Blue Light Reverie

Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986)

2012-01-28T10:16:00.000-08:00

Prior to the release of Friday the 13th, exploitation slash and hacks were the domain of the drive-in and the small time player. Armed with hype and moral disregard, these early autuers, cranked out film after film. They were cheaply made, heavily promoted and completely off limits to the Hollywood controlled mainstream theatre circuit. Major motion picture companies wanted nothing to do with blood soaked, sleaze flicks. The nasty reputation the slash and hacks carried with them seemed bad for business, but then the receipts started trickling in. Slash and hacks were making dough. It didn't take long for Hollywood to ditch the high minded, moral austerity and jump on the band wagon.

Emboldened by the surprising success of Halloween, Paramount snatched up the rights to a low budget, exploitation called Friday the 13th and set it loose on suburban North America. With Paramount as its backer, the film now had access to the shopping mall multiplex and its indigenous free flowing teenage money. Kids flocked to the flick eager for the film's excess gore and wanton sexuality. Parents were appalled, critics were repulsed, and the profits poured in. The golden age of the drive-in slasher flick was over. Slasher films were now part of the mainstream, and unlike the small production houses of the drive-in era, Paramount brought something new to the table: Franchise power. No one was going to merit the slasher film genre as anything more than low end sleaze, so why not milk it for all its worth? Sequel after sequel followed with scant plot variation. The series became cinematic fast food. No matter which sequel you watched, same film repeated over and over, but like a photocopy, each installment degraded significantly from the original. Quality didn't matter; as long as the franchise was making money, sequels would get the green light.

By the summer of 1986, the Friday the 13th franchise was over saturating itself, and becoming the punchline to its own joke. The whole concept of the Jason Voorhees character had become ridiculous, and it was beginning to show at the box office. How many times could a villain be killed? Part three ended with Jason being hacked in the face with an axe, and in the fourth installment, his head was impaled upon a machete. Part five had an angry paramedic dressed up as the killer. What was next? Jason's butler, in the billiard room, with the candlestick? No, what came next was Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, a self aware, violent and over the top homage to classic horror, and the best film in the series.

Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI changed the direction of the Jason Voorhees mythology. The character needed a shot in the arm, and that's exactly what the filmmakers gave him. In an opening scene both outrageous and symbolic, the Jason's corpse is revived by two bolts of lightning. Covered in worms and muck, his eyes rip open in anger, and pulls himself out of his own grave. The message was clear. A near dead slasher franchise and an overwrought villain, back from the grave and ready to show the movie going public there's still gas in the Friday the 13th tank. By turning Jason into a slasher film Frankenstein's monster, the filmmakers not only embraced Jason's preposterousness, they manipulated it to their own gain. Gone is the psychotic, murderous man-child, and in his place, an undead and indestructible zombie. It was a necessary change, but what makes the film's portrayal of Jason even better, is his silent sense of self awareness. Shot with a paintball; he looks down in disgust at the goo dripping down his chest. A can of pop unwittingly poured over him off screen; the audience quietly hears an appalled groan rise up from outside the cabin. The absurdity of these acts cleverly poke fun at the Jason Voorhees caricature, but are short lived and subtle enough to avoid self parody. The key components of the character remain intact, but the film added depth to the character. Transforming Jason from a man into a monster made the character more sinister. Determined and unstoppable, Jason is more threatening than ever before, and credit must be given to the underrated Kane Hodder. With no dialogue, and only glares and movement to convey the iconic Jason Voorhees, Hodder adds quiet rage and misanthropy nonexistent is past performances.

The slasher films of the drive-in era were one time deals that banked on quick bucks from shock. No concern was given for plot, quality or cinematic legacy. Get the word out there, get them in the seats, and make a buck before before they get bored. Friday the 13th was never intended to become a series of sequels. Paramount saw profitability in the slasher genre, but did not expect the phenomenal success of the original film. The quick franchising of the film lifted the slasher genre out of drive-in obscurity and assimilated it into the mainstream, and the Jason Voorhees character instantly metamorphosed from textbook slasher villain to established horror brand. Problem was, Friday the 13th should have been a drive-in movie, not a movieplex blockbuster. There wasn't depth within the Jason Voorhees character or the film to keep up with the success. The series needed to evolve, and grow into its brand. Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI was the evolution of the franchise. Outrageous and intelligent, the film elevated the Jason Voorhees character from its drive-in era roots to a full fledged horror icon easily listed alongside the Wolfman, Dracula, or Frankenstein. Sixth seeded sequels rarely amount to much, but this one is different, and worthy of much more respect than it receives.

Horror High (1974)

2012-01-16T18:59:00.000-08:00

High school ain't no fun. You're either in or you're out, and when you're out, the high school hallway is a tough trip to trod. For the ugly and the unlucky, it can be four or five years of hell, and not much else. Most get out, and end up living better lives, but for the few who can't hack it, the experience can end brutishly. Sometimes there are suicides, often there is mental illness, and on rare occasions, violence. History has shown that this often means harried, suburban white kids packing heat. Bring a gun to class, and all your problems will solved.

Spent shells and dead bullies are a recipe for moral panic. Pundits pontificate. Hysteria spreads. Prayer is put back in school. Public discourse becomes hinged on a romanticized myth that violence in school is new, and that family values are eroding. School violence is not new. Bullets have been flying for years. The harried, suburban white kid wreaking revenge on his tormentors has history, and parallel to the real life violence, is cinematic record of exploitative film making capitalizing on barbaric teenage desires for vengeance and destruction. Its ugly subject matter, and like the actual events these films mirror, there is a historical vacuum. No one wants to remember the bloodshed and the massacre, and child/teenage murderer flicks suffer the same fate.

Horror High is one of these films. Patterned around Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Horror High is all about frustrated, angry, teenage violence. Vernon Potts, the film's protagonist, is an unhappy young man with a precocious talent in chemistry. Tormented daily by faculty and classmates, he spends all of his waking hours in the lab studying and working on his experiments, but he harassment proves too much for Vernon, and he exacts his revenge by ingesting a potion and transforming himself into a murderous monster. One by one, his tormentors begin to disappear. Vernon's life improves, but it doesn't last. The police close in, Vernon and the monster he has become, are killed.

Kids killing kids is an ugly thought. It counters the notions that innocence is inherent to childhood, and brutality is a manifestation of adult moral corruption. The use of the Jekyll and Hyde myth within Horror High refutes this belief. The character of Vernon Potts is portrayed as a mild mannered, bookish young man. Cowardly and weak, Vernon is unable to control the events of his everyday life. The chemical concoction he creates and ingests mutates his daily anguish into unbridled anger. The rage unleashed, manifests itself as a monster, and the killing spree begins. Vernon is aware of the power of his mutation, and he willingly utilizes it as a tool to reclaim control over his life, and exact revenge on his tormentors. The potion and the monster incarnation represent Vernon's desire and capacity for violence. The potion does not create the monster, it merely releases Vernon's suppressed fury, and barbarity ensues.

Murderous teenagers scare up moral panic because they debunk common conceptions of what it means to be a child. Innocence is a vague and undefinable concept projected onto children by the adult mind, but brutality is anything but vague and undefinable, and when it manifests among children it is more easily scapegoated or forgotten than faced. Horror High, despite its low buck jump cuts, and shadowy camera work, thematically examines violence and brutality among young adults by adroitly employing the Jekyll and Hyde myth within the teenage landscape landscape of high school. Its a low budget, drive-in flick, but Horror High goes a little further by expressing tragic empathy for its villain. The character of Vernon Potts is not vacuous evil. His violent rampage is a the twisted result of everyday torment, powerlessness and frustration. The film's juxtaposition of murder and monster is not lost in the narrative, and is symbolic of Vernon's loss of humanity - a portrayal not unlike the profile of many real life, teenage perpetrators of high school violence.

King of the Royal Mounted (1940)

2011-12-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

There's a scene in The Untouchables where the RCMP assist the FBI in a raid on Al Capone's men. The sequence portrays the RCMP as arrogant and incompetent, riding into the fray like a herd of fools, firing their revolvers and behaving like hayseeds. That scene always bummed me out, but it was a common caricature. The moronic Mounties riding around, nabbing bad guys on dumb luck like red coated Inspector Gadgets. If they weren't acting like fools, they were getting in the way and obstructing justice. The Keystone Kops of the Great White North. If there's anything worse than watching boring cultural cliches, its having them thrown back at you with a twist of dumb.

The representation of the RCMP as a backwoods horse and pony show wasn't always the cinematic standard. At one point, there was respect, even reverence. The traditional Mountie image was the strong and determined law man of the North. World War II era serials such as King of the Royal Mounted utilized the rugged persona of the RCMP for war propaganda. King of the Royal Mounted is an espionage themed serial where the RCMP are charged with the break up of an spy ring hell bent on the destruction of the North Atlantic Convoy. The war time perception of Canada was vastly different in the 1940s. The North Atlantic Convoy out of Halifax was the lifeline of the war, and the Canadian Navy was its protector. Using traditional image of noble and courageous Mountie was the perfect metaphor for the Canadian war effort.

Canada's war time role was well represented by the traditional RCMP image, but after the war, the situation changed. While the US continued to evolve into a superpower, Canada demilitarized. Defence budgets were cut, the military shrank, and the country slowly turned toward pacifism and peacekeeping. It was a change in philosophy that cultivated a wimpy international identity. Parallel to Canadian post war demilitarization was the devolution of the traditional Mountie image into moronic caricature. Respect for Canadian law enforcement and military resolve went out the window. The sugar bush stereotypes of grizzly bears and igloos remained, but instead of King of the Royal Mounted, Canada was now Dudley Do-Right riding his horse backwards into the fray, and the caricature stuck. The Moronic Mountie stereotype was contempt masked as a joke, and it set the standard for years of buffoonery and late night, talk show jokes about maple syrup bombs and snowball hand grenades.

The irony of the Moronic Mountie stereotype is Canadians don't care about the RCMP thing. The red coated, law men of the north image is a clip art trinket for tourists. Canada has a strong military past, but war and aggression is not the country's identity. Canada directed its steely determination toward more practical purposes such as controlled inflation, regulated banks, and oh yeah, public health care. Doesn't make for a compelling story, but at least things are somewhat secure (for now). Arctic sovereignty's a dubious situation, but I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that while the Russians probably aren't too concerned, the Danes are likely quaking in their boots over the thought of having to deal with the Moronic Mounties. King of the Royal Mounted rides again! Take that Brian De Palma!

Wattstax (1973)

2011-11-06T14:52:00.000-08:00

Language matters. Change one word, and the cultural perception of an incident can alter drastically. In Watts, the riot of 1965 is known as The Watts Revolt. The people who were involved perceive the incident as an uprising, and an insurrection against a racist police department, and a white supremacist society. The battle in the streets was merely an oppressed people fighting back. The media's designation of the event as riotous disorder and wanton looting dissociated the political impetus behind the uprising and permanently marred the perception of the neighbourhood. Watts became synonymous with everything that was wrong with large urban areas. The notoriety was unjust, but there was little the neighbourhood could do to reverse the reputation. To middle America, big city black neighbourhoods were cesspools of violence and iniquity and Watts was the poster child. Then Wattstax came along.

The film didn't miraculously alter the American perception of urban black communities, but it did attempt to humanize the neighbourhood known as Watts. Stax Records wanted to present a side of Watts that the American public didn't often see. They achieved their aim by putting on a stadium showcase of their top talent, and filming the entire event. Not wanting to trivialize the motivations behind the Watts Revolt, the filmmakers mixed the music with charged imagery, and dialogue sequences relevant to the black experience in America in 1973. Upon release, it was immediately compared to Woodstock. It was a cheap and mediocre comparison. The only common ground between the two films was genre classification. Woodstock was a concert film, and so was Wattstax, but the comparison ended there. Wattstax was cinematic lightning in a bottle. The performances were incredible, the content was moving, and the viewer walked away with two impressions. Number one; damn, I wish I was there, and number two; the Watts riot was more than a riot - it was a revolt.

Wattstax was a party, and its hard to believe so many great acts could fit onto one bill, but Stax Records got it done. A concert movie should make the viewer want to be there, and Wattstax accomplished this with aplomb, but the party never overshadowed the movie's raison d'etre. The music, and the concert, and the dialogue of the people melded into one organic whole. The film is a cultural snapshot of an era, and the issues that drove a neighbourhood to fight back. Stax Records wanted to present a different perspective on the people who lived through the Watts Revolt by presenting a community still effected by the violence, but not detached from its political motivations. This was a perspective America did not see in 1965. America saw lawless disorder and bestial barbarity, not a revolt against oppression. Wattstax, through one amazing concert, conveyed the other side of the story. No one may have been listening, but at least they it out there.

Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968)

2011-10-26T19:57:00.000-07:00

The swing of a hammer, and the driving of a stake blew minds in the '50s, but in 1968, the spurt of vampire blood had grown old. Gothic horror had no place in the turbulent American consciousness. The Vietnam war was escalating, the Zodiac killer was loose, and Dr. King was dead. The exorcism of such violent demons demanded uglier cinematic sacrifices. Bodies needed to be ripped up. Blood needed to be sprayed. Limbs needed to be lopped off. No one cared about a graying vampire chasing virginal girls. Give 'em cannibalism and bodies burning. Give 'em the living dead and doomsday scenarios. Just don't give 'em another Dracula movie.

Hammer Films couldn't have been more out of touch. Pictures of the Mai Lai Massacre everywhere. Dead women and children maimed by American guns, and Dracula Has Risen From The Grave on the big screen down the street. Cinema doesn't have to be topical, but to succeed in the horror genre, it has to be in step. Rosemary's Baby was in step. Night of the Living Dead was in step. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave was not. The Gothic horror of Hammer did not stand a chance alongside the work of Polanski and Romero. Small pools of viscous red blood, so shocking in 1958, was nothing now. Herschel Gordon Lewis had already fed America its feast of flesh, and they'd come back for seconds and thirds. Pointy teeth, and bite marks weren't going to cut it anymore.

Old Dracula was out of date. There was little the character could serve to the public to satiate its taste for gore. A bite here and a bite there was nothing compared to what the competition was putting out, but Hammer continued to remain loyal, resurrecting the vampire count several times over. Brand diversification was out of the question. Hammer lived by the fang and died by the fang. Box office receipts gradually began to wane. To counter the decline, Hammer cranked up the sleaze, but it was a day late and a dollar short. Out of luck and out of sync, the studio slowly shrank into non-existence.

Credit should be given where credit is due. Full colour gore started with Hammer. The bloodiest scenes of their early filmography influenced countless other auteurs. On top of that, the work was good, damn good. Hammer set the bar by mixing classic horror subtlety with the shock value of modern exploitation. It was a good trick, but they couldn't keep it up. Things had to change, and the company had to stay competitive. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave was an unintended eulogy, the end of the classic Hammer Dracula before the censors let up, and the sleaze slid in. Irrelevant and pointless upon its initial release, but the passing of time has been more kind. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave is a classy farewell before the series took a drastic change in content and style. It doesn't have the referential cache of its contemporaries, but as late night TV viewing, it still has the old Hammer chops, and that is good enough.

Don't Look In The Basement (1973)

2011-08-16T20:09:00.000-07:00

Don't let the terrific title deceive you. This is not a flick you put on to impress. For a movie night in with the normies, watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off or Goodfellas. Stay away from Don't Look In The Basement. It will ruin the party and bum people out. The sound is strident and uneven, the plot is meandering and pointless, and the characters are unsympathetic and annoying. In a casual group setting, Don't Look In The Basement is a tough watch, but that doesn't mean the film is without merit. Given the proper venue, things change a bit.

Don't Look In The Basement is a grindhouse flick. It was meant to be watched alone in a grimy movie houses filled with caterwauling noise, gritty lighting and cheap violence. The triple and double bill was it's refuge. Movies like Don't Look In The Basement were at their best in a grindhouse theatre, and the marathon delivery of the all night show would have cultivated a sleazy atmosphere of total horror. Done right, it would've been one hell of an evening, and leaving the theatre after five or six hours of senseless blood and gore would have necessitated some detox (re-socialization?) as the viewer walked back out onto the streets of the living.

This doesn't mean that Don't Look In The Basement cannot be enjoyed without the grindhouse theatre experience. The all night movie ambiance is dependent on context. Cable TV has understood this for years. Midnight showings of films like Don't Look In The Basement were a staple of the thirty channel, basic box format, and the digital age of specialty networks has continued this tradition, and expanded upon it. Channels like Dusk and Chiller know that there are solitary viewers out in TV land looking for the arcane and the macabre, and they provide witching hour movie shows to satiate that need. Don't Look In The Basement was shown as recently as 2010 on Elvira's resurrected Movie Macabre proving there's still gas in the tank for old grindhouse horrors.

Don't Look In The Basement is not representative of all grindhouse flicks. Many of the classic titles still hold their value, exist beyond the midnight movie marathon format. No one would recommend Last House on the Left or I Drink Your Blood for a family pop and chips night, but for open minded adults looking for something different, both films are worth their weight in gold. Don't Look In The Basement is an historical footnote, a paradigm case not worth chasing down, but if you do see it on late at night, give it a shot, keep in mind where it's from and you never know, you might end up having a good time.

