Deathblog:Herschell Gordon Lewis (1929-2016)

Whilst I can’t really claim to be a die-hard fan (I haven’t actually sat down and watched one of his pictures in years), Herschell Gordon Lewis is such a cornerstone of horror cinema and ‘outsider’ culture in general, his work such an inevitable rite of passage for fans of weird movies, that it is impossible not to give him his dues, and I was sad to hear yesterday morning that he has passed away at the age of 87.

Although I find his stuff a bit too… I dunno, damaged… to want to revisit it on a regular basis, there are elements of his films that I absolutely love. Certainly, when the naïve technical clumsiness of a guy who was a businessman first, a carnival huckster second and a “filmmaker” probably about eighth or ninth meets an MO that resembles somebody’s big-mouthed, hard-drinking uncle taking every “why don’t you ever see that in a movie? I’d pay to see that!” type idea he can think of and just MAKING IT HAPPEN with zero concern for the conventions of taste, legality or logic…. well, the sparks that fly are quite something, with the results occasionally hitting a level of high weirdness that even the most unglued of self-consciously ‘provocative’ auteurs would have trouble matching.

My own introduction to HGL occurred under more or less perfect circumstances when, many years ago, as a keen season ticket holder to my local art cinema’s “Fantastic Film Fest” (an admirably programmed occasion that pretty much kick-started the process of discovery that eventually led me to set up this weblog, incidentally), I found myself sitting in an 1pm screening of ‘Blood Feast’ (an actual 35mm print, no less) with very little idea what to expect.

Noting that the five other patrons in the auditorium were all lone men seated as far away from each other as possible, I was a bit worried about what I might be in for, but, despite the film’s notorious reputation, I needn’t have worried – by the time things were underway, myself and my fellow loners were roaring with laughter more or less continuously. I mean, say what you like about ‘Blood Feast’, but it sure plays well to a crowd. Amateurish, deranged and (by 1963 standards) entirely unprecedented though it may be, you’ve also got Lewis’s ruthless business sense high in mix, ensuring that (barring a few publicity-generating offended walk-outs) nobody is ever likely to leave demanding their money back.

So simple, so garish, so purely strange are the events unfolding on screen that, for years after that screening, I felt I could recall the entire film in perfect detail - like a brightly crayoned, one-picture-per-page storybook assembled by an insane child. The audacious gore sequences – shamelessly prurient, yet mercifully unconvincing – may serve to make the film historically noteworthy, but they pale in comparison to the entertainment value that can be extracted from the stuff Lewis came up with to fill the gaps in-between.

From the exquisitely quotable dialogue and magnificently off-message acting, the garish photography and “bare living room redressed as police station” interiors, the sinister “caveman death march” vibes of HGL’s kettle drum & hornpipe jams on the soundtrack, and most of all, the extraordinary presence of Mal Arnold…. well, again, what can you say – love it or hate it, it certainly makes an impression. A classic of its kind that inadvertently succeeds in both defining and perfecting its own peculiar aesthetic, ‘Blood Feast’ is a real charmer within the ‘gore’ canon, irrespective of it’s much ballyhooed status as “the first one”.

After that, his other films popped up as and when over the next few years – ‘Two Thousand Maniacs’ (just as charming as ‘Blood Feast’) at a Halloween party, ‘The Gruesome Twosome’ (OMG, that intro thing with the puppets) on late night TV, ‘She Devils on Wheels’ (not a classic, but a keen bit of ‘60s trash culture nonetheless) on TV, and subsequently some DVDs. ‘Something Weird’ is… aptly named, if not necessarily in a good way, and similarly ‘The Wizard of Gore’ – probably his most quote-unquote “sophisticated” production – remains a pretty bamboozling bunch of hoo-hah.

I must admit though that when we get to the start of the ‘70s (what I think I recall Stephen Thrower referring to as HGL’s “decadent” phase), he loses my good will quite significantly. With ‘Wizard..’, and more particularly ‘The Gore Gore Girls’, he seems to have developed a more self-aware approach that negates the backwoods charm of his earlier work, as if he’d suddenly realised he could gain some traction by aiming his product toward an early camp/cult midnight movie audience, rather than his usual rural drive-in crowd, which negates most of the fun for me, I’m afraid.

I mean, despite its subject matter, you can’t really accuse ‘Blood Feast’ of being misogynistic – it’s just too far off the cultural map, outside of the realm in which such concepts have any relevance; it would be like criticizing Attila The Hun for religious intolerance.

