Creature Double Feature Night 3: THE NIGHTMARE, INFERNO

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

4. THE NIGHTMARE

(2015) Dir. Rodney Ascher 

*** 1/2/ Amazon Image - A

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

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

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

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

3. INFERNO

(1980) Dir Dario Argento

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A

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

 

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

For an optional third feature, consider: 

MANHATTAN BABY

(1982) Dir. Lucio Fulci

***/ Amazon Image - B

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

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

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

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

10 Surreal Cult Gems of the 80s: A Prime-Stream Special

What was the 80s and why was it such a golden age for weird sci-fi and head trips? Was it thanks to the dawn of MTV and Night Flight and their power to amuse stoned kids back late from the punk shows on weekends? Repo Man, Return of the Living Dead, and Night of the Creeps in theaters; Liquid Sky and Street Trash were at (shhh) inner-city theaters; drive-in and the video rental places co-existed comfortably.., for the moment.  Conan, the Terminator, and Robocop made such big money that art house wonders like Brazil and Blue Velvet could be seen and occupy hallowed places in the press.

Also, it was the height of Nancy-fueled anti-drug hysteria, and so--just as, during Prohibition, imbibing booze had become a symbol of American freedom and defiance of knee-jerk puritanism, so now there togetherness and patriotism to be found in smoking weed during the 80s (when you could go to jail for years just for having a joint in your pocket). Today weed is mostly legal and so innocuous its users are unnoticed. But back then, getting high and going to the midnight movie was a rite of dangerous passage. And going home to watch Night Flight and weird rented movies was simply the norm. And as a result, thrived a momentary nation of the strange. We were a decade away from the ecstasy-and-blue recovery roller coaster of the Prozac 90s. We had to invent micro-tripping just to get by - so we liked it weird. As ye shall see, brave wanderer:

1. SOCIETY

(1989) Briam Yuzna

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

For sheer over-the-top surreal class-commentary, nothing really beats Brian Yuzna's SOCIETY which has one of the best WTF denouements in cinema history. I'm going through great pains to not spoil any of it, let's just say that in best surrealist form it taps into the Freudian Id impulse and the anxiety that one is shut out of a massive 80s upper crust orgy--that even your parents are in on some licentious surreal group sex cult secret. It's this very real feeling that underwrote the Satanic panic of the 80s (and continues today in things like Pizza-gate, Q-Anon, and the conspiracies of David Icke -[here]), so it makes sense this came out in the "me" decade, a time when Reagan was in office and 'yuppies' were gobbling up everything, their little IZOD collars turned up and Ray-bans on in slavish imitation of their god, Tom Cruise. Not for nothing, then, does Society star the euphonious Cruise-clone Billy Warlock as a privileged lad who enjoys the finer things thanks to his adopted family, yet is ever reminded of just how much better a slightly richer contingent at his elite school has it.  He begins to realize something is going on when his older sister's paranoid ex-boyfriend-cum-stalker plays him tapes he secretly made of the sister's private conversations with their father re: her debutante 'coming out' party. It sounds, in this weird conversation, like she's going be offered up to some evil reptilian throng as a sexual offering, forced to sleep with everyone in the cult, including her parents and local officials--and that she's looking forward to it. But that can't be--can it? 

To amp the paranoia we're never quite sure, til it's too late, if we're just reading into it. Billy is paranoid, but the truth is far crazier. Along his journey, he picks up a hot mess girlfriend (Devin DeVasquez) and--in the weirdest element--her "mother" (Pamela Matheson), a bizarre hair-eating nutcase that seems to have wandered in from a John Waters casting lagoon, and seems younger than her daughter, starts hanging around with them, regularly trying to eat Billy's hair. 

 Yuzna produced those early Stuart Gordon gems From Beyond and Re-Animator so clearly knew how to hire and use the best effects teams. The gooey weirdness would be CGI today but here it's all latex analogy--the weirdest coolest mess since Carpenter's The Thing. Too bad that, like The Thing itself, so few people saw it in theaters --did it even get a release? Either way, what a blast! It goes everywhere Eyes Wide Shut does in about 1/3 of the time, and then a whole, whole WHOLE lot farther. Along the way it lays down full bushels of insight on the nature of desire, social-climbing, consumer culture, the parasitical nature of the rich, and what's known today as FOMO - or the feeling a massive beautiful people orgy is going on whenever you're not around. Kurbick really should have gone out more, or at least watched some horror movies --Society would have maybe saved his film from its fatal inertia.

And even today, some still believe there's a secret basement where gorgeous women abandon themselves to hairy ugly men at the clang of Get Out teacup rattle or an Eyes Wide Shut Rammstein-style synth/chant dirge. How that 'missing the orgy' feeling ties in with priapism and paranoia could be a full semester course (see here for full syllabus), but Society says it all in 99 minutes and without bitter aftertaste. 

