Pulp Non-Fiction: The Satan Trap: Dangers of the Occult edited by Martin Ebon (Doubleday, 1976)

A companion piece of sorts to last week’s post on The Satan Seller, I don’t have much to say about this odd hardback - recently liberated from a box of books on its way to the charity shop - which can’t be easily gleaned from perusing the scans above.

As you will note from the list of his other works, Martin Ebon (1917-2006) seems to have been knocking out paranormal tomes of one kind or another at a prolific rate through the ‘70s (having apparently moved on from his previous specialist subject of communism). As such, ‘The Satan Trap’ has a “clips show” kind of feel to it, consisting almost entirely of brief extracts from articles first published in journals edited by… Martin Ebon.

Giving it a skim, it’s all much as one might expect, complete with a hang-wringing introduction citing campus unrest, “rootless frustration”, horror movies and LSD a factors encouraging young Americans to blunder blindly into meddling with forces they cannot understand.

Though I can claim no knowledge of Mr Ebon’s wider oeuvre or personal beliefs, his war-time service in the U.S. State Department and Office of War Information tends to suggest he was no greater fan of the communist regimes he spent much of the ‘50s and ‘60s writing about, causing me to reflect on the unhappy possibility that the poor fellow actually spent his entire career studying things he didn’t like. (There’s a beautiful symmetry to the fact that he published ‘World Communism Today’ in 1948, followed by ‘Witchcraft Today’ in 1971.)

Be that as it may, I do love the photograph of him holding court at the American Society of Psychical Research on the back cover here. I really hope that he kept a human skull on his desk in his wood-panelled study, and had the decency to smoke a pipe whenever naïve young people came to consult him on matters pertaining to the dark arts. I mean, you’d have to really, wouldn’t you?

The interesting cover painting for ‘The Satan Trap’ is by Kurt Vargo, a veteran New York-based artist who appears to still be working today.

Lovecraft on Film: The Unnamable (Jean-Paul Ouellette, 1988)

“The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men’s crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty: no freedom – we can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron straightjacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.”  - H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Unnamable’

First published in the July 1925 issue of ‘Weird Tales’, H.P. Lovecraft’s brief tale ‘The Unnamable’ is an odd business, even by its author’s usual standards. Though ostensibly a conventional horror story, with an old dark house, a graveyard, scary folk tales and a grisly climax involving an indescribable monster to be found within its few short pages, Lovecraft’s intentions in drafting this one actually seem to have lain somewhere else entirely.

Seemingly functioning more as an extended in-joke aimed at the author’s fans and correspondents, ‘The Unnamable’ is in fact an archly self-aware piece of niche literary jocularity. Chiefly centred around a faux-Platonic dialogue conducted between two gentlemen lounging around in an Arkham cemetery, it also meanwhile provides a vehicle for Lovecraft’s sincerely held views on the value of mystery and ambiguity within literature and culture (as opposed to the smug, Christian Science-derived rationality proffered by his hypothetical critics).

Though identified in the story’s final sentence as “Carter”, the narrator of ‘The Unnamable’ is clearly a stand-in for Lovecraft himself – an amateur scribbler of spooky tales, criticised by his more down-to-earth friends for his “..constant talk about ‘unnamable’ and ‘unmentionable’ things”; “..a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my low standing as an author,” the narrator informs us, tongue firmly in cheek.

Beginning with the unforgettable opening gambit, “We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying-ground in Arkham and speculating about the unnamable,” the story in fact allows us a rare glimpse of Lovecraft’s capacity not only to recognise, but to happily lampoon, the excesses of his own style, as he proceeds to pepper his text with adjective-clogged sentences so patently absurd that they surely must have been intended as a kind of winking self-parody.(1)

Much of this literary jiggery-pokery is inevitably lost in Jean-Paul Ouellette’s 1988 movie adaptation of ‘The Unnamable’, but nonetheless, the first-time writer/director does a surprisingly good job of retaining the self-reflexive tone of the piece, remaining faithful both to the flimsy outline of the story, and to the reassuringly eerie atmosphere of Lovecraft’s fantastical New England.(2)

Immediately expanding upon Lovecraft’s story, the film opens with a historical prologue which seems designed to reassure nervous Weird Tales fans that they can nix that outraged letter to the editor of ‘Crypt of Cthulhu’ – this movie’s got them covered.

