THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS PT. 3

 

I offered a definition of tropes long ago, back in 2018, but the best breakdown is that tropes describe actions: "orphan must learn the secret of his birth," "hero may refuse the call to adventure but must in time answer said call and do heroic things." In contrast, icons are like "solidified" tropes, concretized into particular entities, forces, or settings in order to invite the identification of a work's audience. -- MY SHORTEST POST YET.

...I don't even expect plots to be fresh.  They are like skeletons.  I think one skeleton looks more or less like the others, but when they are fleshed out, you get a unique person.  So with movie plots. -- poster "atenotol" on Classic Horror Film Board (quoted with permission) 

 I doubt that I'll ever again use the terms "obvious" and "unobvious," given that I only did so in response to my having read George Orwell's 1942 essay on Rudyard Kipling. Though in part 2 I disagreed with many of Orwell's criteria for evaluating Kipling, I must admit that his calling Kipling's works "a monument to the obvious" is almost as quote-worthy as many of the familiar phrases of Kipling. Indeed, the fact that Kipling's "gnomic" utterances were so eminently quotable was the main reason for Orwell to call him "monumental"-- though if familiarity of quotes were the sole measure of one's obviousness, then Shakespeare would outdo Kipling there by that appeal to across-the-intellectual-spectrum familiarity.      

It was also mostly a coincidence that I happened to have read Orwell's online essay a few days before the end of October, which is also when I re-screened, for the first time in perhaps 30 years, the famous "bad movie" BLOODY PIT OF HORROR. Thus I began thinking about what elements of PIT were or were not "obvious," not so much in the specific way Orwell used the word but in the general sense. I noted how much PIT owed to many other Gothic narratives before it, stating, "BLOODY PIT is really not very different from dozens of other Gothic stories in which travelers show up at an old castle or manor and fall afoul of the malefic entity therein." The unobvious element, though, was the idea that said entity "looks like a cross between a masked wrestler and the hero of an Italian muscleman movie." I was of two minds on the effects of the scripters' plunge into unpredictability. On one hand, it caused a lot of viewers to make fun of the film, though on the whole PIT has more mythopoeic content than the average "so bad it's good" flick. On the other hand, PIT's foray into a very unobvious type of menace made a lot of people watch the film who would not have watched the similarly themed PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE. 

Now, in the terms I've established in my above definitions of the terms "trope" and "icon," the basic setup for PIT would be the master trope of the story. But no audience can relate just to a trope, which is just a base description of plot, sometimes with a smattering of a character-arc. Tropes must be "solidified" into icons to make them relatable. If one boiled Orwell's screed down into a trope-icon argument, then Orwell would be saying that Kipling was popular because his tropes were so simple and direct that anyone, no matter how intellectual or non-intellectual, could relate emotionally to them, so in that sense, Kipling's tropes would be appeals to the obvious.

But in my disagreement with Orwell in Part 2, I stressed that emotional appeal was not enough; that Kipling was celebrated because he was a master of literary myth. No matter how improbable intellectuals might deem the author's Cockney soldiers or talking animals, they succeeded because Kipling had an "unobvious" approach to such material. If there was an "obvious" appeal to one of his tropes, like that of a common British soldier seeking to profit from the Raj's presence in India, Kipling was capable of "fleshing out" that trope. His fiction, then, might be considered more of a "monument to the unobvious," since he radically reinterprets the basic structure of the trope he emulates and puts a personal spin of some sort upon it. The same is true of the writers behind BLOODY PIT OF HORROR, though they did not receive, and probably will never receive, much credit for their relative innovation. (I add that being innovative alone is not my sole criterion for distinction. BLOODY PIT and TROLL 2 are both "unobvious" transformations of familiar tropes, but PIT carries an abstract meaning and TROLL 2 does not.)

I also find the poster atenotol's metaphor of skeletons and flesh persuasive. Tropes may not all be alike in design-- and indeed, all human skeletons aren't exactly the same, either. But tropes are always structuring principles, just as skeletons provide scaffolding for all the rest of the human body's organs. Human flesh, particularly with respect to countenances, provides social relatability in the real world, while in the literary world, we need icons-- even when they may be as far from flesh as Lovecraft's "Colour Out of Space"-- in order to make the power of the trope come alive.

