Horror Express: The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (Bonami J. Story, 2023)

So, yes, a word on the title. It’s a bit ‘on the nose’, isn’t it? Could probably stand to lose the ‘angry’ at least... not that I wish to question the character’s anger, you understand, but it just seems unnecessary to cram such descriptors into the title, and it would scan better without it. Also, then maybe they could’ve made it a reference to Bernard Shaw’s ‘The Black Girl in Search of God’ or something instead, who knows? (One for the kids there!)

Anyway - at first, I wasn’t really down with the movie the title is attached to either. In fact, through the opening half hour I was getting ready to give it to stern a lecture about how I’m all for genre movies exploring socio-political issues, but how it tends to work better when they naturally arise from the genre elements. Whereas, this seems to have approached things the other way around, presenting a well-intentioned but dispiritingly one-dimensional take on systemic racism, drugs, police brutality and social inequality (all of which are bad, dontcha know), with a featherweight take on the Frankenstein mythos overlaid on top.

Meanwhile, any narrative tension seemed liable to be nullified by the presence of a central character - Vicaria, played by Laya DeLeon Hayes - who appeared to be destined to spend the film being smarter than everyone else, right about everything all the time, and generally morally unimpeachable / intellectually undefeatable.

In particular, I just didn’t buy Vicaria’s whole “death is a curable disease” shtick as a message which is in any way positive or helpful for those dealing with grief - which is a problem, given that it’s the single rhetorical device upon which most of Bomani J. Story’s script rests. And, similarly, I found the decision to open the film with a succession of close up, slo mo familial deaths to be not so much harrowing (as was presumably intended), but simply emotionally manipulative, establishing a tone of grim self-seriousness which proves hard to shake through the opening act.

Thankfully though, I also felt that the film becomes a lot more interesting as it goes along, really kicking into gear during the second half, and winning me over in the process.

Though Story clearly has no interest whatsoever in delivering the all-black-cast version of ‘Reanimator’ or ‘Monster on Campus’ I suppose I was vaguely hoping for, he does give us a surprisingly faithful reinterpretation of ‘Frankenstein’, as taken straight from the novel, concentrating in particular upon the rarely filmed trope of the creator abandoning and losing track of his/her monster immediately after creating it, only to become engaged with its plight once it returns to threaten his/her loved ones.

Towering in the darkness, its face hidden by dangling, blood-caked dreads and a voluminous hoodie, Vicaria’s ‘monster’ (a reconstituted version of her brother Chris, who was slain in a gang shooting during the opening) proves a pretty menacing and memorable creation, capable of dishing out some reassuringly gruesome ultra-violence at various points in the film. (Although, the attempt to humanise him through the use of a generic, distorted ‘monster voice’ falls rather flat, it must be said.)

Once the monster is on the scene though, the film as a whole becomes more intense, more chaotic and more convincing across the board, questioning our heroine’s motives and means in appropriately Frankensteinian fashion, and incorporating enough moral ambiguity and emotional turbulence to more than justify its existence.

An improv-heavy set of performances from the supporting cast very much helps in this regard, as characters who initially seemed pretty one-note are allowed to come into their own and acquire some depth, lending a sense of authenticity to the avowedly realist setting, and achieving some genuinely powerful moments here and there.

A particular shout out in this regard must go out to Chad L. Coleman, playing Vicaria’s father, who, to not put too fine a point on it, is fucking brilliant. As a broken man struggling to keep it together in the face of grief and substance abuse, he has pathos to burn, and in the (sadly too few) scenes when he’s on screen, the movie really takes flight in dramatic terms.

In fact, it is Coleman who carries the weight of the movie’s most cathartic moment, when he stands his ground and refuses to unlock his surrogate family’s front door for the police who are outside carrying out a door-to-door search.

Amidst all the wide-ranging political point-making and generalised rage at the state of contemporary America crammed into Story’s script, it is this tangential detail, conveyed through Coleman’s all-too-convincing fear and determination, which perhaps made the deepest impression on me, prompting me to reflect on the sobering reality of the fact that, although the family in this case have nothing to hide from the law, black people in the USA (and by extension, members of similarly marginalised communities across the globe) have nothing to gain from allowing armed cops access to their living space, but a hell of a lot to lose.

Elsewhere, Denzel Whitaker is also very good as the housing project’s resident drug dealer, blurring our sympathies as he’s revealed to be just another frightened, overgrown kid once the threat from the monster takes hold, and delivering some of the film’s very few genuine laughs in the process. Child actor Amani Summer meanwhile does great work too, in one of the more interesting portrayals of the obligatory “little girl who befriends the monster” character I can recall seeing in Frankensteinian cinema.

Whilst avoiding spoilers, I’ll conclude simply by noting that the ending of ‘The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster’ is… significantly different from that of a standard Frankenstein narrative, let’s put it that way. By the time we get there though, it feels as if the film (and the characters) have earned it.

Horror Express: In The Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021)

Shot in a remarkable fourteen days during the summer of 2020, when such concerns must have still felt quite scary and new, Ben Wheatley’s most recent horror film begins by using the conventions of old school British post-apocalyptic SF to casually outline the parameters of a world in which a pandemic has progressed in a considerably worse direction than the one we've all been living with for the past few years.

Our protagonist Martin (Joel Fry) has just emerged from four months in isolation, and is met by staff in hazmat suits and subjected to extensive - if inconsistently applied - health and hygiene checks before being allowed to enter the ‘sterile area’ within a lodge on the outskirts of a national park. We soon learn that granulated coffee has become a rare and valued commodity, and there is grim speculation about families fleeing the city to camp out in the forest (“Bristol was hit very badly in the third wave..”).

This unsettling human background gradually fades in importance though once Martin and park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia) set out on foot through an expanse of ‘old growth’ woodland, with the aim of reaching the remote camp where Martin's former colleague Dr Wendel (Hayley Squires) has been alone for some months, conducting research on the possibility of boosting crop yields through stimulation of the neural networks within plant roots, or somesuch.

(I need to break my plot synopsisin’ here to note that I’m not sure I quite buy the idea that there are still areas of forest of the west of England so dense and inaccessible that they can also be reached through several days solid hiking, especially given that, when we eventually reach it, the doctor’s set-up is kitted out with at least a lorry-load of specialist equipment… but never mind, let’s just go with it.)

Without giving too much away, it’s fair to say that the gruelling and terrifying events which Martin and Alma experience during their journey through the forest contain strong trace elements of a modern horror film, incorporating such checklist ticking essentials as axe-wielding psychos, forced incarceration, desperate fights for survival and an uncomfortable preoccupation with gruesome injury detail. 

Beyond that though, it’s easy to see why many viewers were disappointed with and/or perplexed by this film upon release (and the fact it was marketed by Univeral as a straight genre piece probably didn’t help).

What Wheatley has actually gone and done here, y’see, is to funnel a modest studio budget into making another totally zonked out, bad trip ‘head movie’, following a wafer-thin structure which at times put me in mind of ‘Heart of Darkness’, ‘Stalker’, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and Saul Bass's ‘Phase IV’, but that in essence can probably be traced all the way back to the grail myths or ancient Sumerian scriptures or whatever else.

Which is to say: Quest > confrontation/catharsis > revelation, basically. You know the score, I’m sure. (As a pattern for storytelling, it’s curiously compatible with the Marxists’ beloved “thesis / antithesis / synthesis” equation, isn’t it? But, that’s a big pile of navel-gazing for another day, I realise.)

What ‘In The Earth’ reminded me of more than anything though is Wheatley's own ‘A Field in England’ (2013). Indeed, it struck me that the core premise of both films is essentially the same; ie, a pair of innocents being coaxed into a fixed and inescapable rural space in which they are menaced and generally fucked with by a more-or-less insane practitioner of uncertain magickal arts, subjected to non-consensual drug experiences, forced to re-examine their conception of the laws which govern the universe, and at one point obliged to participate in a kind of supernatural tug of war.

Here though, that premise finds itself revisited and greatly expanded in a quasi-realistic contemporary setting, its impact amped up through the use of an extreme and confrontational cinematic aesthetic which basically seeks to replicate the textural & emotional experience of making multiple bad drug decisions at an experimental music festival (with added gory violence).