In the drawing-room of a shadow-haunted, colonial mansion, an aged alchemist or warlock of some kind is chilling out with his extensive collection of grimoires. But, his contemplation of the Pnakotic Manuscripts is persistently interrupted by the unholy sounds emanating from the house’s gabled attic room, causing him to recall that this is where he has locked up the unseen, and indeed unnameable, creature which used to by his wife.

One cautious (and, it must be said, extremely slow) ascent of the perilous staircase later, following some shaky fingering of the wrought iron key which may perchance unlock the big, rusted padlock which keeps the door chained, and – surprise! – we’re treated to some of the best value late ‘80s gore that money can buy, and “the unnameable” is on the loose.

Though admirable in its intent to establish an authentically “Lovecraftian” feel, the meagre resources with which this film was produced are all too clearly on view during this prologue. Though the sets and lighting are pretty decent, and the grimoires and candles and stuff look lovely, some of the other period details have a bit of an Andy Milligan feel to them, which does not necessarily bode well for what follows.

(I just couldn’t get past the absolutely ridiculous nightcap/hanky thing the old man is wearing on his head, whilst the puritan minister who turns up to declare that the house should be sealed up and shunned for all eternity looks about twenty years old, and appears to be wearing a sheet of A1 printing paper with a hole cut in the middle around his neck.)

We’re on safer ground however – in terms of costumery, at least - as we zip forward to present day, where we find ourselves in a bucolic cemetery just down the road from Arkham’s Miskatonic University campus. Here, as per Lovecraft’s tale, a group of friends are indeed ‘speculating about the unnameable’. Admittedly, the mature adults of HPL’s story (in which the narrator’s rationalist antagonist is identified as “principal of the East High School”) have been recast here as fresh-faced students, and there are three of them, rather than two, but y’know – this is an ‘80s horror movie. Young victims are needed. 

Making an inter-textual jump never explicitly stated in the source text, Ouellette’s screenplay assumes that that our narrator, “Carter”, is in fact none other than Randolph Carter, protagonist of both HPL’s titular ‘Statement of…’ (1919), and his subsequent series of Dunsany-inspired “dreamland” fantasies.

As played here by the immediately likeable Mark Kinsey Stephenson, it is also clear that this Randolph Carter is going to be anything but a sickly, introverted Lovecraft stand-in. In fact, he comes across as a lively and rather charismatic figure right from the outset, becoming more-so as the movie progresses.

An oddball aspiring folklorist possessed of nervous energy and a presumably vast knowledge of esoteric lore, Stephenson’s Carter makes for a pretty great horror movie hero all round. It’s easy to imagine him having headed up his own TV show or on-going franchise in which he traipsed around New England, collecting old stories and investigating sinister goings-on, like some more collegiate equivalent of Manly Wade Wellman’s ‘Silver John’ character.

(Though this possibility sadly never came to pass, the appeal of Stephenson’s characterisation was clearly not lost on Ouellette and his collaborators; ‘The Unnamable’s 1992 sequel is sub-titled “The Statement of Randolph Carter”, with Stephenson top-billed.)

Unfortunately, none of the other characters here are quite so memorable, but again – we’re in ‘80s horror movie territory here, so they’re all just meat for the grinder, more or less. For the most part the cast acquit themselves fairly well, with Charles Klausmeyer standing out for his young Roman Polanski / John Moulder-Brown type look in the role of Carter’s younger buddy/protégé Howard Damon. (He also seems to wear a tweed suit and tie to campus every day, which lends a touch of class.) 

In this telling of the story, Carter’s rationalist antagonist in the graveyard discussion – business major Joel Manton, played by Mark Parra – becomes so worked up about his friend’s willingness to embrace the supernatural that he stomps off in the direction of the haunted house just across the way, declaring that he will spend the night there in order to prove that nothing untoward is going on within. (Good luck with that, fella.)

Shrugging this off, Carter and Damon meanwhile return to campus, where we re-join them the following morning in the Miskatonic University library, where they discuss Manton’s apparent failure to return from his impromptu camp-out.

Meanwhile, we suddenly find ourselves in the middle of a routine campus slasher, as two studious sorority girls (one of whom the shy Damon happens to have the hots for) are chatted up by a pair of generic frat-boys, one of whom proudly displays that universal signifier of jockitude, a woollen sweater hanging loose over his shoulders (where indeed it remains, worn like a cloak, for the entire remainder of the movie).

Claiming rather feebly that they need to undertake some nocturnal location-scouting for forthcoming initiation-related hi-jinks, the jocks manage to convince the reluctant girls to meet them at the spooky old house by the graveyard that evening for a thinly veiled double-date, and… well you don’t need to be much of an aspiring folklorist to figure out where all this is headed. (Toward a partial recreation of 1981’s ‘Hell Night’, if nothing else.)