3. LIQUID SKY

(1982) Dir. Slava Sukerman

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

We're deep in the height of the artsy early-80s downtown NYC New-Wave scene, back when it was cool, underground, emaciated and addicted to an array of pills and powders. A small alien saucer lands on the roof above the balcony apartment of trendy new wave icon Margaret (Anne Carlisle) and her drug-dealing lesbian roommate Adrian, played by Paula E. (Alice in Alice Sweet Alice) Shepherd. Across the way in a parallel story is Susan Doukas as Sylvia, mother of Jimmy (also Carlisle) a strung-out sneering male model struggling to pay for a high-end cocaine addiction. A German scientist is lured up to lonely Sylvia's apartment for dinner but really he wants to spy on the saucer across the street. What is it up to? It's zapping anyone nearby at the moment of sexual climax, using the orgone (?) energy for, presumably, rocket fuel or their own form of drug. 

There's oodles of great stuff, style, and disaffect, but the ultimate in weird 'scenes' has got to be Anna Carlisle going down on the male version of herself while a bunch of fashionistas hanging out (while using her gorgeous roof balcony apartment for a photo shoot) jeer in a very punk aggro manner that would be scary if it were done by a bunch of straight dudes, but done by coked-up gay aesthetes it's just kind of punk. As Walter Sobchak might put it, there's nothing to worry about --they're nihilists. 

In the end it's Margaret's zonked renouncement of sexual pleasure in favor of drugs and mind expansion is what saves her while all her lovers are zapped. She doesn't say no to sex, even with her old teacher/mentor who drops up (a different time to be alive in NYC, oh me brothers). Then the aliens zap the life essence out of these lovers in the moment of orgasm and--until Anna complains--leaves their corpses piling up in the apartment. If you're not totally down with this film by the time Adrian starts an impromptu smack-shivery poetry slam while playing one of the corpses's bald head like a conga, then well, you may as well leave the city and move in with your brother out in Phoenix, know what I'm talking about? Me, I belong to this film, I love all its little moments, like Sylvia's a hilarious brunch with her sneezy, coke-withdrawal-wracked son. Now that the image is so lustrous, the sun streaming in through the window makes his suffering so beautiful and uniquely NYC I got a 90s strung-out flashback chill just watching him/her -- been there, bro! Not for coke or heroin, but for alcohol. They are actually similar in that (as I learned in. CASAC school) two withdrawals they have to medicate you for in detoxes, i..e. quitting cold turkey can be fatal! So if you've ever tried to hide how hungover and strung out you are while eating brunch with your mom, you'll really relate.

Clearly, this is the female east coast parallel to Repo Man. Was it an influence on Alex Cox? And like that one-off masterpiece, it's a film to be revisited, again and again - especially now that it's been so lovingly remastered. It probably never looked this good even in its initial NYC run. The shrill pre-programmed Casio synth music mat make the raucous punk on Repo Man's soundtrack seem like Mozart by comparison, but it works.  (see full review)

7. BRAZIL

(1985) Dir. Terry Gilliam

**** / Amazon Image - A-

Time was this was the bee's-knees, a universally praised cult hit, and it's kinda forgotten today due to being kinda dated. Though one of the most gamely dark and savage satires of modern bureaucracy in the history of cinema, here in the paperless 21st century its big anti-bureaucracy messages can seem rather labored. The whole Orwellian hodge podge and endless ducts and malfunctions feel so yesterday since  the entirety of the film's vast "Dept. of Information Retrieval" would be replaced by a handful of geeks on laptops. Still, as the missing link between Kafka (a rather heavy debt is owed) and--alas--one of those whimsical too-obvious Danny Kaye 'daydreaming office drone thinks he's a swashbuckler' odysseys, the level of detail and imagination is stunning. Since it's all before CGI and so beautifully remastered in HD, we can really savor the level of obsessive termite craftsmanship (the clouds in the fantasy flying sequences alone are worth the price of admission). 

Terry Gilliam's trouble as a director has always been that--like Ridley Scott--he can never trust the story to work on its own so his films gush over with detail and interesting things while the mythic root is lost like a child in a Black Friday opening door crush of overworked imagery. Here, since that crush is what it's all about, the overkill actually works perfectly, turning it all into a ballet of post-futuristic 30s decor crumbling under the weight of add-on tech (temporary things installed to fix problems with the fixes to other problems, etc). Still, Jonathan Pryce's flustered Walter Mitty-everyman schtick starts to get wearisome during his prolonged panicky run-for-it with the girl of his dreams. With her short hair and trucker's job she'd be instantly pegged as a lesbian today, making her initial resistance all the more glaring. It never even occurs to Pryce to ask if she likes him. 

That's the cool thing about Gilliam's vision - though a knee-jerk leftist reading is the most obvious--i.e. that Pryce is a hapless hero in a coiled universe strangled by evil bureaucrats-- a closer reading shows that the dystopia is the fantasy as much as the clouds. Reality chokes itself on its own exhaust so millions can relax in air conditioned privacy and dream of angels, or watch The Cocoanuts in their own bathtub while smoking a joint. Hey, I relate, I don't have a bathroom TV but I've smoked weed to Paramount Marx Brothers movies on air-conditioned couches far and wide. Realizing the extent to which my first world consumption habits butterfly tsunamis out to mass poverty in the third world doesn't help me change my habits. Trying to change them now would be like throwing a pale of water on a forest fire. It might make me feel less guilty, but it won't even slow the blaze--and I don't like being hot. 

