Random Paperbacks: All Night Stand by Thom Keyes (Mayflower/Dell, 1967)

Ah, we haven’t had any beatniks on this blog for a while, have we? Yeah, THE BEAT SCENE! Mercurial, untamed, straight from the fridge, da… hang on a minute, a pop group? That doesn’t sound like the sort of endeavour any self-respecting beatniks would get involved in. What year was this thing published again? 1967!? Oh my.

I don’t suppose young Thom Keyes had any aspirations to become the next Hemingway, but he must at least have thought he’d made a solid early entry in the inevitable paisley shirt / groupie rampage “rise and fall of a rock group” paperback sub-genre… and as such, we can only imagine the sheer level of face-palm he must have experienced when he saw what the design team at Mayflower/Dell did to it.

Still, the physics students and the pub stripper they roped in for the photo shoot look like they’re having fun. (Check the upside down painting in the background – because life in our society is, like, UPSIDE DOWN, man!)

Seemingly slightly better known for his SF work, Thom Keyes (1949-1995) is “mainly remembered as the writer of the ‘Space: 1999’ episode ‘The Taybor’”, it says here, and he also contributed to New Worlds.

In and of themselves, the sections of ‘All Night Stand’ I read prior to this post are no great shakes, but for a novel published before its author’s eighteenth birthday it’s a reasonably impressive achievement, I think it’s fair to say.

Franco Files: Venus In Furs (1969)

AKA:

‘Paroxismus’ (Italy?), ‘Black Angel’ (pre-release/script title), ‘To Fantasma tis Afroditis’ (“The Ghost of Venus”, Greece).

Context:

Beginning in about mid-1968, Jess Franco spent a couple of years on the payroll of maverick British producer Harry Alan Towers – a typically frantic period that saw the director signing his name (well, ONE OF his names) to a total of nine films. Whilst Towers’ production muscle succeeded in bringing bigger budgets and closer brushes with ‘respectability’ to Franco pictures though, the producer’s overbearing influence also often seemed to stifle Franco’s rogue creativity, leading to a body of work that can be broadly summarised as a load of old rubbish, a few missed opportunities, and at the top of the heap, two or three shining examples of Franco-genius where everything came together just as it should.(1)

And thankfully today, we’re looking at one of the latter. As was the case with most of his collaborations with Towers, Franco had a handful of slumming ‘name’ actors and a wide variety of international locations to work with here, but, unlike the confused literary adaptations and run of the mill genre exercises that comprised much of the rest of their joint output, 1969's ‘Venus In Furs’ gave the director a chance to funnel these attributes into a more personal project, delivering a commercially viable film that also allowed him to work through some of his characteristic obsessions with… well, a certain degree of freedom, at least.(2)

Often singled out as the Franco film that non-Franco fans are most likely to appreciate, and rated by many as his best work, ‘Venus..’ isn’t really a personal favourite of mine, but, taken on a purely technical level, it is certainly one of our hero’s more cohesive and accomplished efforts.

Content:

According to Franco, the seed for what eventually became ‘Venus In Furs’ was planted after a conversation he had at some point with the legendary jazz musician Chet Baker. Therein, Baker held forth about the strange stories & visions that unfolded in his mind whilst he was on-stage playing a solo, and, inspired by this idea, Franco hit upon the notion of making a film about a celebrated black trumpet player in the Miles Davis mould, who falls in love with a ghostly, white woman whilst lost in musical reverie.

As Franco tells it, Towers and the film’s potential American backers knocked hell out of this noble idea, insisting that audiences in the ‘States weren’t ready to accept a black, male protagonist, and so, reluctantly, Franco agreed to reverse the races of the two leads. Later claiming that this decision “tore the guts” out of his original vision, Jess nonetheless ploughed on with developing the project, which somewhere along the line got mixed up with the latest reiteration of his perpetual “avenging ghost of dead woman kills two blokes and a lady whilst falling in love with a living man” story, this time starring Towers’ number one lady, Maria Rohm.

In fact, the variation on that theme here veers so close to the narrative of the previous year’s Necronomicon that ‘Venus..’ practically becomes a slightly refined remake of that film. Seeing as how ‘Necronomicon’ was still doing brisk business in American theatres at the time under the name ‘Succubus’, the US backers were presumably not adverse to this development. ‘Venus..’ was eventually distributed by AIP in the ‘States, and all of Franco’s beloved jazz stuff – though still present – fell increasingly into the background as production went on.

To some extent, the art-house pretentions of ‘Necronomicon’ are revisited here along with the story - witness for instance the elegant “jet set party” in which members of the “Greek Riviera yachting crowd” appear frozen in statue-like still-life - whilst the ponderous beatnik narration of James Darren as the Chet Baker-esque trumpeter protagonist plays just as prominent a role in the English language version as the equivalent voiceovers did in the earlier film. Whilst still peppered with ridiculous nonsense though (“I tried not to remember why I had buried my horn..”), the narration here is nonetheless a lot weirder and funnier than the heavy-handed, self-aware blather of ‘Necronomicon’s English dub, with some pretty entertaining passages of soul-searching hep-cat jive going down, at times almost exactly replicating the loopy, first person drawl of a Bob Tralins-esque pulp novel.

James Darren has a bit of a “guy you get if you can’t get David Hemmings” kinda vibe about him, but he’s young and keen, and he actually emerges as one of Franco’s more engaging male protagonists, mixing lost-little-boy good looks and world-ravaged intensity to great effect. (And if Franco’s vision for the character perhaps didn’t stretch much beyond “BE LIKE CHET BAKER”, Darren certainly does his best to deliver.)

Initially, I thought that this mixed up horn player might be a bit of a one-off character in the Franco-verse, but actually of course, he fits right in: both as a more interesting successor to Jack Taylor’s character in ‘Necronomicon’, and as a direct forerunner of Taylor’s wondering poet in 1972’s ‘Female Vampire’, a film that in many ways is just as much a remake of ‘Venus..’ as ‘Venus..’ is a remake of ‘Necronomicon’ - a perfect example of how the cyclical logic of Franco’s ur-narrative blends and changes while the central riff plays on.

This archetype of the questing male artist whose psychic sensitivity locks him into a doomed love/obsession scenario with the ever-present female ghost/revenger is of course Franco’s way to hook the audience into the idea that is the central thematic concern of all these films (and of all ‘Bride Wore Black’ type revenge stories in general, when ya think about it): the matter of blind, unalterable cosmic fate.

This ever-present theme is particularly strongly communicated by the key scene in ‘Venus In Furs’ that sees Maria Rohm’s Wanda murdered by a trio of jaded aristocrats (Klaus Kinski, Dennis Price and Italian pop cinema regular Margaret Lee, for anyone keeping score). The sequence plays out slowly and theatrically, almost like a fairytale, heavily emphasising the obsession with fate that seems to fixate Franco whenever he wheels out this story. He even throws in tinted ‘flash-forwards’ from Kinski’s pre-murder face to the later scene of his own demise, just to drive the point home: these sadists may think they're in control of their destiny, but whether they know it or not, they're already victims.

Perhaps more interesting though are the repercussions of the fact that James Darren’s character passively witnesses Wanda’s murder – not an aspect of the story I can remember being passed across to many of its other variations.

“Man it was a wild scene,” reflects the trumpeter’s voiceover, “but if they wanted to go that rough, that was their bag”. The notion that Darren’s character on some level enjoys witnessing Wanda’s degradation is raised at several points in the film, and the implication that this romantic ‘innocent’ is thus in some way party to the crimes of Kinski & co. certainly throws some interesting twists into the formula.

