Capsules of Crank: THE HORDE, RAGING PHOENIX, PIG HUNT, DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT

 THE HORDE
2009 **1/2
Borrowing liberally across a long line of John Carpenter, George Romero and 28 DAYS, this French allegory is shot in that whiplash deep black urban chic way that's become synonymous with modern horror films. Dudes, are running zombies all the rage now? In the original DAWN OF THE DEAD for example, the slow comical zombie moments allowed the human survivors time to reflect, reload and recognize themselves in the zombie's eyes. Then there's the whole RESIDENT EVIL virus that's infected so many zombie movies with 'money shot' climactic moments of one lone human, discharging his/her armaments in full abandon as acres of zombies come charging, like literally rabid fans at a rock concert (see my Hell's Angels Vs. The Flower Child Dead).

But as for humans, you can do worse than the old Carpenter's saw of cops and robbers teaming up to fight the common foe. Eric Ebouaney is awesome the nominal star (he's the guy slapping Rebecca Romjin in FEMME FATALE), playing a crazy Nigerian ex-child soldier turned drug dealer, with--exactly like Ice Cube's situation in the eerily similar GHOSTS OF MARS--a hothead brother who doesn't trust their new white cop allies. I like that they all get jacked up on cocaine before rushing out to battle, and a female zombie pinned to the floor provides weird cokehead gang rape frisson without having to get icky and dehumanizing like DEADGIRL, and when an old neighbor 'Indochine' veteran gets involved, and thinks the zombies are a "chink" counter-attack, you have the deadpan allegory of Romero, if not the shambling.

 RAGING PHOENIX
2009 - ***1/2
Jija Yanin (CHOCOLATE) is a miracle, a wiry, scrappy little darling, kicking so much ass she should charge by the truckload, especially when she learns a hilarious mix of drunken monkey-style and break dancing. She's an avenging angel against kidnapper gangs, but rather than dipping into the usual sleaze and dispiriting inhumanity at the core of the Thai white slave trade, RAGING PHOENIX involves kidnapping women for their precious pheromones; mined via their precious tears in a bizarre underground nightmare lab/dungeon, eerily reminiscent of the tunnels talked about in reptilian conspiracy circles, replete with humans being hypnotized and farmed for emotional response-generated fluids; it's all masterminded by a transgendered martial arts master in a red kimono who does not go down easy.

Unlike the basic stuff from Hong Kong, these guys never use guns, or weapons of any kind... just martial arts, not even bo staves, shuriken, or nunchaku. What kind of gang is that? How can you ever expect to compete with the Yakuza, the Tong, or the Golden Hand? I would have liked to see the booze show up at the last minute like Popeye's spinach, but instead there's some last minute emoting, as the guy our Phoenix loves, well blah blah - but they do some great couple martial arts, he throwing her all over the place an a big elaborate set piece on a stacked series of rope bridge crossings over a vast deep pit is pretty wild, with more of that swanky high-def deep black-saturated color whiplash camera from THE HORDE, circling and sliding and whirling around our various heroes. And the martial arts--from choreography to camera to high-kicks--are wondrous.In the end, though, where are you, whiskey? I went to do the dishes afterwards and smashed a plate I was so pissed off they forgot about booze, their secret weapon! As the subtitles say: "I want  Vengence!" (sic)

PIG HUNT
2008 - **1/4
There's just a few problems here, one is making the sanctimonious pretty boy murph dillweed good guy the hero -John (Travis Aaron Wade) and having his self-important dillweed girlfriend (Tina Huang) invite herself along on an all-guys Northern California camping trip / boar hunt just so she can make wise-ass cracks about their phallic gunsmanship. Ben(Howard Johnson Jr), Quincy(Trevor Bullock), and Wayne(Rajiv Shah) are the other friends, killed more or less in accordance with their stereotypes (Asian guy first, fat guy second, etc.)

There's odd inconsistencies I shan't spoil, but there's also moments of genuine schlock anarchy: a coven of dope-growing hippie girls who preach back-to-nature while sporting silicone breast enhancements; in-joke homage and quotations (as in the fat guy quoting APOCALYPSE NOW); some good looking buds on the fields (John wants to call the police about the crop, which made me see red... hairs that is); a rocking theme song from the reliably deranged Les Claypool (he shows up onscreen as a preacher who dies in a ROAD WARRIOR-homage) and a great antihero duo in the form of DELIVERANCE-ish local boys played supremely well by Jason Foster and Nick Tagas. Spiking their coffee, and ripping crank off their hunting knives, they show the right way to psych yourself up for killin'! I was rooting for them the whole time! Root, Hogs!

When the situation gets explosive and the Deliverance boys rally the locals against these clean-shaven intruders, there's some riveting driving around and waving guns, and the emotional anguish and subsequent carnage is awesome. However the monster finale is disappointing. For one thing, it seems oddly blocked, with a set-up that we don't know where anyone is in relation to each other half the time. Why is everyone standing around watching this pig, with special fx snot hanging out of its nose, rooting around for victims? Wouldn't they want to hide... or something? It's kind of a let-down. But hey, four beers in, you won't give a sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeYIT

 

DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT
1994 - ***
Directed by a woman (Linda Hassani) who is seemingly from another planet, DARK ANGEL (no relation to the TV series starring Jessica Alba) has a bit of a space cadet glow, kind of like MY SO-CALLED LIFE if Angela Chase was a demoness looking to find herself in the world above her Hell home, etc. What's cool is the relative lack of CGI or misogyny as Veronica (Angela Featherstone) finds her way through the city, romancing a young, dumb doctor and wandering around the park ripping spinal columns out of rapists and feeding the meat of sinners to her dog, Hellraiser. When Veronica's about to do a number on someone, her eyes glow green or red. We learn that Hell is owned and operated by God and that the Devil still bows and scrapes when angels drop off memos.

