Cormania: The Intruder (Roger Corman, 1962)

Though not quite the overlooked masterpiece it is sometimes hailed as, this unique entry in Roger Corman’s filmography - a rare and impassioned excursion into the treacherous realm we would today call ‘non-genre’ - certainly still packs a punch, remaining as sickening, uncomfortable and difficult to shake off as a random kick to the kidneys.

One thing which must be understood straight away about ‘The Intruder’s status as a political / message movie, is that it is a diatribe. Anyone in search nuanced characterisations, multiple points of view, or a general recognition of the ever-shifting shades of grey which define the contours of our lives on earth, should probably look elsewhere.

Thankfully though, it is at least a diatribe with which I (and, I would suggest, all reasonable and right-thinking people across the globe) can wholeheartedly agree, and as an unflinching exposé of the manipulative tactics employed by self-serving demagogues seeking to squeeze personal power from the rotting fruit of pre-existing hatreds and social inequality, well… blindingly obvious though may be to say so, it remains as relevant to life in the western world circa 2024 as it was in 1962, if not more so.

Taking its cue to some extent from Orson Welles’ similarly button-pushing ‘The Stranger’ from 1946, ‘The Intruder’ takes us to the emblematic, petri dish-like environment of Caxton, Missouri, a small town into which a dangerous outside element has just been introduced - Adam Cramer, played by William Shatner, an agent provocateur apparently dispatched to the town from Washington DC on behalf of something called the “Patrick Henry Society” (a fairly obvious analogue for the far right John Birch Society).

Stepping off a Greyhound and checking into the town’s only hotel, Cramer, armed with a distinctive white suit and oversized personal confidence, immediately begins canvassing the local citizenry vis-à-vis their views on the Kennedy administration’s then-recent anti-segregation laws, which are due to result in a small number of black pupils soon beginning to attend the town’s previously all-white high school for the first time. Suffice to say, the down home folks’ responses to this topic prove a lot encouraging to Caxton’s purposes than they do to those of us implicitly liberal viewers.

In fact, Corman’s main jumping off point from the template laid down by ‘The Stranger’, and the element which ultimately makes ‘The Intruder’ so much more disturbing, is that, whereas Welles’ film began by evoking a familiar ‘white picket fence’ ideal of the benign American small town into which a corrupting fascist element is introduced, L.A. native Corman’s conception of down home Americana is already pretty close to hell on earth, even before the demonic influence of Shatner’s transient, shit-stirring carpet-bagger is added to the mix.

Shooting in the southeast Missouri towns of Charleston and East Prairie, it’s safe to assume that Corman and his brother Gene (credited as executive producer) very much hedged their bets when it came to letting the townsfolk know exactly what kind of film they were making here. Details of the script were kept a secret, but this reticence apparently didn’t prevent the filmmakers from being thrown out of the latter town by the sheriff on account of being “communists”, whilst Shatner has reported that the production also regularly needed to contend with threats of violence, sabotaged equipment and the like.

Whilst the film’s primary actors were cast in L.A., locals in Missouri were employed on an ad-hoc basis to fill out the rest of the supporting and non-speaking roles, and perhaps the single most disturbing aspect of ‘The Intruder’ when viewed today is that, after Shatner’s character has gotten warmed up and started delivering a series of anti-integration tirades, dropping the N-bomb incessantly as he demeans and demonises the town’s (thus far invisible) black population, the (presumably genuine, and minimally briefed) locals simply listen to him and nod in quiet, uncontested agreement, as if he were talking about repairing potholes, or repainting the local fire station or something.

None of the non-actors and white passers by bearing witness to his hate-filled oratory seem to register even the slightest surprise or unease, whether in the context of a hotel lobby, main street diner, or eventually, at a mass rally on the steps of the town hall. It’s pretty chilling stuff.

Retrospectively adding to this profound sense of discomfort of course is the casting of Shatner, seen here in one of his first significant screen role after a few years spent cutting his teeth in TV and the theatre. Of course, no one in 1962 could have known the path his career would take, but needless to say, the sight of the future Captain Kirk practically frothing at the mouth preaching racial hatred has the potential to prove pretty alarming to multiple generations of Americans, and this cognitive dissonance is only enhanced by the fact that Shatner’s performance here is absolutely superb.

In terms of conventional acting chops in fact, I think this is the best work I’ve ever seen from him by a country mile. Having apparently not yet developed the hammy, staccato diction which would make him such a beloved figure of fun in years to come, Shatner instead plays it totally straight, capturing that very particular brand of weaselly, ingratiating, blank-eyed intensity unique to psychopathic politicos and conmen to an extent which is little short of terrifying.

To 21st century eyes though, the most obvious failure of ‘The Intruder’ is the chronic absence of actual black characters, and the reluctance to assign much of a voice even to those who do appear on screen.

Early in the film, Cramer views the poverty of “N***ertown” through the glass of a taxi window - just as the filmmakers, capturing this more-or-less documentary footage, presumably also did - and effectively, that’s all we in the audience get to see of it for quite a long time thereafter. Eventually, we get a few scenes of a black family group, some more vérité footage of some suitably apprehensive, disheartened looking dudes silently hanging out on their stoops, and then - in the film’s primary image of Civil Rights era emancipation - the sight of a column of primly attired new black pupils, led by the handsome Joey Greene (Charles Barnes), making their way to high school for the first time, as the white populace radiates hatred in their general direction.

It’s a great sequence actually, orchestrated and edited by Corman with Eisensteinian immediacy, but, of all the black school pupils, Joey is the only one allotted much screen time or a role in the narrative - or even a name and personality for that matter. And, even he fits neatly into the reassuringly well spoken, well turned out mould established on screen in the preceding years by Sidney Poiter and Harry Belafonte - a decidedly conventional, unthreatening presence.

Very much the weakest aspect of the film, this limited engagement with actual black life can’t help but nail ‘The Intruder’ squarely as the work of the kind of well-intentioned white liberals who lack the experience or insight to actually conceive of black people as human beings, complete with flaws, complexities and ranges of interests and opinions which extend beyond a set of benign, outdated stereotypes. (Exactly the kind of attitude punctured so brilliantly in a SF/horror context by Jordan Peele in ‘Get Out’ a few years back, funnily enough.)

About the only moment in which the filmmakers even consider the possibility that young black people might want to do something other than be ‘integrated’ into the institutions of a cowardly and gullible white society inhabited by pinch-faced creeps who hate their guts, is the sole scene featuring by far ‘The Intruder’s best black character - Joey’s pre-teen younger brother (who sadly remains uncredited, insofar as I can tell).

A resplendent hep-cat in waiting, this kid is introduced licking on an ice lolly as he listens to blaring be-bop on the radio (“whatchu talkin’ about ‘junk’, that’s MUSIC, man”), and he clearly gets an almighty kick out of mocking his square older brother; “well it’s too bad I ain’t old enough to go to school, I wouldn’t be scared, that’s all … man, you know what you oughta do? I’ll tell you what you oughta do, get yourself a gun, play it cool see, and the first grey stud looks at ya sideways, BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM…”

A bit more time spent with this kid brother, or some similarly outspoken black adults, might have allowed the filmmakers to wrangle a hell of a lot more verisimilitude into ‘The Intruder’, but… what can you say - at the end of the day, they meant well.

I mean, it would certainly have been a lot easier, and a lot more profitable, for Roger, Gene and scriptwriter Charles Beaumont to chill out by the pool back in Hollywood and knock out a couple of radioactive monster flicks, so we at least owe them props for standing up and being counted, putting their careers, their money, and even their personal safety on the line to make a film like this one, live on the scene in the south, whilst the battles of the Civil Rights era were still raging.

