Gettin' Ripped: Luigi Cozzi's PAGANINI HORROR (1989)

If ever there was a time to order Blu-rays of things you want to see on your desert island after civilization's you-know-what, it's now, for the canon of Luigi "The Italian Ed Wood" Cozzi is nearly all fully available from one label or site or another. I've already blathered praise for his two masterworks Starcrash and Hercules.  Now the lunatic eye slash-cum-time warp-devil-dipped and Pleasance-lipped, slippery dippy house bash Paganini Horror (1989) is available on a stunning Blu-ray (via Severin), so the circle is complete (almost). I hope, by the way, you don't think my praise of his crude genius is snide or mean-spirited - quite the opposite. If we can't laugh at Italian versions of our basest music class fears, see them bounced hurly burly into cosmic prisms, fall into slime pits in a universe where time loops are illustrated by giant floating hourglasses and spray-painted physics equations on the drywalls, we may as well hang shop and close up ourselves. 

It's as threadbare a production as they come. It's clear the money ran out somewhere along the line for Paganini Horror in ways it didn't for his other 1989 masterpiece, The Black Cat. Still, budget be damned, no way is Cozzi going to just give us girls in a rock band disemboweled with a bladed violin. L'Italiano Wood has bigger things on his mind. Tell him to make a cheap slasher movie that ties in Paganini to get some free associative publicity from a big budget Paganini biopic in the works at the time and he'll give you the universe. No budgetary constraints can stop him from grabbing at the cosmic ring, even if he knows his horse is out miles too far for his budget's arms. 

Maybe you saw the DVD cover, with the skeleton playing violin (left) and drew some cheap late-80s punk-meets-slasher impression from it. Maybe you figured it would be the usual tactless ladle of topless broads and denim-jacketed idiots offed gorily in some house where money for the electric bill grows on trees. Your conclusions couldn't be more wrong. Instead, Busto Arsizio's favorite son delivers all his usual tropes and tics: plenty of strong women with wild hair, planetary shifts, portentous gazes into nowhere; lasers, wild light effects, godawful dubbing, spiritual homage-paying (the spirits of Jack Kirby, Ray Harryhausen, Alex Raymond, and Bernie Krigstein all watch over Cozzi's shoulder in numb surprise), only in a 'house' that's really more like a half-finished set, drywall only half-painted, buckets laying around, sheets everywhere....  Man, I am talking myself into watching this all over again.... again? 

Bad though it is, in many ways, Paganini Horror is never dull or lacking for color. As in the same year's Black Cat, it reaches a climax at around ten minutes in and just keep building from there until we're too far out in space, riding a cosmic hourglass around the moon, through the moldy mud, through to the same room we left, only now covered in candles. And then someone stabs us with a violin. 

Dario Nicolodi gets star billing as Sylvia, the owner of the fabled "House in the Key of G" (where Paganini lived) which she rents out for cash. This week she's hosting a music video shoot for "Paganini Horror" the new song based on the mysterious last piece of written music by our titular virtuoso. Goosing up the atmos, Nicolodi announces Paganini conducted black mass rituals here in the 19th century. He disemboweled his bride and used her intestines as strings for his Stradivarius! That's how he hit those weird notes only he could hit! It's the screams of his bride forever trapped in the strings! Lead singer Kate  (Jasmin Maimone) exclaims that their 'House in the Key of G video' will be "like Michael Jackson's Thriller!" Bitchy manager Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) hires horror director Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi, who plays the same character in Black Cat) who decorates the shoot by spray painting the song title onto white sheets on the wall. Their most bodacious of bassists, Rita (Luana Ravegnini) wears a devil mask; there's also all-seeing eye lamp, a cosmic hourglass Cozzi must have brought from home, and candles. There's a mention of substituting mannequins as the band members start to disappear, but there's no time to follow up on that, as the disappearances keep happening as more and more people are sent off to look for the missing.... until everyone is being lured into the evil Paganini's clutches.

There are two real crimes to this movie. One, is that most beautiful bassist in all the world, Rita, is the first to die. Why her?  Why not literally anyone else in the cast? It seems very spiteful of our Paganini! Every second with her is precious. The doe-eyed assistant manager boy is next (lured to his death by a wet-haired version of Rita's ghost); but soon there's way more going on than just violin stabbings and standing around, with lots of weird mask cutaways. Holes open up under people's feet; electric energy pulses through those who fall into it or who try to escape the force field surrounding the house. Meanwhile Albert Einstein looks on, balefully, from a tacked-up poster, tongue hanging out in mock disapproval. Just to let you know, weird physics be happenin'.

As for that final piece of music, the one Paganini supposedly wrote that the doe-eyes assistant pays a fortune for from Donald Pleasance, well, no one ever called the film's composer Vince Tempura a modern Paganini. He does okay with the non-diegetic part of the score, not so much the Paganini-attributed song, though it is serviceable certainly. If Paganini is the Jimi Page of his era, this would be the theme from Death Wish II. 

Paganini himself is really the weakest part of the film: naturally the knife he uses has a treble clef-shaped handle, and also his metal Stradivarius switchblade likes to stick into expose bellies, i.e. sweet, sweet Rita's. He also has a huge cello case (no cello) to lock up our final girl and it's then set on fire. In addition, guitarist Elena (Michel Klipstein) gets infected by "a special fungus... like they discovered in the 1800s, on logs... floating along...  certain European rivers," notes Lavania. 'This infected wood.. was used to make a special kind of violin, the Stradivarius." Elena becomes a hideous fungus-covered monster; Lavinia says "this is the fungus, for sure... I saw it... magnified... in a TV documentary." 

Music is magic. We get an update on the harmony of the spheres. As with everything in the Cozzi canon, we get way more than you might expect. It may not all fit, but everything's here - even Cozzi's beloved cosmic hourglass! The name Lavania is also similar to Lavana (from The Black Cat). It's all here. 

If an analyst tells you why all traumatic childhood flashbacks occur in

 red bathrooms, kill them instantly.

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

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

All of the dubbing is pretty bad in both the Italian and English versions. English dubs especially have been Cozzi's Achilles' heel - be it the lame Texas accented robot and shrill Stella Starr of Starcrash, or the grating storytelling narrator in Sinbad and the Seven Seas, the result is that kind of lazy mixing where everyone sounds like they're right up on the mic in a quiet sound booth rather than out in the actual environment depicted. One side effect of it all is the hilarious near-constant screaming of Cozzi's nearly all-female cast. There is so much screaming that the actresses seem to be running out of breath; their screams trail off into hysteria, like they're barely trying to keep a straight face, the way a child who's been crying for hours starts to almost laugh with their crying voice. 

What makes it a true gem is Cozzi's infectious, palpable love and respect for fantasy, for strong women, and moviemaking.  When Ravegnini and the other girl band members gaze into the camera for their music video, you can tell they're feeling happy and part of the Cozzi family pack; they're not taking it very seriously but they love it.  There's no vibe of having to fight off pervy producers or rote macho objectification. These girls glow. Franco Lecca's deep yellow and red-accented cinematography makes everyone seem lovely with natural skin color (rather than the ghastly pale or gaudy tan we sometimes get in Italian horror films) and the Venetian architecture hums in burnished oranges and browns. 

Too bad when they go outside it's all bad day-for-night that makes everyone look purple and green. Why?

Ugh, why, Paganini, why kill Rita first? Why not get Pleasance to do his own dub? Why the bad day-for-night? Why the bad vibe ending? If it didn't have these things I would have seen it a dozen times already, instead of only twice.

Regardless, there are still enough gateways to other dimensions, electrical charges, melting hands, green glowing lights, and strange doorways to hell and all the other Cozzi trimmings to make six ordinary movies, even if full half the film is just one girl or the other walking up and down stairs and down halls, or screaming. We can't blame the master if some turkey distributor who didn't get what he wanted, so took out all the cosmic cutaways. We sure can wish for a full restored director's cut. Wishing is free.