Most of all we learn that if acting is really really bad it becomes almost like innocence.

I dig Featherstone's low-key performance and the dreamlike grungy fairytale threadbare quality is endearing in a Guy Maddin-meets-Silk Stalkings kind of way (Hassani's directed a few episodes of the latter). It's thus the perfect film to pass out to by the tenth whiskey of the night. And if you're one of those Bickle-ish horror fans who has to really search his collection to find a suitable date movie, here it is. Once you see Veronica offer the would-be rapists spinal column to his intended victim as a trophy, you know there really is a God.

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Strangers / with wet hair: TREE OF LIFE (2011) and EMA's Past-Life Martyred Saints

There was an annoying commercial awhile ago with a cute 'brother and sister' ordering movie tickets on their cell phone while pretentiously announcing in that Madison Avenue version of Williamsburg Daria hipster flatline voiceover that "images are important to us." Because they're photographers. So they go to a lot of movies together, which is about $25 per film between them, not including popcorn or bedbug removal. If nothing else, THE TREE OF LIFE proves that images are important to Terrence Malick too - he is a cinematographer...

Malick even acknowledges this weakness in a perhaps autobiographical scene where a child or his sibling finds a sheer nightgown in a neighbor's drawer and steals it. One might imagine he does something icky with the garment, but Malick has never cared about sex, onanistic or otherwise. His Texas is not the Texas of THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and its coming-of-age deviant cataloging or of GIANT and its lustful Deans. For Malick, women are symbols meant to glisten with beauty, particularly if they have long red hair that looks good in the setting sunlight (Chastain could be Sissy Spacek, after Martin Sheen's been sent up the river of life), and if they're wearing shimmering sheer nightgowns it's so the light can send a lace shadow over the lawn. Malick brooks no pornographic, only the Joycean aesthetic arrest, so the theft of the nightgown is the first guilty moment of a future cinematographer--the 'capturing' of a gorgeous ephemerality-- the nailing of butterflies to celluloid ala Stan Brakhage. But without a film to bury the image in, there's no reliable 'container.' The kid notably tries first to bury the nightgown under some mud (too much like sending it to the editor) then decides to release it into the stream, into the flowing fleetingness; the cinema he can't himself witness without a helicopter shot (and there are many); the night gown so ephemeral the only eye that can possess it is the fleeting eye of the all-seeing viewer, the 'God' eye-view. The little river/stream itself is something like a long band of film, and each nightgown tossed onto the waves is a little baby Moses of possible meaning and interpretation before it goes over the falls only to return in the next full rotation of the astral take-up reels in time for the nine PM showing.

Unrepentantly personal as Malick's TREE is, so inflated yet intimate are its emotions, it may help to be on substances or dealing with a recent or impending death in the family while viewing. My dad is very sick after chemo-therapy, so a combination with that and other things made these tight little catalogs of instances between Brad Pitt and his tykes extra pronounced for me. And I grew up with a younger brother who I felt the need to dominate via fake wrestling and we were into war, and violence. If TREE was about girls growing up, I can imagine being bored. Real bored, or if I didn't have a little brother, bored, real bored.

There's no reason to analyze my deep connection too closely, except that if I made too light of death in past posts, I'm sorry now. Preparing for the possibility (which means also, acknowledging the inevitability) you are going to lose your father is like going off a cliff and realizing you don't even know how deep is the gorge and no one really cares if you scream on the way down. There's no way they can stave your fall, so they won't try. Malick is Christian enough to know that guilt is the quickest route to humility, which is the quickest route to God. I know I wasn't the only one amidst the sacrosanct BAM audience breaking down in free-flowing tears once or twice, but not long into the screening, even at the mighty BAM, cell phone blue lights came on like rows of stars below the screen. For shame!

So it's arty, but is it art? Getting the special effects guy from 2001 and BLADERUNNER (Douglas Turnbull) to work on your big bangs might make you cool but Kubrick and Scott were making science fiction not 'mere' student art film abstraction. Kubrick and Scott were showing what might be, stressing the banal aspects of space travel. Making Texas seem to hurtle through space and turn on an axis is only to reveal that which is already is, to undo the tinny illusion of how we seem to be standing still as we whirl around like a mad spinning top across the infinite playroom floor of space-time. Since you are, then, just revealing the real, why presume you're saying anything other than the trite science bombs of a freshman first-time pot smoker? The image of Sean Penn walking through a mysterious desert door frame is the sort of thing they wince at in hip student film festivals, but it still made me cry, not least of reasons being seeing an A-list thesp like Spicoli really commit to such an old trope. Hasn't everyone who ever visited that splotch of desert shot film of themselves going through that door? Only Sean and Terence have returned, dared to bring their experience and weight back to the idealistic naivete of their BFA years.

Malick's going for 'the big fish' as David Lynch would say, and when an artist goes for the big fish they have to get pretentious as a matter of course, lest their spiritual aims get obscured by plot or drive or other tricks of attention getting, or else become boring like Ozu. But in the end, the little bits of character development undo their own seriousness - Brad Pitt's playing the organ at church is undone by the fact he only plays Bach onscreen and we're not subject to tired hymns sung by dusty congregations in fitful slow starts. This isn't the world we're seeing--or even memory with all its weird time images--but an uneasy combo of both, with a biology textbook and Hallmark birthday card stacked on top. I'm amazed I even remembered the dinosaur name 'Ornitholestes' while watching this -- the word coming to me as if from a lost dream of a five year old who learned to spell dinosaur names before he learned how to tie his shoes but hasn't articulated the word 'ornitholestes' in at least three decades - thanks, TREE!