Regardless of whether you think Pryce's character is a hero or just a trust fund Marxist floundering in the deep end, it all gorgeously done, with an extended wordless chase set piece finale that finally fishtails into pure fantasy that references everything from American in Paris to The Red Shoes and (of course) Potemkin under a dazzlingly expansive Michael Kamen score. And what a cast of first-class Brits! Ian Holm has never been funnier as Pryce's nervous wreck boss; Michael Palin is a chilling blast as Pryce's nonchalant torturer college friend and--marvelous as ever--Bob Hoskins is a miracle as a sinister blue collar duct worker. And cuz ya gotta have an American, there's Robert De Niro as a combination Groucho Marx and Che Guevara, zip-lining in and out of windows and balconies along the tall apartment complexes to make bootleg duct repairs without the proper forms. If Gilliam never made another movie after this, he'd be remembered as one of the masters of surrealism and dark comedy. But dystopia has a habit of dragging on... 

6. THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI

(1984) Dir. W.D. Richter 

*** / Amazon Image - A+

The problem with this film was that it kind of positioned itself a shoe-in for cult status, and that's not how cults are made. Cult films are born of legitimately weird outsider types trying to make a normal film, not a normal person trying trying to make a weird outsider film. BUT just because the motives are baffling and the weird hybrid Captain Midnight-brain surgeon-mad scientist-Formula 5 racer-rock band frontman thing is just a little Too Much Johnson, it doesn't mean the cast, effects crew, and too many moments to count in the script, aren't worthy of Sub-Genius-style lionization. Let the lamp affix its beam! Even if one can't simply whip up a franchise out of thin air (Lucas, never forget, used carefully imported mythic ingredients, plumbing Joseph Campbell as well as Alex Raymond), "No matter where you go / there you are" became an instant classic line.

And what a cast: Peter Weller and Ellen Barkin have never been more beautiful (the way Ellen Barkin opens her mouth for a kiss is so carnal and raw it collapses time and space as we know it), and it's clear they vibe on each other's energy. Jeff Goldblum is saddled with a ridiculous cowboy get-up that's just not working for him, but he's great as usual, and so is John Lithgow as Big Booty or Dr. Lizardo (top), and on and on it goes with way too much fan club stuff ("I'm Buckaroo club, Genus chapter!" like anyone watching was old enough to remember Captain Midnight decoder rings)- did they really expect such fan clubs would start? 

One thing too - this is one dense film - packed with mythos and character running which way and that. You can see it over and over agin and are still noticing little details. Around the tenth viewing, it starts to really work except for, it never quite does. Great end theme though. Too bad there weren't ten sequels! Weller - you are or were a gawd!

7. MEET THE HOLLOWHEADS

(1988) Dir. Thomas R. Burdman

*** / Amazon Image - C

A chamber piece that plays like some off-off family sitcom from an alternate reality (we never see a window or an outside - are they all in some gigantic multi-generational cross-galaxy spaceship? Did I miss that part?). No moment of the typical domestic bliss-ticked early-60s-late-80s sitcom is missed in director Thomas Burdman's (and co-writer Lia Morton)'s keen eye for absurdist surreal digression. The doofus grandpa needs force feeding with a giant syringe; the half-dog half-human 'pet' needs de-lousing (the boys shoot the bugs off him with a slingshot); the boss (Richard Portnow) comes over for dinner and dad (John Glover) is planing to ask for an overdue promotion; wife (Nancy Mette) hopes dinner goes just right!  The cute daughter (Juliette Lewis!) is getting ready to go out on a date with some new wave glorkenspruling doofus; the tentacled one-eyed watcher in the foyer (security system?) makes sure no lurkers walk past unnoticed. It's all played letter straight, such as it is, and the weirdness never stops. 

It's very tube-oriented; everything is round and comes out of tubes that connects to a vast system,  one that is cleaned out chimney sweep-style by men covered in pipe cleaner tubules who speak so abstractly they need subtitles (the same font Spheeris uses in The Decline of Western Civilization!). Lewis does her Lolita thing in due earnest here, clearing the way for her iconic stretch of films as a jailbait thumbsucker from the early 90s (Husbands and Wives, Cape Fear, Kalifornia). Just look at her in the top center picture! She's almost a different girl and who's that on her left? It's Bobcat Goldthwait --pre-screechy voice -- as one of the weird cops who carry her home. 

Come over for an evening with the Hollowheads, and stare agog at a universe that might have been. If the 80s was really that kind to weirdness, this would be on muhfuggin' Criterion!

I confess, I was only able to finish Meet the Hollowheads over several 20 minute viewings, as I found it too weird to endure for longer, especially in such bad quality (it's about akin to what you'd find on youtube, duped from some old first run VHS scored at a close-out) though as soon as I finished it, I started it right up again, so what's that tell you? And it's no dis - I watch Godard movies the same way and I love him. If you love crazy Godard too (for the comedy) and if you like the friendly day-glo genuine insanity of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, the industrial Kafka savagery of Brazil, and post-industrial ennui and alienation of Eraserhead, then this is your film. Just watch it from far enough away you don't get any on you. And though the image is bad it's all worth it for the wacky climax which finds the lecherous Portnow running amok, killed more times than Rasputin, the kids coming home wasted after hacking into a forbidden drug tube (the title I'd give it were I in charge: Forbidden Drug Tube-Tap) and the wasted son almost giving the whole show away by thinking the bruised near-dead boss is a monster. What a family. What a film! What set decoration. Would it was clearer, image-wise as that deep red in the round living room alone is to dye for. Stick with it and it you may never get it off. Maybe you won't even want to. 