BLU-RAY EXTRAS:

There's a nice interview with Cozzi at his sci-fi store; and the footage excised by the producer fills in a lot of the blanks  (would there was a copy with all the original shots -love the hourglasses floating in space - recycled from Hercules) and an explanation of why that too-trusting kid assistant would shell out a bag of money to some sinister Hobbes Lane type for an alleged authentic Paganini score.

Anyway, Severin has done wonders with what they got (Did the color grading just give out for the exterior shots, or was it supposed to look like that?) All we need now from Severin (here's hoping it's coming soon) is Cozzi's unofficial meta-Suspiria-sequel (recently re-available on Prime), The Black Cat (aka Demons 6: Anus Profundis) from 1990. (PS they released it this year, 2021!). 

And while we're on the subject, what about that crazy shot-on-video quasi-autobiographical Blood on Melies' Moon? (PS it came out this year, 2022! I'm quoted on the back label!)  I saw a clip wherein the great one himself ruminates in his bedroom about coming to terms with being labeled "The Italian Ed Wood." I guess I'm not the first to call him that. But hey Luigi, if you're reading this, know that a lot of us fans love Ed Wood way more than a more highly regarded artist like, say, Fritz Lang. I have a billion theories why that is but the main one might be the Brechtian distancing opening us up to the interplay of our own imagination, like having the curtains around your favorite play suddenly flung open. We get a bit of that in, say, Bergman's Magic Flute or Olivier's Henry V but it's intentional and hence a little pompous compared to the accidental Brechts like Wood and Cozzi (Godard--erasing his auteur footsteps around the sudden exposure of Brechtian mechanics as if Danny Torrance slinking backwards in his own tracks--is the Mr. In-Between.)

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

For the Complete Cozzi Cannon, click here!

Analog Hacks, Italian-disguised-as-American-Style: GHOSTHOUSE & WITCHERY (aka LA CASA III and VI) Double Feature

Saw AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON or 'Robots smashing Robots in endless pixelated scrimmage II." Was it entertaining? Sure, but also spectacularly uninvolving.  Was there ever a time when we collectively dreaded the sight of a flashing knife going into a stomach, dreaded it in the same blood-chill, heart-in-the-throat way we get now only when we're at the tippy-top of a roller coaster or looking down from a high railing-less ledge? Hurling a spear or waving a sword took at least some muscle or dexterity back then, and both killer and victim were pressed right up against one another. By contrast, watching our amped-up immortal superheroes battle Ultron and his many digitally-encoded robot soldiers--everyone armored up and invulnerable--is to feel that 'watching someone else play a video game' boredom unique to modern CGI movies. When the stakes are no higher than getting your initials on the board, action becomes just compulsive as a rat pressing a lever over and over that once, long ago, dispensed a single treat.

Low-investment pixel-bashing didn't exist in the 80s, at least not on the big screen (TRON aside).  Effects were done with models, fake blood, exploding plaster heads. In the fast, from-the-hip world of Italian horror especially, things ain't perfect: stuntmen trip over carpets and miss their fake punches by a mile. But we're about as far from ULTRON's empty bot-bashing as it's possible to get.

So far away, in fact, you're practically all the way around again.

I didn't come here to pixel-bash, though, I came to make a ridiculous claim, that Scream Factory's new GHOSTHOUSE / WITCHERY Blu-ray double feature is better than ULTRON, By virtue of its analog tactile hurtiness, pre-CGI Italian 80s horror like these go far deeper than its pouffy hair and rotary phones might suggest, back to the innocent time when we were still too young to not be horrified at the sight of intestines being pulled out of a screaming Tom Savini. Every slow walk through a darkened hallway was once fraught with a gut-tingle anxiety. We needed to be able to sneer at the fakeness of the gore even as we needed to look away. 

Though allegedly billed as sequels to Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD movies, which were huge hits in Italy (and there called LA CASA -"the House"), both GHOSTHOUSE and WITCHERY have nothing much in common with Raimi's films except the presence of a house. But today both glow with a quaint air of cheap ambivalence, both generate a certain ominousness and even if they're just imitating Fulci's imitations of America's imitations of Argento's imitations of Bava, or imitating Sean Cunningham's imitation of John Carpenter, hey, the Italians like GHOSTHOUSE's director Umberto Lenzi imitate better than anyone, or at least cheaper.

And though the budgets be low they were shot on 35mm, and they look good. They are serving drive-in dream logic distance and graphic violence. Shit like this was ideal for the post-midnight 'last' film on the drive-in bill after something like NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET IV or WAXWORK before coming straight to video... then to complete obscurity... gone and unmissed, unwanted for over two decades, But now, restored on Blu-ray in a double set from Shout... GHOSTHOUSE and WITCHERY demand your agog disbelief! 

Did anyone ever love them? Many have tried. All have failed.... so far.

Will you be the first, or wretch like the rest?  

 GHOSTHOUSE 

"La Casa III" (1988)
Dir Umberto Lenzi (As Humphrey Humbert)

*1/2

"Oh Paul... I saw death..."

Kids will be ghosts with clown dolls killing kids in late-80s Italian films set in 70s America--instead of just adults with axes and chainsawed because Poltergeist, and Nightmare on Elm Street had cleared away the tired slasher tropes, and Europe is a lot slower to change once it finds a style it likes. When I was in Buenos Aires in 2000 they were still dressing and acting like it was the 70s, and I loved it. So I accept that Lenzi thinks that in 1988 American' kids still give a shit about ham radios, or even CB radios for that matter, and are such good sports that when they hear someone screaming for help on one of the bands, you just know they have to triangulate the signal and rush, a few days later, to the rescue. In case, you know, the killer is really... really slow.

 Turns out, that message came from a deserted house where long ago an evil kid and her singing clown doll killed her parents. Now her ghost is down in the basement, killing anyone who ventures therein, including a diverse roster of good-natured hippie-punk squatters. The ham band join them and they all hang around the house like a mix of SUBURBIA squat and Scooby gang abandoned mine. Not sure why they feel so compelled to linger (we presume they have homes to go to, since they also have a cushy trailer, but you know how kids will be: they just hang out waiting for their creative deaths to find them. 

First up, naturally, is a fat black kid who is also a petty thief, and a freeloader: he hitches a ride, uses a skeleton hand for cheap shocks and pick-pocketing the kids who pick him up and basically shoves people out of the way to be the first to die. Maybe that's Ghosthouse's way of trying to "pass" as an American movie before that racist cliche became too glaring to ever use again. And hey, John Saxon shows up as the sheriff (see replies below for correction), vainly trying to make it better film. He tries to coax the kids to move on, albeit without success. Only Italians would think American suburban law enforcement would ever be nice enough to kids to actually ask them to stop trespassing on private property, then giving up with a chuckle and a sigh once the kids refuse. Even after they begin dying one by one, they feel compelled to linger, like the guests in Luis Bunel's EXTERMINATING ANGEL. It never occurs to them to even walk next door or drive away, or even drive down the block a bit, even though trespassing on private property is a crime (in America), and even they arrived in a still-working RV, and despite the cop's warnings that this isn't a legal, safe and community-oriented way to spend their weekend.

With the English dub, everyone but Saxon (who dubs his own lines, thank god) sounds like a semi-illiterate seventh grader doing a cold read at a junior high school audition while his lacrosse buddies snicker in the hallway. 

One quibble with either the sharpness of the transfer, the color grading or the way Italians overuse stage make-up of the time, the clarity of the HD Blu-ray image drains the lighting of nuanced skin color (if there was any) so we can see the thin color differentiation where the pancake make up line is around the base of their necks and the thin brush stroke marks of every foundation application, even on the men.. The result is the impression the entire cast has been living in a basement for the past decade, or England, or in their third year of clown college (or some Weimar cabaret). Is it just the restoration, or part of a gambit to make Italian actors look more Nordic (as in their general obsession with red hair, or if it's the color grading (1). Either way the cumulative effect is... demoralizing.

