Deathblog: Wings Hauser (1947 - 2025)

So first off - a quick note to any remaining loyal readers, to clarify that I didn’t really intend for this to just become an obits blog going forward, but a total absence of time to write, combined with blogger’s increasingly disruptive barrage of log-in requests, content blocks and cookie pop-ups, make it difficult to envisage a return to regular posting in this space. I have however been diverting my faltering energies into some other projects - which I will hope to update you on soon.

But now, on to more important matters.

I hate to be the one to tell you if you’ve not heard the news elsewhere, but Wings has left the building.

There is, of course, a corny line to be inserted her about bells ringing and angels - but this is a sad time, so I’m not going to be the one to do it.

Wings! What an incredible human being. What untold joy he has brought to those of us who persist in believing that watching low budget genre films made in Los Angeles in the 1980s / 1990s is a respectable use of our time on earth. Truth be told, he personally provided a fairly hefty percentage of the force behind that belief, and he asked so little in return.

Long-term readers will be aware of the respect I hold for actors with the courage to GO BIG in small films, and rarely has a jobbing thespian routinely gone bigger than Wings, a man who seems to have approached the task of playing the baddie in a DTV action flick with the same dedication a professional athlete brings to running a triathlon - commanding the screen, flattening the opposition, capturing the audience in his mad glare like an unshackled psycho about to stick a shiv in the camera operator’s gut.

FUN was always the name of the game with Wings; even on the rare occasions when he was allowed to sink his teeth into a more quote-unquote ‘serious’ role, he gives every impression of having a blast with it, and his energy is infectious - a talent honed no doubt during his apprenticeship as a rock singer (and what I wouldn’t have given to have been able to attend one of his gigs in the ‘70s - at least if ‘The Neon Slime’ [see below] is any indication of his preferred musical oeuvre).

Despite all this though, I am astonished to note that the Deadline obit piece I have linked to above does not mention Hauser’s appearances in motion pictures at all, instead framing his legacy in terms of his prolific TV work and parenthood of his apparently-more-famous children.

I mean, we really do live in a parallel universe here, don't we people?

How has the Cult of Wings been allowed to remain such a fringe concern?

Beats me, but in fairness, in the early days of this blog, I was equally clueless - reviewing Nico Mastorakis’s ‘The Wind’ aka ‘The Edge of Terror’ in 2010 [I won’t link, because those early posts an an embarrassment], I made fun of his name, and remained non-committal on the quality of his (no doubt wonderful) psychopath acting.

Since then though, having obtained a more informed overview of the cinematic hinterland, I’ve naturally seen the light, allowing Wings to ascend to “I will pay to watch anything this man is in” status in my personal pantheon (a pledge which, believe me, has proved painful at times), and experiencing an acute sense of joy each time I see his name fade up, third or fourth billed, in a set of opening credits, probably accompanied by ominous, synthesizer sludge and ‘Terminator’-esque snare drums.

In spite of everything though, there are still some crucial entries in the Wings filmography which I’ve not gotten around to at the time of writing; his surely magnificent top-billed role as ‘The Carpenter’ (1986)? [I’m waiting to pick up that new blu-ray on import.] His collaboration with the equally legendary Brian Trenchard Smith on ‘The Siege of Firebase Gloria’ (1988)? [I have it lined up, but my partner doesn’t care for war movies.] Or what of ‘Skins’ aka ‘Gang Boyz’ (1994), his self-directed skinheadsploitation epic with Linda Blair?!

All of these and more will no doubt find a place in my future viewing schedule, helping to ease the pain of a world without Wings.

Meanwhile though, and bearing in mind the above caveats re: films I’ve not yet seen, here are a few picks of my favourite Hauser performances, to hopefully help the uninitiated get a handle on the achievements of this unique and already missed performer. 

 

Vice Squad (1982)

Hauser’s breakout role (to the extent that he ever really ‘broke out’), and probably most fans’ pick for his definitive performance. It helps of course that ‘Vice Squad’ is one of those films which is about x100 times better than it has any right to be, as director Gary Sherman takes what could have merely been a sleazy ‘hookers on the Strip’ exploitation piece and transforms it into one of the best and most exhilarating American crime movies of the 1980s… but if there is one thing everyone remembers from the film, it is the central presence of Ramrod.

