Deadpan Comic Horror International: 13 Wild Oddities worth Streaming

"Take any fire, any earthquake, any major disaster, then wonder." - Plan Nine from Outer Space

Summer's in its last dying gasp and thank God. I was working on a list here of something else... something more serious and sociologically important, like lesbianism, or 'The Incredible Dissolving Father' which is, as you know, my unfinished thesis capstonezzzzz for the course not taken. But instead... doesn't anyone remember laughter? And horror? Death's too short for lofty theses and lifestyles from which I am twicefold excluded and therefore fascinated by.

The horror-comedy hybrid on the other hand, is all-inclusive. Fear leavened with laughs is like whiskey and ginger ale, like campfires and a leavening quip after a scary urban legend. After all, by day we joke about the monsters that scare us at night. At least I do. Whatever the reason, it's global - and as old as time - and we deserve better than Haunted House 2 and Scary Movie III and V (I won't allow myself to see 'em - but you can on Netflix).

Luckily, an array of options exists from all around the world, each with a mixture all its own of both elements. Some might be unintentionally funny, some are just 'witty' or 'stoner' horror/sci fi movies, not comedies John Dies at the End, Iron Sky, or Cabin in the Woods aren't included here because you just saw them or should. See them! Then wonder.

Hong Kong
OUT OF THE DARK

"Wui wan yeh" (1995) Dir. Stephen Chow
***1/2

Lucky for America, we have most of the Stephen Chow oeuvre on Netflix Streaming (still need the great and hilarious Forbidden City Cop). Here's one I'd never seen before. A huge star in HK and Mainland China, here he's mostly unknown, partly because he's not Jackie Chan or Jet Li and his satire skewers a pop culture partially different than ours but if you've seen any Asian horror movies in the last ten years -- Ringu, Ju-On, Pulse, Dark Water, Suicide Club, Tale of Two Sisters, Audition, A Chinese Ghost Story, etc. --and western films beloved of China, like The Professional and Evil Dead, you should get at least 80% of the jokes (though amazingly, this 1995 film prefigures the entire J-Horror crossover boom here in the states). Chow stars as a crazy ghost hunter called to a towering HK apartment complex to exorcise the vengeful spirit of a couple's recently deceased mother. The daughter (the great Karen Mok) is cute and restless and finds Chow's ghost chaser--with his long black coat, sunglasses and mysterious Chow Yun Fatty ways--intriguing. Soon she's showing up where he lives (an upscale lunatic asylum) dressed like Natalie Portman in The Professional.  He lets her carry his houseplant, with its flower that acts as a diving rod.

On the other hand, he's crazy. Like legit.

There's too much going on to name, but I particularly loved the juxtaposition of Chow's memories of his initial encounters with the supernatural while at a carnival as a child with what he actually saw (where he was clearly remembering all the papier mache monsters as real -left); and a weird scene where he tries to train the security guards to conquer their fears via games of lit dynamite hot potato. It's raucous but so fast you're afraid to laugh lest you miss something. It's also relentlessly scary and intense, with an extended lunatic climax that wipes away old dreads with one hand even as it's wiping new ones in with the other. (In Cantonese w/ English subtitles) 

New Zealand 
HOUSEBOUND

(2014) Dir Gerard Johnstone
***

Morgana O'Reilly does a wild, sneering bravura turn as Kylie Bucknell, an under-house-arrest punk partier cross between DEAD FILES' physical medium Amy Allan and Nicky Marotta from TIMES SQUARE (1980)- must I learn all I can about her? I must, for her wild chutzpah reflects what's missing in American womanhood? Kyle is a bit of a self-absorbed bitch, but hey, who wouldn't be a bitch if stuck, ankle bracelet monitor-first, in a haunted house presided over by a sweet but nonstop babbling mum (Rima Te Wiata), a mostly-absentee stepdad, and a house that--though bordered within and without by maniacs, ghostly visitors, and a squirrel-skinning neighbor--still suffocates with twee folksiness?  I can't reveal more about the plot, especially once it veers towards a rainy rooftop climax, but I will suggest you just relax and let go as your genre expectations are fucked with but in a way that's just deadpan enough to win you over to its weird sense of humor, and scary enough to keep you watching past the occasional ODs of kiwi quirkiness. Just keep your big red eyes on the cool, fearless Kylie who, among other things, isn't afraid to sneak into the suspected killer's house while he's asleep in order to steal the bridgework right out of his mouth. Sweet as! Her mom might be a bit much, but Kylie'll fuck you right up. (See also: The Babadook)

Spain

BITCHES' SABBATH
(aka Witching and Bitching)

"Las brujas de Zugarramurdi" (2014) - Dir. Alex de la Iglesia
***1/2

Largely undiscovered in the US (his stuff is seldom dubbed, which keeps the audience that would most appreciate him at bay, i.e. drunk flyover staters) Alex de la Iglesia is a maniac worth reading subtitles for even if you need to hold a hand over one eye to do it. This is one of his best. a ballsy 'comedy of the sexes' that bursts with mucho original ideas, carnal energy, wit, acumen, and Jungian archetypal initiation ritual mysticism. It's like a gender-reversed Magic Flute if Mozart smoked meth and was married to a hot-tempered harridan from Seville. Hugo Silva stars as a struggling divorced dad, driven past the point of his insanity by his hyper-intense and bitter ex-wife (Macarena Gómez). Beginning with a gone-awry pawn shop robbery and culminating at a bizarre witches' sabbath, the action never lets up and the astonished laughs never stop rolling in. Evoking that other great contemporary midnight movie Spaniard, Almodovar, the coven they stumble on includes a drag queen and features a great three-generational female enclave: there's the older, slightly senile--but always ready to rend a man's flesh with her sharpened steel dentures--Maritxtu (Terele Pávez); the grand dame of the coven, Graciana (Almodovar regular Carmen Maura); and the hot younger daughter Eva (the electric Carolina Bang - who rocks wild Kate McKinnon-style crazy eyes). They leap through the air, crawl on the ceiling, eat a steady diet of psychoactive toad secretions and cooked male children, and are all-in-all so evil they make the witches in Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem seem like the ones in Bewitched... 

And yet... they're jubilant and fun- there's no time to be traumatized as it all enfolds like one mad chase from a an afternoon robbery to a midnight monstrous Willendorf ceremony (that must be seen but still not believed) to a chase all the way through the dawn's merciless light.

Too bad about the tacky American title, though (Witching and Bitching? Yeesh)... and the poster art that makes it seem like a Disney movie. It ain't... no Disney movie, man! It defrosts Walt's head and eats its brains as a mousse. Going boldly through worlds, beyond where most battle-of-the-sexes movies dare go, its cogency in the face of insane chthonic maenad rendering makes it not just hilarious, but truly liberating, and muy sexy. Soy mu encantado! (more)  (In Spanish with English subtitles)

Ireland
 GRABBERS 

 (2012) Dir Jon Wright
***

It's an Irish horror-monster-comedy hybrid that's part of the lineage of solid indie horror films set in the more remote and storm-swept parts of the Emerald Isles, loosely following the 'fish-out-of-water cop relocates to quirky remote town, solves string of murders' structure so common to every BBC miniseries. Here the outsider is a by-the-book but-fetching Holly Hunter-ish cop (Ruth Bradley) who winds up saddled with a curly-haired drunkard for a partner, one long turned half-assedly morose from the sameness of his misty life (join the club!). The murders turn out to be done by giant tentacled monsters who besiege the island and love but can't process alcohol (join the club!), and the whole town gathers to arm themselves at the pub, i.e. get hammered, for their own safety! In other words, every sober alcoholic's secret fantasy (I have to drink to save my life? I am delivered!)