But there's joy in GHOSTHOUSE's many little life-affirming accidental Brechtian details, like the shot of a hand swinging a hammer down into a guy's forehead. The swing downward is held just a few frames too long in the editing so we see the hammer slow to a stop an inch from the victim's forehead before the quick mismatched jump cut to said hammer buried in his suddenly thicker (padded) and darker-hued forehead (the painted-on latex skin color doesn't match). I love this kind of thing as Lenzi's effect crew use the the same camera and effects tricks my buddy Alan and I used in our old super 8mm epics, and I find comfort in knowing we did it better, or maybe since our image wasn't HD, it just looked cleaner. Certainly our editing was better. Anyone can make a decent cut between the axe swinging down and the effect of the axe in the head so that it looks real. Only someone with no idea what they're doing, or a Brechtian like Godard, would leave the frames where we see the axe stop right before it hits the actor's head. But I'm so glad it's there. Without it, the scene would just be another lame murder with bad latex effects instead of a little life-affirming incident (fake death keeps real death at bay).

Finally, as GHOSTHOUSE lumbers towards its required 90-95 minute mark, all the "best kills" come tumbling out. One kid drowns in a boiling lake of skull-sprinkled cream-of-wheat under the basement floor as a cheap great din of 80s SUSPIRIA-ism howls in the bones of the soundtrack. The little sister is cut in half at the waist; a kid is diced up by a fan blade; blood comes out of the sink. There's even ghost doberman like in THE OMEN (though I like to think it's from FACE OF MARBLE). The clown doll is too similar to the one in POLTERGEIST and the ghost girl too similar to the one in KILL BABY KILL. But the scenes of graveyards and old tombs recall all the touchstones of the Fulci and Argento canons. John Saxon is always playing sheriffs, but he always elevates.  It's crap, but it's priceless... crap, And the Blu-ray comes with....

WITCHERY 

"La Casa IV"
(1988) Dir Fabrizio Laurenti (as Martin Newlin)
*

WITCHERY is both much worse than GHOSTHOUSE as far as unrealistic yet nauseating prolonged gore / torture scenes, but better as far as far as cast and writing, with several recognizable American movie faces and a theoretically understandable reason for hanging around an unoccupied murder house while everyone is being picked off (they're stranded on an island due to an alleged off-camera storm).

 Linda Blair is a pregnant lady looking to buy or sell a very old abandoned seaside island hotel --its gray shingles flap in the ocean wind most atmospherically. Pouty Catherine Hickland plays a virgin grad student squatting there while writing her term paper on the 'witch light' that has regularly appeared out of the window throughout the building's early colonial American history and up to this very day! Hickland's then-real life husband David Hasselhoff is her sexually frustrated boyfriend/photographer, forever pressuring her to yield unto his desire, but her grimoire asserts "virginity can be a virtue and not the barrier that separates innocence from knowledge." Touche! He can't argue with that, though he knows it's really her all-consuming fear of penetration, and he can't argue with that either. She has this great slurred drowsy way with a line, like she spent the whole shoot on Valium, and who could blame her? Her imdb.com page notes that after her acting career she became a professional hypnotist, which makes perfect sense considering the pulse-slowing alpha wave-inducing speaking pattern. 

Even so, we feel for the horny Hasselhoff. Why does he stay around? Dost he not know how Hoff he art!? There's other fish in the sea, and what a rod and bait box he surely packeth.  

If only we stayed with this pair and their push me-pull you but stay respectful sexual thing, the film might not be such a drag. If it did that and cut the grotesque yet unconvincing torture scenes down to a manageable length, it might even be watchable. As it is, WITCHERY is brilliantly summarized in Leonard Maltin's Film Guide as "uncomfortable."

I don't mind a certain level of gross-outs, but the victims here get sucked into some kind of sub-basement Middle Age horse barn Hell, consisting of a row of horse stalls that have been converted into an alternate dimension Hell by doing... exactly... nothing to them. They don't even remove the straw. But who needs webs and chains and flames and damned soul when your stable has mocking old pilgrim-cum-carny geek lady and deranged Pagan-looking old man, straight out of a Bruegel painting (those tacky white hoods!), reaching out through the horse stall slots as victims try to pass by, laughing and gibbering like caffeinated mental patients at a Jaycees haunted house for charity? I do. 

After enough suffering, we begin to learn that each victim stranded on the island is there because they are needed for a stern German witch's spell (the one with the witch light!) - each death is an invocation of one of the seven deadly sins in some vague way, so they suffer suitable stable-set punishments: for the pregnant Linda Blair, the Bruegel painting old lady and Satan (not even horns) fight over, and then eat, a premature (very fake-looking) newborn baby. In one prolonged, grotesque scene, the bossy Jewish mother real estate mogul gets her nails broken off, her lips sewn together--a terrible appliance job and we see almost the entire process of sewing all across the mouth, as if the producers were sure they'd have to edit it down (2). She's then is hung upside down in the chimney as the rest of the survivors unwittingly start a fire right under her hanging head and since her mouth is sewn shut they can't hear her screaming as her hair goes up in flames. Oh the humanity! Hickland the virgin is--in the most vile sequence--raped by a sickly youth with sewn-shut lips (what's with the lips thing, Fabrizio?) while the old lady and Satan hold her down -- Yeccch!! Thank 'god' then that Linda Blair's hair gets wild once she's inescapably possessed by the devil, and there's the old classic of when the nympho real estate girl starts seducing the Matthew Broderick-ish dweeb real estate guy in a room with a big mounted swordfish on the wall.... wait for it..... 

Maybe I ate too much of something or other while watching, but I came away from WITCHERY with little but a lingering nausea. I think the film may have been seeking the kind of kinky equilibrium of Clive Barker, whose HELLRAISER was a big horror hit the previous year. But Barker would be too outrageous and creative to let the nausea and ennui take hold. In the Barkerverse you understood the difference between both dimensions (the pinheads' S&M club and tawdry Britain) and felt they were both real, even if just dreams in each other's spaces (the pain/pleasure trip was more or less theoretical). But in WITCHERY, there is no difference, and both feel false. In Barker, the mutilated masochistic demons are trippy and funny. Here, they're 'uncomfortable.' And the latex effects are betrayed by the clarity of HD Blu-ray, making them less shocking and more like arts and crafts. 

There are things I like about WITCHERY though, despite all that.  I like the foreboding sense of isolation, with the eerie wind and dim lapping waves. I like that no one dares take a boat out from the mainland to rescue them, because the ocean is allegedly so choppy from a coming storm, like this is some kind of lost zone off I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING Scotland where everything seems tranquil but nothing is. Take their word for it. Even if you can see the shore from the island. I've had dreams like that. I get it. 

No amount of witchery can made that lipstick color and thick eyeliner work
anything but woe on all who gaze herein

As the seven hundred year-old witch lady mastermind of the murders, Hildegard Knef (left) is hit and mess. In general she reminds us there's a dispriting abrasive flipside to the unflinchingly carnal allure of Germanic lady icons, In specifics, her terrible make-up choices remind us of how some things are never meant for HD, such as old person skin when caked in too much bright oily white make-up, the smell of bad perfume over 'old person' mustiness that evokes slogging one's way through a tedious 'party' at your unfun grandma's. Torture all you want, but in truth it's Knef's black eyeliner and the garish horror of her orange lipstick that are the real horrors of WHITCHERY.

Knef in the 50s - nicely unadorned

Maybe my reaction towards Knef (L'ATLANTIDE) reminds me of my stern and disapproving late German grandfather. Old Germans, man, are the worst - somehow more decadent than any French libertine yet so joyless about it you become a conservative almost instinctively. Their favorite thing is to torture their grandchildren with endless long lunches and dinners und schwarzwaldkuchen. Hours and hours with nothing to do but try to understand their wearingly adult conversation, as the only book or magazine they have in their Apple Canyon cottage is a Reader's Digest from 20 years ago, and the only game in the rec room closet some 1000 piece puzzle of a dull landscape. So one endures a full week of being bored near to death, minutes stretching like years, hushed constantly as children aren't heard, symbolic lips sewn-shut.. waiting as lunch turns to dinner and dinner turns to drinks (which you can't have - you're too young) Being crucified upside down, stabbed with a swordfish and set on fire is an indulgent luxury by comparison...