On paper, the figure of the Elvis-obsessed, faux-cowboy psycho pimp, keeping his girls violently in line through the liberal application of his ‘pimp stick’ (don’t even ask) could have made for a fairly routine / comedic villain… but, as so often, Wings really takes it to another level. Channelling his frustration at spending three years stuck on the soap opera treadmill of ‘The Young & The Restless’ into a hyper-energised performance (even by his standards), he turns Ramrod into an obscene, unstoppable force of physically intimidating chaos, lashing out in all directions with a mixture of unhinged menace and pitiful grotesquery, cutting a bloody swathe through the Hollywood underworld with an intensity which is frankly jaw-dropping.

Feeling very much like a ‘80s analogue to Richard Widmark’s turn in Kiss of Death (1947), it’s hardly surprising the ‘Vice Squad’ opened up a new career for Wings as a go-to guy for scene-stealing villainy. And when, after Ramrod has met his inevitable demise at the hands of the far-less-memorable cops, as the camera gratuitously crane-shots above the urban wasteland and the man himself launches into the aforementioned ‘Neon Slime’, you’ll be hard-pressed not to physically cheer / applaud /salute the magnificent, nihilistic insanity of the whole enterprise. What a movie.

 

Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987)

In a film loaded with unhinged, oversized macho performances, corralled by an even more unhinged, oversized egomaniacal writer-director, Wings still manages to come out as top dog, grinding the competition into the dust as his foul-mouthed, priapic closet-case monster-cop Luther Regency rides roughshod over the privileged populace of Provincetown, Massachusetts, getting so up-in-the-face of bewildered hero Ryan O’Neill that at one point he manages to make a windswept cliff-top feel claustrophobic and sweaty.

I attempted to write about my love for this astonishing, uncategorisable film as part of one of my ‘Best First Watches of 2022’ posts here, but needless to say - despite reportedly being given a hard time by Big Norm on set, Wings fits into Mailer’s toxic, coked out world like a filth-stained leather glove. 

 

Nightmare at Noon (1988)

Quite possibly the aforementioned Nico Mastorakis’s masterpiece, you can read my thoughts on this classic piece of b-movie junk here, but specifically in terms of Hauser’s performance, I find it interesting the way he upturns expectations by playing his everyday-guy-in-an-RV protagonist / hero character as an absolute, raging asshole - whining, wheedling, selfish, he has that nails-down-the-blackboard annoyance down pat, until a “shit just got real” revelation eventually causes him to simmer down and become a helpful part of the bro-hero zombie-fighting team alongside Bo Hopkins and George Kennedy - a beautifully played transition.

 

Pale Blood (1990)

In this entertaining low budget vampire epic from Chinese-American director V.V. Dachin Hsu, Wings essays the role of a Van Helsing-descended vampire hunter with an ancient magic sword, posing as a sleazy, Richard Kern-esque video artist in contemporary L.A. Need I say more?!

I mean, if you’re on the scene in 1990, looking for an actor who’s going to turn up on time everyday for whatever pitiful rate your non-union picture is paying and breath life into a character like that… there’s only one guy you’re gonna call, right?

I can’t quite claim the resulting film is a stone-cold classic, but if you’ve sat through as much horror / sci-fi drek from this era as I have… keep your expectations in check, and you may be pleasantly surprised, let’s put it that way. 

 

Champagne & Bullets [aka ‘Geteven’ aka ‘Road to Revenge’] (1993)

In interviews, Hauser often spoke about his wild, hard-partying lifestyle during the 1980s, and nowhere can you see the weird aftermath of all this hedonism quite so clearly as in this astounding, once seen / never forgotten vanity project from Los Angeles lawyer John De Hart.

One of several b-movie stalwarts drafted in to lend a fig leaf of legitimacy to the production, Wings plays De Hart’s character’s best friend / partner ‘Huck Finney’, and… well, I should emphasise at this point that everything else I’ve ever read about Hauser gives the impression that he was a dedicated, hard-working professional, but let’s just say that he spends the majority of his screen time here instead giving a pretty good impression of being completely out of his mind.

He’s under control and hits the required beats in some scenes, so I’ll assume he was at least aware that he was in this movie, and wasn’t just hanging out at De Hart’s house being covertly filmed or something, but the rest of the time…? We’re deep into “point the camera at him and see what he does” territory here.