This mixture of quirky, Lovecraftian atmospherics and rote slasher movie cliché may seem a little jarring at first, but ‘The Unnamable’s tone actually remains pretty consistent throughout, using hefty doses of humour and raised eyebrow self-awareness to distract attention from the minimal and formulaic plotting -- much as Lovecraft did in his original tale, in fact.

Despite the low budget, the film’s photography (courtesy of DP Tom Fraser) is pretty good, particularly once the action moves entirely into the cluttered, candle-lit interior of the derelict old house during the movie’s second half, making extensive, rather fantastical use of blue gel lighting, alongside some imaginatively patterned shadows.

So smitten do the filmmakers seem in fact by their creepy gothic lighting, the film actually begins to suffer from something of a middle act slump, as characters spend a very, very long time exploring the eerily lit interior sets. Feeling suspiciously like attempts to pad out a near non-existent narrative to feature length, these extended peregrinations could well induce severe wakefulness / attention-span issues amongst late night/inebriated viewers, but as a dedicated fan of ‘60s Italian gothics, I was personally happy enough to roll with ‘em.

Likewise, David Bergeaud’s ridiculously over-bearing, faux-classical keyboard score may prove an intolerable for some, but I actually found it weirdly endearing, functioning in a sense as a persistent reminder of the film’s independent/low budget origins and determined eccentricity, lest we begin expecting it to get too slick n’ professional.

As befits a movie dealing with the, ahem, “unnameable”, much of the drag in the middle half hour results from the filmmakers’ reluctance to reveal their monster. The mystery of what the creature actually looks like is maintained for what, by 80s/90s b-horror standards, feels like an exceptionally long time. And, when we do finally start to get some glimpses of our resident beastie, well…. the hairy goat legs were a bit of a surprise, I’ll tell you that much. [Cue momentary flashback to Dragnet (1987).] 

Unfortunately, most of the posters and box art for this movie rather give the game away, spoiling the eventual appearance of the monster by utilising stills which make it look a scrawny cousin of that demon thing from Ridley Scott’s ‘Legend’, but if we can put that out of our minds before viewing, the creature’s eventual Big Reveal within the movie itself is…. actually quite impressive.

Portrayed by actress Katrin Alexandre, who employs a series of extravagantly theatrical, choreographed movements, this creature’s amalgam of disparate monster tropes manages to justify the “unnameable” epithet about as well as anything which could be conjured up on this movie’s budget possibly could. 

Fans may be liable to declare that it looks absolutely nothing like the kind of entity we usually think of as fitting in to Lovecraft’s universe, but they’d be well advised to refer back to the source text, wherein HPL, who seems to been on a bit of a Cotton Mather-inspired backwoods folklore kick at this point, does actually state that his indescribable creature’s attributes include horns and cloven hooves, as well as the more familiar tentacles and shapeless, shifting clods of organic matter.

Obvious though it may be, the climactic scene here in which the monster skulks in the shadows whilst a doomed jock/sorority girl couple are making out in a deserted room (thus delivering the film’s requisite minimum quantity of gratuitous nudity), rolling a severed head into the view of the female partner, is very well done – a killer scare with some sharp editing. (Meanwhile, I’ve also got to admire the fact that the couple weren’t deterred by discovering a bloody femur bone beneath their makeshift bed.)

Another highlight in the lead-up to the film’s conclusion are the scenes which find a flustered Randolph Carter indulging in a few arch, rather Jeffrey Combs-esque line readings as he ploughs his way through the deceased warlock’s grimoire collection, which has apparently been left untouched for three centuries. Kicking up as much dust as you’d expect in the process, he eventually zeroes in on (what else?) the ‘Necronomicon’ itself, and, in a development almost certainly inspired by ‘The Evil Dead’, he’s soon located the requisite “anaal nathrakh”s necessary to send the unnamable creature which was once the ancient wizard’s wife back from whence it came. (3)

(Actually, it’s implied that Carter saves the day by invoking some kind of dryad-ish woodland spirits embodied in the trees outside the house, or something – an interesting, if under-explored, twist.) 

Though not a lost classic by any stretch of the imagination, ‘The Unnamable’ is nonetheless a noble effort. Ouellette was clearly a sincere fan of Lovecraft’s work, and his attempt to make a film which might actually appeal to his fellow cultists whilst also fulfilling the commercial requirements of a late ‘80s American horror movie demonstrates a certain amount of both daring and ingenuity.