     

                 

THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS PT. 2

 I didn't mention, in the course of Part 1, that my use of the word "unobvious" was derived from a famous essay by George Orwell, in which he defended Rudyard Kipling from a scathing critique from T.S. Eliot. To be sure, the way Orwell defended Kipling might be deemed a "left-handed compliment," since Orwell defined the author's work as a "graceful monument to the obvious."

The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a
sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary
man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in
certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But
what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful
monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form--for verse is a
mnemonic device, among other things--some emotion which very nearly
every human being can share. The merit of a poem like 'When all the world
is young, lad' is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is
'true' sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself
thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you
happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better
than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a
fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious.

Orwell's 1942 essay may not be the earliest example of someone bracketing the words "good" and "bad" as if they were strangely complementary rather than exact opposites, but it's the earliest known to me. Therefore, I deem Orwell the unintentional ancestor of the whole idea of "good bad" entertainment, probably most popularized by the 1978 book FIFTY WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME.

Now, Orwell's criterion hinges entirely upon the distinction he makes between the tastes of "the intellectual" and "the ordinary man," though the essayist is not entirely clear about what that distinction entails. Clearly Orwell deems himself to be an intellectual, and from that the closest thing one can come to a definition from this essay alone is the idea that intellectuals alone are discriminating enough to know when poetry (which I assume should include all fiction-making endeavors, not just verse) is "sentimental" or "sententious." The ordinary man implicitly does not possess such discrimination, and yet, because both ordinary man and intellectual are human beings, they can share an "emotional overlap." At the same time, in other sections of the essay, Orwell seems to admit that having artistic discrimination can deceive its owner as to aesthetic perspicacity.

Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and
aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and
then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined
people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And yet, having said this, Orwell also criticizes those who jump to erroneous conclusions:

And yet the 'Fascist' charge has to be answered, because the first clue
to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that
he was NOT a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane or the most 'progressive' person is able to be nowadays.  

It would appear from this essay that Orwell serves two masters. On one hand, he tends to judge Kipling in terms of intellectual verisimilitude, as to whether the author has, say, correctly reported on the power politics of the British Raj. Yet he appreciates Kipling's ability to come up with highly memorable "gnomic" assertions, which is something not all artists can do.

So Orwell offers, as a left-handed compliment to Kipling, the observation that Kipling could speak to the emotions shared by both intellectuals and ordinary people. This is a familiar contrast between intellect and emotion-- one might almost call it a standard "trope" of basic philosophy. But I don't think it helps to see Kipling's genius-- even if it was confined to gnomic assertions, which I don't think to be the case-- as purely "emotional" in nature.

Without going into a diatribe about my formulation of "the four potentialities," I certainly think that Kipling is more important for his skills with mythopoesis than with purely dramatic emotion. Orwell barely discusses anything but verse poetry in the essay, and that's to be expected as Orwell was reacting against the Eliot polemic on Kipling's verse. But of course, everything Kipling wrote-- verse, novels, short stories, and non-fiction essays-- proceeded from the same source. Thus he's tapping into deeper sources than simple emotional oppositions when he imagines how animals might speak to one another if they were capable of so doing, as in THE JUNGLE BOOK, or imagining the entire history of "The Female of the Species."

But it's perhaps pointless to critique Orwell for not being aware of mythopoetic dimension of art, for he was, in keeping with his own self-identification as an intellectual, his primary concern was with didactic thought, and this shows in the two books for which he's most remembered: ANIMAL FARM and 1984. These are largely didactic presentations of ideas, while THE JUNGLE BOOK, though it like ANIMAL FARM personifies lower animals, is far more about understanding what each animal means as a mythic presence.

So, since I disagree with Orwell defining "the obvious" purely in terms of some common "emotional overlap" between ordinary people and intellectuals, I have a different take on what is "obvious" in literature vs. what is "unobvious"-- which I'll address in Part 3.           

  

  

THE VIRTUES OF THE UNOBVIOUS

 I recently re-screened the 1965 Italian horror-film BLOODY PIT OF HORROR but have not yet reviewed the movie on my film-blog. What I found interesting was the way many IMDB reviews treated PIT as comically overstated, though it's not nearly as overbaked as many other "so bad they're good" flicks like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE or TROLL 2. In terms of the general plot, BLOODY PIT is really not very different from dozens of other Gothic stories in which travelers show up at an old castle or manor and fall afoul of the malefic entity therein. In fact, BLOODY PIT was filmed at the same castle, Palazzo Borghese, as two previous Euro-horror movies, THE PLAYGIRLS AND THE VAMPIRE and THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA. The fact that BLOODY PIT comes in for so much disproportionate hilarity suggests to me that something in the way it was filmed, more than the story per se, tickles many viewers' ideas about the fragility of fantasies.