Long azzits annalog.

NOTES:

1. Italian fondness for red hair in cinema means lots terrible red-on-black hair dye or bad wigs on people who could never in a thousand years pass as Irish, the hot sun melting their brown bronzer intro rivulets of opaque desert sweat (as in the grotesque McBain family wiped out by Fonda in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

2.so they do what so many directors do, add about 20 seconds more gore than they really want, so they can begrudgingly remove it at the censors behest, thus satisfying both of their power trips and ending up right where the director wanted it to begin with (but then if the censors don't say anything, viola- way too much to the point it loses its blunt force impact)

Shat on the Altar: HORROR AT 37,000 FEET, THE DEVIL'S RAIN

William Shatner, the Hawksian organizer of men in a far-flung future without currency. Shatner, determined player of crisis-bound priests, rock-like teachers, a race-baiting hate monger, an Esperanto-speaking Christian soul so pure he converts a succubus, and an Arizona sheriff named 'Dances with Tarantulas.' Shat, so so.. many things, all of them great, some of them even pretty good, but most so very strange that, if you look deep (and it's always worth looking deep with old Shat), you might find a whole other Shat self waiting below the gum line to spit forth a torrent of surprise micro-thesping! 

For your consideration: two films from the early 70s occult revival in which you will see him drink from a flask and scoff at God while on a flight frozen-in-mid air (at 37,000 feet!); and bare his chest and risk his family to hold onto a stolen devil book one minute but then drop his protective amulet the next. What a man is Shat! Courageous, callous, stubborn, fearful, pompous and pugnacious, he's a relic from when scientists and captains had resonant voices and one could be impulsive and brutish yet catlike and dancer nimble. The Neil Diamond of science fiction icons, Shatner is his name. And in the late 60s-early 70s, we kids couldn't have been happier about it - Bop Bop! 

I know there are those hardcore Trekkies annoyed by Shatner's macho fey arrogance as Kirk; using his cast mates hatred of his prima donna behavior on set as evidence, they disimiss him as a hammy egotist. They seem to prefer the dry, safe, nostril-breathing baldness of Patrick Stewart. I am not one of them, I am not even a Trekkie, but I do enjoy the first three seasons, the Kirk era. Shatner elevates the project to greatness. Stewart, as an actor, can be fun when snogging with Steve Railsback in Lifeforce or snogging with Wolverine in X2, but Stewart is too sane as Picard, too much Polonius and not enough Hamlet. Shatner's Kirk is a live wire. 

Maybe my loyalty to Kirk is because of watching Trek reruns every evening, as a small child in the early 70s.  To me, because of this familial connection, Shatner can do no wrong. He was to the TV as Neil DIamond was to my mom's album collection--a fact, a staple, a comfortable but sturdy foundation on which to grow one's taste and eventual collection. So it is with every generation perhaps. For mine, Shat's blowhard egotism is part of the charm. Kirk is always just a bit hammier than called for, his expressive resonant voice... his... unique... pauses...followedby... rapidcascades.... ofwords, have brought decades of amusement to a beleaguered nation. (See: Sex, Drugs, and Quantum Existentialism). And even when starring in dopey films like the two I shall discuss here, or artsy experiments like Incubus, Shat goes for broke, every time. Terrible or triumphant, he never phones in a syllable. Lugging Shakespeare-style oratory into the rarefied sphere of cowboys-vs.-Satanists, or fighting against ancient druid altars in the sky, he gives 100%, no matter how half-assed the vehicle.

So how half-assed does it get? Let's see!

HORROR AT 37,000 FEET

1973 - TVM / CBS

**1/2

In order to earn the primetime slot, a 70s TV movie had to explore at least three pop cultural themes. In Horror at 37,000 Feet, we get: 1) the curse attached to an ancient artifact (ala King Tut); 2) social commentary (i.e. the Salem witch trials); 3) the ensemble cast disaster movie, i.e. Airport. Swirl 'em all together and serve!

The ensemble cast was a huge staple of 70s TV, providing welcome work for familiar-faced old movie and TV actors, nearly-ran and upcoming starlets, and granite-jawed authority figures like Christopher Plummer or David Jansen or Chuck Conners. Since they'd meet as strangers coming together for the first and last time for a voyage, we got their full character trait dossier in a few friendly exchanges between passangers.

Many of them will get picked off and those who make it will end up bonded heroes (see also: Day of the Animals).

The vehicle this time is a jumbo jet luxury cargo-passenger "airplane" hauling a massively heavy Celtic altar exhumed from its sacred grove in Ireland, and but a small scattering of passengers. They make the weird blonde lady put her dog in the cargo hold. And the downstairs storage freezes --the dog is frozen solid! (Why did we need to go through that, so the studio could show off its frozen dog prop? It's upsetting!) And then, the plane become suspended at 37,000 feet, trapped in a crossfire of wind tunnels, providing an ingenious explanation of why the plane interiors never once give the impression of movement, or engine roar, or the inside of the plane being anything but a breakaway set. Luckily the stewardesses all wear hot white go-go boots. Shat, playing a bitter, soused ex-priest who lost his faith (zzz) rocks some writerly glasses while sewing, and sports a toupee far more natural than usual. These little things help and the film needs all it can get. I love Shatner unconditionally but man, is he terrible in this. Richard Burton might have got away with it, maybe it was written with him in mind. But it's painful to buy our Kirk as a misanthropic drunk bitterly ranting about "homo-sapien" as a bunch of savages and noting, prissily: "I didn't lose my faith - it lost me." He doesn't sound drunk, profound, or pleasant to be around. His bitter laughs sound forced and bitchy. He doesn't want to be in this film and is taking it out on us. Has he ever even had a drink or seen a drunk person? 

I ain't complaining about how bad it is, though. I love a kind of zero point surreal experience where some smoke wafting up from a hole in the carpet and the occasional Val Lewtonian shadow substitutes for any kind of monster or concrete threat (which is great, since the whole point of the 'mounting menace' is to keep you glued through the commercials, worried you might miss the monster). The strange fascination with sub-zero temperatures on a plane (just touching the door makes pilot Chuck Connors' whole arm go numb) goes well with the array of locked-in ensemble types waiting for their chance at a terse "Why doesn't somebody do something??!" line. Playing like the unrehearsed table read of an off-off-Broadway one-act drama, directed by someone who has never been on a real plane, there's a sense of disaster always about to happen, as if a dozen actor tantrums are edited out between each line. And what kind of stewardess would confiscate a first-class passenger's flask, and not bring him a sip of champagne? That's taking it too far! 

Shatner is just one of many characters though - no one person really stars. There  Chuck Connors as the square-jawed pilot; Shatner the boozy priest who lost his faith; Lynn Loring his Mia Farrow-ish wife; Russell "The Professor-and" Johnson; Paul Winfield as the nattily-dressed physician whose dogmatic rationalism will soon be put to the test; Buddy Ebsen a cranky millionaire always ready with a homespun witticism; and--providing the bulk of the supernatural exposition--the baby-voiced Mrs. Pinder (Tammy Grimes). A wild-eyed pagan with straight dirty blonde hair and aversion to fire, she knows all about the stone's colorful human sacrifice-enriched past and makes the most out of every evil syllable of dialogue. Her dog, named Damien, stored below by the altar is clearly given no ketamine, the swines.