By the time we get to ‘The Gore Gore Girls’ though, with its warped counter-culture influences and R. Crumb style anti-PC humour, the violence has taken on an undertone of ugly, black-hearted nastiness that I find really hard to take, with bungled attempts at irony only serving to highlight the brutish stupidity at the core of such an enterprise, even as the film’s excesses push it into ‘Thundercrack!’/John Waters style assaultive bad taste territory. So - not really my bag, man, although individual tastes may vary.

And…. I don’t really know where this off-the-top-of-my-head diatribe is going really, but let’s just conclude by saying that, despite my reservations outlined above, HGL was a true original, and will be missed. Like many of the best horror/exploitation directors, he managed to establish his own strange world right from the get-go and proceeded to spend the rest of his career rampaging around it in a thoroughly edifying fashion. Despite operating on a level of cynical chicanery that rivalled any of his more unsavoury peers in the “sizzle not the steak” regional exploitation market, his imagination and respect for his audience allowed him to effortlessly rise above them, creating a cohesive body of work that still provokes discussion, fascination, bafflement, and, most importantly, happiness to this day.

I should really get around to watching his films again.

TV Eye: Imaginary Sharks, Blind Gunfighters and Sex in Space…

Apologies in advance for this post - it's pretty stupid. But I wrote it, so it might as well go up.

“AAh AAaaaooooOWWW!”, as Iggy Pop proclaimed at the start of about seventeen continuous takes back in the hazy days of 1970, pretending to be electrified a-new each time by the leftover fizzle of Ron Asheton’s stacks cooling down from the previous run through. And all things considered, I guess it’s not bad, as far as exclamations go. It is perhaps distantly comparable to the rather less extravagant n’ unabashed noise I made when discovering the prurient joys of 21st century junk TV a few weekends ago, which is what this post is about.

I guess I’ve touched upon my overriding disdain for modern television every now and then on this blog, and indeed, my rejection of the idiot lantern has become so ingrained in recent years that I’m basically completely ignorant of the forms modern Television takes, and the methods by which modern people watch it.

The last time I actually bothered to hook up my little movie-watching TV for television viewing, folks still did that by plugging a cable into the back that led up to an aerial on the roof, and we lucky UK residents four or five fuzzy channels to choose from. And the only things I deemed useful on any of ‘em were The Simpsons, Buffy, and the occasional movie. After all, TV rots the brain, right? Everyone knows that. And MOVIES ARE ART, and thus good for you, so I choose movies. And if today’s movie happens to be about bikini-clad surfer girls being strangled by an unconvincing slime monster with a mouthful of wieners, whilst TV is showing a documentary about the integration of non-religious imagery into Florentine art in the 16th century… well the theory still holds, damn it – don’t ask questions. Look, here comes the slime beast again!

Anyway… as I think mentioned a few posts ago, I was cat-sitting for some friends a few weekends back. Said friends are the owners of one of those new fangled boxes that you plug ya TV into that gives you like a zillion channels or something. A new experience for me, so I thought I’d sit down with the cats and bravely jump in at the deep end, checking out the kind of audio/visual stimulus that the rest of the world is getting beamed into their homes whilst I’m busy with more hermetic and self-improving pursuits, like watching old Vincent Price movies and such.

C’mon TV; I’ve got three or four free nights ahead of me; show me how rotted my brain can get!

Thursday:

For a while, things were looking pretty grim out there…. page after page on the channel guide of nada, zilch, boredom – hundreds of varieties of anti-matter anti-entertainment, just as my curmudgeonly anti-TV standpoint had led me to expect. I was gonna pack it in and watch a DVD instead when I started scrolling through channel numbers in the 500s, but it was THEN, just before the slide off into home-shopping and xtian stations, that we started to hit the, uh, ‘good stuff’. Three words for you: THE HORROR CHANNEL. I mean… wow … they have one of those? That’s pretty cool.

As it turns out though, The Horror Channel kinda sucks. When I tuned in, they were showing another thrilling installment of Friday The 13th: The Series, the existence of which is certainly news to me. I mean how the hell does that work? Does Jason whatshisname go traveling from town to town, solving the problems of simple, smalltown folks by means of stabbing them, before wondering off into the sunset for next week’s adventure? It was pretty bad anyway, so I didn’t stick with it long enough to find out.

Later on, The Horror Channel were showing entries III and IV in an unknown-to-me vampire franchise called Subspecies. Full Moon Productions guy Charles Band was prominently mentioned in the credits, so hell, I thought it might be a laugh. Alas no. These movies seemed to feature interesting looking European locations and a pretty solid vampire-hunting heroine, but mostly Subspecies just gives us a load of really bad ethnic stereotyping, shoddy sets and endless scenes in which a chubby sub-Black Metal vampire guy who looks a bit like Mortiis skulks about the place throwing out garbled mouthfuls of vampiric claptrap. Seemingly this is some kind of ‘saga’, which I suppose is modern horror parlance for “people talk bollocks for hours and nothing fun ever happens”. The whole thing seemed quite bone-crushingly earnest. Ho-hum.