Jessica Chastain as the mother certainly helps redress this Iron John blood poisoning. She reminds me of a girl I wronged, adding all sorts of psilocybic resonance to her wounded dove close-ups, which are so well shot that you can see the 'signature' stamps of alien DNA in her Celtic pale skin, that fair-haired mossy coastline fairness that if you look closely reveals blue webs of capillaries just below the translucent skin, flushing with blood when hot emotions come across her face.

Another plus is the Texas apocalypse angle, which I've written about as far back as 2007, 'the year of the Texas Apocalypse Cinema,' since then we've also had SOUTHLAND TALES (apocalypse-dependent), and Tarantino's DEATH-PROOF (see: The Foxy, the Dead, and the Foxier), all of which are Texas-style apocalyptic if you know how to dig. And for THE TREE OF LIFE, you don't need even need a shovel, as meaning is excavated and then spread upon the bread of the earth. And the earth is without crust, as Emmanuel "Chivo" Lubezki, who was the cinemographer, likes it, as noted by co-producer Nicolas Gonda, “Chivo Lubezki is a vital part of Terry’s process.  In a sense he had to be as much a writer as a D.P. because when the two of them are on the set, things can change in the moment.  It’s a dance between the two of them riffing creatively off each other.”

It's certainly interesting to read the accounts of how they came up with the trippy visual effects in the film--pouring milk through funnels--but who came up with the soundtrack? Better they should have gone with the guy who did the amazing score for THERE WILL BE BLOOD, or Wendy Carlos, or The Stooges' "We Will Fall."  You can get by with being spiritual and non-alienating to atheists. But pick a hymn and you pick a fight.



There's other moments here, like when you see Sean Penn wandering through the steel and glass structures where we works, that conjure Antonioni and his captains of industry striding around glass offices with their manly scrolled-up blueprints -- Rod Taylor in ZABRISKIE POINT; Richard Harris and Carlo Chianetti in RED DESERT. In the equations of Malick, God, Mary Jane, and the theater audience are ultimately indistinguishable, so is Malick referencing Antonioni, or just recreating him, ala Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote?

I can't help but feel that Malick's searching through the miasma of time and evolution, in dopey whisper-overs, is not for God, or his true Dad, or Brecht, but for an ideal art film audience, the kind that 'got' Antonioni and didn't fall asleep or walk out halfway through. He wants a human mind's eye gallery for his photographs, which slowly move--ala Bill Viola--so slow down and weep along or kindly check your messages with your hand over the blue screen. Images are important to us. If the film says anything, it may be "I Am a cinematographer. But is this stuff Tarkovsky, Eisenstein? Ain't no Russians, ain't even any atomic age. I was kind of shocked the mushroom cloud wasn't even addressed, when surely the age of atomic anxiety was at least worth mentioning, or television. Can a family really get along on nothing but prayers and piano lessons? No wonder Brad Pitt's cranky! No wonder that poor son is so starved for images he has to steal female undergarments and hold them up to the light. Unlike the rest of us, he didn't grow up bombarded with TV and in-class movies and filmstrips, and comic books. That lack has made him hot for images the way a reformed Mormon is hot for the pleasures of the flesh. If you've ever made it with an ex-Mormon you know what I mean. They take to your body like someone dying of thirst to an ice cold beer. This is how Malick takes to the image --guilelessly and openly.


But even here trouble arises, for that Mormon might then decide she loves you, and here you're just a no-good tomcat on the prowl, hardly worthy and never intending to stay. Now you have to live with the secret guilt of the dirty Mack every time an actress reminds you of her. Malick's image-worship justifies his lack of familiarity with the lure of scopophilia, or the pornographic, so we never get the idea he's had to lay his tomcat cards on the table. As that old SNL Freud sketch put it: "sometimes a banana is just a banana, Anna." Or in this case, a tree is still a tree, a sigh is just a sigh. A fundamental thing that doesn't apply is that omnipotent POV: What 'eye' is watching the earth form from clouds and dust? What viewer can there be who would have such a correct view of the unfolding universe? Before there were eyes to see, this stuff didn't exist at all. What Malick knows and has seen is brilliantly reproduced: a younger child watching the in-fighting of parents well captured from low, cringing camera angles, and in these scenes culled from foggy memory, flashes of stuff we remember from our own childhood are unearthed and dislodged, relentless as the search for lost keys, or remotes, all that sense of 'fleeting' works devastatingly well. But is that 'lost eye' ever addressed?

2001 has reaction shots: we know who's seeing what for the most part. When David Lynch shows us images where no eyes can be, we shudder with uncanny frisson: a traffic light changing from green to red at a deserted night crossroads, a phone ringing and no one answering, or maybe even calling. We get even with Antonioni this sense of scary freedom when no one is around to see what we see, as in the amazing ending of L'ECLISSE. Gaspar Noe shot an entire film like this in ENTER THE VOID. But the frisson of the disembodied spectator is one sense of the scopophilic gaze that Malick hogs for himself. He's already seen 'deeper' into these images than we ever will.