(In fact, seekers after an auteurist thread running through Wheatley’s work could even go further here, citing the fact that films as disparate as 2015’s ‘High Rise’ or 2017’s brilliant Free Fire also centre around the idea of a zero sum game of survival played out within a single, confined environment, in which characters gradually accumulate wounds and physical impairments as their determination to get out alive transmutes into a kind of despairing, entropic embrace of self-immolation.)

Thankfully though, the mere opportunity to crown Wheatley as the unwilling king of “closed environment injury movies” is pretty much the least interesting thing going on in ‘In The Earth’ - a film which, thematically-speaking, leaves all kinds of fascinating stuff floating around in the ether, just waiting to be plucked out by the critically engaged and/or stoned viewer.

In no particular order then, we’ve got: the nature of English identity and the malign/atavistic aspect of people’s connection to the land, the interplay of science, culture and ritual in understanding the natural environment, the fine line between learning from nature and being consumed by it, the unimaginable psychological impact of contact with non-human intelligence…. and probably a dozen other things besides.

Personally, I couldn’t help latching onto the fact that both of the ‘questers’ within the film are of mixed race / non-white ethnicity (and thus implicitly urban, as well as relatively young), whilst the two characters who have fully lost themselves to the atavistic forces stirred up within the the forest - dwelling within it and becoming at least somewhat crazed and dangerous as a result - are Anglo-Saxon, middle-aged, and recognisably middle class.

Filtering this through the dialectics currently in play within UK society, I couldn’t help but see this as some kind of exaggerated depiction of the underlying menace potentially experienced by bold young urbanites when (as they are want to do) they step out into the remoter depths of the countryside, perhaps seeking that uncanny frisson that comes from connection with the ancient, ancestral earth… only to find that, socially speaking, things have a tendency to get a bit weird, and not necessarily in a good way, as soon as they venture more than a few miles from the nearest train station.

I’m sure this was nowhere near the forefront of Wheatley’s mind when he was conceiving ‘In The Earth’, but, it’s definitely buried in there somewhere, waiting (if you’ll excuse the pun) to be unearthed. Indeed, quite what the film is trying to say about any of the stuff listed above remains nebulous and vague in the extreme; nothing is ever really unpacked or nailed down amid the onslaught of bloody forest mulch and editing room psychedelia.

In short then, it’s easy to see why so many people had such a negative reaction to this film. I appreciate that some viewers may find its style too emphatic and aggressive, or feel that its ideas are mixed up and under-developed to the point of being meaningless; and, they may have a point.

Likewise, Wheatley’s embrace of shop-soiled talismans of the ‘folk horror’ and ‘hauntology’ movements (cf: the film’s ‘Owl Service’ referencing standing stone, and the Julian House-styled faux-Penguin closing credits) may strike some as contrived and opportunistic, whilst the digital psychedelic freak-out effects which comprise much of the finale certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste (not least a few moments which throw caution to the wind and basically turn into a ‘90s new age / techno-pagan screensaver).

But, personally, none of these potential stumbling blocks bothered me. Hell, I enjoyed them! In fact, I got a lot out of the film on all levels. For my money, it’s arguably the most frightening, provocative and impactful film Wheatley has made to date. 

In the long run, I foresee it accumulating a more appreciative audience as the years go by, and in the short term, I imagine it will spend a long time lurking in the back of my mind, as the question of what it all “means” stews around in there, taking on new forms, drawing me to contemplate repeat viewings, in spite of the mild psychic trauma initiated by the first go-round.

Which is exactly what you’d expect of any good zonked out, bad trip ‘head movie’ really, isn't it?

Noir Diary # 15: The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958)

Following the lead of the film itself, let’s start off here by getting the boring bit out of the way: Don Siegel’s ‘The Lineup’ is, technically speaking, a TV spin-off.

Also known as ‘San Francisco Beat’, ‘The Lineup’ began as a radio drama in 1950 before moving to TV via the auspices of CBS in 1953. Generally viewed as a close competitor to Jack Webb’s more successful ‘Dragnet’, the show followed basically the same formula, following the day-to-day crime-fighting travails of straight-laced SFPD detective Lieutenant Ben Guthrie (played by Warner Anderson, who here resembles a somewhat older, less physically intimidating Lee Marvin), with Tom Tully (mysteriously absent from the movie version) as his partner, Sergeant Matt Grebb.

Over a decade since Jules Dassin initially kick-started the trend for cross-breeding Film Noir tropes with shot-on-location / faux-documentary police procedural stuff in 1947’s ‘The Naked City’, it’s safe to assume that movie-goers knew the drill pretty well by this point, and one can only imagine that yet another based-on-the-hit-TV-series trudge through the same good-solid-detective-work, ‘crime doesn’t play’ type palaver didn’t exactly sound too thrilling.

Assigned director Don Siegel and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant apparently agreed. After Silliphant knocked out a script which the pair both saw as the basis for an exciting, unconventional crime movie, Siegel claims that he pleaded with producers Frank Cooper and Jaime Del Valle for the opportunity to extract the movie from the ‘Lineup’ brand and let it stand alone as its own thing - but no dice. Although Cooper & Del Valle apparently didn’t give much of a damn how the film actually turned out, a ‘Lineup’ movie had been promised, and a ‘Lineup’ movie was going to be delivered.

Needless to say, Siegel and Silliphant responded to this decision by essentially pulling the same audacious bait and switch on their audience that Robert Aldrich and A.I. Bezzerides had laid on fans of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels a few years earlier with their extraordinary and iconoclastic ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ (1956).

Doing little to hide their disdain for the franchise they were ostensibly working within, the director and screenwriter proceeded to entirely side-line the familiar certainties that viewers of the TV show might have been expecting, largely confining the obligatory police procedural segments to the opening twenty minutes, and pointedly relegating the show’s star Warner Anderson to the bottom of the on-screen cast list.

Meanwhile, they proceeded to kick up a veritable sandstorm of darker, more challenging and just plain weirder material, resulting in a movie which, a few decades after the dust had settled, began to gain recognition as one of the most startling and forward-thinking American crime films of its era.

Right out of the gate, Siegel’s take on ‘The Lineup’ plunges us into chaos. Out of control automobiles screech around the Embarcdaero in San Francisco’s port district, as suitcases are flung around, incomprehensible yells are exchanged and a police officer is callously mown down by a speeding taxi before the driver takes a bullet in the back and careers into the side of a jack-knifed truck. When Guthrie and his surrogate partner Quine (played by frankly terrifying tough guy actor Emile Meyer) dutifully arrive on the scene to assess the damage, all they can do is despairingly ask, “why?!” (1)

Twenty minutes or so of briskly-paced but uninspiring A-to-B police-work - sticking broadly within the TV show’s remit, albeit with a somewhat harder edge and more attractive locations - help them answer this question to a certain extent, as they uncover the bare bones of an elaborate conspiracy to smuggle heroin into the city, using pre-loaded ‘oriental’ souvenirs carried through customs by unsuspecting tourists.

There are some fun moments during this opening slog - both Anderson and Mayer do solid work, there is some exquisite San Francisco location shooting and I particularly enjoyed the bit where the police’s ‘lab man’ opens up a suspect package with a flick-knife, licks a big dollop of powder off his finger and declares, “yep, it’s heroin alright” - but it is only once the focus shifts elsewhere that the movie really begins.

Indeed, Siegel had literally wanted the film to begin here, as we board a flight into the city and meet the two contractors hired by an unseen cartel to reclaim the hidden dope from its unwitting carriers -- and boy, what a pair they are.

The uncertain relationship between psycho triggerman Dancer (Eli Wallach - blank stare, twisted grimace, porkpie hat) and his older, somewhat effeminate ‘handler’ Julian (brilliantly played by Robert Keith - beady eyes, skull-like grin, pencil moustache) was reportedly intended by Silliphant to mimic that of an aspiring Hollywood star and his agent (“if he continues to listen to me, he’ll be the best,” Julian declares at one point, in the process of talking up his boy’s unparalleled talents in the field of crime). A sly, in-jokey conceit, this approach which works superbly, creating an unforgettably amoral, inscrutable odd couple whose interplay pretty much dominates the film from this moment onward. (2)

Once Julian and Dancer (god, that name) are on the scene, Guthrie and Quine fall almost entirely into the background, turning up merely to shake their heads over the latest corpses and radio in for roadblocks and ambulances. We’re 100% with the bad guys on this one, and that’s just as well, because we just can’t keep our eyes off these two creeps - They’re just fascinatingly perverse in every respect.