Twin Peaks - Lonely Souls (1990)

2011-07-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

Translated books can be a dicey proposition. No matter how adroit the translation, there's always going to be the writer's interpretive bias. Words get chopped, lines get squeezed, and colloquialisms get lost. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on what you want to take away from the work. Every reader comes in looking for something different. The trick is finding the translation that suits best. David Lynch is kind of like books, but its less about the translation and more about the format. Movies like Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway have their visions, but to figure them out you have to have the time and the attention span, and most people just don't care enough to interpret the visual language being thrown at them. Lynch's forays into cable TV are more kind to the casual viewer. Ratings and the complaining voice of advertising forced him to reign in the weird. That doesn't mean that everything's normal in Lynch-land, but it does make the product more palatable.

Accessible or not, Twin Peaks is still an anomaly. The series shouldn't have worked, but it did. Strange and discordant, the show was as bizarre as TV got; enigmatic dream sequences, cryptic dwarves and giants, and a key character with a pet log. Twin Peaks was murder mystery hinged on surrealist imagery, offbeat humour and film noir. The hook of "who killed Laura Palmer?" brought viewers back week after week. Lynch understood that the mystery of the murderer's identity was the main draw of the series, and wanted the secret to be kept indefinitely, but ABC felt otherwise. How could a murder mystery not reveal the killer? It didn't make sense. Lynch capitulated to the pressure and the killer was revealed in the second season episode Lonely Souls. Lynch's insight regarding the secret of the show's success proved right. Ratings rapidly declined after the murderer's identity was revealed. Saddled with a weird show that no one seemed to be watching, ABC cancelled the series and Twin Peaks was over.

Lonely Souls may be the coup de grace of the series, but it is also a testament to the intelligence of Twin Peaks. It took the world of David Lynch and made it coherently approachable without dumbing things down. The killer's identity isn't merely revealed, the scene challenges the viewer to ask questions about the concepts of reality within the mimetic universe of Twin Peaks. The revelation utilizes the surrealist imagery of the series to establish themes of Cartesian dualism within the murderer's identity. For an episode that Lynch wanted nothing to do with, Lonely Souls is the strongest and most ambitious of the series. It could be argued that the aesthetic vision of Twin Peaks was compromised by network meddling, but that depends on what you want to take away from the work. With his hand forced by the creative constraints of cable TV, Lynch reeled in the incoherent and delivered a complex composition of a killer rarely if ever seen on the boob tube.

Given free reign over the series, would Lynch have exercised his cinematic genius and created a masterpiece? Who knows. Maybe in the eyes of some, but chances are, the casual viewer would have eventually tuned out. Cable TV is a fickle abyss with a short attention span. The ongoing and unresolved mystery of Laura Palmer's killer would have inevitably lead to audience frustration and desertion. Revelation or no revelation, the series would have been doomed. Lynch's vision is ultimately cinematic and not meant for the small screen, but for those seeking a more accessible translation, Twin Peaks is an accomplished part of his oeuvre.

Shock Waves (1977)

2011-06-14T17:26:00.000-07:00

The exploitation formula was all shock and titillation, and very genre based. Promise a cheap recognizable thrill and the money will pour in. Categories like “biker revenge”, “women in prison”, and “dragstrip riot” were common and made sense. Nothing sells like crime, sex and pedal-to-the-metal action. Every genre had its portion of unsavoury and offensive subject matter, but there was nothing quite like Nazi sexploitation. Exploitational cinematic sex revolves around the male gaze and is a vicarious act where the viewer places himself within the scene for obvious onanistic reasons. Nazi sexploitation films took the "roughie" nudie phenomenon to odious heights. Violent and sadistic, the Nazi nudies mixed rape with BDSM to exercise mimetic power and control over women. If there ever was a case for the feminist anti-pornography movement of the 1970s Nazi sexploitation filled that role.

Why Nazis? Why not Commies or Trotskyites or Unitarians for that matter? Because when it comes to cliched and over-simplified cinematic evil, nothing compares to the Nazis. When "regular" rape isn't dehumanizing enough, why not amp up the evil and become a Nazi rapist! The Nazi rape fantasy of these nudies was an extreme pathological offshoot of the Nazism-as-ultimate-evil concept that was (and still is) a consistent theme in latter 20th century cinema. Exploitationally, the Nazi nudie's closest thematic cousin would be the Nazi zombie flick, and Shock Waves is good example of the genre. In a nutshell, it is the story of a secret undead SS unit that preys upon vacationers stranded on a desert island. While Shock Waves lacks the violent sexualized nature of the Nazi nudies, from a historically contextual viewpoint, the film is no different from Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS or any other of its cinematic siblings.

First, a little history. The formation of the German Empire in 1871 was a major threat to the existing European powers. No longer a motley crew of minor states, the newly minted nation of Germany had political power, economic clout and military might. The imperialist sweepstakes had a new player at the table. World War One was the inevitable battle royale that decided who was on top, and who was not. To get the masses to fight such a catastrophic conflict, Britain, France and the United States embarked on a massive PR campaign (for the time) that dehumanized the German people as bloodthirsty tyrants seeking world domination. Germany was no different than the other major powers. Their only crime was a desire for a piece of the imperialist pie, and it cost them 13 million lives.

Before the war, German nationalism and the country's collective belief in an prodigious imperial destiny had been high. The loss of the war was devastating both socially and psychologically. National resentment and shame, compounded by the effects of the Great Depression set the stage for act two. Enter the Nazi Party, and their dream of a new German Empire. It was an illusion the country wanted most at a time when they had the least. The German Empire narcotic the Nazis fed the defeated German masses was a story laced with specious legends about mighty Teutonic knights, untarnished chivalric bloodlines, and races of pure Germanic kings. It was like Sir Walter Scott drunk on a cheap cocktail of dubious mythology and ignorant post-war crazy. The end result as everyone knows was brutality and horror on a modern and grand scale; ethnic cleansing, massacres, and the complete destruction of continents and countries.

The violence and the crazy of the Nazi era mixed with another round of bad PR (gotta get those boys on the front lines again!) left a dent in the global subconscious. Make no mistake, the reasons for war were the same (imperialism), but the nastiness of the Nazi regime became synonymous with evil, and a mythology developed. Stories of Nazi occultism, Godless decadence, and vicious human experiments assimilated itself with North American and European social conservatism, and the twisted, exploitational cinematic result was whip wielding Nazi mistresses, sexualized concentration camps and in the case of Shock Waves, SS storm trooper zombies.

The cinematic Nazism-as-ultimate-evil trope that manifested itself in latter 20th century film is not the result of one vacuous moment of history. It is the development of a series of historical narratives culminating together. At it's most populist and entertaining, you get Raiders of the Lost Ark and Inglourious Basterds, and at the ugly and obscure end of the spectrum, SS Girls and Last Orgy of the Third Reich, but it is what it is. Film is too finite a medium to properly represent or address the vast scope of events that make up human history and it's many narratives. High culture, "fact based" films such as Schindler's List and The Pianist are even more problematic. Perceived as unbiased truth due to their position on the cinematic social ladder, the stories told within often receive less scrutiny. In the end, we're probably better off with the zombie Nazis of Shock Waves. It's as good a historical metaphor as you're gonna get. Let's face it, it's been almost 70 years since the death of the Nazi regime, and they're still haunting us from the grave. When are these guys going to finally give up the ghost?

Grand Theft Auto (1977)

2011-05-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

Ron Howard is not a rags to riches story. Social reproduction has been kind to him. His father's an actor and so is his mother. Hollywood is in his blood. It's the family business. Grand Theft Auto is his directorial debut and it shows up on the pop culture landscape three years before the demise of Happy Days. To get the job, he bargained out a deal with Roger Corman: A household Hollywood name on the marquee in exchange for directorial duties. Corman knew cash cow when he saw, so he took the deal. Howard's USC film school credentials only sweetened the deal.

Social reproduction theory often has a cynical tone to it's employment, but this is not always the case. Corman gave Howard his big break because he knew the young man's cinematic pedigree, but he also knew the family, and Grand Theft Auto has the Howard name all over it. Rance Howard (Ron's father) co-wrote the film and played a bit part, and Clint Howard (Ron's brother) also had a minor role as a highway hooligan. The hiring of friends and family is a frequent practice with Ron Howard, and Roger Corman was no different. Actors and crew showed up film after film. Sometimes it's just easier to go with the ones you know and trust, and in the make it or break it world of movie making you do what you gotta do.

Commentary aside, Grand Theft Auto is mostly unremarkable. It's chase film done in a pseudo real time format. The exploitational angle is the action; lots of wrecks and crack-ups with multitudinous things getting destroyed (chicken coups, fruit stands, swimming pools, etc). The amount of imagination that went into choosing the vehicles for the film is laudable. It's not to often that you get to watch a station wagon plow through 70s era suburban living room, and watching an ice cream truck in a car chase is something you don't see in flicks like The Fast and The Furious. The film's also shines in it's economic delivery. Done in fifteen days, Corman put Howard in the lead director's chair, but backed him up with Allan Arkush as second unit director. While Howard worked the acting bits, Arkush did the action scenes. The final result was a popular, low budget film that collected solid profits at the 1977 box office.

Grand Theft Auto is historically significant because it marks the beginning of Ron Howard's directorial career, but it's also an example of the social reproduction that exists within the movie industry, and the forces that drive that supposed partisanship...Blah, blah, blah... That stuff's apt and everything, but you know what? Forget it. It's also a car chase flick with a lot of Corman style, random, tongue-in-cheek destruction. Cars busting and crashing, stuff blowing up for no reason, and lots of character cliches. So turn your brain off and take what you want from it. I know I did. Oh yeah, and best of all - it doesn't star Tom Hanks!

The Transformers - Webworld (1986)

2011-05-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

“You were supposed to repair his mind, not destroy it!”

In 1973, confederates in an experiment conducted by Dr. David Rosenhan checked themselves into several mental hospitals claiming to be hearing voices. Each pseudo-patient was admitted and diagnosed with a psychological disorder. Following the operational definitions of the experiment, the pseudo-patients immediately told the hospital staff that they were feeling fine, and that their voices had ceased. Despite claims of good mental health, the pseudo-patients were detained for an average of nineteen days, with hospital staff maintaining their original diagnoses. At the conclusion of the experiment, not one pseudo-patient was discovered by hospital staff.

What does Dr. Rosenhan's infamous experiment have to do with Webworld, a minor third season episode of the original Transformers animated series? The plot of Webworld is a Rosenhan influenced critique of mental hospitals and their theraputic techniques. In an effort to avoid mutiny within the ranks, Cyclonus (number two Decepticon) checks Galvatron (leader of the Decepticons) into a interplanetary mental health facility called Torkulon. While a patient, Galvatron is subjected to various therapies, but when his mania proves to be too severe, Torkulon's staff decide that lobotomy is the only solution. Cyclonus protests their decision, but he is subdued. The Torkulon staff administer the lobotomy on Galvatron, but the operation goes wrong. Galvatron's twisted psyche is too powerful. The lobotomy fails, and Galvatron wreaks a destructive revenge on the planet.

The Rosenhan experiment concluded that the environment of psychiatric hospitals promoted mental illness through a culture of total institution, and this point of view is reflected in Webworld. Despite its claim as a palliative planet, Torkulon is more mad than its patients. Like a interstellar Venus flytrap for the mentally ill, the planet feeds on the insane and the disturbed. It's entire culture thrives upon its patients, and once admitted, the patients never leave. Torkulon is a fictitious place, but its imaginary world is symbolic of what was the total institution of the mental hospital theraputic ethos. Instead of promoting normalization, the mental hospital environment fostered a prison guard/convict relationship between the patient and the staff that only deepened the division between mental illness and socially accepted normalcy. The epitome of everything that was wrong with the mental hospital environment was the 20th century practice of lobotomy. Countless individuals were mutilated and destroyed by this dehumanizing practice, and Galvatron's rampage at the end of Webworld could definitely be perceived as mimetic revenge against a psychiatric school of thought that was ultimately more destructive that restorative.

Although the experiment was connected to the anti-psychiatry movement, Rosenhan, unlike a lot of the key thinkers associated with anti-psychiatry, did not deny the existence of mental illness. Rosenhan merely criticised the accepted therapeutic methods of the day. Webworld is a sardonic criticism of the mental hospital environment as well, and like Rosenhan, it does not deny the existence of mental illness. The Decepticons are fully aware of Galvatron's violent psychological instability, but the events on Torkulon force the Decepticon rank and file to accept their leader's mental illness and that without him, they are essentially lost. It is a parabolic conclusion that advocates acceptance and not alienation for the mentally ill, but what's most remarkable about Webworld is it's intended audience: The after-school consumer demographic of 9-12 year old boys. A half hour animated commercial geared toward selling toys addressing Rosenhan style psychological theory seems misplaced, but that's the fiction of the Transformers. When it's bad, it stinks (Revenge of The Fallen?), and when it's good, it's exceptional, and Webworld definitely falls into the latter category.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)

2011-04-17T14:52:00.000-07:00

Sequels get no respect. Overshadowed by the originals, and lost in within the continuum, few receive the accolades they may or may not deserve. There are exceptions; Terminator 2, The Empire Strikes Back, The Godfather Part 2, but most are forgotten, and to be honest, rightfully so. Bogged down by the will for profits, quality takes a back seat and the results are usually flushable.

The Nightmare on Elm Street series is different. The first one is canon, the second one is a muddled mess, and the third one is quite solid. Usually, by the third installment, things are becoming fairly low grade, but with A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 the series experiences a distinct visual and dramatic shot in the arm. Plot wise, the film is fairly formulaic, but late at night, with a couple ales under your belt, and the nightmares flowing, the movie is nothing short of entertaining and enthralling.

Nightmare on Elm Street 3 is the logical step the series should have taken with the second installment. The surrealist dreamworld of the Nightmare on Elm Street series was the ideal canvas for a horror narrative. Wes Craven's original film effectively manipulated the boundaries of reality and in the process touched on the theme of violence and barbarity within the suburban middle class consciousness. Visually, the film was inventive, but the low budget kept things conservative. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 opened the door on the visual possibilities within the series. The extra cash in the film's coffers allowed the sinister dreamscape to run wild, and audiences were transported to the skewed and twisted world of Freddy Krueger's imagination.

The film takes creative cues from the best of Clive Barker and Ray Harryhausen, but does not come across as an imitation. The mimetic world within definitely belongs to Krueger, but despite the visual quality of the film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 does not carry much weight. Inspired or not, sequels just don't fit the mold when it comes to establishing an artistic legacy. Just how much material can milked from the same tired concept. Depends on the series, and in the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, there was still a fair amount of life within the dream.

The Twilight Zone - I of Newton (1985)

2011-03-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

Satan's got every facet of nastiness down pat. Let's face it, the guy's evil. He's an interloper, a seducer and a deceiver. He meddles with the affairs of men and women, leads them into temptation with delusions of grandeur, and usually sends them to their destruction. When a person deals with the devil, things never go well.

He also likes to lure individuals from the righteous path by coming as what the want most. Eve met up with a snake, Jesus came across an angel in the desert, and I'm sure Keanu Reeves had a bad experience playing a lawyer once. Either way, the guy has a reputation, and it shows up frequently in fiction. In I of Newton, Satan shows up as a jive talking cool cat hell bent on taking Sherman Helmsley's soul. It's a short segment, but it holds true to the traditional narrative of a persuasive and intimidating Beelzebub and an average Joe trying to save himself from unholy damnation. Physically, human beings are no match for the Lord of the Flies. Only the will of an individual can defeat the Prince of Darkness, and in I of Newton, Sherman Helmsley delivers the knockout punch with a simple "get lost". Outwitted, Satan disappears into the ether.

The theme of Satan as deceiver and interloper has continuity within the first season of The Twilight Zone. The Devil's appearance in Dealer's Choice is similar to that in I of Newton. Both roles are played by separate actors, but the characters seem the same. In Dealer's Choice, Dan Hedaya plays the Prince of Darkness as poker player, and once again, he challenges an average Joe for his soul. The concept of the Devil circulating through The Twilight Zone attempting to make off with people's souls is a fun take on the traditional temptation narrative, and I of Newton works the continuity angle by offering the segment up as "another" public service announcement regarding the Devil and his ways. After thousands of years playing the same game you'd think the old interloper would catch on to the repeating finish (good always conquers evil), but with such a lengthy career in luring and ruining the wicked why make an about face now?

The Twilight Zone - Wordplay (1985)

2011-03-10T12:42:00.000-08:00

Everything seems normal. It's a work day. The coffee's on. The wife is making oatmeal. What could be amiss? At this point, nothing, but thing's are going to get very chaotic for the family man in Wordplay. Word by word, the language of his 20th century North American world will dissolve into anarchy. Everyone else will be in step with the linguistic metamorphosis, but the family man will be left out in the cold, and his fate will be determined by decisions he makes regarding the upheaval.