The only real sore spot is Will Hutchins as a spaghetti western B-cowboy with a terrible towhead mop top wig and rodeo shirt and a habit of shouting all his lines. Yeesh Watching the pathetic way he hits on one of the lady passengers is the most terrifying thing in the movie. Thank 'god' for Mrs. Pinder and her crazy eyes and straight dirt blonde hair, Connors and his  granite jaw of Connors, and of course, the Shat and his faux-drunk sneering at his fellow passenger's atheist-in-a-foxhole panic. Determined to be utterly worthless, he snaps to life when the other passengers contemplate child sacrifice. As Mrs. Pinder says, it just pisses the evil one off by trying to trick him (they try to switch the girl with her doll first). What the altar and its attached warlock wants the blood of one of its ancestors, the psychic girl (Jane Merrow) whose rich architect husband (Roy Thinnes) brought the altar as a souvenir from her ancestral home, against her wishes. The very fact a cargo plane has such a big cabin, and is flying passengers as well as a 11,000 pound altar seems very odd. Does this kind of flight even exist? Seems like that altar should be shipped by a freighter. But hey, it saves on passenger manifests (i.e. no extras needed) and allows more room for the camera and later, the possible child sacrifice fire in the now frigid cargo hold. Will the terrified passengers commit the ultimate transgression or be turned into green puddles before the dawn can come up in time to save them? But first a word from Alpo.

Horror at 37,000 Feet moves pretty fast without the commercials, and fans of Italian horror can luxuriate in the colorful red lights of the cockpit and everyone can appreciate the wild-eyed hysteria with which Loring rises to the occasion, furiously cutting off Jane Merrow's hair to wrap in the child's doll and wrapping it up in her clothes. "And some of your fingernails," she raves, as if possessed. When that doesn't work, it's time to actually sacrifice the child! Great hammy stuff with Shatner wobbling around and all the actors wondering what do in this under-rehearsed closed-in space to 'portray' their types without any directorial input. Shatner out matches Buddy Ebsen in the finger bending department. "Here, take another pain killer,' says the co-pilot to Connors, "no pint in saving them." Shatner realizes he can terrify Mrs. Pinder by waving his Zippo lighter in her face. "Fire... To burn.... witches!" Yikes! He's  not very PC --he even sneers at people who "believe jimson weed will make them immortal!" Dude, take it from an old jimson weed-head, no one thinks that. But Shat should know, having counseled the first and only 'mixed bag' drug addict that same year in Go Ask Alice.

Those of us who were around in the 70s and remember seeing this with the family are far less likely to wince over all this stupidity. We might care though, that the film can no longer hide its poverty in an analog cathode ray blur, or hide its lack of logical sense via the amnesia of regular commercial breaks. For those of us who were kids at the time (I was seven), Horror is a fond touchstone for those days when everyone watched the same shows (there were only three channels and no VHS and families only had one TV) and it gave the all something to laugh about together. For us this is as precious a memento as a family album. Maybe more so.  For us, though the clarity doesn't do the film any favors, the DVD is a must. If only Satan's School for Girls or Death at Love House would one day get the same respectful remastering treatment they too deserve1. May Cheesy Flix die a thousand deaths fo blurring Kate Jackson worse than a bad reception! Still, better than nothing.

 Though I hear 'nothing' is getting better all the time.

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THE DEVIL'S RAIN

1975 - dir. Robert Fuest

**1/2

I've seen hellfire and I've seen face-melting rain/ I've seen green puddles with air bubbling up through them / and it wasn't impressive, even via nostalgia's glowing tolerance. But if you were a kid in the 70s, The Devil's Rain falls into the unholy and powerful relic category of stuff unseen yet dreamt of. Its TV spots were an inescapable part of local prime time TV in 1975, when I was eight and very impressionable and into monsters and devils. I still remember the weird the melting faces, Borgnine with goat horns, and the robes - both kind of a turn on and scary at the same time. I also remember I had a bizarre childhood dream I was part of the coven, melting under the rain, and even now a lingering prepubescent jouissance echo hits me imagining it. Those of us on the playground heard from our older siblings Devil's Rain was lousy, but my dream was amazing, and if I wasn't so savvy about Satanic cinema even at eight years-old, and it was the 80s instead of the 70s, and a careerist child psychologist heard me describe my dream, he'd probably think I was abducted by Satanists and arrest my parents and teachers. But in the 70s it was anybody's game, a whole Middle America demographic had gone to the devil with touchy feely sharing: cocktails, bridge, Jaycees, smoking on planes, turtleneck and medallion conclaves of wife-swappers, communes and encounter groups; there were all-night block parties leading into softball breakfast picnics of still-drunk adults and kids high on their very first sunrise and sleep deprivation. It was grand indeed, total freedom, and even the devils were cool. And church was just an excuse to act rambunctious.

That sub-sexual supernatural power of not being able to see a film like Devil's Rain as a kid is of course a substantial amount of the appeal for me and my Generation X comrades, the last group who experienced the high of unavailability, of R-rated movies being forever out of reach (once they left the theaters) and so projected upon with our most lurid imagination. Just seeing the TV commercial for an R-rated horror movie was enough to give us sexy nightmares and make the world seem full of strange telekinetic magic and unimaginable 'adult' terror. Our constant imagining created a parallel subconscious repository so powerful it later spilled over into our adult reality, dragging us by our budding sexual drives towards a dreaded obsession that finally led to the 'satanic panic' witch hunts of the 1980s and the rise of nervous overprotective brand parenting we're still hurting our children and ourselves with today.

Turns out, in real life, seeing it now on DVD as an adult, I realize the film is too strange, too 'off' and too slow to be scary or sexy, but it is creepy, kinda. The daytime Satanic ceremonies in the Arizona desert, the boarded up church in the middle of a nowhere ghost town, the upside down pentagram stained glass window, the ultimate futile weakness of Shatner's moxy in the face of Borgnine's mojo, the weird Psycho-style mid-film protagonist shift, it all generates a collective creepiness. as does the idea of looking for your parents and finding they've become life-size animated black-eyed wax effigies urging you to bring them 'the book'.

Earnest Borgnine is an odd choice for the head Satanist, but Shatner is great as the cowboy whose parents are sucked into the coven, which has taken over the whole ghost town. Meanwhile Joan Prather is psychic for no good reason except to allow her to 'see' the flashback to colonial times by looking into cult member John Travolta's dead black eyes, and to provide an interesting scene where she performs an EKG for a crowd of psychology students while Dr. Eddie Albert explains that ESP is very real and he's in the process of discovering what brainwave controls it. Tom Skerritt is her husband and eventually wrests the lead away from Shatner like Sylvia Miles from Janet Leigh.  

Any film that gives Hieronymus Bosch and Anton LaVey screen credit deserves some halting respect but I love lots of other things about this screwy picture, from the ESP angle right down to the way Scientology and plastic surgery are precognitively critiqued by the sight of a ceremonial robe-clad very young John Travolta's face melting in the rain. My only complaint is the unnecessary, depressing final 'twist' so I try to remember to stop watching beforehand, like somewhere during the last 20 minutes which is all just rain and melting. I still like it better than Fuest's higher praised work, like Dr. Phibes. Mighty Shat makes shit shows like this soar, son! Drink to that... or be damned like a black Cadillac chasing James Brolin through the dusty desert... with no driver!! Now that's a movie, even if it ain't got no Shat screaming on its altar.

See also: KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS! 

Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)

"The movie appeared at a moment of optimum spiritual chaos in American life. Rosemary’s Baby remains an iconic memory trace of a time when anything seemed possible, including the birth of the Anti-Christ”. - 

Gary Indiana, “Bedeviled”, Village Voice. 