Considering that he and his collaborators were working on a miniscule budget, utilising a largely inexperienced cast and crew, and working to a script which ultimately doesn’t add up to much more than a handful of well-worn genre clichés, I think ‘The Unnamable’ actually emerges as a surprisingly accomplished piece of work, within its own modest parameters. It conveys a ‘little-train-that-could’ style sense of fun and achievement, which seasoned connoisseurs of independent American horror should be able to appreciate, even if it couldn’t hope to hit the heights so recently scaled by Stuart Gordon and co in the field of Lovecraftian cinema. 

---- 

(1)Just as an example, try this one on for size: “Moreover, so far as aesthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”

(2) After working in camera tech / continuity roles on a variety of marginal New York-based productions in late ‘70s, Ouellette seems to have gotten quite a big break when he was appointed as ‘second unit director (action)’ on ‘The Terminator’ in 1984, but sadly his career in the film industry never really seems to have gained much traction after this. Aside from the two ‘Unnameable’ films, his only other feature as director is a 1990 STV actioner named ‘Chinatown Connection’, and the remainder of his sparse CV comprises short films, a TV movie script and production credits on a few little-known projects in the early ‘00s. 

(3) Yeah, I know “anaal nathrakh” is actually from ‘Excalibur’, but gimme a break here – I just like it more than the ‘Evil Dead’ incantations.

Half Time Report: Twin Peaks: The Return(2017)

PLEASE NOTE: For the avoidance of confusion, I’ve chosen to refer to the third series of Twin Peaks aired in 2017 as “Twin Peaks: The Return”, or “Twin Peaks 2017”. The blu-ray box set sitting next to my TV may herald it as “A Limited  Series Event”, but that makes it sound like promo for a range of aftershave or something, so I’ll avoid it and just stick to shorter suffix if nobody minds.

ALSO: As a side effect of my decision to stick to general impressions rather than being drawn into the discussion of individual plot points or story elements in the text below, this post remains largely free of spoilers, so – readers who are even later than me in catching up with the new ‘Twin Peaks’ are advised to read on and fear not.

Given that I posted my reflections on revisiting the original 1990-91 run of ‘Twin Peaks’ almost exactly two years ago, I suppose there may conceivably be some readers wondering what I made of the series’ much heralded 2017 reiteration. So, eight months late (which in fairness beats the 40+ years of lateness that apply to most of my posts here), it’s time for me to come down from the mountain and present my thoughts on the first 50% of this project’s epic eighteen episode run, which I have been watching for the first time this month.

At some point in the near future, I will aim to follow this up with another post, in order to assess how these half-digested impressions, opinions and hypotheses hold up once I have completed by viewing of the series.


1. Running on Empty: Episodes #1 - #6

Though episode # 1 sailed by nicely on the excitement and anticipation of being back in this world and meeting these familiar characters again, I’m afraid I can’t avoid the fact that episodes #2 to #6 proved a real drag. My experience of watching them was in fact characterised by a slow realisation that ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 was shaping up to be a considerable disappointment – either an entirely cynical venture on the part of David Lynch & Mark Frost, or else a colossal artistic miscalculation.

It’s not that the footage and ideas of which the seemingly endless, disjointed narrative strands that comprise these episodes are objectively bad, or boring, or offensive or anything, but… how can I best put this?

The core episodes of the original 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’ (which I would define as including everything up to and including the unmasking of Laura Palmer’s killer) were alternately mysterious, terrifying, funny and charming.

That’s not just a random list of subjective hyperbole either – it’s a very specific one. It is difficult for a piece of narrative film to maintain any of those feelings over an extended period of time, yet ‘Twin Peaks’ succeeded in delivering a intoxicating mixture of all of them, in over-powering quantities, week-on-week. That – more than any of the cultish Lynchian weirdness that people immediately associate with the show – is the reason why it made such an impression on viewers, and why it has acquired such legendary status.

This achievement is thrown into stark relief by the fact that the initial batch of episodes of the 2017 ‘Twin Peaks’ – as master-minded by a pair of creators now gifted with total freedom and seemingly unlimited resources – initially fail to deliver on any of these qualities.

Somewhat uniquely in my experience of watching film and television, they furthermore beg our indulgence in asking us to sit through an expanse of footage longer than some directors’ entire filmographies, before any equivalent redeeming qualities may or may not eventually begin to coalesce.