I've never been one for curly haired Irishmen and this film's got more than one, but Bradley's charming enough to carry the film over the rough spots, and when her character gets drunk for the first time, she becomes like a little two-fisted twinkly-eyed flush-cheeked Gallic faerie.. They have a delirious extended stake-out in the rain scene, craftily lit to make every rain drop in the deluge glisten with pregnant menace and add a depth note of genuine unease to the otherwise near-Rene Clair-style fantasy-romance. Director Wright ably captures the lovely sunsets and the stark treeless beauty of the coastline, though there's a few too many green and azure filters (as in most Irish films of the moment trying to hide their HDV origins) but the whole third act goes down over one long night, filters gone, so 'tis no burden. And like all the best horror films, it ends as dawn breaks... my favorite time of the day, presuming I've been up all night for it (rather than getting up early)... not that I ever do, get up early... that is.

I've said too much.

South Korea

THE HOST

"Gwoemul" (2006) Dir. Bong Joon-Ho
***1/2

A solid storyteller, able to inject more satiric deadpan comedy into more horrific circumstances than Shakespeare, Howard Hawks and Chaplin combined, rolled up, dipped in a sewer, "smokin'"Bong Joon-Ho is no stranger to big issue pathos fusing with doe-eyed bloody cool. HOST encompasses a broad satire against America's containment policies, blind-eye pollution, and hypocritical politics, all while providing a nail-biting endurance test as one bravely dysfunctional family tries to escape a military cover-up quarantine to rescue their young daughter/granddaughter before she dies of consumption, or is consumed by the weird mutant plesiosaurus-frog monster that's spat her out amidst its rotting corpse larder deep inside the Seoul sewer system. It can be a rough viewing experience, undergoing the constant transition between this shivering girl's dwindling optimism and the obstacles faced by her extended family as they follow her weak phone signal. What a family! There's the bronze medalist archery sister; the kindly bumpkin grandfather who presumes bribes and a hangdog look will get him through any scrape; the brother who's 'been to college' so his constant criticism of everyone else's decisions leaves him paralyzed with inaction; and the girl's dimwitted single dad (Bong's blonde-mopped regular leading man Kang-ho Song) who gamely punches his way through his own lobotomy.

Bong loves setting up our expectations for a 'giant monster' film and then skewing them, but he has a vision for mankind so dark and disturbing it almost rings true as stealth optimism. Time and again his heroes destroy themselves on the altar of a better future for their children, which of course can't ever happen. In the process, he gets endless jabs at SK's split personality: burdened by both America and itself, yet somehow finding time to love each other even as they devour the middle class between them. (In Korean with English subtitles; see also: Snowpiercer)

Chinatown (SF, California)

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA

(1986) Dir. John Carpenter
****

Released towards the end of sci fi's golden era, it took the small screen for Carpenter's satirical badass answer to Indiana Jones to find an audience of initially bewildered, half-asleep kids watching HBO on Saturday afternoons. Slowly, one at a time, we snapped out of their stupors in awe. Over the decades, through word of mouth mainly, the film became the beloved cult item it is today. I watch it at least once a year. Kurt Russell stars as Jack Burton, a blustery trucker (a rugged type of hero that was, believe it or not, a thing in the 70s, i.e, Convoy, White Line Fever, Every Which Way But Loose, High-Ballin', etc.) who winds up embroiled in mystery, monsters, and magic (!) in, around, behind, and most importantly under the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown. Carpenter packs the film with an array of welcome familiar Asian-American faces like John Lone as the tittering evil Lo Pan and the Victor Wong as a white magic wizard herb expert. There's also a gorgeous green-eyed young creature, then a total unknown, named Kim Cattrall as intrepid reporter Gracie Law. Wang (Dennis Dun) who's the one who actually does the fighting and has the romance, and so forth. Russell is hilarious, his chemistry with Cattral riveting (back during those sleepy HBO afternoons, we kids all first fell in love with her). Unmissable and beyond classic, Big Trouble doesn't even reveal its full glory until around the 12th viewing. I can't wait to see it again, when the tide is high. 

Norway
DEAD SNOW: RED VS. DEAD
"Dod Sno" (2014) Dir. Tommy Wirkola
***

The Bride of Frankenstein of satirical Nazi zombie pictures, it starts during the climax of the first film: Martin (Vegar Hoel) wakes up in Norway's socialized healthcare system with the the dreaded Colonel Herzog's (Ørjan Gamst) arm sewed onto him (the EMPs found it in the car with him) and now Martin can raise the dead. Naturally once he's released he resurrects a bunch of Russian POWs (that were executed by the Nazis and buried in a mass grave up in the Norwegian mountains - so I guess the frost preserved them fairly well), to go up against Herzog's still slaughterin' crew (who find time to rampage through a WW2 museum and get their hands on an old still-functional Panzer tank!). Martin also recruits three young American geeks-- 'the Zombie Squad' --to fly up to help him: Martin Starr (Party Down, Burning Love), Ingrid Haas, and the lovely Jocelyn DeBoer (above center) as the type who can have her pick of any man at the San Diego comic-con but probably doesn't even realize it, which adds to her smokey eyes and long red hair to make her the coolest thing south of the Arctic circle. Best of all, aside from an over-the-top small town sheriff (who thinks Martin is the one killing everyone), the cast plays it dead straight, as nature, science and Nordic tradition demands. Miss it at your own risk. It's in English (not dubbed): even the non-American actors speak it beautifully, but if you watch this back-to-back with the Norwegian language first film the result can be jarring, so don't.

Southern France

ZOMBIE LAKE 

"Le lac des morts vivants" (1981) Dir. Jean Rollin
**

This film gets a bad rap within the Nazi zombie community, but it's a great melancholy chablis blanc after the steak tartare and whiskey meal of Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead (above) if you're watching these in the presented order here. In fact, it gives a big French shoulder shrug to zombie horror movie conventions on the whole, as if they were nothing more than an annoying American tourist. Instead, as with most Jean Rollin films, Le lac prefers to loll and gambol in the natural stillness of a rural France in the company of beautiful young women and a few older character actors. Thanks to a nice HD restoration, the full pastorale lyricism of Max Monteillet's photography comes out and we can see inside the deep stark shadows of the narrow ancient architecture of village streets. There's very little dialogue, but lots of nature sounds (running water, a few bugs, a scream or two), and Daniel White's macabrely contrapuntal piano, lounge themes. There's nothing to stop us, in short, from turning off and tuning in to the ambience of the pastoral countryside, a locale where Nazi occupation is still fresh in collective memory. The cast and crew have a lot of Franco regulars but Jean Rollin (posing as J.A. Lasar) is the director and you'll know right away by his usual mix of real local French ruins, terrible fake blood, pretty young girls finding time to bathe and disrobe even when in immediate peril, ennui-crippled actors, and a vibe so French everyone seems to be lolling in the sun even when dragging each other off to be killed.

