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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-304875732020-07-03T02:51:05.597-05:00Acidemic - FilmPsychedelironic Pre-Postal Film Criticism - spilled the right way! Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-72757954306941193952020-06-04T14:52:00.000-05:002020-06-04T15:59:48.948-05:00Gone Hawks-in: AROUND THE WORLD UNDER THE SEA (1966)

"We know less about the deep oceans than we know about the surface of the moon!"
There's never any question of getting the bends in the fun and oceanic quasi-sci-fi adventure film Around the World Under the Sea. In fact it's the one element that seems the most unscientific about this charmingly odd duck of a movie, produced by the ever-adventurous Ivan Tors and ably achieving just what it wants to do, i.e. pleasurably evoking the previous nine or so years of ocean-related TV adventure series, Irwin Allen sci-fi films, and Jacques Cousteau documentaries; and I say that as someone who is totally fine with the uncommented on presence of a macro-scoped moray eel doing the duty as the requisite giant sea monster (ala what kept us kids watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea reruns). In fact, I love it. I wish there were more (no giant squid or octopus) but what can you do? There's a deep-breathing Shirley Eaton, so it skews slightly older, and that's cool, too.

Lloyd Bridges (from TV's Sea Hunt) co-stars with Brian Kelly (from TV's Flipper) as two divers on a mission to assemble a team of the leading oceanographers, tech gurus, oxygen mixers (Shirley Eaton), and undersea miners (dull as dishwater William Thompson) to travel the oceans deep and plant seismographic detection devices around the 'ring of fire' and other places via an experimental yellow submarine, the Hydronaut ("she can circle the globe on one cartridge of nuclear fuel!") Are you down for the trip yet? Or would you rather slog through another week of CNN watching the world above you burn, like it does in Irwin Allen's movie version of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea?

Along the way there are rescues (the best one being early on when Bridges dives down to help his sinking buddy with no oxygen tank, and swims 100 feet or so down -doing no real good except to bang on the top of the window). I love it, as no one is perfect. The steam heat of Eaton almost crashes the sub as McCallum is busy trying to woo her and nearly collides with an undersea cliff.

Keenan Wynn co-stars as one of the breathing mixers. And I am fascinated by his bachelor pod under the sea (he lives in a giant NYC studio apartment-sized diving bell several thousand feet down). I have had dreams about just such a place; in these apocalyptic times it's looking better than ever! The only difference is that his lacks a VHS player and TV, instead has an LP player and a nice stack of records, and an ongoing chess game via shortwave. That's OK, too. Lloyd Bridges dives down there and tries to convince him of all the lives he'll save by helping install a chain of underwater earthquake detectors along the Pacific 'ring of fire': "I don't care - let 'em all go." Wynn fires back. "I got it made down here! I got my research, my books, my music!"

Bridges and Kelly, reminding us of a time when men looked like men.

To provide evidence, he shows a shark hatching from its egg: "He's trying to free himself from his nourishing egg yolk! He wants to be born!" The analog is clear. Wynn doesn't want to, preferring to stay in his nourishing egg under the sea. Like I say, I relate to his churlish disposition; it doesn't seem quite fair to drop in and guilt trip him like some crafty Greenpeace canvasser. So he's going to leave all his lab animals to just die in his undersea cave because some scientist wants to save Asia? To prove Wynn's misanthropy is just a lazy doge, Bridges leaves the pod without the right oxygen mix to get back to the surface alive, banking on his old pal coming to the rescue.

Another of my favorite crew, Eaton has that wry knowing look--both haughty and turned-on, dismissive of your interest in her yet intrigued, steaming up the cramped ocean spaces, and throwing the alpha male young buck Kelly into a state of mating season heat; and vexing the Metalunan forehead of David McCallum as the wizard at communications and computers. (Meanwhile dull as dishwater Marshall Thompson occasionally puts his arm around her, presuming she'd marry him in a minute if he asked). I'm no fan of McCallum (he's like Klaus Kinski without the froth) but I like the way the he and Keenan begin their ongoing chess game (magnetically attached to the side of the sub so as not to take up space) without a single word but he's way better an option for Eaton than Thompson, who'd be more believable as her father, even in the 60s. (though he's only 12 years her senior). Luckily, providing handsome manly gruffness as the guy who gets Eaton into whatever bed there is onboard, because he treats her the worst, Kelly beats them all.

The reason for Kelly's gruffness is clear: once they're all submerged on this groovy experimental vessel, the steam rises. You can feel Eaton's pheromones oozing off of her into the mix of sweat and salt water steam. What makes her allure so unique is her rather harsh face --she's not afraid to keep those jet black roots and big black eyebrows, with wide, cunning eyes (as she showed in the The Million Eyes of Sumuru), that devouring face, those gnashing teeth. She's from a brand of mid-60s Bond girl that includes Honor Blackman that, with the era's preference for inch-thick eyeliner, could be seen staring at you with a wolfish smile from a mile away without binoculars. "I've caught them all," is her first line of dialogue, seen on land, after rounding up escaped guinea pigs. But by the end, it's clear who she really means is the entirety of the Hydronaut crew. "You're a lot on a man's blood pressure," admits Bridges. But he also notes she's excellent at her job and men are going to have to get used to women like her being around, i.e. it's not her fault, and she's not just here as eye candy, or a secretary. She's the leading expert in her field and we regularly see her proving it. There are a few shots of her bringing orange juice in and out of rooms on a tray, as if the filmmakers felt the need to satisfy some archaic gender typing; but we also see her injecting the men with chemicals that will help them absorb more oxygen from the limited air, and keeping an eye on her guinea pigs for signs of changing in the breathing. She's a great one for oxygen.

The climax involving a last minute extra sensor right at the foot of an underwater volcanic eruption includes lots of great, albeit unconvincing, miniatures and colors as the bright orange light of the magma creates deep blue dark shadows on the sub and its interiors, evoking Suspiria and early two-strip color films like Dr. X and Mystery of the Wax Museum, with the ship balanced on the lip of a volcano, then sliding vertically so that they're all trying to work while literally falling on top of each other.  and the last minute plan to blow the sub in half to rocket the top half straight up to the surface ensures the framing gets understandably messy--even Twister-esque--in the interiors but man the exteriors look gorgeous in this big climax, with the deep volcanic stock footage and model work casting a cool contrasting blue and orange lattice of shadows as the colors filter through the dark ocean water.

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 It's not for everyone, and I'm no specific fan of underwater TV shows from the 60s, but I have warmed up on movies where the sea monster is a normal-sized predator in an aquarium battling a tiny model and there's something downright Hawksian about these professionals all working together and the slow burn romance bathed in steam.

Truth be told. Not even sure why I like this movie, its title seems designed to weld Around the World in 80 Days to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and it sure is derivative of a lot of different TV and movies like Fantastic Voyage as well. But that's all okay. One amazing element is just how little the film seems to care about the usual oceanography documentary stuff. We see the Great Barrier Reefs and so forth but only in passing. The only dolphin is one programmed to attach magnetic mines to ships.Clearly most of this was filmed on the dry dock or with miniatures in big tanks but I love that. In CGI or life-size 'reality', with endless digressions on the wonders of aquatic life, it would be a snooze (or more of a snooze than it is). Instead, it's almost Hawksian. And in these trying times, regardless of whether you think, like Wynn's salty dog, we should "let 'em all go" or be like Kelly and Nolan and "want to be born," getting far under the sea away from the dizzy situations back on land seems hard to resist. I know a lot of harried dads would love this movie with a few cocktails after their nagging wives go off to bed. Submarine movies work a special kind of magic for us air-conditioning-dependent summertime older males, and provide the ultimate metaphor for late night viewing itself, that special privatized sphere of buzzed insomniacs, when the lack of prying eyes frees you to unfurl all your hidden tentacles, and--even if it's all too dark to see except through a single glowing window--the world is yours.

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-51176369450891092492020-05-15T10:03:00.000-05:002020-05-19T14:54:01.602-05:00Acid Goes Legit: HAVE A GOOD TRIP: ADVENTURES IN PSYCHEDELICS (2020)

"Drugs can be dangerous," notes Nick Offerman, dressed as a scientist in this cautious documentary, playing off all the anti-drug 'educational' films they used to show us in school. "But they can also be... hilarious."

The new Netflix documentary, full of animated renditions of famous comedians' flashbacks, is more than just an LSD documentary or an extended episode of Party Legends. With the presence of pro-therapeutic model doctors like Deepak Chopra on hand (who points out the impossibility of objective reality), it's both a hilarious trip story montage and a medical vindication (with psychiatrists like Charles Grob who use it in clinical trials to help terminal cancer patients let go of their fear of death, etc.) with a final putting to bed of the demonizing double talk. All those phony DNA-warping trials that went into making it illegal during the Vietnam war are finally booed out of the room.

That's not to say it's not full of sound advice on the dangers of dosing. They put cautious stress on set and setting--but it's really an attempt to ease off the stigma that has too long associated good drugs like mushrooms and LSD with 'bad' drugs like cocaine and heroin. Non-addictive, not always 'fun' but nearly always insightful about one's own psychological make-up (even a bad trip can provide ten years of normal psychotherapy in a single night), as long as you don't do nothin' stupid, like dose when you're already drunk and its 5 AM, or try to drive. (Not that I haven't done both).

While it made me very glad to see HAVE A GOOD TRIP, and it gave me a tang on my tongue and sweaty palms, that burning sensation in the third eye (lodged above/between/behind the eyes like a blazing solar bullet), that excited feeling I used to get when my psyche could sense an imminent drug trip even before I maybe had decided to have one. During my own acid/shrooms heyday, approximately 1986-1998 (did you know I invented 'micro-dosing'? You're welcome!) there was something much cooler and more political about drugs because of the war on drugs was at its nadir. Even spoiled white college kids could go to jail for life just for having a few shrooms in their pockets at a Dead show. The danger made it all so sexy and intimate, we were outlaws! Narcs would show up at college asking for larger amounts of course, trying to sweet-talk dumbass freshmen into big enough deals that could send them away for life; the trick with cops was always to act nonchalant, no matter how thuggish they may get and how many drugs you had stashed in your car. Narcs would show up at our parties with all the subtlety of Jack Lemmon in Glengary Glen Ross talking about their friend Joe, or whomever was dumb enough to mention one of us could hook them up. Narcs like Johnny Depp in that show 21 Jump Street were supposed to be cool! (It wasn't until Ed Wood that we were ready to forgive him.) Nancy's "Just Say No" campaign made it mandatory for insurance rates that companies gave urine tests to their employees, like it was some kind of 1984 gulag. Maybe some still do, I don't want to know.

All of which I mean to say, well, man. A documentary like this, right out in the open on Netflix. I would never have thunk this thing possible. Today, it's only the older talking head celebs they have on this show, like Sting, who really understand just how bad things used to be. For us older folks the very idea of an acid documentary seems like, in order for it to have funding, it would have to lean on the down side more than the up. As Sting puts it, stressing his initial reluctance, "I wouldn't want to be an exercise in the Just Say No campaign." I'm not a fan of his music but I fell in love with him here, especially talking about assisting in the birth of a calf while tripping on peyote, and his clear-eyed admission of having plenty of bad trips, noting: "Sometimes it kicks your ass, sometimes you need to have your ego kicked down a rung or two." Indeed, a bad trip is just a sample of the Buddhist idea of Hell, where the burning flames are the demons devouring the shreds of ego still clinging to your soul like crusty flesh moths around a burning lightbulb until at last its full wattage may shine forth. Try to telling that to yourself when you're writhing around on the floor moaning pitifully as little carpet gnomes shred your eyeballs, though. It doesn't help.

Unsurprisingly for his general uptight persona, Ben Stiller didn't jibe with his acid. Stiller talks about the one time he did it and wigged out ("fear and anxiety just being amplified"), walking past the half-inflated animals late at night on the UWS the night before the Thanksgiving Day parade, etc. Incidentally, I had that same experience in the mid-90s, but I loved it! Tripping to a half-inflated Snoopy at 4 AM = pure weird bliss, but Jerry got so wigged he ended up calling his parents! They were off somewhere shooting an episode of The Love Boat! Great details though, gotta love him for that. Elsewhere are those two knuckleheads at the left, enacting an Anthony Bourdain story of a narcoleptic stripper dying on them in a hotel room where they're doing massive amounts of shrooms and cocaine. Noice! She snaps back to life, but they really bring home the full dose of paranoia that can result when you can all but smell the naugahyde in the back seat of the cop car just from thinking about the trouble you might now be in. (The presence of the late Bourdain and Carrie Fisher lets you know--if the startling young age of some of these talking heads didn't give it away beforehand--that this film is many years in the making. Since it's presented as a new documentary, the effect is unintentionally (I presume) quite jarring. Was the film so long in the making because the director was all stoned and whatnot? Bro, I don't even want to tell you what a mess Max and my acid documentary for America in the 60s class was. (We got an F!) In the words of Otto, man, people who party hearty show up tardy, man.

Since his dad is Jerry Stiller, I guess it's OK, and I do like Zoolander, but still, Ben proves my hunch was right, and that he's the type of guy we called a wally, i.e. they don't want to trip but they also want to hang out with you while you do, dragging you down with their banal straight insights. And if they do trip, an hour or two in, they want someone to drive them to the ER as they think they're dying (or worse, they want to give themselves up to the cops). Other comedians in the doc talk about the idiot "friends" it's good to avoid --the ones who find out you are tripping and give you a hard time going "Woo! Woo! You're going down a tunnel!" and all this other moronic townie dirtbag shit. We get a sampling of the wrong crowd too in an a hilariously over-the-top Afterschool special re-enactment that again, only those of us of a certain generation X will be able to relate to (the afterschool special being a thing purely from the 70s, when shows like Go Ask Alice gave us such confusing demonizations of high school drug use we were left as misled as if we read a Judy Blume book for a guide to human sexuality.)

Along the way there is plenty of groovy candy-colored animation ala the other big trippy Netflix animated show, Midnight Gospel. Among other treats, we get a groovy sound mix of how voices and music sounds when your hearing is slipping in and out of the space-time continuum, animated "trees are waving kind of musically at me" There's a bit about wigging out at the Van Gogh Museum as one of the fields of rippling wheat paintings in while scared tourist families gawk (I've been there, but at the Met). We get Nick Kroll remembering being covered in seaweed down at the beach and running around being the seaweed monster. We get Bill Kreutzmann (drummer for the Dead, left) talking about being so high his cymbals were melting. (I've seen his cymbals melt too! I've also seen his tongue hanging out down to his socks with his head rolled back like he's a bloated corpse!) Ae$op Rocky mentions having great sex and when he cam "a rainbow shot out of my penis." (Never saw that one myself, but I've never been much for sex while tripping, it's too intense already.)

As Rocky points out, acid is "not for everybody. I'm an artiste. It's my lifestyle." Man, I totally agree. One of the reasons I stopped trying to be such a keen promoter, was the realization people weren't using it the way I did, originally, as an artistic/spiritual quest device (with overcoming paralyzing depression being a nice side effect) but to get fucked up. Sure, I've done that too. But it's wrong, man. Still, if you take it to get fucked up but then see God, that's way cooler than taking it to see God and just seeing yourself, fucked-up.

Too many funny bits to name, but you can tell this is assembled by someone 'in the know' and they took their time to get all the details right. I love how the first half of the documentary stresses the danger of looking in a mirror while tripping (which I don't agree wit!). The second half stresses how cool it is to look in the mirror while tripping (I was right!). With a little kid dressed as a machine elf pointing out helpful dos and don'ts that sometimes contradict. Watching this I felt my self nodding excitedly, my palms getting clammy with flashback sensations. I got a little misty remembering my mindset back in the late 80s, the total political drug war making a documentary like this all but impossible except on the DL. (I was long afraid to put our acid doc on youtube, for just this reason).

As one of the talking heads notes, tripping visuals have never been captured very well on film except for the carpet patterns in Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Donovan gives us a natural history. Zach Leary (Tim's son) notes DMT "is the express train to the ooze." Reggie Watts gives us a sage bit of bad trip-avoiding advice: "When it doubt, zoom out."

Evie Oddly - Drag Race winner,
a sign o' the trippy times

As usual, however, it's Deepak Chopra who makes 'reality' seems suddenly to have never been a dangerous or confusing place: "In reality there is no such thing as colors and sounds, just a fluctuation of energy in an infinite void." Right on.

As one who's long stuck up for psychedelics as a viable therapeutic and creative tool, even in the un-PC 80s or in AA groups, this documentary made me feel as vindicated as the movie Ed Wood did back in the glorious early 90s. I set this blog up back in 2006, the way Claudia Cardinale's fake-Irish husband Mr. McBain started setting up his station in the middle of nowhere, knowing the train was headed his way... little did I suspect that I too would be more or less killed by Henry Fonda by the time the train got here! I mean, here we are, in the age of Midnight Gospel, Climax, Mandy, Midsommar, The Beach Bum, Evie Oddly, and now this. And I am alive... but at what cost? I can't even do a hit of cough medicine without having an anxiety attack. What's important though is that I have made peace with that, too. Is no longer needing to be hip more important than being so? Is having tripped 100+ times 20 years ago as important as wanting to trip once tomorrow?

It depends!

I no longer don't fear death they way I used to, if that makes sense. But isn't that the province of the young, to face death through some scary gauntlet and come out a better, calmer person? Now the thought of just going to the hospital terrifies me so I keep myself constantly distracted. It's not the same, but sobriety makes a clear-eyed stare into the void rather hard to do, which is why AA stresses prayer so much. Drunk, I could look down the barrel of a gun without flinching. Tripping, I could feel death's cold hands on my just seeing a picture of a gun in a magazine. Sober, I can't even sneeze without having a COVID panic attack. I believe in God, but only because I've had so many religious experiences I'd be a fool not to, like giving back a lifetime of Christmas presents because I refuse to "believe" in Santa.

Ultimately that's the big issue Have a Good Trip skirts around in favor of funny stories; the nature of reality and the link to a higher power. Of course, whether or not there is a God is irrelevant to faith. There is no this, so how can it not be that? Once duality is transcended, the game, the seeking, is over. Once one goes back down from the mountain, knowing what lies beyond, what can one do but pick up their burden again, and continue on, participating joyfully in the sorrows of the universe, so as not to spoil the surprise for everyone else? Knowing this, as the Upanishads say, the rest is known. This is the trick Luke could never figure out when fighting Darth Vader in the awful Return of the Jedi. To fight with love in your heart is not violence. When someone tells you to just say NO, tell them to KNOW is better, but be sure and name check John Lennon in The Yellow Submarine who does that to the Blue Meanies' big marching NO font-monster.

When I saw John do that the last time I was in a mystical experience (during the 2012 galactic alignment). I suddenly, in that satori moment, understood how true love transcends duality. But what does that give you in the end? Lockjaw from too much smiling, a high fever, and... when you see some long... long in the making documentary like this... a kind of pleasant tang in the parasympathetic nervous system, tinged with the regrets of blown, flown youth, and tainted by the realization that, in this life, and maybe even the next, the amount of positive energy it takes to vibrate at a higher frequency is never going last.

Still, if the wave ever comes my way again, and the set and setting is just right, I'm ready to surf. All you got to do is roll right past my house. When the tide is that high, swear to god I'll surf it, like Desolation Williams and Lt. Melanie Ballard at the end of Ghosts of Mars! Momma, I shall surf again!

Further:

June 17, 2012:
Tripumentaries: MAGIC TRIP, DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE, 2012: Mayan Prophecy and Shift of the Ages, and ROBERT THURMAN ON BUDDHISM

June 25, 2015:
Summer of my Netflix Streaming I: A Psychedelic Odyssey- Though all these films are long gone from Netflix streaming, woe is us. You can still program a nice 12 hours of dosed post-whatever viewing from them if you can track 'em down.

And of course, the films of THE PSYCHEDELIC CANON in yonder right hand sidebar (top) and my other 'weirder' sites, like Medsitation and Divinrorum Psychonuauticus + Surrealist Collage Exercises!

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-19678343603064570362020-04-15T17:25:00.002-05:002020-05-29T13:48:05.977-05:0013 Great Films for Week X of a Pandemic (on Prime)

There's a pandemic going on outside and a bad year for spring pollen makes us indoor kids all sneezy and paranoid, thus robbing us of the schadenfreude we'd normally feel at being told we must stay inside in front of the TV all day. But that doesn't mean we don't make excellent guides through the jungle of weird and justly forgotten films from the 60s-80s with which Prime is overrun. So forget about too "on the nose" downers like Outbreak and Coughs on a Plane -and forget about ROTM Prime film recommendations on RT, and the like. Instead, let me hack you a path through 13 wildly post-whatever films, starting from the first failure of CDC style checkpoints in Cassandra Crossing (1978) onwards to Italian cannibal zombies all the way back around to the past-post-apocalyptic Rats: Night of Terror--not to mention all the groovy psychedelic stops along the way, for this carefully programmed series of 13 films dares examine the drastic things humanity is simply too 'human' to do to save itself, until it's too late. And what happens after that.

So, if you can still drink, open up another packet of powdered whiskey and sneak some peeks through the dirty thumb-print looking glass end of reality!

1. THE CASSANDRA CROSSING

(1976) Dir. George P. Cosmatos

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A-

The dad of the director of Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy is clearly highly qualified to tell a tale of what happens when a plague-contaminated terrorist winds up hiding on a speeding international incident of a train, requiring colonel Burt Lancaster to make some tough decisions, like having the military in hazmat gear welding bars over all the train doors and windows so no one can escape, then rerouting it onto a disused line so it can crash into a ravine (thus saving the world and the secret germ warfare program). Ingrid Thulin is the voice of compassion and reason butting his head, maybe she can fly in a cure! Passengers include Martin Sheen and Ava Gardner as an odd pair of con artists; OJ Simpson and Richard Harris try diplomacy and then machine guns to get the hell off; Lionel Stander is a conductor! Lee Strasberg is a stereotypical old European Jew for whom all the brutal revocation of civil liberty is just a little too familiar. Alida Vialli, Lou Costell, Sophia Lauren, John Phillip Law, and Ann Turkel all run around in the background, hoping to help or hinder one side or the other. In other words it's pure 70s cinema: a bloated cast of international stars on a runaway moving vehicle and one of those unresolvable "many must die so more can live" kind of tough choices that let us sympathize with both the military and the innocents battling against their sudden loss of human rights.

2. THE CRAZIES

(1973) Dir. George Romero

*** 1/2/ Amazon Image - A

This early-70s horror film of George Romero's offers a clear indicator why it's so important to let people shelter in their homes rather than herd them into high school gymnasiums at gunpoint in the dead of night. The drastically under-equipped Major Ryder and the cool whiskey flask-packed Colonel Peckham (Lloyd Hollar) figure the best way to contain an outbreak of 'Trixie' --an experimental depopulating agent designed to infiltrate the enemy's water supply like a fatal dose of really bad acid--is to round everyone in the affected sleepy PA town at 2 AM with no explanation of why ("We've been promised bullhorns and loudspeakers," notes Ryder, blithely. "No telling when they're going to arrive!"). But Ryder and Peckham have a problem: this is rural PA in the early 70s, full of bitter and and armed Vietnam vets (ala them Deer Hunter) in no mood to let the military start pushing them around again ("the Army's nobody's friend, man," a vet cautions a father who wants to give himself up. "We know. We've been in it".) An infectious military drums spurs on the very well-edited scenes of Ryder's outfit trying to set up a field office in the local doctor's cramped offices. We sympathize for everyone involved. Peckham, where's that flask!?

It's long been one ugly looking film but recently The Crazies has gotten a loving restoration; Prime's print glows with warm colors; you can tell right off as now the blue eyes of a blonde girl seem otherworldly and rampant fire burns bright orange and the naked skin of nurse Lane Carroll is a heavenly in its rosiness. Romero edits in the same multiple camera semi-documentary style that made Dawn of the Dead still the best zombie movie of all time.

As with our own Corona, this virus travels faster than the ability of the governmental operatives to contain it ("If Trixie jumps perimeter, it could could travel across the entire continent!" notes the guy who orders a nuke-loaded B29 into the air.) When instructed to send in one of the scientists who worked on the virus, they grab the great Richard "Dummies! Dummies!" France (Romero's equivalent to Cronenberg's Joe Silver):"Jesus Christ this is so RANDOM!" he shouts as he's thrown onto a plane with no chance to collect any useful material. In his peevish portly way he's utterly masterful, and centers the film with that great deep booming voice.

Lastly, you have to love any film as clued in the magic of the morning hours: it's a film that starts at one in the morning and sees the sun come up on a whole new world about halfway through the film. It's not unlike the morning after one of those old SU block parties in the late 80s, with zonked still-tripping kids and bikers still awake, staggering around the town, feeling they and the world are so altered by chemical craziness that nothing will ever be the same again. If you were there, you know what I mean. And there's the ever-surprising and deliriously 70s babysitter alluring Lynn Lowry as a sheltered young hippie-ish girl who winds up losing her virginity to her father during one of the more disturbing sequences. Don't let it throw you. She doesn't. Before the rebel vet hero can find her she's outside running around with the sheep.

PS -There are numerous uploads of this film on Prime, so if the image isn't sublime and HD, try another link.
PPS - The remake is also on Prime, and pretty good but now that it's been restored to glowy perfection, the original is the way to go

3. RABID

(1977) Dir. David Cronenberg

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

Cronenberg's second film (after the similar Shivers which you should also see if available) mixes all his pet ingredients: a wintry experimental clinic in the Montreal wilderness, accurate medical jargon, motorcycles, a keen appreciation for the uneasy relationship between the body, viruses, and the mind; and deeply disturbing gore. The latter includes a scene were Dr. Keloid uses what looks like an electric cheese sliver to peel off the upper epidermis of heavenly Marilyn Chambers' legs for an experimental graft. Luckily it grows back and she gets a chance to really show her stuff when she wakes up from her post-crash coma in the early hours of the night and commences to slinking around the cozy clinic in search of surprised patients and staff to drink from through a retractable penis-esqe proboscis on the inside of her elbow. You heard me!

Soon she's back in Montreal and watching her saunter down the street in the neon lights of the city in her fur coat, flashing a hint of a smile as he walks past a poster for Carrie at a downtown theater, makes the film worth watching all by itself, especially in glorious restored HD which captures the mix of warm inviting colors of interiors and flesh tones contrasting with the endless white grey of the outdoors. Ultimately, as in most Cronenberg films, Rabid is about the way sexual addiction and drug addiction are the same blood chemical trip and Chambers is the poster child for both (and can really bring a kind of sneaking sexual invite into a line like "I've been lying in bed so long; I ache all over" without being gauche or overly obvious about it). As with his other 70s films, Cronenberg proves himself a master at believable medical dialogue: when Chambers closes in on a nurse alone in the dead of night hot tub, she says "I better get out soon - I'm getting all wrinkly." And there's a great details like when a rabid lunatic is shot on the hood of Joe Silver's car and the men in hazmat suit spray sterilizing agents on the windshield where the blood and saliva landed before waving him on (and he just turns on the wipers as he drives away) Those kind of details are why Cronenberg rules. He doesn't forget a thing when it comes to the horror of human biology and the way what's monstrous and horrible can become routine almost instantly.

The film doesn't quite gel together as well as Shivers- which kept itself safe inside a singles-friendly high rise, or The Crazies, which kept itself to a small PA town; but Rabid is the shit as a film about Canada's vastness, where empty white expanses are criss-crossed by lonesome highways, and high-end socialized medicine and the niceness of neighbors gives new viruses all sorts of edges, and how a warm Yankee kitten like Chambers can drive a city to its knees with just six deadly embraces. And who doesn't love gravel voiced Joe Silver as the doctor with the new baby on his lap watching TV in the middle of the night? ("Look," he tells the kid, "Mr. Potato Man.") Luckily, we never get to what happens to the kid, if you know what I mean. As in all Cronenberg, we cherish the good times, as the bad loom as inescapably as a Canadian winter.

 12. NIGHTMARE AT NOON

(1987) Dir. Nico Mastarakis

* / Amazon Image - A

If you need a shitty-ass late-80s Cannon-esque version of The Crazies as bad as I do, then check out this typically dumb Nico Mastarikis movie. Wings Hauser and Bo Hopkins drift separately into a small midwestern town (George Kennedy is the sheriff; his deputy is his cute single daughter) and find themselves swept up in green blood and madness. It's pretty laughable, especially Kennedy just stands there with his gun pointed at a lunatic local whose shooting everyone in sight, but won't fire on him, instead keeps moving around behind cars even though he has a perfectly clear shot. The highlight is when "Sharon" (Wings' wife) goes nuts in the police station and starts growling and waving her claws like Divine at the end of Multiple Maniacs. "I got a wife in there who's acting nuts!" Wings yells, singlehandedly trying to ratchet up the nonexistent tension. Outside, as the town falls to shit (the best it can when the budget affords almost no extras), a shades-wearing bunch of goons in black vans watch through high-tech binoculars from yonder cliffs. Brion "Wake up! Time to Die" James is their leader- he never speaks, is an albino, and dresses like the Lone Ranger (with wraparound shades instead of a mask). When he runs out of targets in town, Brion shoots his own men!

If it all seems too bad to endure, stick around until Sharon goes nuts, that's when you'll be hooked, even after the good guys lure Brion and his flunky-fillled black vans over to the desered town drive-in (where showing High Noon. Oy vey!)

So yeah, a lot of Wings-on-van violence follows. Lots of shooting at inanimate objects. Heavy fireballs and for some reason Bo Hopkins turns out to be the real star; a drifter with military ops connections, he can't just shoot a shotgun like an ordinary person; he has to run and jump and fire from the hip--aiming, apparently, at the drive-in screen rather than the bad guys in the parking lot, as her runs around on snack bar roof. Later, keeping up the heavy-handed classic western pastiche, Bo, Wings, and the cute girl deputy (Kimberly Ross), ride from one stunning Utah Red Rocks vista to another, chasing our albino ranger. Seriously, how do some of them rocks stay way up there? At least the henchman bad guys seem like they've shot guns before the making of this film. Since they never speak or take off their shades, we gather they're all stuntmen. We don't get a lot of that from our heroic threesome. They all but close their eyes and hold their breath when shooting. Luckily there are plenty of bullets to go around.

Turns out, Bo really is a hell of a guy. When it's all over, he even kisses the deputy--young enough to be his daughter by a half mile--and I mean with tongue. Ew. Gotta love the 80s. Even so, it's pretty gross, and I say that as an old reprobate with the morals of a gangster. And what about those poor horses? I always feel bad for the horses left stranded in the desert with no idea where the water is or if anyone will ever come along and take the bit out of their mouths. By the end, you'd think the film had totally slipped its moorings and become some tedious TV western movie for the Hallmark Channel. But then Bo and James square off across the rocks, each having a helicopter flying stationary behind them, real helicopters, flying crazy and chasing each other around. Gotta love that. Bo's is bigger, with rocket launchers! Get 'im, Bo!

4. CLIMAX

Dir Gaspar Noe

**** / Amazon Image - A

Sofia Boutella (center above), the lush sinuous Algerian dancer/actress (she was the latest incarnation of The Mummy and a cute alien in Star Trek: Beyond, etc.) stars, or is the most recognizable and sympathetic of the gathered dancers in this ultimate in bad trip dance movies from France. We only follow her about 1/3 or so of the time as the prowling camera weaves in and out of various conversations and dancing characters with the restless rhythm of a jonesing coke fiend roaming a crowded party looking for the slightest telltale sniffle, disguising his mounting sense of metallic panic and pungent sexual desire by constant movement to the throbbing music. I wanted to list some of the atrocities that result when they're all dosed against their knowledge by LSD (in the sangria), but one is better off not knowing beforehand, just expecting a kind of R-rated dance movie and winding up with a kind of dance floor version of Shivers. Just know the dancer/actors's ferocity is so convincing and the flow from organized normalcy to total insanity seems seamless. Their wild-but-controlled arcane dancing style--a mix of modern and urban street, filmed in long medium takes (the Suspiria remake could take a lesson) - gradually succumbs to insane madness so organic that--being dancers all--even in their wracked frothing state their bodies never cease moving and twisting to the throbbing incessant music, blurring the lines between this as an 'acid test' tragedy horror film and a kind of extended 90 minute dance performance. It seems almost impossible this isn't cinema verité from some weird circle of Hell, with Noe capturing a very real experience (anyone who's had a bad trip will relate) with some magic invisible camera. Imagine if the floating soul eye from Noé's 2009 masterpiece, Enter the Void, found an impromptu Panic Theater happening down at Aronofsky's Chilean basement, and tried to get incarnated by following the sexual heat trails. Since we barely see anything of the outdoors, or any 'sane' perspective after a certain period in the film, we lose contact with the real world as much as the actors, leaving us lost in the same weird cabin fever collective break which we all, trapped in our hovels, can relate to by now. It's the best. See it the same night as Shivers for a great double feature!

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5. HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (aka VIRUS)

(1980) Dir. Bruno Mattei

*** / Amazon Image - A-

Directed by the sturdy and reliable Italian talent Bruno Mattei, boosted by a deliriously frantic Goblin synth score (some of which is recycled from past zombie outbreaks), Virus welds elements of the Mondo Cannibal genre (thanks to its New Guinea setting and rather revolting stock scenes of tribal post-mortem rituals) and Romero's Dawn of the Dead (as in a combination of a male and female journalist + male members of a SWAT team banding together in a zombie nightmare), with a screenplay co-written by Claude Troll 2 Fragasso (and Mattei). Margie Newton is the journalist who winds up accidentally embedded with the boys on a secret mission (they're all familiar faces to zombie fans, with familiar dubbed voices). A highlight is when she casually strips down and paints herself crazy colors before leading the group into a nearby village, there to bear witness to grotesque and disturbing mondo stock footage. ("Why should nature suddenly start breaking its own laws?"). Great moments: when one of the commandos kisses a native during the drunken revelry as a zombie takes a bit out of her shoulder, all very casual 1-2-3, the way the zombies seem at first indistinguishable from the painted revelers all drunkenly grinding and chattering. Stock shots of vast bands of natives all covered head-to-toe in red mud (to keep the flies off?) running en masse toward some unknown destination are deftly mixed with shots of zombie attacks and a chaotic meeting of UN reps in ever-dwindling numbers (above) to create a disturbingly foreboding 'found' overpopulation meaning (we get the idea everyone in Africa and all its surrounding islands are just running away from the zombies, forever running, in swarm strength, to nowhere, as they can't escape themselves once themselves are dead) And there's a stinger of a grisly ending. It could happen!

6. RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS

(Aka Atlantis Interceptors)

(1983) Dir. Ruggero Deodato

***1/2 (Amazon Image - B-)

Right up there with Nightmare City and Contamination as far as recently-discovered Italian psychotronica I can return to again and again when the never-ending Italian horror film marathon of my life runs low, I've already seen Raiders at least four times since discovering it for an older Prime marathon list back in 2017. Christopher Connelly and Tony King are a pair of mercs who own a boat together and demonstrate Hawksian cool via cigarettes, alcohol, and manly camaraderie; Ivan Rassimov plays their helicopter pilot buddy; Giola Scol is an archaeologist flown from her Machu Picchu to a remote oil derrick translate an ancient plaque found down on the ocean floor. Then... shortly after the sunken Russian sub is raised by George Hilton... Atlantis, covered in a big protective dome, rises! This triggers a massive tidal wave and an outbreak of marauding savagery in a certain percentage of the nearby population. They instantly begin driving around in their pimped-out bikes, slaughtering everyone who's not infected with their strange madness. The leader calls his gang 'The Interceptors' and announces that all others "but one" must die. Time to get the molotov cocktails lined up, and--luckily--find a warehouse full of guns and ammo.

Naturally we wonder if John Carpenter ever saw this movie as it bears striking resemblance to his last great film: 2001's Ghosts of Mars. In both films the ghosts of a violent, ancient genocidal race are accidentally awakened from their timeless sleep, possessing normal humans to dress up like metal mutants, wiping out all non-infected human life in preparation for the long dead original inhabitant's return.

Naturally with the word Raiders in the title, and it being the early-80s, one expects a certain amount of ancient booby-trapped tomb robbing but that's only towards the end, and is replete with lasers and a hilarious giant fan. Mostly there's a lot of molotov cocktails being thrown and stunt men dying in explosions and good guys jumping out of helicopters onto speeding busses, or vice versa). The whole thing leaps around giddily from one scrape to the next as if there are "reels missing" like in Planet Terror but we can always figure out what's going on and never what's going to happen next, and what better combination is there in early-80s Italian psychotronica? It's not on DVD so Prime is the only place to see it. Be smart and grab the next showing.

 7. SHE

(1984) Dir. Avi Nescher

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

Sandahl Bergman is the goddess of her little slice of the post-'cancellation' wasteland but decides to wander to the north with a handsome idiot (since it's pre-ordained by her oracle) and in the process runs into scrapes with everyone from New Yoahk-accented mutants to crazed warriors in a post-war ruined city and even acolytes of a 'one god' mutant boy who can control matter with his green flashing eyes. There's also a powdered-wig naturalist and his tutu-wearing henchman; and decadent werewolf aesthetes listening to a gramophone (led by David Brandon at the peak of his gorgeousness!). Sandahl and her right hand woman must endure the rack, flogging, the old trash compacting wall cliffhanger, and other travails, and always display a lot of cool feminist force. Israeli auteur Ari Nesher wanted to make sure women weren't objectified, but man do we become thankfully acquainted with Bergman's incredibly lithe dancer legs. They are symbols of great strength as well as dancer grace and beguilement. And she did her own stunts and fights.

Bits like Sandahl's being startled into sword out readiness after stepping on a stray rubber duck by the werewolf elite's swimming pool all come tumbling and it's very well paced, relentlessly entertaining and packed with rock anthems galore. The Prime print is great clearly taken from the latest must-have Blu-ray edition. (full review)

8. DEATHSPORT

(1978) Dir. Allan Arkush

** / Amazon Image - B-

"Remember your code," Richard Lynch tells 'guide' David Carradine in a great low whisper threat monologues: "every tear of patience builds the value." A film for the dirt bike-riding 16 year-old arsonist in all of us, Deathsport was meant to be a Death Race 2000 sequel but instead gives us moody crypto-poetry, blazing fireballs, matte paintings of futuristic dystopian cities, and that old LA desert scrub being ground underfoot by tricked-out dirt bikes. With no sense of humor about its own absurdity, the mix of Arkush-shot action and Niciphor shot pretentious dialogue wizzes along with lots of crazy lasers shot out of Pringles cans and swords made of colored plastic are held vertically as much as possible since they must weigh a ton. Claudia Jennings is a female ranger guide (as in the best Corman stealth-feminism, she's as tough and wise and as combat-proficient as any of the men - and prettier too)

Still, it's Richard Lynch, as the bad guy / master henchman, who steals the show. He gets all the best lines, purred in a mellow emotionless forceful calm: "You call me animal, after all I tried to do to make you feel at peace?" Whatever his fall from grace, he's openly admirable towards the memory of Carradine's warrior mother (whom he killed in battle), giving him the ultimate warrior greeting: "Salute your mother for me." Andrew Stein's synthesizer score provides a great minimalist mess of wind sounds, zaps, and sustained notes somewhere between the Bebe's Forbidden Planet and faux John Carpenter. His attempts at actual melody are terrible, but then---who should appear?-- Jerry Garcia noodles his Gibson forth, in and around in the mix, coming and going at the darndest times. And, as anyone who ever sat through a Dead show can tell you, if you depend on Jerry to lead you out of the caves of aimless noodling, well, you're going to be in there a long while. Best take another hit and meet him halfway.

9. RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR

(1984) Dir. Bruno Mattei

**/ Amazon Image - B+

This is not the usual rat movie, so don't be fooled! It's a post-apocalyptic gang war style cousin to the Warriors of the Wasteland, and Escape from the Bronx, etc. all made in Italy in the wake of the creative and box office success of Escape from New York, The Warriors, The Road Warrior, and Conan the Barbarian. All four elements were swirled together in the Italian trash auteur tradition --it makes a meaty stew, from which swarms of rats may nosh. SNAP.

I still would have run the other way seeing this on some 80s pan-and-scan cable channel, but El Rey and HD have brought new life to it: the restored deep blacks and deep rich grime shades help us get over the general displeasure seeing masses of rats congregated in a room with no clear motive or cheese incentive. In fact these poor rats all seem rather bewildered, tired, underpaid. Luckily director Bruno Mattei made sure no rats were harmed during filming. Oh wait, this is Italy, so yeah they probably were. But in a hellscape like this, the dead are the lucky ones. And at least we don't see them look all betrayed and startled as they're shot with a Bert I. Gordon pink pellet paint gun in slow motion like we do in Food of the Gods. We see one running on fire, but in general they're mere extras; we don't see them much (when they crawl out of mouths or stomachs they're often puppets) but hey, they and the editor try hard to seem like a James Herbert-ish swarm and I suppose it might if you were half asleep in a dark drive-in.

So these Bronx "Rifts" pull into a deserted (bombed out in WW2 and never restored?) Italian (?) villa and soon are besieged by molti ratti --never funnier than when being pulled en masse via an 'unseen' carpet underneath their feet, towards our "terrified" antiheroes and their molls on the other end of the dusty, empty room (they're supposed to be moving on their own, but don't seem too keen on hitting their cues). Keeping up the sci-fi end, there's a secret chamber with futuristic radio equipment and an opening scrawl that delivers a whole series of post-apocalyptic upsets. You know: evolution amok, up and under. None of it matters or makes sense except as setup for a Big Twist. Until then, laugh at the terrible dubbing and game if amateur acting, and the ridiculous rat effects, and the dubious wisdom of gang leader Kurt. He must have got the job for being best looking since he spoils his credibility when he says lame shit like: "open up in the name of humanity!!" after his rival for power locks him out of the room with the debs. This gang has trouble just walking down a small flight of basement steps (there's lots of walking in place and reacting to rats that were presumably going to be overlaid in a process shot) but the print on Prime is sublime, so whaddaya gonna do? (Whatever it is, do it fast: it's coming down off Prime at the end of the April.)

10. CONTAMINATION

(1980) Dir. Luigi Cozzi

*** / Amazon Image - A

Note: there are many different uploads on Prime for this film, so make sure to see the one in HD and the correct anamorphic ratios - the one I like has a kind of 80s comic book illustration cover of a big brain with eyes.

Luigi Cozzi's Alien-inspired sci-fi adventure gets a bad rap in some circles. Cozzi fans like me adore it. Rather than just have some amok alien stalking a space ship crew like every other imitation, the "Italian Ed Wood" keeps the action mostly terrestrial and focuses on the pod / stomach-bursting stage. Shipments of watermelon-sized slime pod eggs explode and cause all those in the vicinity to suddenly have their stomachs padded with what looks like phone books during slow motion rubber bladder explosions. These 'stomach bursts' get kind of monotonous but I love the Freudian-cave-on-Mars flashbacks, the unearthly humming whale-ish noise the pods make when they're fixing to blow, and the 'gentleman's agreement' synergy between the NYC cop (Marino Mase), sexy-but-commanding female colonel of the Army's special disease control unit (Louise Marleau), and the traumatized astronaut (Ian McCulloch) she initially helped get kicked off the space program after his fellow Martian astronaut [Siegried Rauch] wouldn't back up his space egg story. Just as Cozzi's Starcrash turned out to be more like Flash Gordon and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad than Star Wars, so Contamination turns out to be more like Corman's It Conquered the World than Alien. Cozzi also delivers one of his great signature motifs, a sexy female associate (Gisela Hahn) for the evil mastermind. And I love the alien itself, especially that bicycle reflector eye, big slobbery hoover mouth, and glistening artichoke coloring.

Lastly, what really earns my goofball admiration is the kickin' Goblin soundtrack. That late-70s-80s European prog rock style has aged very well. I don't know what else you need to make you love this dumbass film the way that I do. Whatever's missing, you don't need it.

11. NEW ROSE HOTEL

(1998) Dir. Abel Ferrara

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A

William Gibson's camera phone future was here awhile ago; Ferrara's 1998 adaptation doesn't even seem like science fiction anymore. It's got some problems as a film, too: one has to get used to its haphazard sense of economy (the whole last part replays key scenes from the first, as high end corporate saboteur Willem DeFoe hides out in a storage unit, reviewing where his scheme went wrong. But before then, it's a pretty sexy, strange ride, with Christopher Walken at his glib fancy pants best, a very druggy and erotic Asia Argento singing Cat Power at a druggy and erotic cabaret, and a mise-en-scene that seldom leaves a high-end hotel room, from which a high-level headhunt steal--using Argento in a honey trap to lure a big-time Japanese chemist across corporate lines--is conducted almost totally via camera phones and laptops. As with Gibson's other work, it's scary how ahead of the curve it is in predicting a 'work from home' future, where early FaceTime, Google Hangouts and Zoom have becomes the preferred means of business communication, how one might become impossibly rich and then poor again without ever getting to spend or see so much as a sou. It fits that the movie falls apart so dramatically in the back end, looping back on itself in a zonked quest to unravel meaning from itself; and--finding none (and probably running out of money before he can finish the shooting script thanks to producers shadier than the ones in the film) Ferrara just focuses in on how damned hot that Asia looks in a red bathing suit, slinking around the hotel indoor pool like she owns the continent. If I was Defoe, that's what I'd be kicking myself over too. Money comes and goes, but Asia is one in a trillion.

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OK - the next two films are worse, but they are amazing; so bear with me, if you dare,

7. ROBOT MONSTER

(1953) Dir. Phil Tucker

* / Image - B

Though the post-apocalyptic fantasia Robot Monster is not as wondrous as Al Zimbalist's other 1953 production, Cat Women of the Moon, (also on Prime) it's like the yang to its yin. The two films are opposites on every front: Robot Monster is shot entirely outdoors; Cat entirely on sets; Robot during one eternal sunny afternoon; Cat during eternal night. The women of the moon are seductive, powerful and strong-willed. From there the plot gets very similar. The cat women want to invade and take over the Earth, but one 'good' cat woman, who--like some badly written Eastern European defector-- longs for a nice boy to buy her "what you call.. a Coke" topples the attempt. Ro-Man (the infamous gorilla with a diving helmet) in this film is the vanguard of a bunch of all-powerful invaders whose plan falls apart because he hesitates destroying the last woman on earth, Al-lice (Claudia Barrett), who has a great habit of sticking her chest out, chin up and assuming a sublimely haughty, challenging "I am not afraid" look. Robot Monster has too much maudlin praying and sentimental pleas for mercy from John Mylong as Alice's German father, but on other hand, Ro-Man strangles a five year-old girl, and then lustily (as far as lust can be conveyed through a gorilla suit and diving helmet) rips Alice's dress. Bam! Elmer's church chimes come blaring down like someone shot a hole through Goldsmith's OMEN theme. "The great one himself sends the cosmic blast!"

It's so good you can see it again mere minutes after its over, especially if you stop watching after the melange of One Million Years BC outtakes, thus giving you the impression that--fed up by Ro-Man's stalling on killing Alice--the 'Great One' decides to destroy the entire planet, which is a bit like intentionally totaling your new car just because you found a dead wasp in the glove compartment.

<img border="0" height="238" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-t0uzizhYyoU/V-W9fbP1mWI/AAAAAAAA1GE/wKhgsYHkYxM7gCzW0zFAli4TJNjOH6YkgCLcB/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2016-09-23%2Bat%2B7.35.14%2BPM.png" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-radius: 0px; border: 1px solid rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 0px 20px; padding: 8px; position: relative;" width="320" />

A must for bad film completists, it unveils new marvels with every viewing: Al-lice being tied up in shoelaces to stop her from going on a date with Ro-Man; the bewildered uncertainty in Ro-Man's deep echo-drenched voice when he first sees her through the viewing screen; sexist lines like "you're either too smart to be so beautiful or too beautiful to be so smart"; the still visible white-napkin-covered hand holding the sparkler-besieged model rocket as it flies against a cloudy wall.

Quit watching before the kid wakes up and finds out is was a dream. As you can tell from looking outside on the deserted streets... it was no dream.

Bonus Round:

PLANET OF THE SHARKS

(2016) Starring Lindsay Sullivan
*** / Amazon Image - A

This South African-shot Asylum joint imagines a post-waterworld globally-warmed future where the humanity has dwindled down to an advanced functioning matriarchy full of lady doctors and saltwater-damaged blonde hair and sun-blackened tribal markings all living on a network of rafts and boats, but they're still trying to launch a rocket into space with enough Co2 scrubbers to refreeze the caps. And they're using HARP to trigger an ocean earthquake in order to fuck up the ampullae of a massive flock of giant intelligent sharks, since these sharks have no problem jumping up onto networks of rafts and boats to snap up human morsels.

Lindsay Sullivan plays the no-nonsense leader, Dr. Roy Shaw; Christa Vissar is Dr. Caroline Munroe (!) who coordinates the various operations from her boat's CB radio. There's lots of white knuckle suspense too as her colleague Dr. Shayne Nichols (Stephanie Baran) parasails a few leagues ahead of the badass alpha sharks to move a target dingy for the HARP. It's a very well done action sequence, with her riding along on the wind, surfing and flying, leaping up off the surface of the waves, as sharks jump up at her. Another great tense sequence: when the boat sails right into an oncoming HARP-triggered tidal wave, hoping to roll over it before it reaches megalithic heights.)

And if that wasn't enough Bechdel brilliance, consider Angie Teodoro Dick as the wild neopagan shamaness with the spear (above), leader of the rogue New Orleans voodoo style outpost, who deals with the advancing shark issue by a kind of savage Stomp performance on the floating docks, drawing the sharks in so she and her warriors can stab them with old school whaling harpoons. Their growling and chanting and thumping goes on about three minutes too long, but the initial bad vibe created by their eventual senseless shark slaughter is interesting in context, as is the dimly lesbian look Teodoro shares with the incredulous Dr. Shaw. It's the perfect way to end this series, imagining a future that's both better and worse than we've come to dread or dream of.

And Brandon Auret's in it!

See also on Prime and Recommended:
THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)
THE TRIP (1967)
RIOT ON THE SUNSET STRIP (1967)
WARRIORS OF THE WASTELAND (1983)
THE UNDEAD /VOODOO WOMAN (1957)
DARKTOWN STRUTTERS (1975)
SHARKTOPUS VS. WHALEWOLF (2015)

and of course these (note: not all the titles listed may still be avail):
3 Neo-Jungian Fairie Wave
3 Off the Road Vehicles
7 Ennio Morricone-scored Giallos (1970-75)
6 Badass Post-ROAD WARRIOR Gang Violence Trips (1982-85)
4 Post-CONAN Barbarian Sagas
6 Dope Analog Sci-fi Nugs (1978-87)
6 Post-JAWS New World Horrors (1978-80)
7 Badass New World Rebel Girl Uprisings (1971-79)
13 for Halloween, Lost Causes and Autumnal Catalepsies
10 Swingin' Monsters of the 70s
15 Cool/Weird Horror/Sci-fi Films
12 Weird/Cool Italian Films
10 Fairly Bad Sci-Fi Gems
13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies
12 Nifty Vampire Films
6 Surreal Wuxia Wonders
5 Awesomely Psychotronic Films to Prepare you for the New Trumpmerica

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-33636421383622533202020-04-04T21:28:00.003-05:002020-04-05T20:37:35.010-05:00Through the Barriers: HIGHWAY TO HELL, BERMUDA TRIANGLE, and EYE IN THE LABYRINTH (on Prime)

Hey, bud... sheltering in place? Living in the isolation, talking only by phones and Google Hangouts. But mostly.... mostly... watching movies online? Got Amazon Prime? Why not g'head and dig these three gonzo drive-in greats, from Mexico, Italy, and godforsaken Utah.

THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE

"El Triangulo Diaboloico de las Bermudas"

(1978) Dir. Rene Cardona

*** / Amazon Image - B+

Everything cool about the 70s waits for us in the depths of this Mexican-Italian co-production made at the height of the craze for all things Bermuda Triangle. Not only do we get a killer doll picked up from floating in the sea by a rich man's child, but lots of old sea monster... etchings... floating face down in the waves. So met. Directed by Rene "Mexican Schaffner" Cardona Jr.. starring the ever slovenly Hugo Stiglitz as the charter yacht captain and John Huston as the aging patriarch in search of Atlantis in the middle of a certain triangle. We never really know as we're never off the boat or see land, and its groovy. Naturally an aging Bond girl is aboard (Claudine Auger, still foxy but orange is not her color) here an as the bitter wife of drunken doctor Carlos East. Huston's other, younger smokin' hot daughter with nice legs (for awhile) is played by Gloria Guida. The doll (who in some creepy shots is doubled with the Linda Blair-ish face of Nailea Norvind) tells the kid when everyone on the boat will die and drinks the blood of attacking parrots and later the ship's cook, whose jagged death is blamed on falling ketchup bottles. Meta shit like that and the sea monster etchings leave us much to ponder

Part of a cornucopia of late-70s films--including recently-reviewed and loved by this site, Bermuda Depths (also 1978), triggered by the immensely popular Leonard Nimoy-hosted TV show In Search Of...,(which covered the Triangle a year prior - we all saw it), and with a memorable albeit familiar Stevio Cipriani score (and sound effects when things get all triangle-weird lifted directly from Forbidden Planet), this Triangle never dull mix of sea folklore, bitchy histrionics, creative deaths and strange events (including a parrot attack).

The film is clearly shot aboard an actual boat (we never see a speck of land, which adds to the film's eerie unease) and we get to know and like the soothing bobbing up and down in of onboard life. And there are some nice underwater sequences amidst the Atlantean ruins and it all benefits greatly from a widescreen transfer (albeit not digital on Prime, it still looks strong). The whole thing never quite gels but--in a way that's not dissimilar to other 70s catch-all horror affairs, like The Visitor-- it triumphs in the end through sheer abundance of weird happenings: everything from a parrot attack to a mysterious magnetic force that almost capsizes the boat while they investigate a mysterious SOS from a ship lost at sea for a decade (a lengthy nighttime sequence full of odd boat tilting and magnetic disturbance); there is also a mighty hurricane, and even a convincing underwater visit to ruined Atlantis.

----

EYE IN THE LABYRINTH

"L'occhio nel labirinto"

(1972) Dir. Mario Caiano

*** / Amazon Image - B

Rosemary Dexter is Julie the devoted secretary of a missing scoundrel Luca (the silver-eyed krimi star Horst Frank); a weird dream in which she's being chased through a white labyrinth convinces her to leave the office and drive out to the coastal town druggie artist colony where he was last spotted. Soon she's set and setting with the resident bunch of languid hedonists. They spend the day sunning themselves and their nights lunging at each other's throats and/or zippers (ala that old Michael Musto saying about Fire Island etiquette: "fork on the right, spoon in the nose, knife in the back"). Alida Vialli is her usual astringent self as the villa's owner and her terrifying but sexy-gruff Teutonic rasp of a voice is in full flower, and super insecure about her handsome younger lover (Gigi Rizzi) who starts taking Julie for long boat rides and strolls along the rocky coast. Someone shoots a harpoon gun at them - but from where? Someone is trying to kill her and in the process people turn up dead around her. What's going on, and why is Adolfo Celli always around to rescue her, aside from the obvious reason of wanting to sleep with her?

At night, around the cocktails at Vialli's, Julie hears tales of her beloved boss's odious blackmailing, rapey ways--including outing the trans Corrine (played by Peter Kranz) which is mad uncool. Sybl Danning is one of the enclave. The music by Roberto Nicolosi is a kind of trumpet-driven "Silent Way"-style languid jazz, giving it all a kind of broadside post-noir ennui which I am not sure does it any favors. When the suspense ratchet into gear, the music sort of cascades over its the side in drizzles of cymbals and glistening harp swirls. You'll either pick up on it right away or never guess the killer or what's going on, but don't worry, it's all very pretty and Vialli has a great time sinking her big German teeth into the role of a vicious older queen bitch fighting to keep her favorite boytoy. Dexter and Rizzi are both easy on the eyes and appropriately blank and the action is fluid. It may not be the film that kickstarts a giallo marathon at your home DVD / Prime binging weekend, but it won't kill one off either. And if you have Prime, you'll be glad to find it free and looking good (and it's not on Blu-ray or DVD so now or never).

HIGHWAY TO HELL

(1991) Dir Ate de Jong

***/ Amazon Image - A

One of those films I'm rather amazed I ignored until now, mainly because of the all-too familiar sight of the Satanic burnt policeman (C.J. Graham). But there's a lot more going on on the H-to-H than burnt cops, like a never lovelier Kristy Swanson as the damsel in distress, dragged across the dimensional border into Hell for being an eligible virgin, leaving her dopey naif fiancee Chad Lowe behind in our mortal world. Richard Farnsworth plays mournful gas station owner at the edge of 'Perdition,' who lays out what the hapless dopey-eyed groom must do to get her back (he was in a similar situation night under fifty yars ago), equipping him with a magic shotgun and a car souped enough to make the jump to Hell.

Thanks to a surplus of over-the-top action, towheads driving dusty vehicles, and long straight desert highways, you'd be forgiven for thinking Highway to Hell is Australian. Actually it's one of the last big American designated cult pics, a relic of a time when big studios shared drive-in screens with indie distributors and wildly unhinged 80s drive-in ready gonzo classics actually made money, or lost it, but either way they went for it. The golden era of 80s cult films, man, thanks to Prime their legacy endures (see here for more Prime options). Though it's from 1991, it's sooo 80s, occupying a comfy zone between a bigger budget version of Hell Comes to Frogtown or the 1982 She, both personal favorites.

It wouldn't be much of a faux-Aussie road chase odyssey without a colorfully-attired gibbering biker gang, one of whom wearing a top hat and one carrying a dandy sword, one sucking a wawipop, one with dyed blonde hair and spikes, etc. to menace our dimwit hero.

Good use is made of the alien-looking deserts of Utah and Arizona, with wild pit stops such as a dead cop-filled diner, a wild strip club gambling den inside a giant Jimmy Hoffa slot machine, and the surreal confines of the foreboding Hell City. Cool matte paintings, grinding car chases, non-CGI crashes, devilish strippers, carousing evil figures from history are played by dimly familiar faces (the whole Stiller family is here for some reason lost to time: Jerry Stiller is a cop forever unable to get a refill; his son Ben Zoolander Stiller is Attila the Hun; daughter Amy is Cleopatra). Look fast for Gilbert Gottfried as Hitler; and rock star Lita Ford is a busty hitchhiker! I probably missed some others underneath the thick make-up of the damned. An array of sometimes-funny bits about hot this or damned that crop up: undead road crews shredding lost souls into body part cement, etc. And not unlike our man Orpheus, Chad Lowe is both helped and hindered on his mystical but very American SW quest. Swanson, never more fetching, has a super foxy scene where she plays a demon in disguise coming onto Chad while wearing a billowing black dress in a sultry 80s style MTV boudoir, licking the blood from his nose. Though we'd crawl across cut glass to be with her, too, we eventually come to like the can-do gumption of this slack-jawed tow-headed Chad Lowe; he goes way beyond that to rescue her, and that's before it gets really weird!

So, if it's not too much trouble: surrender to this loud action-horror-comedy's quirky mix of thrills, insight and dumb sight gags (whizzing by too fast to elicit any groans) and crazy car chase and brawling action and you're bound to wind up exhilarated. The Prime print is A-okay.

The post-end title "where are they now" crawl seems tacked on by producers after some test screening audience cards asked too many questions.

Man, some folks just can't let shit hang.

PS - Turns out HIGHWAY TO HELL isn't available on Prime at the time of this posting. Well, you could check out a few choice recommendations instead, like the 1982 SHE starring Sandahl Bergman! or RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS (1982)
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More Recommendations and Review of Available-on-Prime Hidden Gems:

12 Weird/Cool Italian Films

7 Ennio Morricone-scored Giallos (1970-75)
6 Badass Post-ROAD WARRIOR Gang Violence Trips (1982-85)
4 Post-CONAN Barbarian Sagas
6 Dope Analog Sci-fi Nugs (1978-87)
6 Post-JAWS New World Horrors (1978-80)
7 Badass New World Rebel Girl Uprisings (1971-79)
13 Lost Causes and Autumnal Catalepsies
10 Swingin' Monsters of the 70s
15 Cool/Weird Horror/Sci-fi Films
10 Fairly Great Bad Sci-Fi Gems

13 Occult/Witch movies
12 Nifty Vampire Films

6 Surreal Wuxia Wonders
5 Awesomely Psychotronic Films to Prepare you for the New Trumpmerica

3 Neo-Jungian Fairie Wave

3 Off the Road

and so much more.... somewhereErich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-91150235664427692762020-03-30T19:14:00.001-05:002020-04-02T13:12:15.712-05:00Slide, Vaquero! SHIP OF MONSTERS (1960)

It's spring in the pre-or-post disease era and, if you love bizarre old classic sci-fi musicals, time to crack open the YouTube and dive into my weirdest/best Mexican cinema discovery since La Maldicion del la Llorona (1963). Long unavailable on DVD, in English either dub or subtitles, it's now got quite legible subtitles on El Youtube -aqui!

For fans of classic matinee sci-fi/horror who'd rather have va-voom classic sex appeal in their sci-fi western comedies, rather than hokey Gene Autrey tunes (as one finds in that hokey 1935 serial The Phantom Empire - which is actually the closest thing this film has to a hermano), Mexico delivers Rogelio Gonzalez's Ship of Monsters. The plot: two glamorous Venusians coming home from a long quest rounding up fit male specimens from the galaxy to repopulate their female-only planet, make an emergency landing in Chihuahua, Mexico for their robot to make repairs. Perhaps you've guessed the rest. A freewheeling vaquero wins one of their hearts with his songs? Si, naturalmente, claro!

I won't bore you with a list of the legion of 50s comedians who've gone to the moon or Venus to find all sorts of babes suffering from an extreme hombre shortage. Everyone from the Stooges to Abbot and Costello to Sonny Tufts went up to space and tangled with them. And that's the key difference - the ladies come here and meet the fabulous singing vaquero Eulalio González! Ay dios mio! Pipporro! And he's cool!

Possessing a genuinely disarming smile, a naturalness in his awed reactions, a dewy twinkle in his dark glassy eyes, and a gently lilting yet masculine baritone voice that deepens to a questioning smolder at the end of every sentence, "Pipporro" also has a great kind of hippity-hop Elvis tango dance style that smolders while still being funny. An inexplicable juke box in his kitchen provides the instrumental back-up to his songs, which he performs to the agog wonderment of his alien women visitors (while their robot plays with his little brother outdoors). Gonzalez shows a great way with each of the ladies in turn: he's passionate, smitten, confident, and a little confused with the nice one; flattered but firm in his 'no!' to the one who comes onto him when the other leaves, and who then transforms into an evil vampiress and frees the monsters from their frozen cave hiding place to run amok. He holds fast. If a spark flies, it's true love and worth being faithful for even if you just met them both at the same time. I never understood why Flash would turn down Aura when Dale is just some blonde earth woman he barely met an hour earlier.. until now. Pipporro helps me understand

Ana Bertha Lepe is Gamma (the good one) and Lorena Velázquez is Beta, the bad one (she played many vampires and wrestling women in the course of her illustrious career, battling everyone from Santos to the Aztec Mummy). These ex-Miss Mexico beauty queens wield ray guns and rock tight-fitting uniforms and generally strut about the Chihuahua flats and into Pipporro's life in a way that puts most American beauties to shame. The alien monster male samples kept on ice from other planets are each unique and cleverly-if-cheaply--constructed. All are done with a mix of fourth grade art class-level papier mache and giddy ballsy passion. And they talk! They make rational decisions, and can make love as easily as they kill. Even a sabre tooth tiger skeleton man gets his opinion considered (and has a great Tom Waits-style croak of a voice). But the alien girls are always in control, able to pause Emilio in mid sentence to check up on the words he uses that they don't understand, accessing what we in our futuristic world might call Alexa reading from Wikipedia. My favorite line is when the narrator of the video they're watching on their laptop to learn about Mexico notes (while showing scenic travel footage) that's it's a lovely country and "for all they've tried, the Mexicans haven't been able to destroy it."

I have fallen in love with this film so much I don't even mind that Lauriano (Gonzalez's character's name) has a little brother, Chuy, (Herberto Davila, Jr) with whom he lives alone on a big ranch outside Chihuahua. I generally can't stand sci-fi films set in southern climates as they always have cute impish kids in them, but Chuy is no imp who should be in school instead of acting as guide for the American hero. Chuy is an able assistant around the ranch, going off to play with the robot when the talk gets adult but when the monsters fly into action, Chuy even tackles and kills one of the monsters all by himself with the fury of one of the kids in Over the Edge or The Bad News Bears! Imagine Abbott and Costello doing anything but running in a similar situation and you begin to understand what the males of America are up against. And these two women aren't afraid to either kick ass or make love to the monsters right there on camera. This has to be sexiest film presumably aimed at a younger audience since Young Frankenstein.

That's basically all there is... what else... hmm, some outfits worthy of Artist and Models (I could see this film as a collaboration between Tashlin and Bunuel) and some lovely female flesh on display--but each woman is resourceful, intelligent, strong and assertive. There's never a thought of turning the good one into a household drudge at the end, someone to gratefully darn the boys' socks and make the chiles. No, amigo. Would it was available on one of those great discs from the (now sadly defunct) La Casa Negra DVD label. Or, ideally, Criterion!

Man, am I losing my mind? I've been watching Tarkovsky, Godard, and Suzuki on Criterion too. I swear ta god: I'm fancy. I'm a highfalutin' intellectual. Criterion should have me do one of their "Adventures in Moviegoing" collections. I'd frickin' nail it. Ship of Monsters - front and center. This is Erich saying, I'm losing my mind.

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-8032568077594407232020-03-20T11:04:00.000-05:002020-03-21T22:18:28.351-05:00Gettin' Ripped: Luigi Cozzi's PAGANINI HORROR (1989) on Blu-ray

If ever there was a time to order Blu-rays of things you want to see on your desert island after civilization's you-know-what, it's the canon of Luigi "The Italian Ed Wood" Cozzi, which is now all available from one label or another. I've already blathered praise for his two masterworks Starcrash and Hercules. And now the lunatic eye slash-cum-time warp-devil-dipped and Pleasance-lipped slippery dippy house bash, Paganini Horror (1989) is available on a stunning Blu-ray (via Severin). In our terrifying times, don't we need to laugh at Italian versions of our basest music class fears, to see them bounced hurly burly into cosmic prisms? Shan't we a universe where time loops are illustrated by giant floating hourglasses and spray-painted equations a-go? It's about time, literally, figuratively and obsessively. Now let the music play.

Maybe you saw the cover for this weird Italian gem, with the skeleton playing violin (left) and drew some cheap late-80s punk (the late-80s Italian kind, ala Ghosthouse -which Cozzi almost directed)-meets-slasher opinion about it. Maybe you figured it would be the usual tactless ladle of topless broads and denim-jacketed idiots offed gorily in some house where money for the electric bill grows on trees. Your conclusions couldn't be more wrong. Busto Arsizio's favorite son delivers all his usual tropes and tics: plenty of strong women in spandex and wild hair, planetary shifts, portentous gazes that lead to nothing; lasers and wild light effects, godawful dubbing, spiritual homage-paying (the spirits of Jack Kirby, Ray Harryhausen, Alex Raymond, and Bernie Krigstein all watch over Cozzi's shoulder in numb surprise)... Man, I am talking myself into watching this all over again.... Again? Hmmm?

Bad in many ways but never dull or unpleasant or lacking for color, it reaches a climax at around three minutes in and just keep building from there until we're out in space, riding cosmic hourglasses to the moon. Dario Nicolodi gets star billing as Sylvia, the owner of the fabled "House in the Key of G", which she rents out for--in this case--a music video shoot for "Paganini Horror" the new song based on the mysterious last piece of written music by our titular virtuoso. Nicolodi announces Paganini conducted black mass rituals there back in the 19th century; he disemboweled his bride and used her intestines as strings for his Stradivarius. And that's how he hit those weird notes only he could hit. Now we know! Lead singer Kate (Jasmin Maimone) exclaims that this will be "like Michael Jackson's Thriller!"Manager Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) hires Argento-style horror maven Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi) who hangs white sheets around, spray paints the words "Paganini Horror" and puts the hot bassist Rita in a devil mask. And did I mention the All-seeing eye lamp, and the candles? There's a mention of mannequins, but we don't see near enough.

Alas, the most beautiful bassist in all the world, Rita (Luana Ravegnini), is the first to die, and that's my biggest issue with this film. Why her? Why not literally anyone else? It seems very spiteful of our murdering Paganini. The doe-eyed assistant manager is next. And if we thought it would be one of those lure-and-slash tales, where everyone is knocked over like dominos, we're soon proven wrong. Holes opening up under people's feet, electric energy pulses through those who fall into it.. Albert Einstein looks on, balefully, from a tacked-up poster; electric shocks zap anyone who tries to escape the house... of Paganini! As for that final piece of music, well, no one ever called composer Vince Tempura a modern Paganini to his face; he does okay with the non-diegetic part of the score, not so much the Paganini-attributed song the band plays (If Paganini is the Jimi Page of his era, it would be the theme from Death Wish II).

Naturally the knife his spirit uses has to off the band has a treble clef-shaped handle. It's Cozzi! Naturally there's a cello case coffin and our heroine burns up in it. Not all of the characters die from being stabbed by a steel-hipped Stradivarius: guitarist Elena (Michel Klipstein) gets infected by "a special fungus... like they discovered in the 1800s, on logs... floating along... certain European rivers, notes Lavania, "wood that was used to make a special kind of violin, the Stradivarius." Elena becomes a hideous fungus-covered monster, Lavinia says "this is the fungus, for sure... I saw it... magnified... in a TV documentary." Music is magic. Though parts drag and there are too many stairs, we get way more with Paganini Horror than you might expect from such a simple and familiar set-up.

If a film professor tells you that when childhood flashbacks occur in red bathrooms

 it symbolizes the uterus, kill them instantly.

We open on the ominous synth notes dotting along as a strange young girl rides up a foggy Venice canal, her violin in her hand and the look of satanic royalty in the way she sits, centered with the violin case in her lap and an evil confident look on her face, the prow of the boat like the tip of some kind of fast moving sea serpent, snaking through the lonely mist as Vince Tempera's soundtrack pulses like Tangerine Dream. At home, amidst her collection of weird dolls, the music echoes with vocals, the girl picks up a Barbie-sized doll with a brown skull face and long white hair (a ringer for the Paganini spirit to come) and stirs mom's bath with it. A stark red wall is behind them...

After the untimely death of the bassist with the best hair, performance, form, grace and make-up of the bunch, the most unconscionable choice is that Donald Pleasance is dubbed by someone else!! His replacement does an okay enough job - especially in his rant about demons when he climbs up to the top of an under-reconstruction clock tower in Venice and throws all the money he got for the Paganini score to the wind. Watching Pleasance try to keep a straight face while talking to money ("fly away, demons, so the real ones can take your place... so what happens with Paganini will repeat itself.... extracted by the one to whom it belongs, his majesty, Satan!") makes for a pretty well modulated rant, but what's the point of even having him in a film if not for that deliciously silkenly seismographic voice?

The dubbing is pretty bad in both versions. Dubbig seems to be Cozzi's Achilles' heel. He seems to have no interest in it, being too busy down the hall painting laser effects onto the celluloid. The result is that kind of lazy mixing where everyone sounds like they're right up on the mic in a quiet sound booth rather than out in the actual environment depicted. Oh well, that's just part of the Cozzi effect. One side effect of it all is the hilarious near-constant screaming of his nearly all-female cast. There is so much that the actresses seem to be running out of breath, their screams trail off, like they're barely trying to keep a straight face, both in the dubbing and the image, running out of wind, the way a child whose been crying for hours starts to almost riff with their crying voice. Is Cozzi making them laugh too much or have they just lost interest?

But what a journey to get to that point! What saves it all and makes it a true gem is the real palpable love and respect for the genre, for strong women characters, and for movie making. It translates to the screen. When Ravegnini and the other girl band members gaze into the camera for their music video, you can tell they're feeling safe and part of the pack, they're not taking it very seriously but they love it. Franco Lecca's deep yellow and red-accented cinematography makes everyone seem lovely with natural skin color (rather than the ghastly pale or gaudy tan we sometimes get in Italian horror films) and Spanish style architecture captured in burnished oranges and browns. Too bad when they go outside it's all bad day-for-night that makes everyone look purple and green. Why?

Ugh, why, Paganini, why kill Rita first? Why not get Pleasance to do his own dub? Why the bad day-for-night? Why the bad vibe end?

Irregardless, there are still enough gateways to other dimensions and strange doorways and all the other trimmings to make six ordinary movies, even if full half the film is just one girl or the other walking up and down stairs and down halls, or screaming. The insane dialogue, terrible dubbing and wacky insanity is all there. We can't blame the master if some turkey who didn't get it took out all the cosmic cutaways. We sure can wish for a full restored director's cut. Wishing is free.

BLU-RAY EXTRAS:

There's a nice interview with Cozzi at his sci-fi store; and the footage excised by the producer fills in a lot of the blanks we don't get and would there was a copy with all the original shots (love the hourglasses floating in space) and an explanation of why that kid would shell out a bag of money to some sinister Hobbes Lane type for an alleged authentic Paganini score.

Anyway, Severin has done wonders with what they got (Did the color grading just give out for the exterior shots, or was it supposed to look like that? Am I quibbling) All we need now from Severin (here's hoping it's coming soon) is Cozzi's unofficial meta-Suspiria-sequel (recently re-available on Prime), The Black Cat (aka Demons 6: Anus Profundis) from 1990. The Prime copy is full frame and from video, but there must be a better source!

And while we're on the subject, what about that crazy shot-on-video quasi-autobiographical Blood on Melies' Moon? I saw a clip wherein the great one himself ruminates in his bedroom about coming to terms with being labeled "The Italian Ed Wood." I guess I'm not the first to call him that. But he should know: we love Ed Wood way more than a more highly regarded artist like, say, Fritz Lang. I have a billion theories why that is but the main one might be the Brechtian distancing opening us up to the interplay of our own imagination, like having the curtains around your favorite play suddenly flung open, allowing us to see all the man behind the curtain. We get a bit of that in, say, Bergman's Magic Flute or Olivier's Henry V but it's intentional and hence a little pompous compared to the accidental Brechts like Wood and Cozzi (Godard--erasing his auteur footsteps around the sudden exposure of Brechtian mechanics as if Danny Torrance slinking backwards in his own tracks racing ahead of his crazed insatiable audience in the Overlook maze--is the Mr. In-Between.)

Maybe it's all too short with a hyper-ironic, if unsatisfying, ending that makes all the parts click into perfect place, the way some insane carnival ride turns out to be "Take the A Train" all along in a Charles Mingus composition. Maybe it was trimmed of its cosmic portent, maybe Rita died too soon; maybe Donald doesn't dub himself like he should, but the Cozzi magic is still there and this film is meant to be treasured for a lifetime of Cozzi binges. Who knows how long that lifetime will be? Einstein on the poster looking wryly your way knows: honey, you better pounce.

For the Complete Cozzi Cannon, click here!

Erich Kuerstenhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-58841919870586109372020-03-13T11:11:00.001-05:002020-03-20T10:37:19.343-05:00Retreat to Move Forward: YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (1983)

We live in a mighty strange time, but when things look bleakest, don't forget about our ace in the hole. Nothing can be too bad when we have so very many good Italian-made drive-in movies so easily available - closer than our fingertips really. YOR, THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (1983) is a stellar example, part of the post-CONAN barbarian surge that got us through Satanic panic, the war on drugs, and the collapse of the social sphere. Now that the social sphere is no bigger than a snapchat window, let Yor come smash it wider! Woo! Antonio "Anthony Dawson" Margheriti ("Mar--garehhh-tee") directed, so you can be it's slam bang without feeling rushed, buoyant but deadpan, guileless and sincere in its ensemble acting without being dull, and bedecked with dinosaurs and lasers, mirror halls, and gorgeous cave girls with thrilling backstories. File it on your A-list shelf next to FLASH GORDON (1980) and SHE (1982) and you'll never want for giddy (but too deadpan to be straight-up camp) qua-glam rock-and-roll, post-reality, early-80s sci-fi action madness.

Only if you know what I mean, though, man. There's no explaining it to those who don't get the need for a good stone knife plunged between the eyes of a dinosaur.

Because let's face it, the cinematic world of cavemen fighting dinosaurs--which paleontologists never tire of reminding us never happened--is circumnavigated and mapped by the prehistoric Hammer movies of the 60s-70s: ONE MILLION BC, WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH, and PREHISTORIC WOMEN can get stodgy and po-faced, filling the minutes with too much patriarchal (or matricidal) head-butting and never enough monsters, energy, and beguiling girls who do more than just lounge in the cave entranceway waiting for a cue. On the other side are the 80s campy winks and cleavage fests from you know who (I hate to name names) that cater way too specifically to a 14 year-old boys and their bored single fathers. YOR is beyond both camps: it won't embarrass us when real live girls are in the room, but it also won't bum us out with too much talking stick-passing. This isn't 1984 anymore, and we are not newly-laid eleventh graders turning our house into an orgy den of hooky-playing couples while mom and dad are at work. Times change! We wouldn't let those creeps in our house now for a hundred dollars. But YOR is beyond houses, beyond time, beyond laid.

The moment the "De Angelis'" rock opera anthem theme song churns to life and begins its shriek into the theme song ether: "He is a man from the future / a man from yesterday / his game is destiny!" you start making room in your desert island disc stash.

Proud and we desire
He's never seen the sun!
He's always on the run!
The list goes on and on.
The English is weird but the intent is universal 80s rock star badass. Barely have the opening theme's last chords ended when Yor (Reb "the real Captain America" Brown) has already killed a life-size papier mache triceratops/stegosaurus combination monster in vivid, up-close battle. It's one of the best, most realistic struggles between man and dinosaur ever. Yor is right in there, stabbing away, blood dripping down, its eyes wild with fear and fury. We feel complex emotions about since it's a stegosaurus and thus a plant eater, merely trying to protect its young cub. It's a tough world. At least Yor's kill of the big beast feeds the whole village and he's welcomed as an honored guest. They dance around licentiously and party in ways that grunting bunch of neanderthals in ONE MILLION BC never would. Wooo! Yor shouts. And you feel he's having a good time, genuinely. And it's terrific because hey, it's rare in this murky kill-and-be-killed era. Conan smiles what, one time? It's rare too to see a bro like Yor rocking out and not kind of think he's a tool. But Yor is down to drop his meat bone and grab his axe and run to battle in a hot second if ape men descend. It's all in the balance.

It's clear though he loves to rock out, Yor doesn't quite fit, because, you see, he's blonde and what's that strange medallion on his neck? He doesn't remember. He's got some weird past he has to find out about. But for moment - Woo! Some celebratory dancing, crazy drumming, and licentious bonding with the statuesque if slightly weatherbeaten Corinne Clery as Kalaa (!), and we're already feeling the love.