As Sergio Angelini thus observes in his essay on the film for the Indicator label’s Columbia Noir Vol. 1 box set, “chaos is given a face and a psychological profile while order is merely represented by men in hats”. In truth though, what keeps us so glued to the travails of these goons is that Silliphant and Siegel never allow us to get an angle on - as the guy who gives Dancer the low-down at the port puts it - “what makes [them] tick”. They are nightmare figures from a world we will never understand.

Where did they come from? (The script tells us Miami, implausibly citing their alleged tans, but if so they must have been living underground like moles.) How did they meet? Has Julian spent his entire life recruiting young psychopaths and sponging off their ill-gotten gains like some kind of sociopathic boxing promoter? What exactly is the nature of their relationship? (Let’s not even go there.)

Throughout the film, the characters Dancer and Julian encounter seem as unsure what to make us them as we are. Pushed by their port-side contact, Dancer makes some blunt statement about not having had a father, but that doesn’t really take us very far in terms of armchair psychology. Later in the film, when tearful hostage Dorothy Bradshaw (Mary LaRoche) demands to know “what kind of men” the pair are, the string of gnomic non-sequiturs the lizard-like Julian spits out in response (“women have no place in society”, “crying is aggressive and so is the law”, “people of your class don’t understand the criminal’s need for violence”) raise more questions than they answer.

All we know at the outset however is that, like all good agents, Julian has his boy learning proper English grammar (“how many characters on a street corner know how to say, ‘if I were you?’”), tempering Dancer’s sullen, animalistic incomprehension with his own twisted sense of refinement. Meanwhile, he gleefully obsesses over the poetic implications of the last words of the Dancer’s victims, which - in another wonderfully tweisted detail of Silliphant’s script - he scrupulously records in a notebook.

Add a young Richard Jaeckel to the equation as the duo’s feckless ‘wheelman’ - fish-faced, bowtied and alcoholic, he’s been drafted in at short notice after the phony taxi driver we saw in the opening got snuffed - and it’s clear the deck is stacked for some pretty hair-raising mayhem over the next sixty minutes or so.

As Angelini further notes, our ostensible ‘heroes’, the quotidian cops, don’t even get to share any screen-time with these outlandish villains. Mirroring the movie’s opening, Guthrie and Quine only make it to the final showdown in time to despairingly survey the carnage. Seemingly left speechless before the final fanfare crashes in, they are denied even their obligatory “well that just about wraps things up” sign off, closing the movie on a note of nihilistic self-destruction which an empty dedication to hard working SFPD does little to dissipate.

In spite of his legendary status amongst crime/noir aficionados, in truth I’ve always felt that Don Siegel’s work as a director can be a bit hit and miss (it’s difficult to imagine his cult gaining much traction on the basis of pictures like Private Hell 36, for example). Looking across his wider career however, he always seems to come alive when dealing with tales of morally ambiguous anti-heroes or outright maniacs of one kind or another - so of course it figures that he was absolutely at the top of his game for this one. Basically we’ve got the man who brought us ‘Riot in Cell Block 11’ and ‘Dirty Harry’ firing on all cylinders here, and the results are nothing short of spectacular. 

In fact, ‘The Lineup’ feels very much like the Ur-text of all past and future Siegel movies, revelling in the pulp-crime aesthetics of his earlier black & white pictures whilst prefiguring elements of the most memorable films he would go on to make over the next few decades (not only the high voltage action and San Fran location work of ‘Dirty Harry’, but the psychotic criminal protagonists of ‘The Killers’ (1964), the elliptical visual storytelling of ‘Charley Varrick’ (1973), and many more besides, I'm sure).

As Siegel wrangles raw, livewire energy, technical precision and unsettling, off-beat artistry here, it’s easy to understand why a young Michael Reeves made a pilgrimage to the director’s doorstep early in the ‘60s to prostrate himself before the master; as a concise summation of the director’s formal strengths and auteurist tics, ‘The Lineup’ is pretty hard to beat.

As with so many of these ‘50s Columbia flicks, the claustrophobic framing and expressionistic shadows of ‘traditional’ noir style have been thoroughly swept away in ‘The Lineup’ (aside from anything else, the entire movie takes place in daylight). Rather than merely falling back on a kind of bland quasi-realism however, Siegel and his DP Hal Mohr offer an alternative visual sensibility which proves just as compelling as the old-time good stuff.

It has often been said that, in a Siegel movie, the camera is always in the right place, and ‘The Lineup’ consistently bears this out, as he and Mohr make inspired use of the by-now-standard widescreen aspect ratio, framing the film’s locations in such a way as to highlight jagged, horizontal lines bisecting bright, white spaces, creating an anxious collage of portside cranes, highway overpasses, art deco tower blocks and advertising hoardings.

Throughout proceedings, the placid serenity of the San Francisco skyline is cut through with a jittery, urban energy, as examples of every means of mechanised transportation known to man (ships, planes, motorcycles - even a blimp at one point) roar hither and yon behind the action, emphasising the relentless velocity of the movie’s plotting whilst casually pre-empting the starkly modernist take on the crime genre inaugurated by John Boorman’s ‘Point Blank’ a decade later.

All of which of course is merely a high-falutin’ way of leading up to the fact that the extended car chase sequence which forms ‘The Lineup’s finale is totally out of control, incorporating a level of stunt-work, action direction and cranked up, adrenalin rush cutting which feels startlingly ahead of its time, pretty much single-handedly inaugurating the “beat THAT” lineage of attention-grabbing car action which would eventually go on to bring us the successive thrills of ‘Bullitt’, ‘The French Connection’, ‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ and so on.

Certainly, I’m not aware of anything else from ‘50s that even comes close to this level of visceral excitement. Even though Siegel falls back on using back projection for most of the interior car shots, it’s at least the best back projection you’ll ever see, with the actors’ reactions and the movement of the ‘foreground’ car perfectly timed to match the hair-raising swerves and near misses of the pre-shot footage, lending it a sense of realism which rarely wavers.

In fact, the sweaty, maniacal claustrophobia of these ‘in-car’ shots - which see the crooks collapse into violent, recriminatory mania as their hostages cower and shriek and the car screeches crazily to avoid on-coming traffic - anticipate yet another trope which would become a staple of hardboiled filmmaking a few decades later, primarily on the other side of the Atlantic, where similar in-car chaos was utilised to great effect in films like Mario Bava’s ‘Rabid Dogs’ (1976) and Pasquale Festa Campanile’s Hitch-Hike (1977), amongst others.

And, when we move outside for the wider exterior shots, well, the stunt-work is just honest-to-god breath-taking, climaxing in a heart-stopping emergency stop / handbrake turn on the edge of an unfinished highway overpass which would have given Jackie Chan the jitters thirty years later. (3) 

Once we stop to think about it for a few minutes of course, much of Silliphant’s script for ‘The Lineup’ is outrageously implausible. Right from the outset, the idea that an international criminal cartel would go to the trouble of planting shipments of dope on unsuspecting tourists, only to then hire a pair of highly conspicuous out-of-town psychos to collect the goods, leaving a trail of murder victims and drug traces in their wake, is totally absurd.

And, that’s before we even get on to the practicalities of smuggling junk in the handles of ivory tableware, or - my personal favourite - the notion that a reclusive, wheelchair-bound mob boss would undertake a dope pick-up himself, in-person and apparently alone… and in a location which can only be reached by navigating multiple flights of stairs, no less!

But, when a movie’s writing is this consistently inventive and attention-grabbing, when the on-screen action is so fast-moving, so packed with wild beauty and delicious craziness, the viewer is forced to engage a mind-set usually reserved for watching giallo and euro-horror movies and simply ask, who cares?

As James Ellroy points out in his characteristically scabrous contributions to the commentary track for the film recorded alongside noir expert Eddie Muller, when it comes down to it, crime fiction is essentially bullshit. Nothing as sensational or destructive as the events portrayed in this film has ever gone down in the annals of real life crime in America - so as long as you’re making shit up, why not go wild?