The human world is held together by language. Our ability to communicate through sounds and symbols allows us to have a history and an ongoing dialogue. It is the foundation of our success as a species. Take it away, and our ideas, our culture, and our social infrastructure comes apart. The family man in Wordplay never loses his facility for language, but the language spoken by the people in his life mutates drastically leaving the family man bewildered and confused. No explanation is given regarding the sudden upheaval. The viewer only sees the chaos unfolding. Lost in a world he no longer understands, the family man's life collapses in on itself, and his reality disintegrates. His inability to communicate the simplest of ideas makes him an outsider in his own world. In a panic, he runs in an attempt to escape the bizarre universe unfolding around him.

Wordplay illustrates the importance of communication within the human social world and the arbitrary nature of meaning within our lives. Human identity is constructed through interaction with others and as the family man's ability to communicate erodes, so does his sense of self. Isolated by strangers he once knew intimately, the family man falls into despair, but moments of despondency are short lived. When confronted with the life threatening illness of his son, the family man chooses to return to the world around him. Frightened by the boy's tenuous mortality, the family man awakens to the fact that while language may be malleable, life and death is not.

Without a language to speak, the family man finds himself in a world gone topsy turvy, but the chaos in Wordplay is only perceptual. Jarring as it is, the dissolution of everything he has known means nothing. The world around him has a new definition of linguistic normalcy. The sickness of his son forces the family man to come to terms with the new reality, and to make a choice. In the final frames of the piece, he is seen in his son's bedroom. He picks up a child's picture book. To survive he must make sense of the nonsense and understand the new language that is being spoken. He opens the book and turns to the first page. His reeducation has begun.

Cobra (1986)

2011-02-11T21:17:00.000-08:00

All America wanted was a hero, a no nonsense man-of-few-words that would lead them out of the morass. There was a feeling of lost innocence, that the old era of prosperity and family values had disappeared. The Vietnam War, the Hostage Crisis, and the country's decline in economic productivity had taken it's toll. The middle class wanted the old glory back, and it didn't matter how they got it, as long as they had it in some way, shape or form.

Ronald Reagan was that hero, and he played the role perfectly. Through a ruse of of sound bites and oversimplified imagery, the Reagan administration created a conceptual familialist America under attack by crime and immoral lifestyles. The American public ate it up. Reagan was the noble sheriff riding into town, looking to clean things up, and make things right. It was only an act, but it was an act that worked. The Reaganite idea of a lost America that needed to be saved became part of the contemporary fiction, and Cobra is a pathological manifestation Reagan era. The film presents to the viewer an America sick with the disease of crime, and unable to cure itself. Serial killers and rapists roam freely, gangs and narcotics run the streets, and the police can do nothing about it. This America needs a hero, a man willing to go against the namby pamby, liberal status quo of equal rights under the law for all citizens. Cobra Cobretti, is that man. Tough and to the point, Cobretti deals the creeps and the psychos a double barreled dose of what they really need. Cobretti doesn't arrest criminals and give them due process; he wastes them because justice in America doesn't work anymore. The only way to prevent crime is to destroy crime.

In the brutal final scenes of the film, Cobretti impales the main villain upon an industrial hook, and watches with stoic resolve as the man screams in agony and is pulled into a cauldron of flames. Absolutist and unflinching, Cobretti wreaks vengeance on the viewer's worst fears. Dehumanized, and never developed beyond depraved and malevolent caricatures, the violent deaths of the antagonists are perceived as fair punishment. Cobra is American style, mimetic catharsis where the mythic lawman strolls into town, and cleans up the creeps. Through Cobretti, viewers could wreak vengeance on their worst fears with a blood lust devoid of any humanity and psychological entanglement. Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out, or in this case move on to the scene where the tough guy rides off with his heterosexual reward.

The conceptual America of Ronald Reagan did not exist. Crime was not a rampant immoral disease infecting the nation, and the vicissitudes of the American narrative were too multi-faceted to be summed up in the "Prouder, stronger, better" soundbites of the era, but fear and frustration dominated the American consciousness of the 1980s. Tired of mistakes failures, the American public wanted a Hollywood finish to the complicated problems that couldn't be solved, and Cobra is very reflective of this ethos. Cobretti the guns blazing cowboy fit the far right notion that crime was a morality issue deserving of punishment, not reform. Socio-economic conditions were just liberal lightweight excuses. Put the psychos to death and the perverts behind bars. That was the direction American experience took with the Ronald Reagan political ride of the 1980s, and for those who believed in the myth, it was morning in America again. For those who didn't fit the mold, well you'll just have to ask them.

The Blue Iguana (1988)

2011-02-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

There's something about the visual imagery of the late 80s and early 90s that was harsh. Nothing was subtle and everything was overt to the point of cliche: neon colours, rough animation, jagged graphics, crass hues, and a whole lot of trying way too hard. Twenty years on, the whole aesthetic is considered retro, ironic, but for those who lived through it, it's either warm and fuzzy or savagely emetic.

The Blue Iguana is a good example of the way things were: opening credits that explode with flashing colour, jagged "Dia del los Muertos" animation, Dean Stockwell in a neck brace, kitschy cultural artifacts, random American ephemera in various states of decay, and an underground rock star in a manic role (Flea all coked up, and ready to get violent). The goal of the movie was neo rock and roll noir, and for that, the filmmakers nailed it. The hard knocks gumshoe, the double crossing dame, the grimy bar and the shadowy hotel room; all of it fits the noir niche, and the boozy, sweat drenched, south of the border atmosphere gives it an Alejandro Escovedo tone, if Alejandro Escovedo has anything to do with crime films based out of Mexico, which he doesn't.

The Alejandro Escovedo comparison isn't fair. The man's from Texas, not Mexico, but it works here because stereotyping is the other thing that The Blue Iguana nails. Watching the film, you'd think that Mexico is a place of barbarous inhumanity. There's guns going off, murders in the streets, wanton sex in the windows, and alcohol running throughout the city. No wonder the town's called Diablo. It's the devil's playground. Hot, tropical, and vicious, just like the Mexico everyone knows and love.

It could be argued that the Mexico in The Blue Iguana is mimetic, but that's not good enough. Film has the capability of skewing reality, and legitimizing pseudo facts. D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation is the poster child for misguided information and influence. It's racist and romanticized version of the antebellum and post Civil War South played significant role in the early 20th century revival of the Klan. The Blue Iguana isn't Birth of a Nation, and it isn't going to alter any one's point of view regarding Mexico and it's culture, but for a noir film aspiring to be a comedic cut above the rest, the subject matter could've been savvier.

That kind of savvy is asking too much, but as a footnote to the visual aesthetic of the late 80s and early 90s, The Blue Iguana could be a cultural signpost, if anyone actually cares remember it. Cinematically, the film is alright, and the noir influence subdues the harsh imagery of the era, giving the film an exaggerated, comic book flair. Then again, I remember that time period well, and it's possible that I'm perceiving the whole thing with a warm and fuzzy glow. Remembrance of things past can do that to you.

The Plague of the Zombies (1966)

2011-01-09T21:38:00.000-08:00

The mine was plentiful, but dangerous. Men were killed, maimed. Eventually, the workers walked away. The country squire was furious. In the old days, the commoners knew their place. Recalcitrant workers were easily corrected, but not anymore. Honour toward the lord and the land was gone, and with it the mine and all its fortune.

An easy solution to the labour problems faced by the squire in The Plague of the Zombies would've been to fix up the mine, make it safe, and gain back the trust of the townspeople, but being a man of his time, he seeks another resolution. Fueled by aristocratic arrogance and pride, he decides that because the dead have no legal status as citizens, why not turn the men of the town into an army of zombies and put them to work in the mine? No strikes, no unions, no labour costs; what more could an early capitalist ask for?

The industrial revolution brought great wealth to the English gentry, but it also heralded in great social change. The role of the peasant transitioned from agricultural worker to factory labourer. Universal civil liberties for the lower classes became fully realized with the right to form unions and strike. Legal subjugation was a thing of the past, but despite the progress, the centuries old social fabric of feudalism created an immense cultural lag. Not everyone was created equal and the working conditions of the proletariat reflected that sentiment. Seen as expendable and nothing more than coarse low born nothings, the lower classes were treated as beasts of burden with little regard to their safety.

The idea of the zombie film as political commentary didn't come into vogue until after George A. Romero's Living Dead trilogy. Mixing metaphor with gut munching became de rigueur, but pre Living Dead zombie films mixed very little but nonchalant racist stereotypes and creepy atmospheres. The Plague of the Zombies predates Night of the Living Dead by at least a year, and the film's usage of zombies as a metaphor for the disposable nature of manual labour is unique in the cinematic zombie canon. The workers are the living dead, indentured to their jobs, and in complete servitude. As zombies they are the perfect workforce: slaves without free will.

The irony of the zombie/slave symbolism is the movie's misuse of Haitian Vodou practices. Haitian Vodou is a combination of forced Catholicism, West African beliefs, and Arawakan religion. It's unfortunate that The Plague of the Zombies narrowly portrays Haitians as purveyors of witchcraft and black magic. Black Haitians were part of the African Diaspora, and were the worst victims of the burgeoning European capitalist market. The film could've done a better job than throwing in "tribal" drummers and an obsequious house servant, but you gotta get your scares and stereotypes from somewhere, and I suppose Caribbean cliches are as good as anything else.

Slaughter (1972)

2010-12-28T21:44:00.000-08:00

He was a big man, with a soft voice, and he was a star. Nine years in the NFL had made him a household name, but he wanted to make a change. He wanted to do something on his own terms. Football had been his ticket to the top, but he was done with being the warrior, the man who tears his opponents limb from limb. He wanted a new role, something different, and in 1965, in the prime of his career, Jim Brown retired from the gridiron.

Times were changing. Hollywood needed a new action star, some one with a marquee name, some one that would be a big box office draw, and some one who would also be reflective of the social climate. Sidney Poitier had the skill and the credentials, but he didn't have the grit. There was Woody Strode, but he didn't have the name recognition. Jim Brown on the other hand, had it all; grit, skill, and a big name. It was a fortuitous situation. Hollywood found their star, and Brown blazed a new career path. He was the perfect no-nonsense, man of few words, tough guy, and with a .45 semi automatic in his hand, he looked downright mean. As a result, many of his roles were politically and racially charged, and it was only a matter of time before blaxploitation came calling as his typecast.

In Slaughter, Brown plays the part of a former Green Beret wronged by racist white gangsters. Brooding, violent, and in control, the eponymous character Slaughter seeks street justice for the murder of his parents. One by one, his adversaries meet their end at the barrel of his gun. The film was a success, and Brown found many subsequent action roles, even reprising the Slaughter role a year later in Slaughter's Big Rip-Off.

Despite it's seemingly progressive subject matter, blaxploitation was ultimately more negative than positive for black film roles. The men were often portrayed as violent, hyper macho, Nat Turner-esque nightmares, and the women as wanton, over-sexed harlots. There was nothing revolutionary about regressive stereotypes. The caricatures blaxploitation portrayed were nothing more than The Birth of a Nation era racist stereotypes dressed up as black power. Luckily, out of gas and out of new tricks, the genre's popularity waned, and by the late 70s, blaxploitation began to fade away.

Politically engaged, Brown understood the parallel between his aggressive reputation on the football field and the violent men he portrayed in the movies. He wanted to take on roles that exuded strength and confidence, and like many of his onscreen characters, he let his actions do the talking, and avoided pontificating publicly. The line was too fine. On the football field, action speaks volumes, what you see is what you get, but on the silver screen, everything is speculative. Films like Slaughter did not have enough nuance to convey anything more than gun play and revenge. Without political dialogue, his conscientious intentions were lost in the violence of his films. Its unfortunate. Brown's intentions were loftier than blaxploitation, but in the end, that is what he delivered. No matter, Brown's cinematic success eclipses this minor failure. The abrupt change in profession was a risky move, but a move that paid off. As a film star, Brown enjoyed a lengthy career that spanned four decades, with many starring roles within his filmography. A remarkable feat for an actor, let alone a football player, but Jim Brown was not your average football player, and apparently he was not your average actor either.

Lust for a Vampire (1971)

2010-11-20T23:39:00.000-08:00

Books aren't written by wallflowers, they're written by men of action, men like Richard LeStrange. To get a good line, you have to live a bit of life, and if that means going after vampire myths and beautiful women, then that's the way it's got to be...

Charismatic and always on the lookout for pleasure, LeStrange embodies the 19th century literary myth of writer-as-libertine. It's a masculine caricature, rakish with subtle machismo, and it fits well into Lust for a Vampire's licentious narrative. Period piece nudies regularly employed such roles as the conduit of the Male Gaze, and in Lust for a Vampire that is the purpose of the LeStrange character. In control, objectifying, he tours the movie peeping and leering at anything in a petticoat, placing all the female characters in direct reference to his sexuality. Even when he's not onscreen the viewer is provided with a taste of LeStrange's prowess; finishing school girls half dressed, engaging in desperate lesbianism, starved of their need for male sex. He is the vicarious vehicle of the male viewer, and every heterosexual male's dream.

Mircalla on the other hand, the main villain, is a female vampire, but despite her position of strength, she doesn't really have any control. Reincarnated by Mike Raven doing his best Christopher Lee, she enters the narrative a (bi)sexualized nymph with little or no memory of her bloodsucker past. She kills, but it's not her own doing. The Raven/Lee master vampire character controls her every move and destiny. Then LeStrange shows up, and his masculine charm, and persuasive discourse breaks her vampire will. Every other character that becomes entangled in her alluring web ends up dead, but the power of LeStrange's Casanova-style, male sexuality is too much for her undead soul. She falls in love, gets naked, everyone has a thrill, and then she dies. Case closed, the nudie horror formula reaches it's climax.

Not quite. This wasn't your typical nudie flick. This was a Hammer Films Production. Hammer was known for it's gothic horror pieces, and in the late 60s and early 70s the company wasn't doing too well. Movie audiences were becoming accustomed to grittier horror like Night of the Living Dead and I Drink Your Blood, and were no longer keen on the classic horror model that buttered Hammer's bread. Hammer releases were bombing left and right, and to compete, Hammer decided to pander to The Male Gaze and ramp up the nudity. If you can't out gore them, maybe you can out sex them. Previous productions focused on the horror and less on sex appeal, but Lust for a Vampire was confusing. Was it nudie sleaze or was it horror? The muddled split personality of the film had a deleterious effect on Hammer's movie going demographic. Even director Jimmy Sangster was appalled by the final product he saw onscreen. Lust for a Vampire did not achieve it's goal. Hammer took the classic movie monsters, updated them, and made them it's own. Hardly a small feat considering the iconic status of the 1930's Frankenstein and Dracula, but it was also the company's inevitable undoing. When the movie market changed, Hammer struggled with it's identity. Where could the company go after all it's gothic horror success? Lust for a Vampire was diversification gone wrong, and a sad sexist death knell for a grand old horror firm. Hammer continued on for a few more years, but eventually ceased all film production by the late 70s. A limp finish for a great legacy, but it doesn't matter, the company's successes far outweigh it's failures. Spend an evening watching The Horror of Dracula or The Curse of Frankenstein and all will be forgotten.

The Old Man's Bride (1967)

2010-10-03T23:05:00.001-07:00

The Motion Picture Production Code had set the standards years ago. The moral principles of society would not be undermined by the wanton ways of smut peddlers and two-bit hucksters. Pornographers and immoral movie men that profited from their productions took the hint. Stag shows took to the clandestine corners of cinema: Carnival tent theatres, peep booths, and the company of men together, smoking cigars, drinking beer and watching dirty films showing girls doing dirty things normal girls didn't do. Erotic bucks cashed in on the kink and fetishization of loose women breaking their social/sexual gender roles.

What I wouldn't do to meet a broad like that! Whores, not like the wife back home. Nasty little high school girls, country girls, sex starved lesbians; all waiting for a real man to take 'em and show 'em what's what. It was a man's world, and in those darkened Dworkian-esque corners where the men gathered and collectively fantasized, sluts took it and got what they deserved, and no one asked any questions because at the bottom, degradation and exploitation is justified by it's very place on the ladder.

The old production code came to an end during the mid to late 60s, and with it went the era of fly-by-night, back room stag shows. There were a few stragglers still stuck in cultural lag, and The Old Man's Bride is one of them. By 1967, the collective rape fantasy of the middle class, white male had moved from the covert world of stag shows to the more legitimate of the downtown grindhouse district. Taking advantage of lenient new obscenity laws, these theatres sought out the nasty and explicit. Ribald, Boccacio-esque nudies that showed more tease than sleaze became a thing of the past, relics of a bygone era.

There was no point in complaining. The law of the cinematic gutter was Social Darwinistic. Those that didn't produce, didn't survive. Mutate or disappear forever, and most of the stag men evolved as the demand of their demographics became dirtier and dirtier. Some just did it quicker than others.