A far more interesting element of Beaumont’s script meanwhile is the nature of Cramer’s main antagonist, Sam Griffin, played to perfection by Corman regular (and occasional script writer) Leo Gordon. Griffin and his demoralised wife Vi (Jeanne Cooper) are, ultimately, the only characters in the movie who become more than cyphers, developing an intriguing and contradictory mess of personality traits as we get to know them better, and the material dealing with Cramer’s interactions with them yields many of the film’s strongest dramatic moments.

Staying at the same rundown hotel as Cramer, Griffin is initially introduced as a loud-mouthed, drunken braggart, apparently employed as some kind of showman / barker charged with luring customers into a shop in a neighbouring town. Much to his chagrin, Cramer initially reads Griffin as a clown, and, as a result, hones in on the clearly-sick-of-it-all Vi with an especially predatory look in his eye.

After Cramer ‘seduces’ Vi in a horribly uncomfortable scene which modern audiences are liable to read less ambiguously as a ‘rape’, prompting her to flee the rest of the film in shame, her husband’s character turns on a dime, dropping the ‘comedy drunkard’ shtick and squaring his shoulders as if he’s suddenly realised he has seriously nasty little fucker to take care of here.

Evidently the immature Cramer’s superior in terms of guts and life experience, Griffin initially disarms and humiliates him in a sweaty hotel room confrontation that pushes the film about as close as it gets to the realm of film noir, whilst, back on the rails of the central political narrative, the decision to put Gordon up against Shatner during the story’s final act proves absolutely inspired.

More-so than a conventional liberal saviour (such as the film’s mild-mannered school principal), Griffin’s background as a store front barker and confidence man means that he instantly recognises the kind of two-bit crap Cramer is peddling, and knows how to deal with it too - publically tearing him down, exposing his lies and allowing the ephemeral power he holds over the suckers to drain away like filth down a storm drain, leaving Cramer sitting alone and forlorn on the high school swing-set from which, just a few short minutes earlier, he was orchestrating an out of control lynch mob baying for blood.

Viewed at this particular point in history, it’s nigh on impossible to get through this closing scene without fervently wishing that a similar scenario could play itself out on a nationwide scale in the USA today… but unfortunately, life is never quite that simple, is it? Just as it’s never as simple as the strawman-baiting and scapegoating of the ‘other’ peddled by Cramer and his ilk.

And just as, likewise, the true darkness of Corman’s film lays not in the spectre of Cramer himself, but in the spectacularly bleak fact that, when the would be lynchmobbers shamefacedly shamble away from their erstwhile leader, they’ve still learned nothing from the experience. They may have given this week’s demagogue the heave-ho, and they may be temporarily willing to observe the law and allow black people to remain alive and attend their schools… but there is no suggestion here at all here that the townsfolk are any less dyed-in-the-wool racists than they were at the start of the film.

The good looks and clear diction of Joey Greene have clearly not won over these representatives of Ugly America, and the town’s black population remains silent, cowed and fearful. After Cramer slinks off to nurse his psychic wounds like a defeated alley cat, how long will it be before the next mean-spirited agitator shows up, or until the next black boy gets accused of looking at a white girl the wrong way, as the fuse on that same old powder keg starts tediously fizzing away yet again?

Enjoy yr ‘happy ending’ whilst you can folks, the film seems to say, because in the long run, this shit is going nowhere, irrespective of who’s holding the mop and bucket at any given time.

AND SO, let’s pencil in a parallel discussion of exactly why this ended up being the only film Roger Corman made during the ‘50s and ‘60s which failed to turn a profit shall we? How about, ooh, let’s say, 4th July in a couple of week? See you there!

October Horrors # 13: Dark August (Martin Goldman, 1976)

By far the biggest revelation unearthed by Arrow Video & Stephen Thrower for the second volume of their admirable American Horror Project, ‘Dark August’ is a low key supernatural thriller shot in Stowe, Vermont in 1976. Never a high profile cult item, the film has, I would suspect, flown entirely beneath the radar of the vast majority of cult movie aficionados prior to its HD resurrection this year; a circumstance that seems extremely unfair after watching it for the first time.

To put it simply, ‘Dark August’ is excellent. If you’re a fan of subtle, slow-burn horror, films with a folk-magic / witchcraft element or independent ‘70s U.S. cinema in general, I would recommend obtaining a copy of Arrow’s new transfer and watching it post-haste.

Although this was a 100% independent production, written, directed and performed by a small collective of Vermont residents with no external funding or distribution deals in place, the finished film exists on an entirely different plain from most of its competitors in the regional horror sweepstakes. Not a “higher” plain necessarily (I don’t want to sound like I’m belittling the noble tradition of independent commercial filmmaking in the USA here) - but a different one, for sure.

The first thing which struck me about the film is its uncanny mixture of stylish, technically accomplished filmmaking (particularly in terms of its editing, camerawork and presentation of the natural environment), and candid naturalism in terms of its performances, plotting and character interactions. A very ‘70s combination, I would suggest, but one which was rarely attempted, let alone achieved, by filmmakers outside of the artier end of the Hollywood industry.

Far away from the work of even the most sophisticated of ‘70s independents (Romero, Hooper etc), ‘Dark August’ instead feels more like a distant cousin to such studio-backed quasi-horror films as Altman’s ‘Images’, Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’ (definitely a conscious influence, I suspect), or even Philip Kaufman’s remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ (which admittedly was made a few years later, but still).

Plot-wise, director Martin Goldman and actors/writers J.J. & Carolyne Barry keep things pretty minimal here, with a set up that on paper sounds like TV movie / short story material at best, but through careful attention to detail, and by zoning in on psychological nuance, they still manage to create an intriguing and open-ended narrative.

Following a messy break-up with his wife, forty-something New York advertising artist Sal Devito (J.J. Barry) has relocated to a small Vermont town to start life afresh, apparently following in the footsteps of his best friend Theo (Frank Bongiorno), who lives nearby and appears to have given up the rat-race to become a potter. During his first year of rural life, Sal has instigated a swell new relationship with Jackie (Carlyne Barry), who has recently established a small art gallery in the town.

Less happily however, Sal has also caused the death of a local young girl, killed when she ran in front of his jeep on a lonely road (a traumatic event which we repeatedly relive alongside him in flashback through the course of the film). Although Sal has been cleared of responsibility for this tragic accident in court, coming to terms with it is not so easy, particularly given the suspicion which already hovers over him as a loud and gregarious outsider moving into a small, insular community.

As the film opens, we see the dead girl’s grief-stricken grandfather turning to age-old sympathetic magic to exact vengeance upon Sal, who, as a result, is about to find himself haunted by something a little more tangible than mere repressed guilt and mid-life angst.

The very definition of a ‘slow burn’, ‘Dark August’ keeps its horror content simmering down at the level of vague, background uneasiness for a good forty-five minutes or so, but in the meantime, it gives us a generous and detailed portrait of the lives of this small group of interlocking friends (Sal, Jackie and Theo, plus the latter’s new age-y girlfriend Lesley (Kate McKeown)) as they haphazardly attempt to establish an idyllic, post-counter-culture environment for themselves in the depths of Vermont’s green hills, reinvigorating the sleepy local community with their arts n’ crafts, pot-smoking, tarot-card reading take on rural life.