Now, in this essay, I quoted Jung as asserting that all creative work is entirely dependent on "fantasy thinking," a position with which I wholly concur:

Not the artist alone but every creative individual whatsoever owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable." (Jung, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES, 1921, page 63.)

Now, the examples of PLAN 9 and TROLL indicate that the free play of fantasy is not an unalloyed virtue. Games need rules to impose limits on the limitlessness of the imagination, and neither Ed Wood nor Claudio Fragasso were able to formulate rule-systems that made sense for their respective monsters.   

BLOODY PIT OF HORROR is directly efficiently if unenthusiastically by Massimo Pupillo, whose disinterest in the horror genre has been widely reported. There are no "Ed Wood" moments that call attention to directorial blunders or FX-shortcomings, so I assume that most of the hilarity stems from something closer to the realm of TROLL 2. Yet the core idea of PIT is no different than that of the celebrated Roger Corman Poe-film PIT AND THE PENDULUM. In Richard Matheson's adaptation of Poe, some innocents-- albeit far fewer in number than those in the 1965 film-- suffer torments by a man who believes himself to be identical with a famous torturer who in reality died years ago. But without looking, I don't think that if I check the IMDB comments for PENDULUM, I will find viewers bagging on that movie for its supposed absurdities, as this viewer did for Pupillo's movie.

The film is filled with lots of sadistic torture and is reminiscent of the German film, THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM (talk about a great title). However, unlike the German film, this one is much sillier and the horrible punishments really don't look all that realistic--just cheesy. But, because it is made so poorly (with horrible dialog and action throughout), it is worth seeing to have a few laughs.

I, however, don't find fault with the execution of BLOODY PIT's torture-scenes as that reviewer did. Here's the central visual trope that makes modern viewers take the menace of PENDULUM seriously:

The menace in PENDULUM looks like a respectable Gothic malefactor; he's dressed in dark colors and looks like he means business. Now here's the not dissimilar torture-happy menace in BLOODY PIT.

Because the evil "Crimson Executioner" looks like a cross between a masked wrestler and the hero of an Italian muscleman movie, I suggest that's the real, and maybe the sole, reason that so many viewers think that BLOODY PIT is so hilarious. Other films are structurally similar, and many may be more badly directed than this one, like the two vampire flicks mentioned above. But they lack such a vivid visual trope.

I don't know exactly why someone chose to juxtapose the masked-wrestler image with that of a Gothic torturer. I'll explore some possibilities in my formal review of the movie, but in this essay, I wanted to spotlight the notion that one or more of the scripters had an agenda. Any agenda probably did not come from Pupillo, who was hoping to move on from horror films to more reputable genres. I think one or more of the writers made some chance correlation between the violence of Gothic films and that of the "muscleman" films. Yet none of the six scripters credited on IMDB have any huge number of outstanding accomplishments in the writing department:

RALPH ZUCKER-- Besides PIT, Zucker did one obscure western, another Gothic horror from 1973, THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT, that I for one found blah, and KONG ISLAND, which is a fairly stupid mad-science jungle flick.

FRANCESCO MERLI-- four other writing credits, but none of the productions are known to me

RUTH CARTER-- aside from PIT, Carter's only other credit is as one of four writers who "adapted" Edgar Allan Poe to produce Pupillo's other major horror flick, TERROR CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE, which was a Barbara Steele vehicle.

CESARE MANCINI-- same as Carter except that he also contributed to some romance movie.  

ROMANO MIGLORINI and ROBERTO NATALE-- And here we finally find a couple of guys who racked up a respectable number of writing credits-- 16 for the first guy, 29 for the second-- though the only outstanding credits they garnered, for a couple of Bava films, came after PIT and TERROR CREATURES, on which they worked alongside Carter and Mancini.

So, in the absence of anyone who looks like an "auteur," I'm going to guess that some or all of the writers convened to figure out what to do with yet another film set in a Gothic castle-- and that instead of going with something obvious like another demented follower of Torquemada or another vampire, just decided that their fiend would be the furthest thing possible from those sort of menaces: a torture who put his chiseled musculature on display more than his torture-devices. That nod to the least obvious sort of menace-- much like Claudio Fragasso's vegetarian goblins-- had no chance of being taken seriously, at least to the extent that audiences responded to obvious menaces like vampires. 