In its way BIRTH (here) said far more on this subject and aped Kubrick slightly better, and even had another translucent redhead in long lysergic close-ups (Nicole Kidman). For the cosmic journey of TREE we see some in utero light shows, some random arrests, a death at the community pool, the telegram of the older son's death (never explained or seen), mourning, early childhood; glimmers of a dad whose misgivings about the fairness of his business leads him to inflict violence on his kids and their ultimate refusal of that violence. After two hours or so, Malick seems to realize he needs to wrap it all up so pulls a Fellini with an ending on the beach that Woody Allen would make a cliche back in the 1970s.

But perhaps your own parents and children are ultimately strangers, and no amount of reconciliation can change the fundamental separateness unless you all meet in jazz heaven. Perhaps we are all unknowable even to ourselves, and the closest thing to paternal union may be acknowledging the sad frailty at the core of our once-invulnerable father - that precious moment, never really explored in this film, where you and your dad get drunk together and he suddenly seems so painfully vulnerable, and he's suddenly just another dude you hang with, more like you than you dared admit before. Or you can turn back through the whiskey mist and see him having wrestled with everything you've wrestled with, made dumb mistakes, but found in you--maybe, if only for a little while--something to be proud of, a one certain time when he could say this I did right, even if shortly thereafter you were busted for pot, or guns, or car theft.

For the last few years I've lived my life according to the myth of A Star is Born, with me the boozy has-been author, my ward the younger ascendant star in blogging. Then, a couple weeks ago, while listening to my iPod on random shuffle and flipping through TV with the sound off, I stumbled onto TCM in the midst of the long scene of James Mason gearing up for his suicide in the George Cukor-directed 1954 version of A STAR IS BORN. Now, I've seen this version only up to the intermission, but I knew, because of the song on the shuffle, "The Grey Ship" by EMA what the long shots of Mason looking out to sea, saying tearful goodbyes to Judy and friends really meant, what was going to happen. As sometimes happens, the editing and beats matched so perfectly that I knew it was a cosmic message as I thought "Look a ghost grey ship is coming my way," And it didn't even have to stop.It just kept on going. My intermission was over, and the long voyage into the infinite was now underway, like back when I stumbled onto FLATLINERS in 1991 (see here)

I've had other weird synchronicity moments but this was another symbolic death, a substitute for an actual death imagined in my chosen Star is Born mythos. Norman Maine did the long swim so I wouldn't have to. Either way, old personal myths are inevitably shed like a snake's old skin, like a snake of life, and you die for real  many many skins down the line - but as TREE shows, your skins come fast... and furious.



I mention this for several reasons, not least is to credit BORN's director Minnelli with achieving in this scene (with EMA's scoring) what it takes TREE over two hours to do -- to see the way cosmic myths descend on us during key moments in our life - and that every moment, in a sense, can be seen in heavenly hindsight as profound, every breath and touch as vast as a 2001 obelisk, and yet a yellow filmy fog descends on this sense of wonder and dread just so we can get on with business and not waste the day away being awed at a sunflower. And if our every action isn't awash in mythic resonance, whose fault is that? It's the fault of the cinematographer, dictating the direction we look, and how long we look there, and when we decide to walk away, and look again, from farther off, until the final screen recedes and the credits rain down from heaven like an unstoppable flood, and the tree of life is buried once again in a flood of flood footage.

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A Tale of Three Anti-Capitalist Musicals: HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM, BRIGADOON, MARAT/SADE

HALLELUJAH I'M A BUM
1933 - **** - dir. Lewis Milestone
A pre-code salute to vagrancy, anarchism, and the days when Central Park was a refuge for depression-era homelessness, Milestone's delightful film is crammed with half-spoken Rogers and Hart songs lamenting the amount of work it takes to remain unemployed ("You own the world / when you don't own a thing"). There's enough economic savvy and cool Central Park set design here to make it both Brechtian and bucolic, an AS YOU LIKE IT with Central Park as Arden and Jolson the swaggering Mack the Knife from THE THREE PENNY OPERA if he was played by a balding Marx brother; with the evil duke a thousand dollar bill Jolson finds in the trash --the very rumor of which sends the park's unwashed denizens into a near riot. Hard boiled softie newspaper man-turned-Broadway scribe Ben Hecht wrote the shit out of it-- Imagine the Lubitsch touch on a SCARFACE spittoon. One of the many awesome little joys is hearing Frank "The Wonderful Wizard" Morgan saying "there's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home" six years early!

I've avoided ever seeing THE JAZZ SINGER (1929) on account of my apprehension of boredom, blackface and schmaltz, but now I want to, indeed, must see it. Though he may be a throwback to a bygone age of minstrels in the 'Swanee / how I love ya how I love ya! Mammy!' jazz-hands tradition, there's something blue collar grotesque about Jolson (if he was taller he could play Moose Malloy). He doesn't seem to be imitating black people or minstrels--that's just him - he's a leftover survivor from a bygone age when everyone sang and acted with gigantic smiles plastered on their pusses, irregardless of if they had huge gaps in their teeth. Watching the film nearly 80 years later, he seems like a cross between a  a lost Marx Brother impersonating Maurice Chevalier, and the misbegotten love child of Lauren Hutton and Frankenstein. With his pancake makeup, strange elocution, and black lipstick he seems like some monstrous human railroad track between all races, religions, and classes... in short, America. And respect the unique frumpiness of Harry Langdon as a  socialist agitant trash collector ("your clothes are worn and your socks have holes / but you're plutocrats down to your souls!"), and dig gorgeous Madge Evans as the mayor's amnesiac mistress, whom Jolson heroically rescues when she plunges several feet off a Central Park bridge into the shallow stream below. Needless to say Jolson falls, too, in love, and he decides to get a job to support his soaked siren, much to the shock and horror of his hobo friends and well-wishers. Capitalism, in short, is for lovers, but it's not admirable!