Given that much of the film was reportedly shot in director Goldman’s own house, and that Bongiorno, McKeown and the Barrys all seem to have been real-life escapees from NYC, I’m guessing that ‘Dark August’s creative team had very direct, personal experience of the situations experienced by the characters herein, and as a result the quiet, subliminal tension between the locals and more cosmopolitan incomers is believably conveyed throughout.

Indeed, although we see this world through Sal’s eyes, there is a distinct ambiguity here regarding who we were actually supposed to sympathising with, suggesting that the film’s supernatural storyline could easily have functioned as an analogue for the filmmakers’ sense of uneasiness regarding their own intrusion into the community around Stowe, Vermont.

It is interesting to note that legendary comics artist Stephen R. Bissette, a lifetime Vermont resident who grew up near the film’s shooting locations, states in his essay accompanying the Arrow release that he finds J.J. Barry’s Sal a deeply dislikeable protagonist and was rooting for the locals throughout, gleefully anticipating the grandfather’s spiritual vengeance. As a city-dweller watching in his London flat though on the other hand, I personally found Sal and his friends to be quite relatable (his refusal to button up his shirt properly notwithstanding), and I enjoyed spending time with them. In keeping with the film’s inevitable designation as “folk horror”, could there be a deeper comparison to be drawn here with the moral ambiguities of ‘The Wicker Man’?

As Sal is increasingly plagued by stomach pains, inexplicable losses of control and unnerving glimpses of a hooded, “spirit of dark and lonely water”-like revenant haunting the woods around his property, Goldman does an excellent job of conveying the character’s increasing sense of paranoia and disorientation, ratcheting up the unease into full-blown menace and setting the stage perfectly for the late introduction of the film’s one ‘name’ performer, Kim Hunter – the widely esteemed method actress who played opposite Brando in 1951’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and went on to earn a steady living as Zira in the ‘Planet of the Apes’ franchise.

Here, Hunter plays Adrianna Putnam, a backwoods witch and psychic counsellor who takes up Sal’s cause after Lesley urges him to consult her - and by anyone’s estimation, she does so brilliantly, using her reportedly genuine interest in the occult to invest the role with the kind of unassailable, “shit just got real” gravitas which adds greatly to the film’s genuinely hair-raising finale.

The organic / atavistic treatment of magic(k) in ‘Dark August’ feels disarmingly matter-of-fact, yet also horrifically tangible, and as things build to a magic circle-bound, battle-of-wills showdown, there is a sense of real exhilaration to be savoured as we realise that a film which initially felt an off-brand version of one of those New Hollywood-type movies where Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton hang around on their porches mumbling to each other, has transformed itself into a full-on ‘The Devil Rides Out’ type proposition, having reeled us in slowly but surely until this transition seems completely natural, and indeed pretty terrifying.

‘Dark August’ is not a perfect film by any means, and I hope I’m not overselling it here. Since you’re asking, my chief complaint would probably be that the story could have worked a lot better if the revelation that the grandfather character actually was instigating a magical attack against Sal had been withheld until the end, thus allowing us to relish the possibility that his problems were solely the result of his own supressed guilt and paranoia, and making the blood n’ thunder action of the finale that much more powerful.

Given that this was a regional independent production offering little in way of obvious exploitation thrills though, I’m guessing that they simply had to put some horror signifiers up front in order to get the film even the very limited distribution it did achieve on the drive-in circuit; so, I won’t hold this missed opportunity against them, and it certainly doesn’t stop ‘Dark August’ from standing out as a vastly more rewarding film that I ever would have suspected – one of my top horror discoveries of the year, without a doubt.

Increasingly these days, dedicated genre film fans could be forgiven for thinking that mid-20th century English language horror films have been picked over so thoroughly – analysed, fetishised, celebrated and monetised – that we surely must have reached the end of the line by now. It’s all too easy to feel that everything special, weird and noteworthy within this finite canon must by this point have been identified as such and commended to our collective attention, leaving critics and blu-ray labels increasingly dredging up the silt as they struggle to remain relevant.

Huge and heartfelt thanks are therefore due to Arrow, and to Stephen Thrower, for renewing our faith and for reminding us of one of the core motivating principle underpinning any adventurous movie fan’s endeavours: there’s always another one. There’s still gold in them there green hills, and ‘Dark August’ is a nugget that proves it.

October Horrors 2019 # 10: Humanoids From The Deep (Barbara Peeters, 1980)

He’s a tricky devil isn’t he, that Roger Corman? Though he has sometimes been praised over the years for promoting female talent within the none-more-male-dominated arena of ‘70s/’80s exploitation film-making, it is also notable that, whenever he offered the director’s chair on one of his New World Pictures productions to a woman, it was for a project that might otherwise have drawn fire for its misogynistic content - thus neatly defusing the critical backlash whilst still delivering the, uh, shall we say, ‘provocative’ content his less enlightened audience demanded.

Think Stephanie Rothman on ‘The Student Nurses’ (1970), Amy Holden Jones on ‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ (1982), or, in this case, Barbara Peeters on ‘Humanoids From The Deep’, aka ‘Monster’, a film whose poster artwork alone would likely have incited its fair share of feminist outrage, had there been a male name sitting in that all-important slot at the end of the credits.

In all of these cases, the directors in question were presumably sufficiently thrilled at the chance to get their name on a feature film that they were happy to take Corman up on his offer, accepting pre-packaged projects with script and marketing materials already more-or-less locked down… and of course, strict orders from the boss regarding the required level of nudity, violence and so forth.

And, in all of the above examples, I believe these women did very creditable work with the material they were handed -- but the terrible irony of the situation of course is that, whereas a roll-call of New World’s male alumni includes Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Joe Dante and Jack Hill, none of the female directors listed above managed to make the transition to mainstream industry success (or even cult recognition) off the back of their Corman pictures. (It is at this point that we pause to shake our fists and spit bitter invective at the ‘Hollywood’ sign.)

Anyway, back to the matter in hand, and in late 1979, Peeters basically found herself staring down the barrel of a script that amounts to a cross between ‘Jaws’ and ‘The Creature from The Black Lagoon’ with added rape, and a few weeks shooting time in an off-season fishing town near Fort Bragg to get it all in the can. (I’ve not read any background on the film’s production, but surely there must be some great material here for a behind-the-scenes docu-drama or Christopher Guest style mockumentary or something?)

What most struck me most about the first half hour of ‘Humanoids..’ is just how authentically grim life in the film’s fictional fishing community of Noyo seemed to be. I suppose I’d been expecting something pretty breezy and tongue-in-cheek, in the vein of Dante’s ‘Piranha’ (1978), but this is a whole other kettle of genetically-modified fish.

Not only does this place seem cold, grey and permanently overcast, but the people, when they’re not being actively horrible to each other, seem glum and withdrawn, whilst the town’s economic decline and cultural isolation are clear for all to see. Amity Island this ain’t. In fact, that isolated mining town from ‘My Bloody Valentine’ (1981) seems positively idyllic by comparison.

As the film opens, controversy surrounds the arrival of representatives from a Big Corporation, who are looking to open a “canning plant” up-stream from the town, securing the area’s economic survival, and, they claim, increasing fishing yields through the application of exciting (read: untested) new scientific techniques. (UH-OH.)

