just well staged play wrestling with tame animals, close-ups of  baring teeth, pink foamy blood, actors and stunt men yelling and running, an animal's teeth resting on someone's arm, and then the hawk looking down signals an end to the scrimmage with his hawk cry like a gym coach's whistle. Girdler's films aren't meant to be great gore pieces, but they are great for sick freaks in search of Cecil B. DeMille-levels of under-direction. Actors stand around in a 'funeral processions and snakes' kind of Cinemascope chorus line and wonder what to do, receive no guidance, and improvise.

Girdler was the Seventies.

With smaller animals this mellow mood can be undercut, as when mice on fishing wires come flying across the rooms backwards onto the head of the fat old sheriff, or hordes of snakes sun themselves inside of cars. Dogs try to mute an instinctive wag of their tales as they snarl, as if afraid of breaking character and losing a biscuit. I don't consider these negatives. In fact if this were an Italian or Japanese film every animal in the film would probably be dead by the end of each scene. Why waste money on a trained cinnamon bear for a wrestling match when you can just stab and drug a real, and let him bleed out like Joaquin did to poor Comodius in Gladiator? Sic transit gloria mundi! But film is forever... and no animal murder will ever be forgotten, Ruggero! And if William Girldler hurt any of these critters, he paid the ultimate price, dying in a helicopter accident scouting locations in Indonesia after making The Manitou.

If you're too young enough to remember Airport you may not have the same giddy rapture for the Poesidon Adventure-Grand Hotel-Stagecoach type ensemble cast trapped in a bad situation films that were all the rage in the seventies, as parodied in Airplane! (1980). But either way let me give you some background on this too:

Once upon a primetime,  The Love Boat and Fantasy Island ruled the weekends. They had a steady cast of hosts and a sea of b-list celebrities of all ages wandering aboard the boat or onto the island for their mundane adventures. Some people managed to become celebs by doing nothing but showing up on these shows, like Charo! Girdler rides this zeitgeist too, so on this hike in Day of the Animals we have the disaster movie cross section:

CHECKLIST OF 70s ENSEMBLE DISASTER CASTING

1. The Shelly Winters
Check ("She KNOWS what she's doing!"- only this one doesn't - to the point of dressing for an overnight hike in her Sunday best).
2. A tiny 25 year-old stunt man posing as her 12 year-old son (BONUS!)
3. 70s bombshell career woman contemplating her lack of a love life and children while eyeing the hero's ring finger - check -70s mainstay Linda Day George
4. Christopher George or David Jansen? Former
5. A Richard Dreyfus in Jaws-style dweeb? check
6. Famous athlete considering retirement / disillusioned preacher? - Former
7. Native American or black sidekick - Check
8. The insane challenger of the rugged hero's leadership? Check Mate!
 9. The Newt or little girl alone and wandering the wasteland ala Sandy Desche in Them. - check
10. Attractive young couple dealing with recently learning about her unplanned pregnancy - Check
11. Fat sheriff roused out of bed in the middle of the night to investigate? 
Yes (Bleeding Skull, I defer to you)

It's a glorious "Girdler Dozen" i.e. one donut short.

A midnight evacuations of the towns above 5,000 feet is given a few shots, hazmat suits, you know, it's The Crazies but for animals... humans slow on the uptake that they are in danger; you'll have deeper resonance to the phrase "Watch you like a hawk" cuz there are some shots of hawks watching stuff on here and honey you are glad what they watchin' ain't you. Hawks' cries signal the start and stop of attacks and Nielsen going shirtless signals his de-evolution into a Putin-like celebrant of masculine power. He pokes a big stick into the belly of a young man so he can make caveman gruntings at the cowering girlfriend: "I killed for you! You're mine now!" and to the 25 year-old widdle boy, "Shaddup you little cockroach or I'll shove you off the cliff!"

But that's not even his most memorable line, it's this:

"If there's a God left up there to believe in. My father who art in heaven you've a made a jack ass out of me for years. Melville's God, that's the God I believe in! You see what you want you take. You take it! And I am going to do just that!"

And by it, you know he means that girlie...

It's hard to remember if I had a point to all this or if I even recommend Day of the Animals, though of course I do, if for no other reason than Nielsen and the amazing near-Morricone-level cacophonous percussion score by Lalo Schifrin. But take a knee and let me tell you one last story:

There was this townie up in Syracuse in the 80s who stole all my Tom Waits albums but he had the best dog in the world. This dog, a mutt of yay height, was super smart and sweet, a brilliant actor. When I was filthy drunk in the Syracuse snow, this dog and I would roll around and I'd scream like he was tearing me apart while he jumped all over me making these terrifying growls. We'd go on and on, rolling around growling and screaming, the dog managing to seem like he was tearing my arm off while barely even getting fang marks on my coat. We sounded, I thought, like someone was being mauled to death. One night, someone finally yelled out a window "hey, you and the dog - please keep it down!" and I was like how the hell can that guy tell I'm not really being hurt? Why isn't he calling an ambulance? How can we as humans just instinctively tell when someone is really being hurt vs. just pretending? I remember we stopped in mid-attack, both looked up at the window, looked at each other, and resumed the attack quieter. How that damn dog knew to go quiet, that really floored me. Some great dog. I miss him the way I love Day of the Animals because even kids can tell the animals aren't being hurt or hurting anyone for real, and it's comforting to pretend, its like an exorcism of interspecies animosity. To paraphrase John Lennon in Yellow Submarine, "if you must roar, roar quietly!" Girdler, the mountain man monster maker in the era of Carter and Grizzly Adams, roars quietly. Melville's behemoth bedtime god demands no less. 

Read More

Pictures Taking Pictures - MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970) and the Misandric Hollywoodophile

Цей короткий зміст недоступний. Натисніть тут, щоб переглянути публікацію.

Read More