Two minutes later the tribe is attacked by giant hulking ape men, the leader of whom is lusting after Kalaa. Since Yor happens to be single and she's done the dance to woo him, it's clear they are meant for mating so it comes as a shock when he spirits her off before they even have a moment to copulate. He must rescue her, and does so in a very familiar looking cave structure via a long chase and battle that would be the climax in any other movie but here is just the first in a long line of wild rescues to come. Woo! He rides into their midst, hang gliding on a bat monster's stiffened corpse! If you're not down for this trip by now, stick your hand in the Aboria tree of manliness and see if the sting is as painful as they say. Cuz honey, you're nuts. WoO!

Kalaa's guardian is the trusty Pag (Luciano "Italian Peter Lorre" Pigozzi) who ambles along on the adventures, rounding out their new wandering threesome. Over desert hill and rolling cliff they wander, meeting new faces all the time, and if the goddess of fire worshipping lepers Roa (the comely and overly-made-up Aysha Gul) turns out to be a real hottie, if you'll forgive the expression and if, like Yor, she thought she was the only blonde with a round medallion in the world, then nature must take it's course. Paag reminds Kalaa that in this realm a man may take many wives (Woo!). This is Flash Gordon if Flash wasn't such a prude with Aura, Ming's sexy daughter, out of loyalty to Dale, a jealous Earth girl whom he literally just met only hours beforehand. Don't you hate when chick's do that? Not here. Yor's no prude, bro, and Kalaa may get mad but she's no uppity cockblocker. This is Italy, or Israel, or somewhere sex isn't for lewd snickering or indignant eye rolls. it's just a thing that happens and is ver-a sexy.

There will be other women in Yor's life before it's all over. Carol André shows up in the third act, on the mysterious island where lasers and complex machinery rule the day. And my favorite, the beguiling Marina Rocchi, whom Yor saves from a (again admirably life-size) dimetrodon.

One thing that stands out, that really makes this a latent beloved film of mine: the monsters here are very much in their natural element. In a lot of the stop motion dinosaur action we get via Harryhausen, for example, can err on the side of the science fair diorama: we see dinosaurs fight and hang out in the midst of barren desert, i.e. how their habitat looks now, all these millions of years later, making us wonder how they can possibly survive with no vegetation or cover (but making it easy to appreciate Harryhausen's animation.) In YOR, the beasts emerge from caves and jungle and it's hard to tell where they end and their surroundings begin. Their natural camouflage means they strike from wthin deep thickets and pond murk, with Yor and Kala climbing all over these giant (life-size) heads, hacking away, the beasts dying but slowly, from loss of blood, savagely stabbed again and agin in soft tissue areas. We're allowed to feel mixed emotions once the look in their big saurian eyes changes from rage to fear and then then the flesh of the dead beasts are eaten at big celebratory feasts, so it's OK. That's just how it is. He'll kill again and again and always the same.

Man, what a film. Where has it been all these years? I remember the commercial for Yor! One Saturday morning or late Friday night in the 80s and thinking: Conan with lasers, dinosaurs and Reb Brown hang gliding off a dead bat creature into action against a bunch of ape men, looking kind of like the Marvel character Ka-Zar. I mean, I could tell it was pretty low budget, but its imagination and gonzo gumption was clear. We who loved bad sci-fi and dinosaur movies could hardly believe it would ever be as great as it looked. Yet we never heard from Yor again until it showed up on Amazon streaming 30 years later.

Hell, 30 or so years isn't too long and ten bucks ain't too high (the Blu-ray is out now. I bought it for my brother last X-mas and he fell asleep within five minutes!)

In short, Yor- it's time has come. If you love Conan, Flash Gordon, and even--despite its dour tone--the 1966 remake of One Million BC, as much as I do... if you sit around wishing there were Blu-rays of 1982's Sword and the Sorcerer (only avail. with a Rifftrax on a shitty dupe) and 1983's Hearts and Armor, well, maybe you're a nostalgic completist who may be waiting awhile. In the meantime, if someone tries to fob some hyper-banal mainstream imitations like Ladyhawke or Legend off on you instead... you know what to do.

Competition of Kalaa (from top); Marina Rocchi, Aysha Gul, Carol Andre

And like Luigi Cozzi's so-bad-it's-sublime Hercules, YOR scores big with me as there are more women in the cast than men, or it's at least the numbers are even. And though they do get rescued now and again they nonetheless are warriors, net-weavers, and/or holding significant scientific positions.

A special shout to Reb Brown as Yor! He would have been perfect as Flash Gordon, as he lacks the kind of self-conscious aww-shucksitude apparent in Sam Jones' twinkly eyes. Not that that film isn't the best or that we don't all love Sam Jones, but Reb Brown would have crushed it. Naive as he is, Brown is acing clearly from the heart. There's not a gram of self-consciousness in him. I dig that he also encourages those he meets to drink the blood of the slain triceratops in a dim nod to Siegfried. "Drinking the blood of your enemy gives you their power." It's just one of the fantastic little details Marghareti peppers the film with. Not all his films hit the mark but over the years he sure has given us a still under-appreciated canon of energetic termite art. Woo! Proud and we desire! Now more than ever, the man from the future is the man from yesterday. We have all the time in the world to scan their silver discs and figure out if they are our grandfathers or are great-grandchildren. At this point in human history, we could go either way and still be proud to have a YOR in the tree.

Erich Kuerstenhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-8063488247952563152020-02-26T12:05:00.002-05:002020-06-23T00:02:58.108-05:00Retro-Futurism was Sure to Go: 10 Cool International 60s Sci-fi Trips Streaming on Prime and Criterion

 Lately I've been unable to escape a yen for all things sci-fi mid-60s --the stretch between Sputnik and the moon landing, when an ex-Nazi rocketeer named Werner released, through Disney of all things, a series of speculative documentaries about NASA's plans for ze future: moon landings, orbiting satellites, revolving space stations, little robot-armed one man capsules, and maybe even explorations of Mars and Venus. Movies--from Kubrick's to Margheriti's--took it all as writ. Science later realized a lot of his proposals wouldn't work (like you couldn't duplicate Earth gravity that easy), so these films don't get trotted out too often. But we've got the movies that sprang from them and now they look better than ever, streaming through the ether to your little paper-thick phone!

Von Braun points out his plan for a new space station in a 1955 Disney film.
This round revolving shape would henceforth be the go-to design
for the next decade+'s science fiction space stations. Sehr gut, Werner!

more post-Axis sci-fi: X FROM OUTER SPACE, THE

This era between Sputnik and Apollo became known in comic book circles as the Silver Age: the era when Marvel made superheroes that were complex, with a cohesive universe full of crazy Steve Ditko abstraction. Onscreen, the squaresville atomic caution of the golden 50s lurched into colorful space opera cocktail decadence. Strong female characters no longer had to fight sexist blowhards to be respected as officers. Now they could heads of communications and operations, doctors in astro-biology and chemistry; they could be pretty without having male crew members snicker behind their backs or lick their lips. I've deliberately eschewed any movie from this list that contains even a hint of that type of dated 50s sexism! I've also avoided any streaming titles of less than watchable quality, though your mileage may vary. So.... What are we waiting for!? The future's not going to get much older!

1. CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS

(1962) Dir. Wesley Barry

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

I'm beginning to see what the fuss was about vis-a-vis Andy Warhol's favorite movie. It's fast becoming one of mine, containing everything I love in a film these days and the image quality on the Prime edition is sublime: lots of deep dark colors and grays, extendable tubes, silver eyeballs, skeletons, space age decor, pulp novel skies, heightened theatricality, and spooky analog sci-fi music. I love the total absence of exterior shots and the way it all unfolds over one long night, before backdrops that seem lifted right out off the covers of heady early-60s space age science fiction novels. Don Megowan stars as the Craigis, a member of the Order of Flesh and Blood, a hate group of sorts, out to halt the production of humanoid robots. The robots, with their grey skin and silver eyes, look too human for the Order and they're afraid of getting replaced as the machines grow indistinguishable from the (dwindling due to radioactive fallout) human population. Dudley Manlove is one of the robots, cementing the film's queer-coded message (i.e. 'we're closer than you know, we mean you no harm, and we won't need to stay invisible much longer"). David Cross (no relation) is Pax, the 'clicker' (as the robots are derisively called) in 'rapport' with Cragis' sister Esme (Frances McCann). Cragis tries to get her to stop it, as her rapport makes him look bad with the order, but not everyone is afraid of having all their needs met by a mechanical device while they wait for the inevitable end.

Beautiful to look at and never boring (even if no one seems to ever move), this is clearly some writer's real labor of love. I like to imagine it got workshopped at some off-off-Broadway East Village coffeehouse all through the 50s before making it to the big screen as it's clearly well edited. For all its measured talkiness, it's never dull, uneven, or repetitive. Occasional deadpan jokes ("we did make you a bit thinner,") that land like gentle spiders amidst the vocalizing space age echoes. Shout out to George Milan as Acto, the 'clicker' with the most lines. Able to seem comforting yet otherworldly at the same time, he makes a great team with Dudley Manlove as his right "man". Manlove or no, this is so much more than a Woodian bad movie, not that it wouldn't be welcome at the convention I imagine it plays best watched by oneself, late at night, with a loved one sleeping next to you (as I tend to do). It Warhol were alive he'd be watching it on his phone right now, so serve the cause of Art by watching Creation of the Humanoids... even sooner.

2. WAR BETWEEN THE PLANETS

(1966) Dir. Antonio Margheriti

*** / Amazon Image - A

An instant immersion in a future world of moon bases and orbiting space stations, cocktails, anti-matter bombs, and astronauts soaring through black soundstage space on visible wires onto planets that breathe out through their craters. Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Kill Baby, Kill) is commander Rod Jacskon, tasked with finding the gravitational disturbance that's destroying Earth's weather patterns. Sultry-eyed Terry Sanchez (Ombretta Colli) is head of communications on Gamma One and an organized officer; Rod loves her but his needy cat-eyed fiancee (Halina Zalewski) on Earth happens to be the general's daughter. There's no time for that kind of thing though, if we don't find the source of the disturbance there'll be no Earth to go back to; and--as the ineffective General Norton (Enzo Fiermonte) puts it--"it's not a matter of days, but hours! As with all the best science fiction films, we never even go to Earth at all; we're plunged right out into space almost instantly. Except for the last scene funeral there isn't a single exterior shot; everything is space ships and soundstage planets, full of odd sound effects and eerie music.

The wild planet they find causing the trouble is an uninhabited but impressive red ball, 25 miles in diamaeter, with fields of cold red gelatin quicksand and islands of hairy ground surrounding craters breathing out plumes of cold steam. Going into one to plant anti-matter charges, they find themselves attacked by white tendrils that bleed but repair themselves as soon as Rod stops hacking at them. It's quite a destination.

I love this crazy movie. It has some of the best dubbing ever, matching the lips with weird hesitance and fast-talking when necessary. Dialogue is rich with technical savvy, using the weird pauses of the actors to create mood and drama... rather than just making them sound drunk (though there's that too): "Read your retros - don't get clogged, Mack!" / "Who's got the flagship?!" / "I'm engaged to her, Terry... not that... I want to be."

The imdb score is unfairly low, and perhaps based on old faded VHS pan and scans but the Prime print puts it on a whole other level. The deep greys, blacks and reds that make up the bulk of the colors look really rich and alluring now, making Gamma-1 seem the place to be, way cooler than the Enterprise or anyplace like that. So if space opera style drama and mature adults doing work as an organized group in constant radio communication is your bag, with plenty of women in capable professional positions (Rod doesn't really even try to stop Terry from going along on all the dangerous missions - telling her "it's every man for himself"). This film should be the cornerstone of your spiritual Euro-6os science fiction pyramid. As Commander Rod says "use your retros!" And then seek out the other movies in the Gamma One Quadrilogy.

3. VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN

(1968) Dir. Peter Bogdanovich

*** / Amazon Image - D+

When I can't sleep in a foreign land I like to fall asleep to this crazy movie, with Mamie Van Doren and assorted blondes wearing seashell tops and mermaid fin-evoking hiphuggers, as Venusian mermaids telepathically interacting with cosmonauts from a relatively expensive-looking Russian science fiction film. As the cosmonauts encountering man-eating plants and various dinosaurs, the mermaids watch and sing and wait, and when the cosmonauts shoot down their pterodactyl god (in self defense), they get really mad and start singing volcanos and floods into existence.

The story of this brilliant melange is cinematic legend: Roger Corman acquired the rights to several Russian science fiction films on a trip east and brought in a young Peter Bogdanovich to restructure, dub into English, and shoot surrounding footage for starring Mamie Van Doren and a cadre of her fellow blonde sea nymphs (with great hip hugger green lame flair slacks subliminally evoking mermaid tails -- a truly inspired high-fashion solution courtesy Alice Mitchell). Who cares if it makes sense? With the audio's near constant flow of ocean sounds, eerie pitch-shifting electronic wind mixing with occasional bursts of Keith Benjamin's score, electronic ship and robot noises, and Bogdanovich's hipster narration (as the younger, romantically inclined cosmonaut, replete with allusions to Welles in Lady from Shanghai), the spooky swooping two-note siren's song, all whirling together, it's the best white noise in the galaxy.

Some of the ways Peter (and production coordinator Polly Platt) merged new and old footage is ingenious: a Hollywood-made rubber pterodactyl corpse washes up in the surf for the girls to find, pray over and send back... back to the sea (after its shot in the Russian film). I love the dopey, near muppet-like voice (uncredited) of Commander Lockhart, and the chef's hat Mamie wears when praying (evoking the hat worn by the one Venusian we see in a reflection at the very end of the Russian version); I love the way the sirens completely blend in with the rocks around them when lolling in the sun (the way seals often do) or the attention to clever details in the underwater scenes (the Russian footage showing nice undersea flourishes like a cloth octopus, merging with our LA sirens spying and undulating).

The Prime copy is bad, but there is no existing good quality DVD I know of, and frankly that's a shame. I have the Retromedia double disk set that includes the Russian original (Planet of Storms)- which looks the best--and contains more monster footage but the image skips and freezes around chapter 5, right when I wanted to see more of those crazy running man-sized allosaurus/T-rex things. Of the three of Corman's Russian adaptations in the set, I couldn't get too far into the achingly dull Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (waaay too much Faith Domergue on the radio); I thought Battle Beyond the Sun was a hootzzz with that way-too-dark space monster and all the cavorting on a tiny rock moon but still, maddeningly dull. I like that though. To make matters worse, the Prehistoric Women on the Retromedia skips in the projector/image! It's burnt-in, so the disk doesn't freeze, but gosh RetroMedia, what a drag! (PS - if you know of a good quality non-skipping transfer of VTTPOPW let me know!) It's worth getting the set just for the great quality of the Russian original, which includes a lot of cogently presented arguments on behalf of the ancient aliens hypothesis. Too bad it freezes up. How convenient.

4. PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES

(1966) Dir. Mario Bava

**** / Amazon Image - A+

Fourth on the bill, Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires is actually the best as far as gorgeous cinematography and clever, if not always successful, in-camera effects (Mario Bava is still ahead of his time). The storyline fuses elements of Last Man on Earth with Invasion of the Body Snatchers and looks forward to Night of the Living Dead, and most notably Alien, which clearly borrowed more than a few things. Wise choice, as it's a gorgeous and fascinating film that would be worth seeing even if you had to see it in Italian without subtitles (and didn't speak it). The plot concerns a rescue mission to a strange foggy planet where the soon-dead crewmen are taken over by fourth dimensional aliens eager to hitch a ride off their dying world. The co-ed crew wear sexy high-collared black leather uniforms with deep yellow trim (the sexiest, coolest and most high fashion space crew uniforms ever), and their ship is a huge minimalist black floored matte and mirage wonder. The outside miniatures make the ship look at times like soap on the rope anchored to the bottom of an aquarium (but that's okay) and the planet is a bizarre landscape or red and blue gels, swirling fog, petrified tentacle tree rocks, quicksand type burbling pits, and weird noises and disembodied voices barely audible in the whooshing winds. The shots of the outside guards looking deep into fog for signs of life are some of the most eerily beautiful in all of science fiction. The dubbing is good (lead Barry Sullivan does his own) and the music is super eerie. It just gets better with every viewing, especially in this HD color-restored super-marvelous shape.

5. TERROR BENEATH THE SEA

(1966) Dir. Hajime Sato

** / Amazon Image - A+

Thanks to an amazing Prime HD image (sourced no doubt from a terrific Blu-ray print), this is a fun, terrible Japanese fusion of underwater Bondian supervillain lair-trashing and Jules Verne-style fish people enslavement ala AIP's War Gods of the Deep, Japan's Atragon, and Italy's Island of the Fishmen (AKA Screamers - also on Prime). Sonny Chiba a blond gaijin named Peggy Neal (The X from Outer Space - see below) star as a pair of intrepid scientist/reporters who follow fishmen tracks in search of a missing scientist and wind up at the bottom of the sea. Both are so youthfully gorgeous and well-lit you understand their horror when the evil sunglasses-wearing villain (so you can't tell if he's Asian?) starts converting them to ugly fish people. Biloxi-born Neal can't act the horror and revulsion stuff nearly as well as the exuberant marine life photographer stuff, and the inevitable fish people are a bit of a disappointment - all cross-eyed but they're a gas when their mind control radio signal gets jammed up and they run amok shooting and killing everyone. Meanwhile American Naval officer friend (Franz Gruber!) labors to convince the top brass to send a search sub once the pair go missing. He won't take no for an answer! But will he find them in time?

He does, of course, but then it all gets really wonky with its editing. We get all sorts of odd gaps, like asides and pauses that make no sense in the usually frenzied editing scheme of an 'underwater lair about to implode' kind of climax. I mean the pauses between reactions that actors and directors presume the editor will snip off in order to 'time-image' action continuity (i.e. the general space of time between a shot of someone looking at something / to what they're looking at). When the gang are trying to escape and battling the bad guy's minions for space on the emergency elevator, this sluggish pace as each new emotion is formed on the actor's faces, is super aggravating. But once you've seen it enough times that the weird pacing doesn't bother you, I imagine it will scale bad movie heights. I already love the way Chiba has to carefully fight with the monsters so as not rip the obviously very thin plastic trash-bag style material used to make the monster skin; and the way the fights drag on while the professor and Neal just stand there, looking aghast, rather than doing anything to help, for minutes on end.

But hey, I'll watch whatever Peggy Neal and Sonny Chiba drag doomsday out forever if they want when the quality of the image is this divine. Everyone in the underwater lair wears white tunics, and Neal's hangs on her just perfectly; beaming with vitality and poise, flipping her short bob of a blonde hairdo, she's a perfect visual counterpoint to Chiba, with those deep dark eyes that all but drown any viewer foolish enough to gaze in them too long. Watching them be each dabbed with some wet gauze flakes that are supposed to be scales, just around the sides of the face. is a tad upsetting but nowhere near as bad as her tantrum at the end! Priceless moments like these make it imperative that you come along when Peggy Neal and Sonny Chiba discover there's TERROR BENEATH THE SEA.

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 6. BATTLE OF THE WORLDS

Il Pianeta degli uomini spenti / Translation: Planet of Extinct Men

(1961) Dir. Antonio Marghereti

**1/2 / Amazon Image - C- / D+

There is a stand-alone version of this on Prime (the "Comic Book Edition") but it's been so yellowed by someone's idea of color grading (for the old yellowed newsprint effect of old comics?) I find I prefer the "Double Doses of Sci-fi: Hostile Planets and Doomsday" version (starting on the 0:17 mark - ending 1:22) It's a shoddy looking analog transfer clearly taken from a VHS tape but--as with the above Planet of Prehistoric Women--there is no good HD upgrade available. Take what you can get, and say thank you to the nice Prime.

Sort of the grandpa of Margheriti's 1966-7 "Gamma One" Tetralogy (its title should not be confused with 1966's War Between the Planets or War of the Planets as those are all separate films), here is an aged, vaguely portly Claude Rains, hamming wildly but never less that magnetic and dubbing his own voice throughout. Such a team player, he sells the dialogue like its Shakespeare and even wears a space helmet during the big climax, racing around like a kid in a candy store through all the miles of alien tubing and red gel lights. A lovable but aloof intellectual curmudgeon who tends his garden in the house next to one of the 'best' observatories in the world, his Professor Benson is a mix of Mycroft Holmes and Peter O'Toole doing Henry II, a mathematician physicist is so brilliant he can just write an equation on the floor in chalk for the world's leaders to see via camera phones, and the world is saved. Meanwhile the young people fawn and stand around in awe and then saddle up when it's time to ride out of orbit and take on "the Outsider." Mario Migliardi's score smoothes over any soft patches and giving the rocky island scenery a proto-giallo sense of class. One can dream of one day seeing this look as good as the above War Between the Planets. What else is the stuffing of the stars, Professor?

7. LIGHTNING BOLT
Operazione Goldman / Operation Goldman

(1966) Dir. Antonio Margheriti

*** / Amazon Image - A-

As with some other features on our list, above and below, we're still exploring the uninhabitable vastnesses and it's still a trip, man, and in this, a superior example of one of the countless spy movies that proliferated in the mid-60s (from Goldfinger and Thunderball), we get both rocket topplings and a trippy undersea lair powered by an undersea volcano. Figures it's from that inexhaustible mastro Antonio Margheriti, as it's got the same sense of spontaneous termite energy as his "Gamma One" films. Packed in amidst the quips, drinks, and car chases lurks some exciting footage of real-life Nasa rocket failures seamlessly interwoven with spy Anthony Eisley's staggering around in front of an ocean of fire. The rest of the time he's either being shot at by a lovely blonde (Wandisa Guida) or trying to score with his lovely handler, Captain Flanagan (Diana Lorys) in what's supposed to Florida but sure looks Mediterranean. Action highlights also include a long chase/brawl through a brewery from the loading docks all the way down the grain silos. And that underwater lair is a major trip. Mid-60s Bond imitations could be stodgy with endless travelogue footage, stripteases, comic relief, static plot-heavy dialogue, trite pick-up lines and fashions so dated and sexist you can smell the cheap cologne in the air even now, but Lightning Bolt is worth standing in the rain for. Riz Ortolani spy music is on-point and on-message throughout and the sublime HD prime print makes the old new again.

(PS Just don't let it convince you to try others in Prime's vast mid-60s European faux-Bond arsenal, most are incorrectly formatted, just for starters. Operation Kid Brother starring Neil Connery isn't bad, even if it has a shockingly imitative Morricone score.)

8. FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER

(1965) Dir. Robert Gaffney

**/ Amazon Image - A

I couldn't let you leave the gates of Prime without first unearthing some American trash from the period, like this, which has the same kinetic weird nouvelle-pulp energy we fist saw in Rollin's Viol du Vampire and Franco's Diabolical Dr. Z., and Japan's The Manster albeit while still staying as gosh-darn American as apple pie (filmed in Puerto Rico!). The plot follows a pair of aliens--the bald pointy eared, vaguely Uncle Fester-meets-Jon Lovitz Dr. Nadir (Lou Cutell) and the aloof Princess Marcuzen (Marilyn Hanold)--as they abduct a bunch of women to zap back to their home planet (their side has won a nuclear war but now all the women are sterile), threatening any resistors with their pet space monster - Growl!. Meanwhile, there's lovely black-and-white footage of driving past NASA's gates and a press conference with their newest astronaut, who--alas--freezes halfway through the Q&A - and so we find the secret: he's a robot! When his ship crashes (thanks to alien toppling powers), Frankie falls to earth a burnt amnesiac who proceeds to run amok until his creator (the great James Karen!) and his girlfirned find him and turn him against the marauding aliens who happen to have landed right nearby. Puerto Rico seems like quite the happenin' spot. FMTSM gets a bad rap in some circles but I think it's just goofy enough to be fun without being campy (it knows the best approach is to always play it deadpan straight up rather than falling back on Goldfootian-camp). Never before has military footage from our Air Force and Army training maneuvers been so seamlessly interwoven to indicate a coordinated attack on a parked UFO. And the Prime print is stunning, revealing once again that good black-and-white cinematography is ageless, as are mid-60s plaid bikini bathing suits. And snap your fingers along to the end song by The Distant Cousins!

Now Come with me to Criterion Channel...!

9. THE X FROM OUTER SPACE

Uchû daikaijû Girara

(1963) Dir. Kazui Nihonmatsu

*** / Criterion Image - B-

With a happy astro-theme song and groovy lounge soundtrack (courtesy Taku Izumi), cheerful blue colored outer space backgrounds, and cute if unconvincing space miniatures and sets, X is set in that once-seemingly inevitable future of permanent bases on the moon, operated by a United World Order where young people of both genders hold high-level positions on orbiting space stations and meet after hours at the space lounge to dance and be interrupted by urgent news. Here we got cute blonde gaijin astrobiologist Lisa (Peggy Neal) as the girl in a group of four bound for Mars, stopping off on the moon to party with cute Michiko (Itoko Harada), whose got a crush on Capt. Sano (Shun'ya Wazaki), who crushes on Lisa (Neal) who likes him too but knows Michiko crushes so much harder. Franz Gruber sports a goatee as a high-ranking scientific advisor (he also counsels Lisa when hearts gets too heavy). Planetary danger erupts when Lisa collects a tiny alien spore she found stuck to the ship's tail fin and brings it down to earth in one of those sample jars that alien spores tend to escape from when everyone is off having cocktails. This one leaves a chicken size footprint etched in acid and immediately grows kaiju massive; though joyful and triumphant, Guilala's attacks are a bit on the weaker side compared to his more esteemed Toho comrade, but with all the fun jetting back and forth from the moon to Earth, the soap dish UFO visits, the widescreen medium shot compositions, the luminous glowing skin of the two lead actresses, and Guilala's aerodynamic head curling its edges when blasting laser spitballs, you won't mind the soft foggy print Criterion works with.

Grooving at the moon's astro-lounge

The Criterion image is soft but hey - if not for their "It came from Shochiku" Eclipse series, it wouldn't be out on anything but a $60 Japanese import. To think, I may never have known it. And as a result I wouldn't have gone on to hunt down and see Atragon and Latitude Zero on overpriced Tokyo Shock DVDs. Man, I'm sick just thinking about it, because if there are cocktails being served on space stations or the moon in a 60s science fiction film, I shall be crawling forth, insatiable. Let me know if there are any I missed, and they shall be trampled!

10. SOLARIS

(1972) Dir. Andre Tarkovsky

 **** / Criterion Image - B

Tarkovsky's acclaimed science fiction masterpiece (which seems like a 60s film, due perhaps to the slower pop trendshifting behind the Iron Curtain) is set in a future where a space station orbits above an all-ocean possibly sentient planet that causes long dead lovers to re-appear, with amnesia, is based on a novel by Polish sci-fi novelist Stanislav Lem. Slow and long, yet never less than compelling... and certainly no slower than its western counterpoint, 2001 - albeit less tripped-out. My recommendation for newcomers: turn up the volume because the ambient sound gets pretty trippy once you let the slowness hypnotize you, which is what it's for. The long drive through Moscow's tunnels and elevated highways to the the airport for example, becomes otherworldly when you tune into the way the sound of the traffic begins to discombobulate into the rush of rockets and radio static. The slow pans around rooms where Kris's (Donatas Bationis) dead ex-wife Khari (Natalya Bondarchuk) appears in different points in time and space, for example, it's way out there, if you meet it halfway - which isn't easy. I've seen it five times and only managed to stay awake to the end once. With its meaning entombed in its weird mise-en-scene of ever shifting memory, in its refusal to yield a momentous narrative or to promise some wild lightshow climax, but with every edit and mismatched glimpse of things there and not there evoking the bathroom/bedroom rebirthing scene of 2001, as if stretched to three hours and including a girl, a child, and a father, and a film projector, with Jupiter being swapped out for a fictional solar ocean... where was I?

Did I nod off?

But what better film to wake up to, rousing from some odd dream, and to find still playing (as I did last night)? To not have to rewind or scroll back, but to just sit up and keep watching where you woke up from, until you nod off, again. To watch in between bouts of consciousness, to blank out right in the middle of some portentous cosmic revelation realized in the engulfing silence of space, knowing perhaps it's the only or best way to experience it? Too much alertness and it might just seem... zzzz.

--
Adieu to the cautious cocktails and radiation-eating hopes of the space age. Adios to swinging astronauts being hoisted around on wires while saving the day. Dasvidaniya to the idea of a perfect romance with a mystical anima projection in the form of an ex-wife at the prime of her hotness. Such is the realization of Tarkovsky's most surreal film. It takes ideas similar to those in many other older science fiction films (including Ib Melchoir's Journey to the Seventh Planet) and drafts a meaning so high and profound it can use swirls of algae on still water, wind-rustled plants, stormy clouds, trees hanging over empty space, and a beautifully knit autumnal-colored afghan wrap held against the glow of a round space station window, to evoke the inscrutable majesty of that alien otherness beyond even the reach of our sleeping unconscious, past the light behind the dark behind the man behind the curtain, that fractal form of probing consciousness we damage the minute we behold it the way water crystalks change just from our looking at them. Such things lie far beyond the limits of special effects, and even human imagination, to interpret in any concrete form.

So we bid farewell even to the most.... basic.... functions...zzz

 (If you refuse to watch SOLARIS, let the tenth film on this list be Criterion's DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968- Dir. Ishoro Honda) Yeah, boy, Akira Ifukube's pounding score, female aliens (above) turning into rocks, and a full roster of kaiju favorites uniting to really stomp the shit out of Ghidorah. I mean it's like six against one, and they basically curb stomp the poor thing. It's not like he came there voluntarily! He was controlled by the Kilaaks, same as they all were hitherto the signal being broken! Get Criterion channel now!! I also recommend GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER (1964), also on Criterion, which has a cool alien possessed princess side plot, and the numbers are much more even --since Ghidorah counts as three monsters at least... because of his three heads.

FURTHER OUT:

For other cool Communist sci-fi films from the 70s that seem like they're from our 60s, I highly recommend these two films from East Germany (avail. only in OOP DVD and sometimes youtube)

THE DUST OF THE STARS

Im Staub der Sterne

(1978) Dir.

*** / DVD image - B-

Gehen sie (for my review) hier

+

ELEOMEA

(1972) Dir. Herrmann Zschoche

*** / DVD image - B-

Gehen sie (for my review) hier

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Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-39931239880037113262020-02-06T10:19:00.000-05:002020-04-29T11:32:41.640-05:00Just a Juggalo: JOKER + The Psychotic Sometimes Swims, Harley Quinn, Harley Quinn

Meanwhile, back in Gotham, here comes another chaotic neutral character from DC Comics, the whirling sexy batwielding, bat-smashing Harley Quinn. Unlike the more Jungian equations of Marvel, DC has always been more of a surface player ala professional wrestling. Their mythic arcs offer a fusion between totemistic mythology, civics lessons, and those old Mexican wrestling movies, the kind where cultural and financial differences are worked out in masks, tights, and fights. Now that JOKER is a work of art, building on the versions by Jared Leto and Heath Ledger, which in turn riffed off Jack Nicholson and Ceasar Romero, we can draw a straight line in DC from camp to art. And dead in the middle? David Ayer's underrated Suicide Squad.

Ayer, paragon of macho (he made Fury with Brad Pitt for god's sakes) is the reason we have Joker getting edgy acclaim, as well as the new Birds of Prey: The Emancipation of Harley Quinn opening this weekend, so it must be acknowledged that some special magic in SS made it a cultural touchstone (all the girls in the club were Harley that Halloween). Maybe his fight club morning practices of helped make everyone seem tougher; or maybe because Robbie was so alluring in the way only hot messes can be; or maybe I'm loyal to SS since I relapsed to it back in Xmas 2016 and my feeling of insane 'emancipation' was perfectly matched in the theme, style and plot. Libertad! Libertad!

You may shake your head in disgust at that last--admittedly personal--connection; if you haven't been sober for 20 years, been a massive alcoholic whose life went instantly from chronic depression to magical aliveness once he started drinking (late, senior year of HS); terrible at sports all through childhood but suddenly, with a drink, impressive and aggressive, then you can't know what it means to go from utterly miserable for days on end in a tiny one room cabin while everyone around you on Xmas day is loud, shouting as Alexa every five minutes, throwing darts over your head, laughing and swilling Jack Daniels--to finally breaking down, gulping a big swig of vodka and going from a 1 to a 10 in mood over the course of a minute. If you haven't done that, don't judge.

That sudden change is, itself, addictive. To know the last 20 years of your life are, with one guzzle, a closed book, is so freeing there are no words for it, except one: Freedom. It's almost worth being miserable and winding up in the hospital for that hour of total freedom and a sense that your horizons have just widened by a significant "Kansas-switched-to-Technicolor-Oz" level. for however long your biological parole counsellor Viola Davis decrees. Her remote control that detonates the jugular vein bombs in the squad's necks being my own biochemistry, no longer able to handle alcohol in any amount, as I would later learn the hard way.

No wonder I too feel the draw of the madness of Joker, a 70s NYC-ish Gotham-set saga of mental illness and delusion... and white male rage! Todd Phillips' film proves a fine echo-drenched tribute to the golden (70s-early-80s) era of Scorsese, and hence perfect in the same year Scorsese slanders comic book movies and delivers his own (early-90s) Goodfellas-"tribute," The Irishman. It all happens in the order it does for a reason. Some day you'll understand that (1).

Living in a loosely delusional zone between Taxi Driver (if Travis was fired from a temp clown agency), and King of Comedy 2, if Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) took over the Jerry Lewis role and finally met someone twice as crazy as him. Joker loses his mom, his grip on reality, and his illusory girlfriend and then he finds his true self when a Goetz-y self-defense killing of three rich a-holes on a late-night subway triggers all sorts of fun insane civil unrest as people reason killing the rich is pretty cool if they can't see your face because you're wearing a clown mask. And Fleck, I mean the Joker, I mean "Joker," doesn't disappoint his fans.

To paraphrase that old Joseph Campbell quote about "the mystic swims where the psychotic drowns," Joker sinks to the bottom and realizes he's got gills. When you've lost everything, as Tyler Durden says, you can do anything. Of course you can argue it's a symptom of our trigger happy white male rage mass shooter age that we mustn't laugh at such things, and that's what makes it funny (though ironic the genius of Joker is acknowledged but the genius of the perhaps even darker Observe and Report is slighted). And thanks to a great color and lighting scheme (how his red, orange and green suit contrast against the dingy gray of the city) and the way---during his celebrated stairs dance---the low-end roll of convicted felon Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll (part 2)" pumps perfectly through the channels opened by the mind-meltingly deep and true cello chords of Icelandic genius Hildur Ingveldar Guðnadóttir, we do get one of the defining moments of the cinematic year.

Pauline Kael would have loved it.

But first, before the psychotic can swim (2)-- he or she must find their animal or elemental or archetypal talisman:a penguin, a cat, an egg, ice, earth, a playing card, fir or ice, a coin, or even just riddles, their talisman and namesake; then their psychosis and amoral love of crime and villainy can take to the air like a kite. And Bruce Wayne can have an excuse to cut out of whatever gala he's slumming through, glad to have--once more--someone to chase around, so don't worry about him. The deal: just tie him up and roast him over some hot coals, rather than merely shoot him. You're all each other has, so make it non-lethal.

But Wayne's just a kid in Joker. It's all just Phoenix looking in the mirror and abusing his smile. But that stairs dance to Glitter's anthem works so indelibly as a moment because it takes the time to work, to breathe into it, and because the music is perfect; the stairs are perfect and the sight of this clown, literally, in this super clean clown suit is so perfectly etched against the filthy melange of urban decay/gray that it makes you stop and catch your breath. We can't help but love him because there is nothing this clown wants from us. He's broken through to the other side. He no longer whines for our love or attention (the way, say, Jerry Langford used to do back in his bellboy days), and that's why we must give it. Usually there's something terrifically desperate about a clown, the human equivalent of a needy puppy that starts to whine the moment you cease petting it. But this clown has moved beyond us. The only person he needs to make laugh is himself. And he can't stop.

Everything builds to a fine old triumphant juggalos amok climax, but very last WTF scene after that kind of annoyed me. No, it really did annoy me. But I sure am fascinated nonetheless about why it seemed so imperative to add this little coda.

My guess: everyone worried the ending--the triumph of the loon--might incite the juggalos to rise the way they way gang violence used to erupt at inner city Warriors screenings, or the old Aurora Dark Knight Rises incident. They even once worried Fight Club would motivate the trolls (back before they were called that) from out mom's basements and teach them the ways of men. The ways of men went on in basements too -- and punches hurt my widdle hobbit hands!

But no worries, the time for fight clubs has passed; the time to don thy juggalo paint and raise a mighty ruckus is also passed. The popularity of Joker (and its cop-out "Scarface on the gallows" ending-ending) assassinated the present and there's no sense fighting if the opponent is but a dream. Safe in anonymity behind the goofball mask, we avoid the sting of teargas and truncheons by living outside the flow of time - clickclickclackclick. The NYC of the 70s, the one of pay phones and rampant street crime, seems long gone today. But Joker reminds us that should our 5G network go out, the 70s won't be far away. Joker is with us when we walk home on NYC streets deserted of brick and mortars. So why worry about the present with its Disney and Warner Bros. flagships that we once bemoaned for cleaning up the dirty streets of Gotham. Their clowns bounce with big bulbous heads, and if the Joker was just more cartoony, he'd be one of them. But let's face it. He's gone dark. He's joined the past, hanging out in front of the stores that were once crumbling movie theaters showing kung fu movies and pornography and posing for invisible tourist pictures.

Welcome the overalls

And now - the ex-girlfriend of the Joker (a sexier, younger Joker, mind you. Time is dead), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) comes pogoing onto screens this weekend. But things are looking grim based on the suspicious lack of advance critical notice. From her 'riveting raver' jumpers, pompom shoulder wraps (made from police tape_ replacing her Suicide Squad baby doll trash and vaudeville slutty clothes (probably a good thing), to the somewhat grating (and all too sane-sounding) Brooklyn voiceover (monologues for crazy villains should sound crazy -- as in "So I wanted to stop the lightning shooting of my forehead and the only way to do that was steal the fingers of my old math teacher or so the shimmering blue triangle in my bathroom said," and not banal girl power edicts like "so the Jokah and I broke up and I was reel sad) Marilyn Monroe dance recreations to express my freedom from lack of materialism." Or whatever. It's kind of shocking to think that even broken free from tenuous sanity, this is the goal..

Of course Anna Biller set the bar really high in Love Witch (2016) as far as able to bring a truly feminine eye towards lady sexy craziness. It looks from the outside like Yan and Hodson aren't even going to try, delivering instead what looks like another 'freshly broken up girl throws Ewan McGregor a beatin'' plot. Now, I'm all for beating up Ewan McGregor. No actor in the last two centuries has seemed to so fully warrant it (3) but the kind of crazy that's psychotic and sexy-gutsy, rather than just a mopey crying-jag downer, in films is all too rare, it's like striking gold when we stumble on it, Hence the preciousness this year with Joker, the Beach Bum; the Parasite birthday picnic, the crazy subterranean's weird smiles in Us, the second half of Climax. But so much else in modern movies seems mired in a by-the-numbers sanity that unfortunately dogs even Frank Miller's DC adaptations like a plague.