Naturally, the gang of beer-swilling racist goons headed up by Vic Morrow are pro-canning plant, but they face opposition from a rival fisherman, a young man named Johnny (Anthony Pena), whom they address as “The Indian” on the basis of his Native American heritage. Unhappily for all concerned, this beef is brought to the boil when something crawls out of the sea and slaughters the men’s dogs (some cheery shots of staged doggie carnage here for animal lovers in the audience). For reasons which do not seem entirely clear (but then, I’m not a stereotypical racist goon, so who knows), Vic and his boys blame “The Indian” for this massacre, and promptly kill his dog in retaliation.

This leads to a showdown, as Johnny interrupts the all-important town hall barn dance at which the townsfolk were due to be introduced to the representatives from the Big Corporation. Throwing down his dead hound in the middle of dancefloor and demanding an explanation, he earns himself a public beating from the goon squad, which soon spills over into a full scale parking lot brawl when some slightly less goon-ish citizens come to his defence, leaving the town’s entire male populace nursing bruises and black eyes, and the canning plant guys no doubt considering their options.

Frankly, unless you like dead dogs, salmon fishing, geriatric bands playing slow, old-timey dance music and simmering small town resentment, there is precious little to enjoy in Noyo, even before it becomes clear that any woman of child-bearing age who strays close to the waterline now also risks being assaulted by a raging, seaweed-covered gillman trying to forcibly copulate with her. Oh boy, just what we need.

In a development reminiscent of Ray Russell’s sleaze-horror opus ‘Incubus’ (published a few years earlier in ’76), it seems that the primary aim of these monsters – which we are later informed have evolved into humanoid form from at hyper-speed after some test-tube mould made a getaway from hard-headed lady scientist Ann Turkel’s lab, or somesuch – is reproduction. They attack (and sometimes abduct) women solely for the purpose of trying to impregnate them, but this tactic has a low success rate, as the majority of human females are simply torn apart by the creatures’ amorous assault. Delightful!

(As I write this, I’m conscious of the fact that rape and violence against animals seem to have inadvertently become recurring motifs in this October’s reviews. It’s entirely accidental, I swear! For the record, I didn’t even intend to watch this one, but ended up throwing it on in an emergency when  my DVD of ‘Mr Vampire III’ failed to play.)

The monster effects in ‘Humanoids From The Deep’, are, I would say, rather uneven. The early scenes in which the beasties attack and molest women on the beach take a no-nonsense “man in a suit” type approach, but elsewhere we get some rather more interesting animatronic type creations. In some shots, they seem outright comical, but, especially towards the end of the film, there are also moments when they look totally awesome. In particular, I loved the way that they sometimes shamble around the place with big, toothy grins and their unnaturally long arms raised above their heads, looking like some kind of Satanic, fungoid Tickle-Me Elmo.

Going back to those early attack sequences, I’m pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that Peeters actually refused to shoot the more exploitative footage demanded by Corman, and that as a result he simply brought another director onto the set to film additional footage without her participation. (IMDB credits these sequences to Jimmy T. Murakami.)

As such, I’m not sure who should really take the blame for these “bikini beach attack” scenes, but either way, they’re pretty damned peculiar and unedifying, temporarily threatening to turn the movie into a humourless, sleazoid update of Del Tenney’s ‘60s drive-in classic ‘The Horror of Party Beach’ (only without the great rock n’ roll music or hipster wise-cracks). (1)

The biggest problem here I think is that the beach itself looks horrible. Clearly the filmmakers had to take what they could get in terms of the weather and location, but even so - with grey, gritty sand, perilous rocks, crashing waves and freezing, overcast skies, it’s safe to say that young people would need to be out of their minds to choose this particular spot for frolicking in bikinis or making out in the surf, immediately adding both a fabricated, surreal quality and an air of bleak, bloody-minded nastiness to proceedings. (Perhaps it could have been this, as much as her objection to the stronger sexual content, which led to Peeters refusing to film these scenes?)

Things get even weirder meanwhile when at one point we cut to a random couple of youngsters who are getting to know each other better in a tent they’ve erected on the sand, and, not only does the poor girl have a sea-monster to deal with, the boy she’s screwing turns out to be a goddamn ventriloquist. We’re really looking at a perfect storm of bad decision-making on her part here, as her partner whips out his dummy and starts running through his ‘gottle-a-geer’ act, but… as you’d imagine, she is given little time to reflect on the sequence of events which led her to this unenviable situation before a rampaging monster intervenes.

(Actually, I think the addition of the ventriloquist’s dummy must have been someone’s attempt to introduce some low-brow, frat-house humour – there is much strained, double entendre type dialogue (“you’ve got to let me see more than just the head”, etc) – but this feels quite out of keeping with the dour tone taken by much of the rest of the film. Frankly the whole thing is just really bizarre.)

Meanwhile, our first line of defence against the fungoid menace is headed up by the mighty Doug McClure, taking a well-earned break from punching cavemen in the face and harpooning dinosaurs in Kevin Connor’s wonderfully entertaining series of Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired ‘70s adventure movies. After all that, you’d think a mere bunch of spongy ‘humanoids’ would be a walk in the park for this dude, but McClure is actually on pretty reserved, naturalistic form here, keeping his fists to himself and playing slightly ‘older’ than was usually the case.

Alongside Doug is the aforementioned Ann Turkel, who looks as if she’s been grown in a vat to be a leading lady in a ‘70s monster movie. I don’t mean that in a negative sense - in fact her performance here is a stand-out - but… can’t quite put my finger on why, but something about her face, her bearing, that hair – I was sure I’d previously seen her as the female lead in ‘Piranha’, or as somebody’s wife in ‘Grizzly’, or, y’know - something like that.

In fact, it turns out ‘Humanoids..’ is one of the only genre movies Turkel has ever appeared in, and I don’t think it was a very happy experience for her (rumours suggest that she actually petitioned the Screen Actors’ Guild to try to stop the film being released, after she learned of the additional footage Corman had added to it).

The sections of the film dealing with these folks and their response to the monster threat quickly fall into the familiar ‘Jaws’ mould, but the difference is that, whereas it’s become a truism that the success of ‘Jaws’ was down to its characters rather than the shark, ‘Humanoids from the Deep’ simply can’t cut it on the same level. Sure, McClure, Turkel and Prena are ‘good guys’ by vestige of the fact that they speak to each other civilly and don’t behave like dicks, but when they set out together in a motor-boat to seek out the monsters’ breeding-grounds, we couldn’t really say that we like them, or particularly care what happens to them.

In fairness however, the film quickly picks up steam in its second half, beginning with our heroes aforementioned monster-blasting excursion, during which they rescue an abducted girl who has been ickily encased in seaweed, which actually turns out to be a pretty fun and exciting action sequence.

Turkel’s character meanwhile does become increasingly forthright and likeable as we get to know her better, and anyone still looking for a gossamer thin thread of potential feminism running through this movie can take heart in the scene back at the lab, which finds her directing an absolutely fantastic tirade of invective at her weaselly male colleague, who wants to try to keep the monsters’ existence secret.

Speaking of ‘Jaws’ meanwhile, you will of course understand that the mayor of Noyo can’t POSSIBLY let the spree of sea-monster rape-murders get in the way of the town’s annual Salmon Festival! And, boy oh boy, it’s during the wonderful, wonderful outburst of absolute mayhem which follows as the monsters attack the town’s nocturnal water-front carnival en masse that this movie really redeems itself - and how! The film’s Japanese title, incidentally, translates simply as ‘MONSTER PANIC!’, and that’s a pretty good two-word summation of everything which follows after this point.