Should I wish to, I could prattle on for thousands of words about the myriad things that annoyed me through the arid expanse of episodes #2 to #6, but in retrospect, it occurs to me that what really irked me about them was basically the way that – just like show’s original run – ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 taps into the aesthetic of its era.

Just as the unique qualities of the ‘Twin Peaks’ 1990-’91 grew from the mutated framework of an ‘80s-‘90s daytime soap opera – complete with fuzzy, over-saturated colour, pungent promises of romance and melodrama, luxuriantly appointed sets and lush, overbearing musical cues – so ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 correspondingly anchors itself in the aesthetics of a 21st century HBO-style high-brow TV show.

Specifically, this equates to a visual tone of almost oppressively crystal clear, HD faux-reality – the cinematic equivalent of a modern office’s remorseless overhead strip-lights. The ‘relatable’/everyday qualities of the people who inhabit this environment meanwhile are heavily sign-posted at every turn, and we are repeatedly invited to join characters who are barely more than ciphers (despite reams of expositional back story) as they seemingly wallow dewy-eyed in the emptiness and alienation of their lives (in between exchanges of on-message wise-cracks and gratuitous displays of solipsistic decadence, that is).

As you will have gathered, this is not really an aesthetic I favour, and as such I found these early episodes a frustrating experience.

There are wonderful moments scattered through these episodes, of course. (Seeing Harry Dean Stanton, still full of spark and strength in one of his last ever screen appearances, is a particular highlight, even if the trailer park he manages seems to have been mysteriously teleported to Twin Peaks from the entirely different town in which it was located in ‘Fire Walk With Me’.)

The overall feeling though is one of blandness, with the bulk of the discursive plot strands subsisting purely on the level of somewhat diverting, mildly entertaining filler – somewhat akin to spending an afternoon watching random videos of people doing odd things on Youtube.

But, it is very much worth pointing out at this stage that the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’ also took its sweet time to fully emerge from its soap opera / murder mystery cocoon. It was only with the revelation of Agent Cooper’s unconventional investigative methods, and his first vision of The Man From The Other Place (which must have been absolutely mind-boggling to unsuspecting viewers on first broadcast) that it became clear we weren’t in Kansas anymore, whilst further moments of capital letter Weirdness were doled out very sparingly thereafter.

By contrast, ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 inevitably showcases it’s dedication to the cause of High Weirdness right from the outset – indeed, it ostensibly piles it on in quantities hitherto unknown on broadcast TV. But, in retrospect I feel that the early episodes I’m discussing here were nonetheless operating on a similar ‘slow-build’ principle to the original series. Whether or not ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 will eventually succeed in blowing minds or upsetting expectations to an extent comparable to the 1990-91 run remains an open question at this point in my viewing (although it seems unlikely, given that a relentless tirade of trademark Lynchian hoo-hah have basically reduced our expectations to “literally anything could happen next”). But, for the moment, I can give them the benefit of the doubt.


2. Paradigm Ambulance?

As I outlined in my previous ‘Twin Peaks’ post, I feel that the success of the series – and indeed the success of the trilogy of L.A. based quasi-horror films that Lynch has subsequently completed – relies to a significant extent upon the non-dogmatic interplay between psychological/expressionistic and overtly supernatural explanations of the on-screen events. (1)

To put this as simply as I can: in the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’, what is the nature of the dark, evil thing – a thing too frightful for them to even mention it out loud, let alone assigning a name to it - that The Book House Boys and the other virtuous characters stand in opposition to?

Is it the gateway to another order of being, occupied by a malign power so alien in nature that – in classic Lovecraftian tradition – human sensory organs can only comprehend it in a garbled, fragmentary manner?

Or, is it the equally unspeakable truth of a network of child abuse and sexual exploitation that has existed beneath the surface of the town’s public life for so long that it has touched the lives of just about everybody?

The answer is of course that it is both – they are one and the same, and it is the frisson between these two paradigms that provides the series with much of its indelible power.

By disregarding this precarious balance, ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 is in danger of ultimately coming up empty, its events signifying little beyond their surface level function as an extended horror/science fiction potboiler.

Whilst the human drama of the new series is too diffuse and fragmentary for us to really dig into any of our characters emotional lives beyond their involvement in the Frost/Lynch mind-maze, likewise The Black Lodge / Other Place – so terrifying and inexplicable in the past – becomes merely banal in its 2017 reiteration. Stripped of the dense layers of fear and obfuscation that shadowed its existence in the original series, it is treated here simply as a routine (if admirably surrealistic) SF conceit.