The Gate (1987)

2010-09-07T16:50:00.000-07:00

I told Mom and Dad that they could trust me, and although they insisted on hiring a babysitter, they eventually relented. I told them I could look after things fine on my own, including my little brother. They agreed that he definitely needed supervision. He'd dug that stupid hole in the backyard a couple days ago, and totally ticked Dad off. Dad immediately grounded him. I normally wouldn't have cared about my brother getting punished like that, but the grounding meant he was going to be stuck around the house all weekend. There's nothing worse than having a little brother hanging around when you're trying to entertain party guests.

Yeah, the party. That's definitely when things started getting weird. All was going well, until we tried to levitate Glen (my little brother) as a party trick. No one expected anything, but for some reason it worked. Glen freaked out. I tried to calm him down, but he insisted on calling Mom and Dad. What? And lose my credibility with them? No way, not a chance, but Glen kept at it. He was really upset, but he was getting on my nerves. I lost my cool the next morning, and after that, he kept quiet.

Looking back on it, the levitation probably should have given it all away, but I was too proud to admit anything. The house was my responsibility. Mom and Dad had trusted me with the safekeeping of their familialist suburban dream. The older sister should know best. Turns out, I didn't know best, but my little brother did. He saw it coming all along. He knew what was down in that hole, and he was furtively fighting it any way he could. I was too busy trying to prove I was an adult.

A couple hours ago, the “man in the wall” dragged me away. I don't know where I am, and I can't tell for sure of I'm dead or alive. I think I'm somewhere in between. Glen's all alone on the other side, trying to fight off the evil. A little boy trying to stop the “Old Gods” and their minions of Hell. Maybe I should have called Mom and Dad, but I don't believe they wouldn't have been able to help. I'm very worried. He's only a little boy, but the consciousness of kids is more complex than you would think. I should know. I'm one myself. My biggest mistake was trying to leave it all behind.

The Stuff (1985)

2010-08-22T13:37:00.000-07:00

Profits are falling, ice cream sales are down, and the market is being eaten up by the new upstarts and their delicious, low fat, alternative dessert. Consumers are hooked on the stuff, they can't seem to get enough. In an ethical world, this would call for a dynamic, new marketing strategy, some ingenious sales plan that'll get all the summertime sugar fiends back on the same old product they've always been buying. Beat the new guy at his own game by playing fair, and honest business practice!

This is not an ethical world. This is business. That Horatio Alger nonsense is for nice guys, and nice guys finish last in the free enterprise system. You don't merely beat the new guy at his own game, you hire some unscrupulous, mercenary to infiltrate the competition's operation, and sabotage what he's doing. Stir up some false controversy, get the media involved, and destroy them, wipe them right off the map. Put them all in the poorhouse, steal their recipe, re-brand it, and watch the profits roll in. Capitalism is a gladiatorial game, and to the most sociopathic go the spoils.

What if the controversy is true? Suppress everything, even the reports about zombism. If our inside guy grows a conscience, make him disappear. Laws don't apply here, and neither does marketplace integrity. Our advocacy department will take care of any obstructive legislation, and our PR guys will whip up the best smear campaign money can buy for any left leaning officials wanting to get in the way of our profits. Besides, the competition registered the recipe as proprietary. Let's see the meddlers mess with that! The legal system only applies when we say it applies. Corporate responsibility is bad for business.

Now sit back, and watch the profits soar. Stock prices are going to reach an all time high. One word of advice though, don't eat the product, and if you see white goop seeping in through the windows and out the drains, run and keep your mouth shut, or we'll shut it for you.

Dementia 13 (1963)

2010-07-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

The only thing Roger Corman had to lose in 1963 was money. Time was of the essence, and quick, quality work was imperative. The man did not hire hacks. To work with him, you had to know the ropes. Incompetence was costly, but then again, so was talent. To get 'em good, without spending a fortune, you had to hire 'em young and fresh, straight outta film school. Hungry, and looking for a chance, the Roger Corman Film School threw 'em right into the line of fire. It was mutually beneficial. The new kid got his first big break, and American International Pictures got a deal on a dilly of a film. The list of graduates is astonishing; Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, and of course, the big name here, Dementia 13's Francis Ford Coppola.

Most biographies claim Corman had a keen eye for talent. Judging by his own work, he definitely knew a thing or two about filmmaking, but there was more at play. Corman may have been a B-movie master, but he was also old guard, and he knew people, lots of people. He had an insider's edge. Corman's early gallery of stars came to him already known. Coppola's dad worked for NBC. Ron Howard was a child actor. Demme's mom was an actress. Bogdanovich's pedigree was in music and the arts. Martin Scorsese? Well, he's a definite meritocracy case, but social reproduction worked in Corman's favour, and it worked well. Corman was a calculated risk taker, a businessman who only took on talent if there was going to be a definite return. Benevolent charity for the unsung hero was not involved.

To his credit, he wasn't all cold, callous business. Corman was very loyal. Once on board, young talent received plenty of work, and rapid advancement. Not exactly something the majors would be willing to bestow, especially on an unknown. Coppola may not have been unknown, but he was unproven. After working with the young man on The Terror, Corman gave Coppola his first chance at wide release, Dementia 13. Word has it, the two fought over the film's final product. Would the film have been more compelling if Coppola had been left alone? Corman was a more seasoned movie man, Coppola the neophyte, but then again, Corman never came anywhere close to a movie like The Godfather.

Dementia 13 is for the most part, unremarkable. It's competent, and a decent late night watch, but it speaks less about Coppola and more about Corman and the success of his recruitment strategy. Coppola was promising young filmmaker, with good references, but a thin resume. Corman banked on him, and took a chance. It was a winning gamble, albeit a bittersweet victory. Coppola's later success solidified the film's position as a historical footnote, but profitability on Dementia 13 has eluded Corman. Archiving gaffes, and the demise of American International Pictures has left the film in the public domain. That's okay, he still has his Oscar.

Bonnie's Kids (1973)

2010-07-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

The nudity happens quickly, and it's naughty and nasty. Young women stripping in their rooms. Peeping tom point-of-views. Lusty older women seducing teenage girls. Sweaty poolside scenes with skimpy bikinis. Bonnie's Kids doesn't cheat. Hot and good, you get lost in the illicit, raunchy, red blooded action, but then something happens. You don't recognize it right away, but the sex slows down, and the pace of the film picks up. Tiffany Bolling's nudity becomes inconsequential. What really matters here is her fate. There's money in her trunk, and hit-men on her tail. Is she going to make it? What about her sister? She's back at the ranch. Will Uncle Ben kill her over this caper? Will her sister come back for her? Or will she make a run for it on her own?

The difference between the best pornography had to offer, and sexploitation's cream of the crop was the intention. No matter how good, porn was always about getting rich on people getting off. Even in it's “golden age”, when porn had the 35mm medium, and large productions with big name starlets, there was still a lack of cinematic legitimacy. The goal was always titillation, which is why porn's biggest success wasn't in it's 70s era flirtation with the mainstream, but it's warm and satyric embrace of the VCR. Home video literally killed the sex film star. Adult theatres closed down, suburban dads took to the privacy of their late night dens, profits went up, and no one even batted an eye. Sexploitation on the other hand, kept on rolling, from the theatre screen to the VHS tape, and beyond.

Sex alone was nothing, but as bait, it sold work and lured kids in, and sexploitation's finest autuers found authenticity through this cloak of deceit. The demographic of North American drive-in circuit was less one dimensional than the adult theatre crowd. It was youth gone wild, hormones, beer cans, sex, rock 'n' roll. The drive-in was Friday night freedom, a chance to escape the ennui of suburbia. Young, unfettered and impressionable, high school kids didn't go to a movie to get off, they went to escape. Their teenage desires were like an open canvas, and the films of the drive-in worked that angle and gave them what they wanted.

Bonnie's Kids is a stylish, well written, Southern California thrill ride. The purgatorial, anything-goes atmosphere of the drive-in circuit allowed the movie to take chances that would not have been available at the mainstream movieplex. The film uses the audience's desire for titillation as a springboard for a story. Once drawn in, the movie moves in a different direction. Sex takes a tertiary role, and a crime caper emerges. If Bonnie's Kids had been only pornographic in nature, this would not have been possible. Sex would have come first. The audience would have demanded it. At the drive-in, the demographic wanted more, and men like Arthur Marks, the director of Bonnie's Kids, benefited from their desires. He was able to do more, with less demands and expectations, and the work endures. Thirty years after it's initial release, Bonnie's Kids still makes the midnight rounds on late night cable, and not because of any inherent kitsch value, but because the film is good.

Waitress! (1982)

2010-06-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

Grimy, greasy, and sleazy, the Troma midnight movie used to be a fixture on the late night TV landscape. Their films were outrageous ninety minute jokes that saturated the witching hour with sex and violence and cheap thrills. Critically, they were vilified and despised as peddlers of putrefaction. The designation was apt, but Troma didn't care. The company revelled in it's reputation, and pushed the limit on indecency with every successive film. Despite their propensity for poor taste, the strength of Troma's schtick went beyond the gross-out theatrics. They knew their history, and the early Troma catalog was very reflective of that fact. Dumb as it all was, Troma produced their films with a strong understanding of the cinematic dialogue, and the references and influences they twisted through their immoral lens gave their movies a certain sick panache that otherwise would have eluded less knowledgeable filmmakers.

Waitress! is one of Troma's earlier efforts. It's not a subtle work, but it does demonstrate Troma's cinematic savvy. The film opens with the lead character trying out for a dramatic stage role, a role she doesn't get because the producers would rather see her naked than see her act. Frustrated, she tears off her top, delivers her lines, and then storms off the stage drawling out one liners and double-entendres in indignation. Hardly Mae West at her best, but the bawdy blonde's influence is all over the scene, and the nod speaks volumes. Waitress! knows it's comedic credentials. One after another, the film deals 'em out, the pace of the jokes rolling out like a routine, with each zinger and sight gag generously seasoned with liberal amounts of naked ladies and slapstick, sexual innuendo. Economical and on budget, Troma wasted very little celluloid. The bits in Waitress! are quick, paranomastic, and play out like variety entertainment. Scenes like the "fly in my soup" bit, and the waiter “serving” dinner rolls with a tennis racket are dumb and groan-worthy, and textbook Vaudevillian. Names like the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges come to mind establishing a comic pedigree that almost transcends boobs and butts and stuff. Well, not really, but it does testify in Troma's favour.

Troma's routine eventually ran out of gas in the early to mid 90s. As cable TV became more specialized, and large media conglomerates took over, Troma was squeezed out. The party ended, and their films became relegated to small time, cinema houses celebrating the past on schlock-fest nights. Backed by an extensive knowledge of cinema's roots and traditions, Troma managed to churn out a special brand of movie malevolence and mischeif, and early films like Waitress! stand as a testament to their sleazy smarts. They are still around, cranking out the crap, but the midnight run is over. It's probably for the best, but to their credit, when they were on, they went all out, and they did keep the night owls captivated for a very long time.

Twice-Told Tales (1963)

2010-05-26T00:04:00.000-07:00

In horror, physical, corporeal locations have a tremendous impact on the visual narrative of a film. Hit on the right spot and a well chosen environment will augment the sinister ambiance of a film, and give credence to the story. Do an even better job, and a location will impart a performance almost as compelling as any actor. Like uncredited cast members, well employed locations can communicate malicious, ugly intentions to the audience without ever saying a word.

Twice-Told Tales is not one of these films. Shot entirely within a studio, it has no tangible, physical locations. There are no streets, no shadowy woodland scenes, and no Psycho-style house on the hill. It is a world composed of life size dollhouse sets, elaborate miniatures, and precisely placed props. Generic but effective, nothing within the theatrical scenery stands out, but that's the point. The sets in Twice-Told Tales are merely mimetic backdrops that set the stage for the film's larger-than-life, big ticket draw.

Vincent Price.

Dark, 19th century fiction was Vincent Price's specialty, and Twice-Told Tales is framed around his performance. His infamous voice narrates the stories, and his vain and villainous charisma permeates the film. A colossal cinematic presence, he was capable of owning a movie and carrying the tone and atmosphere. All he needed was a stage and a well made mimetic environment for authenticity. The old horror master's onscreen persona rendered vast, compelling set locations unnecessary, and his performance in Twice-Told Tales does exactly that.

April Fool's Day (1986)

2010-04-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

Summer vacation, my Grandparents farm, 1987.

"How about April Fool's Day?" suggested my Grandfather.

"What's it about?" I asked.

Looking down through his reading glasses, he read a short description from the satellite TV guide.

“A group of college students gather for a weekend party at a remote mansion only to fall victim to an unseen murderer.”

“Is it a horror movie?” I asked.

“Yes it is,” he replied, “do you want to watch it?”

“Sure.”

I waited on the couch, covered in a blanket. I could hear the satellite dish outside revolving in the dark. I was both nervous, and excited. I was eleven years old and I had never seen an "R" rated movie before. Was I in over my head? Would the movie frighten me? Would there be swearing, and nudity, and violence? When my parents were around, that kind of programming went on behind closed doors. I didn't understand why I was not permitted to see such things. If it was so bad, why did Dad like watching it? And if Dad seemed to like it so much, why didn't Mom?

“It's for adults only,” Dad would explain vaguely, “you're too young.”

“Because I have no interest in watching what your father is watching,” Mom would reply.

None of it made any sense, but maybe after this movie, some of it would. Like a portal into the taboo and the prohibited, I was convinced that April Fool's Day would be my first chance to see what all the fuss was about, to judge for myself whether I was to young to understand or experience such things.

"If you're scared, I can change the channel," said my Grandfather during the creepy opening scenes.

"No, I'm okay," I replied pulling the blanket close to my chin.

I was okay. The film seemed sunny, almost comic. The characters talked dirty and played pranks, like Porky's style teenagers, but that was it. This was what I wasn't allowed to watch? F-words and undone zippers? I saw and heard worse in the sixth grade everyday, but then it happened. The deck hand, trying to secure the ferry to the dock, became trapped as the boat cruised into shore. His face, ground against the beams of the dock, became torn off. Seeing him running around with his eyeball dangling, and blood everywhere freaked me out. I knew I was in for something heavy.

What followed was sex, violence, innuendo, and a mounting body count. I was rapt with the tension. Who was the killer? Was it Muffy? Did she have a twin sister? Somebody had to find out, because party guests were dying, and in no time at all the film was down to two survivors, a young man and a young woman. Frightened, and without keys for the boat, the final couple made a play for the house. They needed to find those keys, and get off the island before getting killed. Things weren't looking good. A frantic search followed, and in the chaos, they became separated. Then, a flash of steel. The killer was at the door, with a knife. A few quick moves with the blade, and the door was open. From room to room they ran, the killer slashing away, until the young woman crashed through a final door, and...

Then it was revealed. All the murdered party guests were in the living room, alive, chatting quietly, playing cards, reading. The young woman stood aghast. Her boyfriend ran into the scene. He too, was equally confounded. The joke was on them. Get it? April Fool's Day.

My Grandfather laughed.

"Did you like that?" he asked.

"Yeah," I replied.

Worked up into a crescendo of tension, and excitement, the twist took me by surprise. None of it was real? Yeah, none of it was real. I should of known, but I didn't. The torn face, the eye dangling; only rubber and latex. As the movie implied, only a ruse for a dramatic and emotional impact on the party guests and the viewer. After the movie was over, I said good night to my Grandfather, and climbed the long, cold, farmhouse stairs toward my bedroom. I thought about the movie, and then about the darkness around me. I scurried into bed, turned off the light, and pulled the covers over my head. My thoughts meandered back to the movie. If it was all fake, why couldn't I watch it? Was Dad watching something worse behind the closed TV room doors at night? I had to find out.

Slowly, my thoughts began to fade. I involuntarily pulled the blankets down, and breathed cool nighttime air, and then, without being conscious of my actions, fell asleep.

Ghoulies (1985)

2010-03-30T22:11:00.001-07:00

Look kid, the world's your oyster. You're young, good looking, and your future's bright. Don't waste it. Take this property you've inherited and sell it. You don't need some old money pit mansion in southern California. Nab the money, buy a swank apartment in the city, pay off your college debt, and get your sweetheart something nice.

A kegger? You want to hold a kegger? Alright, I suppose I get it. Creepy old house, secluded, lots of atmosphere; perfect for a party, but don't take it too far. No Ouija boards, no drunken seances, and keep the cemetery off limits. Alcohol plus college kids always ends up in hanky-panky and tomfoolery, and the dead don't want any of that. Show some respect. This place has history, family history, and believe me, it's the kind of history that's best left alone.

What? You performed a ritual in the basement? What kind of ritual? You summoned a spirit? Good grief. I realize something's been calling to you down there, but you should have left it alone. Sure, right now you might feel like the king of the world, but they don't make spirits like they used to, let alone demons. That's right, demons. What you called forth is a bunch of demons, and like I said, things have changed. This is the 80's. Satan outsources that stuff now, goes cheap. Back in the good old days you got more bang for your soul, like say Mephistopheles, but what you get these days is a bunch of greasy, little green dudes with teeth. They'll do your bidding alright, but necromancy is up for the highest bidder, and if you don't have what it takes, you're toast.