Thrill, as the local pop DJ broadcasts live from the scene, sticking to the mic even as the monsters besiege his booth trying to get at his station’s roller-skating hype girls! Cheer, as loads and loads of ply-wood carnival booths are smashed to pieces by rampaging monsters! Shed a tear (possibly), as Vic Morrow gains last minute redemption by sacrificing himself to save a little girl from the jaws of doom! Laugh uneasily, as the people fight back, and a bunch of guys arms with spiked planks are seen encircling a stricken gillman, seeming slightly unsure of what to do next. Feel slightly confused, as McClure and Turkel enact a plan to spray gasoline across the bay and set the water on fire (because, apparently that will help?).

Even better, all of this fantastic, life-affirming craziness is intercut with the film’s strongest and most convincingly realised horror set-piece, which finds McClure’s wife and young son isolated in their remote beach house, trying to defend themselves from the stalking gillmen. There is some brilliantly tense stuff here, faintly reminiscent of the Timmy-and-Grandma-alone-in-the-house sequence from Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’, and I’d like to think (though I have no particular evidence to back up this claim) that this perhaps represents an example of the slightly more classical suspense filmmaking that Peeters was ideally aiming for, before Corman stepped in to enforce the “monsters tearing off bikinis on a rainy beach” approach.

The frantic cutting between this scene and the wacky carnival mayhem meanwhile struck me as pretty exhilarating, rather than jarring, and, perhaps feeling the benefit of a couple of glasses of wine by this point, I was overjoyed to realise that I was suddenly having a really great time with ‘Humanoids from the Deep’.

In conclusion then, let it be known that ‘Humanoids..’ opens with a dour, mean-spirited vibe that, combined with a surplus of clumsy, joyless sleaze, makes its opening hour pretty difficult to hang with. Adventurous viewers are advised to hang on in there however, because the last few reels make it all worthwhile, delivering exactly what I wanted from a movie like this – which is apparently ABSOLUTE CHAOS - and oh so much more besides.

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(1) A complete digression I realise, but why does ‘Horror of Party Beach’ only score 3.0 on IMDB?! It’s brilliant! I dunno… fuckin’ *people*, eh?

Thoughts on… Revisiting Twin Peaks.

Although it dominated my thoughts on cinema through my late teens and early twenties, my David Lynch obsession has (mercifully for the readers of this blog) lain largely dormant since shortly after the release of his last film to date, ‘Inland Empire’, (god-was-it-really) almost a decade ago.

Following the announcement last year that ‘Twin Peaks’ is due for a 25-years-later return in 2016 however, I became conscious of the fact that my recollection of the original series had faded into a mass of distant, fragmented images and half-forgotten characters buried deep in some forgotten archive in my long-term memory. Thus, I decided that I would quite like to revisit the series prior to this ‘revival’ (the nature & wisdom of which remains decidedly uncertain at the time of writing). As it turned out, my wife had never watched the series at all, so what further excuse did we need to break out the old DVDs?

And, in short, refamiliarising myself with ‘Twin Peaks - reliving its terror, mystery, absurdity and catharsis as if for the first time via my wife’s reactions - has proved an immensely enjoyable experience.

Rather than finding the show grating and insincere, as I feared I might when reassessing it from a more detached, ‘grown up’ point of view, returning to ‘Twin Peaks’ has in fact only served to deepen my appreciation for what David Lynch and Mark Frost managed to achieve through this production.

What follows therefore is merely a collection of tangents and observations that occurred to me whilst re-watching the original episodes of the series, arranged in no particular order and leading up to no particular conclusion, but hopefully perhaps providing a few new avenues for fans of the show to ponder as they nervously anticipate the forthcoming quarter century reunion.

SPOILER WARNING: Whilst I have avoided giving away the story’s Big Reveal in the post that follows, I’m afraid I haven’t been able to avoid hinting at it pretty strongly in places. As such: readers who have not watched ‘Twin Peaks’ in its entirety and intend to do so at some point in their life are STRONGLY ADVISED to skip the remainder of this post until said viewing has been completed. (I’m not usually too bothered about such things, but as those ‘in the know’ will understand in this case, prior knowledge would tend to ruin one’s full appreciation of the show to a significant extent.)

1. Twin Peaks is a rigidly moral universe.

Like many viewers I suspect, I recalled ‘Twin Peaks’ largely as a series of rambling digressions and jarring tonal shifts – but in actual fact, the feature length pilot and seven subsequent episodes that form the first series are as tight as a drum in terms of their construction: painstakingly assembled packages of soap opera-via-horror movie emotional manipulation, centred around an elemental ‘good vs evil’ dichotomy as strictly enforced as that of a Christian morality play (even as organised religion plays almost no role in the show whatsoever).

If we examine the series in terms of its most basic conflicts in fact, we find a universe that is closer in essence to the romantic fantasy of something like ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Lord of the Rings’ that it is to the morally ambiguous, reality-based fiction that it at first appears to be, in spite of the myriad complications that are thrown in to put us off the scent.

When contemplating the first series of ‘Twin Peaks’, one could easily draw a diagram incorporating every single character, their positions defined within a fixed moral framework. (If I had any talent whatsoever for capturing facial likenesses in sketches, there is a chance I might have actually, literally drawn this diagram as some kind of insane work of outsider art, so… let’s all be thankful that I don’t.)

On the right hand side of the diagram, we can envisage the forces of ‘good’, clustered around Agent Cooper and the micro-community within the Sheriff’s office, also incorporating Big Ed (still my favourite character after all these years) and the protective spirit of The Bookhouse Boys, Dr Hayward, Major Briggs, Norma at the diner, and the equally steadfast presence of Pete Martell at The Mill.

These are strong characters, their moral integrity and inner peace keeping them safe from corruption or ‘attack’ by the dark terrors that swirl around the town. Whatever day-to-day perils they might face on the physical plain, on a spiritual/psychic level, they collectively constitute an unassailable fortress.

Branching off slightly from the fortress toward the centre of the diagram, we find James, Donna and Maddy – the ‘good kids’ who remain under the nominal protection of their elders, even as their Nancy Drew-like investigations frequently put them in danger of succumbing to ‘the dark’ – their youth making them susceptible to the deadly combination of personal weakness and metaphysical assault that, even whilst never given name or form within the show, adds an eerie, walking-on-eggshells quality to their scenes throughout the first series.

Far away on the other (left hand) side of the diagram meanwhile lurk the dark, dark woods, and the Evil – terrible, unknowable, unnameable, soul-destroying. In its human aspect: Leo Johnson and Jacques Renault (traditional Bad Men, their spirits so degraded they can tread close to the heart of darkness without even knowing it – literally so, on the night of Laura’s death). In its non-human aspect: the nightmare world of Killer Bob and One Armed Mike, which I will freely admit remains utterly terrifying to me to this day (because no one, but no one, in the field of popular culture pulls off that utter-fucking-terror thing like David Lynch, however old hat his tricks may seem when examined after the fact).

Skirting the line between the ‘evil’ realm and the diagram’s central no-mans-land, we have a little boat captained by Benjamin Horne (also housing Jerry, Blackie of One-Eyed Jacks, and Catherine Martell): figures whose greed and moral turpitude places them far within the influence of the dark, but not so much so that they couldn’t escape it, should they choose to try.

And in the very centre of this diagram of course: Laura Palmer. The empty space around whom everyone else in this system must define themselves from the moment the show begins. Strongly subject to the pull of both good and evil – succumbing to both, repelling both – the central area around her becomes a whirlpool of opposing forces.