8. NIGHT OF THE COMET

(1984) Writer/dir. Thom Eberhardt

*** / Amazon Image - A

With a weird cult-ready veneer that's quintessential 80s, this sci-fi/cult/horror/comedy tics a lot of boxes but does 'em all right. The heroine survives the comet night apocalypse because she was shacked up in the El Rey theater's projection room in a sleeping bag with cult douche Michael Bowen, for god's sake - and rather than work her usher job she eats Twizzlers and rules the Galaga high score in the lobby, saved from being fired by her beauty. Writer/director Robert Thom was one of those almost-iconic auteurs who made too few films to have a following, aside from weirdos like me who love both this and his Sole Survivor (also 1984, though much less widely known - seek it out immediately!) - I remember I saw Night on the big screen in the suburbs during its initial release--by myself, while skipping a high school--so you you know I'm the right guy to defend it. And if you love Mary Woronov and any movie where the teenage heroine warns a guy trying to kill her that she's "been trained" and doesn't want to hurt him (and means it, and does) then you'll love this film which now looks better than ever thanks to a great Shout Factory dusting and color-depth-asizing.

The dazzlingly-haired Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney star as the cool sisters Regina and Samantha--capably rescuing children and mowing down punk mall cops thanks to their CIA op father teaching them home defense before departing for Nicaragua. Woronov's fellow Eating Raoul star, Robert Beltran is a truck driver who answers the girls' survivor call (they set up base at the local LA radio station). Woronov heads an underground lab looking for a cure to the slow decay that hits those who survived the initial mystery dusting of the comet. God, zombies were so much cooler back then. What happened?

One thing may turn some folks off if they watch in the wrong context: this is the film with the quintessential first shopping montage set to Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." Echoing Dawn of the Dead as much as foreshadowing Day with its underground scientist think tank bunker, it's not the film's fault that trying-on-clothes montage set to that song have become inescapably and inseparably cliche. We might wish for a world in which it was cliche instead to have super cool, capable girls like Regina and Samantha as our stars of horror and science fiction films, but they're still rare in any genre. (see also Anita Skinner in Thom's Sole Survivor for another cool Hawksian, this one even quoting To Have and Have Not -here)

9. PHENOMENA

(1985) Dir. Dario Argento

*** 1/2/ Amazon Image - B

When the plot of this was first described to my roommate and I by his girlfriend back around 1994, we knew the movie we needed to see after a drug-addled weekend. The description was so weird we doubted it even existed. This being long before the advent if Wiki and imdb, we could only trudge video store-ward and scope out the Argento titles, and nothing even remotely insect-concerned appeared. Years later, when I finally did get to see Phenomena it was the uncut version presented by Anchor Bay (as opposed to the American butcher job, Creepers) and in widescreen on DVD (as opposed to murky VHS) so it was even better than she made out. I was never so happy. Why am I telling you this? Because to relay the actual plot of it is like giving away the trick ending of Psycho if it was all trick endings. While Argento certainly references everything from (the previous year's hit) Firestarter as well as Carrie, (Jennifer Connolly loves insects and they swarm at her telepathic command) it also goes in all sorts of zig-zaggy directions. I'm not a big fan of Argento's insistence (continued in Opera and other late 80s films) of using heavy metal to underscore the murders, ghoubh. Time has been as kind of Morricone and Goblin as it's been unkind to Iron Maiden, in my opinion. At any rate, the rest of the score is the perfectly accentuated flanger-drenched guitar music of Claudio Simonetti, evoking the film's windy foot-of-the-Alps setting with a palpable unearthly chill. 

What I most love about it though is the weird midnight bond that forms between young Connelly, a wheelchair-bound entymologist played by Donald Pleasance, and his helper chimp, Inga. The dubbing is excellent and a real weird unique mood holds between them, as the ever present chilling wind keeps rolling down and up the Alps creating a totally unique mood in the Argento canon. There's also Daria Nicolodi as a nerdy teacher and Daria Di Lazzaro as the sexy-bitchy headmistress. The last 1/3 is a never-ending cascade of shocks and twists guaranteed to keep any jaw glued to the floor, and in the midst of it all, sweet innocent Jennifer Connelly finds herself swimming in lakes covered by burning fuel and calling insects and drowning in pits of maggot-filled decomposing bodies, and almost decapitated, all in great style. You may be warned, but there's no way you can be prepared...

1. BLUE VELVET

(1986) Dir. David Lynch 

**** / Amazon Image - A

I'll confess it took me a long way to come around to this movie: I found its violent thuggery disturbing and without a cathartic resolution. After a few decades of repeat viewings, and absorbing deep tissue analyses of the film by Todd McGowan and Zizek, I was able to unravel my private relationship to its Freudian subconscious Oedipal separation trauma, so I could let go of my ambivalence. Turns out the purple and blue velvet apartment where Kyle McLachlan spies through the closet blinds isn't merely his anger/anxiety over a woman being hurt, but a primal scene as understood through the mind of a child who mistrusts the animal grunts of sex and seethes with resentment over the dad's power to shut him out of the bedroom at a whim. So, turns out, the problem was mine, not Lynch's! I myself was Frank (Dennis Hopper) as much as Kyle - and I didn't want to be either one. I had to make peace with my inner monster. I tried, and am trying, and sometimes I love this film and sometimes not. I prefer actually Lost Highway, perhaps because it isn't as good. I'm not really connected to it, and that's just fine.