"The creepy nature of the film is not in its special effects, but in its realistic premise. The story takes place in a real apartment building (the Dakota) that has a real reputation of attracting eccentric elements of New York’s high society. The evil coven is not composed of stereotypical, pointy-nose witches but of friendly neighbors, prestigious doctors and distinguished individuals. They are elegant, rational and intelligent and are connected to important people. The realism of the movie forces the viewers to ponder on the existence of such groups, to a point that some feared that the movie, after its release would cause an all-out witch hunt" --Vigilante Citizen

“This is no dream, this is really happening!” - Rosemary Woodhouse

The first film perhaps ever to exploit our deep dread of old folks, 1968's Rosemary's Baby gazes deep and diabolically into the murky waters wherefrom skeletal hands of grandparents reach up to pat their captive breeders' kicking bellies. With real life abominations against women, like the 2012 male-only hearing on women's reproductive freedom in the US, and the stoning to death of women whose hair is accidentally exposed at fundamentalist Muslim markets (so I hear), it's ever-trenchant--and the end goal, conscious or not, is the same: co-opt the womb, destroy the chthonic Kali Durga shell around it before it expands wide enough to envelop you and grind you to pussy-whipped vagina dentata oblivion. At a certain depth, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Satanism become indistinguishable, the same old testament wrath of the 'jealous' god (Moloch disguised as Yaweh), the same flood called in to wipe out the old advanced civilizations and leave us collectively barefoot and pregnant, unable to change a lightbulb for centuries to come, in other words, we learned how to repress the feminine from God his self. Read the Old Testament and it's pretty clear that God, back in those days, was a monster, demanding ever greater blood sacrifices and burnt offerings, thousands of doves nailed to the wall of the church, one of each of the animals on the ark burned alive after waiting a whole extra year in the Ark even though it was dry outside, that kind of thing. Comparatively, Satan seems pretty cool, the Prometheus who turned us onto mind expanding drugs when our creator just wanted our brains docile and unquestioning. 

And that version of God, the old one, had a wife. The Old Testament had female characters like Lillith and Asherah--AKA Mrs. God, Yaweh's female counterpart, all excised from the record.  A million witch burnings had to happen to restore male supremacy, and even then it's in doubt. So who can blame the devil worshippers for being so well-hidden from the public eye?  To the long extinct Asherah worshippers, matriarchal pagans or just women in general, Christianity is as the KKK is to African-Americans, or Nazis to the Jews, Andrew Jackson to the Native American Nation, proof that if you go too far in any direction you become your own opposite. 

A typical early Christian demolishing an Asherah pole (by Dakota O'Leary)

To reach a perspective high enough to see these patterns clearly, let us overlay over the pre-biblical murk of the past, a snapshot of NYC in 1968, a time and place, if there ever was one, for the ashes of Asherah to reform into our realm. Rosemary generated real uncanny paranoia that made the collective unconscious a dangerous place, and finally broke through into the collective consciousness in the Satanic panic of the early-80s. 

But no matter who many women go under man's thumb, Woman, Asherah, Mrs. Old Testament God, never can or will. She can, on the other hand, become a vengeful Medea for being locked out of the men's club Illuminati narrative; are we the brood she bashes for revenge? This feeling of being excluded from knowledge has leaked out into her children too -- if there is an Illuminati they never asked us to join. Like Rosemary with the cult, no one even asks if she wants to be a member. She has to literally break through her own hidden exit to find out what's going on in her own womb. And since we see the entirety of the film from Rosemary's point of view, we have to guess, just as she does, until the very end, where babies really come from. The entirety of the film is absent direct visualization of any devil practices (dream aside), the paintings at the Castavets are removed when Rosemary comes over, like she's a child kept in the dark about why she came from her mother but has her father's features, until she's old enough, or distraught enough, to break through.

Understandably, that paranoid hallucination conspiracy angle was jettisoned for most of Rosemary's imitators, to be replaced by external signifiers like robes, horns, pentagrams, possession, smoke and mirrors and screaming naked virgins. Far from being scarier, this external projection and performative evil came as a great relief, like Hammer's Devil Rides Out (also from 1968). Those films are for more fun than Polanski's. Those are the ones we return to again and again on Halloween. Once we see the horns and the licentious ceremonial dancing, the fear stops, replaced by fond amusement. 

 

Polanski knew to never show such iconography or mindless externalized malice, and even the "this is really happening" dream sequence is kept surreal and strange. Polanski knew a Satanist with a gentle smile and a natty bow-tie and no real malice in his eyes could be far scarier than one that 'looked' scary, i.e. with a goat horn cowl and black cloak. We're never allowed (not old enough?) to see Rosemary's unholy baby, or the rapist devil (a hand and yellow eyes aside); the old people chanting around her in the dream are naked, no robes (a motif repeated with the witches in Polanski's Macbeth); and no horns or forked tail can compare in uncanny dead to the mystery and horror of the human reproductive system, or a flock of naked old folks standing around your bed while you're writhing in a drugged stupor. It's so creepy it's almost never been repeated in these imitations, yet it's all right there - no wardrobe budget needed.

If you know this blog you know I've had my own drugged demon visitations (see here) -- I believe the boundary line between the real and the vividly imagined is traversable in ways our minds as yet cannot consciously grasp, but who knows if certain ancient cults haven't figured out how to do just that, to creep in through the basement of our psyches and partially manifest? They can't all have been wiped out by the flood and then Attilla the Hun, then Genghis Kahn and then the Christians. 

For instance just last night on Late Night with Craig Ferguson he was talking with an author about how characters sometimes break away from you when you're writing them - they show up in places and do things you don't consciously expect as you're writing - as if they notice you writing about them. I had that happen to me writing my first novel wherein my character realizes some people he met the other night at a coke party are Yaqui crow trickster shamans, and right at that moment I could feel real Yaqui crow trickster shamans sensing me writing about them, and they began to begin to stir in their far-off nests, sending psychic representations forth through the gossamer tubeways of thought to climb out of the page to get me, like they could blind me or destroy me with their unified field of chant just as the coven had done to Tony Curtis in RB. Were these the same shaman who guided Carlos Castaneda? That you only had to start writing about them and they'd flutter up through the interdimensional tubeways into your unconscious and take over the typewriter?

But there's more to the story of Rosemary's Baby than just combined creative unconscious drives commingling to blind God long enough that a dream lover spawn might sneak across the uterine expanse of Mother Gaia's unburnt-at-stake dimensional dividers (after all, souls, even those of non-devil babies, have to come from somewhere). 

It wasn't just Polanski's film /cross to bear, and his wasn't the only life it allegedly destroyed. Rosemary had as a producer the legendary master of ballyhoo, William Castle, and, by 1968, Emergo just wasn't gonna cut it. He needed to go deep for a new signature gimmick, one for the turbulent times. He decided to do as the Castavet cult does in the film, to stop with the cardboard horns and skeletons, the axes and insurance politics, and go right for the unconscious, the power of paranoia, of conspiracy and curses. I'm not saying, 'mind' you, that he made up a Macbeth-style curse hanging over the film's production, that his linking of strange on-set accidents and tragedies to the film's subject matter was straight up Castle ballyhoo for the age of Aquarius. But if he did do that, if he started the rumor up, in the vein of Tut's tomb opening curse, then maybe the daemonic tricksters of alternate dimensions noticed him weaving a paranoid associative rumor nexus and sent their Satanic kidney stone calling card across the gossamer web that connects myth, dream, mind, soul, and nerve endings... to 'help' Castle along, as it were. 

David Parkinson writes about the hate mail Castle received for the film, the curses leveled at him, and how Castle and composer Krystof Komeda were both struck down with crippling, painful ailments shortly after the film premiered, and then the murder of Polanski's real-life wife Sharon Tate (who co-starred in Eye of the Devil, see: The Blonde Devils of '66,) and the untimely womb ripping of their child, (he omits the eerie similarity to the violation of Rosemary in the film and Polanski's own rape charges), to end with a link to John Lennon's death in 1980:

John Lennon had spent the spring of 1968 with Mia Farrow at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in India. During their stay, Lennon had written "Dear Prudence" for Farrow's sister (who shared a name with Sharon Tate's Yorkshire terrier) and it featured on The Beatles' White Album that November. Charles Manson claimed that the LP contained coded messages about the impending race war he hoped to provoke with the Cielo Drive slayings. Lennon himself met a violent end in December 1980 when he was gunned down in New York — outside the Dakota apartments." (more) 

For Polanski, a child survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, the coven aspect of Levin's novel surely tapped into the paranoia of his childhood hardship. Part of the Nazi's rationale for their homicidal anti-Semitism was that Jews were a mystical black magic Protocols of the Elders of Zion cabal, and just as educated women had to lay low for centuries lest they be burned at stake, so too this feeling of a secret conspiracy lingered in the Jewish intellectual community, creating separateness, enforced perhaps by Aryan rivals for Jewish business (or property disputes--as in Salem), or disgruntled employees getting passed over for promotion in favor of some kid fresh out of Yeshiva school, or ghettoization (as in Merchant of Venice), or--if you're goy-learning your Jewish fiancee was being pressured not to marry you by the mother of one of your Jewish friends. So which came first? The secrecy and elitism, or the goy intolerance necessitating a strength in numbers that must be hidden from the non-Jewish population, lets they believe the anti-semitic conspiracy theorists? 