Scattered in this maelstrom are the show’s ‘lost souls’ – weaker characters, many of them close to Laura, drawn to the light but damaged by the darkness, without the inner strength to know what is happening to them or to determine their own fate. Bobby Briggs, Dr. Jacoby, Audrey Horne, Josie Packard. And, closest to the centre of the whirlpool of course, the poor, tragic spirits of Leland and Sarah Palmer.

Having laid all that out, I hope I won’t sound too crazy when I state that absolutely everything in series # 1 of ‘Twin Peaks’ fits into this scheme completely. Once you have the form of this diagram in mind, there are very few loose ends, very few threads left hanging.

(One remaining anomaly of course is The Log Lady, who, based on a number of hints quietly dropped in the second series, I think might best be defined as a former victim of the town’s ‘evil’, who, as a result of the resulting trauma, has built up psychic walls to protect herself from it. She lives near the whatever-it-is, intercepts messages from it, but is no longer under threat from it.)

2. The Mike / Bobby thing is worth a mention.

One interesting red herring / unexplored avenue / random headfuck [delete as applicable] in the early episodes of ‘Twin Peaks’ is the implied relationship between the town’s “real life” Mike and Bobby – dumb teenage punks stumbling toward a life of low-level criminality (and thus into the realm of the show’s ‘evil’) – and the supernatural ‘Mike’ and ‘Bob’ whom Cooper and the other characters encounter in dreams and visions.

From the garbled and dream-mangled impressions we receive of these entities, we might initially envisage them as a pair of middle-aged criminals or sadists of some kind, who, lurking in the minds of their victims, have somehow become transfigured into fearful disembodied figures in the psychic realm, pitched somewhere between demons, malevolent magicians and elemental avatars of negative human emotion.

Given that Cooper pointedly states that his dream takes place twenty five years after the present, the logical implication here is that One-Armed Mike and Killer Bob represent the terrible beings that the real life Mike and Bobby will become a quarter century hence, should they continue to pursue their callous and destructive path through life. (Eerily, the vague similarities between the two pairs of actors are just close enough to make this seem plausible, in some dream-logic type fashion.)

Whilst this angle is understandably dropped from the storyline once One-Armed Mike becomes a real-world presence in the form of Mr. Gerard, and the circumstances surrounding Laura’s life and death begin to become clearer, it is nonetheless a queasy and potent notion that sticks in the mind longer than it has any right to. (It might make an interesting springboard for a potential 25-five-years-later storyline, perhaps..?)

3. To fight Great Evil, it takes Great Good.

If you boil down David Lynch’s feature filmography down to its basic essence, what you tend to find are stories of lonely, drifting or otherwise emotionally troubled individuals who are drawn into contact with some spirit of ‘evil’ that, whether interpreted in supernatural or psychological terms, is almost too malignant and frightening for the human mind to bear, and subsequently find themselves tranformed or destroyed by it.

Whilst ‘Twin Peaks’ contains some of the most upsetting outbreaks of this ‘evil’ ever realised by Lynch, it is also the only entry in his canon to set up an equally strong force for ‘good’ alongside the horror. Rather than being characterised as doomed victims, riding a noir-ish whirlpool to their inevitable destruction (as per so many of Lynch’s feature films), the people of Twin Peaks at least have a fighting chance.

This innovation could well be attributed to Mark Frost (whom it is all too easy to see as the Derleth to Lynch’s Lovecraft in this particular partnership), but nonetheless, in the first series at least, it is explored in purely Lynchian terms. ‘Good’, for Lynch, is represented by feelings of comfort, compassion and familiarity, and, at times, these virtues are rendered just as powerfully in ‘Twin Peaks’ as the stark terror and threat of the nameless ‘evil’.

Through the shared appreciation of “damn good coffee” and the lunch-time slice of pie, the rituals of ‘good’ are asserted, and the atmosphere cleansed. The scenes early in the series, in which Agent Cooper is initiated into the ways of The Bookhouse Boys, and in which he and the sheriff’s deputies bond on the shooting range (when Hawk memorably recites the poem he wrote for his girlfriend), convey such a spirit of acceptance and belonging that it is almost overwhelming. As long as guys like this are on the case, the viewer is invited to think, the nameless shadow that hangs over the town can never triumph.

Whilst it is all too easy for less insightful fictions to quantify ‘heroism’ in terms of intelligence and physical strength, ‘Twin Peaks’ is generally careful to side-step this misapprehension, demonstrating in its best moments that the our heroes’ ‘strength’ – that which makes them impervious to the evil into which they delve - exists primarily on a spiritual and moral level. This is expressed through their honesty and selflessness, their acceptance of ‘difference’ within their community (whether it be Cooper’s magickal detective work, the ways of The Log Lady or David Duchovny in drag) and their willingness to help others through difficult times; their love for the people around them, basically.

(As an aside, the mythos of The Bookhouse Boys is to my mind one of the most interesting and under-utilised ideas in ‘Twin Peaks’. The notion of a group of entirely conventional, down-to-earth guys feeling drawn together to organise and guard against a threat so vague and nebulous that none of them can even speak about it out loud or express what it is, is one that greatly appeals to me, and that I would very much like to see further explored in any new iteration of the series. [Whilst on the subject: why the ‘bookhouse’? What is this ‘bookhouse’? What are the nature of the books in it, and who put them there? Has no one ever summoned up the courage to say, “guys, I think the word we’re looking for here is ‘library’”? – all these are questions long overdue an answer.] )

4. Authoritarian Mysticism.

Something else about ‘Twin Peaks’ that had never really occurred to me until I started considering it in terms of the ‘good vs evil’ framework outlined above is how thoroughly conservative the assignment of roles within the show is (on the surface level, at least).

Whilst most of the show’s human villains are very traditional ‘bad guy’ types – drifters, petty criminals, pimps and corrupt businessmen, mostly identified as working class -‘Twin Peaks’ conversely paints an extraordinarily positive picture of traditional authority figures.

Police officers, federal agents, even an Air Force Major (and in one episode, a judge and a District Attorney) – these characters are presented, not only as our main protagonists and moral anchors, but as noble, complex and idiosyncratic individuals – warriors, sages and seekers-into-the-mystery, all navigating their own strange paths to enlightenment.

Of course, American popular culture is not exactly lacking in stories that glorify the exploits of unconventional law enforcement officials, but, coming from a counter-culture aligned representative of the ‘baby boomer’ generation like David Lynch – the enfant terrible director of ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Wild At Heart’, no less – such portrayals swing so far from what we might expect that they become almost transgressive. Especially so given that, as outlined in point # 2 above, the authority figures of ‘Twin Peaks’ are about as far removed from the violent rule-breakers of the John Wayne/’Dirty Harry’ tradition as it is possible to get

Instead, the show’s cops and agents all embrace the civic duty and regimental conformity of their office with almost comical solemnity, whilst simultaneously embodying a set of values that American culture more commonly assigns to lone mystics, saintly humanitarian figures, or, less charitably, just plain hippies.

By so pointedly overturning the clichés of the doltish small town cop, the hard-headed FBI agent and the bullying military dad, Lynch & Frost repeatedly create fresh, interesting and unpredictable characters for us to identify with, and perhaps even to a certain extent succeed in opening the minds of those of us who grew up images of Rodney King beatings and Vietnam massacres to a different, more measured understanding of the human beings behind this kind of civic authority, and the positive force they can exert. And in a certain sense, what could possibly be more subversive than that?