To my great surprise in fact, the thing that is most sorely missed in ‘Twin Peaks’ 2017 thus far is the sense of palpable fear and cosmic dread that has been a trademark of David Lynch’s work ever since ‘Eraserhead’.

As soon as those deep, dark drones start rumbling, the light fittings start flickering and the camera starts slowly edging around the next corner, anyone familiar with the director’s work will know the time has come to brace themselves accordingly. It may be have become a cliché by this point, and Lynch’s apparent desire to move on from it is perhaps understandable, but his failure to replace his ‘old faithful’ with any new ways to terrify us here is pretty dispiriting.

Although ostensibly upsetting and berserkly violent things happen with great frequency in the new ‘Twin Peaks’, few of them succeed in making any real impact. It’s as if, somehow, the man who once managed to make shots of ceiling fans and traffic lights resonate with soul-withering malevolence has here decided to rush through depictions of spectral hobos tearing people’s faces off and psychotic dwarfs murdering women with ice-picks as if he was just getting from A to B on a routine sit-com assignment.

Minor plot points and gnomic coded messages may still be dangled before the us as if they were tantalising hints of some ungraspable mystery, but, once we’ve become accustomed to the existence of the Lodge and basically accepted it as some sort of alternate dimension from which weird people, some good and some bad, occasionally emerge to fuck with us… well, beyond that, what mystery is left to uncover, really?

With the personal/‘psychological’ interpretation of events entirely off the table, are the precise details of what these beings are up to really all that important, or even interesting?

With the ‘supernatural’ plot-line thus rendered as innocuous as a surprisingly psychedelic episode of ‘The X Files’, the new ‘Twin Peaks’ often feels not just bland, but empty, hollowed out – chronically lacking in the thematic resonance and murky emotional depths that characterised the original series.

Moreso that the aesthetic/storytelling lapses I’ve griped about earlier in this post, I feel this will be a difficult obstacle for Frost & Lynch to overcome in subsequent episodes, but…. perhaps my constant comparisons to the original series are unhelpful here. Fingers crossed our writers are just re-setting the table here for some entirely different kind of thematic significance, as yet unguessed at by myself.


3. Picking up steam: Episodes #7 – #9

Although I think it’s best to retain my extended griping above, just in order to capture a range of arguments and observations that I hope will prove interesting on some level, I’m cautiously going to declare that my belief that, from episode # 7 onwards, the new ‘Twin Peaks’ has really been picking up steam, moving – albeit with painstakingly leisure – toward territory that has the potential to engage and fascinate us anew, and to pull us in directions that will hopefully render my desire to constantly reference back to the achievements of the original series happily unnecessary.

The new and not-so-new characters are finally starting to get their hooks into me, and the infuriating narrative non-sequiturs are finally starting to coalesce into something that suggests they may all actually be going somewhere meaningful, rather than just padding out the run-time with endless shaggy dog stories.

Still early days yet – even after nine hours! – but sparks of that old Lynch magic are finally starting to fly; in slo-mo, the match is being struck, throwing shadow on the rambling, inconsequential world we’ve been occupying for the past six/seven hours.

Particularly of note here of course is Episode # 8 (‘Got a Light?’), a sure-to-be-preceded-by-‘infamous’ benchmark of televisual headfuckery, which seemingly aims – with the same grandiose avoidance of subtlety that has characterised all of David Lynch’s 21st century work – to elicit the same dropped jaws and baffled expressions of disbelief from viewers that the original ‘Man From The Other Place’ sequence must have inspired back in 1990.

Essentially, this episode represents a self-contained, stand-alone David Lynch short film; but, unlike the similarly disjointed sequences that have also given this impression during the preceding episodes, ‘Got a Light?’ is an extremely distinctive and powerful David Lynch short film, harking directly back to the grotesquery and abstraction of ‘Eraserhead’ and early shorts like 1970’s ‘The Grandmother’, amped up to proportions the younger Lynch could only dream of by means of studio production values and the possibilities allowed by the (perhaps somewhat excessive) application of CGI effects.

So audacious in fact is this fifty minute diversion from all televisual norms that I’m almost inclined to believe Lynch simply grabbed a credit card from the production office, hired a bunch of visual effects artists and just started making the damn thing without seeking anyone’s approval, leaving somebody (Frost presumably) to desperately justify its existence by crow-baring in some tenuous connections to the ‘Twin Peaks’ universe.