And yet the virtue of that appeal to the unobvious got BLOODY PIT a lot more attention than it would have garnered otherwise, even though it was attention of the "so bad it's good" ilk. In my review I'll hold forth on a few things that make BLOODY PIT a more mythic film than simple goofs like TROLL 2 and PLAN 9, so I'll sum up by saying that sometimes flights of fancy can flout the rules in such a way as to create new games, as good or better than the old ones.         

INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES (1962)

BLOGGER'S NOTE: I usually don't reprint essays from my film-blog here, but I decided that I would do so with this one, inasmuch as its main topic-- sublimity and humor-- touches on some of the material covered in the CUTEY FUNNY posts.


________________________

“From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one step”-- Napoleon Bonaparte.


Rarely does one see the opposite assertion: that one can go to the ridiculous to the sublime in one step. This rarity probably relates to the dynamics of producing both effects, at least in fictional narrative. When a creator seeks to invoke the sublime—which in my view is essentially identical with sci-fi’s “sense of wonder”—the creator tries to invoke a sense of majesty or awesomeness to some phenomenon. When the creator fails to do so, the disconnect between intention and execution often has a comical effect. In cinema, many of the most popular “bad films” are those that suffer such a disconnect, as seen in Ed Wood’s PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE and Phil Tucker’s ROBOT MONSTER.


“Bad film” connoisseurs have shown little regard for Bruno VeSota’s 1962 sci-fi comedy, INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES. In all likelihood this is because INVASION is intended to be ridiculous from the start—literally, since the first credit of the film is the jokey “R.I Diculous Presents.” INVASION follows the tradition of broad comedy a la Abbott and Costello, focusing on frenetic slapstick and simple spoofs of “straight” genres. Such films usually show no insights into what makes the “straight” genre appealing. INVASION is an exception, for it does have such insights. Indeed, the aggressive stupidity of the film, whose humor shouldn’t be overly funny to anyone out of grade school, makes it a little easier to view said insights.

INVASION opens less like a sci-fi parody than a service comedy, focusing on the misadventures of Penn and Philbrick, two dim-witted army privates assigned to duty on a missile base. Penn is nominally the “straight man” of the duo, heaping Abbott-like abuse upon his Costello-like partner, a whining child-man who reads comic books. Specifically, Philbrick reads the space-opera comics of “Space Commander Connors,” who also has his own TV show and marketing campaign. Later, one of the film’s real aliens asks Philbrick what “comic books” are. He replies that “they’re our army tech manuals”—a lame joke that may contain more truth than humor.

In contrast to the service comedies of 1940s Hollywood, everyone in the army is as idiotic as the two protagonists, from a sergeant who converses in Beatnik-speak to a wacky, gun-waving colonel. The colonel whips the plot into motion by choosing Penn and Philbrick to be part of a detachment sent to inspect the site of a recent atom-bomb test. According to the colonel, seven days have gone by, which is adequate time for the “fallout” to disperse, but aerial reconnaissance spotted a strange natural cave opened up by the bomb. Later it’ll be disclosed that the “Star Creatures” of the title are camped out in the cave, and have been there for ten years, but said aliens never comment on having weathered any nuclear explosions. The old force-field trick, perhaps. At any rate the colonel sends the detachment off to investigate the cave for no particular reason.

Following a few more forgettable comic escapades, the detachment arrives at the cave. Most of the soldiers are captured and put into stasis by the Star Creatures, but the aliens allow Penn and Philbrick to remain conscious for interrogation. The aliens take two forms: super-strong mindless plant-creatures called “vege-men” (guys in silly-looking tree-suits) and their mistresses, two stacked space-amazons wearing tight-fitting one-piece swimsuits and high heels. Penn describes the girls as being “seven feet tall,” but this comment may just be a way of masking how short the two heroes really are. Jonathan Haze’s script sneaks a ribald reference into the names of the amazons, who are “Doctor Puna” and “Professor Tanga.” Someone liked the pun so much that those names also appear in the credits, though no other actor in the lead credits has a character-name so referenced.