I don't care if this black magic nonsense won your girlfriend back! Faust got the same reward and where did it get him? Nowhere, that's where. The Devil doesn't deal in weakness, and if some one stronger comes around, he moves on. In this line of work, there's always some one stronger. Get out while you still can (if you still can). The Prince of Darkness has no time for frat boys.

Come back for your soul has he? Why didn't you listen to your old Uncle Jack? I tried warning you about this kind of thing, but no, you had to get cocky and try some of old Beelzebub's magic out for yourself. You called up his low grade minions, your head got big with the power, but now that some one tougher has come to take your place you're finding the heat's got a little too hot. Well, you're lucky you're family. Otherwise, I'd usually let a kid like you learn things the hard way. It shouldn't take me too long to make short work of these losers, but conjure these guys up again, you're on own. Capiche?

Deadly Friend (1986)

2010-02-27T20:56:00.000-08:00

In Deadly Friend, suburbia is presented to the viewer as a flawless collection of peaceful homes and pleasant streets where kids play basketball in the driveway, boys have paper routes, and the neighbourhood trick or treats every October. It is conceptual imagery, straight out of the romantic, Reagan-era vision of the middle class dream, but the serenity is short lived. Cracks in the conservative facade are slowly revealed, and the placid suburban backdrop undergoes a sinister metamorphosis. Paul, the film's protagonist, is a wholesome and happy teenager with a prodigious and precocious aptitude for science and technology. He owns a robot called Beebee (his own creation), and has a scholarship at the local university. Paul's next door neighbour is a young woman named Sam who lives with an alcoholic and abusive father. To escape the nightmare of her home life, Sam begins to spend time with Paul and his mother, but her drunk and paranoid father becomes suspicious, and in a fit of inebriated rage, strikes Sam and kills her. The event devastates Paul. Unwilling to accept her death, Paul decides to steal Sam's corpse and bring her back to life by installing Beebee's CPU within her brain. The Dr. Frankenstein act goes awry and the reanimated Sam, becomes an uncontrollable monster. Taking vengeance on all those who wronged her in her past life, Sam goes on a killing spree. Obsessed with his love for Sam, and his belief that his experiment will work, Paul becomes blind to the world unraveling around him, which leads to the film's tragic conclusion.

The post-war, suburban boom was a powerful cultural explosion. Peace, prosperity, and prolificacy had become the collective dream, and after years of death and destruction, it was also the perfect marketing strategy. The assembly lines were rolling, the free market economy was booming, and with full employment, everyone was buying. It was the golden age of North American capitalism, and no one had the dream down better than the ad men and the real estate developers. Buy your own little private slice of heaven! Raise your children safely, and find the life you always wanted! One by one, vast, sprawling tracts of land were bought and severed, and sleepy bedroom communities emerged. Hinged on the terrible memory of World War Two, suburbia was sold to the common man as a warm, welcoming refuge in a cold, uncaring world. Projected as a safe, blissful and prosperous place, the myth of suburbia became synonymous with the definition of the modern day nuclear family model. Isolation was it's essential appeal. Cut off from the outside world, issues like poverty, crime, civil unrest, and war could be easily negated, creating an artificial sense of security. It was illusory, an escapist universe grounded by conservatism, regressive fear and denial. Considered sacrosanct and inalienable, the exclusive, heterosexual family model was beyond reproach. Deviance, chaos and brutality were outside and invading forces. The suburban nuclear family became a political entity, and government legislation began to reflect it's desires. Harsh prison sentences, homophobic laws, the death penalty; all of it paranoia, bent on keeping the ugly out. The slasher films of the 1970s and 80s exploited these fears. The visceral thrill derived from viewing a suburban killing spree sprung from the belief that safety and security was inherent to suburbia. Watching a maniac mangle and mutilate what essentially equated to the cinematic embodiment of our next door neighbour was frightening. The marauding murderous intruder was the epitome of chaos and social dysfunction, and the reason for our isolation. The killer in a slasher film was deranged disorder, lurking on the outside, wanting to get in, wanting to destroy our perfect world. Escaped mental patients, serial killers, Satanists; this kind of dysfunction and violence never came from within. Suburbia was exempt, always the victim, and never the perpetrator, but in Deadly Friend, things are different. The killer is a product of the social forces within the suburban environment. Sam's violent nature is tragic. Fuelled by the memories of her painful past, and the aggressive and protective nature of Beebee's artificial intelligence, she lashes out and kills, but her victims are not random. Each murder is an act of vengeance upon cruel and adverse individuals living within the neighbourhood, characters who harmed her and Beebee while they still lived. Sam is a monster, but she doesn't exist within some sort of vilified, psychopathic vacuum. She is a construct of the negative elements of her neighbourhood, a victim of it's inherent ills. The character of Sam grounds the social dysfunction within suburbia, negating the myth of it's implicit safety and security.

Maligned as they were, the great slasher films of the 1970s and 80s did more than exploit the fears of suburbia. Expressive, atmospheric and well crafted, the defining examples and auteurs of the genre articulated major dissent with the conservative, suburban ideal. These filmmakers were from the baby boom that followed the post-war suburban explosion, and saw millions of children raised and socialised in the safe, antiseptic world of shopping malls, white flight, Saturday morning cartoons and sugary cereal. Isolated as suburbia was, it could not hide from events like the Vietnam War, Civil Rights and Feminism. The political landscape was changing even if the suburban, middle class family dream was not, and dissent and discontent began to manifest itself. Deadly Friend is the work of Wes Craven, and even though it lacks the nuance and cultural resonance of his masterpiece A Nightmare on Elm Street, as a parable of suburbia in decay, the work is very efficacious.

Waxworks (1924)

2010-01-31T10:57:00.000-08:00

I make promises to myself, promises that turn into pressure. I will do this, and I will do that. The destination, the goal, is imperative. I will write, read, clean, and put it all in order. Push, push, push, no time for the details or the trivialities. I know where I want to be, and I want to get there right now. I watch the clock. I can hear it ticking. Every second has value. Time is a resource, and as it slowly expires I feel my mind becoming a cluttered, inattentive, confusion of concerns and worries. I think of work, obligations, relationships, dinner plans, finances. It is an efluvium of petty burdens, a mess. Why don't I stop? Why don't I just look out the window?

Instead, I put in a DVD.

Waxworks moves slowly. The shots are long, and the dialogue is infrequent. I try to stay focused, but it's difficult. Other issues creep through my consciousness. Despite the distractions, I like what I am seeing. Waxworks is an anthology where the stories are guided along by the pen of a poet hired to tell the tales of three wax figurines. Similar to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the actors play out their roles against an expressionist backdrop. The painted environment is the poet's imagination come to life. It is both tactile and attractive, and the silence of the film only enhances the effect.

I pause the movie during the Ivan the Terrible sequence. I need to get up and walk away, do something else. I stand at the kitchen counter, and make myself a coffee. I look out the window, and into the street. Cars pass by on the wet pavement. I take a sip of coffee, and look at the clock. Almost eleven in the morning, I am running out of time. I sit down on the couch, and resume watching Waxworks. Ivan the Terrible is informed that he has been poisoned, and that his death is imminent. He kneels down before an hour glass, and compulsively turns it over and over. To cheat death, he attempts to cheat time. He goes mad, and the short ends.

I take another sip of coffee. Anxious to get to the end of the film, I am slightly relieved that the final chapter is beginning. The poet is visibly exhausted from the pressure of writing, but knowing that he must complete his work, forges onward. His last subject is Spring Heeled Jack, the murderer. He scribbles down a paragraph, nods off, awakes, then passes out. A dream sequence begins. Pursued by Spring Heeled Jack, the poet and his sweetheart run through a surreal world of carnival rides, and jagged nightmarish images. They cannot escape. Spring Heeled Jack is upon them. He thrusts his blade. The poet awakes with the knife in his chest, except it is not a knife, it is his pen. With his sweetheart beside him, he is relieved that it was only a dream. They embrace, and Waxworks ends.

Waxworks' finish is terrific. I did not expect the film to end so well, and I regret that I didn't take the time to let the narrative unfold at it's own pace. Like I said before, push, push, push, no time for the details or the trivialities. Such impatience is of no benefit. I finish my coffee, and make up my mind to chill out a bit more, take things a little bit easier. It doesn't all have to happen at once.

I stand up, turn off the TV and carry the empty coffee mug to the kitchen sink. I turn the on the hot water, and slowly rinse the mug clean. I place mug on the counter, and check the time on the microwave. It's after twelve, I have to get going. I immediately begin scrambling to get myself together. That appointment I have at one o'clock cannot be missed.

Old habits die hard, and promises are cheap.

Xtro (1982)

2009-12-31T19:24:00.000-08:00

In Xtro, a middle-class British family man vanishes in a flash of light only to unexpectedly return four years later, long after his family has moved on from his disappearance. Cosmetically and cognitively, he is the same man they knew before, but biologically and behaviourally he is completely changed. His physical form is now that of an alien. To become a man again, he is reborn through the “rape”, and impregnation of a young woman living alone in the countryside. The entire process, conception and birth, takes place within the temporal confines of a single night. Born a full grown adult, the delivery kills the young woman. The man, obviously conscious of her death, pays no mind, and coldly cleans himself at the kitchen sink as the woman's blood drips from his naked body.

Is the man at the sink still the man that disappeared years ago? Or is he something completely different? As the film moves on, it is quickly conveyed that the man has returned with a purpose. Find the remnants of his former family, and re-unite with his son. It is also revealed that not only has the man changed physically, but he now possesses powers beyond the range of the average human being and has the ability to alter reality both psychically and physically. A distinct memory of his past life is shown to still exist within his psyche, with his love for his son being the strongest, but as a husband and a colleague, the man no longer seems to exist. He recognizes, remembers and interacts with the people who populated his former life, but his actions are hollow echoes of how he once lived, replayed as a means to an end. An end that has the man reclaiming and metamorphosing his son, and executing this desire with grim and gory results.

I might be making a narrow minded presumption, but I think it's safe to assume that the essential aesthetic goal of Xtro was to be nothing more than a morbid, sci-fi, horror flick. Chock full of creepy imagery, and weirdo scenes, the film achieves that ambition with Hellraiser and Alien style aplomb. It certainly freaked my ten year old mind out, enough to imprint the film onto my conscious memory long after I'd forgotten it's title. That memory tempted me to see the movie, and watching it again after all these years revealed compelling yet inadvertent concepts at play during the course of film. Can a man who seems so maliciously and physically altered still be the same person? Is he still human, or is he an alien? Xtro does very little to answer these questions. Not out of some sort of calculated ambiguity, but probably because any themes and theories regarding human identity and construction of the self within the film were completely unintentional.

Dilettantish nonsense? Maybe, but I can't help myself. It's too fun to ignore, and besides, it's still an entertaining and macabre movie even without all that balderdash. My ten year old self would definitely attest to that! All I wanted that night was a little futuristic action and intergalactic whimsy, but what did I get? Head-under-the-covers bedtime terrors! Thanks Xtro, but you didn't get me this time around. Damn video nasty!

The New York Ripper (1982)

2009-11-30T23:40:00.000-08:00

A man and a woman are on a bed having sex. The lights are hot, garish, bright. A smattering of men sitting close to the stage, squirm and watch quietly. In the front row, a woman in her mid forties, masturbates furtively.

The act ends. The performers leave the stage. A weak applause drifts up from the crowd. Backstage, the woman from the sex act waits for her next show. She hears a noise. Standing up, she investigates, and calls out a familiar name. No response. She steps back. A flash of glass, a broken bottle. Flesh is torn. The woman falls. Blood pours, and spreads across the floor.

On the street outside the theatre, hustlers ply their wares. A woman, a dime bag, a girl, or a boy; you choose. All for sale, and no one cares about anything as long as some one's buying. Neon signs burn bright. Trench coat perverts stroll the block, trying not to be seen. Cops in cars cruise by. They're looking for a killer who's been gutting pretty girls. They're not having much luck. Too many degraded hearts and minds in this market. Down here, every one's a killer, they just don't know it yet...

The world of The New York Ripper is a brutal one. Through it's lens, all is ugly, and everyone is guilty. Drawn along gender lines, it is a primal nightmare that manifests itself in blood. It is a world of despicable men, of wolves in sheep's clothing, predators waiting for their prey. From the mouths of these men comes hate. Every woman is a dumb bitch, and a broad meant to be abused. Wanton, depraved, avaricious, the female body is a vacuous, dehumanized object. Relationships do not exist between the sexes, only exchanges, opportunities, chances at sex and violence. The New York Ripper is very violent, especially toward the female body. Few escape the slaughter. The murderer, driven by a puerile, enthusiastic hatred, eviscerates them. His kill scenes are sexualized, barbarous. These aren't random thrusts from a madman's hand, this is the culmination of the collective male psyche within the film, an exorcism one disembowelment at a time.

A vile misanthropic vision, The New York Ripper seethes with misogyny, but what separates The New York Ripper from other films like The Last House on the Left and I Spit on Your Grave, is it's honesty. Where the other films attempted to mask their ugly intentions with revenge-as-redemption plot devices, The New York Ripper is unapologetic. There are no heroes in this film. Volatile, impulsive, driven forward by their most base desires, the men and women of the movie ask to be euthanized, and that is exactly what Lucio Fulci does, he puts them down.

In the final climax of the film, the killer meets his fate. His demise is violent, abrupt, explosive, and over in an instant. No deliverance. No Death Wish style satisfaction. Only death, an animal put down in a city filled with animals, begging the question, which one should be next?

White Dog (1982)

2009-10-21T23:43:00.000-07:00

Africa's raging baby, and the jungle is burning in Topanga Canyon. Lions and tigers are pacing their cages. Elephants are stamping the ground, kicking up thick clouds of Californian dust. It's all coming to a head. White shots of electric light are bursting along the fence line like fireworks. The dark continent once crying over it's diaspora, is now kicking up a fuss. It's sons and daughters have been down too long, locked up in shackles, at the short end of the stick. It's time it all got taken back. It's time to right what's wrong, and unlearn that hate.

The revolution is going to start now, and it's all going to start with this damn white dog. This white devil, brought up evil, trained to hate black skin, taught to kill. It's all coming out of him. We're going inside, and we're going to tear out every last ounce of that savage and sadistic fury they've put into him, and if we don't get it out, we'll kill him, and move on to the next white dog, and we won't stop until we figure out a way of cleansing the world of this wickedness for good.

To erase a hatred as American as this, you have to start with the basics, a cheeseburger. Offer it, hand out, and make sure that hand is a black hand. How else is the sinner going to learn the folly of his ways unless he faces what he hates most? He'll get used to that blackness soon enough once he sets his eyes on that. Tough to hate something as delicious as a cheeseburger, and the hand that offers it? Damn, must be a friend. He might want to bite you at first, but soon enough he'll be eating right out of your palm. Cheeseburgers do things like that. They bring people and dogs together. It's the law of the jungle and the barbecue.

We have to keep a lid on this though. Out there in the world of officials and lawmen, they won't get what we're doing here. Them city folks they believe in long words like stratification, and social construct, and they also like to ask questions. Questions such as "why should a black man take on the burden of righting a white man's wrongs?". That's why what were doing will scare them, make 'em want to get the law on top of us. The common sense thing is to fix what's wrong, but them fancy academics like to dress things up, make them sound big and important, and not do anything about them. What we're doing here is right and proper, holy you might say. We're taking on the sins of the nation, and we're absolving them, showing that it can be done, and what's more noble than that?

We have to prove to the people that it can be done, that all it takes is that first step, that first victory. Fix this dog, a dog trained to attack black skin on sight, and complete re-socialization will be within our grasp. This is a real life parable we've got going on here. We have to steer this right, and show society that racism can be unlearned, that every last bigot out there can be changed. Sure, it sounds a little far fetched and oversimplified, but revolutions have to start somewhere, and that's what we have here: A revolution! Like I said, things are coming to a head, and we need to make a move. Let the bureaucrats and the ivory tower types do their talking. We're taking matters into our own hands. Actions speak louder than words. Trust me, things are going to change around here. Either that, or we'll have a dead dog on our hands and one hell of a large cheeseburger bill, but I'm hoping for a revolution. Africa's been crying and raging long enough.

Corvette Summer (1978)

2009-09-30T21:39:00.000-07:00

Cars don't die on their own. Their destinies lie in human hands. We are their masters and their makers, and we choose their fates. Broken and cleaved, forsaken to derelict, purgatorial lands, sometimes they call out for a second shot at the road, their language is an unspoken one. Communicated through colour, and symmetrical lines, it becomes diminished over time, almost imperceptible to the undiscerning eye. Those that understand the language, hear their calls from the junkyard loud and clear. Conveyed with a refraction of sunlight, or a broken piece of chrome, it is a plea, and a promise of precious glory.

Give me a chance kid, and I'll make it worth your while.

Kenny Dantley wants that chance. He knows it is waiting for him out there amongst the wrecks stacked row on row, but he doesn't know where to find it. He can hear it calling, but it's voice is lost within the maze of twisted metal. Then it happens. A silver side ornament, a portent dropped from the sky. Kenny races through the wreckage. He chases a busted up shell hanging on it's last chains, riding out it's final mile, and with one panicked punch of dead man's switch, he realizes that chance.