In America, we can't imagine what it's like to be invaded, to have an openly evil and oppressive system turn human compassion and morality upside down, to obliterate all traces of rhyme and reason, to be persecuted for something done centuries before we were even born, all our possessions confiscated or destroyed, starved and beaten. But for Polansk,i this is a formative experience. He knows all we see and hear of 'reality' as Americans constitutes only the tip of a black iceberg. Behind closed doors, who knows what monsters sit, working spells and deals to ensure they win all the marbles before the game is even started? If we knew those spells, wouldn't we use them, too? Didn't we, in a way, already? (we in this case being SWM Christians like myself).

Between 1933-1941, America benefitted indirectly from the Nazi's intolerance. Most of Europe's intellectual Jews, gays, physicists, artists, and filmmakers fled to our shores, bringing their strange occult customs, their atomic bomb formulas and expressionistic lighting designs.

But after the war, America turned away from seances and toward atomic age anxiety, less devil cults and more giant bugs and rockets to the moon. Then the suburbs were born (they didn't exist before WW2), a place where junior could play catch in the back yard and parents with rakes smiled from cross the street and cheered the space race on to the moon. Occasionally a dad could go insane (as in Nicolas Ray's Bigger than Life) or kids could grow up into spoiled brats (as in Douglas Sirk's All that Heaven Allows), but childbirth was holy... and the country club was 'restricted.' 

Babies, housewives, and old people could never be, you know, evil --not in the straight white Anglo-Christian suburbs. 

A few exceptions came and went. There was The Bad Seed, and a spate of crazy old broad movies launched by the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But Jane and Rhoda were psychotic, flash-frozen at childhood, before their brains developed the foundations of the empathetic response --we knew this from the get-go. They might be terrifying in theory, but it was an understandable evil, the suspense was waiting for the rest of the characters to realize it. But they were lone gunmen. And we knew where they lived.

But what about the sane, gentle sweethearts bringing you vitamin shakes to help your pregnancy, or the 'no arguments, young lady' condescension of top shelf pediatricians played by stalwart salts like Ralph Bellamy as Dr. Sapirstein (who tells Rosemary "And please don't read books. Don't listen to your friends either.") Sapirstein could be espousing the Muslin fundamentalist sexist line, or America's before the dawn of the sixties. He might as well add "and for the love of Mike, don't vote or wear slacks." Rosemary's only form of revolt against this trap is her short hair-cut, an expensive 'very chic' affront, which to Guy is tantamount to her drawing on the wall in crayon, defacing his valuable property. As she's getting dangerously thin, pale, and pain-wracked, the effect of the short hair is to evoke the camps all over again... even right there on the UWS.....they're always there. 

In conveying Rosemary's gradual awakening from compliance ("you're gonna think I really flipped,") Polanski exploits our willingness to grant power to unseen forces, almost as if it's in our DNA to do so (and maybe it is). The link between paranoia and pregnancy is made unilateral, and with Polanski's film we see how patriarchal 'big city' condescension and secrecy can completely dominate even a free spirited young woman from Iowa whose determination to be hip is both her saving grace and undoing. Taken in total, "Rome's" story has devils of both the psychoanalytical interpretation variety (paranoia brought on by pregnancy-related estrogen surges) and the physical arrival, up from the subconscious realm, of an actual devil ("Hail Satan!") Like in a Lovecraft story, the womb functions as an interdimensional airport with connecting flights from unconscious hell to conscious reality, on the wings of combined chanting and herb-spiked dreams. Rosemary's Baby is the opposite of a film like Inception - which is a story about people invading other people's dreams. Baby is about a dream incarnated into reality. It happens all the time, like when writing a novel or something and you realize 'you' are really dictating your unconscious's voice, so that the finished product might get that voice's owner, your shadowed anima, closer to actual merging with your daylight consciousness (if only your ego wasn't always in the way, waving its rosary and uttering empty prayers).

HIDING MAKES YOU UNKNOWABLE.

When we sense something is being kept from us, that thing gains in power as our conscious fears project onto it (trying to pre-program our response) and projection is exactly how the coven operates: they chant together and use combined mind projection to astral travel along an associative nine-dimensional curve via an item belonging to the victim into that victim's nervous system. This is the same 'reality' that paranoid schizophrenics and remote viewing agents live in. It's an ocean wherein all dreamers are linked together, like fish, drowning sailors, whales, swimmers, and dolphins are all connected via an oceanic matrix of nonlocal conductive consciousness ('salt water'). 

But not everyone swims, drowns, or paddles. The Satanist sails on the surface of this sea (hence Rosemary's dream of being on a boat and seduced by a Naval officer, like Nicole Kidman's fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut - see Make-Up Your Mind Control). The psychedelic shamans surf until they're wiped out (whoa bro, you rode that wave?!); unconscious dreamers snorkel or bob in the waves, and the schizophrenics drown, and the mystic swims. (to paraphrase Joseph Campbell). Rosemary's dream begins on the ship and winds up bobbing in the waves, then sinking, before clawing her way back to land (finding the secret passage between the apartments). In the end, she joins with the cult because her maternal instinct is too strong to resist. The secret passage behind the cupboard at the end of the hall is like a mirror of the interdimensional womb/chanting gateway by which the horny devil entered her boudoir. "What have you done to its eyes?!" she asks, horrified. "He has his father's eyes," Castavet answers. And its the eyes of Guy's rival for his coveted part that are affected by the telepathic sabotage of the coven. The oceanic matrix connects all parts of all things. They should name the child after the blinded rival actor, and close the circuit.

It's interesting to note that in both Rosemary and the Exorcist there is a mother alone with her child and an absentee father (allowing room for a 'new' one), and a kindly older male friend who dies in mysterious circumstances. The males are all either dysfunctional, absent, or very old and full of strange oaths and bearded like the bard. Is God Dead? so trumpets Time Magazine!

The last proper dad we see in the film, played by Maurice Evens, is the proper authority figure of the old school of monster movies, the backstory exposition scientist, the merry fire-toasted Van Helsing type, outlying some grim history: "Adrian Marcata lived there, so did the Trent sisters." It turns out of course that Marcata / Mocata, it's all the same old man in the painting above the Castavet's mantle. 

The name Adrian Marcata should of course remind Hammer fans of The Devil Rides Out and its villain Bob Adrian Mocata, played by Charles Gray (below left), which came out the exact same year but, compared the resonant contemporary realism of Polanski's film, seems to be from a much earlier era. Even Rosemary's utterance "Hey, let's make love," while they're eating dinner on the floor in their empty apartment, is straight out of the 70s, while in Devil Christopher Lee is throwing magic beans at giant spiders. Yet the two evil patriarchs - the same, just manifesting different powers. The devil may be thwarted in Rides but he wins in Baby -- and he does so by keeping a low profile, hiding his deeds even from the camera. 