As in a Fulci or Argento film, each one of the aforementioned scripting absurdities allows for the creation of cinematic moments - most of them heretofore unmentioned in this review - so audacious and unexpected that only the most joyless, movie-hating pedant would really have cause to complain.

From Vaughn Taylor’s ice-cold turn as ‘The Man’, to the assassination Dancer carries out in the steam bath of ‘The Seaman’s Club’, so loaded with unspoken sexual tension it’s a wonder it didn’t jam the projector, to the horribly suggestive sight of Julian tearing apart the innards of child’s Japanese doll as its owner looks on aghast and uncomprehending - almost every scene in ‘The Lineup’ offers something unforgettable. Like some golden treasury of pulp crime excess, it all serves to build a picture of a precarious, morally bankrupt world in which our bourgeois certainties might explode into bloody violence might explode at any moment.

For a ‘50s studio film, ‘The Lineup’ ultimately presents a remarkably frightening conception of the world, and, anchored by exceptional performances for Wallach and Keith, it remains entirely believable on an emotional level, even as the plotting skirts the fringes of outright insanity, helping cementing its place in the pantheon alongside ‘The Big Combo’, ‘Touch of Evil’ and ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ as one of the very best American crime films of the ‘50s. Hard-boiled cinema at its finest.

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(1) You’ll recall Emile Meyer for his role as the crooked cop in ‘The Sweet Smell oSuccess’ (1957), or perhaps as the priest in Kubrick’s ‘Paths of Glory’ (also ‘57), or as Rufus Ryker in ‘Shane’ (1953). Once you’ve seen him in anything however, his face’ll stick with you, that’s for sure.

(2) Outside of this film, I mainly know Robert (father of Brian) Keith for his role as the unconventional, sympathetic cop character in another excellent San Francisco noir, ‘Woman on the Run’ (1950), but as a solidly reliable character actor he played smaller roles in a raft of quote-unquote ‘classics’ over the years, including ‘The Wild One’ (’53), ‘Guys and Dolls’ (’55) and ‘Written on the Wind’ (’56).

(3) Legend has it that stuntman Guy Way performed this stunt with his own girlfriend in the back seat of the car, doubling the movie’s female hostage. She needed to be helped out of the vehicle, having entered a state of extreme shock, and Siegel later implied in an interview that the couple’s relationship never recovered.

Pulp Non-Fiction: The Satan Seller by Mike Warnke (Logos Books, 1972)

Naturally the ‘Pulp Non-Fiction’ header on this post should be read with heavy inverted commas, as I suspect that this particular volume rarely ventures within spitting distance of the truth…. but then, this series of posts has already veered pretty thoroughly into the realm of outright bullshit in the past, so what the hell, right?

Anyway - I’m sure that many collectors of weird/fantastical paperbacks will be able to relate to the experience of scanning across dusty shelves, alighting upon some black spines featuring exciting words like SATAN or DEVIL, and boom, before we know it, we’re heading home with a bunch of proto-Satanic Panic Evangelical Christian literature warning readers of the nebulous perils of dabbling with the occult.

Indeed, this particular sub-genre of quasi-theological blather seems to be have been so widespread during the 1970s that such volumes are sometimes difficult to avoid, even on this relatively godless side of the Atlantic.

Of course, the back cover copy here provides us with a few dead giveaways right out of the gate (“anti-occult counselling work”, “Melodyland Christian Center”), and even the cover artwork feels a bit ‘off’, with the hooded priest bearing a curious resemblance to those impressionistic “arms raised in praise” figures commonly seen on Xtian publications. (I’d like to think that this piece provided an unusually off-colour assignment for the guy who usually spent his days doing artwork for the Good News Bible or whatever.)

But, the publication date (1972) seems ripe for a bit of that post-Manson ‘Satanic hippie paranoia’ vibe I find so irresistible, and the prospect of a purportedly factual, first-hand account of some young fellow’s descent into the black arts proved too enticing for me to resist picking it up and at least giving it a quick skim-read.

A work of limited literary merit, ‘The Satan Seller’ is written largely in the perfunctory, “this thing happened, which made me feel bad, then this thing happened, which made me feel good” style common to ‘60s / ‘70s sleaze paperbacks - but with a near complete absence of sleaze. True, there are off-hand references to ‘sexual openness’ and ‘carnal favours’ to get the believers’ forbidden juices flowing, whilst the many women Mike Warnke encounters on his journey through human misery are routinely referred to as ‘chicks’ and ‘nymphos’ - but, mindful of their target audience no doubt, that’s about as far as the authors choose to go in this regard.

What is abundantly clear from the outset however is the implicit social conservatism and cultural insularity underpinning this whole racket.

After a hard luck childhood in rural Tennessee, young Mike finds himself packed off to Southern California to live with Roman Catholic relatives - so those would be his first two mistakes, presumably. Thereafter, he is soon frequenting - heaven help us - coffee shops, where, somewhat ironically, he is able to source “hard liquor” (really, this book is as such a substance abuse memoir as anything else), and also finds himself interacting for the first time with real life black people. (In fairness, this is not overtly criticised in the text, but y’know… they still make the point of mentioning it.)

Things go from bad to worse for Mike once he makes the fateful decision to enrol in - saints preserve us! - a liberal arts college, where, before you know it, he’s attempting to fit in with his groovy peers by “blowing weed” and experimenting with the wild world of LSD.

From there of course, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump until he’s mainlining speed and boosting his income by pushing the dreaded “H” around campus;

“I finally missed so many classes I was officially classified a drop-out. This put me into a different category now, a campus hanger-on. There were several of us, and we just hung around the student union building all ‘zacked’ up and looking as weird as possible.”

Deathless cliché though it may seem these days, it’s worth noting that the transition from ‘nice’ to ‘nasty’ drugs was admittedly a central narrative of the early ‘70s counterculture. Far less believable to me however is the idea that all of this campus hard drug use is supposed to be taking place prior to 1965 - a year which Warnke and his co-authors retrospectively diagnose as “a downward turning point for the entire world - for mankind”.

Without further elaboration, Civil Rights marches in Alabama, the Watts riots and Pope Paul VI’s visit to New York(!) are all cited as events signifying “..a quickening of the conflict between good and evil, God and Satan” during 1965. Furthermore;

“It was about then that the sale of narcotics suddenly accelerated, the flower children blossomed from out of nowhere, restlessness manifested itself in thousands of senseless acts all over the planet, rock music hypnotized, blanked-out thinking, and stirred confused youth to defiance of old values and traditions. Evil seemed to be afoot on Planet Earth.”

I think we get the picture. The “zacked up” Mike Warnke of 1965 however proves somewhat more susceptible to the zeitgeist, and when an acquaintance introduces him to a cabal of mystically-minded, well-to-do hipsters, he’s in like Flynn;

“We sat around in a circle and talked and smoked pot. It was not even a ritual. Just hip talk with genuine uninhibited interest in one another. No case histories, no sir! We did not even exchange last names. Dean had cautioned me about that.

As we got higher, the conversation ranged farther out into the twilight zone. Soon the fellows were snuggling up with the girls. And then they split off into couples. It was great, because there was a guy for every guy, not like most places I had been where there was a chronic chick shortage.

Cool-looking, sexy girls too. And every one was liberal. I mean, liberal! These chicks were free-lovers.”

Be warned readers - I’m a bit of a liberal myself, so who knows what might be going on around here after dark.

Suitably impressed, the young Warnke is soon a regular at these parties, finding himself on “a sex bender that was greater than any bag I had ever tried before”.

Expanding his gig as a dealer for his sinister friend Dean into more of a higher level bagman/fixer role on behalf of various shady and vague criminal enterprises, our hero gradually groks to the fact that he’s now knee-deep in “..the witchcraft kick”;

“The witches were mostly eighteen to thirty years of age, men and women from all walks of life, and I mean all: salesmen, carpenters, teachers, students, college professors, housewives, clerks, businessmen, truck drivers, and even a few preachers and priests. We were mostly white and educated, but it was open to all comers, and we had an integrated, ecumenical base that any institution would be proud of.

You could even specialize, like picking a major at college.