When money is more than just paper, signifiers connect, and noir cliches about shadows in crumbling alleys rule over all, then we never really lost anything to begin with, did we, doctor?
---

 SUICIDE SQUADS AND CRAZY LOVERS

"I don't know who's crazier, me or you." - Iris to Travis (Taxi Driver)
Phoenix, coming into Joker, knew he had big shoes to fill.... big shoes to fill.... big shoes to fill... (4) The ballsy insanity we see finally erupting from the ratty shell of lil' Phoenix is like the origin story for the comic book bizarro "dog chasing cars" mania we see fully formed in Heath Ledger's "latter period" edition (in 2008's The Dark Knight.) Scenes like his burning his share of the mob's stolen money, a vast mountain of it which he pours lighter fluid on (just his half!) or his giving a loaded gun to Two-Face and leaning his own head against it (after blowing up his girlfriend). We loved Ledger for putting his head in the lion's jaws of true insane criminal genius. He became a kind of totem of lunatic freedom unseen in films since, perhaps, Tyler Durden in 1999. That model hasn't aged half as well ---too laddish. But Ledger's Joker lives large in our modern age of #metoo (he's not rapey) and global warming (he's all about depopulation). He's selfless in his homicidal genius, beyond desire and fear and even the need to commit weird social jokes. (Durden in turn was the descendant of Sir Guy Grand [Peter Sellers] the millionaire in The Magic Christian [1967] who ends the film by pouring a lot of pound notes in a big vat of sewage waste, so he can judge all the bourgeoisie who go wading in, their expensive suits be hanged [9]). When he throws down weird games of kill your friend or anonymous group on another boat before they kill you, it's not--despite Batman's smug analysis--some sick need to prove Gotham is corrupted, it's for amusement and cajones measuring, in the tradition of Price's Prince Prospero in Masque of the Red Death (1964) or Boris Karloff's General Fang in West of Shanghai (1937).

Jared Leto's Joker in Suicide Squad was, in my opinion, an underrated and very druggy cool serpentine performance, the first embodiment since Ledger's untimely death. Seen through the prism of his adoring lover Harley, we see him first when she was an Arkham shrink, through to his issues trying to fight his gooey feelings towards her by convincing her to fall backwards into a vat of, presumably, toxic magic clown combat syrup, planning to let her drown in there, then sighing and jumping in after her. That was so romantic! I hadn't cried like that since Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946). Anyone in a relationship they're always half-escaping, a love despite their self conception as a rover and a bounder, a love that challenges even their cracked self image, could relate. Is it what we imagined we wanted? No. It's real, and that's even worse. Even virgin nerds could respect that kind of vivid anarchic outlaw couple love. We end up with the person who can stand us, and who we can stand. Those two things are themselves miracles, triumphs. Even if they drive us over a cliff, we can at least lean out the passenger window and flip off the cops and ride it straight to hell with a psychotic laugh.

By contrast, consider the dopey self-absorbed sexual heat between Ilsa and Rick in Casablanca. Rick needs a whole movie to help another man leave with the girl he loves just because that man wrote some inflammatory ant-Nazi pamphlets. Rick and Ilsa are too suffused with self-pity and pious mopery to crank it. (19) If it was real love, Rick and Ilsa would leave Lazlo behind at the airport, shouting your pamphlets suck! Love doesn't let doofus politics or even wars dissuade it. Neither marriage nor jobs or children - it's worse than the most addictive opiate. Rick says "if you don't leave with Viktor you'll regret it, maybe not today but tomorrow and for the rest of your life." Love doesn't give a shit about that, and does regret it for the rest of their life but still, there you are. Love insists on leaving a scar.

There are so few examples in modern movies it's almost shameful. I think of Gun Crazy (1950) and the scene where John Dahl and Peggy Cummins abandon, spur of the moment, their 'take separate cars' getaway plan, or Thelma and Louise going over that cliff. So few outlaw couples films get that moment right that when they do, as in Suicide Squad, it makes my palms sweat. We feel there's a Harvey Keitel in our earpiece begging us not to do it, to accept the cavity search that welcomes us back into banal time-space crawling.

Then there was that Enchantress (Cara Delvinge), alive like a sharp intake of breath, with tentacles and dreamy electric cloud shapes on exhale, her shimmering South American rainforest ayahuasca energy pulsing and slithering around the bigwig government Pentagon offices like an anaconda of kundalini dark magic. Yet she could still say "you don't have the balls" when mentioning her Jekyll side's boyfriends threat to stab her separated straw heart). Or what about the interesting low-key bond that forms in the margins between Harley and Will Smith's sniper character--Smith gamely recognizing the cliche inherent in his character's constantly threatening anyone who steps to him and/or just wanting to see his kids, and doing something new with it. They're both the coolest and most level-headed natural leaders of the group, and smart enough to talk to each other in their indoor voices.

I feel like I'm trying to justify my love of the Squad. Is it that dirty a kind, the kind not the sex kind of dirty but the need to justify with intellectual pretension dirty?

One gets a feeling that for her Boids of Prey "emancipation," Harley is not being allowed to keep that kind of moment-to-moment beyond good-and-evil kinetic batshit DSM-V charting, sexy-crazy-cool, becoming instead a kind of de facto good girl whose crazy is limited to a few giggles, endless video game-style choreographed fights, and the odd goofy dance or slow-mo walk away from an explosion. After all, there was that one wrong note where Enchantress shows Harley a possible future as a banal housewife with a baby and Joker heading off to his legit 9-5 job in the sunshine of the early morning. Ewwww! She likes that kind of sick shit?

No offense to the married and childrened, but offense meant for implying that underneath her bravado and kinetic psychosexycrazycool, she's just acting nuts because her "puddin" is nuts and that she hopes one day he'll grow out of it and get a real job, the way friends who didn't know you were gay or bi, presume you'll grow out of it after college and settle down to 'what matters." Love makes us do funny things: Kate Hepburn even gave up a lot of her own freedom to correspond to Spence's antiquated notions of femininity. She even plunged to her death rather than embarrassing Herbert Marshall with a kid out of wedlock in Christopher Strong. She did get a statue out of it but not the golden man kind, the silver art deco Central Park kind. Still nice, but then again the patriarchy always honors scary freedom once it's safely dead - the passed past is where freedom rings its scary drum. Statue please!

THE AWAKE RUNNETH AMOK IN THE CITY OF SLEEP

What makes DC comics different from Marvel is that Marvel generally makes every character (this being Stan Lee's secret sauce) complex--grey rather than black or white. There's no all-good hero or all-bad villain - everyone has their reasons and their weaknesses. They are 3-D people down to the smallest role. DC on the other hand, is all about types, ala professional wrestling. Gotham in particular, is a land of 'types' - everyone not in the main character roster is as banal and shorn of tics as a civics lesson film strip. The news vendor must sound like a blue collar guy from the 30s ("papah heeeeah!"); the thugs must be brutes with bad teeth and a thoid grade education; the victims must cower in the corner of the parking lot before saying "Th-th-thanks, Batman." The mobster on trial must cover his smirk with his hand as the rigged jury finds him innocent. His lawyer must be a shifty mouthpiece; the DA a noble idiot whose hands are tied. Even Batman with his childhood trauma of seeing his rich parents shot, is a type: seldom smiling, all justice-vigilante, but never killing anyone (that we see, he risks terrific collateral damage in order not to directly kill or permanently maim even the most evil of villains). Who wouldn't be crazy in a city like that? And who wouldn't be motivated to crime, as if no one but you really exists, that this is all a dream so there are no consequences to your actions?

Thus, it's fitting that the villains generally wind up not in jail but in Arkham, Gotham's asylum for the criminally insane, where it's very easy to escape. In short, being the only complex characters in a city of 'types' like Gotham has made them crazy. There's no reality to challenge them. Even Phoenix's Joker, whose Gotham is perhaps the most realistic, has no firm grip on reality. It's all a dream within a dream. Phoenix being the origin story Joker, is just realizing this - the rudimentary feeling that marks psychosis and schizophrenic narcissism. His Arthur Fleck/Joker thought he was in real life for the longest time, but by the end he knows it's "just a comedy." He's free. But the flip side is a terrible loneliness you can never wake up from. That's why his romance is so touching in the long game of Squad.

Harley on the other hand with her doctoral brilliance, does believe people are real, and so they are. The best moment in Squad, for example, is Harley asking one of the other members if he can see the wild light show effects circling above the amok Enchantress and her newly incarnated temple god brother (it is really there - she's relieved to find out. , into their own evil power station; her relief to find out. The Joker wouldn't worry whether the orbiting cloud of stuff was real or not. No true psychotic ever bothers to sort that shit out. When Don Birnim screams at the sight of the bat eating the rat in the wall during his DTs in Lost Weekend he's proving he's still a punter. A seasoned tripper wouldn't blink twice, even if the bat and rat were really there he'd presume he's hallucinating and shrug it off. We've all looked down at our hand and seen the flesh melting off the bone during bad acid trips, but we're not wally enough to try to cut it off with a bandsaw like in Psych-out or demanding someone drive us to the ER.

There is one Batman movie where Gotham is nuts as the villains, i.e 1997's Batman and Robin, (above) in which everything resembles one big black light poster; all the graffiti is Day-Glo and ridiculous art deco sculptured skyscrapers threaten to swallow up the villains to the extent they become normal inside the context. It's Batman with his copycat hangers-on Batgirl and Robin, that become the odd ducks. Freshman 15-afflicted Alicia Silverstone as ill-equipped for form fitting black leather tights and also too short to seem at all menacing; Robin bidding for Poison Ivy's attention with Bruce's own money like a bitch, trying so hard to seem straight while wearing little green shorts and a sailor boy crew cut. Clooney's Batman doing his best with this dopey coterie of kiddies but gladly letting Uma and Arnold take the cake and run. But run where? It's all like being trapped in an 80s new wave club, trying to find the bathroom but finding only day-glo graffitti on painted black plywood dividers.

Heath Ledger's Joker in Dark Knight on the other hand gets that he's dreaming for no city could be this 'film they show you at jury duty'-level banal. He thinks he Batman are the only normal, cool people in town. Batman on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge the divide, doesn't even grant Joker a courtesy laugh. Sadly, Joker is alone in his full consciousness. He just gave Batman the benefit of the doubt because of the kinky get-up. But sometimes loners dress like bats for reasons that have nothing to do with pleasure, or so they keep telling themselves.

THE ROGUE'S GALLERY

Everyone has their favorite villains in this DC-verse and their least (Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor). When it comes to Catwoman I belong to Julie Newmar. See my praise on nearby Mediated "Kitty Kali" if you doubt that I'm down. Her playful ease with her mouse-eared crook gang in the 60s TV show is exactly the way I imagined myself in her presence (me being merely seven or eight when I first fell for her), a kitten luxuriating in the clawy grasp of a lithe black-spangled diamond snatcher with the kind of brilliance of real cats. Runner up Catwoman would be Ann Hathaway, who still rocks the best eyeliner in Hollywood. Michelle Pfeiffer's was okay but that Burton sequel was rather leaden and hard to wade through with all Danny DeVito's hamming and Michael Keaton's sulking. And Halle Berry's the worst Catwoman of all, mistaking mousiness for for normal and materialism for a superpower (she's only a hero because when she's about to rob a diamond store, someone is already there first, so she settles for kicking their ass -stealing from thieves being the lamest kind of heroism).

As for the Riddler, there is only Frank Gorshin. As for Two Face, who gives a shit (or who doesn't)? The rest of my love goes to Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy. and Dr. Zodiac himself, Ceasar Romero as the TV show Joker (far underrated over the sea of time, check him out again if the series rolls past you and give a close reading of his giddy mephistophelean relish for crime and cunning).

As for the heroes, there's no such thing as a good Robin - the whole boy sidekick idea is misguided and shows a horrific lack of understanding of the average child reader's psyche (Marvel never had them after Stan Lee took over). The best Batman is Adam West. Batgirl by Yvonne Craig looks marvelous, but the idea of just feeling the right to imitate Batman's schtick out of some little sister copycat style impulse is kind of anathema to what superheroism is all about, Mom! Cindy, get your own cave and animal totem. I support the lesbian slant of the new WB's new version, but what's with the terrible red wig?

And now, between the three recent Jokers--Phoenix's low key psychotic, Jared Leto's druggy serpentine hustler, and the late Heath's ambulance-chasing dog anarchist, the bar has been raised mighty high. The big issue which we will learn this week is: Does Harley Quinn survive her girl power makeover emancipation or does she become just another over-costumed mannequin on which various craftsman all drape to the point of overkill in between her letting her hair fall in her eyes so she can be doubled by her stuntwoman? Shall she be drenched in the stagnant swamp of unconscious Gotham sanity? Shall the Birds of Prey lure her into peppy 70s-scored montages ballet kicking? Will this become another girl Ghostbusters making genitalia jokes in between 3D stream crossing, or tired Charlie's Angels boasting of their concert hall-style closets=?

Make no mistake, DC villain roster! After Phoenix's Joker and Robbie's first rendition of Harley Quinn (and maybe the second), the writing is on the wall - go nuts. I don't mean the hamming it to the rooftop with evil laughing nuts, I mean DSM-V-charting here comes the warm jets surrealist gibbering nuts. I mean the 'break the shackles of the establishment and terrify the old academy into turning the channel lest the villain crawl through the screen and grab them around the neck'-kind of nuts. The last thing we need now is another step back from the ledge into some generic half-hearted Eisenbergian titter. We've come so far! Just one more push! And this time, no "it was all a psychotic break hallucination," por favor. Some of us still just want to watch the world burn! We know it's a movie. We don't need an extra layer between madness and the real world outside the theater.

Oops, forgot. Outside in the parking lot... the world is engulfed in fire. I was kidding (myself) before, the happy ending to Joker is not the same as Robot Monster or Wizard of Oz but the same as Brazil. What we don't see from inside Arkham is that the world is burning outside. And the 'just a dream' coda is our see-no-evil last gasp denial of our responsibility for it. We didn't stop the fire, we just warmed ourself at it then quietly snuck away. The engulfing flame of mob violence, and Jennifer Lawrence hitting the 'reset' button (6), take saints and sinners alike in its arkless arms. So hide in the comfort of your televisual straitjacket while ye may, Erichs. And let the Ativan work its magic. Note how soothing are these nice white walls, their bubbling white paint like polka dots. Feel how gobsmacked this electric current is by her flames; even the electroshock machine melts in her mouth of madness.

In the name of Pauline Kael, Molly Haskell, Camille Paglia, and Kim Morgan, let the gutsy brilliance of true feminine lunacy ring. xoxo

2/7/20: The film is out and the critics have spoken. So far the reviews are positive Looks like I was wrong to rant so (though the critics are all dumping on Suicide Squad at the same time and citing references to Tank Girl, which I do not care for. )

PS -2/15: I saw it, stay tuned for a new post on it, Batfans. Crazier than even this one!

FURTHER BAT READING:

Monsters Crash the Pajama Party: DARK KNIGHT RISES, TARGETS (8/6/2012)
"Gunman turns movie into surreal horror: 'This is real'" - News headline (Aurora Shooting)"

Creedence and Ivy's Eco-Terrorist Revue: BATMAN AND ROBIN, TROLL 2 (9/12/2012)
Rolling her eyes and carrying on about the plants of Mother Nature having their day, luxuriating over her plans to rid Freeze and herself of the feathered and furry caped crusaders, Thurman is at least in on the joke and exhibiting some signs--lacking in all the other cast members--that she's actually seen some of the films Schumacher is referencing. Bane, too, is ten times more fun in this issue as a hulking, mute, seemingly-inflatable Mexican wrestler under her control instead of Chris Nolan's musclebound Marxist professor.

Burn the Money: DARK KNIGHT and The Joker's Post-Fascist Used Topia (8/5/2008)
Chris Nolan seems to underline the hyper-commodity fetishism of Wayne's world, offering a sly socialist critique even as he fulfills his conspicuous consumption fantasy obligations to the producers and advertisers (Alfred is always interested in knowing what of Wayne's many cars will be taken out for drives. "The Lamborghini, sir?" he says, all a quiver)

All Clawed up and Nowhere to Go: CATWOMAN (8/10/2004)
Showgirls was camp feminism as imagined by bearded men with coke habits and million dollar tabs with Heidi Fleiss, but at least they weren't afraid to portray the kind of feminism they wanted to see: Sharon Stone sticking that ice pick; a Joe Esterhaz stand-in getting the tar kicked out of him by a stripper in high heels --that's real feminism as only the heirs to the Russ Meyer throne can portray it! But leave it to a Frenchman to get camp so very wrong. Here the feminist icon can't crack a convincing smile let alone a whip.

Kitty Kali: (4/4/2011)
a sexy supervillainess makes the Batman mythos operate at a far more evolved level than with male baddies, for instead of an all-boy group of kids pretend fighting in the backyard, there's the female element of the hottie next door who makes all the boys stammer; the yin-yang dichotomy is in place. She becomes the chthonic enemy of normal patriarchal civilization, its inescapable shadow. How easily she gets our dynamic duo in tied-up situations, yet always leaves them room to escape; she likes the chase and the drama and the last minute rescues and, like the other villains, there's a clear idea that without the dynamic duo to wrestle with and subject to various colorful slow torments, a life of crime would be a drab, dull affair--no one to play with..

NOTES:

1. as Bogie once said to Ingrid in Casablanca, a line that smacks of patriarchal condescension (she's been trying to get him to understand it all through the movie; then she realizes the easiest way to get those visas is to play along and let him think it's his idea)

2. To paraphrase that old Joseph Campbell quote (? was it Jung?) "A mystic swims where a psychotic drowns"
3. Though to be fair, I'm basing that off of three movies he was in where he played a reprehensible swine, his smirky wally in The Men Who Stare at Goats; his entitled abusive/possessive poet in Moulin Rouge; and his bad haircut-sporting traitor ex-boyfriend to Gina Carano in the oft-seen-by-me Haywire.
4. Simpsons quote (S1: "Krusty gets Busted"), because we shouldn't let the last 20 seasons sway us from remembering the brilliance of the first 10
6. See: Mother (2016)
9. The kind of gross 'dead-horse-dragging' belabored hipster triteness that makes you turn your back on hipsters and never want to watch the movie again for no other reason than the memory of it makes you want to retch and it's such a waste of Raquel Welch as a whip-wielding galley master. Who was the idiot editor who said "less Welch in leather please, and more posh shit-wading
19. In the flashbacks we see how cuckoo he is over her, and how for her it's just sex at first but also amused at his naivete and goo-goo eyes. This is now Americans fall for Europeans (or girls from Buenos Aires), our inability to realize a relationship can be just sex because when we find a girl for whom it's just sex we fall in love since we've longed for such a thing. It's the ultimate irony that then our innocence and adoration wins them over, as if that kind of naive swooning was as precious to them, moored in old world cool as they are, as their slutty self-assertion is to us (whose sex is mired in neo-Puritan 'Rules') But it's not really love, not the way Thelma and Louise, or the Joker and Harley, or John Dahl and Peggy Cummins, do it. The problem with the Lazlos of the world is they force everyone to either kill them or join the fight. It takes a Switzerland to know how to stay neutral even when the Lazlos are grabbing at your lapels like old Ugharti begging for a place to hide.
Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-30400148555610452762020-01-31T16:29:00.000-05:002020-02-03T09:01:06.021-05:00Acidemic's Collected CinemArchetypes: Your Guide to Jungian Psyche-cinematic Awakening! By special request, to round them up for easy reference. Here is Acidemic's Tarot Deck of CinemArchetypes, a guide to analyzing cinema and its connection to your own reality and life via Jungian archetypal psychology. Things are about to get weird. But then aren't they always? Peel the onion and it all leads here...

The Red Queen

1. The Trickster

2. The Anima

3. The Animus

4. The Hanged Man

5. The Human Sacrifice

6. The Intimidating Nymph

7. The Shadow

8. The Dark Father

9. The Devouring Mother

10. The Wild Man

11. The Wild-Wise Woman

12. The Sage / Senex

13. The Skeevy Boyfriend

14. The Cougar / Puella Aeterna

15. The Animal Familiar

16. Automaton / Ariel

17. The Devil

18. The Aesthete

19. The Holy Madman

20. The 3 Sisters

21. The Ego

22. The Outlaw Pair

23. The Wild Child

24. Death

25. The Fisher King

26. The Stoner

27. Androgyne / Alien

There are a couple more of these on the docket, including "Elementals," and the long-awaited "Der Trumpen," (can't get to that one til the smoke clears, and the fire rages on). But to round them up for easy linking. Here is the Tarot Deck of Cinematic Types and their Jungian array-aageErich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-40624825790263062772020-01-03T10:00:00.000-05:002020-05-16T20:01:44.618-05:00Best Films of the Decade (10s)

It's maybe a strange accident all the films on this list are American (save one), but I doubt it. American flag tweet! Dear friends in Europe and abroad: in case it doesn't travel, I am being sarcastic.. In about one to five more years we should get our act back together, electoral-college-strangling-Americarily speaking. I guess all we can do until then is crank out adrenalin-packed escapism and say: 'Yo, world, why not disappear down the rabbit hole mit uns? Wir haben CBD!'

Argue about ART in cinema as art if thou wish but there's no reality anymore. There is no 'morality' to rail against, no church imposing enough to incite fascist riots at surrealist anti-papal movie screenings. All western institutions have long learned to incorporate their own critiques ("fight corporations with Coke!") as per Debord's concept of recuperation; even homesickness has become an escapist fantasy. Kansas mud-mired Dorothy misses Oz so much she keeps hitting herself on the head to simulate a tornado, but with every visit, the Technicolor of Oz fades just a bit more to muddy red, and back in Kansas she finds her vision has permanently blurred from all the concussions. It's called addiction, Dorothy! And one look at your Kansas reality and we can't quite blame you.

Myth is the mirror shield with which we may behold Medusa. Straight-up, the gorgon offers only the wrong kind of stoning. This factors into these choices: 2011's Melancholia  is way too apt for repeat viewings. I cried during Tree of Life (also 2011) but I watched it in the theater minutes after I had taken shrooms, and then learned my dad was dying, so the fact I had a spiritual experience disqualifies my judgement.  After six viewings, I still am only halfway to appreciating Inherent Vice. Maybe I'd resonate differently with it if I lived in LA? It took me 20 viewings to appreciate Big Lebowski. What a ride that's "been."

These are the films from this decade that vibrated my kundalini fibers with their astonishing then-ness. You may disagree, but what does it matter? This kind of decade is beyond mere time and passing, it's become like a marijuana plant trimmed at the top so it grows out, fertile but stunted, outward bound.

See also:

Best of the -00s: (2000-2010

 Best of the -80s: (1980-1989)

1. IT FOLLOWS

(2015) Dir. David Thomas Mitchell

Scary without being cruel or callous, sweet without being corny, David Thomas Mitchell has made one of the most succinct and scariest cinematic coming-of-age myths ever, with the best scary cool analog synth score not made by John Carpenter. A dream-past reverie on that mortal moment when we realize we're now 'grown' and not 'growing' --so we begin running from death as it runs to meet us fast as a mental patient's relentless stalking countdown. Seeking immortality in the sexual drive, 'passing it on' through the generations (Life as the original STD), the horror of birth and fear of death commingled like atoms to form the core of what makes 80s slasher movie tropes our new Grimm's Fairy Tales archetypal lexicon. Beautiful pink and blue lights and 70s suburban shadows make every shot a luminous poem alive with vaguely 30s two-strip color used on films like the original Mystery at the Wax Museum. A masterpiece. (see: It's a Carpenter Hush)

2. SICARIO

(2015) Dir Denis Villeneuve

There is an eerie enigmatic near-Apocalypse of the Lambs artistry at work in this tale of an Arizona FBI rookie brought into the murky world of CIA drug dealer assassinations that marks Villeneuve as the premiere stylist of the decade. The refreshingly ominous and abstract use of sound, the way Jóhann Jóhannsson's droning ominous synthesizer casts an intoxicating pall over the proceedings, as if the bottom is slowly dropping out in an endless elevator to Hell that opens out onto the sky at the same time, the naturalistic low-key dialogue, the vast empty spaces, and one of the best scenes of slow building tension and violent explosion (at the Mexico-US border crossing traffic) ever. As the moral compass Emily Blunt whispers through the whole movie like a lover trying not to wake her kids. Brolin and del Toro have such chemistry they're reminiscent of Clu and Lee in the '64 KILLERS. The easy realism of the various military-CIA-Texas Ranger joint-op briefings recalls the best Hawks' men-in-group maturity, which is so rare it must be savored, like a last meal.

3. MOTHER

(2017) Directed by Darren Aronofsky

One of the trippiest, wildest, most insane biblical fables ever, it's also a perfect emblem of its #metoo / Greta and the Global Meltdown moment. Here we have Woman as Earth, as avenger and astro-turf for that grinding, rending, overpopulating violent plague, humanity. As someone who has spent his fair share of really bad acid trips at over-crowded house parties (in my own house!), with people I don't know rummaging through my room (and me tongue stop-tied toot out kick them), is how we never really notice the moment a single night's poetry book release party with a handful of fans on the front lawn devolves into a full scale riot, and then beyond, all in real time, as Jennifer Lawrence moves from room to room of her house, trying to prevent each new destructive urge in her uninvited guests. It's so familiar I began to feel that old tang on my tongue. I wanted to run to my room and lock the door before the seagulls could strip it dry in search of souvenirs to lick for possible holy lysergic residue. With Javier Bardem as the all-forgiving poet husband/god, always inviting in more and more of the great unwashed, rationalizing each new atrocity with his endless capacity for fogiveness. It's beyond horrible, back into blissful, and farther into the abyss of religious allegorical truth than any other film since Dogville. It's weird, but it's not as sadistic or pretentious as some of Aronofsky's earlier work, depending on your tolerances for atrocity. It's the allegory we deserve, and Jennifer Lawrence--so terrible in her last few 'big' pictures (ala X-Men)--redeems herself in spades as her generation's golden wild child. (more)

4. ENTER THE VOID

(2010) (dir. Gaspar Noe)

Death never had it so good: sex, drugs, techno, the Buddhist's wheel of fear and desire roulette afterlife, every drug dealer's worst nightmare is realized. A panic attack for all seasons, with some dynamo Fantasia 2001-meets-Tron lightshows, it simultaneously makes religion and pornography obsolete. It's the Sidpa bardo (look it up!) and the relentless quest for a new fertilized egg to incarnate in, and then the shattering realization that after all that soul I AM drifting, rebirth bring just another prison, this one of dirty diapers and the terror of motherless nighttime, rather than the loneliness of drifting through a completed level of a computer game, never finding that one key that unlocks the next. Noe's talent is without measure: savage, psychedelically-enhanced to the point of madness, but never incoherent, simplistic or pretentious. Maybe racist, and misogynist, and strangely pro-life, but so honest about it, so relentlessly scathing, and filled with so many intensely psychedelic day-glo tableaux, it can't help but leave you transformed, especially on a lot of cough syrup. (read more here)

5. MOONRISE KINGDOM

(2012) Dir. Wes Anderson

Pair-bond romance has always been Wes Anderson's weak point: he tends to focus on the childhood friendship of two (or sometimes three) boys and/or immature men, often ne'er do wells or scoundrels which a girl--usually more mature--comes painfully betwixt, if at all. But in this, his so-far only true love story, and he nails it by making the pair too young to be out and about without disproving adult permission, and too cool to let that stop them. when pushed. They do not cower! With her dark eye shadowed fox eyes and focused fearless deadpan expression, 14 year-old Kara Hayward is to Wes Anderson as Lauren Bacall was to Hawks, or Lana Del Rey to Val Lewton, and the effect is the same; Jared Gilman as her opposite number, an intrepid woodsman orphan, is shorter and seemingly younger, with owlish glasses and a Daniel Boone cap, but possessed of an eerie confidence and curiosity that sets him leagues apart from the 'average' shy and smitten doofusness so many lesser directors mistake for 'real' kid behavior. He's a badass.

We all have felt this type of heady connection, this thrilling outlaw romance, at some point in our lives, I hope. I would regret anyone missing it, this lightning bolt that comes at any age, at any time. Whether we either rise to its challenge or drown it, like a wolf cub in the bathtub, is up to us. Moonrise Kingdom commands you help this pair of cool lovers escape parental and societal constraints; don't impede them, or you will get bit. And this is maybe the best and most undrowned wolf of a film Anderson film he's ever released into the wild. A true wolf whirlwind, it's full of great animal totems, woodcraft, folklore, park ranger-style factoids, and Francoise Hardy and two of the coolest kid/characters in movies since 1979's Over the Edge.

6. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

(2015) Dir. George Miller

Miller's fourth Max film takes the big truck chase climax of the The Road Warrior and stretches it two hours into the void, filling it full of sunbleached women, Nordic mutants and crazy vehicles, a whole dense future warlord-led fiefdom in a sterile desert wasteland, where water, gasoline, and bullets are the currency that runs the small corner of the world, but everyone is decked out, and when the warlord and his mobile horde descend from their fertile mesa, they naturally have a kettle drummer and a mutant albino wailing on an electric guitar that's also a flame thrower to spur the gang to higher speeds. It left some critics too shellshocked to applaud but most of us had our socks blown off so far they drifted in astral winds, and we loved it. George Miller may have fumbled with the dreadfully PG Thunderdome, but this more than makes up for it. With its bright blazing graphic novel colors (those deep reds!) it's always a joy to look at, and edited so quick and with such a dense, character-infested, mythically coherent mise-en-scene, it can stand a trillion re-viewings and still have termite details left to unfurl.

7. LADY BIRD
(2017) Written and directed by Greta Gerwig

Neither shying away from the romantic faux pas nor the cool little moments of triumph that come with growing up artsy but confident, here's a Catholic school girl movie that avoids all the tired (albeit necessary) sexual endangerment/obsession tropes we get with all the 'women's coming-of-age' stories (the ones written by dudes). Gerwig allows us clearly autobiographical triumphant sing-outs like the take-down of the visiting anti-abortion rally speaker, the inspiring albeit ridiculous aspects of an after-school drama club, and the disillusionment that comes with first-time sex. In a rapid series of stunning vignettes and perfectly-realized moments, we get the story, not of some 'average' girl buffeted by the winds of change in her rocky search for the right guy to surrender her freedom to, but of a specific strong-willed young woman who couldn't be conventional if she tried, and thank god. Not quite as mature as she acts but totally free of anything resembling a cliche'd trait, lovingly embodied by star Saoirse Ronan. An amazing achievement that fulfills the halo of stoner grace I saw over Great Gerwig as far back as 2009's Baghead. But this is Gerwig's Live through This, her Exile in Guyville. It's the writing on the wall outside the gates of Eden, written in the blood of uncored apples.

Good ole Fashioned Florida Tie:

8.a. THE FLORIDA PROJECT

(2017) Dir. Sean Baker

For all her ratchet tats, foxy Bria Vinaite is hellfire and ice cream as a wildchild young jaguar mom, raising wild children who create, cause and relish in danger (the "project" is a cheap unofficially residential motel near Disneyland, inhabited by various transient families eking by week-to-week while their children run amok in the parking lot). I generally avoid 'social worker' movies (one has her eye on Bria due to her occasional trick turning to pay the bills), but I actually love these amok kids as they're not doe-eyed symbols of a failed welfare state but wild and free in that rare and vivid primal force state of Over her Edge and Wild Boys of the Road. Willem DaFoe's protective but vaguely annoyed presence as the hotel manager suggests another form of 'great 70s dad' as a kind of peripheral game warden, keeping the lion cubs away from poachers, but otherwise letting them do as they will provided they don't make more work for him. I even liked the CPS people - who try their best to do their job and aren't far wrong in their diagnosis. Meanwhile it's the summer and the gorgeous Florida skies have seldom looked more candy flip delightful, overrun with deep purples and greens that vibrate against the clear blue in some truly breathtaking panoramas, as when a rainbow surreptitiously arrives overhead. All beautifully and elegantly framed; every scene throbs with a vibrant resonant life, for better or worse. Scenes like when Bria brings her child to a hotel open brunch bar ("Just walk in like we're guests") glimmer with something of the profound mythic magic we used to get out of Tennessee Williams. In sum, a masterpiece.

8.b. THE BEACH BUM

 (2019) Dir. Harmony Korine

Harmony Korine has found a second home down in old Florida, apparently, and between Beach Bum and 2011's Spring Breakers must be having a high old time. It's palpable and this film has a great druggy mystical flow that only a wally would consider dull or self-indulgent (though who knows, the next time I see it I might feel that way --Korine's films are like that, then again so are Kubrick's). The great Matthew McConaughey does his thing better than ever as the titular Bum, flowing through life as a kind of Bukowski-Robert Hunter (no doubt similar to Harmony himself), welcomed and revered wherever he goes --a total fantasy only the MaMaCon could make so palpable and believable a contact high rolls right through the sceen. Here's a fantasy for every freshman poetry major on his first joint or shroom trip: fame in a world that looks the other way when he commits assault on a passers-by, or smashes his way out of rehab with an amped-up speed freaak Zac Effron -- whaaa?. Like Spring Breakers (a close runner-up), a great 4-AM movie for coming down of ecstasy, listening with your bedroom lights off and via good headphones while the rest of your threesome is asleep on the other end of the massive king-size hotel suite bed, sleeping off their intentionally taken half-a-Rohypnols. Unafraid to put his mouth where the money is, HarKor keeps both films twisting in the mind like a slow burning big joint still drying after being moistened by a very sticky mouth. Very.... very sticky, to the point these films slither out of any conventional genre confines, link back up with Gummo and Julien Donkey-boy, and set up shop right in your cerebellum 4 life. (see Air Auda Beya Lah).

Gone-wrong Brothers' Tie

9.a. HELL OR HIGH WATER

(2016) Dir David McKenzie

When lesser writers do these chamber piece rural Texas bank robber brother-bonding odysseys they get hung up on big messy Oscar-bait emotional dot-connecting rather than great dialogue and naturalistic moments (i.e. more drinking, less romance). Here it's all written the way the bank robbing pair of brothers--specially the older, wilder jailbird one (Ben Foster), might talk, but with a kind of Cormac McCarthy/Elmore Leonard concisely mytho-poetic hipster brilliance. They constantly surprise us with their natural, easygoing back and forth. Both actors (Chris Pine is the 'clean record' one) are brilliantf. We also have the laconic, near-retired sheriff (a marvelously laconic Jeff Bridges), his Navajo (but half-Mexican and devout Christian!) deputy, and all the lawyers and bank tellers and waitresses in between. They don't need those artificial 'weathered' facial cracks big budget films give people in the Heartland to give off the feeling of being where they are. Here the flat endless horizon-line is a kind of TV, everyone trains their eyes on it and they stare at each other the same way, waiting for one or the other to make a move for their gun or proclaim it's "beer o-clock". Chris Pine more than lives up to the promise of those steely blue eyes -- moving so deep into character you'd swear he was found by a roaming casting director hitchhiking through Arlington. I had lines of his and his brothers' ringing in my head for weeks afterwards while writhing with the flu a few years back - and I Still love it. It's only drawback, some very ROTM country songs on the soundtrack.

9.b. GOOD TIME

(2017) Dir. The Safdie Brothers

This is a certain strata of outer borough living a lot of us 'aging hipster' New Yorkers don't really get to know anymore, not since the advent of cell phones made scoring so much simpler. And as rents rise, the lower world dregs are continually pushed farther and farther uptown, and marijuana more and more decriminalized, it becomes hard to find them. That's why scenes like the one with twitchy Jennifer Jason Leigh desperately trying to shout her way onto one of her mom's long-canceled credit cards from the bail bondsman's office will kind of blow your mind. The Safdies capture the mix of slumming thrills and the way some twitchy but charming hustler (Robert Pattinson) sweeps you up in their drama so fast that what started as you buying a dime bag and getting the hell back to your friends downtown winds up in you putting up your car up as bail collateral for someone you barely know after running from the police with a head full of angel dust you didn't know you'd smoked and taking another of your dealer's friends to a hospital ER, hoping to get him admitted before the cops show up and you have to run all over again, and you're too young and/or naive and/or nice and/or stoned to figure out how to make your goodbyes and extricate you from this hustler's Jenga hodge podge of quick fixes before it topples down into handcuffs or a bullet. Whew! Sorry that was all one sentence but that's how this film moves, vibrant pulsing and rolling through the murk most of us just ride past in a Lyft or Arecibo on our way to JFK, and not without good reason. (more)

10. MALEFICENT

(2014) Dir. Robert Stromberg

Scripted with great sensitivity and Jungian Girls who Run with the Wolves-ish archetypal revisionist moxy by Linda Woolverton, this 'other side of the story' operates on the presumption there's more to Jolie's joyless laugh and a peerless sense of wry poise than we might think in our snide, sexist, dismissive tabloid cover disdain moments. There is. I know a girl or two just like her in AA and maybe they're cold for similar reasons, for here we have the origin story for why beautiful women become marble-cold and it's not just because they don't want to crack their make-up. Here, at last, never before in any Disney film, is a mythic contextualization of that unforgivably common social evil --date rape. One doesn't realize the extent of it as a problem of female maturity until its finally made mythic. Now it all makes sense. The resulting film, for all its beauty and fairy tale shimmer, is as alchemically healing as a caustic salve, brought up from deep murky chthonic of a growing girl's true poltergeist power, and slathered on all over the place while censorious moms and stern patriarchs can do nothing but moan in shame for letting it come to this through their centuries of their 'don't ask/don't listen' parenting and blind trust in authority figures. With art direction that can stand proudly next to the Pre-Raphaelite work of Edward Burne-Jones, J.W. Waterhouse, Michael Parkes, Maxfield Parrish, and William Blake, Maleficent's fairy kingdom pulses and writhes in ways that make every frame worthy of one. Trees grow and change at an accelerated rate; warriors of stone and tree root rise up from the ground on command; beings small and large fly and shimmer at night in ways Max Reinhardt would have been jealous of in his 1935 production of Midsummer Night's Dream. And this time there's not a single Mickey Rooney to grab the mic - it's a lady's show the whole way through - all the men can do is sulk about it, not even their best princely kisser need apply. (see also: CinemArchetype 11: The Wild, Wise Woman.)

Too bad about the sequel though. Pair with The Black Swan and/or Moonrise Kingdom for more women in black feathers clawing and cawing their way towards Dietrich in Shanghai Express-level coolness.

 SPECIAL MENTION FOR THESE TWO

MASTERWORKS OF ANACHRONISM:

These films came out in the 10s, but are they really from that decade? One is so rooted in the decor and vibe of the early-70s that it's almost a time capsule. It could also well be from some magical Arthurian pre-Christian chthonic paradise of matriarchal herbscraft -- figure it out for yourself, but irregardless, the colors, the unified art, music, costumes, colors and deliberately (I hope) stilted acting, all signify the arrival of a true wunderkind, Anna Biller. The other on this list is the result of Orson Welles acolyte Peter Bogdanovich finally finishing the master's great lost, long-in-legal-limbo, ever-in-progress, final masterpiece, shot mostly in the mid-60s-early 70s, and a towering titanic, if madly egotistical, achievement

 THE LOVE WITCH

(2016) Written and directed by Anna Biller

The drugs in this amber brew are potent, vibrant and rich, infused with an ingeniously stilted ceremonial acting style; thou cannot help but succumb to the film's cohesive look and sound, its adept deconstruction and Pagan rearrangement of the kind of pre-Quixote romantic Thoth Tarot blueprint for mythologizing reality into delirious love overload. Teen girls smitten with Disney and afternoon soap operas might imagine Love Witch while taking a mid-afternoon nap but never dream it could be a movie. Brechtian dissolution of the 'western eye' and a cohesive, eerily familiar beauty... Wait, is that even a sentence? Why am I getting so relaxed? What's in this flax, flaks... flask? I know now what love is, and it's fucking terrifying, but colorful, and Ennio is there. (See Bell, Book, and Hallucinogenic Tampon)

<img border="0" data-original-height="736" data-original-width="1442" height="203" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9YfYJjt2z6M/XBpr1eTPlLI/AAAAAAAA7jQ/1lYc8XvT3pANvJEObv0iHoaAdCED8sdpgCLcBGAs/s400/Screen%2BShot%2B2018-12-19%2Bat%2B11.02.13%2BAM.png" style="border-radius: 0px; border: 1px solid rgb(255, 255, 255); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) 0px 0px 20px; color: #920101; font-family: georgia, utopia, "palatino linotype", palatino, serif; font-size: medium; padding: 8px; position: relative;" width="400" />

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND

(2018) Dir. Orson Welles (w/ Peter Bogdanovich)

Thanks to the more decisive, less debilitatingly brilliant, mind of long-time Welles' friend and biographer, director Peter Bogdanovich, and state-of-the-art digital remastering, the last unfinished Welles film about the last day in the life of a Wellesian director working on his last, unfinished film is finally.... well, finished. What makes it even more meta is that Peter Bogdanovich plays such a key character in the film, as more or less himself, and he finished it, with John Huston filling in for Orson. Together they seem to be working through the angles of male friendship, biographer-subject, father-son, remora-shark, fan-hero, and apostle-Christ --which suits the unique nature of the finished product so well it seems like fate--like the ultimate metatextual Welles flourish, as if he knew the film couldn't be finished until long enough after he died that Bogdanovich could use digital means to clean-up the film stock and have the chutzpah to tackle such a mammoth project. It may be Bogdanovich's best film as well as one of Welles's, with film quality and sound are so good it's hard to imagine this wasn't all filmed a few months ago -it's actually better than new, even, since it's on 35mm film - and every frame is lovingly color-saturated or otherwise cleaned up to the point it all shines better than any new dime minted in the last 25 years. It's not perfect, the inscrutable Native American actress lead seems to have an allure understood only by Welles, as neither we nor that camera seem to figure it out (especially when her greasy make-up starts dripping off in the rain), though she does come alive briefly in the kinky Suspiria-lit sex car scene, and the mix of egotistic moveable feast self-indulgence phony 'Art' (Welles thinks he can indulge as long as he frames it all as a film-within-a-film) remains open to debate. Then again, who cares? We're in the 20s now - where release dates no longer have meaning. (see longer entry, in best of 2018 here)

MORE:

Erich's All-Time Favorite 25 Films

Great Women of Horror - Acidemic Top Ten.