Laura Dern co-stars, at her dreamy-but-chipper best; the beautiful Dean Stockwell as a kind of dream world pimp lip syncing Roy Orbison (see CinemArchetype 18: The Aesthete) while Kyle tries not come off like a frightened kid who visits his drug dealer on the wrong night and ends up a veritable hostage in an all-night road trip binge. An initiation into a darker realm of life beneath the grass line of sunny Lumberton, these scary people eventually guide him into becoming a mature man through their loving abuse (like in Sonny Boy, with which it would make a fine double feature!).



Lynch's subsequent works would all point back to this key moment, some improving on it (Mulholland Dr.) some not so much (Wild at Heart). But Blue Velvet is Lynch's first great 'cracking it wide open' while still staying in a recognizable (small town noir) genre format. It's his "Demoiselles d'avignon," his Pollock's 1947 drip stick moment. No matter how many times you see it, it's never the same movie, but it's always, always disturbing. It's the dark nightmare of childhood brought into the light like a screaming, still-alive, tar pit mastodon.

TOO WEIRD EVEN FOR ME: 

These are definitely cult/surreal and look great on Prime but --me--personally - I couldn't stand them. I hate them And I'll give you my reasons why, in case your mileage varies. One critic's bias should never lose a film's chance at the right viewer.

SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS
(1989) Dir. Alex Proyas
*1/2 / Amazon Image - A

In and around a cloistered shack in the middle of a nowhere post-apocalyptic outback, two wildly overacting eccentrics--one a wheelchair-bound aviation enthusiast, one a Gothic virgin introvert--help a monosyllabic punk rocker type escape the empty desert plain via a homemade airplane. Though the scenery is lovely, the actors are grotesque and do little to allay the monotony. The film seems to last forever as nothing happens, but not in a cool Jarmusch way but in an overwrought hammy Aussie way - the worst of both worlds. It needs either a genuinely macabre element (ala Burton's Beetlejuice), savage gallows satire (ala Gilliam's Tideland) or deadpan zest for living (ala Kusturica's Arizona Dream). This has none of the three! NONE! I hate it the way I hate those stale nightmares I used to have when suffering from a bad flu. The deep aqua-blue tint of the wide open sky and the burnished gold sand indicate gorgeous cinematography and color-grading; the Tangerine Dream soundscapes keep it all at a dreamy windswept beguilement; Melissa Davis hams it up like a kind of Helena Bonham Carter gone butoh missionary, but it's not enough to make it worth enduring the spittle-flecked hamming of Michael Lake, usually filmed for maximum grotesque close-ups (his teeth need work).  Director Proyas went on to make The Crow and Dark City, so he has his fans. The rest of us might survive if we view it as a prequel origin story for Bruce Spence's pilot character in The Road Warrior. Nonetheless watching it is too much like that feeling of being trapped in the middle of nowhere I used to have as a child in the suburbs. God, being forced to hang out with these three people the rest of my life seems far worse than any death by dehydration. 

THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

(1980) Dir. Richard Elfman

* / Amazon Image - B

Though zany and strangely familiar to any one who's watched old Betty Boop cartoons while macro-tripping, the ceaseless toilet humor of Elfman's little miracle gets very old fast, in fact before it starts. There's so much shit imagery and septic tanks I wonder how mired in infantile poop obsession can any alleged adult be? Further, Oingo Boingo is one irritatingly uncool band. Clearly a lot of effort went into this film and Herve is amazing (those dewey eyes....sigh), but everyone else -- good lord. I felt sick to my sacrum for weeks after only ten minutes of viewing. God blind me to the sights herein. 

Brecht and the Single Girl: PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT (1973)

If you're confused about why Italy continually undoes the soundness of the Euro, Elio Petri's PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT, a nihilistic anti-capitalist Brechtian satire from 1973, can surely clarify for you toute suite. (Short answer: too many Commies --and they got a funny idea 'bout money.)

The "plot" follows neurotic bank teller Total (Flavio Bucci - the blind pianist in Suspiria) as he tries to escape his meager 9-5 barely-make-ends-meet job, which mainly consists of doling out cash to greedy titans of industry who proudly brag about their non-paying of taxes, oblivious to the seething rage welling up in the little guy who counts their capital. Snapping his pea brain after a robbery, Total becomes obsessed with a rich, corrupt butcher (Ugo Tognazzi), stealing all his signifiers: little butcher hat, favorite carving knife, his car, even his mistress (Daria Nicolodi!). Launching himself on an absurdist Harpo-cum-Karl Marx-Quixote odyssey, Total wind up lost in the out-of-bound weeds of Anarchy. Burning a lire note in his boss's office ("that's sacrilege!") to signify his resignation, he justifies his identity stealing operation by staying 'pure' i.e. not stealing any actual cash: "I'm a Mandrakian Marxist," he announces. "I only steal what I need." By Mandrake, naturally, he means 'the Magician'. When it comes to films equally indebted to crime, communism and comic strips, no one outdpes Elio Petri (The 10th Victim, Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion, A Quiet Place in the Country).