On the shop floor, the body of a Stingray whispers the words of a promise. Locked within it's shattered hulk is the hottest street machine on the West coast. A candy apple and azure flaked vision of the American dream. It is a golden ticket, and Kenny is going to drive that dream machine right up to the front doors of GM, and the big wigs are going to take notice. One glimpse is all it will take. This baby is gonna blow minds.

One glimpse, and one night. One night downtown: AM radio, pretty girls, neon lights, pizza parlours, burger joints, and all the other mean machines of the night. The Stingray holds court. Princes and pretenders pay their deference to the newly crowned king. The pageantry is intoxicating, blinding. Too blinding. A dozen cokes later, and the dream is gone. The fuzz say they can't do anything about it. Corvettes are in high demand. The Stingray is probably already chopped up and sold.

Kenny knows. This ain't the way it's supposed to end. This is a one of a kind ride we're talking about here. Cars like that have a profound destiny. They go out in a fiery crashes, and cosmic bursts of interstellar light, not under the hands of two bit car thieves and back alley hack jobs. No way. Unacceptable. The Stingray is not a regret in the making. It's providential destiny. A dream. Kenny has to get it back.

Word gets out. The Stingray is in Vegas. With no wheels to his name, Kenny sets out on foot. The path to it's righteous reclamation begins on the highway. Kenny hangs out his thumb. Dust gusts in the desert. Caravans pass him by on his pilgrimage to the city of sin. Until she shows up: Vanessa and her van, and her water bed, and her backseat, and her charity. Vanessa has a dream too, you know. She's gonna be a call girl, and Vegas is where girls like her go to make their name. Maybe Kenny would like to be the first paying customer? No thanks. This is an ascetic journey. There's a car to reclaim, a dream machine. Worldly distractions are for the lost, and Kenny is no loser. The Stingray is the real deal. You can keep your coloured lights, and your make up, and your alluring charm. The pearly gates of Detroit, the holy land of all thing automotive await this cat. You can keep your temporal desires. Find another sucker to bait.

Except, maybe the real deal ain't so real after all. Maybe the dream machine, the Stingray, is a mirage in this Saharan city of lights and lost luck. Maybe the Stingray isn't so cherry after all. A lot of stuff in this town just ain't what it seems. All is vice. Soccer moms in station wagons ripping off gas stations. Cozy old grandpas working the snake oil, looking for dupes. Junker Japanese imports dressed up in the latest finery. Slot machines conning kids out of their milk money. A dream machine in the hands of a shop teacher's former student, painted gold and being sold like a cheap alchemic parlour trick.

And then there's Vanessa. She ain't what she seems either. Sure she's a girl looking to sell her body for a little piece of the dream too, but didn't she save your tail back there Kenny? Hell, come to think of it, every time you fall she always seems to pulling up to the curb in that garish old bawdy house on wheels. Nice girl huh? She's got some sand, not to mention some moves. Dust her off a bit, and she could everything your asking for, but you gotta clean yourself up first.

Don't blame the Stingray though Kenny. It was just a car. A damn fine one, and yes, without a doubt the hottest street machine on the West coast. Other, more venal forces determined it's future, but here it is, in your hands, still looking good. Unless you turn that key, shift those gears, and step on that gas, it ain't going nowhere now. That's the problem though; that's all it takes. Anyone can get behind the wheel of that car and make it his own, but that girl walking away, the working girl you know as Vanessa? She belongs to you. Let her get away, and you may never get her back. There'll be other cars Kenny, but there'll only be one Vanessa. Go get her man. She's waiting for you to forget that stupid car.

Garbage Pail Kids (1987)

2009-09-07T20:53:00.000-07:00

Tawny tosses an olive pit. It disappears into the darkness.

"Where did that land?" I ask.

"In the street," she replies.

"You sure?"

"Of course I'm sure."

She takes an olive from her martini glass, places it in her mouth. Moments later, she has another pit in her hand.

"Watch," she instructs.

She throws the pit. I follow it's trajectory fleetingly as it soars into the night.

"I think it landed in my neighbour's yard," I tell her.

"Nope, it landed in the street. Didn't you hear it?"

It has been a long time since I've had company in my apartment, almost a year. Accustomed to the isolation, Tawny's presence makes me nervous, like I don't know what to do next, but I'm getting used to it. She leans against the balcony railing. Smoke drifts up from the American Spirit between her fingers.

"Can I have another martini?" she asks.

"Sure."

She crushes out her cigarette. I open the sliding glass door to the balcony. We step inside. The apartment smells of Tex Mex, and stir fried vegetables. In the kitchen, I begin mixing the martinis. Tawny props herself up on a nearby counter. We talk and laugh. It's a pleasant moment. I pour the mixture of vermouth, vodka, and brine into a chilled glass filled with olives. I hand it to her. She takes a sip.

"It's nice," she says.

I mix and pour another martini for myself.

"Garbage Pail Kids?" I ask taking the cocktail in my hand.

"Yeah."

Tawny walks toward the couch, and sits down. She curls her legs up behind her. I place the DVD in the player.

"Is that a flying garbage can?" she asks.

"Looks like it," I reply joining her on the couch.

"I didn't expect them to make their appearance that way."

The Garbage Pail Kids do not make their appearance that way, but as a tongue-in-cheek opening credit scene, it's effective and endearing. When they do arrive, each one is introduced by name and nuance.

"What's the baby's name?" asks Tawny.

"Foul Phil," I respond.

"Obviously the nerd's special feature is pissing himself, but what's Foul Phil's?"

"I'm not sure, maybe smelling bad? It's hard to tell."

"I like Foul Phil."

Each character is taken directly from the cards. Goofball, gross out relics from Tawny and I's past, the cards were both reviled and revered. Reviled by parents for their corruptive value, and revered like currency amongst my elementary school colleagues. Disgusting and debauched, they were traded and viewed furtively in cloakrooms, and the farthest corners of the schoolyard. Rumour had it they were banned from many schools. This only intensified their popularity. They were antipodal antiheroes, the perfect, puke stained reaction to the cloying, Reagan era toy craze that was the Cabbage Patch Kids.

"We Can Do Anything By Working With Each Other? What a ridiculous song. Yeah, that's it, this movie's awesome."

"Pretty much," Tawny agrees.

As the evening wears on, and the martini body count builds, we start to lose track of the movie. Neither one of us can tell what's going on anymore. It's one strange disconnected scene after another. I begin to nod off. When I wake up, the movie is over. Tawny is still awake. She stands up.

"You alright there?" she asks.

"I'm sleepy," I reply.

"I can tell. I'm going for a smoke."

I stretch out on the couch. Through the soporific effects of the alcohol, I perceive Tawny through the sliding glass doors. She is leaning against the balcony railing, cigarette between her fingers, looking out onto the street below. I roll over, and fall asleep.

"Ready for bed?" inquires a voice.

"What?" I respond turning over and sitting up.

Tawny is standing over me. She sits down on the couch.

"You're barely awake here," she says.

I lean forward, and pick an olive from one of the martini glasses.

"I missed the end of the movie," I tell her.

"So did I," she replies, "I dozed off just before it ended. You're going to have to watch it again and tell me how it turned out. I don't remember. It's been so long since I saw it when I was a kid."

"The past tends to repeat itself doesn't it?"

I put the olive in my mouth. It's flesh is soft and salty.

"Some parts of the past is nice," she says.

I take the olive pit out of my mouth.

"Yeah, but I'm not gonna throw this around my apartment," I avow placing the pit in one of the glasses on the coffee table.

"That's a good thing," she replies.

Orgy of the Dead (1965)

2009-08-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

The stripper comes out. She begins to dance. She's done this all before, and she has the switchblade scar to prove it. It doesn't take long, only a few quick takes, and she's in her panties doing her best bump and grind. The director wants her to interpret the scene through her movements. He sounds like he cares, but let's face it, this is a nudie film, and in the end, the only thing that matters is that everyone gets paid.

The smoke machine fills the floor with the haunting fog of death. The dancer moves, writhes, and undulates through the mist. Loose leaves stick to the soles of her feet. The set floor wrinkles every time she pushes off. The director notices, but doesn't care. Film costs money, and to shoot this bit all over again might make the difference between having a fifth of Granddad, and not having one.

The guy in the Wolfman mask howls. The Mummy moves about. Their presence makes it all feel better, like this is real horror, just like Bela used to make. It's an alcoholic illusion, but it does the job, and yes, the dream is still alive. Now where is that bottle? Oh yeah, in wardrobe.

Orgy of the Dead was Ed Wood's last stand. Gone were the days of fighting the good fight, and the legendary charges toward stardom. The hope and the desire was still intact, but the dream had long ago gone down in defeat. Teetering on the edge, a crumpled script in his hand, booze on his breath, and a run in his nylons, this was Ed Wood's last attempt before his final descent into pornographic exile.

He didn't stand a chance. Degradation and drink had settled in, and so had desperation. Criswell was still hanging in there, but Vampira had moved on, Bela Lugosi was dead (yeah, I know, Bauhaus), and Tor Johnson was nowhere to be seen. All that was left was a crappy set, and the trappings of the night. The Ed Wood universe as it used to be, but not enough of it to abate the decline. The strippers, although tame enough, were just hardened reality, the onset of what was to come: banal titillation, and tired, unfeeling, paid-for sex, burned to celluloid for a couple hundred bucks a pop. The final chapter in the story of a man who kept fighting long after the battle had been lost. A man who worked nightly, writing, drinking, talking, marching forward with the dream, almost blindly as his health deteriorated, and his heart eventually gave out.

Ed Wood meant what he did. His desire to make movies was an artless ardour that drove him forward, despite the fact that his career was a complete failure. In 1965, his dissolution was in full swing. Shreds and shards of the dream still remained, but they were diaphanous echoes of a past long gone. Sex and sleaze was the future, and Orgy of the Dead was a harbinger, a signpost along the way. His story is not that of a wunderkind ability extinguished prematurely due to a callous and uncaring entertainment industry. It is a tale of a determined man with a dream that worked against great odds. The fact that he achieved his dream is a miracle in and of itself. This was the 1950s after all, an era of tactile cut and splice editing, and big movie house domination. Yet, somehow, he did it. Ed Wood's filmography is the story he should've told, if he'd had the talent to tell it, but that unfortunately was saved for a director of greater genius.

Bloodshack (1971)

2009-07-31T08:28:00.000-07:00

When I saw Blood Shack for the first time, I was a teenager, and it made an impression. The film never had a theatrical release, but for the first couple decades after it's release, VHS was it's world, and it benefited from the less than perfect universe of magnetic tape. Flaws were left unseen. The Chooper's face was indiscernible. The mystery was maintained. The mystery was everything. As a teenager, I liked it's sandy, almost sepia toned quality, and the chilling music set against the desert and the broken down ranch. I also liked the way the Chooper screeched, his voice coming out of the TV like a chainsaw, and I liked his shadowy, simple look running roughshod throughout the film. The whole primitive aesthetic excited my young, receptive mind, and knowing nothing about the film beyond it's bleached, crackling frames only added to my enthusiasm. A few months later, my best friend and I ventured off into an abandoned farmhouse and filmed our own tribute to the Chooper. It was sweltering hot that day, and the final result on our borrowed camcorder was a choppy, one take mess, with the black flies circling and the auto focus wanting to give up the ghost.

Ray Dennis Steckler would've been proud.

A lot of the scenes in Blood Shack did not make sense when I first saw them years ago, but their malapropos position within the movie only made me like it that much more. Why on earth would there be stock footage of children playing musical chairs in a horror film? What's with all the rodeo scenes? It didn't fit, and it even seemed to create chaos within the film. One minute there's a demonic spectre killing a cop, and the next there's a couple little girls riding around on a pony called Peanuts. It made no sense, and I liked it that way.

The broke, no budget yarn was Steckler's specialty, and his films had an almost family approach to their creation. Quite often casting his wife as the heroine, as well as his good friend Ron Haydock in secondary roles. The little girls on riding the pony? Those were Steckler's daughters. I didn't know any of this the first time I viewed the movie, because I didn't even know Steckler was responsible for the film. He directed the project under the pseudonym Wolfgang Schmidt. Was he consciously trying to keep things secret. Who knows, but viewing Blood Shack now, 15 years later, the footage of Steckler's daughters playing, and the days out at the rodeo seem like scenes of his family life tacked on to the narrative of the film, and believe it or not, as mawkish as it sounds, it makes me like the whole darn thing all over again.

The DVD format has erased a lot of the original mystery behind Blood Shack. The Chooper, clearly visible, looks like a guy in a black suit and cheap make up. The extra features, an interview with Steckler and his ex-wife and star of the show, Carolyn Brandt offers insight into a movie I knew next to nothing about as a teenager, and reveals less about the plot, but more about the film and the circumstances under which it was made. Steckler was broke family man, and his movies were filmed with very little regard for structure or script. He had a hippie-esque, just-let-it-happen-man mindset, and what you saw was what you got. While the movie was being put together, Steckler had all his friends stay at the "Blood Shack" ranch along with he and his family. Kind of like a hippie commune with a horror film being shot in the background.

I wasn't sure how Blood Shack would stand up after 15 years. There was no way I'd perceive the film the same way I did when I was 17, but the question was would I even care anymore? And the answer is yes, I do care. No longer really relevant in an age where mystery is almost impossible to maintain, the switch from VHS to DVD has been positive for Blood Shack. The gritty veil has been removed, only to reveal that what was behind it was a movie made by man and his wife with impoverished dreams of being a successful cinematic auteurs. They sort of made it, and they sort of didn't, but in the process, they left behind a record of their efforts, and I know of one kid who watched it, and liked what they did.

Ginger (1971)

2009-07-22T01:43:00.000-07:00

One scene, that's all it takes. One remarkable scene in a movie filled with unremarkable scenes and voila! There it is! The one thing that makes this misogynist, racist, sloppy pile of sleaze special, and it's a male full frontal.

Sexploitation thrillers like Ginger are fueled on straight male lust, and all the purchasing power behind it's priapic ascendancy. The naked female form is the product and the point of sale. Without it, you have nothing. Male nudity, if it exists at all, is strictly window dressing. Which is what makes this one nude scene so astonishing. Not only does it come across as erotic in it's display, it seems to tempt the viewer (presumably male) to be turned on by naked male body tied down to the bed. Augmenting this is Ginger, the titular lead character when she declares...

"I'm just enjoying the view."

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's completely unintended, a random mistake committed by a hack filmmaker with no sense of continuity or cinematic ambiance. Ginger is an awkward affair, but on the bed, who is that? And of all the actors in the film who get busy at one point or another, why is he the one exposed in such a way when the others seem like props?

The actor on the bed is Calvin Culver. Who is Calvin Culver? In Ginger, he plays Rodney, the handsome Hampton's playboy smooth enough to swing between the seedy and the sublime. A man as much at home within the high brow culture of the country club, as he is within the sewer of sex for sale, and oblivion at a price.

The dual identity of Culver's Rodney is very much art imitating life. Two years after Ginger, Culver would star in another little film, but this one a little more landmark, and definitely more infamous. That movie was none other than Boys in the Sand, and it launched Culver's professional alter ego: Casey Donovan, gay pornographic film star.

Boys in the Sand was a milestone in gay adult cinema, and Culver's role in the movie cemented his status as a queer icon. His filmography was short, but he went on to star in a few other X-rated flicks as well as Radley Metzger's Score, one of the first sexploitation films to deal with male bisexuality, and not just the standard woman on woman fare. It's sad, for such a short career (he died of an AIDS related illness in 1987), Culver's credentials are impressive. He was a true star in an era of cinematic sexual exploration. He deserves much more mainstream recognition, but I guess it still doesn't pay to be gay.

Culver's nudity in Ginger was intended, but most likely devoid of any meaning. He was a sex worker. Getting tied to a bed in his birthday suit would have been easy for him, and any erotic implications within the scene are probably coincidental. Ginger just isn't that type of movie. Nothing really stands out in it's run time of 101 minutes, but if anything does, it's Culver's nude scene, and that's a good thing. It shocks you when you see it, and it made me curious as to who the actor was behind it all, and once I found out, I realized that there was something worthwhile about Ginger after all.

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)

2009-07-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

Night of the Living Dead was not the first movie to feature zombies as the antagonists, but it was unique. Besides being a character study of strangers randomly thrown together and reacting to a crisis, it introduced the zombie as a symptom of some shadowy epidemic. Zombie features of the past relied on supernatural pretense, quite often employing the quasi racist voodoo/witch doctor device. It was a tired cliche, and it needed an update. The War of the Worlds-esque zombie Armageddon theme proved popular and has been the dominant definition of zombie-ness ever since. Night of the Living Dead is now synonymous with the genre, and holds a seat in cinematic history, not to mention a position on the National Film Registry for being artistically and culturally relevant.