Special mention: Dredged up from the lake along with the rest of his dead Wermacht unit is a sensitive zombie private who was on his way to visit the offspring of his verboten romance with a local girl just before his unit was killed by French resistance fighters and thrown in the le lac. When he finds his daughter, he protects her from the rest of his outfit --and this all done without any speaking or mime or goofy cues, which makes it eerily touching rather than merely maudlin. Conveniently, nearly early every woman in the village is young, gorgeous, and caught completely off guard when a zombie comes shambling into her backyard, though every one in town knows perfectly well the zombies are around --that's very French! Very French, too, in that the harder it tries to be serious and horrific the more amusing and gently life-affirming it all becomes.  (In French with English subtitles.) 

Barcelona

[REC] 3: GENESIS 

"[Rec]³: Génesis" 2012 Dir. Paco Plaza
***

I don't really like, or haven't seen enough of, the first two [Rec] films but I knew a wedding video would be an ideal zombie subject, since it would basically be all your friends and family in one contained place, making their subsequent transformation from a horde of well-wishing loved ones to grabby monsters like a wedding cake in reverse. And, as the Spanish are a people in whom romantic love runs so strong it trumps self-preservation, I knew there'd be comical twists when the loved ones turned rabid. I was right! But there's other stuff I didn't expect, too. With her popping Clara Bow eyes, tattered wedding gown and chainsaw, Leticia Dolera makes a terrific romantic heroine and Diego Martin (the sheriff in the recommended Dusk to Dawn series on El Rey) struggles gamely inside his medieval helmet and armor as the new husband. Having it all take place within one big gate-enclosed wedding-hosting estate in is genius. The freedom from the constraints of found footage (after the first 20 minutes or so) is managed without losing its diegetic advantages (they just kind of slowly expand from it, not unlike Olivier with the proscenium arch in Henry V). And thanks to leaps forward in digital technology, and the flowery architecture of the manor itself enables a vast depth of HD field, with all sorts of nifty stunts, like figures falling off balconies and fighting off in the distance far behind the foregrounded actors (but still in focus), and the menacing figures emerging from the dark are all sans music cues, making for great jolts and laughs without cheap shocks and mickey-mouse scoring. The intentionally grand all white frills wedding set-up--the disco party lights, white tablecloths, tuxedoes, sexy dresses, grand fixtures and the DJ booth-- offer uncanny frisson to anyone who's spent a significant amount of their weekends going to other people's weddings, secretly wishing some disaster would strike so you could leave early. Favorite comic moments: the girl who admits she almost didn't come, the rifle-wielding SpongeJohn (not SpongeBob, for "trademark reasons"), and the pair of young revelers who miss the whole first half of the outbreak because they're off in the billiard room hooking up... muy Barthelona! (In Spanish with English subtitles).

Hollywood, USA

INVASION OF THE BEE GIRLS

(1973) Dir. Denis Sanders
**1/2

Displaying kind of the reverse problem of Zombie Lake, Bee Girls' (AKA Graveyard Tramps) only real issue is its dreadful Gary Graver cinematography. He cannot block shots correctly, light anything beyond a bad student movie, or do much more than keep things in focus 80% of the time. He was a busy man, though, working on six other exploitation films in 1973 alone, including Bummer, and The Clones. It could be there's a better negative or restoration somewhere that would prove I'm wrong about old Graver, but I doubt it. Who cares? I do. Fuckin' Love Anitra Ford as a sexy etymologist, the Cronenberg-esque scientific research setting (where scientists are all dying from sexual exhaustion), the lucky break caught temporarily by the gay scientist and the investigating federal agent's relatively enlightened reaction to it, the great buzzing soundtrack and the jet black eyes.

Saskatchewan, Canada

WOLFCOP

(2014) Dir Lowell Dean
***

Shot in the woolly wilderness of Saskatchewan, this weird fusion of woodsy lupine elements includes lumberjackin', copious whiskey drinking, cop car ride-pimping/weaponizing, and a prison visit from a hot bitch bartender wearing a sexy red riding hood cape and bearing a basket of candles, erotic lotions, and fine hooch. Old lady Satanists, a good lady cop, and duplicitous heshers round out the pack. Is Wolfcop kind of rough around the edges? Does the lead have unsightly curly hair even in 'human' form? Sure. But how many films are set and shot wayyy up in the provinces, and of those, how many really capture the woodsy small town sense of boozy depressed/isolation only those of us who've lived through unreasonably harsh and brutal winters in nowhere towns by staying totally drunk 24/7 can know (1). I like it cuz it's aboot more than just dumb Troma snark, crap CGI, or Japanese arterial spray. It's mean, wry and got its nose low to the ground. It may get so drunk it can't remember its own name, but it never forgets to rock. (See also: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil)

Iran (Bakersfield, CA)

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

2014 Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour
***1/2

This unique crowd-pleaser isn't funny haha, but funny in that it's like something Tom Waits might make if he were an Iranian vampire girl drinking the oil derrick border town dry in Touch of Evil. A Persian language film rich with a deadpan mastery of Jarmusch-brand motion-in-stillness (though it's way livelier than Jarmusch's misleadingly titled Only Lovers Left Alive), it connects indirectly with two druggy black and white NYC art movies from the 90s, Almeredya's Nadja and Ferrara's The Addiction. (See: Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City) and despite the cultural differences (different coast, decade, language) the similarities to those two films are striking, especially in the importance of alternative music on the soundtrack. Nadja made fine atmospheric use of 90s trip-hop like Portishead; Addiction found urgent West Village grit via Cypress Hill and Skooly D.; Girl makes great use of 80s pop group White Lines' song "Death," which if you didn't know of it before, will make you quietly shuffle it onto your 80s Spotify list quick-as-ya-like.

As "The Girl," Sheila Vand--her black hijab like Dracula's cape--consumes both a coke-dealing thug and a junky dad who lets his son support his habit, and we cheer their gruesome demise by this specter of Muslim feminist vengeance,  I love that she waits until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move, all the better to get high off their blood (though this is never spelled out, it recalls the druggy blood-harvesting of Dark Angel AKA I Come in Peace). Gauging their response to her silent staring and seemingly everywhere at once, Vand's playfulness as she stalks and mirrors carries itself a long way, especially into her touching romance with the semi-cool lead boy.  (In Persian with English subtitles)

----
NOTES
1. I was an English Lit major up in Syracuse NY from 1985-1989 
2. Though based on all her UCB videos, every little (male) nerd comic in the world feels the same way and casts her as his wide-eyed girlfriend, which makes me hate said comics for wasting our time with their wishful Napoleonic ego tripping. Unlike them, Wirkola clearly knows better: boyfriends never enter into Red Vs. Dead, which is just one of its great strengths. Jocelyn! Call me! I'm ever-so smart! 

Summer of my Netflix Streaming I: A Psychedelic Odyssey

It's the time of year when people come to me and say "Dude, how can you just sit there watching movies when it's so nice out??" Splayed upon the couch, limbs fecund with moss, I retort "duuuude, I'm going to get up any minute." They wait, but I do not stir. "OK, guess I'll go home," they finally say, "but I need some good Netflix recommendations. What should I watch tonight?" To this, I lurch forward in a great beverage-toppling spasm. "Welcome, then," I say, "to part three of a one part series: Summer of my Netflix Streaming; a psychedelic odyssey. Take two with grapefruit juice and call me in the void between six and sixtereen.

First Up:  Do you believe in death after life?  Roll the shizz, mon Scarab...

To remove your anxiety about what to watch in what order and when, I suggest you check all whatever of these in the order listed.. Empty your cue.... empty.... your....cue. By dawn things will make sinse (hic).

DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE

(2012) Hosted by Joe Rogan

Go Rick Strassman go-ooo--ohmmm! In case you were born in some inane, counterintuitive dimension where all the chemical shortcuts to spiritual enlightenment have been made into felonies, you should know Dr. Rick Strassman actually got official clearance by the government to do DMT studies in clinical trials. The results? Mind-blowing, of course, but inconclusive, equally of course. See this and answer the question only you can answer: is there really any difference between hallucination and reality? If what you experience in the DMT-verse feels a hundred times more real than your waking, consensual reality, then doesn't that mean--as quantum physics and bioverse theorists contend--it's realer?

The only answer is.

Even so, enough bad trips happened under Strassman's watchful eye that he now feels a little guilty for messing up so many minds. So is he a Pandora's box cutter, a modern messiah, an apex predator Albert Hoffman, or just a scientist who, like Dr. Eric Vornoff before him, tampered in God's domain?  Only the machine elves know for sure --and they only tell the silver spiders tat spin together crystal cities that cohere out of our universal thought web. Deep down, you sense you already know the answer, and you do. 

Heads talking include my boy Daniel Pinchbeck and that 'other'-other McKenna. There's lots of groovy Alex Grey art and deep hallucinogen-ready kaleidoscopes. Joe Rogan narrates while standing in front of a blackboard --for extra validity. (more from Tripumentaries)

See also: Ayuhuasca Vine of the Soul

ENTER THE VOID

(2009) Dir. Gasper Noe

Drifting around Tokyo's pinku parlors, orbiting the heated copulations and floating into light bulbs (like Hitchcock's POV if it didn't find its way out of the black tunnel connecting the drain with Janet Leigh's pupil in PSYCHO), we never know what the late Oscar's free-floating POV soul orb is thinking or trying to merge into (though we can guess, heh heh) Drawn to the gravity of the flaming sexual heat of the sidpa bardo's intertwined coupling, the film's/Oscar's disembodied POV drifts towards any old giant sun egg in which to be reborn, looking for the white light to absorb it/us into the 3D space time groove. But it/we find only the respite of 60 watt bulb lamps, black light art exhibits, frenzied and deserved narc-bashing, and sex that goes nowhere as far as reincarnation opportunities. The Oscar/our POV/soul matrix winds winding up floating off to the ceiling again and again, ever on the move, falling via the abortionist's knife, and bumbling onto passenger planes, floating along he way we used to walk around outside the Dead shows when we didn't have that miracle ticket, looking for that unlocked fence, that lax security guard... that one ripped condom, the missed pill.. (from: Die Like an Eagle) 

FANTASIA 

(1940) Start at the 7:32 mark (and avoid the 2000 version)

(From Acid Sound Symphony:) Walt Disney was determined to not just blow minds and thrill art lovers with his 1940 epic animated classical music film FANTASIA, but to bring what critic James Agee referred to as "middlebrow highbrow" culture to an America on the edge of war. It didn't work, but when re-released in 1969, FANTASIA caught on with a new kind of American at the edge of war, the dosed hippie draft dodger. Seen today, whether you love or hate it it really depends, however high you may be when you come in, what you're feeling, how loud the sound is, and how receptive you are to a non-linear narrative concept of this painterly magnitude. The wonderful thing about trippers, is that a long, nonviolent movie full of nonlinear painterly abstraction and music is like heaven. The big fear, having to leave your comfortable spot on the floor and face the downstairs neighbors. But with headphones cranking the Bartok, the colors dripping off the page, it's either transformative perfection or the movie equivalent of the chill out tent. Either way, now you can scroll ahead if a segment is tedious or too square. Your bound to find something, especially if you start watching at the 7:32 mark, to avoid the draggy intro, and stick with the original. 

 METROPOLIS 

Giorgio Moroder version 
(1927) Dir. Fritz Lang (new version1984)

With wild color tinting, sci-fi sound effects, and Giorgio Moroder's 'great' 80s rock soundtrack (w/ Pat Benatar and Queen among others), Moroder's often unjustly-forgotten FANTASIA style protean music video narrative is way more fun and engagingly goofy than the digitally restored super-long original cut (also on Streaming) that got a theatrical rerelease back in 2005 (I've seen 'em both on big screens). I know it's cineaste heresy but I think Lang would have roared in indignation-cloaked delight to see his 1927 sci-fi parable turned into a stoner rock musical instead of slathered in the orchestral pomp most versions use for their soundtrack. If he could see the genius in Jess Franco's SUCCUBUS, Lang could surely see Moroder's grandiloquent disco cocaine-shiver synth 80s synth grandeur is the perfect fit for his cast's Weimar-rabid frothing-at-the-mouth acting style and the sped-up herky-jerk of Karl Freund's silent 'crank' camera.

Great moments of rock synergy include the factory workers' FLASHDANCE-style pop anthem, and the upper class brothel debut of the robot Maria, which is given growling rock authority via Bonnie Tyler's "Sweet Jane"-chorded "Here She Comes." If only all silent sci-fi films were given such loving attention from synthesizer-twiddling Italian disco composers! You'll be wondering where lurketh thy holy copy of 1980's FLASH GORDON after this, for the two would be a great double bill. Some detractors say the story's harder to follow this way (it's condensed to a brisk 90 minutes), I say those people are just not high enough, and neither is their stereo. 

CHARIOTS OF THE GODS

(1970) based on the book by Erich von Däniken 

The History Channel has been laden now for years with ancient alien-related programming and Erich von Däniken is there, but so is repetitive narration and whiplash editing and enough catheter commercials to give you panic attacks. But this is the original, the groundbreaker. The wild locations where Von Däniken found his archeological signifiers are still fecund with overgrowth, under-explored, and surrounded by indigenous tribespeople; von Däniken is obviously the first white man some of these natives have seen since the last 'god' came down. Shot on 16mm with the earthy 60s-early 70s In Search Of vibe, most all the talking heads are translated / dubbed (from German and Russian) giving a nice weird alienation affect. An illuminating highlight: some valuable footage of cargo cults in the Pacific help us understand the root of all religious thought, drawing such a clear parallel with sky cult Christianity you'd need to be blind no to see it. These natives keep watching the skies, praying for the return of the white brothers in their big silver birds and their cans of delicious peaches, if we want the aliens to land on the White House lawn, why don't we visit these islands again, drop off some canned goods and lighters, and thus kickstart the engines of sky god karma?

THE SOURCE FAMILY
(2012) Starring: Yod, The Source Family

At one point does a divinely inspired lysergic-macrobiotic sage remember that way down deep he's just a lusty huckster?  Yaweh-O, or whatever Papa Bear's name in this incarnation, was a Gilgamesh-esque mountain man messiah and ex-bank robber who, like the greatest of modern gurus, was able to waken peoples' kundalini with just a touch or a glance. Alas, poor Yod, he was deluding even himself if he thought he could hang glide (he crashed and died). That's why my own spirituality will always stop short of wearing long flowing robes and divesting my worldly possessions. It's a curse as well as a blessing to be so wary and spiritual at the same time - it's only the twin signs like Pisces can do it, and we have no choice - we're never taken in totally, not even by our suspicions. Wether your kundalini sleeps or crawls, watching this crazy documentary and hearing these crazy beautiful starry-eyed people proves to be a solid trip that can charm your inner electric serpent into crawling up your spine and sparking off your third eye like an Olympic torch struck by a cobra bite strength tester hammer gong. (see also CinemArchetype Senex: The Sage)

And now... two episodes of STAR TREK 

(1968-70)

1. "This Side of Paradise" (season 1, ep. 25) finds Kirk as the only member of the crew not bewitched by space poppies. Everyone who beams down on this certain Edenic planet becomes too happy and content to do anything but loll around in the sun and love one another. Kirk tries to convince them they need goals... and challenges... to evolve... as people, but the crew are too busy mooning over the flowers; it's not until he stirs their more violent emotions that they snap out of it. Turns out humans need to be miserable and angry to evolve, to move forward. Without negativity we lilies-in-the-field it like a bunch of blazed welfare bums.