In one scene, he seems to be having a conversation with a wooden Cigar Store Indian; in another, he’s lolloping about senselessly in De Hart’s swimming pool, outlining his plan for starting a new religion based around ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’. I may be misremembering, but I think he spends some time theatrically downing and crushing cans of beer, in response to his character’s marital difficulties, or something?

I have no idea what is going on with all this. Did De Hart pay him in bourbon (or worse)? Or did Wings simply respond to the amateurishness of the production by throwing caution to the wind and going full-on Dr Gonzo? Who can say.

Whatever the case, Hauser’s performance ranks as about the 86th most uncomfortable thing in the gruelling duration of ‘Champagne & Bullets’. 

 

Mutant (1984)

And finally, I don’t think anyone on earth would pick this poverty-stricken alien/zombie flick from director John ‘Bud’ Carlos as an all-time favourite, but if you’re a tolerant viewer who likes this sort of thing, it’s certainly worth a watch.

With the exception of top-billed Bo Hopkins, Wings is clearly the best actor on the movie by a factor of ten, and I recall being touched by the way that, rather than simply steamrolling his younger, inexperienced co-stars and leaving the production a smouldering ruin (as he could so easily have done), he reins his performance in beautifully, considerately leaving space for the other actors to fill, and using his own presence to prop them up.

In particular, my memory is that his scenes with female lead Jody Medford feel more like acting workshops than anything else, as he patiently tries to help her through her faltering performance, revealing what I would like to think is a generosity of spirit rarely glimpsed in his more over-sized roles.

--

And, that’s about it for now I think, but in closing - I recommend opening your windows, cranking your speakers, and paying tribute to the late, great Wings Hauser by exposing your neighbours to an undiluted dose of The Neon Slime…. you know you want to.

Deathblog: David Lynch (1946-2025)

Of all the obituary posts I’ve felt obliged to hastily bang out for this blog over the years, this loss is perhaps the one which has proved most difficult to process, or to find words for.

When looking at a figure like Lynch - who has been a giant presence within any kind of art or culture I’d deign to care about, throughout my life - it would be all too easy to begin throwing ill-judged superlatives around.

For instance, in terms of what we might colloquially refer to as “being weird” - or, more precisely, using art and narrative to open the gates to previously unknown realms within/without/above/beneath the fabric of quotidian reality - I’d tend to remove him from any discussion around late 20th/early 21st century filmmakers, and instead place him in the same category as figures as diverse as Lovecraft, Burroughs (W.S., not E.R., although he’s cool too), Blake or Dali.

Like all of the above, his explorations of unmapped terrain are so totally suffused with his own personality, his own background and aesthetic concerns, they’ve become melded into a totally singular body of work, which for the most part defies comparison with that of any contemporaries in their chosen field. Instantly recognisable yet totally inimitable, impenetrable as an eerily misshapen hunk of granite in the middle of the cultural highway.

Unlike the others on the above list however, Lynch consistently managed to filter this vision through an industry requiring millions of dollars, labyrinthine layers of corporate approval and hundreds of collaborators, and still somehow managed to deliver it to receptive audiences in a form which felt like more-or-less 100% proof.

And, in stark contrast to the aforementioned exemplars, he achieved all this whilst still giving every impression of being a real swell guy, whom I’m sure most of us would have loved the opportunity to share a cup of (damn fine) coffee with - his sense of humour and unflappable, humane optimism as unique and cherished as his approaches to art, craft, metaphysics and whatever else.

But, yeah - overblown superlatives and vast generalisations. Probably not helpful.

Strategy # 2 when composing an obit post meanwhile, is to take the personal angle, so let’s do that.

Have I ever told this blog the story of how I first discovered the work of David Lynch? I don’t believe I have, so, ok, here we go…

I must have been about 14 or 15 years old, and (being a slow starter in this regard, with censorious parents and little access to non-mainstream culture to draw upon), my entire knowledge/experience of cinema comprised science fiction (which I loved across all media), dumb blockbusters and even dumber comedies. Maybe the occasional black & white classic mixed in there, but that was about it.

David Lynch, at the time, was going through an extended period of critical disapproval / disappearance from The Official Culture (post-‘Fire Walk With Me’, pre-‘Mulholland Drive’), and as such his name meant nothing to me.