 BRIGADOON
1954- **1/2 - dir. Vincente Minnelli
You never thought a magical Scottish hamlet could be boring, but you're wrong. Vincente Minnelli clearly has no grasp of what makes Scottish culture great, i.e. Scotch whiskey. Alcohol here is clearly associated with a crowded Manhattan bar Gene Kelly and sourpuss drunk Van Johnson inhabit before and after their trip to Scotland (to shoot grouse, of all things). Scotland is played by various uninspired sets on which Kelly climbs and taps and sings like a silly monkey.

Minnelli stacks the deck by making everyone at the bar vulgarians and Kelly's fiancee a social climbing materialistic bitch. But associating booze with big city shallowness doesn't allay the dull piety of the mythical town itself, which is stranded in a fundamentalist annex of John Ford chaperone-and-plow malarkey but without Ford's magic touch. This ain't the Scottish musical version of THE QUIET MAN, much as it would like to be. For one thing, more booze and fistfights, and ghosts, would have helped. And the widescreen formatting--meant for giant Cinemascope stretch screens-- eschews close-ups and fast edits (such things made audiences nauseous and disoriented on such large canvases)  in favor of long shots on obvious stage sets, where, for example, everyone's dancing feet are at the bottom of the screen, and their heads at the top, duplicating a Broadway theater experience, perhaps, but in failing to explore the magical possibilities of its subject, even on the big screen it's enough to reduce you to napping in all the wrong places.

If you want something magically Scottish, check out I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING or LOCAL HERO. What you get from BRIGADOON is the dry notion that Scottish culture is so inhibited it makes Irish Catholics look like Haight-Ashbury hippies  Considering the awesomeness of the stars--Kelly and my favorite Cyd Charisse--there's some surprisingly awkward dancing amidst the finery, and the super sexy Cyd is barely recognizable: her legs hidden in thick skirts, shapely upper regions sheathed in a highlands sash. She's supposed to look wan and bonny but often just seems sad and hungover.

Meanwhile Van Johnson is the ugly American personified, grousing about how he came to Scotland to shoot grouse and making alcohol look bad as he drawls off his endless flask and shotguns treed locals. Why does Kelly insist on bringing him along? He's like Ronald Coleman's ungrateful brother in LOST HORIZON. Why go to Scotland just to deal with that kind of crap? Just don't hang out with him! On the other hand, does Kelly really want to eat haggis and smell peat moss fires and offal for the rest of time immortal? Why doesn't he just go back to New York and find a different bar? One less crowded and boorish? He's a grass is greener type, aye, and sure'n the grass is no greener than in a wee place you can never get to except once every hundred years.

MARAT/SADE
1967 **** - dir. Peter Brook.
Glenda Jackson stabs a guy named Marat during the French Revolution, while the Marquis de Sade looks on, delighted, and corrects flubbed lines--or are his corrections part of the play within the play? Meanwhile the mental institution director interrupts too, but in rhyme, so is he part of the play or not? What are all these interruptions! Revolution!!

Based on Peter Weiss's play-within-a-play about some drama therapy at the insane asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, the full UK title is "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade", and since you're watching this on TV now you're watching a video of a movie of a play within a play about the French Revolution, so there's guillotines, Brechtian frame-bending through a whole maze of fourth walls, and long twisted monologues about walking through the bloody streets of Paris, rolling like a river of severed heads and blood, and bath steam, and the special way syphilis makes you insane (antibiotics had yet to be invented) and hydrotherapy might help for the moment but there's no cure for the madness of trying to create a government for the people when the people are all corrupt, murderous, uneducated, unwashed denizens!

I used to intern in the creative arts therapy drama department at Bellevue, so I know the score, and this here's real! Watch out Glenda Jackson doesn't reach right out from the screen and stab you too. Superb on every level, some of the songs are almost Fairport Convention-level psych-folkish. As the NY Times TV critic used to say, pounce. Or in this case, stream! Enjoy the digital fruits of your capitalist bourgeois internet whilst you may.  New Marats are born every day, or am I thinking of mallrats? Either way, we're doomed.

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Capsules d'Monstre: GHIDORAH, PHANTASM II, MANSTER, THE SMILING GHOST, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS

GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER

1964 - dir. Ishiro Honda

****

I've seen a lot of Godzilla movies as a kid but I never... until lately. Man, GHIDORAH is the best one! Maybe it's Akira Ifukube's great, blowsy ominous-cool bassoon jazz score, which perfectly captures the drunken heaviness of these here monster giants as they stagger around and down volcanoes and bump into apartment complexes. Ifukube's cues repeat over and over but that's fine.  The dubbing is solid. The framing and colors are comic book perfection. Maybe it's because it ingeniously integrates a lot of fringe science elements. GHIDORAH: Number One!

It seems a bunch of scientists have been having nightly meetings with UFOs, so they invite a lady reporter to come check out how cool they are. When the UFOs don't come the night she's there, they accuse her of sending skeptical brainwaves out into the atmosphere and scaring the aliens off! Skeptical brainwaves! When the reporter dismisses the idea that brainwaves even exist, the scientists smile patronizingly. That's cool despite being sexist because it shows the easy way science can flip-flop on issues, condemning non-believers with an array of defense mechanisms, from witch burning to shows like Fact or Faked and Myth-busters. One day they sneer at the 'nuts' who believe UFOs exist; the next day they sneer at the 'cranks' who believe they don't. Look at the scientist's desk above and you see the way science might have matured had not events like Roswell been so effectively hushed up.