There were students of Satanism (utilizing the power of the devil through worship); demonology (summoning different demons - the devil’s helpers); necromancy (communication with the dead through the summoning up of spirits); vampirism (belief in vampires, blood-sucking ghosts); lycanthropy (the assumption of the form and traits of a wolf through witchcraft).

But as I said, I was getting impatient with these secondary matters, especially as I spoke to those in the know who hinted about evil spells, solemn rites, hard-core Satan worship and really deep stuff.”

Great! Let’s get to it then, shall we?

“In the centre of the circle was the altar - a granite slab supported on two sawhorses. On the slab, a girl lay on her back, nude and waiting, her skin glowing red in the light given off by the candles and the balefire glowing in a crucible nearby. An inverted cross and an image of a goat’s head stood at each end of the altar.

[…] 

The service was a Black Mass. All the traditional rituals were reversed and deliberately profaned. The sacraments were desecrated. Blasphemies took the place of prayers. Words attributed to Satan were read from the book, The Great Mother, which Dean, now standing, held open, resting the back of the book on the girl’s stomach.  

[…]

I had been high on a massive intravenous jack of speed, excited by the sudden chance to be “in,” and in addition, something in the air was going to my head. From having read and talked about rituals, I suddenly realized that the smoke curling up from the crucible on the altar was fumes of deadly nightshade - belladonna. When properly vaporized, it gave off fumes which put you in the right state of mindlessness. Under all these influences, my mind drifted off.

[…]

Later, after Dean had changed back to his street clothes - his pin-striped suit and well-pressed trousers - metamorphosed again to just an ordinary, everyday guy, I said, ‘This is for me, man. When can I get initiated?’ 

We got into the car. ‘At the next full moon,’ he said thoughtfully.”

Well, not exactly the most imaginative literary Black Mass I’ve ever encountered, but it’ll do.

Notes: 

1. What’s a ‘balefire’, exactly? Wiktionary definition. Filed away for future usage. Thanks, ‘The Satan Seller’.

2. Searching for a Satanic grimoire entitled ‘The Great Mother’, the closest match I can come up with is The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, published in 1955 by Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann. Although it’s easy to believe Dr Neumann may have claimed some space on college-educated hippie bookshelves, I very much doubt he had much to say therein on the subject of Satanism, so your guess is as good as mine here really.

Anyway, as the book goes on, Mike is properly initiated in to The Brotherhood, subsequently enjoying a memorable lesson in potion-making with a suburban witch, and seeing his drug-dealer gig expanded into that of a full-time Satanic evangelist, praying upon hip, turned on youngsters, with a steady stream of neophytes demanded by his masters. (“Screen out the squares. Soften out the marks. Provide the readiness,” he is urged.)

These particular Satanists, it soon becomes clear, live in mortal fear of actual, physical demons popping up out of the ether to molest them, should they snigger during rituals or place their toes outside the magickal circle, whilst a further note of paranoia is added by the mysterious presence of the tall, slim, taciturn ‘adepts’ who sometimes attend The Brotherhood’s rituals and are treated for all due fear and reverence. (Distant shadows of UFO/conspiracy mythology already creeping in here perhaps?)

In this vein, one thing ‘The Satan Seller’ seems at pains to make clear is that the organisation Mike has joined is a big-time proposition, its tentacles expanding into all corners of conventional society. Many of its adherents are wealthy and sophisticated, and it boasts week-long training courses, a strict line management structure and assigned offices dealing with “coven business” - filing invoices, answering correspondence and so forth. (“The chicks did a good job of keeping the place neat and tidy,” Mike notes when his newly refurbished apartment becomes one such establishment.)

Delightfully, there’s also a lot of detail about the down-to-earth practicalities of operating a covert Satanic sect;

“‘Say, Mike,’ Paul said, ‘will you give me a hand with this altar?’

‘Sure, Paul, be right there.’ I went over. ‘For the love of the devil, what did they make this slab out of, and where did you get it? It weighs a ton.’ We heaved the slab of black granite marble into the back of Paul’s pickup, then the heavy box of robes and ritual items.”

Various shenanigans which need not detain us here ensue as Mike swiftly makes his way through the ranks of the brotherhood. Enthralling as all this may seem however, things are dulled by the flat, pointedly non-salacious and comprehensively square fashion in which events are conveyed, leavened, inevitably, with achingly dull passages of soul-searching self-reflection. (For a Satan-worshipping drug-fiend, Warnke seems terribly concerned with getting to bed early.)

I did however enjoy the following bit, in which Mike, having obtained mastery over his own small coven, discusses livening up their dusty old rituals with a similarly ascended “chick”, whose forthright views he finds a little challenging;

“‘I think you need to get rid of all that archaic stuff, put a more mod appeal into the rituals. Use some acid-rock music to set the mood. Then you can shut off the music before you start the actual ceremony. Get a little hand clapping into the meetings, and, sure, go heavier into the blood and the bread.’

‘We’ve got some people who still go to Catholic Mass, then come down to the second stage,’ she continued. They go to Mass for the status and because it’s a front for the benefit of their parents, and so on, but they’re hip with us and eager to do little jobs, like stealing communion bread laid out by the priests -’

[…]

For a split second, her eyes narrowed. She wet her lips with her tongue and continued, ‘And holy water. You know the procedure with the holy bread. After the Catholic priest has consecrated it to Jesus, the guy pockets as much as he can without being noticed. Then we step on it to desecrate it and pass it around whilst we’re drinking the blood or whatever.’”

Desecrated communion wafers! Boy, I bet nobody ever thought of that one before. What kind of so-called Satanists are these guys, anyway?

Further hi-jinks ensue later in the same chapter, when\ the aforementioned “chick” instructs Mike to attend a nearby “rock concert” in order to undertake some missionary work;

“I had planned on using acid-rock to keep our young crowd tuned in. Now we had a chance to renew our acquaintance of what was ‘in’ with the hard-core hippie cult when we made the scene in Victorville.

[…]

Paul knew where we were headed and had Hank turn off on an ungraded road that went along a riverbed which had only a thin stream of water in it. Where level land fanned out in a broad valley dotted with scanty shrub, we found them, the flower children, blank eyes staring out through veils of hair.

[…]

Some had moved wrecked, engineless cars to the riverbank to use as dormitories. Some were moving aimlessly down the road, tripped out. Others were awake enough to beat noise out of tinny guitars, and a few were animate enough to sway to the discordant rhythms.”

I love how palpable the post-Manson nightmare of feral, junkyard-dwelling, braindead hippies is here. Feel the fear!

Half a century down the line, we might also be apt to wonder at the fact that the young Mr Warnke - a college drop-out who takes massive quantities of drugs, practices free love, wears bell bottoms and polka dots and ministers to a mystic, underground cult - considers himself to be entirely outside of the hippie movement. But, well… there are hippies and then there are hippies, I suppose. Who knows.

Besides which, we probably also have to take account of the fact that, despite being neck deep in counter-cultural hoo-hah, Mike still somehow manages to come on like the grand duke of squaresville. I suppose evangelical xtian rebirth will do that to you. This can be seen all too clearly a few paragraphs later, when he observes;

“When it came time for the blast, some pros in rock entertainment showed up.”

Befriending the leader of these “pros” (Lydia, “wrapped in a slinky silver sari”), Mike is allowed on-stage, interrupting their “music” (as he disdainfully refers to it, with inverted commas) for an impromptu rap on the joys of Satanism;

“‘You do for him,’ I pointed out, ‘and he does for you. When you get on a bummer, he’s there to ease you. Have hassles? No sweat. He takes care of your cares. He gives you an easy coasting and gives you a nice, soft crash pad when you need it. Heard of the magic dragon? That’s Lucifer, man! Ever hear of Pan? He’s love, man. Free and easy love. Satan’s cloven hooves are from Pan, and Pan was the natural god of love and fertility. Satan’s the pusher of all your heart’s desires and pushes up the flowers of the earth. Well, all I can say, man, is: get with it. You know.’”

You forgot ‘far out’ and ‘dig it’, Mike.

Evidently a full-blown addict by this point, Mike begins mistreating his cult-assigned slave girls (off-page, of course) and, becoming ever more frenzied in his dedication to the cause, starts sacrificing cats during his coven’s rituals, before encouraging his followers to dedicate their pinkie fingers to Satan, cutting them off and eating them(!), which I think officially makes them more bad-ass than the Yakuza, though I’d have to double-check.