5. When quality drops, it drops hard.

Back when I first viewed ‘Twin Peaks’, the much vaunted drop in quality between the first and second series never struck me as that much of an issue, but, returning to it again with my critical faculties more carefully attuned, what can I say but - ouch.

As I suppose will be obvious to fans, all of my fine words above and below relate primary to the ‘core’ of the series – that being, the first season, and the portions of the second season directly related the mystery surrounding Laura’s murder. Outside of that, the speed with which the carefully wrought atmosphere and universe of the show’s first series falls apart in season # 2 is staggering.

Whilst the business with Major Briggs and the Black and White Lodges remains diverting, any sense of real gravitas is long gone (it’s as if a Zulawski or Herzog film suddenly turned into an episode of ‘The X Files’, effectively), and by the time the central mystery of Laura’s death is concluded, it is only the fine characterisations previously established by actors like Kyle MacLachlan, Jack Nance, Don S. Davis, Everett McGill and Sherilyn Fenn that even keep things watchable. In terms of writing and direction, we’re running on fumes from thereon in.

Whilst there is no point dwelling unduly on the negative, there are a couple of characters in particular who are very poorly served by this quality drop. In particular, it is the younger characters who seem to get their personal story arcs most cruelly bashed out of shape by the second series, and this irks me to the extent that I’d quite like to tell you about it.

Having started out as a not-terribly-likeable caricature of a swaggering teen delinquent, Bobby Briggs seemed to have turned a corner and become a potentially interesting character by the end of season #1. Breaking down under questioning from Dr Jacoby, he tearfully admits that it was Laura who convinced him to start pushing drugs and getting involved with bad guys, and, with her corrupting influence removed, we start to see a picture of the goofy, innocent teenager beneath emerging. When his father subsequently reveals his dream of his son’s future happiness, we see Bobby genuinely touched, and, perhaps boosted by his initially very positively portrayed relationship with Shelly, we start to feel that he has perhaps been ‘saved’, under the terms of the show’s moral schema.

All this goes straight out of the window in season # 2 though, as he’s immediately back to being a two-dimensional teen hood straight of a second rate sit-com – an easier sell for both actor and writers, no doubt, but a shameful betrayal of the character who was just beginning to emerge at the end of season # 1.

Even more redundant are James and Donna, who, I’d imagine I won’t be the first to observe, are a complete waste of space in season # 2. Whilst their ambiguous moral position, and the trauma of their proximity to Laura’s murder and the dark deeds of her killer, fuels the drama of their scenes very effectively in season # 1, season #2 drops the ball horrendously.

In terms of season # 1’s strict moral scheme, the mess their little gang gets into with the unfortunate Harold Smith should see them advancing further down the path of danger and corruption – ignoring their moral culpability for his death whilst they increasingly let their own self-pity and melodramatic emotional hang-ups define their actions, at the expense of those around them. If the menace of the earlier episodes was still hanging in the air, this is the point at which the show’s ‘evil’, feeding on such weakness, would make its presence felt and draw them in.

The writers and directors of season # 2 dodge this necessary judgement call entirely however, apparently expecting us to indulge and even sympathise with these solipsistic wet blankets, and, as a result, their respective plotlines drivel off into sub-soap opera tedium and irrelevance. (And, if there’s one thing worse than a daytime soap, it’s daytime soap material that thinks it is being better and cooler than a daytime soap, whilst failing to actually offer up anything at all to critique or transcend the form.)

Whilst on a roll, I could also lament the way that the entire Jean Renault / One-Eyed Jacks storyline, having been so painstakingly built up, fizzles out in an ‘action set-piece’ so flat and half-hearted it leaves no impression on the wider narrative whatsoever, and could rue the day that some script editor decided that the pantomime villainy of Windom Earle made an appropriate replacement for the genuine horror of the forces tied up with Laura’s death, but… well, you get the idea – I think we’ve dwelt on this long enough.

6. ‘Twin Peaks’ is a great work of art.

Above and beyond all of the irony, surrealism and affected quirk that ‘Twin Peaks’ wears like a cloak, the central story of Laura Palmer’s life and death remains a tragedy that no remotely sensitive viewer can remain untouched by, whilst the far-reaching implications and coded, hidden worlds that are uncovered in the course of the investigation of her death can’t help but echo those of similar, undocumented stories – cruel, painful and endlessly circular – that unfold in every city in the world, every day.

By establishing a framework that allows every single facet of one such ‘case’ to be absorbed in the form of popular entertainment – crucially keeping the audience ‘in the dark’ until it is far too late for them to withdraw their emotional investment – Lynch and Frost achieve something uniquely powerful.

Although both creators have repeatedly insisted that they never intended to reveal the identity of Laura’s killer (the lore around the show claiming that this was a decision dictated by the broadcaster ABC), I find such a dismissal difficult to believe, given how beautifully the ‘big reveal’ is eventually handled, and how thoroughly the light of the resulting knowledge retrospectively casts a dark shadow over everything we have seen up to that point – a shadow that, ultimately, defines the meaning of the entire series.

Characteristic of David Lynch’s directorial work, the scenes surrounding the ‘reveal’ operate on a level of psychic/emotional ‘truth’ that at times becomes entirely disconnected from the logic real world cause & effect. In particular, take the way that the murderer’s third killing (the moment at which the penny drops for the audience) is intercut with an almost otherworldly gathering of souls at The Roadhouse (where Julee Cruise’s band plays, and the giant appears to inform Cooper that “IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN”).

Various characters, all of them close to Laura, have gathered there for no reason that is ever made explicitly clear. As they sit separately around the room whilst Cruise and Badalamenti’s upbeat yet strangely harrowing dream-pop music plays and Coop mulls over the realisation that he has failed to anticipate or prevent another killing, a shared feeling of realisation seems to creep over all of the characters similtaneously, even though, in story terms, they do not yet know the literal truth. Why could we not see what was happening? Why did we let it continue? Somewhere deep in their souls, they – and by extension, the whole town – knew the answer. They just couldn't admit it to themselves until now. They did nothing, but what could they do, against a secret so closely guarded? We can place no blame upon them.

Without needing to utter a word out loud, the scene overwhelms us with a combination of sadness, resignation, forgiveness and horror, as the characters see that same shadow stretching back across all they’ve experienced up to this point, just as we feel it falling across the memory of this intriguing and entertaining TV show we’ve been watching over the past however many weeks.

As mentioned earlier in this piece, Lynch’s mysteries can always be approached in either supernatural or psychological/symbolic terms – but crucial to their power is the fact that neither interpretation cancels out the other. Like the work of any magician, it exists on both plains simultaneously.

Put it this way, perhaps: Lynch & Frost could easily have made a grim, real life drama about the events in the Palmer household. It might have been harrowing and compelling, with committed performances and inspired direction. But few would have had the stomach to watch it, let alone fully engage with it, and I certainly wouldn’t be talking about it today.

By drawing us instead into the dark mysteries of The Other Place, the dwarf and the giant, the occult fragments and obtuse clues that lead to the terrifying realm of Killer Bob, they have us hooked before we even know what we’re hooked with.

When Bob makes his attacks – revved up using all the tricks in the Lynch playbook, like the elemental father of every horror movie boogeyman – we feel a genuine sliver of the kind of raw terror experienced daily by victims and perpetrators alike in real life situations that mirror that of Laura's. As we don’t initially know the root of what we’re seeing and feeling, our armour is not in place, and it goes straight in like a knife.