Certainly, the strange fate that awaits Darren at the film’s conclusion can most usefully be read as the result of his realising too late that he too has been one of Wanda’s victims all along, rather than the post-revenge love interest he naively assumed himself to be, whilst the implications of his taking pleasure from viewing a sexualised murder taking place, then subsequently believing himself free of guilt, also provides unsettling commentary on the nexus of sadism and voyeurism at the heart of Franco’s cinema, obliquely suggesting that there is a stern moral judgement waiting to be passed on filmmaker and viewer alike.

All of which sounds pretty high-minded I suppose, but, this being Franco, there are of course some glaring flaws that prevent ‘Venus In Furs’ from ever becoming the mythic Franco ‘masterpiece’ that you could screen for your Film Studies lecturer and expect to get away with it.

For one thing, the movie is full of totally pointless, Mondo-esque stock footage of the Rio Carnival (presumably shot when Franco was in South America making ‘The Girl From Rio’ and ‘The Blood of Fu Manchu’ for Towers the previous year). And for another, the a-cappella musical sting that plays after each of Wanda’s revenge murders (y’know, that “Venus in furs will be smiling” one) is just incredibly infuriating - so heavy-handed and inappropriate that it almost kills the effectiveness of those scenes stone-dead.(3)

And the numerous scenes between Darren and his ‘real life’ girlfriend Rita (played by singer Barbara McNair) are also a bit of a drag, to be honest. Presumably the last remaining vestiges of Franco’s original “black trumpeter falls in love with a blonde goddess” storyline, these segments seem to have been preserved long after whatever point they're trying to make vanished from the script. They are interesting in that they play closer to a straight relationship drama than anything you’d usually see in Franco film, but sadly they’re also quite dull, and the ‘love triangle’ aspect of the story never really gels, wasting valuable time with what one suspects is only a pale echo of Franco’s original vision.

Kink:

Whilst ‘Venus In Furs’ has absolutely nothing to do with the Sacher-Masoch book of the same name (AIP insisted on the title for some reason, and Franco grudgingly obliged by having Maria Rohm wear furs in a few scenes), ironically it does to some extent reflect the director’s genuine interest in the works of the Marquis DeSade. The sex & sadism of Wanda’s murder scene in particular is amped up beyond anything else Franco had filmed up to this point in his career, and there's certainly a lot more waist-up nudity and (non-explicit) sex scenes here than I remember seeing in any of his earlier films, whilst the pain/pleasure dynamic of the whole thing is emphasised pretty strongly in Rohm’s grimly ambiguous performance.

Furthermore, it struck me whilst revisiting the film for this review that, between Rohm’s black bob wig, the occasional fetishisation of camera equipment and the extensive use of mirrors and fractured frames amid moments of elegant, stocking-fixated S&M, ‘Venus In Furs’ actually comes pretty close at times to replicating the style of renowned erotic comics genius Guido Crepax. (Despite the frequent stylistic cross-over between their work, I’m not aware that Franco ever admitted to admiring, or even being aware of, Crepax, so it is possible that the similarities are entirely coincidental; after all, they were basically both just horny devils with a good artistic eye and a thing for Louise Brooks haircuts, weren’t they?)

3/5

Creepitude:

Following ‘Necronomicon’s lead, ‘Venus In Furs’ continues Franco’s determination to frame his supernatural horror stories in a manner that completely rejects the clichés of ‘60s gothic horror film-making. As such, it is difficult to really think of ‘Venus..’ as being very “horror-y”, even though the violence is quite strong for the period and the weight of eternal doom hangs heavy over the characters.

The one exception to this rule is the scene of Wanda’s murder, which seems to knowingly wink in the direction of the gothic, taking place as it does in a candle-lit stone dungeon complete with an ornate wrought-iron grating through which Darren’s character observes the action, and a variable light source that seems to flash on and off every few seconds. Whether this is meant to represent some extremely unrealistic lightning, a swinging overhead light fixture (very noir) or simply some wild, non-diegetic stylistic quirk, I’m unsure, but it is certainly very effective, shading us from what we imagine to be fleeting moments of unseen brutality, even as the erotically-charged violence of the scenario is laid bare, setting the agenda for what is basically an inventive and unusual ‘ghost movie’ with suitably ghoulish aplomb.

3/5

Pulp Thrills:

Though it is not really ‘pulp cinema’ in the same sense as Franco’s pre-‘Necronomicon’ genre movies, ‘Venus..’ nonetheless perfectly epitomises the kind of “Mediterranean cocktail lounge erotic apocalypse” aesthetic that would go on to dominate his work for years to come, and that could easily have found itself replicated in some luridly jacketed airport best-seller later in the '70s.

Plus, you know – beatniks, hep-cat jive-talk, etc.

It would have been easy have go with 1 or 2 on this one, but instead I’m gonna give it…

3/5

Altered States:

‘Venus In Furs’ begins as only a Franco flick can, with shaky travelogue footage of Istanbul, and the shadow of a pair of hands resting against the glass of a hotel window overlooking the shimmering sea… by which point fans will have relaxed, safe in the knowledge that Uncle Jess is at the controls, whilst his detractors conversely will be preparing for the worst. Once the film gets going however, both camps may find themselves adjusting their expectations slightly...

For instance, whilst the flashback / flash-forward structure and general atmosphere of freaked out zaniness tend to render ‘Venus..’ a disorientating experience for those watching with one eye elsewhere, attentive viewers will soon cop to the fact that the film is actually a very linear and well-constructed example of Franco’s narrative technique, telling a simple story with circular thematic unity and barely any loose ends, and utilising a system of imagery that, by and large, remains coherent throughout.

Dig for example the way that characters involved in the central revenge narrative are repeatedly framed, tableau-like, against bright red walls. These shots are spread throughout the film, all leading up to a breath-taking concluding image of Maria Rohm stretched out & comatose on a tiled floor, coldly observed by her erstwhile victims as they lean against the walls of a deep red ‘ghost room’, the symbolism of which recalls the otherworldly terror-spaces of David Lynch’s films, as Wanda’s karma is demonstrated to have gone full circle; an idea that is powerfully conveyed without the use of any crude explanatory dialogue or join-the-dots exposition.

Also notable by its relative absence here is the kind of in-camera ‘experimentalism’ that characterised so many of Franco's films. A few of his trademark wobbly zooms and focus-blurring transition shots can still be found, but by and large I think, Towers kept Franco on a tight leash technically-speaking, and as a result most of the footage here is properly framed, in focus and professionally lit, leaving Jess to conjure his preferred atmosphere of psychedelic delirium through more conventional means of jagged angles, kaleidoscopic mirrors, jarring cuts, weird interior décor and wild music – all of which works excellently, elevating central sequences such as the murders of Price and Kinski to dizzying heights of sado-orgasmic revelry, whilst also no doubt earning the director a few box-ticks from viewers who lack patience with his usual diet of wandering zooms, incidental detail and fuzzed out extreme close-ups. (Interestingly, 'Venus..' also utilises a lot of slow-motion, tinted colours, solarized shots, and other post-production tricks that were presumably beyond the director's means as his budgets hit the poverty line and his workload multiplied over the next few years).