While I'm no fan of what I can't help but read as Petri's ingenuità utopica (given allowances for its time and place), I love his deeply cynical reading of a social structure so deeply ingrained most filmmakers don't even notice it's there. The title is confusing mistake, though, a riff on an old anarchist slogan revived for the 60s, when commie ideology was snuck into movie dialogue by leftist filmmakers like Petri, Fernando di Leo and Giuliu Questi. Italians really love the idea that stealing in time of necessity is justified. Obviously they have a violent reaction one way or another to their Catholic guilt, so keep belaboring it, ever evoking the 'bread riots' of the 1940s - as seen in Rossellini's Rome: Open City. (The kind of thing America was briefly allowed to explore (i.e. between the Crash and the Code) in films like Hero for Sale and The World Changes).  Also, they had an establishment much more corrupted and deadlocked government to actually work, so chaos descended. That's why 60s Italian master thief characters like Diabolik (who would be the villains in American comics like Batman) became the heroes of Italy, encouraging the average Italian to smash and grab what they want, leading to rampant crime in the streets and all the other things anti-capitalist Commie subversives would have loved to see become the norm in the US as well. So thank you, Joseph McCarthy, after all!

Property is No Longer a Theft is a child of that mindset in more ways than one. It's on Blu-ray from Arrow, and looks and sounds great, but--if you don't believe in money but do have a Prime subscription, you can pretend you're stealing it by watching it 'free'. Just don't wonder if Arrow suddenly doesn't have any money for new restorations. It's your fault.

What drew me to the title initially (aside from being enthralled by Petri's earlier masterpiece A Quiet Place in the Country) was a recommendation from horror film historian Tim Lucas on Facebook, who pointed out its proto-giallo greatness. Total may not be a crazed killer in high giallo style, but he does threaten people with a knife. Ennio Morricone delivers one of his most surreal breathy scores; Deep Red cinematographer Luigi Kuveller twists the frame with portentous shadows and expressionist angles (lots of doors within doors), star Bucci played the pianist in Suspiria, and longtime Argento collaborator Daria Nicolodi (1) looms tall and ungainly-albeit-sexy as Anita, the butcher's mistress. When she lets loose a deep throaty laugh during one of her Brechtian fourth wall-breaking monologues, you might get an instant chill as you recognize her voice's deep masculine depths from so many Argento classics (it's the same laugh from Phenomena, when daring Jennifer Connelly to call her insects, or the mocking, snarling demoness at the Suspiria climax). Since Bucci looks more than a little like Dario Argento himself (with a Dog-eared dash of a young Pacino around the eyes) it would be easy to see Property as a kind of deranged reflection of the Argento-Nicolodi collaborative canon (1), with the Butcher representing typical 'red telephone' Italian filmmaking at the time, and Total the Argento who steers Daria free. But to what end? 

Keeping the giallo framework in mind might help today's 60s-70s-era Italian genre cinema fan keep its odd mix of police corruption and insurance scam satire (we follow the flow of $$ from robbery to insurance claim, to inventory-exaggerating, cop bribing, policy collecting, to thief selling stolen goods back to insurance company, like some giant financial food chain) from getting too mired in either didactic dissertation (In standard Brechtian practice, characters break the narrative flow perhaps too regularly) or Polanski-style young hungry male vs. olde rich male for sexually ravenous younger woman - power triangulating.

Meanwhile, weird characters pop up to keep you guessing: there's the droop-eyed chief of detective (Orazio Orlando) who seems like he's either fishing for a bribe or trying to trap the butcher into a confession with a sense of conspiratorial camaraderie ("If you're not afraid of having it stolen," he notes, during the insurance tally, "you can't enjoy your wealth"); a cross-dressing master thief named Albertone (Mario Scaccia) who teaches Total the trade (and Total in exchange, does nothing but taxes his mentor's weak, albeit big-as-all-outdoors queer heart with his irrational Ledger Joker-x-Harpo Marxist nonsense), and  Cecillia Pollizi as a dyke fence who evokes Lotte Lenya's madame in Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone albiet in a  resonant post-glam fashion. There's even Diabolik in a blink-and-miss cameo (below):

Diabolik dies in a posion gas-filled car at a security expo in Property is No Longer a Theft

It's not all surreal Brechtian digressions though. A real unhappy, even if trenchant, thread in the film is the Butcher's and Total's treatment of Anita, and her realization that neither being a sexual object or 'powerful' will generate even a flicker of human compassion from them. It's a rather sad in a reflection of the same objectifying dread animosity towards the opposite sex we see in a lot of neorealist and nouvelle vague works of the time wherein a dash of meta-awareness tries to offset the leering (i.e. make sure her legs are crossed and breasts are heaving while she tallies the day's profits in the window a butcher shop display, sigh. The Symbolism!! Is it not deep?). Naming her various succulent sweet meat body parts while addressing the camera, Petri might be referencing the first part of Godard's Contempt (the part Joe Levine wanted added to include some seat-filling Bardot nudity), or --the theme that clouded the mind of Franco Nero's artist in Petri's A Quiet Place in the Country --one of the classic devil's bargains of European film in the 50s-70s-- the relationship of the sex-hungry producer to the idealistic auteur.