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie on the other hand, barely even has a name. The working title here is only one of many. It is a zombie flick passed from theatre to theatre, and from drive-in to drive-in. Promotional material marketed it as a fright fest filled with blood and guts and gore, and it did deliver on that promise. Victims are disemboweled, entrails are pulled and stretched, organs are devoured, and in one particularly revolting scene, a woman's breast is ripped to pieces (trust me, very cringe-worthy).

As a project, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie was meant to cash in on the zombie craze brought on by Night of the Living Dead. Beyond that stipulation, it did not need to do much more than draw in the masses, give them a scare, gross them out, and rip some dollars from their wallets. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie went beyond that limitation, and what emerged from the mayhem was something different, something almost aesthetically pleasing, and definitely very personal.

The movie opens with a montage of rough, urban imagery juxtaposed with rural/nature scenes. Winding his way through the dirty old town, is the male lead trying to escape the decay on his motorcycle. He stops at a red light, traffic builds. A woman on sidewalk, dressed in an overcoat, standing outside of an abandoned building, strips naked and runs through the halted vehicles. No one notices, or pays any mind. Heavy handed? Maybe, but it's calculated film making, and it sets the artistic ethos of the movie.

Once the film leaves town, the cinematography changes it's focus. The English countryside becomes lushly accented with verdant shots of green and grassy moors, and rolling hillsides dotted with trees. When the first corpse walks, he walks amongst mossy timbers and a rain soaked forest floor. Then the din of the film's high frequency soundtrack kicks in, coupled with heavy and distorted breathing. The scene is stentorian and intense, but it works and it makes an impression. As it should, considering what went into the conception of how the zombies should be perceived audibly by the audience. According to Jorge Grau, the director, when his father passed away, his body continued to expel air similar to the sound of heavy breathing. Grau decided to incorporate this into the film to convey the sound of death as he understood it. Yeah, I'm impressed too.

The high frequency soundtrack was not a discordant gimmick meant to infect the audience with discomfort. The noise was part of the plot. Grau, like Romero before him, wanted to ground the explanation of the zombie plague outside of the fantastical. What we hear while the dead march is the sound of technology out of control and wreaking havoc on nature. Death is a progression of the life cycle, and corpses walking due to ultrasonic radiation suggests disorder within the natural world. This idea is further expanded upon when infants and insects are shown reacting to the emissions and going berserk. An epidemic begins to emerge, and the protagonists slowly put the pieces of the puzzle together, but when they go to the authorities, no one believes. The cops are too fixated on solving the recent spate of murders. The city slickers quickly become suspects. A foolish doctor working with the police suggests they could be Satanists (a ignorant return to the fantastical?). Besides, how could progress steer them astray? It's killed off all the pests, and the apple crop this year is going to be big, really big!

Bodies build up, the dead keep on killing, and the foolish triumph.

Pretty unbelievable for a gory grindhouse flick isn't it? Which is what makes it unfortunate that the film never earned enough respect to at least a have a solid name. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie seems to be the one most attributed these days, but after 35 years and a list of titles just as long, it makes you wonder how long this one will last. I'm sure it will stick, but I doubt the movie will ever receive proper recognition for it's effort. In a lot of ways, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie eclipses Night of the Living Dead in scope and daring. Don't get me wrong, Night of the Living Dead deserves the credit and the copy cat recognition it has received, but sometimes within the decaying debris of forgotten cinema other works become overlooked, and their contribution diminished. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is one of those films, and even if it never secures the adulation Romero's work has earned, at least let it keep it's name.

Bright Lights, Big City (1988)

2009-07-05T10:35:00.000-07:00

"Your brain is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They're tired and muddy from their long march through the night, and they're hungry. They need to be fed. They need the Bolivian marching powder."

You wander, lost, from nightclub to nightclub, party to party, burying your grief in the powder of the coca leaf and drowning your lost sense of self in vodka tonics. It's a quilt of quantitative hedonism that you're using to cover up the loss of your partner for over a year now.

She said she'd come back. It wasn't a promise. It was something you assumed, counted on. It's not much of a surprise she didn't return. You knew it was inevitable. You're the kind of guy who brings home fresh bread to his partner, and she's the kind of woman that leaves you when the fresh bread isn't good enough anymore, and something better has come along.

The spiral is quick and deep. There's very little you think about. Events happen and that's about it. Your comrade in arms is an exaggerated mirror reflection of you. Nothing stands in his way when it comes to having a good time. He never stops to reflect, he only acts. He wants as much pleasure in as short amount of time as possible.

"We scooped it out of these tall Ming vases, and I did lines off of her beautiful naked body."

He isn't inhuman, he's just a little more serious about the maelstrom than you. You could judge him for it, but what's there to judge? You're good with the confidence and the charisma, the languid devil-may-care kinesis. Why not take all you can get while the getting's good? Self-contented decency is a sickening dead end road, the pathway of the dullard.

"Didn't you see the sign on her forehead? 'Space to let; long and short term leasing'?"

There was nothing real about her, but it was a convincing act; the messed up childhood, the excited desire for self betterment, the striking looks, the charm. It was a reciprocal ruse. You liked her performance. You rolled with it, embellished it, and made her into something she wasn't. It was all in your head, and it worked for awhile, but once the house got too small for her show, she moved on, upgraded, and left you with a phone call and a whole lot of wasted time.

The lie is over. She's gone, and no drug and alcohol fueled meltdown will ever bring her back. Let alone provide you with any answers. Besides, do you really want to be financing brigades of Bolivian soldiers for a few fleeting moments of escape? It's alright run away from reality, but you can't run away forever. Sooner or later you're going to have to face it, the city, the neighbourhood, the truth. It's a new world out there, but you're going to have to go slowly, and learn everything all over again. It'll be alright, once you get used to it.

The Sealed Room (1909)

2009-06-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

I've never understood why, to this day, The Birth of a Nation is still given any kind of credit. The American Film Institute ranked it as recently as 1998, as one of the top 100 movies of all time. Good grief. The film was based on a novel written by a jackass called Thomas Dixon. Dixon didn't like Reconstruction so he reconstructed reality to fit his views, and published The Clansmen to back it up. Is there anything more noble than a novel celebrating the Klan, and portaying them as white knights and the saviours of the South? Why, yes there is! A movie adaptation that kickstarts the Klan all over again almost 40 years later! Good stuff!

The Sealed Room, also by D.W. Griffith, is ostensibly "racism free!", but it does have that early 20th century Aryan feel where the collective white consciousness was looking back all misty eyed, and romantic on the good days when white kings and queens ruled with sagacious dignity and honour. When society was just, and moral, and bloodlines were pure... Except with The Sealed Room, you have a count excercising his royal right to imprison his cheating lady with her lover and let them suffocate.

The Sealed Room is one of the first movies I've ever seen to use the word "dovecote". A dovecote was essentially a small brick structures made with the intention of housing pigeons, and doves, and other assorted birds, but in the case of this film, it's more like the cubby hole of death. Ah, the good old days or murderous rage, bodies swinging in gibbets, and your kept woman screwing the hired help behind your back. Aren't rose coloured glasses wonderful? They even obscure the blood stains on the floor!

Okay, it ain't all bad. In fact, I quite liked it. The movie is like a tempest that comes into its full fury, starting off slow and then ending in a crescendo of manic energy. The overacting of the silent players really brings it all out too. Especially the count played by Arthur V. Johnson, and with only 11 minutes of film to work with, the guy has his work cut out for him. Good Canadian kid Mary Pickford's in this one too. Her role is too small to notice, but it's certainly worth noting.

D.W. Griffith had talent. The guy could work a silent movie, but did he need to do The Birth of a Nation? Couldn't have done some more Poe (like this one)? I don't care what the AFI thinks, the guy's legacy is completely tarnished by that one film, and to continue putting it on modern day "best of" lists is only reconstructing the reality of the film, and ignoring the ugly truth of it all. Amazing how history just continues to repeat itself huh?

Alligator (1980)

2009-06-26T01:38:00.000-07:00

You don't have to be innovative to be good, but a fresh spin doesn't hurt.

By the mid to late 70's, there wasn't much in the movie industry that hadn't already been done, but the with the release of Jaws in 1975 the horror genre received a much needed shot in the arm. Jaws in and of itself was not the the source of the Nile when it came to giant monster movies. Eisenhower era creature features had already tackled the big-beast-killing-us-all motif hundreds of times before, but what Jaws did was combine literary narrative with the genre, Moby Dick in particular. It was impressive, and other filmmakers took note, as did the movie studios. Looking to hack off a piece of the fish for themselves, project after project was given the green light, and the market was flooded with all sorts of over sized and blood crazed animals.

Alligator is a Jaws clone, no two ways about it, but it appears to be aware that it's a clone and even seems to run with it without becoming Scream style self parody. Take the big game hunter brought in by a clueless and corrupt city official. An obvious spoof on the Quint character from Jaws, he spends his short time onscreen behaving like a pompous buffoon, making alligator mating calls ("the alligator is a very romantic animal"), and then finally getting munched in an alleyway moments after buying off some "natives" with malt liquor. The malt liquor scene was a little bit much; why couldn't he have just given them money? It wouldn't have taken away from the bit, and trying to view the scene as the mastication of Rudyard Kipling and all his racist myths is projecting way too much, even if you have had a few martinis. At least the black guy didn't get killed. Heck, come to think of it, I don't think any black people got killed in the movie, and there were black people in it, and not just extras. How oddly progressive. Way to go Alligator! I think.

Subtle, facetious fun is definitely Alligator's charm, and like I said, it never takes it to the point where you feel like the movie is making fun of itself. Jaws on the other hand was dark, and for the most part humourless. When Roy Scheider and his fishing buddies set off after the shark, their mission was monomaniacal. The shark had to be stopped, at all costs. Alligator's Robert Forster is determined to destroy the lizard, but a little bit of respect along the way wouldn't hurt either. Why would anyone care to pester a guy about his thinning hair when a mutant alligator is on the loose killing people all over town? Captain Ahab never faced such indignities, but that's because Captain Ahab is a metaphorical icon of American literature, and Forster's Detective David Madison is a washed up cop running around the sewers of Chicago trying to kill an alligator that's jacked up on growth hormones. Guys like Madison get smacked around by dumbass, existential absurdities because let's face it, being characters in an early 80's monster flick, than being the central figure within a leviathan of letters.

Alligator could have attempted literary pretension, but when you're already riding the wave of a more erudite blockbuster what's the point? Especially when that wave's final destination is the heart of the city sewer. Damn tough to pull metaphors out of there, but that doesn't mean there's nothing down there. Lost within those labyrinthine tunnels, floating amongst the severed legs and arms, and medical waste was a fairly decent horror movie. One about an abandoned, and overgrown alligator feeding off the iniquitous negligence of Chicago, and one cop's mission to stop it from chewing up the regular folks of the Windy City. A facsimile so good, it makes you forget about the original. Who would of known?

Inseminoid (1981)

2009-06-15T05:40:00.000-07:00

I always try to find something of value in movies like Inseminoid. After all, some one somewhere did work hard on the project. Hard enough to get international distribution on the film, and that deserves credit, but this one was tough to get through. I probably should've known what I was up against once the opening credits hit the screen. Text superimposed over a background that looked like a condensed mix of (ejaculating) seminal fluid and deep space? The writing was definitely on the wall.

It would be easy to pick on Judy Geeson, the actress that plays the alien-inseminated-woman-villain. Her mugging and bawling, and her constant bellowing ("it hurts!"), is what made the movie most unbearable. Kind of like the mutant baby from Eraserhead, but much more irritating, and not at all calculated. As aggravating as the performance is, my point of view is always a bit Marxist when it comes to finding fault within a cinematic train wreck. Given the choice between hanging a king or a commoner, I will always hang the king. Why blame the bit players in and around the bottom? Unless you're Angelina Jolie, actors have very little input regarding the final outcome of a flick. The cast is the cosmetic face of the film, but they are not the film itself. Behind the camera is the cinematographer, and he's taking his cues from the director, and the director is under pressure from the executive producer, and he's catching grief from the jokers who've invested money in the movie. Let's not forget that once the whole thing is put to celluloid, it still has to go through the hands of the editor and his crew, and who knows how he/she will butcher the damn thing! Point is, I may be skewering Judy Geeson, but she's not the one who decided to litter the picture with close-ups of her wide eyed, and wailing face. That was some other moron's decision, and what a bad decision it was!

All I know is I wanted it to end, but it didn't seem to want to end. Judy Geeson just kept winning, and the movie just kept going on and on. Case in point? There's a scene where a surviving crew member tries to blow up the possessed Judy Geeson with carefully placed explosives. All he has to do is plant the bombs, get Judy to chase him, and them presto! Detonate, and she's done, end of film. No, that would be too easy. While running through the caves with Judy on his tail, he drops the detonator. When he goes back to pick it up, she beats him to it. He can't fight her because she's all jacked up on alien semen, and it gives her super human strength (kind of like Gummi Berry Juice, but much more disgusting!). He flees, she picks up the detonator, collects the bombs, and continues to kill, and bawl, and cry, and...

I didn't yell, but I did exclaim my frustration rather forcefully. Were the filmmakers trying to torture the audience on purpose? There are examples of art out there that were calculated to annoy. Seminal hardcore band Flipper purposely used crawling, disjointed melody as their aesthetic guideline, and it often alienated the punk rock crowds of the early 1980s. The anti-music ideology Will Shatter and company espoused was ugly, but it was also great, not to mention ahead of it's time. To call Inseminoid anti-movie, or even insinuate that the mess I watched a week ago was even remotely deliberate, is being too generous. It's definitely anti-audience, I'll give it that, but it's too damn dumb to be that way on purpose. I had high hopes for this movie too. Gotta learn to not project too much on to things. It's a sure fire way to get let down.

Did I mention that the alien and it's offspring look like penises? They do.

Policewomen (1974)

2009-05-31T20:49:00.000-07:00

There's a jailbreak at the county lock up. Inmates are on the loose, and pandemonium is spreading. One diminutive, redhead cop holds her ground, and when the tear gas clears, only Lacy Bond is still standing.

The chief of police takes notice. He could use a woman like Lacy on Vice. It seems there's an all female mafia smuggling stolen gold into the country, and the guys on the squad can't seem to crack the case. The chief needs special kind of cop to take care of this job. After years of being overlooked due to her gender, this is Lacy's chance to finally put her talents to work.

Her recruitment is not exactly greeted with open arms. The boys don't want her around, and to break her, they run her through a battery of tests. Cocksure, and convinced she'll fail, they make wise cracks, and poke fun, but in the end, it's Lacy that has the last laugh. Not only can she fire an automatic weapon, and pull a police cruiser out of a tailspin, she can drop any man who comes at her with fists clenched. Suitably impressed, the chief puts her on the case, and turns her loose.

Working with the guys on Vice, she carefully stakes the gang out. It doesn't take long before this savvy cop figures out a way in, and gains access to the crew. Once inside, she teams up with another undercover agent, and together, through tough police work, and even tougher fight scenes, they bring down the all girl mafia, and the gold smuggling operation goes bust.

Is Policewomen for real? Does it have the intrinsic feminist strength that it seems to convey? Or is it a joke, a wolf in sheep's clothing?

"The system stinks," says Lacy Bond, "the system is totally maintained, and created by men. So, I thought a woman's touch might make it a little better."

For all it's proto feminist pomp, Policewomen was not made by women. It was made by men, and as tough as Lacy and the women are in this film, their fighting skills take second banana to their collective tits and ass. Lacy's kung fu rescue of the county jail is littered with upskirt shots, and the all girl mafia sure do spend a lot of time either nude or in bikinis. Jeanne Bell, who plays Pam Harris, the secret service agent also planted to bring the girl gang down from the inside, receives even less egalitarian treatment. On top of bikini scenes and copious nudity, her early persona is full on Sapphire/Jungle Woman. Then there's the fight sequence where she goes toe to toe with another woman to earn cred with the gang. Obviously billed as the "the black girl vs the Asian chick", it even has the two of them exchanging racial slurs just to give the scene some authenticity. The Sapphire schtick is eventually dropped once it's revealed the Pam is a cop too (just a "ghetto" act I guess?), but the Asian chick (Eileen Saki), doesn't fare so well. Her caricature is never dropped, and has her ass handed to her in a fight with Lacy near the end of the film. There's even Charlie-Chan-Chinatown music playing while it goes down. Some ladies never catch a break.

While exploitational nudity is high on the film's list of thrills, there's no denying it; Sondra Currie's Lacy Bond is one tough lady. No matter what happens to her in the film, Lacy Bond is always in control. She owns her sexuality, and love interests are strictly peripheral. Her enemies (man or woman) may put her in a tight situation, but they never get the best of her, and no matter what happens during the action, Lacy is always cool under fire, tough, and resourceful. It is a character usually reserved for men, but in this case, the role is played by a woman, and if anything in Policewomen transcends the sexy exploitational stuff, it's this. It's not perfect, but I think modern day viewers would perceive the essential strength of her character.