The film’s jazz elements also add greatly to its overall success I think. The notion that Franco “makes films like jazz” has become a bit of a truism amongst commentators on his work, but rarely did he make a film that  reflects his love of music as directly as this one – indeed, you can see him right there during the film’s performance scenes, laying it down on trombone, bass and piano alongside James Darren (a genuine trumpet player) and members of Manfred Mann’s late ‘60s ensemble ‘Chapter 3’.

Mann and his long-time collaborator Mike Hugg were deep into their own twisted jazz groove by this point, and hiring them to provide the soundtrack to this movie was an inspired move, even if, as is par for the course in a Franco film, I’m uncertain how much of what we eventually hear during the film’s other scenes actually originated with the credited composers.(4) (The American print of the film under review here includes a bunch of fairly generic sounding orchestral library cues, and then there’s that damn ‘Venus in Furs’ jingle to account for too…).

Anyway, regardless, the film’s jazz scenes are really cool, conveying a smoky, sweaty authenticity that captures the joy and swing of a weed-fuelled late night session via roving camera-work, snappy editing and some hot playing... and there are a lot of other good music moments to enjoy here too.

Barbara McNair’s best scene by far arrives when she delivers a great, ‘Stones-esque tough-ballad entitled either ‘Let’s Get Together’ or ‘I Got A Feeling’ (toss you a coin for it), whilst writhing around horizontally on a blue-tiled nightclub floor as the band rocks out behind her! (Fans will note that this is the closest ‘Venus In Furs’ gets to a kinky nightclub scene, which surely means it can’t POSSIBLY qualify as "the perfect Jess Franco film", right?). My favourite bit of music in ‘Venus..’ though has got to be the demonic, Bruno Nicolai-esque bass pulse that builds into a totally whacked out, atonal horn freakout whilst Dennis Price meets his demise – far out, man! (I'm guessing that one at least  is a Mann/Hugg joint.)

Through use of this musical heavy weather and formalist visual beat-down, Franco’s original idea of a dream / reality disjuncture occurring in the mind of a wigged out jazz musician is actually still communicated pretty well by ‘Venus In Furs’, even as that notion becomes pretty marginalised within the script. With the precise points at which Darren’s external reality blurs into Wanda’s internal dream-space remaining, as they should, extremely unclear, we are left with a film that is as trippy as anything Franco made in the ‘70s whilst also as cohesive as anything made by... well, you know, a ‘normal’ film director. Win/win? You tell me.

4/5

Sight-seeing:

One of Harry Alan Towers’ characteristically insane international co-productions, ‘Venus In Furs’ appears to have been filmed all over the place – Rome (in Carlo Ponti’s house!), Istanbul, Barcelona, Rio, maybe other places besides – but nonetheless, it somehow lacks the strong sense of place that pervades so many of Franco’s other productions.

Though some of it was undoubtedly shot by the man himself, the location-work in Istanbul and Rio feels very much like stock footage, crudely inserted around scenes shot on sets (actual SETS on a Franco film ferchrissake, what’s that all about?), and anonymous interiors that could have been filmed anywhere.

Occasional nice things do still stand out at times: a scene in which Darren and Rohm flee from the cops features a network of ancient, overhanging streets, presumably in Istanbul, that very much recalls the still-unidentified location that was put to such good use back in The Diabolical Dr. Z, and this actually leads on to a brief but snappily edited car chase(!) through some similarly colourful Turkish neightbourhoods.

For the most part though, as our dashing trumpeter himself puts it; “When you don’t know where you’re at, man, I tell ya, time is like the ocean..” - a statement that ironically makes a pretty good criticism of many of the less successful films Jess Franco turned in over the years.

2/5

Conclusion:

Having basically said a lot of broadly positive things about ‘Venus In Furs’ above, I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to trying to express in words why the film leaves me a little cold. Whether viewed from within the Francoverse or outside it, it is certainly a richly accomplished and stylistically daring example of late ‘60s horror/exotica, with a great deal to recommend it, but… I dunno, man. Somehow it just feels a bit emotionally distant to me.

Maybe, speaking as a fan of Franco’s far more ragged and damaged ‘70s work, I just end up seeing this one as the equivalent of his shiny, well-produced major label album; it’s cool as far as it goes, and I can’t really fault it much, but… given the choice, you’ll always be more likely to find me chilling with the rough demos of the same material, or the weird drunken live album, if you get my drift.

(1) That may not sound like much of a compliment, but whatever your opinion of him, I think Jess Franco actually achieved a better hit rate than any of Towers’ other pet directors. Just try making it alive through a double bill of ‘Circus of Fear’ and ‘House of 1,000 Dolls’ if you want to get an idea of the sheer tedium involved in your average, non-Franco H.A.T. production.

(2) Whilst it was Towers’ influence that first brought them together, it is interesting to note that both Klaus Kinski and Dennis Price apparently found working with Franco sufficiently agreeable that they went on to collaborate with him again on some far cheaper productions during the ‘70s.

(3) Who the hell came up with this stupid jingle anyway, and how did it end up in the film..?! Given that Franco disapproved of the ‘Venus In Furs’ name and his claims he lost control of the final cut, it is reasonable to assume it wasn’t *his* fault, and it doesn’t really bear much resemblance to the rest of Mann & Hugg’s work on the movie either, so who knows…

(4) Check out Mann’s overlooked ‘Chapter Three’ LP, also from ’69, if you don’t believe me. It ain’t no ‘Quinn The Eskimo’, but it’s as fine a slice of moody, creeped out jazz-rock as you could possibly wish for, with some definite Italo-soundtrack overtones too. Recommended.

Deathblog: Mike Vraney (1957-2014) & Top Five Something Weird Releases.

I’m afraid I’m a bit late on this one, but it wasn’t until earlier this week that I learned – via a tribute post on Tim Lucas’s blog – that Mike Vraney, founder of the legendary Something Weird Video label, passed away at the start of January.

Conditions in whatever passes for the “industry” of restoring and repackaging old films may have moved on considerably since SWV’s glory days in the ‘90s, but the sheer volume of lunatic oddities and forgotten, marginal footage that they unleashed upon the world means that most of us are still playing catch-up, and it’s safe to say that most people who have been fans of weird movies for any length of time can probably recite their famous opening reel from memory. Their releases were certainly pivotal in inspiring me to begin taking an active interest in this kinda thing, and that crazy echo effect that plays beneath their logo still gives me a brilliant “I-have-no-idea-what’s-gonna-happen-next”, thrill of the unknown type tingle every time I hear it.

Of course, what ‘happened next’ wasn’t always all that great – try as I might, I’m really just not in the market for most of the seemingly endless ‘60s sexploitation flicks that they put so much effort into releasing, and, hilarious though most of his movies may be on first viewing, I’m not really that big a fan of their flagship director Herschell Gordon Lewis. But nonetheless, I’m glad that all that kinda stuff exists, and that there was someone dedicated enough to put it all out there – and, as Lucas’s obit makes abundantly clear, when it comes to the legacy of SWV, exists is very much the key word.

In the past few decades, we’ve got used to a world in which the chances of any currently existing piece of art or culture being lost forever is fairly minimal (or so we assume, anyway). But that certainly wasn’t the case back when Vraney was making the scene, and I think it’s fair to say that the impact he personally had on the preservation of pre-video tape era American film was vast.