Ironically, these forced and rather silly series references serve to rather spoil the overall effect of what is otherwise a perfectly unsettling surrealist tour de force on Lynch’s part – one that, for all that it may initially seem entirely disconnected from the rest of ‘Twin Peaks’, nonetheless succeeds in tearing open a whole new can of potential thematic concerns, through which the comparatively mundane episodes that surround it can perhaps be re-evaluated.


4. New patterns emerge?

In ‘Got a Light?’, Lynch seems to be introducing us to the notion that, at the point of the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945, some dark spirit entered the USA. Moving forward eleven years from there – and using a set of imagery highly reminiscent of atomic-era American monster movies – he portrays some beings apparently spawned from this event literally emerging from the New Mexico soil and infiltrating and/or violently destroying various symbols of the dream-like innocence that the director has always assigned to the beloved, electrified 1950s of his childhood.

In view of this, it is worth noting that allusions to American nationhood and the faintly melancholic reflections on “American dream”/national heritage type imagery that seems to pop up with peculiar persistence throughout the opening half of ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’.

Alongside the expected celebration of the FBI as a great, inclusive national institution and general force for good in the world (once again, ‘Twin Peaks’ surely provides the Feds with the best PR they’ve received at any point in their existence), we have Gordon Cole – his desk backed by a giant blow up of a mushroom cloud – gazing longingly at the flag, and earnestly contemplating the photograph of Mt. Rushmore that Albert hands him at the start of their sojourn in South Dakota (“FACES OF STONE”).

In Las Vegas meanwhile, Dougie Jones (our sleeping hero) gazes blankly at the statue of a gesticulating cowboy that stands in the centre of the disconcertingly clean public square fronting the bland, new-build office complex that houses the insurance company for which he works. In a later scene, we find Dougie and Janey-E in the waiting area of a similarly anti-sceptic police station. As the cynical, self-absorbed Vegas cops waste their time, Dougie finds himself staring at the forlorn, loosely rolled American flag that sits in the corner of the room, as a warped, Caretaker-ised version of ‘America the Brave’ plays distantly on the soundtrack, and, of course, an electrical socket crackles ominously.

This reminds me in turn of one of The Log Lady’s cryptic messages to Deputy Hawk, in which – you’ll forgive me for not checking back to get an exact quote – she speaks of electricity being everywhere, crackling through the air, over the water and the woods, putting me in mind of the expressions of elation inspired by the electrification of the plains and the spread of electric lights to remote parts of the USA during the early 20th century. (I’m particularly reminded of Richard Brautigan’s beautiful I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone from ‘Revenge of the Lawn’.) The Log Lady goes on however to note that the power of which she speaks is getting dimmer, and harder to find – she says there’s not so much of it around, these days.

Could Lynch be moving here toward some kind of elegiac reflection on the slow death of America? Is he encouraging us to cross-reference these moments of patriotic nostalgia with the depression, violence and confusion that seems to characterise the air-conditioned lives of the show’s 21st century characters? Well, it’s just a thought. (2)

This all coincides of course with Lynch’s continued fascination with the sinister properties of electricity – a long-running trope within his work that reaches new heights in ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’. Rather than simply sign-posting the inter-connections between different orders of being (or, warning of the proximity of evil) as they have in past works, the fizzing sockets, crackling bulbs, humming power lines and so on seem at times here to be reaching a kind of continuous, rolling crescendo, drawing an inevitable comparison with the language of fire and light frequently employed by the denizens of the Lodge and their earthly intermediaries, and taking us, by implication, straight back to that ultimate holy fire - the nightmare of nuclear incineration depicted so vividly in ‘Got a Light?’

That episode title – uttered by the black-faced “woodsmen” creatures as they mechanically thrust unlit cigarettes in the face of prospective victims – speaks for itself in this context (as above, so below), as does Hawk’s unravelling of his ancient Native American map of the Twin Peaks area, with its ominous warning of the “black fire”.

The ‘blue rose’ (the code name for Gordon Cole’s covert unit within the FBI) is of course often used as an example something that does not occur within nature. Opponents of nuclear power have likewise often characterised atomic science as “unnatural”, raising spectres of a warning against “meddling in forces beyond our understanding” common to both Frankensteinian mad science narratives and also to the kind of occult/black magickal dabbling that – reflecting the fearful warnings of The Log Lady – could easily lead ill-prepared humans into communion with the denizens of the Lodge.

In view of the clear science fictional slant evidenced in ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’, I’m sure you’ll all recall Arthur C. Clarke’s oft-quoted “sufficiently advanced science indistinguishable from magic” jive.