Then, when we’ve been through the worst of it together, when Laura’s murderer eventually leaves this world at peace, the remaining part of his heart that loved her duly forgiven, and the other characters come to terms with the unpalatable truth that is now out in the clear light of day, we feel a kind of ‘closure’ that is difficult to put into words.

I should conclude here by saying that I’m speaking here as someone who has never been at all affected by any of the, uh, ‘issues’ involved in this storyline, but its resolution still left me flattened. I can’t even imagine the effect that viewing ‘Twin Peaks’ might have on someone for whom such issues did have personal significance, but, I believe that effect would ultimately be positive, and indeed, I hope it was.

VHS Purgatory: The Brotherhood of Satan (Bernard McEveety, 1971)

When I reviewed lovably eccentric Louisiana witchcraft movie The Witchmaker a few years back (mental note: gotta get a watchable copy of that some time), I failed to make the connection between producer L.Q. Jones and the gaunt cowboy actor of the same name who turns up in most of Sam Peckinpah’s ‘60s/’70s films. Partly I just wasn’t paying that much attention, and partly it just seems kinda unlikely, y’know? Well, turns out that it actually was that same L.Q. Jones, and that following the success(?) of his first venture into low budget occult horror, he and co-producer/actor Alvy Moore actually took a second shot at the genre, with Jones persuading his frequent on-screen partner Strother Martin to co-star in 1971’s Texas-lensed ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’. (You’ll remember the pair as the hapless bounty hunters in ‘The Wild Bunch’, and the varmints who leave Jason Robards to die in the desert in ‘The Ballad of Cable Hogue’.)

Regrettably, what they came up with is a dull and rather mystifying stab at the early 70s “Satanic panic” sub-genre, mostly lacking the self-contained charm of its predecessor. But, it is at least a lot stranger than the already fairly strange 'Witchmaker’, and that’s gotta count for something.

What manner of madness is this, you may find yourself asking from the outset, as the film opens with motion-blurred close-ups of tank tracks crushing piles of metal, accompanied by grinding machine noise and occasional sounds of people screaming in terror, intercut with shots of a wind up toy tank (shades of ‘Astro Zombies’). When this… whatever it is.. has been completed, we see a small boy walking away from a pile of smouldering wreckage. Climbing a hill, he meets a couple of other children, including a girl who begins to brightly glow in supernatural fashion – cue animated credits sequence.

After that, we’re introduced to a happy family who are having a nice day out near a.. lake? I guess it’s a lake. Driving off, they travel along a desert road, where they discover the crushed car seen in the prologue. Heading to a nearby town to report this rather extreme ‘accident’, they meet with an inexplicably hostile reception, as the cops immediately rough up and interrogate the father, before a crowd of locals descend upon their car in a kind of mass rage. “You took them away from us!”, a man who looks rather like Fidel Castro yells despairingly as the family turn tail and get the hell out of there.

Strange stuff this. Definitely uneasy. Not at all a good end to a day at the lake. But yes – unease, unease, unease seems to be prolific TV director Bernard McEveety’s bag, his apparent disdain for establishing shots and clear transitions leaving us with an uncomfortable mixture of blurry, abstract close ups and cramped, medium shot dialogue scenes that never really settles down into any kind of sensible rhythm.

The actual storyline of the film, once we’ve figured it out, is predictable bordering on tedious – a coven of elderly citizens are using Satanic powers to prevent local people from leaving town, and hypnotising/stealing their children one by one, so that they can transfer their spirits from the older bodies to the younger and continue their unholy existence. Ho hum. A pretty straight-down-the-line set up for horror fans, and unfortunately one that veers closer to the oh-so-‘70s threat-to-the-family vibe of ‘The Stepford Wives’ or Bert I. Gordon’s achingly dull ‘Necromancy’ than to the more decadent, whacked out brand of Satanism I tend to favour.

But linear though this plot may be, it becomes unbearably confusing simply due to the film’s refusal (or inability?) to really communicate anything to us very effectively. Hard to explain quite what I mean, but basically this is the kind of film where at any point characters we’ve never seen before can start wondering around, talking about stuff we have no interest in; in which we’re never quite sure where or why a certain scene is happening, or what pertinent information we should take away from it. Whether the result of incompetent editing, heavy cutting or reliance on incomplete footage, or just an admirable (if doomed) attempt to avoid exposition-heavy dialogue, the result is that we’re often simply lost.

I know at this point you’re probably thinking “great, I love movies like that”, but the kicker here is that not a great deal happens to make any of this narrative heavy lifting worthwhile. Despite some moderate outbursts of violence and fright, the whole thing has an inescapable TV movie feel about it, which certainly gels with McEveety’s CV. But imagine a TV movie directed by someone who seems to be looking to Jess Franco as a paragon of narrative efficiency, and you’ll start to get the idea.

Not that the Franco comparison extends much further than that, unfortunately. Certainly Uncle Jess wouldn’t think much of ‘Brotherhood..’s subdued retiree Satanists, led by head cultist Strother Martin, here mustering little of the energy he brought to his western roles as he intones some totally square Satanic litanies (just yr typical “oh Lord Satan..” sorta stuff really). Admittedly, their hideout does have a couple of pretty cool sets (that cobweb-shrouded giant ankh gateway thing is a bit of an eye-opener), and all that business with making hypnotised children stand motionless on marble pillars is pretty peculiar and subliminally disturbing, but… yeah, not much doing really.

In essence I think ‘Brotherhood of Satan’ is a viewing experience very well suited to the pungent charms of this 1989 Parkfield Entertainment VHS (other titles in the “Hollywood Horror Collection” include ‘Torture Garden’, ‘The Mutations’ and ‘Blind Terror’). As well as the coating of nutritious fuzz, adding an extra layer of unearthliness to otherwise mundane imagery, it’s a good one for drifting in and out of sleep to as the VCR wheels whir.

In fact, good advice for watching this one would be… well actually good advice would be to watch something that provides some degree of entertainment value or emotional/intellectual engagement instead. But if say you were to find yourself stuck on some hellish airline where they’re showing this as the inflight movie, taking some sedatives and just letting it roll over you is definitely the way to go.

Yes, watching whilst fully awake would be a mistake. You’d only start asking questions. Why do the elderly Satanists seem to be letting a a young-ish woman join their ranks? Why - possibly as a result of this, possibly not - does one of the elderly women in the coven have to beg for her life before the altar and then stand motionless on a pillar with the kidnapped children whilst the rest of the cult mock her? What’s the reasoning behind giving Strother Martin’s character a ‘real world’ identity as the town’s mild-mannered doctor? (His secret identity as head Satanist is never revealed to the good guys, and he never uses any of the information he’s learned from hanging around with them to modify the plans of his cult - in fact he does bugger all in either of his identities really). Why, after a typically confusing scene in which it is implied that two people have died, do we see our male lead (who wasn’t there) walking shell-shocked through some hellish basement full of body bags as the police question him?

No, best not to worry about any of that. Just wash half a sleeping pill down with a few stiff drinks. As you drift in and out of consciousness, strange pictures will appear, flickering across your mind’s eye, hinting at far stranger mysteries than this the sober surface of ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’ is able to provide.

Men in monastic robes move hypnotised, formally attired children around on a chequered floor, like chess pieces.

A woman sinks into an armchair, experiencing some sort of seizure, as her husband(?) sits disinterestedly behind her, reading obscure and/or oddly translated bible verses aloud.

A distraught deputy sheriff chases the dust cloud kicked up by a departing car, waving an orange toy monkey above his head.

These are the building blocks ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’ offers the brave somnambulist. Dare you try to assemble them..?