All of those stranger, trashier, seedier flicks form the ‘50s, ‘60s & ‘70s that so many of us are currently so busy downloading, streaming, watching on Youtube..? A fair percentage of them wouldn’t just have been ‘hard to find’ without the efforts of Vraney and SWV, they would have been destroyed. The kind of material he specialised in fell well below the radar of any ‘official’ archive or film library, and if it wasn’t for his timely intervention, how many movies which are now marvelled over by viewers around the world (to say nothing of their value as a historical record of American life & culture in the mid-20th century) would have ended up in the incinerator? I don’t know much about Vraney as a person, but for that alone I think, he deserves our eternal respect.

As such, a good way to pay tribute seems to be to run through a quick list of some of my all-time favourite SWV releases, most of which would probably never have even reached our eyes without the efforts of Mike Vraney and his collaborators.

5. The Black Cat (1964)

Not to be confused with any of the numerous, more storied horror films inspired by Poe’s most-filmed tale, this out-of-nowhere regional obscurity – strangely accomplished on a technical level, yet utterly batshit in terms of acting & scripting – uses its literary source material as the jumping off point for the story of a strange, cackling man-child who, in between a lot of rather boring talky segments, commands our continued attention by means of force-feeding champagne to his frightened menagerie of animal friends, silently freaking out in an outburst of murderous rage in a ‘Moe’s Tavern’-esque dive-bar as an unknown, eye-patch wearing garage band plays, and finally lamping his long-suffering wife in the face with a fire-axe, in a full-on gore moment that could have escaped from an ‘80s Fulci movie. What does it all mean..? The immediate death of somebody’s dreams of being a great film director, more than likely, but I for one certainly enjoyed the resulting mess.

4. Blood Freak (1971)

My god, what can you possibly say about this one that hasn’t been said already? Truly one of most confounding brain-wrongs ever coughed up from the depths of marginal American film-making, it is staggeringly inept, utterly bizarre and genuinely rather unsettling in its presentation of a world in which everyone seems to be a severely traumatised and/or maladjusted individual under the influence of heavy sedatives, torn between the influence of evangelical Christianity, systematic drug abuse and chemically-enhanced factory farming. It’s like a Butthole Surfers album come to life in the form of a pro-God, anti-drug, Vietnam-damaged turkey-headed psychedelic gore movie, with the fact that it’s confused message seems to be entirely in earnest only rendering it all the more upsetting. Or at least, I think it is, anyway. To be honest, I’m still not sure whether the stern narrator who turns up at the end to warn us about the dangers of drug addiction whilst smoking cigarettes and coughing like a cancer patient is meant as a piece of intentional humour, or just the result of random, unthinking incompetence. In fact, I don’t know if anyone really knows. Most of the other people on screen act like they barely even know how to breathe or stand upright, so they’re not really giving us any clues. In the final analysis: I don’t know where this came from, or what it’s trying to say, but God help us all. UNcinema at its finest, and most terrifying.

3. The Fat Black Pussycat (1963)

Featured on the same disc as the aforementioned ‘Black Cat’ (hence no cover art), it’s been a long time since I watched this one so my memory ain’t all that clear, but my overall impression was that of it being an absolute belter of a weird little movie. As I recall, the story goes that it started life as a sorta New York shot murder mystery in which two square cops go under cover amid Greenwich Village beatniks, prompting much wonderful early Roger Corman / Jack Hill type comedic shenanigans as they search for a giallo-esque killer amid the wastrels and hep-cats of the coffee bar / house party scene. Then apparently, after all this was done and dusted, a new producer (the aptly named M.A. Ripps) got hold of the initial cut, decided it was too dull to release as was, and set out again to shoot a bunch of new foot age and a new ending, splicing additional moments of sex, violence and bomb blasts into existing scenes, and adding a horror-ish plotline about an evil cat taking over people’s minds and driving them to murder! The result? Disorientating moments of spatial and temporal incoherence, jarring and unpredictable shifts in tone, meaningful plot-lines that gradually veer off into drooling insanity, and (as I recall) more fun than those squares who insist upon watching movies that were all shot at the same time by the same people can even imagine.

2. Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973) / Roseland (1971)

You want “something weird”? You got it. And praise be to SWV for helping to disinter two thirds of the extant celluloid legacy of perhaps the greatest unsung hero of American outsider cinema, the one and only Fredric Hobbs. I already spilled much ink on the subject of ‘Godmonster..’ here, so instead we’ll say a few words about ‘Roseland’, which I was meaning to embark on a similarly detailed write-up of, but… just couldn’t face it, to be honest. Shot for producer Harry Novak on the basis of “nudity + whatever = bucks”, ‘Roseland’ is ostensibly Hobbs’ “sexploitation” film, in much the same way that Alabama’s Ghost is his “blaxploitation” film and ‘Godmonster..’ is his “monster movie”. Which is to say: certain images and ideas may momentarily cross over with the conventions of the genre in question, but basically 98% of the completed footage resembles nothing that has previously been seen in any motion picture made anywhere on earth.

Featuring Hobbs regulars E. Kerrigan Prescott and Christopher Brooks delivering their most fevered and theatrical performances to date (the latter in the role of a black Hieronymous Bosch), ‘Roseland’ to some extent concerns with the following: 1) Prescott’s career-ruining performance on the Ed Sullivan show of a big band show tune entitled ‘You Can’t Fart Around With Love’, an event that apparently traumatises the nation. 2) His subsequent mental illness, which sees him assuming the guise of ‘the black bandit’ and stealing prints of pornographic films from what appears to be a giant, echoing gymnasium. 3) The revelations imparted to him by the re-embodied spirit of Hieronymous Bosch, and his ongoing ideological conflict with a sleazy psychiatrist regarding issues of sexual morality that become increasingly unclear as the film progresses. And, 4), extremely lengthy messianic fantasy sequences in which armies of naked hippies trudge across expanses of unoccupied hillside to prostrate themselves in worship before a series of giant phallic statues. In conclusion, I would not recommend this film for viewing by the uninitiated, for that way lies only pain, but for those of us already driven to a state of fanaticism by Hobbs’ two later works, it represents another essential corner of the Bermuda triangle that is his brief but unique filmography.

1. Confessions of a Psycho-Cat (196?)

Yeah, so apparently I just really like cheap, black & white films of uncertain pedigree with vague counter-cultural affiliations and the word ‘cat’ in the title. Deal with it. Anyway, I’ll immediately cop that ‘Confessions of a Psycho-Cat’ isn’t really ostensibly ‘better’ (or weirder, or more entertaining) than any of the other films on this list, but for me, it still stands tall as the perfect example of an SWV release: a vicious, sleaze-packed and total impoverished exploitation picture, seemingly thrown together by a gang of sneering, Nouvelle Vague-digging beatniks, none of whom ever troubled the film industry again, and incorporating footage culled from at least two completely different projects, seemingly shot about five years apart. Pure magic. This was actually one of the first films I reviewed for this weblog, and, whilst I can’t really endorse either the tone or content of my writing back then (never mind the stolen screen-grabs, before I figured out how to do them myself), my enthusiasm for the film itself remains untarnished. In short, an unlikely ‘Most Dangerous Game’ framing story sets the scene for a deranged female huntress stalking the streets of New York in search of three nefarious losers who accepted her “stay alive for 24 hours” wager. Much semi-experimental, hand-held camera based mayhem ensues, incorporating twitchy, Hawaiian shirt-clad drug pushers, Jake LaMotta staggering about like a drunken human cannonball, wild modern jazz freakouts, bloody misogynistic murder flashbacks and a bow & arrow battle in Central Park. Whoa there. Just in case we get TOO excited, there are a lot of languorous, fully-clothed hippie ‘love’ scenes spliced in from the later, post-’67 shooting date too, but hey, it’s Something Weird, so you wouldn’t expect anything less really, would you? Go with it.