And though we get cogent arguments for the validity of both sides, it's one of the earliest examples of Kirk seeming a killjoy, especially when Spock gets the closing line: "For the first time in my life, I was happy."

2. "The Way to Eden" (season 3, ep. 20) finds a band of itinerant space hippies trying various scams to convince the Enterprise crew to take them through the 'forbidden zone' to an allegedly pristine planet named Eden. The hippies include Charles Napier, on space guitar! He invites Spock to sit in and jam with the flower people. Spock does! ("He is not Herbert! We reach!") Vulcans, Spock explains, consider the way these groovy brothers and sisters live to be the highest form of sanity. But just as the Source Family found disaster following Father Yod to Hawaii in the last film, so this Eden planet carries its own tricky backhand bitch slap reward for their bucolic naiveté. (Sex, Drugs and Quantum Existentialism: The Acidemic STAR TREK Short Guide)

MICROCOSMOS

(1996) - Starring: insects (les bugs)

With all the machine elf aliens dancing and the dangerous space microbes and cosmic mind-altering spores of the last films still percolating in your toasted brain, let's, in the words of Steve Martin, get small. Without any music or narration, this day-on-the-leaf insect documentary provides the kind of 'close' reading nature's been primping for all this time. Finally, special cameras show how truly fucking bizarre insect interactions are. We see ants milking droplets of water they stole from clingy flea-style bugs; ants kicking ladybugs off their precious droplets, but gently... etc. This weird 'right under our noses' insight is what head trips are meant for. The utterly strange fractal aliveness of our world--what our mind usually screens out unless it recognizes a threat or a desire--is made suddenly front and center. Only as small kids were we attuned to the crazy scariness and odd joys of the insect community. Remember back when turning over a garden rock was like opening the door to a gross weird world? Was that before DDT wiped it all away, or did we just get too tall to see and too distracted to care?

Well, when you tune into the 'other' realms you get all that kid's eye view back, so let the bug show begin.

On the other hand if this gets too boring or gives you a minor dose of delirium tremens, skip ahead!

JOHN DIES AT THE END

(2012) Dir. Don Coscarelli

What if those weird bugs from Microcosmos were also hallucinogens that let their user see through time and space and transmute dimensions? And other bugs were constantly taking over human hosts and killing them while preparing for a sixth-dimensional Lovecraftian tentacle crossover? Whaaat? Slow down, man. Thing about what you're slaying... 

Unlike Gilliam's Loathing, this is truly a film where the weird turn pro.

HENDRIX: HEAR MY TRAIN A COMIN'

(2013) Dir Bob Smeaton

There's one thing that never gets old when you're super tripped-out, and that's the crunchy delicious sexually far out sounds of Hendrix's guitar. On good psychedelics, his blazing electric sound is one long warm, trippy current that zaps your saliva glands like patchouli lemons and makes all other music seem pointless (aside from Ravi Shankar and Otis Redding). Let it take your mind wild places, and wonder what new sounds might have come forth from his giant hands, if not for the always bad idea of mixing excessive Valium and alcohol.

In fact, I actually tried to go back in time to prevent Hendrix's death, as a kind of Reverse Terminator, but instead I just aged into oblivion. (see: Hippy in a Hell Basket - left)

---

From here of course you can greet the dawn's early light with The Other One, the Bob Weir Story; or the occasionally not pretentious and over-budgeted Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or you could go to bed. I mean, the sun's coming up, dude. People are getting up for work! They'll know! 

Too bad W.C. Fields isn't on Netflix because what you really need now is Never Give a Sucker an Even Break or International House, Mississippi or The Fatal Glass of Beer. 

IF AT ANY POINT YOU WIG OUT:

TELETUBBIES

If the walls start closing in, switch to this televisual equivalent of a Wavy Gravy chill-out tent immediately. This is way better than Bruce Dern handing you thorazine but insisting on touching your hand in a weird soft way when he does so, or Jack Nicholson and Adam Roarke melting into zombie monsters while trying to stop you from cutting off your own hand with a circular saw at 'the gallery'. Not that you ever would, because you're not a lightweight. And because you know when to change the channel on the escalating hellfire pit of Bruce Dern-handedness.

TELETUBBIES will save you!! It was designed to stop kids from crying so I think you'll be able to handle it bro, so nut up. 

Coming up Next in the Summer Series: "Post-Giallo Dream Logic"

Tales from the Benway Pharmacy: BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, THE MACHINE

If I ventured into the 'flix stream, between the viaducts of Dr. Benway prescribed drug-enhanced science fiction hallucination dream, would you find me?  Or would there no longer be a 'me' to find, and no difference between you, these words, the future, the past and all constructs of self I may adopt and discard over lifetimes? Yeah, it's the second option, because good films dissolve all difference. The screen is just the first in an endless banana peel of self (and vice versa).

I dissolved once or twice into that void this week, thanks to the following two films being available on Netflix and their modulating, droning and pulsing analog synth scores being available on Spotify. By Sinoa Caves and Tom Raybould respectively, these evocative scores make a big difference, especially this time of year, the autumnal Samhain, i.e. Halloween. These two films seem to occur in a realm of permanent ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981) midnight where dangerously liberated prisoners/patients/experimental subjects break out of bizarro world environments, in the process etching out as fine a metaphor for the dangerous liberation offered by psychedelic drugs as anything I've seen since PSYCH-OUT (1968).

So, when you're on an all-night weird movie binge, save these two for the late late show slot, i.e. the high strangeness Interzone gateway stretch between three and six AM, when the straight and sober are fast asleep so their bland consensual reality can't interfere with your psionic reception, because thanks to Netflix, the future is then!

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW 

2010 - written and directed by Panos Cosmatos

***1/2

A lot of typical science fiction buffs are nerds, man, and they stay that way for one reason: they're scared of psychedelics. Scared to lift the throbbing rock of the known and scoop the writhing worms and scorpions from the muddy void and devour them, they live in a reality circumscribed by the trappings of the social order; the border between their fantasy life (as a fifth-level chaotic good paladin in D&D) and reality (high-school) is very well-marked. The closest they get to living their own fiction is, perhaps, LRP or paintball, but never the 'inside job' of acid or mushrooms.

This cautious avoidance is a wise decision. Unless one feels the psychedelic zone tug them towards it like a magnet, one is probably not invited, and would probably not be treated well. As Bill Lee says in Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH, "the 'zone takes care of its own", implying: all others beware. Not everyone is meant to have their ego ripped like a bad tooth from their screaming psyche. Their self-centered fears lodged like a giant tick in the back of their skull, each wrench of the psycho-active pliers felt like fire consuming the crown chakra, and only the already in pain would want to stick it out in the chair, enduring the probing and inflamed wrenching, until that sucker is at last ripped out. But for nerds of the sci-fi role playing type, maybe their egos aren't solid enough to be killed. There's no formative I AM life experience to get cocky about, no hardening of yesterday's persona.