Horror of Women Month: 13 Haunted Girls

10 Great Movies for a New Years Day Hangover

BEST OF 2019
BEST OF 2018

BEST OF 2017

BEST OF 2016
BEST OF 2015

BEST OF 2014

BEST OF 2013

BEST OF 2012

BEST OF 2011

BEST OF 2010

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-66965204043691231702019-12-26T20:08:00.003-05:002020-04-13T10:10:21.881-05:00Best of 2019

It's all over, man, the year, the decade, the Great White Way, the coral, picnics (thanks to the killer bees) and fresh water. The burning of Australia and the flooding of somewhere else considered little more than deep state fake news by our twittering Nero. So what, you say? As Rodney Dangerfield once said, "So!? So let's dance!"

If 2017 was the year of the Woman, and 2018 was the year of howling rage, 2019 is the year of the fuck-it let's show last year's uninvolving Suspiria remake what a real Satanic dancing school rehearsal/dorm space looks like! So as dancing while old white paragons wheeze out swan song farewells as young women and/or non-white/non-straight men danced ecstatically while tripping their faces off, there were one but three films with long-haired dudes hanging out by the seaside getting loaded! Maybe five if you count Quentin's.

I'm sure there were other movies floating around worthy of note I haven't seen, like Hitler the Rabbit, Her Smell (which has one character up to the task of being as off the rails as three of these other movies, and the rest of the cast just circling around, trying to harsh her mellow, and then succeeding) and/or that Bong Jon movie we kept meaning to see at the Alamo but was always sold out. If I see anything else good I'll fold it in here later, and act like I wasn't too lazy to get out of the house back when it was on big screens.

I'm Gen-X, and I'm on massive meds, so don't blame me if four films on here are superheroes you can see how none of it is my fault.

1. THE BEACH BUM

Dir. Harmony Korine

One of a trio of neo-'head' movies (along with Climax and Midsommar) that marks 2019 as the year psychedelics became the new weed (and weed became a nootropic), The Beach Bum is a probably loosely autobiographical work of art from Harmony Korine starring a perfectly cast Matthew McConaughey - in the role he was meant to play ever since he fist rolled onto the scene in the ultimate high school initiation movie, Dazed and Confused. Korine takes that same druggy ASMR stream-of-consciousness flow--wherein reality is both captured and transcended, i.e. the actual experience of being on drugs, and I mean good drugs, the kind of drugs that make drugs worth doing... and... uh where was I? Poetry?! The fantasy that one can be a filthy rich and known and beloved by all while being nothing but a hairbag poet (my dad's phrase for me in college). That one can sell a poetry book and cash-in the way someone like JK Rowling might in real life, albeit with poetry, and that you might be the recipient of a Pulitzer and zillions and all sorts of free weed from Florida locals like Snoop Dogg. Like Korine's previous movie, Spring Breakers, this seems a great 'four-AM, strung out on cough syrup or coming down of ecstasy, listening to it with the lights on synchronized color changes and via good headphones while the rest of your threesome is asleep on the other end of the massive king-size hotel suite bed, sleeping off their intentionally taken half-a-Rohypnols' kind of a film. It's also what you show your grandmother before convincing her to give you a massive loan. (see Air Auda Beya Lah).

 2. CLIMAX

Dir Gaspar Noe

Gaspar Noe's super bizarro dance troupe amok on too-much LSD administered without their knowledge at a pre-tour/post-rehearsal party: Sofia Boutella, the lush sinuous Algerian dancer/actress (she was the latest incarnation of The Mummy and a cute alien in Star Trek: Beyond, etc.) stars, or is the most recognizable and sympathetic of the gathered dancers, though we only follow her about 1/4 or so of the time as Noe's ever-mingling camera merges the difference between a restless eavesdropping mingler and a choreographer using the party and its wild aftermath/devolution as the ultimate in a fusion of dance/party/collective insanity breakdown, and as an instrument of dance in itself. Aside from a few prolonged stationary shots such as the overhead shot from above during the big dance that breaks the first half (the rehearsal, the "normal" partying) with the second half, the twirling, dissolution, the camera never stops moving. The last 40 minutes seems to unfold all in real time, as incidents of sex, violence and druggy desperation with just one notable moment being when a girl accidentally lights her hair on fire while trying to smoke crack/freebase and deny it to some other joneser at the same time, and is in turn just walked past while the dancer we follow stalks the full length of the rehearsal space and the adjoining lounge, dorm rooms, and bathroom, looking for an escape back to some kind of sanity. Only time, sex, sleep, death, and the dawn's early police raid might bring this.

The dancer's ferocity is so convincing and the flow from organized normalcy (if their wild-but-controlled arcane dancing style, a mix of modern and street, filmed as if by a zonked Busby Berkley, can be called normal) to insane madness and finally murder and sexual hook-ups, is so organic that--being dancers all--even in their wracked state their bodies never cease moving and twisting to the throbbing incessant music, blurring the lines between this as an 'acid test' tragedy horror film and a kind of extended 90 minute dance performance. It seems almost impossible this isn't cinema verité from some weird circle of Hell (this is clearly an annex of the dancing school in Suspiria, and some of the characters seem to sense it, reacting to the blood/black red walls and strange flag ("I don't like that flag, man..." says one of the dancers). Since we barely see anything of the real world, aside from the snow right outside the front door (ala a group happening Shining), we lose contact with the real world as much as the actors, leaving us lost in the same weird cabin fever collective break. Watch it again and again! It's on Prime. Leave all hope behind. (see The Broken Dagger Mirror in the High of the Beholder).

3. MIDSOMMAR

Dir. Ari Aster

Though the tripping feels pretty real in the first two films on this list, thanks to some great sound mixing and the wild dancer amok grace of the talented young cast, the visuals of tripping are fantastically rendered only here, in this horror movie about the strange experiences of a deeply depressed young woman (Florence Pugh) who invites herself along on her boyfriend Christian's (!) spring break jaunt to a remote agrarian commune in Sweden, where they are pretty knowledgable about how to get you super high with just a drink of mead or a puff of powder into your unsuspecting puss. Sign me up! The best sex scene of the year occurs with the entirety, nearly, of the female population of said cult/commune, breathing in unison, and other stuff is so super weird yet logical and maybe saner than our own amok over-populated shithole of a normal world that you may find yourself smiling too.

Bobby "Haxan Cloak" Krlic's avant garde string-heavy score might veer strangely close to Colin Stetson's for Aster's previous instant horror classic Hereditary - especially near the end, when the Phillip Glassy synth drones and cascading triplets come flowing into a kind of transformative sound re-baptism - but he gets the paranoid long-bowing bottom-dropping coccyx- tingling drones, Lygeti-esque solar wind socking, and encounter group breath work flowing through the barn door cracks to just the perfect level of strange. The visitors, a conglomeration of Americans and--to the side--some Brits--are the right kind of bewildered, hunched over body language, cynical attitudes, and especially in the case of Florence Pugh's heroine and her passive-aggressive boyfriend, unable to let go of old programming. (Ed Note: It took me a second view to see how much the film is really about modern young people's romantic entanglements, the way guys especially lack the guts to break up with a girl, nor to commit fully to her, so the result is a kind of frustrating non-committal half-assed distance bound to drive any woman nuts). Once Pugh does break free, we see enough great moments and the 'truest' hallucinations ever in cinema - you have to watch every flower very closely, and the pupils! And it's probably the most even-keeled examination of communal life ever, showing the pros and cons of everything from the collapse of privacy, the loss of independent thought, the way 'breathing method' panting seems here a seamless part of conception, and the lack of abjectification within the ranks---it leaves us reeling in a kind of dream daze that the rest of the film takes and--if not runs with--certainly walks in imperceptibly slight slow-motion ceremonial clockwork steps with, right into the fire. (full)

4. ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.

Dir Quentin Tarantino

The heavy thoughts of Manson and his Cielo Drive slaughter hangs over the first two hours or so of this film like an ominous portent, which only makes the big climax all the more cathartic - no spoilers. For a lot of us fans in the last year or so, hearing Tarantino was going to do a film about the Manson murders was as exciting as hearing Scorsese was going to do a first-person narrated mob story starring De Niro as an Irish hitman. Of all the tired, overly-eulogized scenes to explore --there were like eight Manson movies that year alone (including the dreadful but nicely dusky Bad Times at the El Royale). But we should not have worried. That's QT's big trick in his last four films, a long leisurely drive that we don't even know is setting a slow boil tension until it explodes in a full bore catharsis. The costumes and sights of LA, the endless great diegetic songs, that roar to life on radios of gorgeous period cars, and die as suddenly with every ignition key twist; it all denotes the hand of a confident master. Unlike Scorsese's Irishman, here there's no end need for a priest, God is clear as a bell, thanks to the miracle of film. Though it's hard to take Leo serious as a young western actor hero, he once again proves he makes a superb villain, which is one of the characters we see him playing for the film within the film, who bonds with the precocious omega-wave feminist child actor his character is holding hostage. Little bits of brilliance pepper throughout and Brad Pitt steals the show with his deadpan elan, though we also get a horde of cool young horror auteurs and up-and-comers including Kansas BC Butcher Bowling and Samantha Love Witch Robinson as either Manson girls or cool well-costumed friends of Margot Robbie's super sexily-attired Sharon Tate. Re-establishing herself as the super-talented fox of the hour, Robbie's wide-eyed innocent wonder conveys vast oceans of innocence and allure with very few words. Then there's her shadow opposite, a filthy but alluring Manson girl named Pussycat played by a fabulous Margaret Qualley who shares a long drive with a Brad 'statutory-rape-avoidance-made-cool' Pitt.

Tarantino's camera meanwhile roves the rooftops looking down on the highways and mansion pool parties like some omnipotent spirit made nonetheless FOMO restless by the Santa Ana winds. Who has ever visited LA who couldn't relate to that terrible but sexy yearning for that next party? And along the way we're treated to little digressions and eddies in the current, as when Tate cruises downtown and ends up seeing a Matt Helm movie she's in (The Wrecking Crew), showing off karate moves she learned from Bruce Lee (a perfectly cast Mike Moh) during his martial arts stuntman training days (while also playing Kato on the short-lived Green Hornet TV series). Another highlight: Leo's crushing realization of his advancing age and irrelevance, comforted by an up-and-coming precocious child actress (Julia Butters) who will shortly be his terrifying characters' innocent hostage. Little precious moments abound: all of working Hollywood taking an 8PM breather to tune into FBI on TV, as able to be subsumed into the hypnotic lull of a gripping narrative as much as anyone else. The climax measured and exhilarating, just much as the one in Django. And who can't relate to Leo's big tantrum of despair trashing his dressing room after flubbing his lines, rueing the fact he drank eight whiskey sours last night instead of the two or three he was intending? I sure can't.

5. LOUD TIE:

5a. THE IRISHMAN

Dir. Theorella Laguardia

Marty may be an old codger by now, but his awe of the wiseguys from that neighborhood never seems to fade. By now those old thugs must feel like museum pieces, especially with their unconvincing young person CGI botox (their bronzed faces nearly tumble into the Uncanny Valley; Pacino looks like he just had oral surgery and the novocaine isn't wearing off) but it's nice to see Joe Pesci in a restrained performance for a change -- and he's aces as an older mediary wiseguy in this vivid, funny, low-key Wild Strawberryfellas. Fans of the Bloods a Rover trilogy from James Elroy will be pleased as we get our lead's small but key roles in both Bay of Pigs to the Hoffa vanishing. The last half lags with way too much of De Niro's union thug trying to get Pacino's Hoffa to heed the warnings that things are about to get at the "It is what it is" stage due to his flagrant defiance of mafia edicts. Meanwhile when Hoffa's wife finally gets a line or two, the whole film seems to do a double take as no women have had speaking roles for the last hour and a half.

Al Pacino is here this time, acting in a Scorsese movie at last, and as with Avengers and Toy Story 4, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood we sense we're in a 'capstone' project for an aging patriarchal superstructure - equal parts elegy, celebration, spiritual last gasp /holy key brass ring grasp, and victory lap. But hey - you could edit Irishman together with Goodfellas and Casino and have one long seamless film lasting about 12 hours, especially if you could get over seeing Joe and Bobby in three separate roles, acting out numerous ages for each character while various ages themselves. Like old Don Fanucci at the San Genarro puppet show it might be the violence that gets to you, but the comedy is for keeps. Besides, why obey Marty's film snob edicts you should watch it all in one go and shun Marvel and small screens? I know I'm the last wit in the sphere to suggest you watch this on your phone in ten minute installments at an airport and loudly proclaim "it's pretty good but it ain't no Aquaman" but express it I will. These are the good times.

The real scene stealers here, despite all the heavy hitters, are really Ray Romano as a neighborhood union lawyer, and Anthony Palitano as a bar owner and Harvey Keitel, seething with silver-eyed menace as one of the big capos of the five families. His chemistry with De Niro, stretching back to Marty's big break-out hit, Mean Streets, seems to come to an icy climax.

Best of all is the historical connection between World War 2 and the rise of the mafia, both before and after. Remember that the nation was suddenly inundated with unemployed young men with experience killing people. The original flood of Forgotten Men in the Great War led to bootlegging empires thanks to Prohibition. After the second great war, it's unions, pension-skimming, extortion, and loansharking. De Niro's amiable brute learns to kill shooting unarmed German prisoners. Alas the whole back hour kind of runs out of steam as Scorsese tries to blend his loftier notions (the Silence, Kundun, Passion of the Chirst side) with his gangster bread and butter. Bergman seems to be what all New York auteurs strive to emulate, but he ended his film on time if you remember. Strawberries barely seemed like an end at all, how can a film so deeply about death end in a way that doesn't feel redundant? But The Irishman doesn't realize the hopelessness of winning such a bargain. The result, like the elderly characters themselves, it just waits there at the end, expecting something to happen and being forced to wait even longer than the film can stick around.

40 years on, and De Niro still hasn't started talkin'.

5.b. UNCUT GEMS

Dir. The Safdie Brothers

One of those frantic 'last 24 hours in the life of a deranged gambler' style movies, the Safdie's latest is a riveting, embedded tale of a diamond district lunatic played by Adam Sandler, who seems born to be hustling around the Jewish jeweler with the gaudy but high-end taste that makes him the go-to guy for athletes and rappers. Too bad he never pays his debts, ever trying to win enough money to bet on a basketball game so he can pay back his loansharking brother-in-law and also live like a king. The action centers around the titular gem, a crazy 'stuff that dreams are made of' mcguffin that turns the action with an almost magic force. Still, as with past Safdie films, this feels so fly on the wall realistic the center gem is almost not needed. You may feel the need to take a shower afterwards, all the testosterone and loud cologne and taxi exhaust seeps into your pores, and it's not as swirlingly psychedelic as the more nocturnal Good Time but Uncut Gems is still a propulsive masterpiece that owes as much to Abel Ferrara as Scorsese, yet seems to outpace them both, with Daniel Lopatin's amniotic analog synth score coursing through its veins like an amphetamine B-12 shot.

6. TOY STORY 4

Dir Josh Cooley

The more our characters change in the Toy Story series the more they stay the same, but meanwhile-- thanks to Woody's 'never leave a toy behind' Munchausen-by-proxy neediness--there's never a shortage of rescues to be made out in the cruel world. Wow-settings include a traveling carnival sandbox packed with childless toys and an antique store policed by a quartet of ventriloquist dummies and a ceramic old school doll with the best limpid pool evil eyes in the history of animation -and it's the villain! Voiced by Christina Hendricks, she's both beguiling and terrifying. There is also the big debut 'good' character is 'Forky' a character Bonnie (the human owner) glues together on her first day in kindergarten. (The film never asks why she never makes a single friend). Thing is, Forky was made from junk Woody fished out of the trash in his micro-managing hovering. And Forky liked it there, but Woody won't let him die since he's so determined to keep Bonnie sheltered and cut off. In other words, Forky is a combination Frankenstein monster ("me... love dead") and any alcoholic or drug addict, with Woody as the hovering co-dependent 'fixer.' Randy Newman sings "I can't let you throw yourself away" over a montage of Woody pulling Forky from the trash over and over, addicts and alcoholics will surely recognize the pattern of that person in your life who continually comes over to run interventions rather than letting you disappear down the rabbit hole (Forky considers the trash warm and safe, like a good bottle of whiskey or shot of smack.)

As with Avengers: Endgame, there's a bit too many tearful goodbyes at the end, more or less stopping the film dead in its tracks to indulge in them, over and over, like a depressive Irish mother off her meds, but there are so many hilarious details and gorgeously observed moments (the residents of Bonnie's closet asking the less-played-with Woody what he'll name his first dust bunny), massive streaks of feminism (though possible lesbian Rosie-the-Riveter overtones aren't developed) and great bits from Key and Peele as a pair of never-won stuffed animals at a carnival toss game, that Hanks' overbearing caregiver schtick can be halfway forgiven.

7. BOOKSMART

Dir. Olivia Wilde

Sure, it's Superbad for girls-ish, an all in a single night/day "better cram all our partying into one wild time before graduation" flick. Certainly one can't do ecstasy and then be 'down' a beat later, especially if it's your first time even drinking; and sure, it's almost logically impossible for all the things that happen to happen before dawn. But hey, one look at the credits--which include a crew and production team of so many damned women--and it's a thunderstruck galvanizing moment. Lady Bird  may have launched the volley, but this is the film that slays the oncoming charge, the backlash brigade. The only sex on display is a lesbian third base foul in the bathroom with pouty beauty Diana Silvers (Ma) but the main thing is the intense screwball comedy patter between Kaitlyn Denver (a revelation) and Beanie Feldstein (the pal in Lady Bird). What dialogue! What energy! Finally another comedy duo where they know each other's rhythms like real best friends and sweep us along in their tide.

 I wish I had been able to see this movie in high-school instead of shit like My Bodyguard, and all the Stephen King adaptations with their endless bullying and abuse- all of which made it seem like it's impossible to attend school and keep your dignity at the same time. While I don't envy kids growing up in the age of constant texting and slutshaming, (in the 80s, sluts had a very special place in our hearts), at least there's no teacher-ignored assaults and bullying itself is at least less tolerated and therefore less visible. None of the stuff they hope for comes to pass but in the process, they realize there was nothing to fear or be intimidated by in their peers. Maybe that's the lesson America as a whole needs. The enemy has always been in our heads projected onto others and exploited by some sock puppet think tank in Russia. Stop fighting shadows and look deep into the eyes of your mirror foe... Dumbass.

8. LITTLE WOMEN

Directed by Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig uses the classic prestige pic template to herald the arrival of the female Bechdel test 'sister power' auteur and her ability to craft legit art, all in a way that puts the first three adaptations to shame (just kidding, no one is shamed here. The days of shame-based comparisons are done). A roster of familiar faces, including Hermione Granger (as the poor one) and Midsommar's Florence Pugh (as the 'sensible' one who marries Timothée Chalamet's Laurie after he's spurned by) Saoirse Ronan as Jo, once again demonstrating her perfect rapport with Gerwig's dialogue and vision. Its odd 'zipping back-and-forth through time' structure has apparently confused a few viewers not well acquainted with the book or its three more linear previous adaptations. Me, I'm not acquainted nor confused. But in 1994 I saw and loved Gillian Armstrong's Winona Ryder-starring version version. I remember I cried at that one, all boozy and emotional on a rainy Sunday night, all dewy and smitten by Ryder in ways neither Gerwig nor Ronan would encourage/tolerate today. But Chalament makes for much more engaging Laurie than Christian Bale was (Bale always seemed like he was encroaching on some precious girl time with some stealth testosterone). Though I cried less this when the sick sister (Eliza Scanlen) was dying, it might be as I'm now all sober and medicated (but then I remembered Olive, our beloved cat, dead now some months, I was able to quietly bawl along with the chicks I was with). Gerwig stages the descent into soap and romantic foibles as possible fictionalized to placate the publisher's idea of chick lit., which makes it all somehow easier to bear but less ultimately engaging.

For the first half of the film, this is the best movie of the year, all rich with overlapping simultaneously occurring chitchat dialogue as the girls all tumble over each other in brilliantly choreographed movements worthy of a Hawks screwball comedy, albeit with the cinematography of Yorick Le Saux capturing an eternal dusky autumnal period richness and Gerwig's keen familiarity and clear love of the book palpable in every frame. Streep and Chris Cooper are reunited again after Adaptation as the cool older generation and steal all their scenes (this is the rare story with no villains, not even the vaguely patriarchal publisher). A great early moment is a stunning tracking shots of Jo racing excitedly down the crowded period NYC street after selling her first story, and a haunting art gallery-worthy golden hued nighttime train station romantic 'possible concession to the publisher" climax. And of course the various plays and attics, lots of well photographed, orchestrated and attended dances, and some existential moments on a windy beach, and Louis Garrel makes a magnetic Friedric

9. AQUAMAN

Dir. James Wan

The plot may parallel Black Panther, Lion King and a zillion other movies/myths with some positions jostled vis-a-vis rightful heir to the crown battles, just with the ocean instead of Africa, but who cares? The tale was old when it was told in The Lion King and, probably, when Sir Thomas Mallory wrote Le Morte d'Arthur in 1485. It will never get old, as long as there are dudes hanging around guzzling brew instead of reclaiming their kingdoms from bureaucrat usurpers. But much as I mancrush on Jason Momoa, there's one reason why this should be one here, and one reason should be enough: the wet, straggly hair.

There's a moment when we're up close in Nicole Kidman's waterlogged grey (!) straggly dreads when it hits us - the hair in this movie could have gone horribly wrong: anime flat, soft boy gelly, or dry or worse, taped down, the sort of lazy cop-out akin to the having kaiju slap-downs occur on cloudy days (freeing animators from dealing with bothersome afternoon shadows and scale-glint highlights), but director James Wan (Fast and the Furious - the most consistently good dude-friendly action series ever) wisely knows the wet hair makes or breaks this movie and our belief these people are actually underwater rather than just making swimming gestures in slow motion in front of a blue screen. I'll grant you, all the hair isn't that amazing (Heard's artificial candy apple Ariel red) and some of the acting is hammy, especially by Willem Defoe who speaks in that declamatory outdoor voice kind of over-enunciation of Saturday morning cartoons where voice actors talk to each other adult characters like they're really talking to children despite their booming declarativeness and moving their lips in such a way as to make things easy for the dubbing crews to come.

Then you have Patrick Wilson -- one of those items you just keep getting on the menu though you never ordered it, maybe because it's not offensive enough to send back or deliberately request be left off the plate, like the pickle and the little tub of cole slaw at the diner. It might be delicious if you really dug into it, but why would you when there's mighty Dolph Lundgren as the King Triton-cum-Sea Monkey? There's that green spangle scale costume and clashing dyed red hair too on the usually sublime Amber Heard as the girl who brings the Momoa down deep to prevent a massive ocean-land war. Bad color grader, bad!

None of that matters, because this is the best of this kind of Henry V/Arthur-esque scraggly king and his girl and his mother riding in to the wasteland to declare his might against his kingdom's enemies together' movie since Dune. And then there's Jason Mamoa, with his massive beard and super-brooding eyes and gloriously tattooed body, is the kind of king you know you can swig beers with but then proudly serve, not unlike the Hemsworth Thor when we first found him way back in 2005 or whenever. Such a genius casting move to make him all a half-Polynesian / half-Poesidon rather than the towheaded Aryan in green slippers from the comics, and keeping his hair and groovy mods rather than streamlining him to some whitebread DC pap ideal in elvin slippers and orange scales

One weird but strangely hopeful sign too: the presence of a set of African-American father-son high-tech submarine pirates who open the film boring into nuclear subs to kill the crew and steal the nukes. What an idea --an African American father -son bond but they're the bad guys!! It's all well and good to put African Americans as sidekicks and main character heroes, but casting them as villains, for DC that's a huge complexity for which they should be congratulated. Watching them in action, we're so conditioned to scan a pair like this as stars in some underprivileged small scale drama that acknowledging them as evil and the Russian nuclear sub crew as the good guys, runs so counter to a lifetime of movie conditioning it quietly cracks open a long-closed iron door. Are we free of those prisons now? Am I showing my age just by pointing these firsts out?

10. CRAWL

Dir. Alexandra Aja

Kaya Scodelro gives a star-making performance as the tough ex-swim champ who didn't win on her big chance or something, and is heading past the barriers back to her immanently flooded Florida home where divorced handyman dad (Barry Pepper) isn't answering his phone. The result, daughter must rescue dad and dog from an influx of gators from a nearby gator farm, rolling in with a massive catagory 5 hurricane. All things considered (see above), it couldn't be more timely. The sets are amazing -including a massive flooded exterior, where the whole neighborhood, from the house across the street to the gas station, is actually flooded. Rescue teams come by but those gators won't quit. Aja uses every foot of the four stories of the house, from basement up to attic are used to wreak maximum suspense. The gators keep coming, and Haley keeps rising to the challenge leading to a pretty memorable final shot in a rollicking film that keeps one engaged and entertained from the beginning to the end.

11. CAPTAIN MARVEL

Dir. Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck

I know, too many comic book movies in my list/s, but I can't help what I watch or like or what stands as genuine mythic arc lighting and social progress and screw anyone who disagrees. It's funny that Marty Scorsese's dislike of Marvel movies becomes a meme when The Irishman is such a cliche in its format, from Scorsese's regular guy narration to the moments chosen to focus in on, such as Joe Pesci's irritation with his wife's smoking in the car as an excuse for those stops along the symbolic Jersey road. Does Marty prefer not to drive so doesn't know that's a feature most cars have, that you can roll down a damned window?). It's simple shit like that. Scorsese thinking that we should feel involved in Leo Di Caprio's urge to kill the man who killed a father he didn't even know, when it was a fair fight during a big 5-Points battle (Gangs of New York) or that we're not supposed to be sick to death of De Niro's character's surprise when he's slammed by the gaming license committee after he refuses to keep Joe Bob Briggs on staff, even "farther down the trough" (in Casino). Such moments seem to indicate Marty is severely challenged when it comes to the basics of reality.

The best Marvel movies, on the other hand, don't give a shit. They're mythic, and so much more attuned to reality than Marty's asphalt-eyed adoration of regular guys. Though its plot is hardly original even in comic book movies, Lady Marvel has got everything great films should have. And as the title character, Brie Larson proves a sea change along the lines of the one we see in Booksmart and Little Women and Crawl, i.e. the arrival of 'last wave' feminism, wherein strong female characters no longer need to keep banging on the edges of the shattered glass ceiling like the millionth spokesperson for grrl power. The ceiling is busted and Brie knows you can just move on up through and, rather than stay up there making a speech on glass ceilings, looking for some small corner still uncracked so she can break it a bit more; to use a D-Day parlance, she's smart enough to gets the hell of the beach. No longer merely identified via the handrails of the 'strong female woman' but eight miles beyond it, the way Sam Jackson's Nick Fury's whole demeanor changes when he realizes this is marvelous. While Captain Marvel was a wearisome snooze as a man, with Brie at the helm she's part of a grand scheme that points out to America, in the most mythic way, that in the next war, upcoming election pending, we might well be the fascist bad guys.

12. DOLEMITE IS MY NAME

Dir. Craig Brewer

A fascinating rags-to-riches tale of DOLEMITE, a DIY film that broke cult midnight movie records and made its star and producer, Rudy Ray Moore, famous. It's a FUBU affair, with Eddie Murphy as Rudy Ray Moore, a stand-up comedian who makes a name for himself in his neighborhood and black clubs when he starts using the boasting limerick-style sexual potency pre-rap rapping of the local street bums in his act. Calling himself Dolemite he's soon putting out 'blue' records and eventually getting financed to make a small low budget movie. Stealing electricity and using local film students as a crew, the film goes onto become a smash hit primarily with all black audiences who'd been longing to see just such a participatory raunchy mess. Eddy Murphy disappears into the role of Moore, and captures the highs and lows of the character, letting us into the mix of go-for-broke moxy that every struggling filmmaker yearns to capture. The 99% black cast backing him up is top notch. Best of all, here is a film about the black experience that eschews any tired examples of racism as an impediment to success (there are police cars or social sermons) to focus instead on black culture taking the tools of the trade and making their own damn movie, free and clear of any liens on having to represent some kind of black crisis, black pride, or other "Big Message" that so often makes black movies seem like dreary liberal preach to the choir racism call-outs. The take-away is nothing sort of a revelation, a glimpse into what a post-racist black culture might look like, free of the need to define itself by past oppression or economic woes. Like the poetry of Langston Hughes, the film has the guts to reach way past that and provide a mythic core to the African-American experience and what it is--outside of music, of course--may still be forming, but Dolemite is my Name is proof of patent. The sea change is nigh. Black-made movies about black people making their own movies is just the first step out of the reactionary ghetto. The signs are all around that even as this world burns and drowns at the same time, the cinematic alternate is looking mighty rosy.

13.a. US

Dir. Jordan Peele

Though in the end the reveal doesn't make a lot of logical sense, the meanings and interpretations remain intriguing and varied. And like Endgame, certain key termite moments transcend the whole and become original, real, iconic and terrifying. Lupita Nyong'o in particular is so balls-out crazy and lit so well that her round huge eyes and glaring white teeth, blazing but barely making a hight against the all consuming blackness of her ebony face, becomes a terrifying monster behind the mask of normality, as if the gleaming smiles of past America's past black caricatures come ripping open to expose some kind of terrifying archaic savage. It's such a wild piece of acting we can feel the pantheon of great horror icons opening up to embrace her, should she deign to stay. If the film itself and its weird obsession with Hands Across America can't quite live up to the expectations we all had after Get Out, it's still loaded with enough weird symbolism, an examination of a century-old problem in the African American community (i.e. that no one can enter the upper middle class without carrying the guilt of not helping the community they left behind move up too (and thus draining their own bank accounts). It's a problem that has never gone away in human history but is surely felt quite keenly in the African America community. The idea of this other linked world never quite feels real but it's beautifully lit, shot, and acted, with enough great horror moments that it earns a spot in this looney-tunes list.

 13.b. PARASITE

Dir. Bong Jon Hoo

2019 was really the year for metaphors for class resentment and mirroring: one family destined to literally live 'below' another, the wealthier one taking their privilege for granted and never looking twice at the mirror reflections out to get them. Luckily Bong Jon is way beyond the American/British bourgeois cinema's compulsive need to depict the poor as simpleton saints. Here they're crafty and also ruthless, forging documents and faking their into their positions as art therapist, driver, housekeeper and tutor, their poor roots betrayed only by that inescapable basement apartment mold smell they can't quite shake. But this is more than just another plan to siphon wealth off the rich, these four do the work required, and well --it just seems to be the level of subterfuge one has to undertake just to get paid regularly. After an ingenious set-up in the first half, this comedy of manners soon gets tense, building up through deeper secrets (layers below even the lowest) exploding with all the murderous force of a Freudian hysteric symptom. Not just a great metaphor for the South/North Korea divide (especially when the poor family must wade through their flooded basement apartment, drowning in their own shit), or some kind of class commentary, it gets at some primal root too deep to do anything but depict. Cultivated critics may note similarities to Downstairs, Boudu Saved From Drowning, The Rules of the Game, and Korean cinema's seminal The Housemaid. But for me, too earth-salted to admit I recognized those haughty links, it was the stunning similarities to Us that made me wonder which one is the Psycho and which one the Horror Hotel. Bong's De Niro, the perennially stone faced Kang-ho Song is once again front and center as the patriarch of the less-than clan, the Kims, with the gorgeous Yeo-Jeong Jo (The Servant) as the neurotic rich wife, and So-dam Park is the crafitest of the poor clan, who steps into the role of art therapist with admirable confidence. America, be scared.

 14. AVENGERS: END GAME
By Anthony and Joe Russo

Well, in addition to the joy of partying like the tab for the world is about to arrive and, rather than admit you can't pay it, you just stall and start ordering more rounds of shots, the big 'last day on earth' celebrations also have a very real flip side, a tendency to lose a grip on their usual semi-cool and mythic elan and to get blubbery and let every character take a sobbing bow, dying in one another's arms left and right. I can't spoil the surprises in the bottom of the Endgame cereal box but, as with Toy Story 4, the maudlin goodbye speeches and dewy-eyed "human" contact moments kind of wind up in a fender-bender five mile back-up that seems to freeze time in place while the saccharine strings build and the hugs commence. One of the reasons I risk critical reputation (!) by regarding these movies so highly is their mythic resonance, but when they get like this they're no longer resonant towards the larger myths - the Parsifal/Moses/Perseus hero with a thousand faces archetypal blueprint --and more just a homage to a homage, like Red Riding Hood cut with B-12 and baby powder. Maybe that's what they call the actor's 'reward'. You can see the reward in TV shows, where--even in dramas--they'll let certain actors with musical theater roots belt out an anachronistic song, or the whole cast will do some choreographed lip sync dance party and you're like ugh.

Then again, as with Aquaman's hair, all the angst and sobbing (dude, no one gives a shit about Pepper Potts!) is worth it just for Thor's big gut and devolving from mega-hero to slovenly dude playing videogames and quaffing beers with the survivors from Asgard's destruction at the end of Thor: Ragnarok. The scene where he time travels and bumps into his mom (dead since Thor 2) and she instantly gets he's from the future on an important mission, and the way he plays it, clearly overwhelmed and finally breaking down in her arms, made my cinematic year. Go Thor! Go!

Wildcard: JOKER

Dir Todd Phillips

The Beach Bum's even more crack-pot brother from another psycho mother, this is a well-crafted sashay into the looney-bin, with Hildur Guðnadóttir's brilliant droning, if familiarly Johan Johannson-ish (she was cellist on SICARIO and ARRIVAL) soundtrack like the opening bars of George Harrison's "Within you and Without You" blown out into a nightmarish elevator drop. Set in a very garbage strike 70s NYC-style Gotham, with shades of NYC in the Goetz-Sliwa 70s, with a Reagan's California 80s approach to the mentally ill in the depiction of paranoid schizophrenic workaday clown Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), unwisely given a gun by his Peter Boyle-d work chum after he endures a stomping from a gang of local toughs. What's next is a fusion of Martin Scorsese-Robert De Niro cinematic allusions along with digs at the murph alt-right fascist juggalo contingents of your red state hometown. Fleck's ill-advised foray onto an open mic night stage (he aims to be a stand-up comic) merges his Bickle with the Pupkin (De Niro is in the Jerry Langford role, if that makes it more meta and less ripper-offy) leaving us to regularly wonder what's real vs. a psychotic delusion.

But that's a slipper-slopperly slope when making a silly-willy clown movie, Mr. Todd! There's a difference between WIZARD OF OZ and SUCKER PUNCH. To me and my gal, it was as much of a cop-out as the cracked head and opening disclaimer tacked onto Roger Corman's THE TRIP (1967) by an uneasy James Nicholson, or the censor-imposed hanging/trial ending to SCARFACE (1933). I can't be sure, but I presume it was added after nervous producers saw the rough cut and worried hooligan fans would start post-show riots in a reversal of Aurora's DARK KNIGHT RISES premiere.

STILL The one and only RIPoxoxox

Another issue: though Guðnadóttir's drones rawked, the classic rock songs on the juke box often seemed a little too on the nose. I loved, like everyone else, Phoenix's dance to Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Part II" atop a now meme-sanctified set of stairs, but hearing Burdon sing "It's my life/ and I'll do what I want," Creem's "White Room", CCR's "Fortunate Son," not to mention that tacky "Send in the Clowns" and "Smile" renditions, is problematic. Good thing that, despite all that, there's real dirty kick danger burned into this film, and I have no doubt that Joker mask shall be worn by more than one masked juggalo taking advantage of large protests to smash windows and throw rocks at cops. And though I initially had issues with Joaquin Phoenix in the lead (he seems way too old to play an origin story), his insane laughing is pretty terrifying. When confessing his crimes on Robert De Niro's TV talk-show in a lurid triple play version of De Niro's own characters in KING OF COMEDY, TAXI DRIVER and BLOODY MAMA, you know you're into some dark twisted waters, and no amount of 'all a dream' what-iffery can belay its Captain Ahab-esque order.

I just wish Phillips and Co. had the courage to ride its dark fantasy all the way up against the police barricades and beyond, for being caught up in a riot used to be a rite of passage (I've been caught in three of them, and each time I learned a little bit more about the ugliness of mob mentality - and that, for all my Herzog-ish fascination with the process, I can never quite join in). Finally, here is a film not afraid to stage one but chicken to incite one - the FIGHT CLUB of its generation and it backs off. You think Heath Ledger's Joker, setting fire to millions of dollars was just empty movie gesturing? Would Phillips insist on having a close-up that it's just play money so don't cry, capitalism is safe.

Still, more than a lot of these films even on this list, JOKER stayed with me enough I snuck it on here in the tail end. It clearly has at least a finger up the external acoustic meatus of our national disquiet for the sheer amount of writing on it via this WWW has been staggering. With a mighty swath of acting by old Joaquin, great colors, pacing, dialogue and vivid characters and grime to spare, you can forgive it its whiffling and waffling. And even more so than is expected in the recent years rise in excellent creative sound mixing, the foley and other sound work here in duplicating the numb feeling of being getting the crap knocked out of you or racing down the street. Next time, Todd, put down your PC-bashing tweeter, put on your steel tipped sneakers, and kick out the struts like a summer camp can.

--

TELEVISION:

1. FLEABAG - Season 2

By Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Even my own significant other wanted to re-watch season 2 in order to nurse her crush on the hot priest (Andrew Scott) and she hasn't had such a notion in a decade. The in-love with the show critics note it's the perfect end to the series since she seems to break up with us, her viewers, at the end, but let's hope not. It's the most raucous, focused comedy on TV, and Waller-Bridge is a badass sex addict of the first order. We simply must stalk her into a third season.