Something Weird Video still exists, and you can buy stuff from them here.

Nippon Horrors: The Woman From The Sea (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1959)

---

VIEWING NOTE: At present I do not own a copy of this film, and the review below is written on the basis of a screening that I attended as part of the BFI’s Nikkatsu centennial season in June. As such, no proper screengrabs I’m afraid, and my hazy memory may have injected some slight inaccuracies into the plot info summarised below. I’ve also been unable to locate an accurate / understandable cast list for the film, so character and actor names are scarcer than I might have preferred.

---

One of the key figures in the rebirth of Nikkatsu studios as a powerhouse of contemporary youth and crime films during the late 1950s was novelist and scriptwriter Shintarô Ishihara. Probably better-known in Japan today for his subsequent political career, which saw him championing a raft of disappointingly right wing policies during his thirteen year tenure as Governor of Tokyo, the ‘new wave’ sensibility of his early writing proved a great boon for Nikkatsu as they sought to engage with younger audiences, and Ishihara-scripted films such as ‘Season of the Sun’ (1956), ‘Crazed Fruit’ (1956) and ‘Rusty Knife’ (1958) (all starring the writer’s brother, teen heartthrob Yûjirô) proved to be huge critical and popular successes for the studio. A somewhat less celebrated work from the pen of Shintarô however comes in the shape of 1959’s ‘The Woman From The Sea’, a decidedly peculiar borderline horror / coming of age tale with an ethereal, seaside atmosphere that seems uncannily similar to that of Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide, released two years later. (1)

Unobtrusively directed by one of Nikkatsu’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers, Koreyoshi Kurahara (‘Black Sun’, ‘The Warped Ones’), ‘The Woman From The Sea’ begins in a similar milieu to Ishihara’s “sun tribe” stories – an idyllic coastal retreat where idle rich kids while away their summer holidays, mamboing to swing records and engaging in sundry horseplay, whilst the adult world looks elsewhere. One of these youngsters seems a little more serious-minded than most however. Young Toshio (Tamio Kawachi) rejects the empty hedonism of his peers (and particularly his jock/sex pest brother), instead dedicating his time to strumming his ukulele, staring wistfully out to sea and pottering about in his modestly equipped sailing boat. It is implied that the two boys are adopted orphans whose rich new parents don’t really care for them – or I think that’s the case anyway, the dialogue is somewhat unclear. But whatever the case, affection of any kind seems very distant for poor Toshio, his only real emotional connection being with the kindly Nanny (Keiko Sumida) who is charged with looking after the boys in their beach house, and his only real ‘friend’ (well, sort of) a ‘touched’ beatnik writer whose not-quite-all-there babblings he blankly tolerates when the two bump into each other on the cliffs.

It is this writer character who provides us with our first inkling that something unusual is afoot on this stretch of coast, exhibiting the kind of foresight often attributed to artistic types and the mentally ill (so a double score for this guy) as he drags Toshio down to the shore one morning, insisting that he has seen a terrifying apparition – some kind of ghostly woman had who previously appeared to him many years earlier, trying to lure him siren-like into the ocean… or something. Understandably, Toshio ignores the writer’s ravings, just as he pays little attention to the surly local fishermen who subsequently accost him, complaining that some maniac has destroyed their fish-farms, slaughtering their stock.

Slightly harder to ignore however is the sight that greets Toshio when he heads back down to his boat at dawn the next morning: a voluptuous, muscular young woman (Hisako Tsukuba) clad in a skimpy, makeshift swimsuit, sitting on the deck, bloodily devouring a raw fish. As you might well imagine, Toshio’s initial reaction to this discovery is a combination of confusion, outrage and disbelief, especially when the girl casually tells him that she caught the fish with her bare hands, that she swam to the harbour from her home ‘nearby’, and that she lives alone, sustaining herself solely via the food she catches from the ocean.

Despite Toshio’s bewilderment though, his new acquaintance seems to have taken a bit of a shine to him, perhaps appreciating the gentle earnestness that sets him apart from his more obnoxious land-dwelling peers. Following their first meeting, she soon begins making unannounced visits to his bedroom at night, clambering up the rocks outside and sneaking through the window, prompting several laugh-out-loud moments as poor old Nanny intrudes on the pair, suddenly finding her shy and introverted charge in the company of a brazen, half-naked amazon.

Soon of course, Toshio’s initial reluctance dissipates, and he finds himself following the same path as any other lonely young heterosexual fellow suddenly confronted with such a fortuitous turn of events: namely, he falls head over heels for the nameless girl, cherishing their time together as he temporarily puts aside the vagueness of her explanations of who she is and where she comes from, and discounts any possible connection between her sudden appearance and the various rum goings-on that are now dominating conversation in the local village.

More fish have been slaughtered, and boats have been damaged. Sightings of a large and predatory shark have been reported, and a fisherman has gone missing (in fact, Toshio and the girl find his severed arm whilst out diving). Before long, we learn about how, twenty years previously, the men of the village hunted down and killed a giant shark that had been plaguing the harbour. It is whispered that this particular shark had the power to take on human form, and that it had taken a human woman as its lover, spiriting her away to the sea, from whence she has never returned, and…. well you can probably guess where all this is heading, especially once the superstitious villagers catch a glimpse of Toshio parading around with his mysterious new girlfriend.

Much like ‘Night Tide’ though, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ presents a far more ambiguous take on things than a standard “vengeful femme fatale from the ocean” narrative, down-playing the story’s potential supernatural aspects and instead focusing on the ontological uncertainties the previously apathetic Toshio is suddenly confronted with, and on the blink-of-an-eye ease with which the frankly insane beliefs of the villagers suddenly take precedence as the dominant belief system on this quiet corner of the Japanese coast - an explanation for their troubles that, for the lack of any alternative, is deemed solid enough to justify violent action against a flesh & blood woman.

And even if we – like seemingly everyone else around - accept the villagers’ supernatural hypothesis, Tsukuba’s shark-woman remains a very sympathetic figure, in spite of the destruction she may have caused. Her concerns are simple, and she acts impulsively, like a proud animal spirit, just going about her business. Certainly, she shows no sign of embodying any of the evil desires which the villagers project upon her. In all likelihood, she has simply returned to the harbour for much the same reasons a normal shark would - to find food and warm water, rather than to pursue any agenda of ghostly vengeance. And her affection for Toshio seems very genuine too – a source of companionship that connects her to her former human self, rather than some attempt to lure him to his doom.

Seemingly shot almost entirely in the very early morning or late at night, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ has a fresh, blinking-in-the-sun-at-dawn kind of quality to it that very much adds to the slightly unreal, daydream-like nature of proceedings. Led by the reserved Kawachi and the matter-of-fact Tsukuba, the drama of the film is handled in very ‘light’ fashion, managing to exercise a strange grip on the viewer whilst rarely resorting to melodrama or explicit displays of emotion. But what hasn’t come across thus far in this review is that, in spite of some potentially dark subject matter, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ is above all an extremely funny film. Rather than chest-beating emotion, the keynote of pretty much every inter-personal encounter here is an endearing sense of polite awkwardness. From Toshio’s disinterested tolerance of his writer friend’s outbursts, to Nanny’s utter bemusement at the unconventional behaviour of the scantily-clad new arrival in her household, the film achieves a kind of deadpan, goofball surreality that it’s hard not to love.