The space amazons are, in essence, the element of Haze’s script that most pushes the crude humor from the ridiculous to the sublime. Sci-fi cinema of the 1950s sports a fair number of stories about alien worlds ruled by women, as seen in 1954’s CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON and 1958’s QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE. In these films the females possess technology superior to that of Earth, but their feminine emotions make them vulnerable to the charms of hunky Earthmen. INVASION follows this basic pattern, but Tanga and Puna are scientists who are far more intelligent than any Earth-denizen in the story, rather than simply inheriting technology from their culture. Their ability to loom over the short soldiers is of course exploited for sex appeal—lots of shots of Philbrick looking straight up into Puna’s cleavage—but it also allows an interesting reversal, in that Puna and Tanga can and do frequently push or knock the two males about with impunity. To be sure, one line suggests that the males back home may be equally big, since Haze’s script devotes a few sentences to describing their culture as a “three-phase society,” in which men are the warriors, women are “the technicals” (implicitly the rulers?), and vege-men are the slaves. Haze says nothing further about the male natives of the alien world, but curiously takes the trouble to relate the history of how the women took control of the vege-men by killing off their leader (Che Gherkin, perhaps) and confining future vege-men to grow only from their “pastures.” To be sure, this mini-history is used as a cue for a lot of dopey vegetable jokes, as well as one of many witticisms about how much the vegetable slaves are treated like the army’s “yardbirds.” Still, the conquest and neutralization of the vege-men sounds a lot like standard tropes concerning amazon-societies conquering and neutralizing the male sex.

The “Star Creatures” originally came to Earth as scouts for possible invasion. As noted earlier they’ve been stuck down in this cave for ten years, stranded by damage their spaceship sustained on landing and unable to communicate with the home planet. That damage has just been repaired, however, and the amazons are making ready to blast off, taking Penn, Philbrick, and the rest of their detachment along as specimens into “the black voids of space.”

For some reason everything the space-babes say starts to sound dirty after a while. Maybe it’s those names…

The big girls have a chink in their armor, though: ten years is a long time without a man. Tanga doesn’t seem particularly charmed by their captives, and has issues with the male sex generally: “Stupid arrogant braggarts, all of them, with their illusions of superiority!” Her subordinate Puna, however, seems receptive to Philbrick’s attentions, and Tanga tells her that the Earth-man has merely stimulated her “maternal instincts.” This effectively turns the sci-fi trope of the “invading virile Earthman” on its head; in INVASION it’s the men who must “stoop to conquer,” seducing the superior females with their childlike weakness.

True, Penn does try one show of force: ambushing Puna to take her gun. She puts his lights out with a handy judo-toss, so Philbrick must fast-talk the amazon into receiving a cultural education on the human custom of kissing. In a schtick probably swiped from some Three Stooges short, the human-alien kiss creates electric-spark sounds and both of them are semi-paralyzed with ecstacy. Penn manages to drag Philbrick away from his conquest and the two escape.

Back at the army base, the two doofuses fail to convince their chicken colonel of the impending danger—that is, until Philbrick reveals that he is a member of “Space Commander Connors’ Secret Squadron.” The colonel is a member too—“Space pals forever!”—and so he and his two new buddies lead another (very small) detachment against the alien cave. This ersatz “cavalry” promptly gets detained by a group of roaming Native Americans who happen to be in the neighborhood. Philbrick explains their mission, only to once again invoke the name of Commander Connors, whereon the Indians’ leader reveals that he too is a member of the squadron. In fact, he has a superior rank to both Philbrick and the colonel. “Outranked by a savage,” grouses the colonel. The cavalry and the Indians both get drunk on firewater, leaving Penn and Philbrick once more alone to plumb the perilous papier-mache cavern.

By the only kind of luck such heroes ever have—the dumb kind—the soldiers not only sneak into the cave without being torn apart by vege-men, they manage to launch the amazons’ spaceship without anyone aboard, where it will be lost in space. Soon Puna and Tanga learn they’ve been marooned on Earth, and conclude that when they don’t return to their homeworld the invasion will be called off. Tanga doesn’t take it well, beating up both men and threatening to shoot them. Puna draws her own weapon and forces Tanga to surrender. She suggests that they throw themselves upon the Earthmen’s mercy. Penn gives Tanga the requisite electric lip-job and the two men propose marriage. “It sounds like slavery,” says the bemused Tanga. “That’s exactly what it is,” responds cagey Penn. INVASION then concludes with the two soldiers getting medals for their heroism. They go to their car, where their amazon wives-- now clad in Earth-garments-- are seated atop the rumble seat like two tremendous trophies. Off the two dopes drive with their prizes, and so ends the INVASION.