That's just it. In it's day, Policewomen probably would have been written off as exploitational pap, but times have changed. We live in a world where the Playboy brand is now embraced as much by women as it is by men, if not more. Does reclaiming traditional sexist material make it okay? Maybe, maybe not, but the Lacy Bond character isn't a brand, nor is she composed only of her tits and ass. She's actually pretty tough, and I think that for the most part stands on it's own.

The House That Dripped Blood (1971)

2009-05-19T23:34:00.000-07:00

The title, although titillating, is a bit misleading. Fact is, there just isn't that much blood in this film. There is a decapitation, but it's more inferred than shown, and the bits are done up in a more classic vein, banking more on subtle chills than offensive flash. Even if it is hyperbole, there is a grain of truth in it there somewhere. The house does in fact take lives, and at the end of the film it's the real estate agent (Crypt Keeper?) who rents out the house that let's us in on it's secret, and the unifying theme of the movie...

"The house reflects the personality of whomever lives in it, and treats them accordingly."

Very Edgar Allan Poe don't you think? Either that, or EC Comics? Which would fit considering the subject matter and format. When done right, a horror anthology should feel feel like an old horror comic come to life onscreen. Amicus Productions accomplishes just that with this omnibus, and at the same time, doesn't take itself too seriously either. The final chapter alone plays out like a satire on low budget film making. It kind of reminded me of Charles Bukowski's novel Pulp, where he writes poorly on purpose. Except in this case, as silly as the final piece is, it's still well done, and Jon Pertwee is great as the aging and choleric horror film star bemoaning his waning career and crappy film prospects.

The movie is blessed with a lot of terrific talent. From the always awesome, but usually unrecognized Peter Cushing, to the stoic Christopher Lee, and my own personal favourite, Denholm Elliot. Yes, it's true, the house may not drip blood, but it does have a good stock of Lucas/Spielberg luminaries!

You know, come to think of it, I doubt Poe would have used a real estate agent to reveal the dark secrets of the house, and wouldn't a real estate agent want to keep his mouth shut about such things?

Yeah, I know. Forget it.

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

2009-05-03T22:13:00.000-07:00

The good Dr. Emmanuel Hildern comes back from New Guinea where he's spent the last couple of years exercising his White Man's Burden, and ripping off anthropological artifacts. His prize discovery is an ancient, monstrous skeleton with big, ugly head. When he gets one of it's fingers wet, and it grows flesh, he decides to take a sample, and after careful study, he comes to the conclusion that the skeleton and flesh before him must be none other than evil in it's purest form!

"With this knowledge, I could wipe evil away from the world. It could be abolished forever. We could have a new paradise here on Earth," he pompously states to his assistant.

He immediately gets to work on creating an anti-evil vaccine. Yes, evil is a disease, and how do you cure it? You take a human blood sample, and an evil monster blood sample. You mix the two together, boil them and then take the crap left over and there's your antidote.

Doesn't get much more 19th century than that now does it? What's next? Female Hysteria? As a matter of fact, yes, and that's exactly how the doctor finds out that his vaccine against evil isn't worth a hill of beans.

The doctor's domestic life hasn't always been roses. His wife, being the deceitful, self centred, sensualist that she is, sleeps around on him, parties like it was 1899, and then eventually goes crazy. Like any other 19th century physician, he assumes it's hysteria she's suffering from (and not a cocaine addled, syphilitic brain), and has her locked up in his stepbrother's mental institution. The events devastate the old man, and to prevent his daughter Penelope from going down the same path, he tells her that her mother is dead, and shields her from the evils of society by all but locking her up in the family homestead. Dig this exchange when he catches her reading a romance novel:

"Where did you get it?" the doctor asks, "You have not been out?"

"No father," his daughter replies, "I haven't left the house since you were away except to walk in the garden."

"My dear child," he tells her, "my every thought is for your welfare. You are my beloved responsibility, and I've tried to keep from you anything that might cause distress."

That's a not recipe for disaster now is it?

When Penelope finds out that her mother's death is a sham, she flips out on her old man, and storms out of the room. Assuming her behaviour is the onset of Hysteria, the doctor panics, and to prevent any further emotional outbursts, administers his anti-evil vaccine on her as a preventative measure.

The cure for Female Hysteria in Victorian England, was to have the family physician drop by and give a "pelvic massage" to your wife or daughter or whoever it was that was suffering from the affliction, and it was considered a legitimate form of medical treatment. In this case, the doctor would've been better off taking the manual stimulation route instead of pumping his daughter full of monster blood. The infusion of the wicked home brew has an opposite effect on her, and instead of preventing her Hysteria, it causes the poor girl to run amok all over town in her mother's dress as she slowly loses her marbles.

Of course, it wouldn't be a monster movie if there wasn't a monster, and through a dastardly chain of events orchestrated by the doctor's unprincipled stepbrother, the monster skeleton eventually gets soaked, becomes whole again and comes after the Dr. Hildern. What for? It's missing finger, and as revenge, it tears off one of the doctor's own fingers, and then disappears into the night. The doctor doesn't hold up too well after these events, and he ends the film locked up in his stepbrother's insane asylum one door down from his own daughter. If only he'd learned how to make better use of a finger. Maybe his fortunes would have turned out a bit different?

The Transformers - More Than Meets The Eye (1984)

2009-04-08T23:34:00.000-07:00

More Than Meets The Eye is the forgotten beginning of the Transformers fiction on screen. Released in 1984, it set the tone, and introduced us to key elements of the Transformers storyline. Through this three part pilot, we became familiar with the dark, metal wasteland known as Cybertron and the struggle between a divided race of robots ravaged by years of war. It's target audience was young boys, and it was chock full of heroic cliches and asinine antics, but it was different. There was a darkness to it. The enmity between the Decepticons and Autobots was palpable, and bitter. Each side appeared bent on the complete destruction of the other. As villains, the Decepticons were more ruthless than evil. They were detached from their environment. They were not on Earth to kill humans and behave maniacally, they were there to drain the planet of it's energy. Engagement with the native species was circumstantial. If you got in their way, you would be destroyed, otherwise you were irrelevant. The Autobots on the other hand, were civilians cast into a conflict they were not ready for. They were compassionate, and able to empathize with indigenous lifeforms, even connect with them on a personal level. Desperate, and ill equipped, some of them showed fear, and an unwillingness to fight that was only tempered by a desire to stop the Decepticons, and avoid total annihilation.

The episodes were drawn by Toei, and it made a difference. In Japan, animation has always had a starker, more mature quality, and More Than Meets The Eye profited from this decision. Hasbro's market competitor at the time, Tonka, chose to animate their series, Challenge of The Gobots, with Hanna Barbera, and it proved to be a bad choice. Hanna Barbera had dominated North American TV animation for decades with shows like The Flinstones, Scooby-Doo, and The Yogi Bear Show. These programs, although popular, were mainly tongue-in-cheek comedy. The closest to science fiction the studio had come to was The Jetsons, but it too was merely comedy in a futuristic setting. Like Super Friends in metallic clothing, Challenge of The Gobots lacked depth, and suffered from the flat, sparse animation that was synonymous with Hanna Barbera, and it eventually faded away.

Since More Than Meets The Eye first aired in 1984, the Transformers fiction has grown exponentially. A great debt of that growth being owed to the creators of the original Marvel comic books, and the Beast Wars series of the mid 90s. Beast Wars took it's cue and inspiration from the tone of the original series, and built upon that foundation, adding depth and complexity that would be carried forward into future continuities. This summer, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the sequel to the 2007 live action film Transformers, will be released in theatres across North America. Although it exists in a separate continuum, a direct line can be drawn from More Than Meets The Eye to the movie's present day plot line. Want an example? Watch the Decepticons attack the rocket base in More Than Meets The Eye, and then watch Blackout destroy the US military base in Transformers. The similarities between the two scenes is uncanny.

The Transformers have endured, and the reason for the toyline's twenty five year survival is the compelling, and gutsy fiction that has surrounded the brand. Without it, the Transformers would've went the way of their old rivals, the Gobots (or the Rock Lords for that matter!). Mind you, the Gobots aren't completely dead. In 1991, Hasbro took over Tonka, and absorbed the Gobot trademark. The Gobots now live on within the Transformer fiction, and appear once in awhile within the various comic books and other assorted media! Which isn't very hospitable news if your name is Cy-Kill, because Megatron has a tendency to get a little rough sometimes...

Battlestar Galactica - Razor (2007)

2009-03-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

When a young Admiral William Adama parachutes into a secret Cylon base, he discovers a science facility where Cylon Centurions are conducting cruel, and horrific experiments on live human subjects. Rumours of a Cylon super weapon have circulated for years, but what the weapon actually is has eluded Human intelligence efforts. What Adama sees in that facility, is the development of that super weapon in it's infancy.

Fast forward forty years. Admiral Helena Cain, commanding officer of the Battlestar Pegasus, orders a full on offensive against what she mistakenly believes is a Cylon communications relay. The communications relay turns out to be a staging ground for Cylon forces. Admiral Cain, seeking vengeance, and not wanting to back down, orders the strike to continue, despite her officers' pleas for retreat. Outnumbered four to one, the Pegasus loses a large number of her forces during the battle.

After the battle, the battered Pegasus, comes in contact with a small fleet of civilian refugees. Knowing that her damaged Battlestar will not survive in the condition that it is in, Admiral Cain orders her forces to take all the necessary supplies they need from the civilian ships, and to kill any one who interferes. The soldiers of the Pegasus board one of the ships, the civilians, expecting a rescue, greet them with warmth. When they discover that the soldiers are there to strip the fleet of it's resources, they revolt, and a massacre ensues.

The Pegasus was badly damaged. If it encountered another Cylon fleet, it would've been destroyed. Admiral Cain knew this, and made her decision based on this knowledge, and without the Pegasus to defend them, what chances did the civilian fleet have at surviving? In the end, the civilian fleet was left for dead, and the Pegasus carried on with her dark secret.

Should a sentient robot species share the same ethics as humans, even if they are it's creators? Do we have the right to question their brutality if we are so quick to leave the defenseless for dead?

This is the beauty of Battlestar Galactica. The current series asks these questions with more depth and insight, but the original series was ahead of it's time, and did not shy away from these questions either.

The beauty of Razor? Razor, while part of the re-imagined continuum, bridges the gap somewhat between the old series and the new, and does it skillfully without losing track of the current plot line.

Man, I love this show. Watch it if you can.

Trip With The Teacher (1975)

2009-02-28T08:43:00.000-08:00

Trip With The Teacher was a fun film, but like Best Friends, you'd never expect where the film eventually ends up. The movie opens with with sunshine, music, the open road, and a bus load of teenage girls on a class trip. I assumed the film was going to be either a Partridge Family style road trip movie, or a zany, biker, teenage girl, titty fest. Boy, was I wrong! Turns out it's a violent, biker, hostage, nudie thriller. Huh? Didn't expect that from the opening credits.

Cheap, exploitation cinema is filled with scenes of violence and sex. It's what get's people to buy movie tickets, and don't get me wrong, I liked this movie, but there's something that needs to be said about it's content. I'm going to sound like a party pooper here, but I have to admit, there are some things some things about this movie that are a bit off. Let me explain...

There are three sexual assaults in this film, and while all three are portrayed as vile, villainous attacks, I didn't get the need for extensive female nudity in each scene. In fact, the only nudity in the movie is during these various rapes, murders, and degradations. Why? Tits and ass for the sake of tits and ass is one thing, but context means a lot. Take for example, Gas Pump Girls. There's plenty of gratuitous nudity in that little off colour romp, but the women are for the most part, in control, or at the very least, on an even keel with the men in the movie, but here we have nudity only during the worst scenes of violence against the women.

Some out there might argue that the teacher, Miss Tenny, kills the main attacker in the end, but killing one's attacker isn't always a sign of power, and it certainly doesn't absolve the fact that the filmmakers exploited the rape scenes just to get a few nude scenes for the viewers. In fact, I've noticed over the years that a lot of trashy, drive in thrillers from the 70s contain this very nudie/rape element. It probably would have been common in the 60s and 50s as well, but full on nudity was illegal in mainstream films during those decades preventing such tasteless displays. The 70s however, let it all hang out once the censors were off their backs, and apparently rape and nudity was high on the agenda. Pretty messed up if you ask me.

On a lighter note, I developed quite a crush on the actress who played Miss Tenny, and found myself enjoying her scenes very much. Must be the auburn hair, and the feisty, Irish good looks. I wonder what she's doing these days? I probably don't want to know. Brenda Fogarty, if only you had a much more extensive filmography! I'd be in bliss! She's apparently in the lead role of a movie called The Beach Bunnies, a film about a reporter investigating a movie star about his sex change operation. If she's in it, I'll watch it!

Best Friends (1975)

2009-02-15T14:02:00.001-08:00

I swear this movie wanted to be daytime drama at one point, but never quite made it there. The opening credits alone are very TV, and the black and white photo album style montage of the two lead actors with it's Dukes of Hazzard/Golden Girls theme music, has almost sitcom overtones. The film opens with Pat and Jesse; two all American boys fresh out of the army, and ready to take on the world. Their plan? To drive across California in a rented camper with their girlfriends, and have one last blast before they each tie the knot.

The perfect buddy movie right? Well, not exactly. The film runs off it's "coming of age" rails fairly quickly. There's something wrong with Pat. It's never fully explained, but you get the feeling his last tour of duty messed him up a little. He's gung-ho at first, but as the trip wears on, he starts to lose heart, and not wanting to lose his best bud to some dumb chick, he tries to erode their relationship.

"Man, you and me cruising around America, looking at all that scenery, grabbing at every girl we can! The whole world dreams about doing what you and me got a chance to do! Come on, you and me! Just pick up and go!" he says to Jesse when they stumble upon a motorcycle dealership.

His overtures are in vain. Jesse wants to get married. He has a job lined up, and he loves his fiance. Pat does not take the rejection well. He doubles his efforts, slowly becoming more sinister with every attempt. From trying to trick the young woman into being bitten by a rattlesnake, to finally attempting to rape her while Jesse is away buying groceries, nothing is too extreme for Pat, and nothing is going to get in between he and Jesse, except Jesse walking in on the attempted rape! The two of them fight. Jesse beats the hell out of his former best friend, and Pat takes off.

Pat continues to terrorize, circling the RV at night on a motorcycle, throwing rocks through the windows. Jesse starts to lose it. He takes a gun, and searches for Pat in the darkness. He fires shots into the night. Some one screams. Jesse has put a bullet through his fiance's neck. She dies instantly.

Rape? Violence? An antagonist who doesn't meet a just and tidy end? Not exactly daytime television fare, but it sure seemed like it wanted to be at one point, or was it just making fun? I don't know, but maybe Pat sums it up best the next morning when he discovers Jesse's fiance laying dead in the sand.

"What happened?" he asks boyishly to an obviously devastated and distraught Jesse.

I Drink Your Blood (1970)

2009-02-11T01:59:00.001-08:00

"Let it be known sons and daughters that Satan was an acid head."

He sure was, and he brought the hippies with him!

From what I understand, David E. Durston (the director) and Jerry Gross (the producer) disagreed on what tone I Drink Your Blood should have. Durston wanted seriousness, while Gross wanted comedy. I'm pretty sure Durston won the argument, but you can't help but see the comedic element. It's kind of like a cross between Night of the Living Dead and Reefer Madness, except instead of getting whacked out on weed, everyone goes off the rails on rabies, thanks in no part to a local kid feeding an already unbalanced Manson Family knock off infected meat pies.

The mayhem starts with the hippies, but eventually spreads to a nearby construction crew after they come in contact with one of the infected flower children. After picking her up at night while she's wandering the road, they take her back to camp, and then it's one big gang shag. She slowly goes mad during the love-in, and as no good deed goes unrewarded, the construction guys eventually kill her and throw her body into a ravine. And their compensation for handling the situation with such aplomb? Every one of them goes beserk, and they wander the countryside frothing at the mouth, murdering any one they come across.

The movie's kind of heavy on the racial stereotyping. Watch the movie, and you'll see what I mean. Of course, all the good townspeople are white, and the worst of the hippie bunch are the lunatic, visible minority fringe, but what are you going to do? 1970 right? That's a pretty good excuse isn't it?

Okay, lots of people going crazy, lots of people running for their lives, and lots of people getting hacked up. Pretty serious, right? So where's the comedy? It would be a stretch to say that Durston and Gross were shooting for a satire on small town American fears regarding contemporary representations of race, drugs, and the counterculture, but if they were, and they were trying to do it with a horror style re-work of Reefer Madness, then they nailed it, because that's how the film comes across, and when you view it that way, it's pretty damn funny.

Despite it's flaws, I liked this movie, and I can understand why it was a drive-in theatre staple for years. It's very watchable, and I'm always a fan of thin electronic noises being used to enhance the mood of a movie. I also liked how the movie shamelessly and unpretentiously jammed a lot of great stuff into it's plot. It's pretty hard to beat rabid hippies, chicken sacrifices, heads being chopped off, nude satanic rituals, and old men being forced to take LSD. Lots of entertainment, and lots of fun! All I have to do now is track down a copy of I Eat Your Skin (I Drink Your Blood's original double bill sister flick), and I'm set.