Anyway, later that night some hot princess of the mythical kingdom of Sergina (Akiko Wakabayashi) is abducted from her private plane by a UFO right before a terrorist bomb blows it to bits. The next day, scientists investigate a meteor that crashed in the mountains and left a huge Ghidorah egg. The princess appears at the dock, now possessed by a Martian (below) for a dockside press conference: "I come from the planet you call Mars! The earth--your planet-- is on the brink of destruction, and you refuse to take it seriously." They laugh. And the hatching egg is their reward. Look who's come all the way from space to show you that three heads are better than one, and that killing whales, dolphins, and Nanking is wrong! Ghidorah functions here as a kind of anti-global terrorist bomb, sent to wipe out violent civilizations before they can become a threat to the Galactic Federation (which is a real thing, according to my in-the-know informants!)

 

Of course, the glee with which Japan is wiped out time and again has become dampened by recent cataclysms, but can we doubt this scrappy dolphin-hating nation won't bounce back? So I got to go with Ghidorah on this one, even if those cute Mothra handler sisters are around to sing their little songs to get Godzilla and the latest incarnation of Mothra (still in caterpillar form) to unite against him. Then that Ifukube drunken bassoon score really stumbles into low, low gear, and the rumble atop the volcanic jungle is on.

 It's true, I used to root for the bad guys as a child watching Speed Racer; being a tot and inexperienced, I kept thinking "This time... this time they'll finally win." They never won! Like me, in kickball. Ghidorah, I want that Mach-5 crushed underfoot!

PHANTASM II 

1988 - dir. Don Coscarelli

***

Who knows where we go after we die? The Shadow and Don Coscarelli know, or at least dare to look in the same trans-dimensional direction as fringe theorists like David Icke and Nick Redfern. Like its predecessor, PHANTASM II deconstructs down to reveal what it's like to see the warped mysteries of humanity's archaic funeral rituals through the eyes of a young terrified child wandering the mausoleum while his parents cremate grandma, and being freaked out by the glint of the fading afternoon sun on the shiny marble walls, imagining a flying metal ball coming around looking for him, to drill out his pineal gland (the home of the soul) for use in bizarre fourth dimensional enslavement rites. Also, there's the ingenious STAR WARS-associative use of Jawa fashions for the tall man's undead ghost-dwarf minions.

Considering all the bizarre accoutrements of the funeral trade, you can imagine there being a hidden white room in the mortuary, where corpses are compacted for rebirth in a dimension where the gravity is much stronger, the colors morphed, and the winds relentless. The dimension when finally shown eerily resembles near-death experiences of the unlucky ones who miss the white light. Such people report their astral body/soul floating up to the white light and then being snatched by hands emerging from the dark shadows along the tunnel's sides, yanked into this prison of Hell, where untold despair is instilled and harvested as they march along a long trail through a desert-like plain led in front by a flying saucer that seems to be harvesting elements of their souls! Part Moses and Yaweh leading the Israelites through the wasteland, part literal hell.

Whoa, hey! Too much? Then just enjoy this low key TERMINATOR-meets-EVIL DEAD thrill ride movie, with its periodic in-jokes (the name on one bag of cremation ashes is "Sam Raimi") and pretend you're in a car at a crumbling drive-in in the early 1980s, the world alive with youth, health, and bravado... all of which about to shortly crumble down around you, like the drive-in itself, until all that's left are ashes in an urn and an undead dwarf in a brown robe, texting furiously.

THE MANSTER

1959 - dir. George P. Breakson

***

Here's something you don't see often: a black and white Japanese horror movie where all the actors speak English (i.e. they are not post-dubbed). Pretty awesome, as is the moody but economical but moody black and white photography and surplus of monsters. The story has the evil Dr. Suzuki (Tetsu Nakamara) and his hot assistant (Terri Zimmern) drugging (with experimental mutant-making serum) a dimwitted American journalist named Larry (Peter Dynely) then having Terri seduce him so that he'll stick around Japan and they can monitor him as he devolves. Adrift in the Tokyo bar scene, Larry starts drinking heavily, skulking around at night, killing random people, lusting for Terri, and avoiding his journalistic responsibilities.

Terri Zimmern

Dialogue is awesome in its directness; acting is okay; low-key B-movie expressionism rocks--as in the famous Dali-esque eyeball shoulder scene--and a Val Letwon-RKO kind of midnight ramble through a Zen Buddhist temple. So keenly rendered is the way the serum makes Larry into a hard-drinking, surly mess that I would recommend this movie to rehab centers. There's even some intervention-style drama with a clingy gaijin wife (Jayne Hilton) who wants Larry to come home and live a life of quiet desperation and he can't stand quiet desperation! As we say in AA, I really related.

THE SMILING GHOST

1941 - dir. Lewis Selier

**1/2

This all-nonsense studio B-picture concerns a layabout-for-hire (Wayne Morris) brought to a mysterious estate to marry an heiress (Alexis Smith) with a rep as 'the black widow' since her last three husbands died suspiciously. She wants to find out why, so marries our dimwit handyman hero as bait. Cue sheet metal thunder and secret panels! Meanwhile a spunky female reporter (Brenda Marshall) snoops around the bushes and an old uncle (Charles Halton) tries to add Willie Best's slack-jawed noggin to his shrunken head collection. I've seen some horribly racist caricatures of black people in old horror movies, but nothing quite like this! Willie Best even withholds vital information that could save lives because he's too busy overacting, as when he witnesses a secret passage open and shut and--even after armed good guys burst into the room moment later--all he can do is run away gibbering and bug-eyed instead of telling them where the panel is. It's almost enough to make you forget the rest of the movie's pretty good. It's not Best's fault but unlike Mantan Moreland's similar roles, there's no subversive actorly subtext (that I noticed anyway).