When I first viewed this film as a kid, I thought most of its humor was pretty lame, especially the parts where grown men were playing some sort of Buck Rogers-Captain Video space-opera games. I still think the humor itself is lame, but it’s interesting that writer Haze and director VeSota end up depicting all the patriarchal societies seen in the film as no better than a “secret squadron” based on a television show. For male juveniles of that time period, such merchandise-related “societies” functioned as “boys’ clubs” in which males could fantasize about performing the deeds of men. Such deeds included conquering alien princesses as a substitute for fraternizing with real girls. The two dunces do indeed conquer a pair of space-babes, but the way they do so undercuts the heroic element of such fantasies. Given that INVASION doesn’t work that well as a comedy, it’s surprising that it has such a comparatively high level of mythicity, mostly within the sociological and cosmological functions.

TROLL PLAYING PART 2

"The symbolic materials given to our senses, the Gestalten or fundamental perceptual forms which invite us to construe the pandemonium of sheer impression into a world of things and occasions, belong to the 'presentational order'. They furnish the elementary abstractions in terms of which ordinary sense-exerience is understood."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 98.

The other major facet of TROLL 2 that brought about its unlooked-for cult popularity is identical with the facet that vaulted Ed Wood to prominence in the 1980s: a lunatic disregard for the discursive mode of storytelling. What takes the place of this mode is just this "pandemonium of sheer impression," though in contrast to Langer's formulation it's a pandemonium that fails, due to authorial incompetence, to resolve itself into a presentational (or, to use Cassirer's term, "expressive") order.

Late in '08 I wrote an essay on the early Superman stories of Siegel and Shuster, titled "OCD on a Hotplate" as a way of describing how Siegel's scripts seemed to "wander without knowing what effect they're shooting for." But even Siegel's scripts are governed by more of the Aristotelian unities than TROLL 2. Rossella Drudi's script for the film clearly is trying to riff on many things at once. Two aspects already noted in TROLL PLAYING PART 1 include both vampire tropes and folklore about cannibalistic boogiemen (for which Scandinavian trolls *might* actually be better suited than Celtic goblins). I'll also speculate that given the film's heavy emphasis on the goblins forcing the beleaguered human protagonists to eat tainted food so that the humans will turn into plants, Drudi might even have been influenced by the mythic motif I'll call "eating the otherworld's food," which invariably causes mortals from Persephone on down to remain in the otherworld. All of these myth-motifs could have been arranged into some impressive presentational order, perhaps on a par with Jim Henson's 1986 film LABYRINTH.

But of course, Drudi and her director-collaborator Claudio Fragasso DON'T manage to arrange their sensational concepts into any kind of order, and what one gets is pure pandemonium. There have been many popular authors whose essential way of impressing their public involves basically throwing everything plus the kitchen sink at the audience in the hope of grabbing its attention. It's been a particularly popular strategy in the world of animated cartoons, which as I noted here are often the first contact young audiences have with presentational symbols lacking any discursive rationale. Of course, when Tex Avery bombards his characters with rapid-fire sensational events lacking any rationale beyond "telling a joke," both he and his audience know that they're participating in this kind of non-discursive form of entertainment. I view this form as identical with the sort of non-discursive order that Langer finds in the fairytale, whose "purpose is to gratify wishes."

But though TROLL 2 has sequences that were probably meant to be broadly humorous by Drudi and Fragasso, Fragasso's complaint that audiences were laughing at a lot of the other sequences indicates that neither he nor his wife could see how weirdly incongrous their rewritings of archaic myths had turned out. It may be remembered that Schopenhauer considered incongruity the basic appeal of all humor, and TROLL 2 is almost as much a montage of incongruous scenes as Wood's GLEN OR GLENDA. If cannibal vegetarian goblins don't seem incongrous enough, one encounters also:

--The kid-character pissing on a table of tainted goblin-food to prevent his beloved family from eating it--

--a spectral protector, the kid's grandpa, who in one scene can blast a goblin with lightning and in another gives the kid a mundane Molotov cocktail to throw at the boogeymen--

--the aforementioned use of a "double decker baloney sandwich" as a crucifix--

--an evil witch-goblin who can transform herself into a hot babe who then proceeds to have sex with a young dude while popping him some popcorn in a unique manner--

--and the source of the evil ones' powers, a "Stonehenge magical stone" which the heroes use to defeat the goblins, even though the creatures come back for a horrific coda looking none the worse for their defeat.