Further echoes from the nexus of shady rumours which accumulated in the wake of the Manson trial [see my post on Ed Sanders’ ‘The Family’ here] can meanwhile be detected In the following digression;

“At one of the secondary meetings I got to talk with my old friend the police officer, who was present with a young lady.

‘Are you the guys who are killing all those dogs and draining their blood?’ he asked me. ‘Reports of this have increased by 500 percent over the past three months.’ He shook his head. ‘Would you talk to your people? The whole thing is causing quite a litter problem.’ I remembered reading reports in the San Francisco paper about an increase in the number of dead animals found along the highways, so I guess it was not exactly confined to our area. In some cases, the incision was made as expertly as any surgeon’s - a ‘tribute’ to our movement’s students in this art.”

Mike’s higher ups in the Satanic organisation are apparently so impressed by his evangelical fervour that, before he can even get his head together, he finds himself hustled on-board a private jet bound for (where else?) Salem, MS, there to be inducted into the company of what seem to be the next in a never-ending series of layers of well-to-do Devil-worshipping big-shots.

From hereon-in, ‘The Satan Seller’s authors go very heavy on the overtly fantastical paranoia / conspiracy stuff, portraying the Satanic overlords as the high level source of every evil on the face of the earth;

“The word Illuminati was whispered around here, too, though it was still the wispiest of references. […] A worldwide, super-secret control group with perhaps as few as a dozen at the very top… with key men controlling governments, economies, armies, food supplies… pulling the strings on every major international event… and not just now, but for generations, centuries, since the beginning of civilisation… manipulating men by their egos and their appetites, rewarding and depriving, enraging and pacifying, raising up first one side and then the other, maintaining a balance of frustration, bitterness and despair…?”

Poor old Anton LaVey and his Wurlitzer organ don’t get much of a look-in, in other words.

(Actually, LaVey makes a brief cameo in the following chapter, when big-shot Mike Warnke runs into him at some boring occult conference, summarily dismissing him, accurately though with no small degree of hypocrisy in this context, as a jive-ass phony.)

And… that just about concludes the ‘fun’ part of the book, sadly, as shortly thereafter, Mike is double-crossed by one of his underlings, forcibly ODed and thrown out on the street as part of an internal cult power struggle - at which point he finally comes to the realisation that leading a sect of blood-thirsty devil-worshippers can be a pretty cut-throat business, and that self-proclaimed devotees of evil do not necessarily make for the most reliable friends.

The narrative subsequently segues back into what I’m going to assume is something slightly closer to Mike Warnke’s actual life story, as, strung out and destitute on the mean streets of San Diego, he pulls a full 180 on his earlier life choices and, uh…. joins the navy.

Safely back within the nurturing bosom of the military-industrial complex, he in short order finds Jesus, gets shipped out to Vietnam, wonders how he can ever reconcile his new Christian faith with the horrors he finds there, heads back home shell-shocked but serene, begins his ministry, and decides that hitting the road on an “I was a teenage devil worshipper” ticket will be a good way to make a quick bu - I mean, uh, expose the evils of the international Satanist conspiracy which blights all of our lives and prevents the Lord’s earthly paradise from becoming a reality.

And speaking of making a quick buck, if there was one thing Warnke learned from his days as a Satan Seller, it’s how to milk it for all it’s worth. In addition to t-shirts, baseball caps and the book I currently hold in my hand, 1972 found Mike Warnke & Associates of Danville, Kentucky offering no less than six record albums for sale to the faithful - seven bucks a piece, postage paid.

Did these albums contain “music” I wonder? And does it lose the inverted commas when offered in praise of the correct deity? Or are they just testifyin’ and such like? I’m sure a brief google search would tell all, but I really don’t want to go down that particular wormhole just at the moment.

For now, I’ll merely conclude by noting that, for all its shameless hucksterism and bland / unimaginative prose, the central, Satanism-related segments of ‘The Satan Seller’ at least provides a fascinating (and frequently uproarious) insight into the curious confluence of mixed up ideas which initially emerged from conservative/right wing reaction to the counter-culture of the late 1960s, latching directly onto the psychic blowback from Manson, Altamont, Patty Hearst and the era’s sundry other hippie horror stories.

Often recalling the furtive, barely disguised sexual fantasies first propagated by the original witch-hunters of the late middle ages, the kind of ideas and imagery wantonly thrown about in books like this one would gradually mutate over the next few years, acquiring a degree of spurious mainstream legitimacy as they migrated into the realm of pop psychology, precipitating the more genuinely dangerous delusions of the 1980s ‘Satanic Panic’ movement. But that, thankfully, is a story for another dark night of the soul.

October Horrors # 12 / Thoughts on… Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018)

1.

“Where the mystic swims, the psychotic drowns,” attentive listeners may hear Nicholas Cage growl during his climactic show-down with Linus Roache’s narcissistic, Mansonite cult leader towards the end of Panos Cosmatos’ ‘Mandy’. I’m unsure of the origin of this phrase (it sounds like it could be an unattributed quote from somewhere or other?), but it certainly seems to hit the mark re: Cosmatos’ apparent desire to leave both his characters and, potentially, his audience struggling to keep their heads above water amidst a veritable tsunami of sensory overload.

I recall director Ben Wheatley, in interviews around the release of his (excellent) film ‘A Field in England’ a few years back, lamenting what he saw as the disappearance of the “Head Movie” – a phenomenon he saw as being exemplified by films like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘The Holy Mountain’ – from contemporary screens, and declaring his intention to add his own modest contribution to this seemingly defunct canon. Cosmatos, we assume, must have felt a similar absence… but his own reaction to it is anything but modest.

Refracting its director’s apparent desire to create the Ultimate Acidhead Movie through the lens of what I take to be his own childhood aesthetic obsessions, and further filtering it through the grand stylistic excess of some his contemporaries in nouveau-cult cinema (Winding Refn, Strickland etc), ‘Mandy’ is, inarguably, one hell of a trip.

Like a powerful psychotropic experience, it is a film that leaves a long, pungent aftertaste. It’s the kind of movie that sits in the back of your mind after viewing, like a big mental snowball of unearned experience, just waiting to be poked with a stick.

The fact that many of ‘Mandy’s on-screen characters spend much of their time tripping balls provides a none-too-subtle hint that this is indeed a valid way to read the film, but there is far more going on here than just some ‘Fear & Loathing..’/‘Inherent Vice’ styled stoner fantasia. Applying this phantasmagorical portrayal of chemically-altered perception to an ultra-violent horror/fantasy framework, the film offers us characters whose psychotropic intake has taken them to the very edges of humanity, and in some cases terrifyingly far beyond them.

At the opposite end of the scale from those who approach drug-taking from the comfortable, new age perspective of guided meditational growth, this is a film for those wild(wo)men who prefer to go into it weaponised – with extreme metal in their ears, darkened woods or concrete hinterland as their surroundings and physical danger close at hand, as if daring the expanded universe to tear them apart.

I am very much not one of those people, but, so long as it all remains safely within the confines of a motion picture screen, with sound properly balanced and the camera safely mounted on a tripod, I can surely dig it.

Based on reviews I’ve read so far, ‘Mandy’ seems to have left writers unable to resist the temptation to resort to dubious, hyperbolic sound-bites in an attempt to encapsulate the experience of watching the film, so, here’s my shot at the pull-quote bulls-eye: ‘Mandy’ is like watching Jodorowsky direct a ‘Death Wish’ sequel written by Robert E. Howard, as your pupils expand to the size of dinner plates and your fingers begin to wriggle before your eyes like Lovecraftian spaghetti.

If that sounds like a recommendation to you, I highly recommend finding time to catch this one theatrically whilst you have the chance. Please take this opportunity to search for screenings in your local area.

In the meantime, the following numbered thoughts and tangents may be best appreciated by those who have already seen the film, but if you haven’t, I shouldn’t worry – it’s pretty difficult to “spoil” a story that can be expressed in its entirety in one sentence, and that was probably first carved in stone by some ancient scribe before the dawn of recorded time.


2.

‘Mandy’ has rather strange relationship to reality… and not just because of all the acid, either.