Mocata / Marcata 

The first time we see Roman Castavet AKA Steven Marcata, he is wearing a Satanic dark red velour shit that contrasts sharply (especially in the recent brilliant hi-def version) with the dark surroundings. He sits off by himself, in a big chair far enough away from the couch whereon Rosemary, Guy, and Minnie are squeezed together to indicate his mastery over them, as if he's on stage, and just his talk about having been all around, every town on earth, makes him seem ageless, omnipresent (even as its folded into his folksy homilies) his ability to seem familiar with Guy's work is standard suggestive manipulation ala fortune tellers at the carnival. And if you've ever been in rich people's parlors where the furniture is all the way across the room, you may may have noted that they don't shout; it's kind of up to you to sharpen your hearing enough to comprehend what they're saying, amazed, perhaps, that you can. You realize you're so used to boorish loud people you've forgotten how to talk in a low voice to someone whose ten or 20 feet away. 

The cynical self-serving unconscious bluster of Guy is apparently sensed by the Castavets, which is why he's brought into their fold and not Rosemary. They sense in her a deep goodness that he--self serving prick that he is--lacks. What she is, on the other hand, is naive and easily smitten - the common thread associated with 'goodness' as mere lack of experience (otherwise she'd wise up to his snake oil charms) When the news announces "Pope Paul VI arrived at 9:47 AM" - he excitedly shouts, "that's a great spot for my Yamaha commercial!" as if he has some say in media buying or that the pope doesn't exist outside the TV, he's just trying to weasel in to anywhere he'll get exposure. We later hear some of his true vitriol come out while he's rehearsing with his crutch, shouting the line "I'm in love with no one, especially not your goddamned fat wife!" as if anticipating Rosemary's swollen belly. He's bad at hiding things, and such a weak actor he can't even commit to the part of the concerned doting husband.

 It's a part that also shows Cassavettes' limits as an artist and actor which fits the character he plays and which would typecast him for decades: the charming swine who genuinely thinks we were all awed by his projected street savvy warmth.(1) Polanski nails all that down around Guy so all Cassavettes can do is squirm and pace the room and seem utterly confused by the fact that Rosemary's growing less and less charmed by his patronizing grin. She's growing out of him, while he doesn't change his act. His is a kind of evil we're familiar with, for it stems from vanity, like the fallout of getting by on your charisma for so long you're no longer able to function without it. When your looks fade, you find yourself without the one thing that masked your dysfunction. Such a person is so ripe for Satan's book it's easy to imagine Satan helped make him attractive to begin with. Any relapsed alcoholic knows too well how the devil is patient, willing to work a long con, planting a seed then coming back when it's a tree and chopping it down. 

But that kind of paranoia leads to madness. As we let ourselves get obsessive over the obscure elements of the film, it begins to take its place in the 'evidence' of a global Satanic conspiracy (for realsies). Take the central dream/rape sequence, a benchmark in how surreal dream sequences can enhance reality rather than diminish it. Most films' dream sequences are cop-outs, places to dump the sexy weird shots or artsy ideas that don't fit the story but which the producers want so they can use them in the poster and coming attractions. Only great surrealists like David Lynch or Luis Bunuel understand that dreams are the real part, it's life that's the mirage. When Rosemary momentarily comes out of her trance to note that "this is really happening" it's terrifying in a way no film has been before or since, because suddenly we can't really fathom which parts of what we see and hear are the dreams and which are reality. Polanski knows the power of the mind and the flexible nature of space and time and that in these areas lurk real horrors.

The blue laser eyes and telekinetic devil children of later films are just the opposite, which is not necessarily bad. In externalizing and materializing the threat, we can laugh at our own fears and so in some small way, allay them (i.e the smiling black man with the yellow eyes in The Devil Rides Out). But with no monster in sight, no matter how far we look, and no 'seen murders' (no blood), there's actually a crisper sense of dread in Rosemary. Of all the horror films of the last 20 years, only The Blair Witch Project has fully exploited this same murky power. 

"death is no dream..." - Rezső Seress

The conspiracy theories of authors like David Icke, re: the Illuminati and Zionist banking cabals, work on a similar level to these terrifying ambiguous dreams, all suffused with strange symbols and meanings. Irregardless of its authenticity, the Illuminati-Zionist-Rothschild-Bildenberg banking conspiracy is a vibrant, fascinating myth, operating between truth and fiction, allowing us to see through reality until it dissolves into a a series of stages, mirror reflections, or stereograms. As Peter Tork once said: "the mind can't distinguish between the real and the vividly imagined." He said that in HEAD, also from 1968. And the reverse is also true - the mind cannot see itself except through hallucination, and what's the difference between a graphic artist working with a computer to create a hidden 3D pattern in a stereogram and a shaman chanting a spirit into existence? Nada. Just try doing eye surgery on yourself without a mirror, or cubism with one eye shut. This is why we have therapists -- to show us what we really are under all the bluster, make-up, and pageantry.

But there is also the 'anti-therapist;' filmmakers and SRA inflictors --who understand the significance  of performative or mimetic rituals we see today only in indigenous tribes or at Burning Man. It is the ultimate power of self-deception. 

HERS IS THE POWERLESSNESS, THE AGONY & THE GORY for Eve-a and Eva-a

There's a practical reason, apparently, why Satanists and CIA brainwashers inflict sexual abuse and physical torture on their children, The intense trauma creates in their growing minds a dissociative state, resulting in split personalities, where the daytime conscious one has no memory of these rituals. 

I myself noticed the way intense agony creates a split in one's consciousness when I dislocated my knee cap. The extreme sensory pain launched my perspective into a split where one side of me in agony at the slightest movement, screaming involuntarily, on the other me standing slightly back, floating over my prostrate form, hearing my own screams but muffled, as if I had earplugs in. The greater my body's physical distress the more the contemplative serenity increased. 

Surely the breathing exercises of Lamaze also tap into this, as well as Stockholm syndrome: the agony of childbirth shifts the consciousness of a woman into that of 'an' expectant mother to 'the" Mother-- her triumph for enduring the unbearable pain the flush rapture of being finally free of all that weight, floating like an angel in your own loving arms. Torturous initiations for boys becoming men; menstruation for girls; hazing for frat guys--all coincides with the journey from mythic third eye visualization, 'the becoming', the five senses perceiving 'the becomed' sixth in a kind of recoil motion, vomiting the soul up into the mythic outsider "observer" position, the subject moving from being a Rosemary-style child guest, kept out of the adult swim, to being initiated into a cosmic truth too ambivalent and full of surface hostility and danger (such as Christian persecution) for children and innocent Iowa girls to grasp without first heating up their rigidly naive flyover state consciousness through pain and tribulation.

Most devil movies end with the coven being swallowed up in flames (ala Suspiria, Inferno, The Devil's Rain, Ride with the Devil, etc.) which is mocked in Babt bywhy the burning church painting Rosemary finds when she finally breaks through the hidden door into the Castavet's apartment is so wry (and which she recognizes from when it was "really happening" below decks in her dream). There are no flames for the devils, the fiery climax is frozen in amber and it's the Christian church that burns down therein. When Marcata declares that God is dead you feel that he just might be right. At any rate, now that they're in charge, he advises them to accept Rosemary's outmoded belief (her "oh my god" outburst) in order to not become as barbaric as the Christians before them. The party Rosemary bursts in on is, after all, hardly threatening. They're eccentrics - they're funny - such as the miffed old lady trying to rock the cradle, and the weird guy from Japan. In finally solving the mystery, of merging into the unconscious realm, inverse to the way her baby has broken through into consciousness, Rosemary doesn't trigger the usual inferno that burns down the devil's house in all the other devil films, she just realizes God's church is already burned down, metaphysically, in reality, and in memory. Enlightenment isn't always a matter of restoring patriarchal supremacy, or conquering evil on behalf of good, it can also be about finally telling your husband to fuck off, and recognizing no amount of negativity has ever killed a devil yet. But slowly rocking it back to sleep, with a loving, forgiving gaze? Momma, that's murder. 

NOTES:

1.  (He's magnetic as the jazz scene beatnik TV detective Johnny Staccato in 59-60).