Brenda Marshall

Tiffany Bolling and friend

KINGDOM THE SPIDERS

1977 - dir. John "Bud" Cardos

***1/2

A loose remake of THE BIRDS, this spawn of the post-JAWS environ-amok genre stars William Shatner as a small town Arizona veterinarian and Tiffany Bolling as a big town etymologist sent in to help when toxicology on a dead calf reveals spider venom. Bolling's the Melanie Daniels; Marcy Lafferty (Shatner's real-life wife at the time) is the Annie Hayworth; the meet cute is at a gas station instead of a pet store, but there's still the holing up at the hotel bar with the cross section of the populace, and the big attack with people running around in panic with little creatures on them.

The Arizona scenery is beautiful with mesas like the ones in STAGECOACH. The worried black rancher (Woody Strode) fearful of losing his livestock in a quarantine-- "he worked for seven years to get that bull!"--is allowed much dignity and concern, so we're slowly climbing up the stereotypes from Best's cowardly manservant to over-serious humble sobriety... it's still a cliche, though, since he and his wife are the first humans to die. It's pretty dumb that the white folks decide to go on a picnic after finding the dead black couple lying in the grass covered with arachnid bites. Dumb, but typical.

But hey, you know this film is awesome when a tarantula--with scary library music cues filling the soundtrack--slowly climbs up onto Bolling's desk and into the open desk drawer while she's in the shower. When she finds it she just smiles like she's found a kitten, cradles it in her hand, then releases it outside. Tiffany Bolling, in other words, kicks ass! I love the way she towers over Shatner, and gently mocks him when he tries to seduce her, while still letting him continue to try. Her reputation amongst the Psychotronic set is well-deserved. I instantly ordered BONNIE'S KIDS after seeing this, and rented TRIANGLE (1970). Bill Shatner earns his cult, too, especially when he does an awesome high-stepping dance to not step on any of the spiders. He sometimes does step on them, but at least no hairpieces were harmed during the making of this movie.

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Queen of Daze: PJ Soles in ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)

 

Part of the PJ Soles Blogathon on Day of the Woman

The blowing up of one's school was a sacred fantasy to us, the sugar-crazed kids in the 1970s; we imagined big explosions and gym mats and sneakers raining in slow motion down over our neighborhood. It was a time long before ADD, Columbine, or anthrax, a time when a little pyrotechnic destruction of one's school was expected, allowed, respected. And it's that fantasy that comes true in ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL, and it's never since been depicted before or since with such strident rock defiance.  If ROCK was released now, well... it just wouldn't be released at all, so why even ponder? As it is, we'll always have 1979.

The school's fate is sealed with the arrival of a new principal (Mary Woronov, drawing on her experience playing cruel dyke prison wardens) at Vince Lombardi High. She's determined to weed out the bad kids, such as platter-spinning Ramones devotee Riff Randle (PJ Soles). Oblivious to this looming threat, Riff just knows if she can get her songs to Joey Ramone he'd sing them, she think he's dreamy and if PJ Soles can think a hunched beanpole doofus like Joey Ramone is dreamy then there is surely hope for us all. Meanwhile an insecure jock played by Vince Van Patten pays for make-out lessons from the school's drug dealer, and Woronov's loyal EATING RAOUL comrade Paul Bartel is the music teacher who ends up joining the revolution, declaring that "if Beethoven were a student at Vince Lombardi, he'd be a Ramone!"

The music of the Ramones is the perfect pogo-ready soundtrack to the angsty years of high school and their nonstop rock infects the entire rhythm of the film, gradually pulling the narrative away from Randle and Co's high school persecution and into total celebration of rock and roll, and in particular, the album Road to Ruin, which Riff Randle plays while relaxing with a joint in her bedroom. She puffs and rocks so righteous, the Ramones even appear... Joey even serenades her in her shower!

This fantasy sequence, in foxy orange undergarments, maintains an admirable mix of the edgy and innocent. A joint is no indication of sexual activeness in a cool movie like this. And the band's too busy playing to ever submit to the petty lusts that drag other rock films down. Soles and her Ramones puritans of punk, replacing sex with destruction, and when the Ramones come to the local rock theater, Joey reads Riff's letter on stage it seems natural. Of course they will show up at the school. Of course slutty teen groupies are a fact of life on the road, but again, I admire how Randle's almost spiritual devotion to their primitivist rock energy transcends any rote deflowering on their end. And for their part, her letter is taken seriously enough to let you know they're more than just on the look-out for easy tail. She's like a punk Mary Magdalene and they become a groovy flotilla of leather jacket Jesuses.

The success of PORKY'S the following year undid the progress and once again sex and boys were all girls were allowed to think about, but in 1979 they understood that rock and roll is a holy thing.

 

This is awesome because, without this kind of sublimation, the female adolescent fantasy cannot survive. Because of endless unwelcome pawing backstage, whole roads of exploration and rebellion are avoided by the wary girl traveler, and the result are movies about teenage girls that are mired in boytoy mirroring and anti-objectification/prurience dichotomies like LITTLE DARLINGS, FOXES, and FOXFIRE, where every man is abusive, groping, desperate, stalking, or a degenerate charmer out to steal their allowance. But not here, baby. The Ramones become Riff's surrogate beast of burden, the animus primely situated between the ponies of childhood and the sexual boyfriends of maturity. And they know it, and they're into it. Punk is their unified field. So what a joy to find this kind of thing in a rock film since, in addition to the issue of blowing up the school, letting underage high school girls around mature punk rocker skeeves would raise so many eyebrows in a few short years that the laws of self-fulfilling prophecy would take effect. Parents would protest a movie like this before it even came out, then secretly go see it and feel cheated when there's no gang bang. 

