In short: UFO: Secret Video (1986)

Journalist Jeff (Jeff Hutchinson) has a hot scoop concerning a desert UFO sighting! Well, in theory, he does, for he doesn’t really have any footage that proves his encounter, so he’s mostly running on hot air. Still, two hilariously awkward Men in Black (here definitely of the government type) are on his tail.

So our hero goes on the run with his soon to be ex-girlfriend Suzy (Suzanne Solari), to have shouting matches with various people. We witness all this through material shot on Suzy’s very own camera.

Who knew that the same year he made his first post-apocalyptic roller blade movie (called Roller Blade, obviously), ultra-indie genre filmmaker Donald G. Jackson also made an early example of the POV SF genre? And really, given how it looks and sounds, it’s also a proto-mumblecore movie.

To wit: an early scene has Jeff and Suzy absorbed in a long, long, oh so very long shouting match about the state of their relationship (it’s bad), while Suzy’s parrot screeches and chatters so enthusiastically, he not only wins the prize of the best actor in the movie, but also makes at least half of the circular argument absolutely unparsable. The camera is usually just randomly dumped in the corner of a room and left to its own devices, so actors (and director) can ignore sensible positioning in the frame all the better.

The supposed thriller plot devolves in a series of annoying shouting matches between characters. Witness Jeff shout at Suzy and Suzy shout at Jeff! Jeff’s boss – whose newspaper is apparently made in a single cellar room as if it were 2020 – needs a good shouting and even an exciting bit of grappling, as well! Be screeched at, Jeff’s former photographer friend! And so it goes, until everything ends in a moment of perfectly embarrassing non-action you gotta (not) see to believe!

It’s quite the thing.

In short: Demon Lover Diary (1980)

In this verité style documentary, Joel DeMott shoots the troubles and travails that occur when her boyfriend Jeff Kreines hires on (well, since he isn’t initially meant to get paid, “volunteers” might be the better term) as a director of photography for The Demon Lover, the very first film of Donald G. Jackson, who would be come so indefatigable a filmmaker of indie genre movies, he’s still getting production and direction credits nearly two decades after his death. If no possessed spirit mediums are involved, I don’t want to hear it.

As you know Jim, Jackson would go on to direct kinda-sorta classics like Hell Comes to Frogtown and an absurd amount of rollerblade based post-apocalyptic films (some of which genuinely manage to be incredibly boring and mind-blowing at the same time). At this point in time, he is apparently pretending to be sick so he can shoot his movie while still keeping his employment in a factory, partnering on the direction side with the clearly much more defatigable Jerry Younkins, who, going by what the film tells us, has hacked off a couple of his fingers on his job to get insurance money to finance their film.

As you can imagine with this kind of backstory, DeMott’s film, looking as rough as it really should be, is full of scenes of passive aggression, very active aggression, and of people losing their shit for very minor reasons indeed while shrugging off much more complicated parts of what’s going on. The production is in a state of chaos, barely held together by wheedling and said passive aggression, with basically nobody involved seeming to have much of a clue of what they are doing, and doing this on little sleep (which explains a lot of the passive aggression) and no money. There are great, teachable moments for budding filmmakers here too, like the reason why directors don’t carry equipment, why one shouldn’t ask their teenage actresses to improvise, why one might want to avoid Ted Nugent (cough, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, cough), and so on and so forth.

While this may sound a lot like a “point and laugh at these idiots” kind of affair, I really prefer to read it as a paean to a particular kind of insanity, that filmmaking bug that can look like hubris, or a way to make a quick buck, yet in truth is something very special indeed, a thing of awe, wonder and utter ridiculousness. And really, look at this horrifying mess, and just stand in awe at the fact that Jackson never really seems to have stopped making movies afterwards – not even after his death. Please also spend a thought for his mom, who was clearly hoping her son would put that filmmaking business behind him after this whole affair had run its course.

The Devil Master (1977)

aka The Demon Lover

An aging Iron Maiden fan named Laval Blessing (Christmas Robbins, only lacking the facial hair to be truly deserving of his first name) lives in a tower he likes to call a castle deep in the woods. Laval has his own little coven of Satanist friends coming over for regular meetings and very much hopes they'll some day call him master.

When he proposes a nice little orgy to end everyone's virginity, and the channeling of everyone's awesome power through the trigger of his "gun", his people rebel, supposedly out of fear that he actually means "virgin sacrifice" when he says defloration and anger about his dominant personality, although I suspect the truth of the matter is that they have just realized Laval has a tent in his bedroom and that when he says "gun", he means his penis.

Be that as it may, as soon as his theoretical minions leave him, never to return, a naked woman teleports in to let herself be used in a magickal ceremony. Santa ClausChristmas manages to summon a guy in a gorilla costume with a horned mask with red, glowing eyes who screeches something about killing.

Soon, the traitorous coven members are indeed being killed, some by being filmed with a very shaky camera and doing some enthusiastic shaking themselves, some by murdering each other, others by letting the gorilla goat throttle them.

An irascible cop named after artist Frank Frazetta (Tom Hutton)- although he's called Tom - shouts at people and gets angry, Laval trains his karate, Laval gets into a bar brawl, women have a whipped cream fight (so that's what women do when no pillows are around?), random stuff happens, someone has a quarrel shot into his crotch. Finally, everybody dies, The END.

If I can believe the IMDB and the evidence of my eyes, then The Devil Master is an early work by the impressive and wonderful Donald G. Jackson, filmed half a decade before the man became obsessed with frog people and the future of rollerskating after the apocalypse (see films like Hell Comes to Frog Town, Roller Blade, Roller Blade Warriors).

It already shows the same mix of high enthusiasm and comical incompetence that makes his other films so endearing. The Devil Master is possibly even more fun than his later films, for where those are usually marred by having moments of competence or sudden appearances of actors who are only frighteningly amateurish instead of total amateurs, this is the pure, undiluted stuff of Roger Ebert's nightmares.

Nothing here is well done, fits, or makes sense, there's not a single moment in which the film works like normal films do. It is truly gloriously inept, full of badly framed sequences, odd editing, noodly music, mumbled dialogue, beautiful randomness and awesomely cramped sets.

What the movie never is, is boring. Nothing of what's going on might make any sense to you or me or look like a real movie to the film critic down the block, but there is always something going on to keep the rightminded viewer interested, sudden glances into a place and time where all the nonsense contained here would suddenly start to make sense and where Christmas would be a star, bouts of laughter brought about by the magic that happens when regular people suddenly make their own movies.

And to think that Jackson somehow managed to make a career out of it! Ours surely must be a better world than we might think. Special cinematic artifacts like this are proof for everyone who cares to see.

 

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