Japanese comedy, like that of many other countries, often doesn’t translate well when presented to the English-speaking world (2), but in this case I think it’s safe to say that the subtleties of the gags arrive intact, and there is a great deal of honest laughter to be had from ‘The Woman From The Sea’. Perhaps most interesting in this respect though is Kurahara’s knack for directly fusing this humour with the film’s more poignant and troubling aspects in a somewhat challenging fashion that perhaps prefigures the confrontational projects the director was to undertake during the ‘60s, creating odd juxtapositions of laughter and pathos that twist up the viewer’s emotions something rotten. Witness for instance the sight of Toshio earnestly practicing his ukulele after learning that his brother and lover have apparently died in a boating accident, tears running down his cheeks as he incongruously whistles a jaunty, Hawaiian melody; or the almost apologetic, ‘sorry-about-all-this-but-whatcha-gonna-do’ tone taken by the angry mob who turn up at the door to inform him that his girlfriend is a shape-shifting shark monster, their embarrassed buffoonery strangely undercutting the savage violence of their purpose.

Hand in hand with this tonal ambiguity and otherworldly atmosphere is the vague implication that Toshio is to some extent living out a fantasy, perhaps having ‘invented’ or otherwise summoned up the shark-girl to assuage his own loneliness – a notion that even seems to occur to him towards the end of the film, meaning that even in the wake of the crushing, all-too-real bloodshed that closes proceedings, he is still able to reluctantly shrug off what has happened like a lost dream, the supernatural atmosphere which now prevails allowing him to stumble forward into adult life without shedding a tear… but with the shadow of the haunted writer’s solitary existence nonetheless looming large in his future.

Prior to its horrifying conclusion at least, ‘The Woman From The Sea’ plays very much as a consciously light-weight film, but nonetheless it is one that lives long in the memory. Strange, funny, touching and genuinely haunting, it could easily sit alongside ‘Night Tide’, ‘Spider Baby’, ‘A Bucket of Blood’ or – particularly relevant here, perhaps - Val Lewton’s ‘Cat People’ in the loose pantheon of emotionally resonant black & white horror favourites. If only it had been more widely seen, I’m sure it could have gained a measure of the same affection those films receive from their fans; though modest in both style and execution, it is a work that justifies the overused “undiscovered gem” designation as well as any other film I can think of at the moment.

(As a post-script, my Japanese friends tell me that this film’s story was reworked for a notoriously sleazy TV show in the 1980s, revelling in a slightly less subtle title that translates as something like ‘Terrifying Shark Woman: She Eats Human Flesh’. Still proudly bearing a “created by Shintarô Ishihara” credit, it’s easy to speculate that the exalted Governor of Tokyo’s embarrassment at such a connection may have played a role in the near complete invisibility of this apparently well-remembered series online - a circumstance that perhaps also serves to deepen the relative obscurity in which ‘The Woman From The Sea’ languishes..?

Whatever the case, it’s certainly a shame that the film didn’t make it onto Criterion Eclipse’s recent ‘The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara’ box set, despite it clearly being a very distinctive and enjoyable example of the director’s work. But the sub-titled print Nikkatsu provided to the BFI this year looked quite nice, so I suppose we can maybe at least keep our fingers distantly crossed for some kind of release at some point in the future..? Here’s hoping, because I’d certainly like to see it again.)

The pitchfork photo at the top of this post was uploaded to Flickr by PreviewF3C. Many thanks to Satori for helping me track down the other screen-shots used above.

(1) Seeing as how ‘The Woman Form The Sea’ was never released outside Japan and remains largely unseen in the English-speaking world to this day, I think the notion that Harrington took any direct inspiration from this film can probably be discounted; the similarities between the two works are likely more just a happy coinciding of eerie aesthetic sensibilities.

(2) A factor that perhaps serves to reinforce the slightly skewed picture we tend to get of their popular culture… but that’s another story.

Penguin Crime Week: The Half Hunter by John Sherwood (1961)

(Cover design by Sheila Perry.)

Well you had me at “ice-skating beatniks”. Might have to give this one a try too.

Not sure what the big black square on the back is all about..?

Gothic Horror Round-Up II: Devils of Darkness (Lance Comfort, 1965)

One of the more rewarding fly-by-night horror pictures that flooded the UK’s less salubrious screens through the early/mid ‘60s as independent producers tried to catch a ride on Hammer’s coattails, ‘Devils of Darkness’ is brought to us by the mysterious Planet Film Productions, from a script provided by Lyn Fairhurst, who had previously worked as production manager and “stunt supervisor” on the American drive-in classic ‘The Flesheaters’. It turned out to be the swan-song of its director, British b-movie veteran Lance Comfort, who died the following year, having signed his name to no less than forty-four features since 1942.

Ironically for a film that is chiefly notable for the ‘continental’ sensibility it brings to British horror, the opening twenty minutes here are mostly memorable for their jaw-droppingly awful portrayal of the French. As our petulant/loud-mouthed Anglo-American protagonists pitch up in a rural Gallic village where *nothing is quite as it seems*, they find themselves surrounded by a gaggle of underpaid British character actors, all suitably outfitted with the inevitable berets and black moustaches, giving us their very best shifty mannerisms and out-rrrageous ac-cents. Needless to say, and with all due respect to the French people and their culture, as a native-born Briton I found this hilarious (the tolerance of other nationalities may vary).

I particularly liked the scene in which the pigheaded American hero (William Sylvester, who later turned up in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’) confronts the crooked chief of police, who lazily refuses to begin investigating his catalogue of mysterious disappearances and attempted murders until he's enjoyed a leisurely breakfast of black coffee and croissants. Sacre bleu!

Even my tolerance for such deplorable ethnic stereotyping has its limits though, and I’ll admit that it came as a great relief when the action promptly moves to London, saving us from the prospect of another hour of that sort of thing. As it transpires, the plot-line of ‘Devils of Darkness’ is a catch-all assortment of Satanic cult clichés wrapped up in a bit of bonus vampirism, rendered interesting due to the fact that, by my reckoning, none of them were really clichés yet at this point. Most witchcraft-related British movies of the early ‘60s (cf: ‘Night of the Eagle’, Don Sharp’s ‘Witchcraft’) take the lone witch / folk magic / vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave angle, with only John Llewelyn Moxey’s decidedly weird ‘City of the Dead’ really springing to mind as an example of a movie from this period that features a full-on devil cult, and as I recall even they more or less kept themselves to themselves, rather than jetting between countries and using an international network of bourgeois followers to persecute a designated victim, as is portrayed here. In fact, ‘Devils of Darkness’ manages to take on board many of the elements that became commonplace in post-‘Rosemary’s Baby’ Satanist movies, despite pre-dating that “trigger film” by a number of years.

And whilst we’re giving Comfort’s film the chance to call ‘shotgun’ on stuff, it can also proudly stake its claim (sorry) as the first British vampire movie with a contemporary setting, and perhaps also as the first film anywhere to explore the inexplicable idea of a vampire leading a Satanic cult (hey, why not, right?). Additionally, the ritual scenes in ‘Devils..’ seem directly to pre-empt (in terms of framing, colour scheme etc) those later seen in ‘The Devil Rides Out’, whilst the film’s plotline, visuals and even locations all exhibit a veeery strong similarity to Sergio Martino’s supernatural giallo ‘All The Colours Of The Dark’, released almost a decade later.