Lick the 2001-legged Monolith

Sometimes the sci-fi coterie do make it past their initial fear and enter the void, and if they do, they tend to run in packs, and--when running is done--retreat to the movies (as we all have), spending the come down from the peak watching 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), because it's the familiar made unfamiliar. Kubrick's movie is never entirely familiar no matter how many hundreds of times you see it, and on LSD or shrooms it's a whole other thing. From there, an adept sailor of cinematic madness will wind up leaving England along Commonwealth solar trade winds and winding up at two Canadian horror films: SCANNERS (1981) and BLUE SUNSHINE (1978). Each explore the long term psychic side effects of prolonged exposure to the drug-dealing elder god behind the wizard behind the curtain. In BLUE a particular strand of LSD makes people lose their hair and go on rampages after exactly ten years elapse. In SCANNERS a briefly marketed pill prescribed to pregnant moms has caused a offspring to be born with the power to blow other people's heads apart through conscious projection.

I mention these two films this for a reason, this acidhead tab of Canadian druggie sci-fi history is imperative for a deep lysergic appreciation of the 2010 Canadian homage to that golden era of tripping man's Kubrickian-Cronenbergian-Blue Sunshine maker crossroad science fiction, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW.

The first feature by Panos Cosmatos, RAINBOW stars Michael Rogers as a batshit crazy psychiatrist named Barry Nyle. His pet patient is a scanner-style mutant girl Elena (Eva Bourne) kept under sedation in a futuristic white room for reasons no expository monologue need explain (we having seen SCANNERS and deduced the drug side effect angle via the psychoactive experiment clinic prologue). During the daily sessions, Nyle tries to provoke any kind of response from Elena, talking molasses slow through a thick protective glass while jotting down 'notes' and going even more insane. He also has special guards called 'sentinauts' (their brains can't be exploded) and a weird white triangle device that can deliver sound vibrational (presumed) shockwaves to knock Elena to the ground and (presumably) jam her brainwaves should she try to escape. Clearly, she must have the power to transmit her thoughts and explode the heads of anyone in the same room if the puramid thing should be turned off.  The uncanny analogy synth score by Sinoia Caves heats and throbs and pitch modulates as the doctor and patient engage in a long drug-addled silent treatments and staring contests. Cosmatos trusts his viewers to connect the dots, to have seen the classics, to have had their egotistic wisdom teeth pulled at the psychedelic dentist, to know that fields of red and pulsing, throbbing analogy synth music is enuff.

To make it all just that much better, the institute is housed in a bizarre retrofuturist geodesic dome, which includes the office/drug den of a terminally-ill Buckminster Fuller-Timothy Leary-ish junky, the founder of the institute (and Elena's father). In a flashback to 1966 we see this guy taking Barry on his deep dish drug trip (the date is important: LSD was legal then and being used by forward-thinking psychiatrists the provinces over). Barry's trip resembles the 'Beyond the Infinite' section of 2001 if slowed down 99% and experiences while meditating as one's face melted off. It's so much like my last few salvia divinorum trips I nearly fell off the floor, but Barry is not like us. He is  reborn in an oil slick, crawling out of a black circle like a reptile from its egg, and latching onto the woman, some woman... I don't know...his wife? Elena's mother? Does he kill her by ripping her throat out with his teeth, or is that an ejaculation? Is she coasting on an orgasm, or is the light going out of her eyes?

Either way, when it's over it's clear the doctor blames himself; Barry's not held responsible... but the hope for the future is done, and though Elena shall be born with all the special extra sparkage having a dosed-out LSD-awakened mother can bring to one's junk DNA, she'll wind up a prisoner in an all-white room in a geodesic dome in the middle of nowhere, the captive of an insane doctor who killed her mother while in the throes of a deep dish LSD freakout.

 Meanwhile there's lots of delicious red walls and filters and the sense that time is melting (Barry pops pills from the Benway pharmacy--another nod to Burroughs) and though he's off-putting at first, Rogers gonzo performance grows on one over repeat viewings; he's committed to his work, he should be committed into the place he works, period. It fits hims snug like in a strait-jacket. Being a shrink seems like a pretty awesome occupation for a druggy maniac: you get to prescribe whatever mind-expanding things you want for yourself and go so deep into the void that reality ceases to exist and you finally get a peak 'beyond the black rainbow' and don't have to worry about a thing, as you have all the Ativan and Thorazine you need to bring you back down to 3D space-time if things get too terrifying.

If you get confused, just presume this is all meant as an analogy to the mysteries of consciousness itself as it may have existed in Canada after the collapse of the psychedelic movement: Elena is the unconscious, the anima- mutated along with the psyche's chromosomes; Barry is the amok ego trying to keep the sinful Jane Eyre attic madwoman lovechild locked up tight; the old man is the repressed superego dissolving from years of drug abuse (nothing nullifies a moral compass like addiction) and watching his high watermark 60s utopian vision for the future gradually erode under the deranged stewardship of his sociopathic protege. No matter how lofty one's intention, the ego finds a way to take advantage of it.

So remember, nerds: baldness = homicidal madness, and if you can't escape quickly, move so slowly no one can see you; otherwise you're dead at the hands of a guy who's so high he can't tell the difference between your skull and a stress ball.

THE MACHINE

2014 - written and directed by Caradog W. James

***

THe low-budget but highly intelligent (if unimaginatively titled) British film THE MACHINE (2014) has great gloomy electronic momentum (no daytime shots ever, which is great), a beautifully retro Carpenter-meets-Vangelis synth score from Tom Raybould, an overall aesthetic that splices the labs of the Tyrell Corporation to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK's Lee Van Cleef sub basement, And a script that mixes some TERMINATOR touches with CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS (1962) post-humanist philosophy. The captivating Caity Lotz is great in a double role, evoking Elsa Lanchester in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, as both the inventor and the machine. And thanks to thrifty use of lots of Val Lewton darkness, a single, largely empty cavernous soundstage and great artistic (and ingeniously simple) touches like the way the bodies of the artificial beings light up in strange patterns when excited (though the lights are clearly just projected onto their skin), Caradog's etched out ONE of those economic sleeper B-movie gems that can sometimes be unearthed when digging around in Netflix Streaming, ranking it alongside other dusty gems I've found there, like BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, THE ORGEGONIAN, IRON SKY, BOUNTY KILLER, and JOHN DIES AT THE END. It's short, yet operatic. There's no filler, no corners are cut. Everything fits and it doesn't need trauma or didactic postures to feel justified in existing, though of course there is some of each. Even the bit with the dying daughter sidesteps all the usual cliche'd sentimental pitfalls.

The story begins with bigwig AI engineer Vincent (Toby Stevens --the Richard Branson-ish villain in DIE ANOTHER DAY) interviewing various freelancer-designed artificial intelligence programs via a series of surrealist questions to see which can answer far enough outside the box of logocentric thinking that genuine personality is possible. Ava's (Caity Lotz) program comes closest, and she's cute, sparks fly, so she's hired, and brought down into a deeply buried network of basement level research programs, all funded by the British military intelligence operatives for assassination work in China. Vincent's not a fan of the assassin aspect, but he loves the unlimited funding. It's enabled him to develop software that can scan and duplicate whole personalities via sensitive headsets worn during Voight-Kampf-style questions. Meanwhile, military vets suffering from brain injuries and missing limbs are turned into half-machine monsters, the trouble being they're liable to kill everyone in the room during the slightest existential tantrum. Meanwhile one of them steers Ava towards a possible cover-up conspiracy in the works - these soldiers are being cut off from their loved ones, treated essentially like slaves. She knows too much!