‘Twin Peaks’, at this point, seemed to be treated as a quirky cultural phenomenon which had come and gone some years beforehand, mentioned in print only in relation to the various cast members whose careers it had helped launch, whilst a year or two later, I recall ‘Lost Highway’ achieving only a very marginal release in the UK (did it even go straight to video?), and receiving Ebert-esque reviews of the, “oh, is this guy still making his pretentious, sleazy films which make no sense” variety.

This was the late ‘90s, pre-internet void in other words, and if you were looking for “weird movie directors” and had no access to somewhat more enlightened alternative/underground print media, you were pointed straight in the direction of Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam - do not pass Go, and do not collect $200.

BUT ANYWAY. One day during the school holidays, my parents had assigned me the task of going through a box of unlabelled, recorded-off-TV VHS tapes, to find out what was on them, and to determine whether or not it was worth keeping. (Nearly three decades later incidentally, it occurs to me that this chore sounds like pretty much the most fun day that I could possibly imagine having - but, I digress.)

So, you probably saw this coming, but, second or third tape out of the box - it was ‘Blue Velvet’.

(How it got there, I have no idea, but I can only assume it was a result of my parents’ habit of occasionally setting the video to record a movie which had been given a five-star rating in the Radio Times, then either forgetting about it or deciding they didn’t like it, or something along those lines.)

Not only was it ‘Blue Velvet’ furthermore, but (presumably due to the fact that either the video player’s timer or the TV schedules were constantly fucking up), the tape had missed the entire opening of the movie (including the all-important credits), beginning - so memory serves - shortly before the moment in which the camera descends into the severed ear.

You can picture the instant “what the fuck is THIS” reaction from teenage me, and likewise imagine the effect which the rest of film had on me; an overwhelming mixture of danger, terror and total bafflement / disorientation which I daresay I’ve been searching for in cinema ever since.

This must have been a BBC broadcast, because there were no ad breaks, and no on-screen idents to let me know what I was watching, or to reassure me that it was actually a commercially released motion picture and not some insane, Videodrome-esque televisual hallucination. (In analogue, pan-and-scan form, with all detail and texture rubbed off the images and sound, such distinctions could easily get a bit blurry.)

The only thing which served to ground me through this fateful viewing was (ironically enough, given how terrifying he is in the film) the fact that I recognised Dennis Hopper. So I knew this thing was… at least kind of legitimate?

With the unlabelled tape subsequently ferretted away somewhere as a powerful piece of contraband, the next thing I recall - imagine this, youngsters - actually going to the local library, finding some massive movie reference book, and looking up the entry on Hopper to try to figure out the identity of this insane spectacle which had wreaked such untold havoc upon my impressionable young mind.

Naturally enough, it was easy to pinpoint the culprit as ‘Blue Velvet’, to follow this to the corresponding entry for David Lynch… and what follows from there is fairly self-explanatory.

My brother and I were just reaching the age where our parents were easing up and allowing us to buy / rent tapes without close supervision, and so a weird twofer of ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Wild At Heart’, the first season of ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘The Elephant Man’, ‘Dune’, the initial VHS release of ‘Lost Highway’ and (wow) a DVD of ‘Fire Walk With Me’ were gradually acquired over the next few years, as we spent our days muttering darkly about fire, cherry pie and the nature of “the other place”.

I’m not going to say that this process was directly responsible for my signing up to take an A-Level in Film Studies aged sixteen (by then toting Lynch, Cronenberg and Romero as my heroes, despite having only seen a merest handful of each of their movies), or for anything that’s happened since as I’ve moved deeper into an obsession with / appreciation of film during my adult life; but it definitely played a part.

I’m sure that others, across multiple generations, have similar tales to tell, which is all basically a long-winded way of getting around to the point that, whilst the appeal of Lynch’s work will probably never be universal (and I can easily sympathise with the frustration those immune to its charms must feel as the likes of me bang on, and on, about it), he nonetheless managed to reach an almost unfeasibly large number of people across the globe, and to touch and change each one of us more deeply than we perhaps know how to understand.

He has left us with feelings, ideas, images and sounds which will remain with us throughout our lives, but which will never become settled, nostalgic, over-familiar; they will always be alive, always changing, always lurking just around the corner, behind the trash cans outside Winkies - always wild.

And, churlish as it may seem to make such a comment about an artist whose achievements were so unprecedented, and who left us with eighteen solid hours of new directorial material (which I must get around to re-watching, incidentally) just a few short years ago - it still pains me deeply to realise there will now be no more of them.