By 1973, though, this was all just a bit didactic. On the the other hand, it's nice she can enjoy sex enough to get her rocks off without losing face in her struggle for gender equality. Petri does leave space for Nicolodi to--as he did for Redgrave did for Quiet Place in the Country--to quietly fill up her character's margins with traits that divulge themselves--Farber termite-style--subtly, on repeat viewing. Watching her face, for example, after the butcher instructs her to cry over the 'stolen' items from Total's first robbery. (claiming h stole way more than he really did, hiding non-stolen jewels in a suitcase in the basement to get more insurance $$). Facing close to the camera in close-up we see her crying increase and decrease based on Pirelli's proximity. When it starts to grate on the butcher's nerves, she stops abruptly and cuts into a vague smile, barely able to reign in her delight at the thought of 'earning' more expensive and useless stuff.

Neither happy nor totally miserable in the life of basically a contracted--albeit relatively well-treated--sex-worker, at least Nicolodi doesn't have to play second fiddle to some harridan wife. She and the butcher live together without any tinge of Catholic guilt. She has a nice job as the cashier at the butcher shop; he trusts her, and he buys her expensive things like nice, presumably real, pearls. She can put up with his macho abuse, aware that--in her own words to the audience--if she wasn't here, she'd still be somewhere else. She doesn't consider any of us--there in some imagined air-conditioned little Italian cinema of her mind--to be any less trapped. At least she's free to enjoy her cage as best she can, rather than just banging her head against the bars in an inevitably-doomed attempt to impress some far-away future feminist studies professor.

The chameleonic sexual personae of Daria: with long black hair as armed mistress (PROPERTY 1973); as can-do, sexually assertive reporter (DEEP RED 1975)

Bearing the meta-textuality still further, we find the butcher and Anita going to the adult movie show where he threatens to "send her back to work at the bar" if she doesn't obediently go down on him. He also hits her when frustrated, which doesn't seem to foster any resentment on her part, beyond a fleeting feeling of shock. On the other hand, he also goes down on her --which we know from pop culture is a sad rarity with Italian men, who consider it demeaning to them. In a way, his slapping her around, and her whining to the camera almost seem like they were thrown in last minute efforts to taint what is essentially the film's only full-formed human relationship. Everyone else treats each other the way they might treat vending machines or food products, Total--for all his commie bellyaching--is the worst of all. In the world of backwards men like Total, his rationalizing father (who enjoys the fruits of his son's thievery but doesn't want to hear where it came from), the crazy cop, the drag queen gang of fur thieves, etc., the butcher is, at the very least, reliable and loyal (he doesn't have a wandering eye). Together he and Anita work to keep a legit business in the black, and after hours they share a certain post-coital simpatico that captures the benefits of long-term casual sexual relationships that are very rarely shown in movies which usually deal only in extremes of rapture or loathing. I love the scene when she abruptly stops him from going down on her in the office while she's counting the days tallies,  by announcing she's hungry and wants a steak. He agrees and gets up and there's a moment they share of simpatico alignment, a relationship without the need for little bambinos and sacred mother-in-law's nagging everyone to go to mass. We can, if we care to, admire the way the trappings of love and family are avoided in favor of a long term simpatico entrainment, the languid way two lovers disengage and prepare to go get something to eat, not really looking at each other but totally aligned; since pleasure, wealth and convenience are the focus, and not God or family or some other phony idolatry, they are fulfilled.

When you see these names in the credits, pounce! 

That may not add up to much in the end, but what really puts it all over into classic status, is the presence of an Ennio Morricone score. Why more composers don't endeavor to follow his lead--the use of antithetical counterpoint and surreal minimalism--is one of cinema's great tragic mysteries. Most composers try to show off all the stuff they learned in music school with a lot of mickey mousing orchestral pomp, dictating our every emotion. Ennio shows how the twang of a jaw harp and a lady whispering urgently but incoherently over discordant guitar stings would work so much better than a 100 piece orchestra. Has Ennio ever done a bad score? (and in the 60s-70s he did like ten or more a year). Certainly this is one of his weirdest and most memorable (and it's on Spotify!) especially during the strange opening credits, which play over overlapped densely colored pencils sketches of all the principle players on paper that resembles marble (but with lire notes for veins) while heavy breathing repetitions of "I.... have" ("avere! av-ere!") pulse over whooshing timpani undercurrents.  Elsewhere little ominous electric bass lines, stabby little mountain king strings, and little cycling piano riffs foreshadow similar pulsing passages in his recent Oscar-winning Hateful Eight score (Hey, we all steal from ourselves - and it suits the subject matter)

Ultimately, the main problem with Theft is a not uncommon one for anti-establishment movies of the period: it gest so busy critiquing the current system, and rebelling against it, it runs out of room to find an alternative. Do communist intellectuals seriously think they'll ever weed the Stalin reality out of their Trotskyist idealism by attacking capitalism's status quo? NEVER!