All that is great, but what finally unmoors the movie from traditional sex comedy orbit altogether is the wild frenetic anarchy of the all-ages punk rock show centerpiece of the film. Director Alan Arkush had worked as an usher for the Filmore so both this and his unjustly unavailable 1983 masterwork GET CRAZY have that real-life sense of being there, of being caught up in the excitement. His concerts reek of pot, cigarette, dry ice, and a thousand crushed-together perfumes, like real rock concerts smell. Hey! Hey! And the kids can come too, that's the important thing. The all-ages show is never taken lightly. I've been there and can ascertain, this is how it is/was. I saw many all-ages Ramones shows as a teenager and this one is ever better. Arkush sustains the excitement most concert films only touch on scattershot, and he builds it up, and then farther up.

Soles, who so often played best friends to final girls--goofy, strident, horny, and lacking the sense of insecurity and self-consciousness that would make her aware of approaching danger (such as in HALLOWEEN)--lets fly as Riff, unafraid to be infectiously goofball rather than sexy; she's great, and it's a crime it's her only lead role in any major film. Her little lithe body bouncing around covered in the bright shiny colors that had not yet come to signify the encroaching 1980s, her natural tendency to make funny faces, bugging her eyes out, tightening and pursing her thin lips, can't be dismissed as mugging since it's so perfectly apt for the age. Never adding more smarts than a normal teen would have, and twice as much heedless momentum, she's a tangle of sincerity, giggles, self-satire and genuine ferocity. I'd be scared to date her. But I'd want to be at parties she was at.

In short, PJ Soles rocks and if you have problems getting through the first bits of this movie, with ancient Og Oggleby as a school official in a boardroom and all the typical teen sexcom clownery, hold fast, go pour a drink, and then return to let the rock of the Ramones work its magic. You might end up as I did, bouncing around your living room to their protean punk and PJ's awesome bug-eyed purity while your flatmates look at you with quiet annoyance. But hey, Riff's got a chainsaw with their name on it.

 

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A Plea for Badder Elderly

The recent pair of "Bad" movies - BAD TEACHER and VERY BAD BOSSES - gives me hope for the cinema future. I've not seen either, but I have seen my cinema nation gradually morph from something occasionally edgy into this weird saccharine sarcophagi, where the only bad guys are cardboard super villains whose daddies didn't love them enough, or ourselves.

Another thing is old people. Were no female actresses born in the 1950s so we can have them play crazy old bat lunatics, like Bette Davis in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? That film set the bar, then Roman Polanski made them even creepier with Ruth Gordon in ROSEMARY'S BABY. Many followed her lead and though none captured her Satanic inevitability and none the horror of realizing you're old like Davis, all tried their best, if they weren't too drunk. They smoked, told dirty jokes, fooled around with unwary grips and rocked films with names like WHO SLEW AUNTIE ROO, WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH HELEN? and countful others--for awhile, in the late 60-early 70s, old people weren't tedious saints but terrifying spectres. Has there been any crazy old bats since these, from that golden rhinestone era? The era that brought us aging divas not only wrestling with impending mortality, but chewing its ear off and axing the referee in the crotch?

The problem with having a youth-obsessed pop culture for too many generations has become apparent in every empty gesture of our rom com heroines, every vacant slackjawed stare of our actors playing shaven hunks trying to maintain just-sex relationships with hotties from THE BLACK SWAN while their hairy bros tell dick jokes and wallow in a post-FREAKS AND GEEKS adolescence while the women comediennes roll their eyes and try to make the best of whatever few dumb lines they have. They're lacking substance, the substance that can only come from being made miserable by live-in relatives.

If they bothered to not only live with their parents but bring in the grandparents and all live under the same roof like families did in brownstones and Victorian 4-10 bedroom houses before the World War Two, then they'd actually see more old people, and on long enough a basis to be so creeped out they'd have to make movies about it. And forget Hollywood, where old people are all farmed off to Palm Springs, never to be seen again. The rest of us see the old ones on holidays when they are on their best behavior, and in hospitals when they're sucking our future social security up their IV tubes. Gimme that IV tube old lady! Have a Lark.

Don't blame me, a simple messenger, blame the pre-fab tract house suburbia boom that followed WW2. Soldiers came home from the war and balked at suddenly being expected to adhere to centuries-old curfews after three years of genital freedom. Since the rocket-pocket 1950s we've been bred to associate fleeing the nest with being the first step to true fun and freedom. It's only later, much later, that you get the bill for this luxury, and by then you're far too old to benefit from the lesson; you don't know how to act once you crest 30 because you live only with younger people. You haven't changed, it's just that now there's only one generation ahead of you, and more creeping behind you all the time, younger and younger... and ever more clueless with only the facts of the internet to guide them, and not the shaky logic and maddeningly repetitive and racist stories of their great grandparents.

I'd love to see, for example, a film about a crazy old lady who lures young men to her mansion then drugs them with sticky candy and makes them listen as she reads the bible, or kills them. But nooo, old people won't learn to use the internet, so we'll have to wait til my generation's old enough to crave company. Our actresses will be needing work once their plastic surgeons have finally said "finis! There is no more I can do." So maybe they'll be down for it. I know I am. Will BAD TEACHER lead to this crazy old axe murdering bat renaissance? If AA has taught me anything, it's no.

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