So.. there ya go. Put that in yr pipe and smoke it, genre historians. As such a catalogue of unintentional ‘firsts’ might imply, Fairhurst’s script is actually a bit of an eyebrow-raiser within the repetitive constraints of the ‘60s gothic formula, rambling hither and yon across all manner of slightly unusual territory, and, unfortunately, suffering under the accompanying yoke of severe pacing issues, arid plains of meandering exposition and some truly dismal performances. All of which merits pointing out in passing, but I mean, we’re not watching a ‘60s gothic horror for the tight plotting and dramatic intensity, are we?

If we’ve got any sense, what we ARE watching it for is primarily the film’s wonderful visual sensibility. Probably one of the most brightly-lit gothic horrors ever made, Comfort and cinematographer Reg Wyer here take the more extreme elements of Hammer’s technicolor style and run wild with them, crafting a blunt but beautifully realised tone poem of blinding reds, mossy greens and oceanic blues that, aided by the loose and rambling narrative and excellent use of set dressing, costumes and props, helps mark the film out as a an interesting halfway point between the meat n’ potatoes approach of traditional British horror, and the kind of dreamy thrills purveyed by such decadent continental types as Bava, Freda and Vadim.

Particularly notable in this regard is the fairytale-like pre-credits sequence, in which a red robed, hooded figure strides through a mist-strewn woodland graveyard holding a black candle aloft, ready to oversee the resurrection of the recently deceased ‘Comte Sinistre’. Meanwhile, Carole Grey (from ‘The Young Ones’ and ‘Brides of Fu Manchu’) appears as some kind of wild gypsy girl, performing an uninhibited bare-footed dance for her fiancée… until she’s struck down by the malign influence of the Comte, marking her for death as he flies overhead in the unmistakable form of a big ol’ rubber bat.

The fantastical, hyperreal quality of these sequences is startling – a feast of absolute prime Satanist / witch cult imagery, ready to be plundered, boiled down and filtered through the depths of popular culture over the following decade or so, making their way onto paperback covers, tabloid exposes and porno photo-shoots. Oh, and did I mention there’s a scene with a snake dancer later on too, and some pretty broad implications of lesbianism, including an obvious sub/dom couple in supporting roles? That always helps.

Another highlight is a great decadent bohemian party scene in London (I think the implication is supposed to be that it's a pot party, but it seems more like a party for people who just really like smoking), which introduces us to the astonishingly beautiful Tracey Reed (a relative by marriage of both Carol and Ollie, she’d achieved immortality of a sort as General Ripper’s secretary in ‘Dr. Strangelove’ the previous year). Reed’s presence, along with a plot-line that sees her working as an artist’s model, provides Comfort and Wyer with all the excuse they need to indulge in a feast of Pre-Raphaelite style ‘painterly’ mise en scene, framing her against couches, silk sheets and – naturellement – sacrificial altars in a manner that would do the aforementioned Euro-directors proud.

Though subject to some of the regrettable drawbacks you’d expect of an unheralded ‘60s schedule filler (in particular, Sylvester’s gormless leading man and charisma-free vampire mastermind Hubert Noël drain the picture’s energy so badly you’d suspect they were sneaking it home at night in plastic bags), ‘Devils of Darkness’ is still a beguiling oddity within the canon of ‘60s gothics, well worth tracking down for fans of this-sorta-thing.

Night Tide(Curtis Harrington, 1961)

As an unusually subtle and low-key independent b film emerging from an era in which sensationalism was all, Curtis Harrington’s first commercial feature ‘Night Tide’ seems born to be UNDERRATED - an epithet used in probably every capsule review of the movie ever penned, raising the question of precisely how far an underrated film can go before it becomes officially ‘rated’, and perhaps eventually overrated - witness the fate of the two films to which ‘Night Tide’ probably bears closest comparison, Herk Harvey’s ‘Carnival of Souls’ and Jacques Tourneur’s ‘Cat People’.

In fact, maybe one of the factors that has helped keep ‘Night Tide’ under the radar for so long is the sheer weight of the debt it owes to the aforementioned Lewton/Tourneur film. To lay it down straight for ya before we get all mystical later in this review, it must be noted that ‘Night Tide’s storyline is an almost an exact rewrite of ‘Cat People’, with the action moved to the Santa Monica sea-front, and Simone Simon’s potential cat-woman replaced by Linda Lawson’s potential mermaid, Mora.




Drawn into Mora’s orbit when he clumsily tries to pick her up in a beachside jazz bar is Johnny, an impetuous young navy recruit played by none other than Dennis Hopper. Already well-known by this point for his bohemian lifestyle and tough guy/troublemaker screen persona, it is to Hopper’s credit that he manages to make himself so believable here as a fresh-faced innocent, away from home for the first time and awkwardly trying to engage with the world around him. Fusing the character’s eager-to-please naivety with his trademark nervous energy and disconnected stare, Hopper makes for a goofily endearing protagonist, just as Lawson, looking like she’s just stepped off the front of a Les Baxter ‘exotica’ LP, plays the doomed, ethereal, forever unknowable heroine to perfection.




Even the most strident movie-tech snob (is there a movie equivalent of the term ‘muso’? suggestions on a postcard) would have to cop that Harrington’s direction here is excellent too – beautiful, bright photography and eerie, graceful camera movements a speciality – and his scripting’s none too shabby either, aforementioned ‘Cat People’ debt notwithstanding. From the outset, ‘Night Tide’ is clearly the work of a guy trying to position himself a good few notches above yr standard drive-in fare.

Best of all from my point of view though, ‘Night Tide’ excels in that particular kind of careful, hypnotic pacing that that so often seems to accompany films shot in sea-front locations, as events seem to ebb and flow with the tide, imbuing the film with that unique feel of disconnected seaside weirdness that I’m always going on about here.




Were that the sum total of ‘Night Tide’s charms, we could file it as a well made / well acted variation on ‘Cat People’ and get on with our lives, but what really gives the film such an uncanny resonance is it’s setting and unique cultural background. Although it is never directly addressed in the film as such, the rich occult/bohemian/art scene and strange atmosphere of the L.A. beach communities in the late 50s/early ‘60s seems to breath through every pore of Harrington’s film, every detail throwing up a new, unexpected connection that makes ‘Night Tide’ fascinating viewing for any student of mid-century American underground type bru-ha-ha.

If the film’s artier moments seem to recall the languid Cali-mysticism of Maya Deren’s ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’, well perhaps that’s no accident - prior to moving into the commercial film industry, Curtis Harrington was a big name on the West Coast avant garde scene. He assisted Deren and Alexander Hamid on ‘Meshes..’, and worked with Kenneth Anger on ‘Puce Moment’ and ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’, appearing in the latter as Cesare the Sleepwalker, as well as producing his own portfolio of experimental shorts, notably ‘Fragment of Seeking’ (1946) and the heavily Anger-influenced ‘Wormwood Star’ (1956), a portrait of his fellow ‘..Pleasure Dome’ star Marjorie Cameron.

Bridging the gap between this avant/occult scene and the (relatively) mainstream world Harrington was trying to find his way into at the start of the ‘60s, Cameron reappears in ‘Night Tide’ as the mysterious woman who haunts Mora, calling her back toward the ocean, and it is her unmistakable presence that will immediately have any occult bozos in the audience sitting up and paying attention.