Ava is assassinated by Chinese assassins before Vincent can even work up the nerve to ask her out, not before doing all the tests of course. How convenient! Dennis (DR. WHO) Lawson is the ruthless installation director who wants to make sure this new Eva isn't so independent she'd refuse a direct order, especially since Vincent tells her killing anyone--even Chinese diplomats!--is wrong. She murders a guy in a clown mask during a routine test. She feels bad. Raybould's synth pads swell in mecha-grim portent.

Oh well, it's not hard to guess the rest, and we viewers we don't really give a shit about Vincent's Asimovian ethics, so Lawson needs to to up the stakes via an enforced robot lobotomy and another easy-to-guess subplot with the daughter. But what could be some douche chill sentimental nonsense in non-British hands (such as Guillermo del Toro's) doesn't rankle, and I've got a sensitive rankle meter for that shit.

Slick and dark, but with some genuine AI insight and vintage analog originality to back it up (See also CinemArchetype #13 - The Automaton / Replicant / Ariel), it's a good lesson in how you too can survive the coming robot revolution! Hint: treat the machines with compassion or at least tact, because they'll remember every last kind or derogatory word forever, no matter how far out of earshot you think they are when you say it. They are the past and future, reaching back and forward along your every gesture, like karma's own sweet engine.

Remember us, your future? CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS! 

If you have Spotify, click here for a mix of both the amazing scores of these films.

NOTES:
1. If you don't get that reference, see BLUE SUNSHINE!

Dawn of the Dinkins: RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE (2013), BLANK CITY (2010)

I came late to the party in Manhattan, but in 1992, moving in gradually via couch osmosis, it was still, at least, a party. The white boy funk thing was big -- Spin Doctors, Blues Traveller --my band, the Mud, 2 Skinny Js.... we danced like maniacs at Wetlands, New Music Cafe, Tramp's, Nightingale's-- most now long closed or sold, rebranded. But back then there was no 'cabaret law' (it's still illegal to dance in NYC). Back then you could drink on the street (if you wrapped it in a brown paper bag - known as the "bag law") And you could smoke. It's all gone...  but at least in the early 90s the party was still raging. Disney hadn't commandeered the porn marquess of Times Square. You could still see hookers--gay and straight--loafing out on the dirty boulevard. 

You maybe read my 2011 piece, Manhattan Sinking Like a Rock, wherein I admonished the average New Yorker for letting all our lovely sleaze disappear. I predicted (or rather hoped for) a time when the city might be sleazy and crime-ridden once more, to allow cheap rents and flourishing arts.

Man, was I wrong. NYC will never slide again or rage again, There's too much $$ invested in its real estate for the 1% to let the rents drop. No one is taking the accursed city down into the artistic abyss anymore, not without a grant, (you know, to cover the insurance).

Godard homage indicated by pose and striped shirt

Brit filmmaker Ashley Cahill feels as I do about NYC. He too remembers the brown bags and dancing wherever the fuck days of old- and he's done something about it. And that something is serial murder. Looking like some weird cross between Seth Meyers and Beck, Cahill puts himself in the center a fauxcumentary where he kills random citizenry in order to set the fuse on what he hopes will be a rent-lowering, Summer of Sam-style fear-upping art-blooming crime wave. 

God (or rather godlessness) bless his tousled little head. He's doing this for you, for me, for US, for posterity.

The film's had more than a few titles before settling on RANDOM ACTS. It was CHARM, for example, which is moronically vague, but on Netflix Streaming, with one of those ubiquitous torture porn-looking covers, it has finally landed before me as RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE. I don't know how it made it past my usual ignoring of such things (for I dread torture porn as it leaves me dispirited for years, even decades). But I am glad I did. 

If you share my mistrust of all the nanny state health that NYC is touting these days, this is your movie!

Celebrity friends should always be displayed proudly.

Godard and Truffaut T-shirts

scenebomber

It's one of those first-person meta-documentary violence deconstructions ala MAN BITES DOG, with Cahill as a slightly more homicidal version of, presumably, himself, since both he and his character are Godard-hip and so able to use the low budget and stolen shot approach as contextual meta-commentary beyond just the subject (the film is dedicated to Sam Fuller!). And though he never says so outright, he clearly shares my dislike of the second-guessing anxiety that sabotages so many homicidal comedies, i.e. the need to have Winona Ryder feel remorseful and turn on Slater in HEATHERS, or to only put her disappointing dates into comas they can one day recover from (in SEX AND DEATH 101 -see "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise?), or to have Dexter only kill other serial killers, or Edward the TWILIGHT vampire be a 'vegetarian.'

In other words, so many films or shows that want to be naughty are afraid to get all Alex and his Droogs-level challenging to our limits of audience identification. They want to be Scorsese but are afraid of telling Tommy DeVito to get his shine box. Not our boy Ashley. Once he does his first random stabbing in RANDOM, man, you know this Tommy be shine box splintered. Cahill is no kibbitzer!

After a lengthy opening monologue, Malcolm stops addressing the camera on the greatness of pre-Giuliani NYC (when it beat out Detroit as "the murder capital of the world"), and we're off the known grid of the normal disaffected poseur: Someone answers an anonymous door he's been knocking on, and we're expecting some kind of standard pre-arranged greeting scene (wherein a camera is already inside waiting for him as per so many reality shows). Instead, he grabs the unlucky inhabitant, throws her onto her couch and stabs her repeatedly and rapidly, without any drama or Bernard Hermann scissor music to let us prep for the discomfort and shock. He's suddenly moved faster than the cameraman and become a real threat. We're just not expecting it and its genuinely shocking - way beyond the usual tacky violence of Hollywood. Even though we know it's not 'real' per se, it's hard not to shiver, almost painfully. So many fauxquementaries have tried to get to this same spot, only to pull back like little pussies. Cahill dives in, and ignores our ashen complexions.


Your reaction will probably be centered around your own neighborhood: if you live in the suburbs, even our contemporary Disney-sanitized NYC might seem scary just for being unknown, but to me the suburbs are far scarier. When I'm visiting friends there, I'm awake all night, freaking out over the quietude and feeling of vulnerability. There's usually at least three doors and dozens of ground floor single pane windows that even a child could break into, so how can I fall asleep? Don't they have bars on windows and deadbolts? And it's so dead quiet after, say, midnight. Not a creature is stirring. Like Roderick Usher one better, I can hear the mice in the neighbor's walls. In NYC we have deadbolts on thick metal doors, and only one possible entry window (the one above the fire escape) and neighbors on every side who can hear any cry for help. But if your buzzer goes off or there's a knock on the door while you're watching RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE, I imagine it could be quite scary. And when Malcolm garrotes a guy for texting in what looks like the Anthology Film Archives' downstairs screening room it's fun to imagine seeing the film there and realizing you forgot your turn your phone off, afraid to even move to find it in your bag lest this guy be sitting behind you.