In one sense, the film, particularly during its opening (pre-revenge) section, is a detailed and highly specific evocation of a particular time and place (a mountainous area of the USA, 1983). (1)

Every prop, item of clothing, vehicle or piece of furniture, and each small aspect of the web of cultural reference points that drift through the idyllic existence of Red (Cage) and Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) – all of these have been carefully chosen to scratch a nameless, deeply buried nostalgic itch that many viewers (particularly those born in the ‘80s) will not even have been aware of until they watch this movie and feel a touch of it in their bones. (2)

These temporal conjurations extend even to the texture of the film itself. Though evidently shot with all the smooth, HD clarity that the 21st century has to offer, ‘Mandy’s photography simultaneously swarms with a thick, almost intrusive layer of film grain, recalling more than anything the unique ‘feel’ of 16mm footage blown up to 35, as exemplified during the ‘80s by break-out low budget features such as ‘The Evil Dead’ and Jim VanBebber’s ‘Deadbeat at Dawn’.

Within this scheme, visual textures are deliberately tweaked scene by scene to sink hooks into deep-buried memories. When we see Red engaged in his work felling trees, climbing into a chopper with his co-workers for the ride home, the heavy grain is combined with washed out greens and browns, recalling any number of ‘80s Vietnam / forest survival type movies, whilst a later scene in which he and Mandy drift in a boat upon shimmering lake adopts a blown-out, over-saturated VHS kind of look, flashing us straight back to the gently psychedelic drift of a ‘70s bigfoot documentary.

In this regard, ‘Mandy’ is an exercise in high level aesthetic alchemy – a creative excavation of the recent past comparable to that which the Ghostbox label have carried out for the UK of the 1970s. As an evoker of *feel*, as a wrangler of the wildly divergent strands of temporal-cultural suggestion, Cosmatos here proves himself a master.

Naturally, the more obvious and potentially comedic signifiers of the era have for the most part been avoided; by and large, things are more subtle. This may, for instance, be the most METAL film not to actually feature any metal on the soundtrack. (3)

The use of fonts, cult-ish visual signifiers and the occasional t-shirt is as far as it goes, but the essence of METAL (in capitals) nonetheless runs rich and deep through these two hours. Fans of the genre will be left no doubt that Cosmatos is one of their own, though nary a power chord is struck nor a devil horn thrown. (A battle axe is forged in the shape of the ‘F’ from the Celtic Frost logo however, so… what more proof of good faith could fans possibly require?)


3.

But, on the other hand… well, speaking of battle axes, let’s just say that my reference to Robert E. Howard above wasn’t just plucked out of thin air. After the prolonged and appalling home invasion/murder sequence that constitutes ‘Mandy’s transitional central phase, it becomes increasingly clear that a hologram of Howard’s Hyborian Age has been super-imposed upon the USA of the early 1980s.

(A not inappropriate collision of worlds, given how thoroughly the sword & sorcery genre suffused that era’s popular culture, with John Milius’s 1982 ‘Conan the Barbarian’ in particular instigating an unsettling communion between Howard’s might-is-right prehistoric philosophy and the equally fantastical macho individualism of Reagan-ite political discourse; a heady fusion that, nearly forty years later, still filters through to ‘Mandy’s otherwise rather contradictory notion of a fuzzily nostalgic vigilante revenge story.)

When Red hits up his enigmatic pal Carruthers (a wonderful one scene bit from 80s/90s action vet Bill Duke) to reclaim his crossbow, we’re presented with a fistful of the kind of ominous exposition you’d usually expect some D&D players to receive from an aged traveller in a remote tavern. There have been “rumours of dark riders”, they were last seen heading for such-and-such a place, he “once glimpsed them upon the horizon”, and so on.

Leaving aside the question of exactly what kind of druggy, Satanic grapevine Carruthers picked up this info from, given that he seems to be a total recluse, we may find ourselves rubbing our eyes and wondering where exactly we are again..? The United States in 1983 suddenly seems very far away.

Indeed, from front to back, this is a story that, with a few minor adjustments, could have happened to Conan or King Kull, rather than a 40-something lumberjack played by Nicholas Cage, and the simplistic, video game-like storytelling favoured by Howard predominates from the moment Red’s quest for vengeance begins. [You know - Conan/Cage obtains weapons, confronts enemies, is captured. Escapes, kills enemies, reclaims weapons, proceeds directly to next set of enemies, and so on.]

We know this is not a post-apocalyptic world, because there’s stuff on TV, and people have jobs and visit grocery stores, but at no point do we actually visit a human habitation that comprises more than a single building. Isolated, makeshift homesteads and compounds dotted around the wilderness provide our only points of reference, and signs of wider societal organisation are entirely absent. No vehicles that are not directly connected to our story travel the roads through the forest.

Much of this I think is this is simply the result of Cosmatos’ desire to cut absolutely all connecting tissue out of his narrative. Acting less on the basis of conventional, A-to-B cinematic story-telling and more like some restless, ‘Metal Hurlant’ style comic book artist, this director doesn’t really give a damn about how his characters get from one place to another, or how they find out where they’re supposed to be going in the first place.

Instead, he is happy simply to teleport his hero (who, lest we forget, is actually wielding a battle axe) straight from one spectacular action set-piece to the next, wringing maximum value out of each epic confrontation, with no time for any non-epic messing about in-between.


4.

Boy, those Cenobite bikers (can we go with “Cenobikers”?) are quite a piece of work. I won’t go into their “origin story” (as it is one of the few details of ‘Mandy’s plot that it is probably best for viewers to discover as they go along), but, jesus - what a terrifying conception.

The moment when they are first ‘summoned’ – interrupting what up to this point has been a film ostensibly set in the real world, and a richly detailed version of it at that – is truly startling, causing us to share to some extent the fear we might actually experience if we found one of these creatures standing in front of us.

Deep, nasty dread is henceforth infused into all that follows, and I found the subsequent strobe-lit nocturnal kidnapping almost impossible to watch; it is just too horrible to contemplate, recalling the ghost of childhood anxiety that, no matter how unlikely it seems, or however often your parents tell you otherwise, such horrors – as expressed through the somehow-very-‘80s biker / serial killer / demon composite that I’m sure I recall all too clearly from some nasty comics that my parents should probably have not let me read at the time - may actually be out there somewhere.

And, indeed, they might. One of the things that makes these particular monsters so ghastly is that, though they may lurk at the very far end of unlikelihood and have no real life analogues (I hope), the explanation that is eventually offered for their existence is not actually a supernatural one. As a ready-made urban myth ready so be shared wherever young people gather to take drugs and get up to no good in the dark, they are wonderfully potent. (I mean, there’s a whole slasher movie franchise just waiting to happen there, at the very least.)

Also: along with this fairly direct tribute to ‘Hellraiser’, one of the relatively few blunt, Tarantino-style “homages” that creeps into ‘Mandy’ involves a big shout-out to Phantasm II, of all things. We’re among friends here, no doubt. (4)


5.

Ok, the Nicholas Cage thing. Let’s get on with it.

Personally, I really ‘cannot hang’ (as I believe the phrase goes) with this comedy/meme thing that’s built up around Mr Cage in recent years. To be honest, I prefer to think of him as just a extremely fine actor whose apparent willingness to say ‘yes’ to just about anything, though admirable, doesn’t always help his reputation in these days of social media snark.

To misquote Norma Desmond, it’s not his playing that’s too big, it’s the pictures that are too small. Like a modern day Klaus Kinski, he might get a bit goofy and OTT in the mediocre, run-of-the-mill assignments that take up much of his time, but, once in a blue moon, a project arrives that is worthy of his particular, highly tuned sensibilities - and at that point, you can just wind the fucker up and watch him go.

A few years back, Werner Herzog (funnily enough) gave him one such opportunity with the brilliant (and seemingly quite under-rated?) ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans’ – and, needless to say, with ‘Mandy’ Cosmatos gives him another chance to strut his stuff on the level where he truly belongs. Once again, he does fantastic work here. (5)

I would leave it at that, were it not for the fact that many attendees the screening I attended evidently thought differently in this regard, having apparently pitched up with the primary intention of wringing maximum Cage-laffs from proceedings.