A figure of almost mythical hip/esoteric fascination, Cameron’s legend dates back to her days as the wife and muse of Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder and Crowleyite magus Jack Parsons. An active participant in Parsons’ American branch of Aleister Crowley’s OTO dring the ‘40s, Cameron became the central focus of Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard’s infamous ‘Babalon Working’ in the Mojave Desert – a doomed(?) attempt to realise one of Crowley’s more apocalyptic notions by conceiving a supernatural ‘moonchild’ whose existence would help hasten the end of all creation, or somesuch.

Understandably perhaps, Cameron seems to have dropped out of sight for a while after that. But a few years later, following the various magical and financial battles that resulted from the rivalry between Parsons and Hubbard, culminating in her husand’s much-publicised fiery demise, it is little wonder that Cameron went on to build a reputation for herself as the flame-haired Scarlet Woman of West Coast occultism, a reputation that was immortalised forever by Kenneth Anger – whom she apparently schooled in Thelemic practice – when he cast her as Kali, the claw-handed destroyer in ‘..Pleasuredome’ – an image that I *guarantee* you would recognise from somewhere, even if you have no interest in this stuff whatsoever.

Perhaps it is the resonance of this backstory, or perhaps just her naturally striking visage, but each of the brief appearances Cameron makes in ‘Night Tide’ is pretty thunderous. In some ways, Harrington seems a bit like a reformed alcoholic in the making of this film, trying to stick rigidly to the straight n’ narrow of a linear, narrative film, whilst Cameron seems like some demon on his shoulder, pulling the film back toward the otherness of abstraction and magick, just as her unnamed character seems to want to drag Johnny and Mora back into the subconscious depths of the ocean.







Watching ‘Night Tide’ with knowledge of Harrington’s background, you can almost picture him desperately trying to convince distributors that he’s a regular guy plugging a regular movie, but all in vain. Despite his best efforts, there is something here that is just off; not just the dreamy atmospherics or the suspicion that he’s taking all this psychological ocean-ambiguity shtick a bit more seriously than is really becoming for a shlock movie guy, but just in telling details like the fact that this is probably the first horror(ish) movie I’ve ever seen that actually features a believable tarot reading. Sure, the seaside carnival’s resident Countess Romanov type gives it some theatrical hoo-hah, but she’s essentially laying down the cards for Johnny in exactly the way your old how-to book on the Tarot told you to, with typically perplexing and long-winded results for the, er, ‘uninitiated’ (read: BORED) viewer.

(I thought it was pretty cool that Hopper’s ‘fate’ card is The Hanged Man – a result that oddly doesn’t fit his character in the movie very well, but suits the weird path of his later life and character pretty perfectly.)



The scene is which ‘Night Tide’ relapses most severely into the realm-of-the-weird comes when Johnny tails Cameron’s mysterious woman, apparently following her all the way to boho-haunted Venice Beach – a locale that the film presents as being some kind of treacherous, spectral zone that physically resembles a deserted Turkish fishing village or something – where he traces his quarry back to – where else? – 777 Baabek Lane.




Knocking on the door, Johnny is surprised to find himself greeted by Mora’s business partner/adopted father Captain Sam, who denies all knowledge of any mysterious woman, but is nonetheless happy to fill Johnny’s head with all kinds of wonderfully creepy blather about the ‘sea people’ and Mora’s true place among them – a great, forboding scene and a great performance from Gavin Muir.


Captain Sam himself is another bohemian beach community archetype of course – a kind of avuncular Henry Miller figure, drinking away his twilight years with anyone who’ll hang around long enough to listen to his bullish reminiscences. Even aside from all the magickal stuff, ‘Night Tide’ has a nocturnal boho charm that’s hard to define, but impossible to ignore.

The modal jazz being played in the cellar bar (‘The Blue Grotto’) in the opening sequence is fucking good, and characters seem to drift randomly through the day, staring out to sea, drinkin’ coffee, drinking in the silence before the crowds arrive for the funfair. Another perfeact example of those strange, self-contained horror-movie worlds that I just want to go and live in.


If one thing denies ‘Night Tide’ it’s richly deserved ‘cult classic’ status though, it is probably the ending. After the slow-burning dream-feel of the rest of the picture, the conclusion seems perfunctory and stupid on first viewing, giving every indication of a crass, producer-enforced happy ending that fails to even honour the basic Weird Tales convention that demands a naive protagonist be darkly changed by his or her uncanny experience.

Initially it’s a real disappointment - but thankfully, the crucial ambiguity remains. Johnny might have decided to bail on the story for good, cutting his losses and exiting stage-left with a nice new gal to pal around with, and Captain Sam might have delivered his stock confession to the fuzz and resigned himself to a life behind bars, but no moderately imaginative viewer is gonna take that shit at face value. Marjorie Cameron is still a no show – who WAS that strange woman, and what was the alien language we heard her speak in the opening sequence…? Mora herself may be conveniently ‘dead’, but the circumstances strike me as pretty vague. We are not privy to the results of the inquest, or to the details of her burial. Given her obvious love of the ocean, could she have been buried at sea, by any chance…? Harrington and his producers might have called time when things hit the last reel, but somewhere off screen, Mora’s tale continues.


Although it’s a solid movie in almost every respect, for me the fascination of ‘Night Tide’ stems from it’s role as a kind of prism, reflecting the psycho-cultural landscape of the L.A. beach towns, and foreshadowing the immense changes that were about to be wrought upon their hermetic cultural development in the following decade.

Somewhere just down the way, The Beach Boys were probably getting warmed up, and Sandra Dee was probably busy shooting ‘Gidget Goes Hawaiian’, without the faintest idea that she’d be reduced to orgasmic altar-writhing in ‘The Dunwich Horror’ before the decade was out. Bob Markley, future tragic avatar of ‘60s L.A. weird, was probably down there somewhere, hustling chicks and playing bongos on the beach in his faux-beatnik, pre-Law School get-up (and probably with markedly less success than the beach-bongo dudes who appear in another one of ‘Night Tide’s great moments of super/natural peril).


Dennis Hopper himself would of course go on to become emblematic of the shape of things to come, as the man on the scene when the ‘weird’ culture that seems so marginal, so exotic in the world of ‘Night Tide’ crashed headfirst into Hollywood and every other damn place, reaching it’s grizzly end a few short years later as the bloated carcass of what became ‘the counter-culture’ collapsed under combined weight of chemicals, ego and miscellaneous abuse. And if seeing Hopper here as a holy innocent is perhaps not entirely out of keeping with the quixotic travails that would take him on the strange path from ‘Easy Rider’ through ‘The Last Movie’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’, it nonetheless seems especially eerie to see him young, clean and sober, wetting his toes in the waters of the weird for the first time (or at least pretending to).

One thing’s for sure: it would have been a hell of a lot easier for a young goof like Hopper’s character to get mixed up with salty characters and mystical hoodoo in the Santa Monica of 1971. But it just wouldn’t have been half as much fun, would it? That wide-open feeling would have been long gone, the truly weird creatures having long ago returned to the shadows.




’Night Tide’ is public domain, and my screengrabs are taken from a surprisingly nice looking print you get find on archive.org. Frustratingly though, the audio track on this file doesn’t sync right, rendering it pretty useless. If you want to turn the sound down and just enjoy the visuals, I found that Grouper’s ‘AIA: Alien Observer’ album and side two of Miles Davis’s ‘E.S.P’ make for an excellent alternative soundtrack. If you’d prefer to actually hear the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths and follow the story though, you’ll have to resort to roughing it on Youtube I’m afraid. Or you could always be swish cat and find it on DVD I guess, but jeez, do I look like I’m madea money..?