So even if --or because--it's a bit unnerving, one must applaud the filmmaker's full commitment to the tenets of starting a crime wave. And if he eventually turns on his own crew, and finally even his own French girlfriend, well that's to be expected. What's not expected is the deader-than-deadpan approach that never trivializes the violence Malcolm commits while never judging it either, so we end up in a very unique zone that's the opposite of HEATHERS' hypocritical inference that we're all so impressionable we need a pretty girl's buzzkill morals to remind us killing our high school enemies isn't "cool."

That's Jamie Frey (of the Brooklyn What?) at left-a buddy of mine who showed up in a random
RANDOM tracking shot, a comforting indication that the raw edge of NYC ain't totally dead

But even if our sense of identification is pushed to HENRY,  CLOCKWORK or RICHARD III extremes, we trust Cahill because he is so openly homicidal he shatters our conception of safety, of distance from the screen, in ways we rarely see; he evinces a thorough knowledge of the movies. The phrasing he incorporates into his speech conveys among other things a deep absorption of GODFATHER 2 ("You gonna help me with these things I gotta do, or what?"), TAXI DRIVER, GOODFELLAS, and BREATHLESS. And I applaud how much this approach ties into true film fans' collective rejection of banal reality and his Don Quixote-esque quest to exhume the twitchy corpse of New York's grimy past. Like all great quests it's doomed to backfire, but then again NYC hasn't ever been the same, not ever. Even one day to the next, it's never the same. It's like a mutating geographical variation of THE THING. Any chance to shape its mutant growth to our liking has long since gone before we even got there. Yer we already did shape it, sometime or other, and never for the better or the worse.. Always, always both.

Vince Gallo!

BLANK CITY (2010) is a real documentary about the time and place Cahill longs to return to, specifically NYC's underground 70s film scene. It's full of exquisite glimpses into the early 8mm and 16mm clips of the artsy downtown druggie enclaves centered around CBGB's, Max's Kansas City, Tompkins Square Park (when it was a homeless encampment) and the Alphabet City shooting galleries. The age of Youtube, Final Cut, and digital video put an end to the uniqueness of the scene. But I too remember how we used to project 8mm and 16mm films on white walls or sheets for gathered friends and/or family members. Each showing was a one-time event, special in the way no amount of today's Skyy Vodka sponsorship, rooftop screening fests, and swag can equal. And the kids then had more drugs--they could afford them living in $10 a month loft apartments with ten other people. So with ample footage from the original films (by people like Amos Poe and Richard Kern) and talking heads like Lydia Lunch, Steve Buscemi, Thurston Moore, John Waters, Deborah Harry, and various members of various punk bands, it's better than being there, I'm sure - at least smell-wise, and--I'm fairly sure--way better than having to see the entirety of each film.

With its good sense of humor about the poverty-enforced ingenuity of these early filmmakers, it's possible to long to return to BLANK CITY's innocence and imagine how great it would be to see the whole films, even while knowing in reality they would be excruciating for more than a few minutes, and the lack of air conditioning or clean underwear would eventually wear us down. In that sense, BLANK CITY is better than being there, while making you long to return anyway. I especially loved the snippets of ROME 78 - a re-enactment of the fall of an empire as filmed on the sly around the City's more Roman-esque landmarks, so while a kid in a toga dies in the Central Park fountain, 70s tourists walk by; a coliseum scene occurs in front of the Bronx Zoo lion cage, etc. It's the kind of gutsy shot stealing that makes New York City great!

ROME 78 - John Lurie (bottom)

And it's in that sense that the documentary's poverty-is-the-mother-of-invention reverie is so invaluable, and the scene's inclusiveness so impressive. The proletarian mix of thick New York accents, kids kicked out of their working class Bronx neighborhoods for being gay or fleeing their midwestern nowheresville hometowns like MIDNIGHT COWBOY makes for a cohesive unit of subculture that was too out there to become mainstream, but did anyway. There's also a coordinated effort merged the downtown punks with the uptown African-American WILD STYLE graffiti artists, dancers and street poets. All of it goes to prove that if you're literate, young, bisexual, and hot you can never be considered homeless in a neighborhood/time where everyone takes care of everyone else and the class system is part of what's being rebelled against... until of course the money starts rolling in...

And it's that money and the eighties that leads to skyrocketing rents, which means big real estate investments, which means the end of the squats and slums of the Village, which means the need to protect those investments, which means Republican mayors. So gradually, especially with the incursion of Giuliani in 1994, the herald of zero tolerance public smoking, the abolition of the 'brown bag' drink, and the Cabaret Law that Kevin Bacon fought successfully in FOOTLOOSE in the 80s but we lost in the 'real life' of the New York streets in the 90s, the crackdowns on the drugs at Limelight, the rise of swing dancing, the rise of video, DVD, FCP, AIDS, the WWW, and 9/11 and my own near death over and over from alcoholism... we lost it all. I blame Giuliani for all of it. We could use a man like Ed Koch or Dinkins again.

Lydia Lunch

Shooting your own shit is so easy now it's hard to warrant a film festival at all, hard to motivate people to go find some shady address from a hand-drawn flyer and sit on the concrete floor for three hours when the movie you're showing them is a mere click away on the home screen. Back then if you had a projector and a camera you could make a movie on Monday and get it back from Kodak by the weekend and screen it promptly for a 100 rowdy urchins. And since everyone knew everyone else and half the people were squatters and no one had TVs to compete with, and half the people were in the movie anyway. So huge crowds packed into lofts and garages and wherever and legends were born, and today these squalid art films are shown in university classes. But that will soon change as more and more class moves to the web and more and more public screenings are too unreliable. In other words, there's no word of mouth anymore because word of mouth itself has proliferated to infinity, and posting invites to Facebook is so easy that there are now so many options none of them end up being anything worth doing. If you went outside, well, you couldn't smoke there anyway, might not know anyone, just pay $14 for a mixed drink. Man, I remember when shit was still immediate, urgent, vital, cheap...

You know, like with Friendster. 

Basquiat (I left the red loading circle in, for art's sake)

POST SCRIPT

There's this other documentary on Netflix, WE CAUSE SCENES: THE RISE OF IMPROV EVERYWHERE (2013), about a group of NYC hipsters who do big flash mob-ish pranks and I'm a little jealous of their huge turnouts, which would seem to contradict all I've said here. But on the other hand, I've never been good at highly organized 'spontaneity.' It's fine for some people but the New Yorker embodied by Cahill in RANDOM ACTS or the filmmakers in BLANK CITY might point out as I do that it's just conformity in a new package.

Safe for mainstream consumption

I can respect the original gaggle of dudes involved in the 'sudden improv' concept, but the idea that whole masses of people want to join up and be led into safe, happy flash mob antics makes me realize that cigarettes are essential to true revolution (and I say this as part of Shelley Jackson's SKIN project) It lacks the 'everyone's in charge' freedom of similar movements (as in the Merry Pranksters or the Cockettes or Diggers) that relied on chaos for true freedom of the sort impossible without very strong psychedelics and tobacco. The idea that sober people eagerly participate in chances to get told what to do in order to 'break away' from lockstep drone reality makes no sense. This is how ideas like the Diggers morphed into cults like the Mansons, and how the Rolling Stone mossed, and how Times Square became 'family-friendly.'

Thank god there's one artist who will never break that seal. His name? Abel Ferrara. At least he understood how NYC --and therefore the world--would end in 4:44: LAST DAYS ON EARTH, not with a bang but with NY1's Pat Kiernan delivering a quietly dignified sign off.

All else is just Sony... selling itself copies of its older self... through the TV mirror.