Sellers takes aim at bourgeois values - The Magic Christian (1969)

MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL PRINTED-GREEN PAPER

An example of this same problem can be found in 1969's The Magic Christian (above)--a satire of consumer culture not unlike Property-- which finds bored millionaire Peter Sellers and his nephew Ringo learning about the world through staging of some very elaborate (and presumably overpriced) 'freak outs' to blow the minds of standard bowler-and-brolly London-suburb train commuters. You can all but trace the thought lines of these little gags back to a time when access to a flood of freely available, semi-legal high-quality LSD woke artists up to the handrails and structure of modern society. The sudden awareness of the absurdity of money and other social mores --as aesthetic things in and of themselves--are made--while tripping--instantly absurd. The cash in hand is no longer 'invisible' as a symbol for goods and services but a pocketful of green portraits of old men in weird wigs; their strange knotty faces seem to be smiling and winking to your dilating pupils. They seem to be struggling to move; en verso, the eye in the pyramid follows you around the room, blinks, and blazes light, pulling you in towards it like a tractor beam. The fact that 'normal' people don't notice these things is even funnier. "Living is easy with eyes closed." With newly opened eyes, one naturally wants to open the eyes of the sleeping straights around him, even if only for a few flash moments, like one of Jerry Garcia's onstage backflips tripping deadheads often see in concert. Pranksters like Ken Kesey and his magic bus pull over on some random small town main street to run amok for five minutes, then disappear - leaving the sleepy town to wonder if it was all just something they ate. This is art. Important. Maybe pointless. And can get you jailed.

Noble in original intent, it spun out of control too fast - too many idiots taking too much of stuff that was too strong, too often, then clogging up the ER en masse the minute they think they're dying (i.e. the 'only fools rush in' preliminary bad trip bardos); the logistics of the endless stream of runaway kids turning Golden Gate Park into a giant toilet. It was a revolution with nowhere to go.

Take that!

But in Europe, there was a movement of intellectuals ready to absorb the psychedelic culture shocks with deadpan bemusement: Antonioni, whose earlier work like Red Desert explored, in a much more abstract, intellectual way, the collapse of structuralism (even sober, he and Monica were hip to the aesthetic absurdity of bank notes) connected with the turned-on generation in such a way as to help form it (via Blow-up), leading to the idea that by keeping your behavior totally random, and embracing a kind of abstract chaos magic approach to life, you can shimmy down from the symbolic ledge and run 'free' without having to run naked, screaming, down 5th Ave with question marks written all over your body in Day-Glo paint.

Even so, some symbols - like 'Stop' signs are better left heeded for their symbolic message rather than regarded purely as red octagons. Failure to comply could lead to your death by car. Similarly, give your money away like it's a disease and you can drift so far off the grid you can't get back on, which might be important if you want to eat regularly. Screw with your own life at your own risk, and you better take that risk seriously. Vanessa Redgrave isn't playing around.

(see also: Through a Dark Symbol).

Pull the string!

That's the core of what's missing in Petri's Theft - which shows the all-importance of having a good star at the center of a work like this: the closest thing we have to a person to root for is Albertone, the beloved cross-dressing leader of a queer gang of jewel robbers who-- their identity as maligned subculture perhaps leading them towards a group loyalty--are truly grieved by his passing. (though he only shows up in the last third). This being a time when queerness was portrayed in giallos as one more signifier of freaky transgression, drag was a common enough drag sight, a symbol of the split self (and Norman Bates), in Petri's reserving of the bulk of our sympathy for Albertone show that beneath its cynical Brechtian satire, Petri's film has a genuine heart and respect for humanity and artistic perception.

If you can admit your confusion, you earn a pass.

But the price of true post-structuralist realization--of stepping free of the bullshit-- is complete paralysis. Hemmings with the ghost tennis ball in his hand, frozen in contemplation. Without real money, and real balls, the void stretches past even new life and new civilizations - it boldly goes where no man has gone before... but leaves you standing there, just a focal point for the endless nada.

One happy little family, pre-Total

You know where I'm going with this: America got around this anti-money issue with a show called Star Trek where private property no longer existed. Maybe one day we'd grow into it, but only if we didn't rush things. America couldn't afford to be nihilistic about money, not at right then, having used up all our nihilism cards on our all-consuming hobby, Vietnam. But, at least the Cold War helped externalize the Red Menace well enough that we didn't have to fight it in the mirror, unlike some people - ahemItalycoguh. 

But hey - in 1973, crime in New York City was as bad as it was Rome, albeit with less motor-scooter purse snatching (ciao, Scippatori!) and more subway knife-point mugging.

Funny, but hardly surprising, that we took the opposite approach of Italy, whose pop culture tended to idolize the crooks, encouraging readers to fantasize they were like Diabolik, robbing the country blind while bemoaning its collective impoverishment, never getting how the two were linked. Here in the USA it was the reverse, we decided to invoke our second amendment rights and make a stand. Here, we wouldn't cheer these masked crooks at all... we'd... well...let's just say, we gotta guy comin' in, and he knows just how to deal with punks like you. See you soon, pally!

(Charles Bronson Death Wish - 1974)

FURTHER READING:

1. See 'Woman is the Father of Horror' - which I argue that a lot of the success of the great horror auteurs comes from their female writing/producing partners - i.e. Debra Hill, Daria Nicolodi, Gale Ann Hurd.