Appropo of my "kitchen sink" remark, I'd be tempted to call all this "kitchen sink surrealism" if an online search hadn't shown me that the term has already been used for a distinct artistic movement. But maybe something like "presentational incoherence" would be just as good to distinguish works like TROLL 2 or GLEN OR GLENDA from works that may be equally non-discursive but which show more authorial control, as per the examples of Tex Avery and Jerry Siegel. Certainly the makers of TROLL 2-- including the actors, costumers, etc.-- were all guilty of incoherence of some sort, be it conceptual or purely linguistic.

TROLL PLAYING

Troll2 is a fable for children a crazy horror, much comic. The film did not have to be prohibited, nothing censorship, therefore nothing blood that I have replaced with the chlorophyll, using the green color of the goblin, North European Celtic legend, like monster vegetarians many fanatics us of the salutista, macrobiotico food. I have used the goblin like vampiri, using the amburger (tipical american food) of meat to [sic] the place dell' Saint water...-- a poster signed on as TROLL 2 writer Rossella Drudi on this review comments-thread.

My most recent cinematic viewing was a double feature consisting of TROLL 2, a recent claimant to the title of "best worst movie," and BEST WORST MOVIE, a documentary about the making of this 1990 cultfilm and its slow word-of-mouth revival over the ensuing 20 years.

Written and directed by Michael Stephenson, who as a child starred in TROLL 2, BEST WORST MOVIE is an enjoyable documentary whose most interesting subtext involves showing how easy it is for one person's enthusiasm to become another person's "move away slowly from the creepy guy" vibe. BWM (as I'll abbreviate it here) is as full of oddball viewpoints as Zwigoff's CRUMB, not least the TROLL 2 scripter Drudi, quoted above. (Of course I can't be sure that a poster on a review-site is the real Rossella Drudi, but nothing this poster says contradicts the words of the Drudi of the documentary.) There she justifies her notion of cannibalistic vegetarian trolls (actually called "goblins" in the film proper) by noting that at the time the film was scripted she had a serious mad-on against vegetarianism. True, in the doc Drudi doesn't mention having modeled her goblins on vampires, but it's pretty obvious: the scene in which Stephenson's kid-character drives away the goblins by brandishing a "double decker baloney sandwich" is an obvious parody of a familiar vampire trope. Even here, though, it's amusing that the poster confuses two different vampiric banes: the "amburger" is being used in place of a cross, not "Saint water" (holy water, one presumes).

Drudi's husband Claudio Fragasso directed the film and appears in BWM as well, and he doesn't seem to agree that the film was meant to be "much comic," becoming visibly testy whenever he realizes that the audiences aren't just laughing at the things he meant to be funny, but at pretty much everything in the film. But bruised egos aside, the question must be asked-- does TROLL 2 deserve the title of "best worst movie?"

The short answer for me is no, for I can think of many, many other bad movies which I liked more. I do appreciate the lunacy of TROLL 2, but watching it in the theater proved more of an endurance test than (say) my experience watching a revival of Jack Hill's dynamic SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975).

Still, TROLL 2 can't help but be a contender for my list of, say, the top 20 badfilms. Part of the flick's appeal falls into the same Burnsian "to see ourselves as others see us" mentality that comes across in the documentary, for all through TROLL 2 the characters-- most of whom were played by amateur American thespians-- speak what may be the most amazing English patois ever devised for a professional film. This was a consequence of the fact that the film was being shot in Utah by an Italian crew that barely spoke English, and though director Fragasso claims in BWM that during the shooting he became "more American than the Americans," a big part of TROLL 2's appeal is seeing cornfed Utah residents spout weird, hyperbolic dialogue. A minor line that might sound perfectly ordinary in conversational Italian, such as Stevenson's line to his sibling-- "You're a genius, big sister!"-- becomes horrendously over-the-top and laughworthy coming from the Utah-born actor. In a dubbed Italian movie, one is always aware that the English dialogue is coming from Italian actors, and so one doesn't necessarily laugh at the weirder verbal sallies. But in TROLL 2, the disconnnect is a constant source of fun.

And so the disjunction between two modes of speech is at least one big facet of TROLL 2's burgeoning appeal.

However, it's not the only one, and I'll address yet another facet of the film's popularity in Part 2 of TROLL PLAYING.