2. LOS ESPOOKYS

(HBO) Creators: Julio Torres, Anna Fabrega

Written and conceived by doe-eyed El Salvadorian ex-SNL writer Julio Torres (the genius behind the 'Wells for Boys' sketch) and the startlingly deadpan young writer/comedian Ana Fabrega, LOS ESPOOKYS, a new HBO comedy, is one of the first HBO series to be filmed in Spanish but meant for American audiences as well as the world. Set in Mexico with forays to LA, the show chronicles the interlocking adventures of a group of horror make-up/effects specialists who--for a fee--stage 'real' scares: everything from UFO abductions, to exorcisms, sea monster sightings (to drum up seaside tourism), and old dark house hauntings (for will readings) and so forth. Fans of classic Mexican horror, Ed Wood, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the ficciones of Borges, the wheezing of Togella, the drollery of Armisen and all the true (?) ghost and UFO shows on cable--ay dios mio!-- must love it. (Full: "Disinformation Please!")

3. MARIANNE

(Netflix) Dir. Samuel Bodin

This Gallic Stephen King-ish tale isn't the first to use Stephen King's collective ouevre as a genre unto itself, but it is the best. Ala It 2, we have a group of grown-up childhood friends in a French seaside town who reunite when one of them commits suicide at one of her book readings. Their leader, a hot girl version of Stephen King, is forced to realize her writing both creates and comes from the evil spirit, a kind of La Llorona in a mildly twee-meta vein, Marianne. The whole "you must write me so I exist" angle can get your eye rolling if you're not from a country that reveres writers (i.e. like the USA, where we're notoriously contemptuous of them), but the acting is all great and there is perhaps the scariest actress performance ever in the shape of Mireille Herbstmeyer as the possessed mother of the 'suicide' girl - clearly they're using some kind of imperceptable secret CGI to enlarge her eyes and mouth ever so slightly here and there, never enough to really break the wall of normality, and that's why it's so terrifying. Maybe the best use of 'subliminal' CGI since What Lies Beneath.

(in French with English Subtitles)

 4. UNDONE

(Prime) season 1

Using a family history of mental illness as a jumping off point, this rotoscope "Waking Life"-style animated series explores the before and after of a major car accident that throws disaffected Daria-style star Rosa Salazar into what is either a fourth dimensional reunion with her late father (Bob Odenkirk) or a total psychotic break. Deftly captured in the animation, the trippy segues in and out of alternate realities are a wonder to behold, as is the way the animation captures the wealth of expressions from wunderkind Salazar. Amazingly, the whole thing never strays very far from that split of the difference between reality and the vividly imagined, managing to give us both possibilities so seamlessly we realize that-- in our collective move towards re-embracing psychedelics as a doorway into the world normally experienced only via mental illness-- subjective experience is not only as legitimate 'consensual reality,' its more coherent.

5. EUPHORIA

(season 1) HBO

Though typical for the network in its shockingly blatant sexual violence, something that haunts me way too much even years after I see it (I get the shivers just hearing the word "Bolton" or seeing that actor in a different movie or show, because of GOT for example), I can't deny that EUPHORIA is a major work of art, especially in the writing and the performances of the two main characters, the barely-out-of-rehab Rue (played by the masterfully disaffected Zendaya) and fearless trans blonde pixie Jules (Hunter Schaefer), who together navigate the sometimes terrifying worlds of--for Jules--rough trade sexual online hookups--and Rue, the horror of trying to say remotely clean in a world filled with triggers. Meanwhile all sorts of horrible HBO sexual transgressions and violent repercussions go on, most thanks to a terrifying alpha male (Jacob Elordi) and his power top papa. There is, as usual too with HBO, stunningly vivid acting, including wildly grounded and super cool work by Angus Cloud as Rue's chill dealer.

6. Of course, Rick and Morty - season 4. It's just as wildly imaginative, trippy, densely woven and filthy as it ever was. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, I don't know what they're smoking over there, but find out what it is and distribute it to the other shows. Great as it is, I only add it last, almost in secret, as the troll fan contingent and other elements give the show a tainted aura outside of itself, particularly where uppity broads like my own beloved #mefirst feminist cohabitant is concerned. But hey, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, and all the other 'can't we just have this one thing?' blah blah appeals we SWMs make to keep the things that double us over in hilarity free from associative slime. Ohm, it's a shrinking island. I'm on it and increasingly worrying if the streak of 'just kidding' no fear gestures I make are getting through, or if I'm just sounding like a Drunk Uncle. That's I guess the challenge of the 20s. But guess what? Now we have a name for the decade! It's been weird trying to find the right moniker for this past 20 years, "way back in the aughts, or the 10s, or double-00s, or the 'teens" - nothing sounds or feels quite right. But the twenties?! Hell Yeah the 20s. Long may they roar, quietly.

P.S. - The best show, as far as prime time, was of course THE MASKED SINGER, but I'm too embarrassed to praise it properly. Had I the balls, its odd mix of Ken's annoying comedy, the crazy inspired dancers, the relative sexy middle-aged pair of statuesque female judges with normal looking lips, the idea of a game show with no prizes and no real losers (and the whole Who-scored demasking climaxes), the way the amazing host Nick Cannon never misses a beat, looks great in a Sikh/magician turban and stresses the hard G and K in the title (i.e. the "MasKed Sinh-Ger"), the strange, strange but wildly imaginative performances, and the propensity of judge Nicole Scherzinger to shed more than one tear the moment shit gets ballad-ish (plus her tender love affair with the "Thingamajig"), the amazing editing, cutting to random but always trenchant audience reaction close-ups, and the fact even hoity toity brainiacs like me and mine can get just as into it as some red state Fox viewer and neither of us have to feel slighted or ironic. If we can all agree on this show, there's no limit to the things we can achieve.

Erich Kuerstenhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-66175174422432841372019-12-11T10:31:00.004-05:002019-12-13T10:33:38.364-05:00Sandahl Bergman's SHE (1984) comes to Blu-ray, Swingin'

Finally the great "SHE" starring Sandahl Bergman comes to Blu-ray in a flawless edition from Kino, released the other week. The Image and Sound are sublime, it's never looked better, and with a great interview given for the disc by director/writer Ari Nesher (yes that Aris Nesher), its pedigree as a cult rock-and-roll intellectually distaff comic book adventure can at last loom as medium large as it deserves. Finally we can examine the film in the light of what it is, a wildly imaginative, comic book-style adventure mixing all sorts of genres together to form an idea of what a post-apocalyptic renaissance faire might look like if its inhabitants roamed around and infiltrated other early 80s genre movies. It's a land where boxes of cereal are sold as antiques and one can wander from an underground mutant kingdom to a rich young werewolf pool party dinner/dance orgy in a few connecting woodsy shots, finding themselves captured by a bewigged 18th century naturalist and his tutu-wearing flunky; a war-torn city run by vicious warlords who regularly raid the countryside for women, a faux-Christian telekinetic Christ mutant and his funky monks, and so forth. There's a kinky edge, to be sure, with Bergman's goddess "She" and her right hand warrior woman enduring whippings and other torture, and all sorts of wildly imaginative Alex Raymond-style violence, but feminism always looms larger than sex (there is none). I kind of like that, as in the end, sisterhood wins out, as She goes back to her --but I can't spoil it.

Validating its worth as a great cult film, a kind of cross between Alphaville and Flash Gordon (1980) is an extra interview with Nesher, an Israeli film critic-turned-director/writer who made this in his 20s once out of his obligatory military service. Turns out he's an intellectual Cahiers du Cinéma type who went on to a distinguished career making 'serious' films in Israel like Rage and Glory, but also enjoying keeping his hand in with American genre junk like Doppelganger and Timebomb. -A handsome well-spoken guy who shot the extra while in New York for a retrospective of his Israeli films at (I'm guessing) Lincoln Center, the fact that he spoke so highly of his time making the film (a great anecdote his lunch with Fellini, who was shooting a film one soundstage over and had complained about the constant blaring heavy metal they were playing.)

There's a kind of Parsifal hero's journey that, when I originally caught only the last 2/3 of this back when it was on Netflix and seemed nothing more than a bargain basement Conan copy-cat, but Blu-ray and HD have been kind to such things, especially the ones made in Italy (as this was) which really hum along from wild set-piece cliffhanger to cliffhanger, with a little more than a little sex thrown in. (There's no sex here,

 Finding it to be a great post-modern melange, with mighty Bergman as the goddess of her little slice of the post-'cancellation' wasteland, wandering to the north with a handsome idiot (since it's pre-ordained by her oracle) and running into scrapes with everyone from New Yoahk-accented mutants to crazed warriors in a ruined city, acolytes of a 'one god' mutant boy who can control matter with his green flashing eyes; a powdered-wig naturalist and his tutu-wearing henchman, who are collecting and notating the flora and fauna and treating their captives like butterflies pinned to the wall. There's also a rack, flogging, the old trash compacting wall cliffhanger, and a lot of cool feminist force (Nesher wanted to make sure women weren't objectified, but man do we become thankfully acquainted with Bergman's incredibly lithe dancer legs. Symbols of great strength as well as lithe dancer grace and beguilement. )

This is what it looked like before the Blu - murky.

Nesher says Bergman spurred the stunt people on, to using real swords and cutting it real close, getting physical like she trained for for Conan. Nesher says it was great fun, and he loved working with Bergman, and we believe him. Apparently it did well enough the producers wanted him to do a sequel, which is odd since I, a Bergman fan, never heard of it until a chance catch on Netflix back in 2012 (which I tied in with Meet John Doe here).

In its past incarnations it looked kind of cheap and rundown but now, on this solid Blu-ray transfer the witty genius of the film can really be felt. Bits like Sandahl's being startled into sword out readiness by the squeak from stepping on a stray rubber duck by the werewolf elite's swimming pool; David Brandon as the ridiculously gorgeous Sebastian Venable. It's all very well paced, relentlessly entertaining and packed with crazy songs, rock anthems galore, reflecting the style of the time, but in Europe, when prog and metal was taking the edge to the limit and avoiding the slick empty synth sounds the AOR guys in the States were convinced every artist needed to have. Similarly, the much bigger-budgeted groupthink-bespoiled Red Sonja seems to have, alongside Conan the Destroyer derailed the Conan train (thanks be to director Richard Fleischer--"great" choice in director--and his PG-minded producers). If only SHE had been freely avail when I was a smitten-by-Sandahl Conan worshipper back in the day, but as far as I know this never made it to the rental store... or other... 'til now.

Anyway, Blu-ray of the year!

Runners-up: HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD (Kino), THE PSYCHIC (Scorpion) and PORT OF SHADOWS (Kino) and PAGANINI HORROR (Severin).

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-69435776381013504332019-11-19T13:55:00.001-05:002019-12-02T13:00:51.001-05:00Holiday Hide-out: Your CHARLIE'S ANGELS WTF Reader.

Is my credibility as an haughty film studies intellectual harpooned by my open-air breeching love for Charlie's Angels? And Kristen Stewart? Readers of the blog know I love them both, so ain't it passing strange I carry instant disdain for this apparently misguided 'reboot'. Is that maturity or just wisdom? Nothing dampens my love for the original show, not even itself, which can be often lazy, slow and self-imitating (especially after the first 10 episodes of any given season - though lets not forget back then the average season length was 22 episodes). But to see how great it is, one need only compare it to the 'McG' remakes, on whose shoulders the new remake-- rather than going for the more laid-back 70s procedural warmth of the original ABC seasons--seems to stand. Just the commercials are enough to dissuade me from this new reboot, regardless that a woman (Banks!) directed it. Based on the ads, mind you, if anything it's more like a mix of any number of Hong Kong girl spy unit movies and the female assassin wing of the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Man, I remember loving that first 'McG' Charlie's Angels movie, but now it just seems dumb and loud, like a big commercial for itself. The sequel was even dumber and louder. And each made the critical mistake of giving them boyfriends. Dude! In the Aaron Spelling playbook, the Angels never keep a beau beyond the episode he shows up in - he either dies or turns out to be a crook. It's the rules that allow male viewers to not feel threatened. And besides, for those who know how to dig for it, the clear pair bond of the show is between Sabrina and Kelly. Taken on that level, the lack of sex is a clear indicator of the closeted era, when gay people just seemed uninterested in sex altogether. The new reboot looks very gay (there's more than one giant closet!! It's a mix of weaponry, disguises and, I'm sure, very expensive shoes and handbags) and racially harmonized (which is good, provided the non-white characters avoid the kind of pasteurized blandness that comes when stereotype traits are excised but nothing is added in its place). But none of the girls look like they can throw a punch, so it's more being impressed by Zoe Bell and her hair-in-the-face body double girl squad, and--hopefully--the green screen team, than any actual law-of-gravity-obeying action.

So convincing

It's barely even the same thing once they can defy gravity with super kicks. Now the Angels have kind of super spy action hero level of vapidity disguised as Bondian fluency, the type where they can squeeze off three shots while doing a slow-mo somersault backflip to catch a passing helicopter rope in order to swing up right into a drop kick on some rooftop sniper. The original may not have had that level of PG carnage, it was real. If a car blew up or crashed, it really did, and was a highlight of the show. It meant something. You could feel the trauma emanating from the experience throughout the rest of the episode. The effect of the climactic and occasional violence and trauma was something the Angels felt and relied on each other to salve with their strong sisterly nurturing. Everything hurt, and violence was only the last resort. Luckily, once you had a gun in your hand and shouted "freeze!" the perps generally gave up, and meekly rolled along with the credits. But in the McG reboot, cartoon action is ramped up to the impossible levels demanded by viewers' numbness. We're all big budget action addicts for which every new movie must top all that came before it, until only CGI can even begin to capture it.

But who knows? I may see it an like it. Besides, I have stayed in contact with the original series, and it looks better than ever over the dusty muskrat musk of time. Aaron Spelling wisely kept them all single, in a kind of perpetual sisterhood of the Charlie - handmaidens to the absent father; the dead father come alive

If you turn to your Moses and Monotheism, you'll see where Freud writes about the social order dawning when the jealous sons kill the primal father so they can have access to his harem. With the killing of the evil father comes the guilt, with the result that the men each take one woman for their wives, and stick to monogamy, sex without libidinal excess, symbolizing the renouncement of the odious arrangement still present in packs of apes, lions, and sea lions. BUT once killed, the murdered father is expunged of his odium and now venerated as a kind of symbolic holy icon, the ultimate signifier. In his absence he becomes a holy guiding light. Our guilt absolves him. His name, henceforth, shall be Charlie.

We earn our spot on the team by renouncing sex, the drive which caused us to murder him and drive him from our sight. For an spooked prepubescent child of the swinging 70s, a bit weirded out by the magnetic gravitas of adult sexuality, such a collective renouncement comes as a sigh of relief. These Angels stay the babysitters that would rather hang out with you playing the Star Wars board game on the living room floor than leave you alone while the go make out with their boyfriend or spend all night on the phone (they stay the Jamie Lee Curtis rather than the Nancy Loomis and PJ Soles, if you get my meaning). We can swoon free of worry.

This our Charlie is, the heavenly platonic pimp of angels, in a sense, provides. Speaking to them from beyond the grave, he spares them the sight of his conspicuous enjoyment up in his (presumably Beverly Hills) heaven, ever attended by smiling bimbos we get but a glimpse of (they are, clearly, ensured to be cute but never as beautiful as the Angels themselves). Thus he continues his obscene enjoyment, but it matters not for his image. We never see his face, nor do we see the women for long. Nonetheless it's these brief moments that people equate the show with, irregardless of the fact that 99.5% of it is the three Angels solving crimes, and they are seldom in bathing suits unless at the beach or on vacation or in disguise.

It matters little, the bawdy glimpses of Charlie's bilious private life are what the naysayers base their views on. Maybe The very fact it is three women solving crimes is threatening enough to the status quo that it gets reviled as "jiggle TV". In critiquing a Taylor Swift video, my blood rite goddess Camille Paglia wrote:

" A warmer model of female friendship was embodied in Aaron Spelling's blockbuster Charlie's Angels TV show, which was denounced by feminists as a "tits-and-ass" parade but was in fact an effervescent action-adventure showing smart, bold women working side by side in fruitful collaboration." (Full)
I'm glad Kristen Stewart went for it, ca$h-wise, and that a woman is the director, but Kristen is too good an actress to be this kind of McG-ish super agent sexual manipulator. It would have been great to see a stripped-down analog return to form. Mind you, I'm only going by the commercials, which show a female Charlie (visible?), a female Bosley (?) and a horde of Angels of all races, shapes, orientations, gender identitites, and sizes, all around the needy world.

Meanwhile, available on DVD, streaming and--if you get METV on your cable--5 PM Eastern Time in daily rerun, the original series beckons. If you're hiding out from the world for the holidays, to hibernate and lay around snug in your electric blankets, crying, sniffling, laughing in deranged happiness, or just unwinding with easily unnerved relatives after the kids are in bed over the festivities, here are my capsule reviews/ratings of the first three seasons, episode--by-episode, to ensure a seemingly endless stream of mellowness and familiar guest stars (Dean Martin! Jamie Lee Curtis! Tiffany Bolling!) They got me through my last relapse, and they got me through my last recovery. They're there.

Season I (1976-1977)

Season II (1977-1978)

Season III (1978-79)

ALSO:

Thy Name is Charlie

(August 2006)

+ Notes on Charlie's Angels

(August 2006)

A Tale of Two Sammies
(March 2009)

Kate Jackson was my Village
(March, 2009)

Happy Birthday Cheryl Ladd
(July 12, 2012)

RIP, ANGEL BABY

(July 2/2009)

NOW FOR THE BIG NEWS - if you are a fan, that is.
I'm working on an episode guide to seasons 4 and 5, at long last...

Stay tuned, Angels!

That's why all these pics of season 5 with aquamarine-eyed angel Tanya Roberts

PLUS

KRISTEN STEWART ROUND-UP:

Choose Death: Revisiting TWILIGHT's Junky Delirium

The Metatextual Exorcist's Assistant: CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Kristen Stewart in the Snow with Poison: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

All the Usual Vices: THE RUNAWAYS

"These bad boys mean Business" -TWILIGHT BREAKING DAWN vs. FACING EVIL with Candice DeLong

Bella's Big Bounce: TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN PART II

Someone to Fight Over Me: Feminism, S/M, and the Daemonic in TWILIGHT (BL 4/10)

TWILIGHTs Cinematic Ancestors

Erich Kuerstenhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-70044710377576421762019-10-31T17:31:00.001-05:002020-06-04T22:23:31.256-05:00Creature Double Feature: BEYOND THE DOOR, VAMPYRES (+LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM!)

It's Halloween! We made it, and for the millions or one of you who've been following this strange double feature nightly Prime journey, or even just picking and choosing and chuckling, now we've come to the end. All that's left are the dregs! Feel free to scroll back and marvel at all the free time I must have on my hands. Hey, if October is your favorite month you know the reason why. Here's a list of ten super trashy films, some old gems and newly discovered monstrosities amidst Prime's countless dumpster fires. Once the mayhem is done and the buzz is laid down, come here.... come... here.

 BEYOND THE DOOR

(1974) Dir. O.G. Assonitis; R. Barrett

*/*** / Amazon Image - C-

Even best-laid fans of the crappies 70s Italian horror knock-offs are dismissive of this obvious Exorcist's Baby cash-in, but maybe that's why I have a soft, rotting spot in my warped floorboard heart for it. Terrible it is--rushed by the horns of its pants through production and into theaters the same year (1974) as The Exorcist, imitating all its talked-about moments (the green slime vomit, the levitation, the 180 degree head turn) like a kid doing charades, and making a bad precedent-setting mess of a fortune in the process. I'll grant you too that the Prime print on which I saw it (and you can most easily find it) is murky SD; and the dubbing of some of the actors is strictly the 'phoned in (maybe literally) variety... and.. OK, now the why of my love: Franco Micalizz's score (his ninth in 1974 alone!) has lots of soul singing, death rattles, billowing noises, quiet storm flutes, groovy bass and Satanic sighs, and a killer theme song--"Bargain with the Devil"--by wondrous Warren Wilson. We even see his sesh musicians laying it all down in the studio during the opening credits, lorded over by the soon-to-be-pregnant-and-possessed woman's anemic music producer husband Robert (Gabriele Lavia, the boozy, gay friend of David Hemmings in Deep Red). You know he's a great music producer from the he keeps yelling at the musicians to "do it better" but with no specifics beyond that. Outside in the streets, luckily, the San Francisco backdrop is as vivid and strange as only an Italian tourist can film it outside his tour bus window (there's even a scene where the hero is walking through the Tenderloin and being semi-exorcised, shunned and serenaded by a gang of steel drummers!); lots of seeing strange people reflected in the glass windows of famous edifices! Whip it frenziedly to froth and you have a very strange piece of junk, worth a visit when your standards have dropped well past the red line. "Do it Better!" never crossed these guys' minds.

Why it's great is where it veers from mere Exorcist filler, becoming instead a child's nightmare variation, tacky and broad in ways that let our guard down before zeroing in on primal anxieties about our own parents, mom in particular. It's one thing to have a possessed daughter, but a possessed mom? But when we hear the voice of the devil, it's as over-the-top evil as you'd want in a Halloween party Satan, roping Richard The Haunting Johnson into playing nursemaid for the unborn child of evil and given a second chance back up out of a Highway 101 car plunge freeze-frame if he will facilitate the birth of the devil's most unholy firstborn child---currently gestating in the womb of his runaway long ago cult member Jessica (Juliet Mills). Currently she's married to Robert, so Dimitri (Johnson) decides to shadow him through endless walks around SF, until Robert finally notices and starts to get creeped out. How does one tell one's ex-cult member's new husband she has the devil's baby inside her, and to then offer to help deliver it? Even after the green vomit, psychokinesis, and levitation starts in earnest, it's a big ask. Robert's doctor friend warns him not to accept Dimitri's help but can offer absolutely no solutions or alternatives in the bargain. The couple's other two kids, meanwhile, are regularly left alone with their demon mom since dad is too busy wandering the B-roll scenery looking stricken and indecisive to be much of a parent. The children barricade themselves in their room as best they can while mom floats around trashing everything. "Please don't leave us alone with mommy again," becomes a chilling, flatly intoned request to daddy. But daddy still has lots of B-roll streets left to muse through, and that comes first. When it comes right down to it, if there is any devil more terrifying than an evil parent, it might be the other parent's neglect.

Alas, thanks to inept editing (?), scenes that might have been really scary are cut away from too quickly. In one of the scariest moments, the children screams and panic one night after their room is smashed by poltergeists; they come tentatively to mom's bed for solace after she just gives them a 360-head spin and super creepy smile; we then smash cut to a long pointless scene of Robert's headlights driving through town. When he finally gets home, everything is normal again. We get we're supposed to be worried and a bit angry and Robert's shitty sense of priorities, but then... is that really why we never cut back to that chilling moment? Even with all the creepy doll close-ups, a lot of it doesn't make sense. Like if Carpenter's original Halloween cut away from the climactic upstairs hallway moment when Michael sits back up after being stabbed, to the sheriff and Loomis having milkshakes, and then when we next check in at the house, Michael's already left, and the kids are back to watching TV.

BUT- that's part of what makes the best Italian exploitation so indelible. Reaction shots, linear logic, easy resolutions, clarifying establishing shots, all must die. We don't really know where we stand in a film like Beyond the Door, and that can be terrifying in a backhand kind of way. Sure it's a blatant Exorcist rip-off, but it moves fast, keeps you off-center, and has a finger on a pulse deeper than most Americans can find even with a finger deep in their own wrist. Full of great anti-Christian beats, such as the elevated position from which Jessica finally gives birth, her Satanic voice commanding Dimitri reach up into her vagina and pull the baby down and out (below); it helps it was released widely on big screens here in the US, with a marketing campaign burned into my young child brain. I still remember it, even at seven years-old: there was a door cracked open, billowing curtains, whooshing winds, and the implication that something evil was waiting.... beyond the door.

That's all we kids needed back then. A door and some curtains. Our dread was off and running and what nameless evil was in that room. I still shudder when I see the posters for it, or any half-opened doors with curtains blowing for that matter. Followed by several name-only sequels, including Mario Bava's last film/son Lamberto's first, Shock! Also on Prime and recommended, maybe even worse/better than this!! And in 1989 Assonitis later gave us the very strange and recommended Amok Train, which was then billed as Beyond the Door 3. It's worth putting on the Netflix DVD cue when you're of a mind to hoot and holler!

2. VAMPYRES
(1974) Dir. José Ramón Larraz
*** / Amazon Image - A

As with Larraz's other British filmed work, Symptoms (starring that alien-eyed elf being, Angela Pleasance) the two things going on here are 1: Gorgeous cinematography capturing a magnificently fecund English countryside, and 2: Lesbianism as the ultimate swinger waterloo. Here we have Anulka Dziubinska and Marianne Morris as a pair of lovers who--just like so many innocent sapphic pairs before and after them--are massacred in bed by some unseen misogynist and then proceed to wage a blood-drinking nightly vampire massacre on swingers ala 1968's Kuroneko. A run-down English castle estate (with one or two vary cozy firelit rooms and a magnificent wine cellar) provides a nice squat in which to bring back louche male swingers for a rollicking good three or foursome. In the morning, if the men are still alive, they're more than usually 'drained.' In fact, they can barely find their way back to their cars. If they're bad at directions, they won't even find it, and will be trapped on the grounds when the sun falls yet again. If they're really crazy, they won't want to leave even knowing the riskks. This being England the men are all the kid of leisure suit and side-burned pale, bloated types who seem horribly drained and hungover even before their night at the castle begins. One such blighter (Murray Brown) is determined to get to the bottom of it all, as is the nosy girlfriend Harriet (Rose Faulkner) of traveling artist John (Brian Deacon); the couple have been caravanning around the countryside to take in the foliage. She can't let go of her curiosity about the two mysterious women, glimpsed briefly hitchhiking as they drove past, or the man who came running past their caravan in the dead of night, yelling for help, but wasn't there once she woke John to do something about it. Dam, Harriet, John says, let it go! But she won't, and that will mean...

It all sounds a tad sordid and it's at least nudity and blood-drenched and has some pretty richly erotic moments, especially from the interesting team of Dziubinska, the quieter, blood-drunk blonde, and Morris, the more verbose and ferocious of the pair. If Harriet thinks she's in their league, she needs to think twice. But hey, it's Larraz country, where women always get the last stab, and the fall has never looked more autumnal, making it the ideal Halloween late night treat after the kids have trundled off to their stomach-ache induced nightmares. (Recommended also Daughters of Darkness).

BONUS Third Feature:

3. LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM

(1985) Dir. Ken Russell

*** / Amazon Image - A

Though it's cheap and cheeky (Ken Russell on a bunbury after completing the exhausting Crimes of Passion), laden with endless puns and campy jokes and constant symbolic references, Lair of the White Worm is still a grand lark, laden with drolleries and--in its way--maybe his most consistent and cohesively satisfying film. The small cast is sublime: Amanda Donohoe is the ageless evil druid priestess of the serpent cult, never camping or vamping but nailing, in every possible permutation that verb can be permuted, the most intoxicating upper crust broad since Stanwyck as The Lady Eve. Her snake goddess is what Auntie Mame always aspired to be but could never shake her ostentatious American petit-bourgeois baggahge. She can go from sneering at the appalling smells of her latest worm food boy scout, to championing Dionin with her champagne flute and cigarette holders raised in stiff salute, to merely remarking "oh damn," when interrupted by her neighbor at the door bell, inquiring as to her safety. The good guys are Peter Capaldi as a summering archeologist who unearths a dragon skull (the German word for dragon being wurm) near some old Roman ruins in the front yard of a local country inn, and Hugh Grant, in his film debut, is great as the local lord-inherit who inherits too the burden of slaying the giant white worm.

The two local blonde sisters at the inn (Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis) are fetching, smart, and crafty and we get a real sense of what it's like to party with them (Oxenberg and Grant don't even drive up to the inn until well after dawn but they don't act all Yank-style obnoxious about it); the quarter's soujurns to the surreal hill slope cave (in search of clues to the sisters' missing--and presumed digested--parents) have a you-are-there vividness (we can practically smell the welcome thermos of hot coffee), and it's clear the actors and crew are all really up in this eerie mountain sloping cavern [Thor's Cave, in ducky old Staffordshire!] to get these amazing shots. Even the obligatory Russell-ian psychedelic-obscenity-religious allegory hallucination has a disturbing coherence and potency that makes it one of his most successful ("she had a bad trip" -- notes Grant, after one of the sisters accidentally touches some of hallucinatory snake venom and sees a white snake attacking Jesus on the cross while Roman soldiers rape and murder nuns). Hell yeah its more succinctly psychedelic than anything in Altered States.

In other words, it's a great film to drink to or come down from a bad mushroom experience. No one ever says no to a drink anywhere in the film and Hugh Grant goes to sleep with two bottles of Bolinger chilling at his bedside. What a way to mix a late night snack with breakfast! Between this and his Chopin opposite Judy Davis in Impromptu, Grant was catapulting himself into the A-list and winning over even jaundiced straight male hearts like mine. There's also the hottest/weirdest older woman-on-paralyzed younger boy seduction in film since Creedence Leonore Gielgud's corn cob visitation in Troll 2. And best of all --no priests. So forgive the occasional overflow of cheekiness--such as the absurd fangs and charmed-snake wiggle dancing of Paul Brooke and the relentlessly on-the-nose 'white snake' imagery and you may be charmed, yourself. Cheers!

For more Ken Russell weirdness on Prime: check out the start of this series, GOTHIC. How fitting this is where it ends since he made that film right after this one (time does not exist!) Alpha and omega, Ken! Even my daughter --even that-- for you.

Erich Kuerstenhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-33844878867612106582019-10-31T10:13:00.001-05:002020-06-11T17:32:04.307-05:00Creature Double Feature Night 10 (Halloween!): TROLL 2, TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN (+ THE EVIL)

Surprise! It's a soggy, spring-like Halloween today, and thus the conclusion, Night 10, of our grand Creature Double Feature 10 Day Marathon is best spent couch-ways. Feel free to scroll back and marvel, and maybe gape, at the other nights in previous day's posts (and watch it all on good old Prime). And for now, here's a gem of badness worth always revisiting especially on Prime's A+ HD remastered print. All that green food coloring has never been more appetizing. There's also a second dish on these mankind servings, a droll Canadian sci-fi pastiche made by a zonkers auteur whose films are like if Guy Maddin met Larry Blamire and trounced him pertly on the sconce. What a find! Prime's countless dumpster fires never extinguish!

And since it's a special night, some backing items for the no family.

TROLL 2

(1990) Dir. Claudio Fragasso

*/**** / Amazon Image - A+

I've only seen this cult-deserving gem three or four times, and though I love it more each time, it's not as addictive to me as Plan Nine, Mesa of Lost Women or Cat Women of the Moon. At least... not yet. Still, as bad movies go, the sort with not a single 'normal' moment, it's a gem to be treasured, and it's never looked better. Written by the (Italian) director's wife as a satire on (American-style) vegetarianism (!) we're left to wonder, does she think so little of us, or is she a witch, or a genius? How can a script have so very little to do with the way real life works, in America or anywhere? And how did we get so blessed to have Troll 2 ever just a click away in beautiful richly-colored HD? We must have ate something wonderful...

The story has four person family (please don't make me tell you their names), deciding to swap houses for a summer vacation with a family way out in the country, to unplug and get some real country living. What they don't know is that the town they'll be staying in, Nilbog, is "Goblin spelled backwards!" The locals are real hospitable and crazy about green food coloring and at the drop of a hat turn into gnarly little goblins (or trolls). On moving into the new house, the fam finds tons of food laid out--real country hospitality-- but it's all green-tinted and the ghost of the young Joshua's grandpa tells him he has to stop everyone from eating any of it! It's dangerous! Freezing time for 30 seconds so he can think of a plan! He doesn't just grab it all and throw it on the floor like a normal person, he stands on the table to pee on it. We don't see the pee but we cut to him being led off to his bedroom to watch his father menacingly un-notch his belt.... then tighten it. Yes, it's that kind of a movie. At that point you're either in for life, or hitting stop like its a red-headed stepchild.

For those of us left, oh so many highlights it's hard to pick even a few, but most of my favorites center around Creedence (Deborah Reed), a kind of witchy mother to the trolls, who lives in a comfortable looking refurbished church, where she turns visiting humans into trees, which she then grows in little pots, to harvest as food for her little goblin charges. As if a graduate of the Fuad Ramses school of acting, Reed milks every line, every syllable, as much as possible - eyes bugged, lips curled back in an obscene smile. Her victims tend to be virile young boys, a gaggle of whom have followed the girlfriend (Joshua's older sister) of one of them to the country in their Winnebago. Nothing gay about them sleeping together with their shirts off. They're there to meet girls! The dim boyfriend promised them. But they're camped in a true nightmare of a town; forget about cool local ladies, they don't even have coffee at the general store! "There's no coffee here in Nilbog," exclaims the general store proprietor. "It's the devil's drink!!"

 Actually, the boyfriend's inability to let go of his boys club coterie proves one of the more interesting arcs of the film, seldom explored in other films (it also lets Creedence have a fine garden this year). Like her troll children, she can change looks instantly, going from a hot babe with a corn cob in her garter to a librarian with bad teeth and Anne Bancroft shades to a wild-haired witch with even worse teeth, and all the time with a 'from-the-diaphragm' acting approach even Toshiro Mifune might find excessive.

My favorite of her many disguises for Creedence is as a seductress (with great teeth) who appears on the last living lunkhead's mobile camper TV screen as he sulks alone, parked way out in the middle of nowhere for no clear reason. It's like any lonesome teenager's fantasy has come true: babes are literally coming right out of the TV screen to 'do it' with him in his trailer. Now all he has to do, he thinks, is keep perfectly still... It's like getting a tattoo or getting a deer to come closer... He just stands there, terrified, motionless, and no doubt aroused, trying not to make eye contact while Creedence musses his hair... and...the cob commences popping... and popping.

See, these goblins, or trolls, can't eat raw human flesh. To digest it they first have to "soak it in vinegar all night!" So to get around that they have to trick humans into eating a special green food coloring substance that will turn their bodies into vegetable matter. We see this illustrated when a victim dissolved into a pool of green slime which the throng then devour, rather clumsily considering how all of it is still left on the floor). Michael Paul Stephenson is Joshua, who though not a good actor, certainly performs with a stalwart earnestness, especially during the foggy alternate reality Stonehenge climax (where the secret weapon turns out to be a balogna sandwich, almost undoing the relatively deadpan mood with deliberate comedy); Grandpa helps Joshua set a preacher on fire, and--eventually--the accumulated weirdness convinces the rest of the family it's time to get the hell out of Nilbog. Too bad... But there's always our next film....

TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN

(1999) Dir. John Paisz

*** / Amazon Image - A

You might have never heard of this odd but endearingly Canadian sci-fi/horror comedy --I sure didn't. Still not sure how it found me: the Prime thumbnail is just a black box with the words, making it seem like some dreary 30 minute documentary on factory farming. Instead it's an affectionate homage to the sci-fi of the 50s (ala It Came From Outer Space), replete with a patriarchally smug pipe smoking atomic scientist hero, and the hot-to-trot single belle of the small town he finds himself in, a suspicious sheriff who'd rather moon over his lack of luck with said belle and snipe at his new rival (for the belle goes for all that science malarkey), than deal with the problem of an alien presence with possibly sinister motives who's turned a small town into its own nefarious lab, and is.... eating the locals.

It could have gone south a dozen different ways of bad (sometimes bad on purpose can just be boring and indulgent) and parts of it do drag a bit in the beginning (as in a too-long dinner scene early on) but it succeeds largely because of its very dry but consistent Canadian wit (fans of Guy Maddin will be much pleased) and because of a pinpoint accurate turn by Campbell Scott (Roger Dodger) as the atomic physicist Dr. Carl Lamont and the deeply attractive sacral chakra-blazing erotically awake and sensually hungry performance by Fiona Loewi as Sandy, the motel owner who has a very special kind of 'ahem' bond with her dimwitted brother Guy (Tom Everett Scott). It's all very matter of fact, with no judgment of each other's kinky proclivities; and coolest of all, there's Jesus, waving on a cross, once TV is restored. Gory, erotic, ridiculous, with very little CGI (or none?) and a great monster (at the very end), it's made with a lot of loving care by Paisz and worth a look for anyone who's ever spent lonely teenage summers watching It Came From Outer Space over and over (if you dig it, go onto tackle Paisz' previous labor of love, Crime Wave, which is even stranger).

Third Option:

4. THE EVIL

(1978) Dir. Gus Trikonis

*/***1/2 - Amazon Image - B

An undersung New World bad movie gem from 1978, The Evil is clearly meant to ride the late-70s obsession with Jay Anson's 1977 runaway bestseller The Amityville Horror if the house was bigger and was being renovated by a group of drug counsellors as a home/school/runaway shelter --that kind of groovy half-way house teenager runaway shelter sort of vibe so very late-70s. Richard Crenna is the director, and as things go wrong around him he refuses to believe in the supernatural as a factor. The boiler incinerates the drunk caretaker (Ed Bakey), there are malevolent house quakes, freak electrical shocks (pin scratches on the celluloid), attempted ghost assaults, and --once the hatch on the basement floor is opened, wind rushes up, the Satanic laughter echoes, all the doors and windows lock shut, and Crenna has to think fast to explain it all aways as wind gusts.

Fan favorite Andrew Pine--that quintessentially 70s laid-back lanky hipster (Grizzly)--is one of the more pro-active counsellors who tries to facilitate an escape over the side of the third floor balcony once it's clear Crenna has led them all into a locked box of doom.

As with Troll 2 and Top of the Food Chain it's not a good film but it doesn't try to just be 'okay' -it shoots way higher than just a few bumps in the night and maybe flies on the window. It goes for broke, like the crazy kid who tries to run to third on a base hit. It take a few beats too long to get started (old Bakey seems to wander around that old building, taking a gallon of slugs from his half-pint hip flask, through lengthy opening credits) but-- once that trapdoor opens-- the action just keeps getting faster, wilder and weirder until you're shrieking with agog delight (I refuse to give away the totally out-there ending, so you'll just have to trust me). In other words, it's the best kind of bad there is.

The Amazon print is fine, if a little faded but hey, aren't we all? (If you want to find more of the 'possessed mansion killing guests one-by-one' movies that were all the rage in 1978, might I be so bold as to recommend The Legacy)?

-- I guess that's it for now! Happy Halloween and I hope you've enjoyed this 30 films on Prime review (via the last 10 posts). Scroll back for the others, and also check out these past lists on Prime. Prime! Prime! Prime! It's like having a Kim's Video store right in your pocket.