There is, it must be said, a lot of intentional humour in ‘Mandy’. There are zany one-liners and everything, and these tend to be mixed up quite jarringly with passages that are otherwise harrowing or savage. So, I appreciate that people may get a bit disorientated by this and take a “what can you do but laugh?” approach to navigating the choppy waters of this singularly intense and unusual movie.

There are other sections here however that are clearly not meant to be funny. The already infamous ‘bathroom scene’ is one of them, but, in view of the unspeakably terrible things that happen to Cage’s character during this film, I don’t believe he is overplaying here at all. Hell, if anything, he’s underplaying. Few of us, I’d imagine, would proceed in quite such a reasonable manner in similarly dire circumstances.

Seemingly channelling Warren Oates’ devastating portrayal of masculine grief in Peckinpah’s ‘Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia’ (a divisive head-trip of a revenge film with which ‘Mandy’ shares more than a few eerie parallels, now that I come to think of it), Cage is pretty on point here, and I could really have done without the chuckles in the row behind me.

I’d assume that at least some of these chucklers were the same people who were already loudly yakking away on their phones about other things in the queue ahead of me as they left the auditorium, whilst the closing credits were still rolling. I mean… c’mon man. Maybe you liked the movie, maybe you didn’t, but please - give it a few minutes to settle in before you’re planning tomorrow’s fucking brunch.

Thankfully though, these were not the only people who made it to this sold out city centre screening. A middle-aged couple with matching straight black hair, silently putting on their matching leather battle jackets. A big guy with impressive wrist tattoos and an unreadable metal band logo t-shirt, smoking a rollie with shaking hands on the step outside the cinema. Various other lone, scraggle-haired individuals, quickly striding off into the late afternoon shadows; heading straight back to their black light basements, I would like to think.

In aspirational terms at least, these folks feel more like my kind of people, and it is spiriting to see that word of mouth (or word of wi-fi, at least) has already connected ‘Mandy’ to its real audience.


6.

For all its savage violence, drug-damaged black humour and kaleidoscopic visuals, and despite the crassness of its neanderthal boilerplate revenge storyline, ‘Mandy’, like ‘..Alfredo Garcia’ before it, is a love story.

I mean, the clue’s in the name, man. Cosmatos could easily have called his film “Demon Fire” or “Serpent’s Eye” or something, and would probably have sold some extra tickets to people who might currently be apt to mistake it for a romantic comedy whilst scanning the listings - but that’s not what it’s about.

Without Mandy, and the thirty or so minutes we spend with her, none of the other stuff in the film would matter a damn. It would be some huge, empty, post-modern, lol-worthy mega-action laff-fest, and I probably would have concluded my thoughts on it far earlier than this.

Like ‘..Alfredo Garcia’, this is a film split into two halves, hinged around a transitional moment of blackest desolation at its centre. And, as with ‘..Alfredo Garcia’, it is the first half – slow, almost meditative in tone – that will eventually live longest in your memory.

So, how can I best put this? I have a very strong, very good feeling about Red and Mandy’s life together in the early part of the film. Their house and its surroundings are beautiful, the pace of their life and the time they spend together is beautiful. I mean, I may not particularly want to go to work as a lumberjack, but that aside – their life is about as close to a vision of an ideal existence as I could possibly imagine.

Perhaps not everyone will share this feeling, but as we have established, ‘Mandy’ is probably not a film for everyone. For those within a certain age-group though, or those who hark back to the recent past, or enjoy things like rock music, or science fiction, or solitude…? Well I’d imagine that if you’re reading this weblog, you’re probably in the club, let’s put it that way.

Mandy herself is not some generic, pretty wife character who exists solely in order toprovide moral justification to Arnie or Charles Bronson as they embark upon their regulation seventy minutes of cathartic violence. Mandy is different. Mandy is cool.

In spite of a necessarily limited amount of dialogue and screen time, Andrea Riseborough does an amazing job of building her into a fully-formed person (and, she is probably going to have to deal with people staring at her on the street and silently mouthing “mandy” for years to come as a result).

We’re perhaps not going to fall head-over-heels for her like Roache’s creepazoid cult leader does, but she is someone we would all like to play a bit part in our lives. She is the kind of acquaintance we would always think of warmly, wondering what she’s up to, but confident that it must be a-ok, whatever it is – and most of all, we’d appreciate what a good thing she has with Red. She’s the kind of affirmative, self-contained person who might send you a postcard now and then, and you’d always be very happy to receive it.

We in the audience might all chuckle at it when it plays out the first time, but in retrospect, the scene in which Red and Mandy sit together on the sofa, distractedly eating their dinner whilst completely enraptured by Don Dohler’s ‘Night Beast’ (1982) as it plays out on their fuzzy portable TV, is… well it’s something that will stay with us, let’s put it that way.


7.

Perhaps the soul of any revenge movie can be judged by what the revenger does after his or her labours are complete. It is always a tricky, uncertain moment, determining what we will be left with after the fleeting catharsis of vengeance has faded, and there are many directions a story can be taken in during those vital few minutes before the credits roll. Something though tells me that any such film in which the protagonist brushes off their hands and goes home, congratulating themselves on a job well done, is probably not a good one.

As Nicholas Cage sits dazed after his final confrontation, he is closer - in appearance, mental state and deed - to one of the Cenobikers he has recently dispatched than he is to the man who initially set out on his quest for vengeance. He has tasted their sacred acid and worn their armour; he is just as plastered in blood and filth as they were, and has committed acts scarcely less horrendous.

The thought of his returning to any kind of quote-unquote ‘normal’ life after all this is unthinkable. This netherworld of drugs and psychosis and mindless debasement would seem to have swallowed him whole. Has he indeed drowned, as per the aphorism he so recently muttered?

We might worry at this point that the film, along with its central character, has rather lost touch with  where it began, left empty and exhausted after a solid hour of mind-flaying, hysterical madness.

But then – that flashback. Perfectly placed. Devastating. I’ll spare you the details.

Tears in our eyes at the end of a film in which Nicholas Cage snorted a faceful of cocaine off a shard of broken glass after crushing the head of a demon biker?

I know this film has had a lot of hype already, but really – believe it.

Movie of the year? Are you kidding..?

Like Mandy listening to that cult leader’s hippie folk song, I survey the competition and laugh.

Stay metal, friends.

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(1) Suitably vague, the film’s stated location of “The Silver Mountains” generates search engine hits for areas in Washington, Idaho and Michigan, and ‘Mandy’ was seemingly filmed in Belgium, rather surprisingly.

(2) Oddly enough, the one thing that didn’t really ring true for me in the film’s production design was Mandy’s Motley Crue t-shirt. She and her husband are more-or-less in their 40s, we presume, and it seems unlikely to me that someone who was this age in 1983 would have much use for Nikki Sixx and co. (They would, in fact, be baby boomers pretty much – of the same generation as the psychotic hippies who proceed to persecute them.) All is forgiven however, when she wears a Black Sabbath T in the next scene. Spot on.

(3) Admittedly, doom-lord Stephen O’Malley’s contributions to the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack probably help in this regard. Before any arguments erupt, we should also probably note at this juncture that the use of the one pre-existing song featured in the movie – ‘Starless’ by King Crimson – is both totally sublime and hugely appropriate… but calling it metal is probably a stretch, for my purposes at least.

(4) FUN FACT: Christopher Figg - producer of the original ‘Hellraiser’ and subsequently of Neil Marshall’s ‘Dog Soldiers’ (2002), amongst other things - can be found prominently listed in ‘Mandy’s production credits. For his apparent role as a behind-the-scenes instigator of superior horror cinema across four decades, we salute him.

(5)As an aside, I wish that Herzog could / would return to his brief dalliance with making fictional, Hollywood-type movies. I mean, we all know he can draw a few thousand quid from the bank and make a weirdo Werner Herzog documentary without breaking a sweat, but the strange collision between Werner wackiness and mainstream genre movie aesthetics made both ‘Bad Lieutenant’ and ‘Rescue Dawn’ fairly extraordinary, IMHO.

Nikkatsu Trailer Theatre # 3: A DRAGON SYMBOL ADORNS THEIR HELMETS!

Well I don’t know about you readers, but I’m already heading to my local picture house to demand a ticket for Yasuharu Hasebe’s third and final instalment in the Stray Cat Rock franchise, and the fact this is neither 1970 nor Tokyo be damned.