Satori awaited but a few clicks away though, as I discovered ‘Movies4Men’! Christ, what the hell do they show on there, I hear you ask; razorblade adverts? sports biopics? porn? No, get this: ‘Movies4Men’ show second-string Spaghetti Westerns (and occasional action/gangster flicks), pretty much all the time! Hot dog! Now let it be said that I usually go out of my way to avoid any product specifically marketed at ‘men’, but I swear, I’ve never before felt as manly as I did when Movies4Men let me watch Antonio Baldi’s ‘Blindman’ and Abel Ferrara’s ‘King of New York’ in quick succession. I could have damn well gone out and cut down a tree and turned it into a fence whilst wearing a sweat-stained vest right there and then.

Thanks to ‘Movies4Men’, I also got to watch a happy handful of Spaghettis so obscure and underachieving no one’s even bothered to review them on IMDB in some cases. No Alex Cox plaudits for YOU, ‘Brother Outlaw’ (1971) and ‘I Want Him Dead’ (1968)! The chunks of them I watched were ok though. One of them had Tony Kendall in it. Watching Italian westerns is kind of the movie equivalent of listening to the Grateful Dead; I can all too easily just zone out let them ramble on endlessly, critical faculties disengaged, appreciation of stuff that’s actually good long forgotten.

Blindman was pretty great though! By ‘great’, naturally I mean it was totally stupid, pointless and objectionable, but what can I say? Baldi and co kick it with the kind of gusto and good humour that clear befits the tale of a blind crack-shot gunman and Ringo Starr escorting a wagon full of kidnapped prostitutes across a backlot desert, and as such it’s the kind of movie that’s impossible not to enjoy on some level. Plus, a good Spaghetti always stands or falls by its ending, and the one here is total comedy genius – as an off the cuff “ah, screw you” to anyone who was expecting the requisite shot at Leone style majesty/tragedy, it’s inspired.

Somewhere in the midst of all this I flicked over to a nearby TV movie channel and became one of the few sober adults to have ever watched Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus in its entirety. C’mon, don’t lie, I know you watched the trailer on youtube. And basically, I’d recommend you keep on doing so rather than investigate further, as MS vs. GO stands as perhaps the preeminent example of a film built around two ten second ‘cool bits’ to grab people’s interest on Youtube, and 89 minutes 40 seconds of cynical clock-watching.

So naturally I kinda enjoyed it, in a disconnected K-hole car-crash observation sorta fashion: guys portraying submarine captains sit on sets, shouting stuff into headphone mics and clicking Atari ST joysticks as lights flash and the camera goes shaky, interspersed with the same few unimpressive CGI shots of our prehistoric beasties, repeated ad-nauseum. Our heroes are scientists, and they spend a great deal of time DOING SCIENCE, by means of decanting brightly coloured liquids between beakers and test tubes, whilst nodding and half-smiling at each other in a “damn, we’re a great team, we’re doing good work here” sorta fashion. It was quite nice, kinda hypnotic, like that bit in “Astro Zombies” where John Carradine spends about an hour farting about in his laboratory, doing meaningless things reaaally, really slowly. God I love “Astro Zombies”. ANYWAY, back to MS vs. GO - if anyone ever explained what all this food-colouring related jollity had to do with repelling Mega-Shark before he eats California, I must have missed it, but as I say, I liked it just fine. There were ‘beautiful’ sunsets, and there was limp ecological moralizing, which was less good.

There is something deeply sad about the psychology of an industry that makes a movie called “Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus”, utilising technology by which said beasts can be realised with handy pixels rather than cumbersome model/effects work… and then delivers a film almost entirely devoid of either Mega Shark or Giant Octopus. In fact there was so little Giant Octopus it was beyond a joke – it’s like those lazy potheads with the animation software were just like, “Eight arms? Fuck that man – let’s just do another one with the shark instead”.

Gone are the days when noble gentlemen like Ishiro Honda recognised that the desire to watch movies about giant monsters hitting each other is a perfectly reasonable one, and treated their audience with appropriate respect, providing content, incident, drama, visual excitement, ideas and fun for everybody, alongside lashings of painstakingly realised monster-bashing.

By contrast, the unspoken message emanating from MegaShark vs Giant Octopus’s creators seems to be that anyone watching a film like this is probably a retard, and thus they deserve whatever tossed off crap they get. Then I bet they go home and work on their abstract photos of electricity pylons or pilot scripts for ‘intelligent’ high concept TV shows or whatever crap it is they’re REALLY into, leaving the rare opportunity to make a great bit of popular cinema they’ve been handed to wither on the vine. Fucking assholes.