Prime Creature Double/Triple Feature Callbacks:

Night 9: PROM NIGHT 2: HELLO MARY LOU; WAXWORK (+ ONE DARK NIGHT)
Night 8: SPIDER BABY, BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE (+ MESA OF LOST WOMAN)
Night 7: ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS; CALTIKI - THE IMMORTAL MONSTER (+ THE KILLER SHREWS)
Night 6: 7 DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE, THE GHOUL (1933) + THE RAVEN (1963)

Nigh 5: DOLLS, THE MONSTER SQUAD, (+TRILOGY OF TERROR- "Amelia)
Night 4: BAFFLED!, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (+ THE ETERNAL)
Night 3: THE NIGHTMARE, INFERNO (+MANHATTAN BABY)
Night 2: 1957! THE UNDEAD, VOODOO WOMAN (+THE ASTOUNDING SHE MONSTER)
NIght 1: SOMETHING CREEPING IN THE DARK (1972), HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), THE HAUNTING (1999)
Prelude: GOTHIC (1988)

PAST LISTS (some of these may be no longer avail on Prime, but most are-- tread carelessly!):

3 Neo-Jungian Fairie Wave
3 Off the Road
7 Ennio Morricone-scored Giallos (1970-75)
6 Badass Post-ROAD WARRIOR Gang Violence Trips (1982-85)
4 Post-CONAN Barbarian Sagas
6 Dope Analog Sci-fi Nugs (1978-87)
6 Post-JAWS New World Horrors (1978-80)
7 Badass New World Rebel Girl Uprisings (1971-79)
13 for Halloween, Lost Causes and Autumnal Catalepsies
10 Swingin' Monsters of the 70s
15 Cool/Weird Horror/Sci-fi Films
12 Weird/Cool Italian Films
10 Fairly Bad Sci-Fi Gems
13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies
12 Nifty Vampire Films

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-11491736224562073062019-10-30T09:55:00.002-05:002019-11-02T17:06:46.267-05:00Creature Double Feature Night 9: PROM NIGHT 2: HELLO MARY LOU, WAXWORK

Tonight - Two teenager-centric but effects-driven gems of the realm... okay maybe cracked plastic tiaras and cheap wax exhibits, but don't turn your back on them - because those aren't wax, baby. And when the tiara represents ascendence to prom queen, don't f--ck with Mary Lou! And when it comes to virginal crushes don't turn your back on the Marquis de Sade. Severin! Your servant comes in bells / please don't forsake him!

 PROM NIGHT 2: HELLO, MARY LOU

(1987) Dir Bruce Pittman

**1/2 / Amazon Image - C+

The first Prom Night was a flatly-shot Halloween-wannabe Canadian melange of red herrings (a suspicious janitor? Take off, eh?!), glass windows, stoners, dated police methods, one of the most sparsely attended proms ever, dimly unfinished plywood sets and Jamie Lee Curtis. This name-only sequel has the incomparable Lisa Schrage as a vicious 50s high school diva killed by fellow senior Michael Ironside (Starship Troopers!) via a stink bomb prank gone awry that burns her alive during her big onstage Carrie prom queen of 1957 moment. Flash ahead to 1987, when an old drama club trunk that happens to contain Mary Lou's crown amongst other things, is opened by an unassuming but cute blonde named Vicki (Wendy Lyon) looking for a prom ideas in the school storage attic. The spirit of Mary-Lou is released into the oxygen-rich late-80s and Vicki starts having crazy dreams while John Zaza's knowingly eerie music gooses things into weird termite corners. Eventually she's sucked into the blackboard during detention and drowns into the swirling ink and chalk like Cocteau-style. Also, her rocking horse (she's got Picasso's Guernica on the wall and a big hobby horse that starts to turn demonic, leering at her with its big phallic tongue and staring through red eyes). Everyone name-checks the Exorcist and "Linda Blairsville" when Vicki starts wearing bobby socks and "talking like she's in an Elvis Presley movie." "Give her a break guys, says her Hopper-browed boyfriend, "she's just trying to be an individual."

Fitting right in with the punk hairspray aesthetic, but drawing eyebrows when she uses words like "swell," the girls are confused by the new Vicki. Bespectacled old Ironside (Scanners!) is now the principal, keeping out of trouble, with a son who happens to be dating Vicki. Ironside's principal is in no way eager to accept the prospect of his victim returning to wreak vengeance (the scene where Mary Lou/Vicki sashays into his office and onto his lap, and he recognizes her is pretty intense). Meanwhile, Mary Lou destroys anyone who so much as looks at her cross-eyed via an arsenal of telekinetic powers that make Carrie White seem like a faker (she even brings her red-eyed hobby horse to life and caresses its big phallic tongue). Naturally Mary Lou-cum-Wendy shall seduce and destroy Ironside (Free Willy!), as well as all the rivals, before she steps to the podium, and her speech shall be truly euthanizing.."Mary Lou Malone...has come back." The reverend knows from confession Ironside is guilty -

 I remember it looking better but the Film Rise print looks wan and washed out, though the nudity is naturalistic (no augments or spray tans) as I get older, high school locker room nudity becomes no longer sexy but disturbing. Yet there's empowerment in a naked Vicki/Marylou doing the menacing singing while strolling naked towards her prey. We need more badass female monster icons, hot girls who show how sexual come-ons can be terrifying (she makes out with inappropriate abandoned, including french kissing her father). Too bad this film never earned sequels. Isn't it funny how that happens when a cool movie has the girl as the powerful amoral sexually uninhibited female as the monster instead of the victim? Mary Lou's seemingly limitless abilities include being able to sense when the vote tabulating tech guy changes the count to favor the girl who just went down on him, and kills him by sticking her hand near a phone jack and zapping him through his computer screen (after threatening him in two different fonts). Another girl gets crushed to death inside a locker after rebuffing a lesbian advance. Mom gets blown throw the screen door for saying shit about her making out with her dad. Thanks to FX-wiz Jim Doyle (Nightmare on Elm Street 4). lasers come out of eyes and during the big climax, Mary Lou's charred corpse shambles forth from Vicki's chest once she's crowned, and in a Carrie-trouncing prom queen moment begins to reconstitute herself back into her former hot self while the student bodies die from falling neon lightning rods. Ironside stalks the halls with a gun to kill her yet again but ends up hanging from the rafters while his son lurches after him. It's all pretty fun and imaginative, rich with propulsive underscoring and smartly paced, high school drama cliches are, for the most part, sidestepped. Even the acting is mostly good, especially Wendy Lyon as Vicki, who runs emotional gamuts very deftly. Too bad the Prime version is a full screen video dupe, though maybe that's how it was shot. Is that the best available version? I have DVD of it somewhere, but Prime is so much easier... (PS - if you don't have Prime it's regularly on free PlutoTV.)

--

13. WAXWORKS

(1988) Dir. Anthony Hickox

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A

I still have never seen Gremlins all the way through, so strong is my disregard for Zach Galligan but I have to get past it when it comes to this uber-dope flick because no one in the rest of the cast seems too pleased about him either and he's not in every scene, and the cast also includes my boy Dana Ashbrook (so great as Bobby Briggs in Twin Peaks) turning into a werewolf; Deborah Foreman (Valley Girl), and--as the sexually hungry girl who Galligan seems to think he owns since she slept with him one time, Michelle Johnson (Blame it on Rio). There's also Patrick MacNee (in a wheelchair) as Galligan's grandfather, and the immovable David Warner (Time After Time) having a high old time as the fey owner of a waxworks museum that suddenly appears in a foreboding corner mansion: each tableaux is so lifelike it's clear it holds a real murderer or monster in suspended animation - and the exhibits suck kids into them as they pass- so the 'innocent' teens suddenly find themselves in period dress and about to be killed by some familiar movie monster in some classic (and very well-done) mise-en-scene. When they die they become part of the exhibits, which include a surprisingly vast array of roman-a-clef versions of famous horror films (Hickox knows his classics enough to mix them up, so The Elephant Man becomes the snake monster in SSssss, and an Alien-style monster winds up in a slasher film, etc. They're cool, these kids and/or they die fast --they smoke cigarettes (indoors!) and dress like pre-Pulp Fiction preppies and have a cool lived-in low-key rapport. Except for Galligan, with his oily black hair and smug expression-- he's the only wrong note. But hey, he suffers a lot and winds up running from zombies in black-and-white ala Romero's 1968 classic. Ashbrook winds up in pastiche of Hammer's Curse of the Werewolf meets Company of Wolves; Johnson finds herself in a very becoming white dress, bare shouldered with strange flower-feather adornments (the costumes are A+) eating raw meet and drinking blood in a sexy and strange Anne Rice-style vampire castle with some eerie sets and Byronic sinister lordly vampires. Virginal Foremen winds up tied to marble columns and lashed by the Marquis de Sade (a hilariously wry J. Kenneth Campbell) while lords and jealous ladies squirm in delight. For some odd reason I find this scene almost revoltingly hot. Foreman, drenched in sweat, her back streaked with welts, moaning for the Marquis to keep going, even as the dandy prince is urging him to kill her. Whoa- what is this crazy kernel of kink (and the almost-as-strangely hot vampire sequence) doing here? This film is full of tricks and treats.

Then, like the kid your mom makes you bring along, into the whipping scene trundles self-righteous bossy Zach, to rescue Foreman, though she doesn't even want to be rescued. Yeesh what a kinky scene until he crashes it. She leaves with him, but the struggle within Foreman's psyche to let go of this new kind of overwhelming pleasure/pain and return back to the dubious joys of reality becomes one of the more tragic albeit key bits of the film. "you're just mad I gave her her first orgasm." De Sade caustically notes. It's as if the girl cenobite in Hellraiser decided to go home to her drab husband in the suburbs and give up her piercings. And hey, it all ends in a massive brawl with all the monsters, including such rare sights as Dirty Harry shooting the head off a vampire bat, someone shooting the baby from It's Alive, and Foreman tossing David Warner's little person sidekick into the open jaws of Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors. It's pretty sloppy by then--the walls of the sets seem to be falling down around them, but there's too many crazy things, happening to really complain, except... yeah, Galligan. Still, no one else seems to like him either, "kill the wimp" Warner says to De Sade when Zach loses their fair sword fight and then just gives up and waits to die. (Foreman saves him with an axe!)

The Amazon Print catches it all in rich detail.

(see: Suspended Imagination: Waxwork, Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master - 5/12)

Third Option:

ONE DARK NIGHT

(1982) Dir Tom McLoughlin

**1/2 / Amazon Image - B-

Meg Tilly broke big with critics and audiences via her role here as a sensitive high school (or college?) kid whose initiation into a pretty lame girl gang involves spending a night alone in a creepy mausoleum. The mean girls mount spooky pranks (never pledge a sorority after you've stolen its leader's boyfriend Steve [David Mason Daniels]) but the corpse of a vengeful Russian psychic rises after they toss a lit roach through the cracked marble of his sepulcher. The way it builds up, Halloween style, from late afternoon in and around school, to after-school plan making, to driving around, to breaking in, from sorority prank scares to the actual genuine scares, is pretty seamless. And there's no sex or idiot snickering from the boys to dumb it down. The bitchy gang leader (Robin Evans) is grating on the nerves (you'd rise from the dead to smite her too) but her long dirty blonde hair looks terrific! Too bad her sycophantic sidekick (Leslie Speights) won't stop chewing on a yellow toothbrush, watching her too long I start to get a phantom gross feeling in my mouth - Demerit!

As the "dark" night plays on (the inside of the mausoleum is way too bright - demerit!), the psychic's estranged daughter, (Melissa Newman) listens to a tape left by a researcher of her late father's telekinetic talents and gets her own 'shining'-style flashes of Meg Tilly in danger from her dead dad's pissy corpse (weed makes him paranoid, I guess). Her husband (Adam West) doesn't do much to help her except snidely dismiss her worries, so she eventually has to go face her evil father's telekinetic (and possibly high) spirit to save the day or die trying.

Prime's print is fairly washed out but it is in HD but it works for the film as the intense white of the mausoleum carries a nice dreamy disconnect. The scares are fun but the real reason to see it is Meg Tilly of course who makes this into her big league calling card. She's so real and vulnerable that we feel instantly invested, anxious over her gullible nature (why submit to the petty whims of the girl whose boyfriend you just stole? Meg, what's wrong with you?) and terrifying predicament. You'll understand why every filmmaker in town who saw this wanted to cast her, leading to significant roles in The Big Chill and Psycho 2 the following year.

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-56355980584328515652019-10-28T10:40:00.000-05:002020-03-27T16:42:42.070-05:00Creature Double Feature Night 8: THE BRAIN THAT COULDN'T DIE (1962), SPIDER BABY (1964)

When it comes to trashy black and white films from the 60s, thanks to The Addams Family and The Muensters, as well as Dr. Shock, Ghoulardi and all the other local TV monster movie hosts across the land, America had developed a national obsession with goofy monsters, along with muscle cars, and hey-hey rock-and-roll. Here are two films that dig into that realm with enough intelligence to know they must play things absolutely straight, to dare even to be touching at times. These are dynamite drinking movies that I first fell in love with watching them round the clock back to back on an old VHS 6-hour tape dupe I made, so I can vouch for their sea legs. Thanks to Prime and progress, you won't have to endure the streaks. Today I may need to be sober as far as booze goes, but these two films still make me drunk on delirious horror shivers, with absurdity and genuine tragedy eyeing each other across a wild dance floor.

THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE

(1961) Dir. Joseph Green

***1/2 / Amazon Image - B-

A beloved classic in the disembodied head canon, this has handsome intern Herb Evers using his experimental formula for transplants despite father-in-law's stodgy insistence on animal tests first. He keeps a sentient hodge podge of living tissue in the closet and his fiancee's head on a tray until he can find a "suitable" body. Occurring in some strange twilight realm of tawdry nightclubs and louche stares, Brain features two great performances by two ravishing brunettes: Virginia Leith as the severed head, rasping her threats and pleas from inside a TV tray full of blood; and Adele Lamont as an initially wary streetwise low rent model whose body Evers figures would be.... just right. Meanwhile, Leith bonds with the thing in the closet, forming a unique friendship in the monster annals ("I've got to see your hideousness and you've got to see mine... I am just a head... and you are whatever you are... but together we're strong!") Lamont conveys what it must be like to endure endless come-ons. That's what makes it all the more tragic when she falls for Evers line about fixing her scarred face, only to wind up roofied and laid out on the operating table. She was so smart up to a point that we really feel for her as the POV camera shows Evers walking expressionlessly towards her as her vision blurs to blankness after shortly telling him, "I trust you with my life." ("I can't ask for more than that," he says) Man, oh man. It's the creepiest because it's all done in real time, with a nice bump-n-grind jazz score calling it all out, slow as you like. "This kind of thing must be done," he later says, to Leith's horrified head.

Adele Lamont dares to fall for Herb Evers' bullshit

Unfortunately the Prime print isn't ideal, as someone figured it would be fancier in widescreen so merely lobbed the bottom and top of the frame off (so we don't see Virginia Leith's head tray half the time; the image is cut off at her chin) Still, having this so handy, just a click away at all times, ensures nothing bad can ever happen to you again, provided you don't let smoov dudes leave your note for your roommate so she'll know where to find you if you fail to come home. And with her scratchy sexy voice and limitless desire to crush her ex-fiancee with a little help from her friend, Leith's head makes her the most enduring sci/for horror female icon since Brigitte in Metropolis.

SPIDER BABY

(1968 - really 1964) Dir. Jack Hill

**** / Prime Image - C

One of those perennial Halloween gems at the Kuersten house, or anytime really. Jack Hill's scrappy gem it's somewhere between Lolita, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Addams Family and... well, I guess in its way it's a total original yet feels so familiar... It's got Lon Chaney at his best, both macabre and a little sad; his teary little moment with the kids before he gets the idea to bring home some dynamite is justifiably regarded as one of his most moving moments, a capstone sign-off (he died shortly after) akin to Bela's "Home... I have no home" speech in Bride of the Monster. It's got the late, lamented Sid Haig as Ralph, and it's got letter perfect Jill Banner and Beverly Washburn as murderous Lolita-style moppets, one of whom is really into something called "the spider game," which you won't want to play, but kind of do. Think it can't be anymore perfect? Try adding Mantan Moreland as a nervous telegram delivery guy, Carol Ohmart as a scheming relative sensing a fortune buried in a revocable trust somewhere; and even the 'normal' couple are pretty cool, "Are you a horror fan, Ann?" says Uncle Bill with a clear post-tavern buzz on. Dam right she is. (see: A League of Wednesdays)

The Prime print isn't the greatest. If you're a fan, Ann, it's worth getting the Arrow Blu-ray. If like me you loved this film to death even as a crappy dupe, the new version, scored from the negative finally, is like a dream come true. This edition isn't the HD remaster, but is still highly effective.

If you want to go really crazy, chase it with Mesa of Lost Women, and Plan Nine from Outer Space and if you're still awake after that, Cat Women of the Moon. They are all on Prime. If you want to go off Prime, find The Boogieman will Get You, a personal deranged favorite. You don't need any of these other films... but seriously.

Triple Feature Recommendation:

MESA OF LOST WOMEN

(1953) Dir. Ron Ormond

**** / Amazon Image - C

My favorite bad movie, perhaps surpassing even Plan Nine and Cat Women of the Moon in my undying esteem. It's the tale of a scientist who somehow winds up a basket case after escaping the tarantula arms of Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan) and his 'experiments' who live high up on a mesa in New Mexico's Muerto Desert. Aranya's able to accelerate spider DNA to make hot Mexican women and small men (including Angelo Rossittio!) from black widow spiders ("the male of the species," Aranya notes, "is a poor and puny thing." There are also giant spiders, either early drafts or side effects of the process. Coogan is a long way off from Uncle Fester and so thankfully so underplays it, and the result becomes almost surreal. The star of the show of course is Harmond Stevens as Dr. Leland J. Masterson, who Michael Weldon famously describes as doing a weird Elmer Fudd impression. He does so much more, Michael! Watch him when other people are talking at the cantina, the terrifying and hilarious way he holds these frozen super-creepy smiles as he stares but doesn't seem to see anything. Suddenly his 'nurse' (George "Ro-Man" Barrows)shows up from the local mental hospital and announces he's somehow his patient has acquired a gun along the way so we all better humor him. When he spots one of the spider women he remembers from the mesa, Leland shoots her right in the middle of her "tarantella." Soon he's hijacking the private plane of a rich honeymooning May-December couple, and a bottle of whiskey stashed in the cockpit helps warm the cockles after the plane crashes on Aranya's mesa. Over a long and scary night the survivors are menaced by all giant spiders and shady looking shadows, and well, I can't possibly do it justice. Nor can I even begin to stop praising the shattered flamenco and off-key barroom piano hammering of the repetitive score. You'll either love it or hate it, but if you love it you can't get enough of it. I dig the fact for example that--aside from some daytime desert exterior in the framing device, it's all shot on soundstages, even the crashed plane; there's this great sense of interiority when bad movies shoot outdoor scenes indoors, a neither here/there vibe that, for some of us, is so eerily evocative of delirious dream states we've had and still cherish the memory of, that they become our happy place: the graveyard and pilot's porch in Plan Nine from Outer Space, the cave and temples of Cat Women of the Moon, and The Mesa of Lost Women!

Prime directive: See the upload with the black "Film Detective" border; the "Wade Williams" cover upload has a slight jump. That said, it's worth getting the actual Wade Williams DVD of Mesa if you're a true blue fan, though the ideal version has yet to be struck. The night scenes are still hard to see once they're away from the fire but it's clearer. Is it too much to ask, Shout Factory or Arrow or even Criterion, to give us a remastered Blu-ray, maybe with some other long-out-of-circulation Ron and Suzy Ormond titles!? Stand back and let me dream on it.

(see: So Close to Heaven)

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-12445369986218648182019-10-27T17:20:00.000-05:002019-10-27T23:49:45.789-05:00Creature Triple Feature Night 7: ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS; CALTIKI, THE IMMORTAL MONSTER; THE KILLER SHREWS

It's a rainy drab stuffy Sunday here in Manhattan, but with the comforting chill of night comes the chance to once more delve into Prime's bottomless cesspool. Tonight, a trio of monster classics, each mean and strange. Do you dare tamper in God's domain along with these stalwart scientists?

ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS

(1957) Dir. Roger Corman

*** 1/2 / Amazon Image - A

Roger was at the top of his pre-60s/Poe phase game for this fast, cheap and fun whizzbang sci-fi / horror film. It's already come, wowed the world, and gone by the time other science fiction films are just starting to get their heads out of their asses. So we've got a group of scientists investigating the effects of nuclear fall-out on local marine life at a super remote atoll (ala Bikini) at the height of the Cold War atomic bomb test one-upsmanship days. The scientists include many of the cast members from THE UNDEAD: Mel Welles, Pamela Duncan, and Richard Garland. Beach Dickerson is a Marine left on the beach with a buddy and a case of dynamite and grenades. What would a bunch of scientists want with this stuff? Beach wonders. Fat lot of good it does against crabs made of anti-matter who absorb the intelligences and voices of the scientists they eat (and then call to the survivors to meet them in the underwater caves, their voices drenched in heavy reverb). Sure the film gets laughs because the crabs are kind of ridiculous (and there was only one at a time) but I'll take a giant life size parade float puppet thing where you can see the shade sash for its eye lids over just some rear screen projection of crab stock footage or something. Corman gets that. His crabs make only a feint towards crabbiness, but they have wild big eyes and booming voices and massive claws- and they rock.

I turn to this film again and again late at night when I need to forget the last film I just watched or allay whatever woes or anxiety. Its Charles B. Griffith script crackles with fast-paced brightness and speed. No sooner have they rolled onto the island than a Marine gets his head chopped off while looking underwater to see what's holding back their raft. I still remember the dirty kick I got from that as a kid (this was on TV a lot) as such sights were rare due to squeaky censors. Speaking of TV, future Professor (sans Marianne) on Gilligan's Island, Russell Johnson is Hank, the radio operator. He strikes 'sparks' with Duncan, though she's betrothed to Garland for some unforeseen reason (is it the hairpiece?). Not that there's any time for such tomfoolery. The crabs are using their atomic powers to slowly destroy the island, whittling the sides of rock to fall into the sea, ensuring the humans run out of places to hide. It's an interesting idea in itself, along with a few dozen others, and then BAM - it's all over. Now you're back on the Prime menu, left to figure it out for yourself. But come back anytime.

21. CALTIKI, THE IMMORTAL MONSTER

(1959) Dir. Mario Bava, Riccardo Freda

*** - Amazon Image - A+

If you don't already have this on Arrow Blu-ray, you're probably not a Mario Bava fan. What's wrong with you? See his Black Sunday, Black Sabbath and Kill, Baby, Kill! and you'll understand. You'll even understand why we love this early--comparatively minor--work, his debut as director, co-working with old mentor Freda. It's an odd but entertaining enough mix of Gothic and sci-fi elements (a kind of Quatermass Catholica), imagining The Blob if coupled to The Mummy, with a giant pulsing amoeba monster with a great weird look of some kind of black wet slimy muslin and jelly blob pulsing its way around, rising from its sleepy tomb deep in a Mayan cave (in Italy and Spain they go to Central America for their mummies) after being stirred to life by curious macho archaeologists. It must have been what drove away and/or ate the Mayans! A naive patriarchal scientist (John Merivale) figures a tiny sample of the thing can't hurt to bring home and study, but it only takes a little lightning storm or cosmic rays from a passing meteor or something to get it all swelled up again. While he's off dealing with the big one at the lab, his take-home sample of the Caltiki engorges as well. Soon it's devouring his entire house; he Italian army blasts the villa to run via flame-thrower-mounted tanks in a fiery climax.

Meanwhile a racist German archaeologist (Gérard Herter) who touched the thing back in the tombs and lost his hand from its poisonous weird rabies/gangrene combination, is now insane and will stop at nothing to ravish the scientist's pretty wife (Didi Sullivan), all while his own darker-skinned woman (Daniele Rocca) fumes from the shadows. As he chases the blonde wife all around the mansion (brilliantly under-lit by Bava to emphasize his impure intent), the blob gets bigger and bigger, breaking all sorts of glass, slithering around the halls and through the doors and foyers of the lower level of the house most enjoyably while Didi and her child cower on the ledge above, all brilliantly lit by Bava's startling black-and-white cinematography, deftly preserved for the immaculate HD prime stream. In the sparkling restoration Caltiki itself looks divine, deep black but with Bava's brilliant lighting capturing the glint of light off the slimy weird fabric/scales/ooze as it splits into smaller versions all growing ever larger as they devour flesh and trees alike during the climactic dark night.

The first 1/4 is the best, with the expedition to the rainforest all rendered brilliantly via Bava's masterful use of mattes, mirrors, and miniatures, replete with time out for a sexy native dance set to bongos while the men leer and the women scowl. Parts get too soapy or too dry in spots but blame that on Freda if we must. Bava fills Caltiki with his beautiful camera movements, mattes (the Mayan ruin exteriors are depicted using nothing but a photo and some smoke) and lighting schemes so--if nothing else--it's damned atmospheric, beautiful, and bizarre. In other words, just fine for the Halloween festival curation purposes of this, an accursed Kuersten Prime-a-thon (in Italian with optional English subtitles).

THE KILLER SHREWS

(1957) Dir. Ray Kellogg
** 1/2 / Amazon Image - A-

Casual fans may wonder, but for those of us of a certain age, the SHREWS was one of the better afternoon creature feature offerings on local TV-- we weren't particularly convinced by the monsters - easy enough to tell they were shaggy dogs with wigs and false teeth, but they're terrifying because--as the doctor explained--their digestive juices are so corrosive that even a tiny prick from their fangs is fatal. We kids could dig that. As adults, it's fun to see Gunsmoke regular Ken Curtis as a drunken owl-hoot pining for blonde research assistant Ingrid Goude and trying to off his chief rival, the laconic charter captain (James Best). We'd grow up to see Curtis tangle with so many John Ford characters in similar circumstances (i.e. The Searchers) and Best chasing the Duke boys around the backroads of Hazzard county, and we'd think 'I know those two dudes from somewhere'. And the big climactic use of overturned oil drums lashed together and used as protection for the survivors' escape to the coast was something no kid who saw it in the 70s ever forgot. It was the kind of thing we could vividly imagine ourselves doing, and it wasn't until Tremors-- with its savvy incorporation of the 'carpet is lava' furniture-hopping game--that we'd see our exact type of imaginative invention so succinctly expressed. Catching it on early morning TV as a kid, it was like our last nightmare of the night was still playing. Even today there's something unsettling about these monsters, chewing through walls with their venomous corrosive saliva, and Curtis just waiting for a chance to get you in a room with one so he can once more have no competition for sultry Goulde. And there are cocktails. Lots of cocktails.

Prime has a color version but their black-and-white version is the best (the one with the shrew tail wrapping itself around a woman's shoe).

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-57269595715811670762019-10-26T19:04:00.002-05:002019-10-26T19:38:12.852-05:00Creature Double Feature Night 6: SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE (1973), THE GHOUL (1933)

 Tonight, a double feature of prime Prime old dark house thrillers, each set rollicking over gloomy Gothic estates with their own secret chambers to the burial grounds, tombs with cats, gems and vows of vengeance beyond the grave, an assortment of shifty-eyed suspects and a couple of 'kissin' cousins' who haven't seen each other since they were kids, teaming up "shoulder-to-shoulder" in a kind of young hip 'divine right of hotness after a key death in the family ramps up the antics of a relentless killer. The denouement of both is even similar, with surprise villainy where you used to least expect it. Prizing heavy Gothic atmosphere over whodunnit base tagging, these films make a perfect October night in. Working can wait, as the old hillbilly in that WB cartoon once sang, this is para-diise... for some of us. I'm rating and reviewing these according to my eccentric patriarchal whims, as stated in my will...

SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE

La morte negli occhi del gatto

1973 - Dir. Antonio Margheriti

***1/2 / Amazon Image - C

Often creatively ranslated or interpreted (the English credit is "Seven Deaths in the Cats Eyes" and on imdb it's "Seven Dead in a Cat's Eye"), La morte negli occhi del gatto is worth seeing under any guise or language track, provided the colors are as lovingly soaked in dusky golden, maroon and black, as here. And with her huge eyes and endearingly crooked smile, Jane Birkin makes a fabulous Edgar Wallace-style heroine; her suitor/cousin, Hiram Keller (Satyricon) is the pretty but blank Hamlin-esque 'madman' Lord James MacGrieff, kept a virtual prisoner up in his fabulous top of the castle salon with his paints and pet gorilla (you know it's an old dark house movie when there's a gorilla, provided it's played by a guy in a gorilla suit- and this is one of the worst I've ever seen. I'm in a peculiar kind of heaven). This international-Italian/French co-production finds Lady Corringa (Birkin) hiding the fact she's been expelled from the nun-run girl's boarding school she's been attending and dropping in unannounced on her mother and her aunt, who lives in the ornate castle and won't sell it even though she'll get no more money to run it. Soon mom is dead and our unlucky ingenue is possibly going mad in a mansion full of eccentrics all vying for possession of the elaborate yet crumbling secret passage-ridden ancestral estate. She's a bit like Paulette Goddard in the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY if the Bob Hope part was played by a brooding Byronic pretty boy chief suspect... and he had a pet gorilla; and she came to the reading of the will with her mom, but her mom was murdered and then appeared to her as a vampire ghost at night, with a Hamlet-like demand for vengeance.

The score's a bit on the dimestore Morrione cop show side, but that's hardly bad thing. The main benefit here is gorgeous photography lush enough that at times Birkin's luminous hair is so perfectly reflected in her candelabra's lamplight we can count the strands. This film bumps up three stars now that it's not a panned, scanned, washed-out mess. Margheriti clearly loves along with the writing of the godfather of the giallo, Edgar Wallace.

One of the stand-out elements here are the clothes, which 'nod' to an assumed setting of 1930's England, but just nod, keeping the high fashion edge rather than getting bogged down in stuffy details like bowler hats and woolen overcoats. For her mourning wear (above) Birkin is given a beautiful black fur collar and her nightgown's sexy without being tacky (Von Sternberg would have approved). The whole production, aside from lingering close-ups of rats eating the face of victim #1, is very tasteful. The music is the orchestral suspense-generating variety rather than the moody giallo electric guitars of the time, but that's not worth a demerit. Indeed, the only demerit is maybe dubbing Serge Gainsbourg (he's the detective) with a fake Scotch burr.

SPECIAL NOTE: My experience with Prime, and finding a good stream, is that there are often numerous options --the one in the upper left of the screenshot at right has a picture of the DVD cover art, so seems to be the most reliable, but it has an issue in the last half where the image jerks around like every third frame is missing. Too bad, as the image is divine. The middle version (left) with a green frame isn't 'Prime' so who cares?

Then there's another version, also "Prime", with no cover thumbnail art at all (circled) but there's no jerking; however the image is somewhat softer, though not to a dealbreaker extent. The beauty still comes through. This is of course subject to change. However, it's good enough that if you love the film you may be prompted to buy the Blue Underground DVD and you'll be glad ya did.

THE GHOUL

(1933) Dir. T. Hayes Hunter

*** / Amazon Image - B (various versions exist on Prime)

To be a classic horror fan is to love any movie that features both Boris Karloff and Ernest Thesiger (they co-starred in two James Whale classics: Old Dark House and Bride of Frankenstein), so we love The Ghouls. Here they're back home in England, at lovely old Gaumont, but with Universal's horror film tropes at the forefront of their producer's minds, and we love their minds for loving those tropes as we do, even if they don't quite have a full-on horror knack, and this bends more towards Gothic chiller, the type with wry wit and--thankfully--no scenes of local color shootin' the shit down the pub, a British staple. Here we get lots of swirling fog and no daytime scenes whatsoever, which I love. Karloff is a dying Egyptologist living on a big dark estate with its own Egyptian tomb. Most of his remaining fortune has been spent on a huge mystical emerald which he thinks will bring him back from the dead once he rises in the shadow of giant statue of Isis (ala The Mummy). His big worry, some quick-thinking pallbearer will steal it before he gets walled-in. After he dies, and his eerie Egyptian-style funerary procession to the strains of Wagner's immortal "Siegfried's Funeral March" is concluded, the real show begins with the jewel and A+ MacGuffin. The first person to break in finds the gem already missing, thanks to nervous but well-meaning butler (Thesiger) but there's also Ralph Richardson as an overly-friendly parson; Cedrick Hardwicke as a grumpy Dickensian lawyer; the great Harold Huth is Aga Ben Dragore, the art dealer who sold Karloff the jewel, and the shifty agents he stole it from. Dorothy Hyson and Anthony Bushell are the young, attractive, egal inheritors of the estate and therefore the jewel (depending on who you ask). Cousins who bicker over old grievances, they stand "shoulder to shoulder" once the spooky goings on commence. Kathleen Harrison provides the comic relief as Hyson's pal who comes along for moral support and ends up swooning over Dragore's tales of whipping slave girls for miles across the dunes. It all takes place over a single, wild night in almost real time (my favorite kind of movie). Naturally Karloff come back from the dead and skulks about the mansion search of his expensive emerald, scaring, killing, and even the bit where he carves an ankh symbol on his chest has been restored!

Long just a streaky duped public domain blur, available only on second-hand dupes, The Ghoul has since been spiffed up and now is a personal favorite that's just oozing with delicious spooky Universal-does-Edgar Wallace atmosphere (with dabs of The Mummy). Pure 30s horror / old dark house mood it is, with enough fog to carry it through to the giddy end (no tired moments or tedious exterior daytime shots). And if you lose track of who has the jewel, or where it's hid, or where everyone else is relative to everyone else on the grounds, don't worry, just vibe on the old dark house glory of it all, and watch it again later. It gets better, and easier to understand, with every viewing... now that you can see what's going on, kind of, in the fog.

Amazon also has a 1970s Ghoul with Peter Cushing, no relation to the 1933 version, and with terrible dupe streaks and bad framing. There are several uploads of the 1933 version on Prime too, so pick a good one. The green and white cover with Karloff's face is the one I'm covering here. It's a slow burn joy, so is Seven Deaths.

Optional Third Choice (for the die-hards)

THE RAVEN

1963 - dir. Roger Corman
 **** / Amazon Image - A

A personal October perennial, this loose comedic 'adaptation' of Poe's poem has reluctant sorceress Vincent Price longing for his Lenore on a dark and stormy night, reading forgotten lore until Peter Lorre (bloated but hilarious) as the raven interrupts his moody brooding with a request for wizarding aid. A drunken sorcerer of lesser skill, Lorre tells Price he was turned into a raven by Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff)--whose castle is right down the coast (Big Sur, naturally). It just so happens Scarabus killed Price's master sorcerer father in a duel years earlier. Price lost Lenore (Hazel Court) to him as well (a bit like Karloff stole Lugosi's wife in the 1934 Black Cat --another Poe "adaptation") but doesn't know she's still alive. Soon they're all packed away in a carriage, along with a young Jack Nicholson as Lorre's son Rexford and Olive Sturgess as Price's cute daughter.The Les Baxter score at times errs on the side of the Mickey Mouse-ish but this is pure uncut Halloween delight, so you might as well bring the kids, by which I mean depressed lovelorn sophomores reeling from too much bad acid, as I was, catching this at the Student Union while a sophomore, and needing desperately at the time to return to the Gothic chambers and forgotten lore of childhood, wherein every fairy tale was grim.

In the land of the damned Price is as the soothing balm of Ativan to the alcoholically twisted.

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-65137247414102382212019-10-25T11:51:00.002-05:002019-11-06T12:31:43.302-05:00Creature Double Feature Night 5: DOLLS, THE MONSTER SQUAD, + Trilogy of Terror's "Amelia"

Here's a two 1/3 films for the whole family, rich with scary dolls and vampire brides, waiting right there on Prime, in glorious HD. And by family, I don't mean in a sticky, irritating way where the kids who star in the film are saints with little string leitmotifs accompanying their dewey-eyed close-ups or passively suffering Stephen King-style bullies and shady government agents. Hell no. These two films have kids in them, but they're cool kids. They don't grate a childless old curmudgeon's last nerve the way some do. What happened to kids in movies, man? They used to be cool, like Tatum O'Neal and Jackie Earle Hayley cool. Well, we have to films with their like within them. These have cool settings, deep blacks, and interesting approaches to the good vs. evil dichotomy. Shall we go then, you and I?

11. DOLLS

(1987) Dir Stuart Gordon

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A+

A disparate bunch of dislikable travelers, along with two 'good' ones, seek shelter at a remote mansion full of dolls when their cars run into a sudden storm and mysterious engine trouble. Little do they suspect, the eerily tolerant elderly couple (Guy Rolfe and Hilary Mason) who live there are... well... I can't say more. Creepy and colorful, beautifully photographed, and with just the right note of macabre glee, all ages are welcome to DOLLS if they don't mind a little or a lot of blood. Of the six travelers, only an sweet-dispositioned endomorph (named Ralph, what else?) who never lost his inner child, and the very imaginative daughter (Carrie Lorraine) of a particularly hammy pair of life-size dipshits (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon [the 'mean' rival shrink trying to give everyone electroshock treatments in From Beyond] and Ian Patrick Williams) may be spared. Everyone else is asking to die--or be shrunk and locked inside a ceramic doll-shaped encasement. Even the jangly-jeweled over-acting Madonna-ish Aussie new wave punk hitchhikers (Cassie Stuart and Buntley Bailey) are asking for it by, amongst other things, trying to rob the place after the humans go to bed. See, late at night the dolls come to life and are rather insistent on everyone else doing the opposite. The pissed off parents accuse Ralph of the murders since he's running around covered in blood and his habit of running around with the daughter, screaming.

The all-in-a-single-night pace and a refreshingly non-carousel-sourced score by the impossibly named Fuzbee Norse help this one sing briskly and without insufferable whimsy. Producer Charles Band's main man Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) directed, so it's invested with considerably more style and care than usual for a New Moon/Empire production. The HD Prime print is sublime, better than great, allowing Marc Ahlberg's cinematographic craftsmanship to fill in every ornate room and hallway with deep black dark corners, and nooks brimming with malevolent lifeless doll eyes, all lit seemingly only by the fireplace, candles, or the incessant cracks of lightning from outside. (That's the Charles Band secret, shooting in cash-strapped European countries with affordable genius lighting craftsman) Pretty darn perfect for an October drinking sesh, bro. Just be respectful of the noise levels, or we newly sewn-together old folks are gonna get ya. ++

12. MONSTER SQUAD

(1987) Dir. Fred Dekker

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A+

It was easy for me to steer away from a child-encrusted title like The Monster Squad for years, expecting a kind of super-tacky faux-Spielbergian/faux-hip family stickiness with monsters and kids teaming up to fight illiteracy or something, a kind of ET-meets-Ghostbusters with, presumably, a fat kid who never stops eating his feeling and getting chocolate on everything he touches. Boy was I wrong. I should have looked at the screenwriting credit, seen Shane Black's name, and known these kids were going to be cool (as per his great kid characters in Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys). Black and Dekker (!) were UCLA English majors together and this was their big collaboration - it died on arrival but found a second life on cable and is now highly regarded, so finally I had to see it. Wow! Now, here's a film ahead of its time as far as depicting the kind of reasonably cool kids where the local cops (the main kid's dad is a bewildered homicide detective) don't mind the boys taking their guns during big stand-offs with armies of monsters. These kids are like my buddies and I were back in the day, i.e. well-armed and well-versed in self-defense, the types who don't flinch from a fight with the local bullies, or monsters, and have perhaps the coolest tree house in all tree houses; the type who draw monsters in science class instead of taking notes. It's such a breath of fresh air if you grew up psychically harassed a priori by all the bullies in Stephen King movies (and that includes IT), you'll be like 'at last, here's a film for the kids who actually fight back right out the gate' and not have to endure proxy humiliations and wait for the later moment of vengeance. And lo, there's the ultimate in cool Stan Shaw (TNT Jackson) as dad's partner. Dekker also gave us Night of the Creeps and House, two other pastiche films done with real love and care, for a certain type of viewer. The Amazon HD print is sparkling, with great dusky golden colors (as per the tree house above) and the monsters are genuinely kind of scary, able to provide chills as well as laughs and never resorting to self-aware camp. Any movie where Dracula fights those humans out to kill him by dynamiting their houses and cop cars definitely has something on the beam. The big extended Main Street climax, an all out war between armed kids, cops and monsters, guns blazing, death toll mounting, is just about the neatest thing this side of the Stay-Puff marshmallow man. Best of all, Dekker doesn't forget the three sexy vampire brides (top), though they die a bit too easily.

Though one caveat, why are these genius kids totally unwilling to use crosses when fighting Dracula? It never seems to occur to them! The end rap theme is terrible and might make you belatedly realize this film was trying a little too obviously for a Ghostbusters-style hit and maybe franchise, but don't let that stop you from giving it the chance it never got on the big screen! There's even a cool little sister (don't ask me to list any of their names). Even if, like me, the idea of a bunch of kids fighting the Universal pantheon seems tacky to you, believe me, it's done right. Those idiots who ruined the Mummy reboot should have given it a close gander. Even the tagalong little sister is cool, even her tearful goodbye to Frankie is done nicely, with nary a shred of Spielberg maudlin tack. If you're like me, still traumatized by the death of little Maria in the 1931 original, seeing her holding that hunted and despised monster's hand and leading him not into flower-throwing temptation proves a truly healing moment.

 TRILOGY OF TERROR:

part 3:"Amelia"(start at 45:42)

(1975) Dir. Dan Curtis

***1/2 / Amazon Image - B+

Karen Black got a chance to show off her versatility in this Robert Bloch-penned horror triptych TV movie, and, wigged out those of my generation who got to stay up late and see the last story, forever known as 'the one with the crazy fetish doll'. And since we're all digital now it's super easy to skip the first two, not that there's anything wrong with them. They're okay. But nothing like "Amelia," the tale that starts at the 45:42 minute mark. So since we've already seen Dolls and The Monster Squad, consider this one a final chaser, not really aimed at kids but we who were kids in 1975 regard it as one of the key touchstones of our TV horror youth, the sort of tale told in dark closets with flashlights illuminating our faces, or at night around campfires.

The story has Karen Black as a woman under the thumb of a domineering mom (we hear her dealing with, and submitting to, mom's unreasonable manipulations via a phone call), who we never see leave her high-rise apartment after walking in with the package containing a large "Zuni" fetish doll she receives as a gift. The note with the doll proclaims it promotes fertility etc. and is supposedly a god trapped in the doll by a chain around its waist. If the chain falls off, the doll... well.... it comes to life, and it chases her around the room, even into her bath. Yes I know that sounds crazy and m-m-maybe it is but you have to believe me when I say everyone I know who saw it during its initial broadcast never forgot it. My strict bedtime meant I missed it and could only hear of it from kids with cooler dads. It sounded kind of silly to me that a crazy doll with a spear could inspire such a reaction. The doll is great but all the kudos go to Karen Black. She brings so much life to the story she could freak you out using just a sock puppet and some string if she half-tried. Either way, you may never take a bath in a room with a Zuni fetish doll again! Fairly warned be ye.

If you're really into Black, you can start Trilogy over after it's done and see the first two stories, also written by Robert Bloch, but not half has freaky. Or you could just go to bed! Good luck!

Erich Kuerstenhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-19288001116090922512019-10-24T14:19:00.002-05:002019-10-24T18:25:06.711-05:00Creature Double Feature Night 4: BAFFLED! (1972); CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980)

Tonight, here's an oddball pairing of films (currently on Prime) about oddball couples investigating strange happenings together based on an eerie and unexpected premonition that strikes one of them out of the blue. In each film, one is a layman with the vision, the other is an investigator with a yen for a big story, eager to visit the place they saw in the vision. To balance things out, in one film its a NYC woman (Catriona MacColl) who has the premonition and the man is a cigar-chomping newspaper reporter (Christopher Plummer) sensing a scoop and maybe some chemistry (he rescues her from a coffin --and nearly splitting her head open with a pickaxe doing so, after she 'dies' in the midst of a seance) and the town is in New England. In the other, the seer is a race car driver (Leonard Nimoy!) who almost dies in a racing accident while having the vision, and the investigator is a spunky lady Brit rare occult book detective (Susan Hampshire) and the town is nestled in the remote English countryside. One is a gory nightmare of zombies and creepy violence; the other an early 70s TV movie/pilot. Can you ask for a more/less at the same time? A veritable yin/yang they are.

1. BAFFLED!
(1972) Dir. Phillip Leacock

*** / Amazon Image - B-

The weird surprise of this one-off bloodless supernatural comedy-thriller pilot is the odd duck chemistry between Leonard Nimoy and Susan Hampshire as a pair of pre-Minority Report solvers of crimes yet to happen. Nimoy plays a race car driver suddenly stricken with the ability to see future events, in this case it's a murder at some weird English mansion. Nimoy can't shake his alien aura long enough to convince as a regular Formula 500 joe, but he seems to be having a wry blast of a time running around the countryside with Hampshire and his Satanic alien head seems natural for a hip soothsayer. For her part, Susan Hampshire radiates a kind of can-do British cheek as occult bookseller Michelle. She sees him on TV after his big race, talking about a flash to a murder yet-to-happen and she's determined to help him find the mansion and prevent the crime. Rachel Roberts (Picnic at Hanging Rock's uptight headmistress) is in charge of the place (open to guests in summer); Vera Miles as the rich middle aged actress Kovak sees falling out of an attic window. She's with her daughter (Jewel Blanche) while her estranged ex-husband (Mike Murray -She-Devils in Chains), sporting the most cruelly Satanic haircut of the entire decade--hides in the greenhouse where he lures his daughter to dark side with the help of a mystic wolf amulet. See? BAFFLED! is Cool!

Lots of turtlenecks and medallions and occult signifiers; fancy British cars tool around the grounds to make sure the car fanatic aspect of Kovac's character fits in (with some unconvincing but just dandy rear projection during the chase scenes). There are way too many daylight exteriors and extraneous herrings about but I like the weird non-sexual friendship chemistry of Nimoy and Hampshire's characters. They're into each other but not enough for it to get in the way with their strange bond, which means they're smart enough to leave it as a will they-or-won't they. Between her trenchant knowledge of arcane texts and his weird flash forwards to strange murders somehow tied in with an an occult group of weirdoes known as the House of the Wolf, they're kept too busy, aside from being stuck in an elevator shaft during most of the hair-raising climax, too get gooey (but Kovak's already seen the previews). The cast of British BBC stock are all in their best chipper form. Hampshire is especially a delight: animated, assertive, fearless, funny and forthright, bouncing around in her 70s peasant frocks and groovy turtlenecks. A bewildered Nimoy can't help but laugh in admiration.

Richard Hill's score is over the top cop show pumping, never quite on the nose as far as being bouncy when it should be scary or scary when it should be bouncy, but that adds an almost mocking tenor that's most invigorating. The Prime image is pretty solid, albeit in that usual drab TV movie frame, luckily the colors are strong, as you can tell from the red of Michelle's turtleneck, above. There's a great final line after their awkward near-kiss goodbye: "Michelle… we're leaving for Paris. Someone's in trouble… I don't know who, yet…"

---

CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD

(1980) Dir. Lucio Fulci

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

Despite its unconvincing and excessive gore and gross-ours, City of the Living Dead is a strangely beautiful film, thanks especially to a great HD transfer: the darkness seems to stretch inward to the infinite; it occurs almost all at night or late afternoon and each scene is lit for maximum moody October night eeriness. The ground is ever laden with billowing fog, the night courses jet-black (no 'day for night' balderdash here) and the hair of the ladies is wondrously loose, auburn and backlit so it glows with an unerring luster.

It's not perfect: Carlo De Mejo sports a terrible frizz toupee and fake beard as Gerry, Dunwich's resident shrink and some of the gross outs are a bit overdone, such as when sultry Daniela Doria vomits her literal guts out and cries blood after seeing a vision of a hung priest while trying to make out with Michele Soavi in a car. Those who consider 'nightmare logic' merely an excuse for narrative inconsistency and lazy writing won't like that the zombies can sometimes appear and disappear at will, or that someone might die early in the evening and then escape from the funeral home a few hours later, nor will they like all the evidence of editing as story tangents pop up out of nowhere and disappear as fast (like the strange body that shows up in Agren's kitchen) but those are also some reasons why I love the film so much.

On the fourth or fifth viewing it gets no easier to unravel, especially when marveling on the weird web of sexy relationships and inappropriateness going on in the lives of Dunwich's residents. For example: Gerry's girlfriend Emily (Antonella Interlenghi) is far too young for him, was probably once a patient (how unprofessional!) and even barges in on his session with sultry Janet Agren, only to have her self-deprecatingly dismiss her own dreams as just 'daddy issues,' all just so Emily can cancel her date with himsas she decides she has to (for some unknown reason) to go check on 'Bob,' (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) a deranged sex addict derelict who lives in a hovel on the outskirts of town. Somehow or other she thinks she must barge in on a session of psychoanalysis, and break up a date all just to pose seductively (and uninvitedly) on Bob's rotted mattress, only for him--all pale and red-eyed in fear of some disembodied moaning monster-- to push her down as he spring away, so whatever it is takes her instead of him. Talk about nightmare logic! Why the frickin' hell would she head off into this dump to visit a deranged sex offender on his filthy mattress in the dark of an autumnal night? If you have an answer, you must be lost in a vivid REM cycle.

Even the title is misleading, since we leave NYC early on and spend the rest of the movie in the small town of Midwich. This is a movie that's like descending slimy marble stairs in the dark with no handrail. You can either crawl patiently downward like a little bitch, or just throw yourself down and try to surf the edges and probably break your neck. You can practically hear the "thuck!" of your skull hitting wet stone as you think about it. You'll have to wake up in a few minutes either way. What's important is that a crisp autumn air rushes through every open space, and that Fabio Frizzi's insane score is one of the greatest ever, a bizarre fusion of ominous guitar signatures on repeat, atonal keyboard fist mashes, 'off' concert piano refrains (like a drunk trying to remember scales) and a main theme which seems to be always slowly building with sampled male mellotron moan sampler echo and impatient click drum track leading up to a neat little antithetical synth anthem that sounds like it could be Flash Gordon's funeral procession through the Aboria swamps. ADD A brilliant HD restoration, cinematography by the great Sergio Salvati, and a wide assortment of pretty women, and even some cool cops, and it all comes together in a coming apartness kind of way.

The middle child bridging Fulci's early Zombie and the gonzo far-outness of The Beyond and House by the Cemetery, City is a great R-rated (for gore alone) creeptastic ideal 2 AM Halloween pick for the Mole Family. Pounce on its wriggling form before it vanishes back into the ground, and all therein that may be explored.

Third Feature Option:

18. THE ETERNAL

(1998) Dir. Michael Almereyda

*** 1/2 / Amazon Image - A-

A kind of Lower East Side downtown hipster coffee and cigarettes experimental and cool, The Eternal is a boozy metatextual dissertation on memory, alcoholism, and the bonds of the moment transcending the bite of history and vice versa, it's also a loose, sexy update of a kind of combination of Hammer's 1972 Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (and its Stoker source novel) and the 1951 The Thing. The story has boozy rich couple Alison Elliot and Jared Harris leaving NYC for her ancestral Irish moor's estate, as if called home by some archaic homing signal (shades of 1934'a Black Moon, though I can't imagine Almereyda has seen it). As far as the previous two films, it's got that American out of water vibe as an ancestral estate is visited, strange visions, sudden corpses, and a sense of nonchalant cool highly unusual for the horror genre.

Christopher Walken has a couple of great scenes as a boozy call aesthete puttering around the mansion in his red robe, drinking Irish whiskey and, amongst other things, showing Alison the mummified corpse of a long dead druid priestess relative, found nestled in amidst old basement trunks. Amongst other curious things, the more Elliot starts to feel woozy and black out, the more alive and beautiful the mummy gets, until it looks almost identical to her, though gifted with immortal strength, a disregard for the life and death of those around her, and telekinesis. What's her deal? "It was the Iron Age," notes Walken. "You had to do a lot of nasty things, just to get by." Amen.
(see full article)

Erich Kuerstenhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-54937996327726868182019-10-23T09:44:00.001-05:002019-10-23T09:53:12.852-05:00Creature Double Feature Night 3: THE NIGHTMARE, INFERNO

Here's a weird, unusual and very creepy double feature that explores dream logic and the very real terrors of sleep paralysis. Some people have it so bad they're as afraid to go to sleep as the kids on Elm Street. I remember a nightmarish man about 10 feet tall as a kid, just once, and it scared me for weeks, I would hold my eyelids open terrified to go to sleep. Now I know our old Lansdale PA house was haunted. All the signs are there. Here's the proof, a documentary by the maker of Room 237 and a perhaps justifiably under-praised Suspiria sequel from Dario Argento that takes the same colors and creepy nightmare logic and opens it up inside a vast strange apartment building in NYC. Both are on Prime; on their own they're just weird. Take them together and it's like banesteria caapi and an Mimosa hostilis... take 'em together and you get alchemical transubstantiation, and maybe some life-altering shadow person terrors.

4. THE NIGHTMARE

(2015) Dir. Rodney Ascher

*** 1/2/ Amazon Image - A

The director of the strangely super creepy Shining theorist documentary Room 237 tackles another weird subject: sleep paralysis by, once again, interviewing a series of slightly un-normal people in depth about what can either be termed their deep transpersonal insight or near-psychosis, in this case with creepy re-enactments of their sleep paralysis experiences. Each recounted dream/waking nightmare is vividly is recreated for an approach that transcends mere 'documentary' to become something truly new, twisted, and deeply illuminating. Creepy highlights include the human figures composed of TV static and the awake encounter during a hike between a man's weird hippie girlfriend and blue light being. Somehow the girl herself is almost as surreal and otherworldly as the blue glowing spirit. In another uncanny moment we see the bedrooms of the sleepers all connected by a common interdimensional soundstage where the beings move between rooms, conjuring Monsters Inc. and Dr. Who's "The Girl in the Fireplace" episode, and too many other things not to cause a jolt or realization. Have we seen this room before ourselves.... in dreams? Jonathan Snipes, who crafted the moody analog synth score for Room 237 (a propulsive, chilling soundtrack I still listen to) does the eerie score of slow traveling synth drones and creepily accelerating 'asleep on the highway' rhythms, with his creepy percolating klave during the scary recollection of "The Hat Man" being a special highlight of uncanny disquiet.

In short, though technically a documentary, Asher's film makes a fine addition to any streaming horror marathon or, in this case, dream logic double feature.

(For more on sleep paralysis on Acidemic's sister site Divinorum Psychonauticus, see: Demon Sheets: Sleep Paralysis Theories)

See also Ascher's Shudder documentary short Primal Screen covering one man's recollection of being terrified as a kid watching a commercial for that Anthony Hopkins as a tortured ventriloquist movie Magic. Rodney, if that's going to be a series, I'm happy to share my own reminiscence of a similar 'TV commercial' alchemical horror paralysis via a long ad for what was then called: Silent Night / Deadly Night.

3. INFERNO

(1980) Dir Dario Argento

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A

The follow-up to Suspiria maybe had expectations too high, OR it was just a case of the music not being as wild and eerie as Goblin's certifiably insane score in the original, which proved a key factor in making the wild visuals and sudden jarring horrific violence all the more raw and unsettlingly poetic. Between that film and Carpenter's score for Halloween the following year there was no doubt that a musical score could make or break a horror movie, usher it into the cannon or escort it out. But Goblin "couldn't do it" they say. What, they were busy? How hard can it be to rattle some sheet metal and howl? Ennio Morricone, who had done Argento's first three films, could have knocked a killer score out in an afternoon and it would leagues better than old Keith Emerson's clunky 'Thelonious Monk -cum-Englebert Humperdink grand piano, and super high operatic prog rock Verdi (Meco's disco version of Star Wars and Walter Murphy's A Fifth of Beethoven were chart toppers at the time) and latin dirge chant funk. Running riot over the visuals, these missed-mile atrocities have the opposite effect of what Goblin provided. His yen for metal and prog rock would lead, alas, to many such 'suddenly we're watching MTV Europe' moments in his later films. Truly, pumping its soundtrack full of prog rock and hair metal tracks is a sure way to make your film truly dated in years to come.

Still, there are all sorts of termite details reflecting arcane tarot meaning (all four elements - it starts with water, ends with fire), lots bibliophilia ("our lives are governed by the words of dead people" intones the Sataninc looking archaic bookstore owner) and pretty lighting (especially on Prime's solid HD transfer, which looks better than my Blu-ray). So hey, it's just like any dream in that the parts are more than the sum, and that's why it's a perfect movie for Halloween or when you're expecting to be distracted throughout. It may be disjointed, and some scenes may drag (as in the nighttime rat attack in Central Park) but other parts are wild - including a strong opening with an underwater flooded ballroom in a cellar; a surreal visit to an old Roman library and its deep dark basement spine re-binding room, and various extended scenes of hanging around scared in red/blue apartment rooms listening through vents in the walls, exploring strange corners of the bizarre apartment building where rain gets in in the roof and basement, and no one seems to be around, aside from killers and victims. Apparently there were all sorts of problems with the production end, leading to many things not getting shot, or bad second guessing, etc, but what we have is still worth seeing- and rewards multiple viewings --if it's not exactly better each time, it's certainly no worse. (see also: Deep Red, Phenomena, Opera and Trauma - also on Prime)

For an optional third feature, consider:

MANHATTAN BABY

(1982) Dir. Lucio Fulci

***/ Amazon Image - B

Fans of Fulci often disparage Baby for the same reasons I dig it: the discordant dream logic. If you let go of 'sense' and admire the framing, the mood, and the raucously ironic Fabio Frizzi synths, and the strange way music and sound effects merge into such a way we can't quite tell which, the way it plays on the rhythm of other movies as if a jazz counterpoint (in this case, the other movies would be both the original Exorcist and the sequel) as well as the narrative tricks of our own nightmares, well, maybe that's enough. Franco and Rollin make films that flow like idylls dipped in the brush of nightmare, but Fulci does the reverse, he's the quicksand that lets you appreciate the beauty of the flowers even as a shambling corpse filled with maggots pulls your eyes out of their sockets. That's why firm supporters of his House by the Cemetery (see 'Nightmare Logic') should seek out Manhattan Baby, for the cast is largely the same and--hey--it's even less coherent, by which I mean good.

The plot involves a mysterious amulet given by a mysterious old lady somewhere in the Valley of the Kings, to a little girl who's visiting Egypt with her parents. Dad (Christopher Connelly) is an Egyptologist investigating a strange tomb; mom writes or photographs for Time or Life (at least there are exteriors shot at the building). At night, back in NYC, the jewel opens up a stargate between some lost Pharaoh tomb and the little girl and her brother's bedroom in (this leads to lots of sand on their bedroom). The dad meanwhile was temporarily blinded back in Egypt by the gem's twin embedded in a wall in a secret part of a tomb. It shoots him with blue lasers when he looked at it too long in a mysterious cave/tomb wall carving. As his eyesight slowly returns, a psychic tosses the family a note from a window that lets them know they're not out of the woods: the amulet is a gateway to evil that gets off on possessing children and trapping their souls within its sinister facets. Anyone who gets in its way, including a taxidermist, a louche family friend, and the psychic herself--all wind up either attacked by stuffed birds, real cats, or dropped through an interdimensional doorway that dumps them in Egypt and leaves lots of sand on the carpet after it closes again.

The parents' initial skepticism soon gives way to concern and once the amulet is found - well, it becomes harder and harder to tell what's real, what's a dream (the kids call their ancient Egypt astral traveling 'voyaging') and what's supposed to be happening in real time; if there's a difference between being actually in modern Egypt, floating around ancient Egypt, visiting either one inside the jewel, or a collective dream, don't expect to find it out - just savor the eerie sense of meta timelessness Fulci culls from his mix of location shooting, strange interiors and his groovy style. If you can do that, and if it doesn't bother you that when the wife sees the sand on the floor of the bedroom we can't tell if she's in Egypt looking down from a mountain or New York looking down at the carpet, then this is your movie. And if you like catching odd little details, like when the dad catches a scorpion to give to his daughter as a souvenir (says his guide: "be sure to tell her it's a symbol of death!") then this is your movie, too. As long as you're open to surreal 'you are there/not there' duality, and as long as you stop trying to understand and just think, hey - the taxidermist psychic is named Adrian Mercata, a reference to Rosemary's Baby's Adrian Marcata), then suddenly the weird title makes sense at last. And you find, strangely enough, you love Manhattan Baby.

And the next time you're stricken by sleep paralysis, don't fight it, just say 'please, give me Goblin or Fabio Frizzi and not Keith Emerson for the soundtrack! And keep an eye out for the bewitching anima figure played by Ania Pieroni in Inferno. Sure she's terrifying, but she's you.

Erich Kuerstenhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-56091114315341970562019-10-22T09:03:00.002-05:002020-04-26T18:09:20.693-05:00"Made Just for Halloween:" THE UNDEAD, VOODOO WOMAN

The AIP graveyard is alive with beatnik dancing thanks to ShoutTV via Prime. Right now they're showing both parts of a 1957 AIP "Made just for Halloween" double bill: THE UNDEAD and VOODOO WOMAN. There's no time like tonight or any night to experience this bizarro only in America in the wake of Bergman's SEVENTH SEAL could such a thing be possible. Shout + Prime = the October majesty of Satan and Marla English.

THE UNDEAD

(1957) Dir. Roger Corman

**** / Amazon Image - B

Meant to tie in to the then-craze for reincarnation (set in motion by the popularity of the Bridey Murphy story) the story quickly throws logic and even metaphysics to the wind, and ends up derailing the 'Grand Scheme of Things' when Lorna Love is able to whisper advice to her about-to-be-beheaded for witchcraft Middle Ages incarnation, Helene. Whoa! That's not how hypnosis works, but hey -- go for it! We shouldn't really care about internal logic in a Corman movie when there are so many more cool things going on. Clearly Roger just saw The Seventh Seal, newly arrived from Sweden, and it blew his cinematic mind. The idea that archetypes like Death, the Devil, the Knight and the Witch could be directly represented as if straight out of a woodcut, but sexier, funnier, and edgier, redefined the 'so old it's new' adage. And what else is intuition if not selves of the future shooting us tips and cautionary warnings from their shrink's space couch? And whether you are labeled a witch or schizophrenic depends on the century. Either way, soon the castle guards are giving chase through the gnarled trees, and in the 20th century, the hypnotist has no choice but to get hypnotized himself and join her in the past to try and correct the matter. Whoa! You will be either outraged at the total disregard for logic or jumping for joy for the same reason. It's the kind of looney premise we wouldn't see repeated until Exorcist II when Richard Burton straps in to rescue an endangered Linda Blair from her dream demon.

I saw Undead when very young on TV and the scene were Duncan seeks shelter at the witch's house is to me the eternally definitive Halloween moment. Dorothy Neumann is the definitive good witch: her crooked nose, clearly made by cheap putty that seems always about to dry and fall off (you can see the line between Neumann's real nose and the false one), warped screechy laugh, bubbling cauldron, and other trappings, puts to rest the libelous claim of Glenda in Oz that "only bad witches are ugly" (the bad witch here is the sexy Alison Hayes, turning into one of the flying rubber bats from It Conquered the World and flying around with her cackling mute imp played by Billy Barty, raising unholy hell); and I love the casual way she asks the stranger at her door: "Are you from this era or from a time yet to be?" as if hypnotists from the future were not uncommon. And Richard Devon is a helluva devil; and those graveyard dancers, oh man. , And how Livia and Meg Maud size each other up and admiringly realize "you will make a good opponent" in a wager for the life of Helene and love of Pendragon (Richard Garland). It's all so good, so strange, so uniquely (as per below) "Made Just for Halloween." I'm so glad it's finally on Prime, so the world can know!

VOODOO WOMAN

(1957) Dir. Edward L. Cahn

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A

If you want to see the genius of Corman, just consider the output of Edward L. Cahn, a journeyman director given more or less the same mix of low money and total freedom by producers Arkoff and Nicholson. If the script and cast were good he did it right, but if it was shit, it stayed shit, lacking even William Beaudine's ambivalence to bring it some Brechtian modernist sublimeness. Also, while Corman used his punchy young crew of regulars-- can-do beatniks who brought a hipster cool to the material-- Cahn goes for lumpen middle-aged white men trying to hide their drinking problems long enough to make it with a starlet half their age before she turns into a Paul Blaisdell monster and shreds them limb from limb, and rightly so! Here the drunk is Tom Conway. He'd be dead in another decade (from cirrhosis) but here he's hitting his marks, and looking more or less conscious whilst bedecked in a crazy feather hat, injecting prostate dames with monster serum while the natives shimmy and shake menacingly around him (they're in darkest Africa, or somewhere). Most unforgivably, he's very mean to his trophy wife (Susan Gerard), keeping her a prisoner in their one story but pretty nice hut, with a fat armed guard (with spear) ever-lurking outside the window while he's off in yonder cave, conducting hybrid voodoo and medical experiments on the local girls, trying to turn them into rampaging beasts that will kill upon his psychic command!

The good news is that Cahn is doing a fine job with the atmospheric jungle setting. I like that there are absolutely no animals (in cages or even stock footage) nor white guys trying to pass for locals, and that it's shot on on dark and misty sound stages rather than outdoors, allowing for deeper, truer blacks, with thick potted vegetation, torch-lit caves, and a swirling abyss topped off with slow brewing mist!

And most importantly, there's a unique full-tilt unmitigated villainy from Maria English as a gold-digging (literally) femme fatale (she uses men like men use their fists). If you're as tired of watching her passively endure the hypnotic caresses of Chester Morris's one-note villain, until such time as she can turn into a monster and rend him to pieces (in The She Creature) you may love this as much as I do. Here she's a badass even before she becomes a Paul Blaisdell monster and rends her maker limb from limb. Only by English's flat strident delivery stops her from being one of my favorite deadly women as she plunges headfirst deep into voodoo country with only a gun and her punching bag boyfriend for protection, just on the off chance the tribe has gold trinkets for her to steal. While her 'good' guide finds a nice girl in Conway's imprisoned wife, English finds a good match in Conway, who tricks her into thinking she's undergoing an "initiation rite" which will enable her to become a voodoo priestess (he has no romantic designs, he only wants a psychically controlled literal lady killer with a bullet-proof epidermis). An out of focus dime store skull mask and blonde wig replaces the lobster head from She Creature, but Blaisdell's armor plating is still there and English has no problem with killing masses of people. So if you're a person who loves strong, armor-plated femme fatales with no qualms about killing, and you dig jungle movies filmed indoors amidst swirling fog and potted fronds on deliciously dark soundstages with cool females (and no one sweating or exploiting animals), this is your kind of jungle movie. If you can't tell, I am one of those people. The Prime print via Shout TV, is perfection. (PS - no relation to Voodoo Man, which is also on Prime streaming - see here). Would make a good double bill with The Disembodied if you need another hour-long voodoo woman jungle movie shot on indoor sets with no animal footage or sweating (that one only marred by Hayes' censor-bar-evoking black fringe tops).

The Optional Third Feature:

19. THE SHE CREATURE

(1957) Dir. Edward L. Cahn

** / Amazon Image - A

Neither good nor bad, this fusion of the past life/Bridey Murphy craze from The Undead and the Marla English becomes an archaic monster plot from Voodoo Woman, stars Chester Morris as an unscrupulous hypnotist who conjures the past life of his enslaved subject (English) for aghast ritzy audiences. He goes so far back in time, he actually conjures a dormant sea creature, a weird blend of Forbidden Planet's Monster from the Id and a ghost girl version of the Creature from the Black Lagoon (via a dynamite monster costume by the legendary Paul Blaisdell). Morris loves English; she's more into the bland hero but is too passive and so can't escape Chester's Svengali-style machinations, and that of his sponsor, a just-beginning-to-fade Tom Conway whose gift with ballyhoo has made them both rich, but now really wishes Morris would move out of his guest house as he's creeping everyone out.

Alas, unlike The Undead or Voodoo Woman, The Astounding Sea Monster (from the same past life-crazy year of 1957) this is kind of a bummer, with way too much watching passive Marla English get fought over by Morris and the snidely dismissive 'won't believe his own eyes' hero. Voodoo Woman is so much better since there are two women, and English's character is a remorseless villainess. Hence, this is not really a recommendation except for hardcore AIP 1957 fans. It's good to fall asleep too though as it has this misty late night at the beach ambience about it, and the Prime print gives us deep, inky blacks. The whole vibe is like being at a late night half-drunk seance magic show hypnotist session, surrounded by gullible cocktail revelers and swathed in black curtains and incense smoke, yet feeling always a sense of muted unease, like you can't tell if you're coming down with a fever or are just hungover on a cloudy Sunday afternoon.

Erich Kuerstenhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-30487573.post-48512994926357398002019-10-21T10:55:00.001-05:002020-03-29T01:34:53.308-05:00Creature Triple Feature I: SOMETHING CREEPING IN THE DARK + HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, THE HAUNTING (via Prime)

Good evening friends of the creeping floor! October is halfway done. Over the next ten days leading up to Halloween, Acidemic will be presenting several curated double and triple features of films streaming on Prime, one every other day until Halloween. (I was going to release on super long 22 film post but my reviews for each were too long, so it got kind of unwieldy). At the end, there may be a massive round-up. And hey, man, even if you don't have Prime (or live in a country with different licensing), you can find these greats lolling around in all sorts of spots. They're worth the hunt!

The first theme is Dark, stormy, and eventful Nights spent in Haunted Houses! We've got one maybe as new to you as it was to me title, one old chestnut, and one so bad-it's-good. You can't resist, so yield the remote to my skeletal hand, and spend the night lost between two washed-out bridges.

SOMETHING CREEPING IN THE DARK

"Qualcosa Striscia nel Buio"

(1971) Dir. Mario Colucci

*** / Amazon Image - B-

This weird Italian horror movie bobbed to the surface on Prime last week. Having no awareness of what it was about, only that my man Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Kill Baby Kill) was driving on a dark and rainy night to some far off party in the opening, right off the bad, grabbing my attention with the sarcastic salvo "Helen certainly picked a beautiful night to unveil her new nose." to his snippy wife Sylvia (Lucia Bosé). As we hear their repartee, the image freezes with a violent clank from the score to list a new name in the credits and our hand moves from the stop button and puts the remote down, confident that whatever this is, it's gonna be engaging. We see other people in cars, in the rainy darkness Soon the bridge is washed out, on both sides, and as in The Old Dark House and The Black Raven, the stranded travelers seek shelter at the only house around, which just happens to belong to a recently deceased lady occultist. One of the cars holds two detectives and a psycho killer in a leather jacket named Spike. If you're wondering why that psycho killer seems so familiar, it's because it's Farley Granger, and he still looks terrific after all these years, though with his thick black hairpiece and leather jacket he has kind of a Horror House-era Frankie Avalon's cool but disturbed older brother vibe. With those big kind of hurt child eyes you want to untie him and give him a knife even knowing he's supposed to be guilty of a string of murders. He develops an instant sad eyed connection with Sylvia; as he plays a plaintive theme on the piano in the occultist's parlor to pass the time, she has a very strange slow-mo fantasy about stabbing him. Pretty but repressed (hence the glasses) Susan (Mia Genberg) is assistant to a clueless handsome surgeon Dr. Williams (Stelvio Rossi), urgently needed at the hospital. There's also an old mystic who advises them to not scoff at the supernatural and a hood-eyed manservant (Giulia Raval) who keeps a half-naked lover (Gianni Medici) hiding in his room.

It might have been an uneventful night, but restless Sylvia, after a few drinks, goads everyone into a seance to contact their dead host. Maybe not a good idea as soon they're being possessed, haunted, and generally released from their inhibitions (and not necessarily in a good way). Most notably Susan, who lets down her hair and her blouse in a play for Dr. Williams, who is urgently needed at the hospital, but how can he resist? Meanwhile Granger's mad killer is loose in the woodsy stretch around the house (not that there's anywhere to run; the water is rising on all sides)!

Like his fellow countryman Elio Petri, it seems Colucci is a bit of a post-modern prankster; the film brims with all sorts of wry sidesteps, like a cape distracting the bull of our narrative film conditioning snd then yanking away, getting at the nature of hauntings almost incidentally. From the opening freeze frames with the metallic clank of Angelo Francesco Lagavino's moody score, we know we're in a special rarefied realm, between genre and nothingness. It's as if the red telephone has been left out in the storm and is now a kind of found object art.

 I'll confess: I'm prejudiced to adore this movie, as I'm partial to movies that take place over one wild night and end at dawn. I'm a big fan of partying til the morning light, and this is a great example. The night exteriors are all really filmed at night (rather than lazy 'day-for-night'), too, which makes a huge difference. And there a lot of bizarre termite touches that are very effective, as when all the clocks in the house suddenly stop after all ticking relentlessly all night, and everyone thinks they've gone deaf. Though the mise-en-scene is reminiscent of an American TV movie of the time, the direction is a notch above and gets good mileage out of characters even when they're doing little more than standing around. Characters succumb to the possession of the occultist woman's spirit, or not, while the actual scholar of the bizarre stays, smartly, in the main room, playing solitaire, as those who dare drift off to their own rooms slowly run into trouble and come back, in one state or another. It's not great but it is a great discovery, and laden with enough termite touches to get over its ultimate shrug of an ending.

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PS - I highly recommend Granger's book Include Me Out. I read it all in one night, until dawn, while enduring terrible allergies and fear in a haunted Westchester tract home after seeing two Baghead movies.

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL

(1959) Dir. William Castle

*** / Amazon Image - A-

Monster hands reaching for a terrified ingenue, an organ playing by itself, a rope that coils and moves around her room, pistols in little coffins as party favors; a woman hanging by the stairs, her bare feet dangling high in the foyer; a falling chandelier, a head in a suitcase, a super scary old lady who floats in and out of the darkness on (presumably) wheels, her hands and face in a distorted evil crone grimace, and old man caretaker named Jonah Slides who grabs the shrieking nervous breakdown candidate from behind and whispers, "Come with us before they kill you!"-- these are just some of the delights in this William Castle chestnut. As perfect for October and Halloween as It's a Wonderful Life is for Xmas. It all goes down over one long night, in a big house that millionaire playboy Vincent Price's conniving trophy wife (Carol Ohmart!) blithely describes as "Charles Foster Kane meets The Muensters." He's offered an assortment of guests $10,000 each if they'll spend the night with him in this allegedly uber-haunted house, where there's already been seven murders. Elisha Cook Jr. is the only person who's ever survived a night there, and he takes the guests on a tour of where all the murders went down, including a big pool of acid in the basement wine cellar. He notes that the murders were never ordinary but "kind of wild." (And if you've seen him drumming in a jazz band for Phantom Lady, you'll know he's an expert on wildness). He also notes the ghosts have chosen to focus on the wild-eyed damsel Carolyn Craig, who seems to be having a nervous breakdown just because she keeps seeing 'things'. Smug white man Lance tries to take charge of Craig due to some surface affinity they seem to have for each other but then winds up trapped inside a wall for the climax, after earlier getting conked on the head by, presumably, a spirit. "I wonder why they didn't kill him," says Cook Jr. Indeed, they really missed a prime specimen.

We classic horror fans who were too young to have seen it in the theater (with 'Emergo!') first fell in love with Hill when it used to appear in a haze of local UHF antenna static on some afternoon Dr. Shock double feature back in the 70s, that's when I first found it, when I'd get up so early on a Saturday morning I could catch the late late movies. It seemed like a ghostly transmission - so many old horror movies were just bland talk - talk -talk, the sort kids like me don't understand so merely endure waiting for the monster. Castle knew this, the plot and dialogue are easy for an eight year-old to follow all the way through; we loved Vincent Price at any age, and the spooky touches are evenly spread around.

House on Haunted Hill is built for such ghostly travel. It's strong and sparse enough to blast its way through blurry dupes and fuzzy reception like a shot from a cathode ray gun out of a tiny party favor coffin, and to maintain its ghoulish gleeful spookiness even in a theater full of kids throwing popcorn at the screen and the skeleton on the string. The Robb White script is full of bitchy marital vitriol which of course the kiddies love as much as the blind caretaker being reeled through the hall and back like a 'scare' pop-up on a five-cent carnival ride. And though time has added creaks in the joints (and marred its name with a super-shitty remake), Castle's full empty ersatz fly-by-the-seat reckless effrontery is still the perfect Halloween party all-ages show and whether snarling in a kind of half-veiled purr at sultry conniver Carol Ohmart, rolling his eyes at doomsaying drunk Elisha Cook Jr., or scaring a progressively hysterical Carolyn Craig, Price is the perfect Halloween party host.

A very sexy nightgown down the stairs waft for the climax made Carol Ohmart a fan
favorite for many of us from childhood. Her subsequent work for Corman (Creature from the Haunted Sea)
and Jack Hill (Spider Baby) would cement this, and both are on Prime!

The Prime print is sublimely perfect, don't do the color version, that would be somehow.... disrespectful to the ghosts.

15. THE HAUNTING

(1999) Dir. Jan de Bont

*/*** / Amazon Image - A

I resepect the Robert Wise 1964 Haunting as much as the next fella, but even they have to admit it's flatly lit (ghosts live in the dark corners but Wise makes sure every corner is lit so we can see the bric-a-brac even in the dead of night) and I find myself dreading having to put up with the smug psych-101 self-satisfaction of the doctor, or the smarm of Russ Tamblyn just to get to the lesbian sultriness of Claire Bloom. I keep hoping Russ will have one, just ONE line of dialogue that doesn't concern how much money he can get for this or that this ghost stuff is a lot of bunk, I mean, you can't be serious with this ghost jazz. Julie Harris is almost too good as the sheltered, shattered spinster but she loses our sympathy when she displays curt homophobic slurring towards Bloom.

Some of that is still present in the gorgeous if vacuous remake, but though it's super crappy in a lot of ways it's never boring or vulgar. And on a bad, rainy day it's the nonalcoholic equivalent of a hot toddy. And it just gets better every viewing. You could say it's bad because it gives up the 'power of suggestion' in favor of CGI cherubs, but De Bont isn't interested in dialogue, clearly. He just wants to waste massive amounts of money creating a titanic fun house of spinning floors and mirrored halls, for these actors to waft through. Most importantly he knows that Lili Taylor and Catherine Zeta Jones--dressed all in dark red, with black flowing hair, and luminous pale skin--are the best parts. The homophobia is lessened, with Jones' character now not a psychic but an insecure fashionista desperate to seem worldly. Now her bisexual tendency draws Taylor's mousy character towards her and--for awhile--watching these raven-haired clear-eyed ladies running amok, holding hands, in this deep wood and gold mansion.

Alas, all too soon they tumble into the sights of Owen Wilson, looking almost like a Reid Fleming-drawn portrait of himself and Liam Neeson, who seems so lost and uninterested it's almost like De Bont is just projecting Star Wars outtakes onto his face. Though still a nice change up from Tamblyn, Wilson looks intimidated and under-directed which just makes him a prime target for Jones, who ably deflects his attraction and places him as the designated little brother position. That she does so without him getting petulant should make it an important moment of study for girls still trying to not alienate smitten tow-headed morons.

As for the ghosts, alas, in 1999 the CGI was still rather crude when it came to human figures so just pretend the ghosts are supposed to look like the flash-frozen Han Solo in Return of the Jedi or like the characters in Polar Express went through a torrid zone detour. They're tacky Disney ride sculptures come to life, as fake in their fakeness as the clay Orson Welles in Heavenly Creatures. Who cares? This is a movie as a ride, it's supposed to be fun, more like the previous film in this triple feature, House on Haunted Hill, than the pretentious original. It's not supposed to be a turgid white elephant downer with everyone snapping at one another and mouthing terrible pun-choked dismissive analysis that feels it has to justify itself to its imagined skeptics a dozen times a page. It has no ambition to be taken seriously or to at least be nominated; it's just trying to make it to 90 minutes, in peace, so it can go home, like everybody else. (see Rococo Gold: The remake of HAUNTING is better than the original, yeah I said it)

As for the quality, it's the usual sublime HD duskiness. My review of */**** is, in case you don't know, the 'so bad its good' rating, where the enjoyment level exceeds the quality level in that ultimate sublime manner reserved for the greats, like Ed Wood, Luigi Cozzi, and Ron Ormond.

Erich Kuerstenhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com