I know I said ‘sober’ a few paragraphs ago, but I guess by now I must have been pretty plastered, or else suffering some kind of psychotropic trash overload, because the next thing I remember I was trying to watch something called Emmanuelle in Space, which… well fuck it, I don’t have to justify myself to you. I think it was a TV series rather than a movie, but either way, sub-Red Shoe Diaries ‘erotic encounters’ interspersed with occasional repetition of the same model spaceship fly-by shot and some footage of guys wearing flimsy-looking virtual reality headsets seems to be the somewhat puzzling score here. What’s the betting that the dire softcore stuff was originally a different show/movie, and they just threw the other bits in Al Adamson style, new title, and hey presto, money in the bank! If any of your local zillion channels ever happen to be showing this one, I recommend tuning in just for the credits sequence / theme tune – I think it actually made some part of my brain melt. My hand/eye co-ordination is shot, but it was worth it. It’s truly incredible.

Even more puzzling, there was another barrel-scraping Emmanuelle spin-off on another channel that didn’t seem to have anything to do with faux-European decadence and crap softcore sex at all, and instead was some kind of made-for-TV movie about Californian lifeguards fighting CGI sharks so shoddy they make Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus look like a natural history seminar. What the hell? I don’t know who it was who originally came up with the Emmanuelle name/concept (assuming “chick has lots of sex” can be claimed as a concept) all those years ago, but I bet they must get up each morning and ritualistically punch themselves in the face for not copyrighting it.

Friday / Saturday:

Ok, so sadly the evening related above was by far the best day of my TV excursion. After that things get a bit hazy, and I resorted to watching some decent(?) movies on DVD, and even talking to people and doing other things, but I still have some mixed up memories or what transpired TV-wise. Memories that seem to confirm that when it’s not Spaghetti Westwern night, ‘Movies4Men’ show a lot of war films, and revenge thrillers and stuff. One of them was old, and Italian, and had Klaus Kinski in it, but it didn’t really hold my interest. The rest were ‘90s, and American, and blah.

The Horror Channel meanwhile continued to prove themselves the world’s leading purveyors of godawful vampire claptrap – hours upon hours of it. Jesus, somebody stake those fuckers, then at least they might shut up! If you manage to stay up late enough though, they do at least have the decency to show a weirdo cult movie or two on the weekends – usually hitting at that magic “must stay awake till the next ad break” point in the early morning, when lunatic movie imagery flows into dreams, and vice versa.

I recall seeing most of The Gore Gore Girls, and thinking, Christ, this is even more vile and deranged than I remember it being. Really fucking morbid and brain-damaged and almost psychedelically primitive, even by HG Lewis standards. Not good to fall asleep to, but somehow I managed. I think the cats enjoyed it. All the bright colors and sudden movements and seething mush – repetitive barbarity on a level so basic, I think most mammals would probably get the point.

Sadly none of the TV series/TV-movie based trash I encountered during the weekend proved even remotely watchable, but somehow I soldiered on. I remember nothing.

2:30am on the third night, I should really have gone to bed, but The Horror Channel had something on their schedule called Lips Of Blood. No advance info on its contents, and naturally that’d be an obvious title for yet more ‘90s vampire claptrap, but…. there is a chance… it COULD be…. Yes, yes, it actually is! It’s a screening of the only ‘70s Jean Rollin movie I’ve never got round to watching! Hallelujah!

Obviously it was a hell of a lot better than anything else I watched this weekend, but on first go-round I don’t think it was one of my favourite Rollins. Kind of a transitory work between his earlier fun-packed vampire flicks, and the slower, more existential approach he went on to develop in ‘Fascination’ and ‘Living Dead Girl’ maybe..? Too much of the latter to really make an impression on me when I was fighting to keep my eyes open I’m afraid, although I do remember some characteristically wonderful shenanigans with the ubiquitous vampire twins.… were there four of them this time, or did I dream that? I’ll have to give ‘Lips Of Blood’ another watch when I feel more up to it.


And that makes the perfect conclusion to my TV odyssey really: staying up all night in order to blearily watch an example of precisely the kind of weird old horror stuff I usually watch at home anyway.

So, TV: it’s quite good on Thursdays, but beyond that, fergeddaboutit.

And if my hosts for the weekend (who shall remain nameless) ever read this: I’m sorry I made your cats watch a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie when they should have been out doing healthy nocturnal cat type stuff. They seemed ok about it though, I think.