Given that ‘Twin Peaks: The Return’ seems keen on going far more deeply into the origins of Cole’s “Blue Rose” investigations and their thoroughly X Files-y background in the US Army’s ‘Project Blue Book’, could we be looking at a ‘Twin Peaks’ that ends – in the ultimate example of bombastic narrative one-upmanship – with some supernaturally mandated countdown to Armageddon..? (Or, here’s hoping, something a little more original and thought-provoking, drawn from these same themes.) Fire Walk With Me, indeed.

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That’s all for now – TO BE CONTINUED once I’ve been able to gather my thoughts after watching episodes #10 - #18.

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(1) I won’t clog up space by going into it here, but I’d actually contest that ‘Lost Highway’, ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘Inland Empire’ can all easily be read as taking place within the same “world” as ‘Twin Peaks’ – an idea that is lent further weight by the parallels with those films’ plot lines that creep into the 2017 series. In essence, all three of these films concern characters who are victimised by dark, evil powers from another order of being, manipulated by them into carrying out assassinations and other acts for reasons unknown, then abandoned to states of madness, fragmentation of identity and/or death. The flickering of electricity that heralds manifestations from beyond, the garbled messages of unclear significance delivered by its messengers, and the weird, unheimlich human forms they assume – none of this will be new to viewers of ‘Twin Peaks’, and no further evidence should be needed I feel to establish all of these works as part of the same shared universe.

(2) Through much of his work, Lynch seems to have been positing an “innocence corrupted” narrative of American society, presenting his shimmering, guilt-free suburban ideal of the 1950s – with a particular emphasis on the hope and excitement that that decade’s technology and engineered seemed to represent – and contrasting it with a creeping tide of cynicism, uncertainly, psychosis and moral turpitude that he seems to imply has weakened and eventually destroyed this ideal through subsequent decades. In ‘Blue Velvet’, we can see this latter strain portrayed as a kind of “worm in the apple” corrupting suburbia from within, and this interpretation can also obviously be placed upon the overriding narrative of the 1990-91 ‘Twin Peaks’.

Subsequent to this I think, it is notable that Lynch’s trilogy of L.A.-set films take place in a world that is already thoroughly corrupt, sinking deep into a noir-ish abyss and impossible for the kind of honest, avuncular characters that Lynch often champions to negotiate without finding their personalities shattered into pieces. It’s as if he is admitting that the battle has already been lost, that the America he knew as a child has already fallen, torn apart by the loss of innocence that was the second half of the 20th century. (This, essentially, is the story he gives us in miniature through the oddball science fictional imagery of ‘Got a Light?’)

October Horrors #9: The Void (Jeremy Gillespie & Steven Kostanski, 2016)

Our token new movie for this Halloween season, and I’m sad to report that, despite a “can’t miss” outlay (heavily Carpenter-influenced action/survival horror about inter-dimensional Lovecraftian beastliness breaking loose in an isolated hospital) and a fair amount of positive word of mouth, ‘The Void’ never really came together the way I wanted it to.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of good stuff in here - some solid performances, genuinely fearful notions, great practical effects and a few eyebrow searingly intense moments, but, for all its good references and technical acumen, it felt to me like a film that never quite got the drop of what it wanted to be, or how it intended to get there.

To get straight to the heart of one of the film’s biggest problems, well… let’s put it this way: ‘Assault on Precinct 13’, ‘The Thing’, ‘Prince of Darkness’, ‘Halloween’, ‘Reanimator’, ‘The Resurrected’, ‘Possession’, ‘Hellraiser’, ‘Night of the Living Dead’, ‘The Beyond’.

Did I miss any, guys? Let’s swap lists and compare.

I normally have a pretty high tolerance for in-jokes and cultural references in cinema, to the extent that I’d normally be perfectly happy for filmmakers to let me know in no uncertain terms that they think any of the items on the above list are really cool, but, even by the furthest reaches of what it allowable in a post-Tarantino world, there are limits.

If Gillespie & Kostanski were merely making a fun monster romp, their decision to pay tribute to the aforementioned inspirations, not by harnessing the ambition, atmosphere or imagination that made them so memorable in the first place but instead merely by shamelessly imitating bits of them, might have flown ok with me.

For better or for worse though, that is not what they’re making (or at least, I don’t think it is – like I say, there is some confusion of intent here), and ‘The Void’s combination of fan service-level borderline plagiarism with a tone of deadly seriousness, bordering on outright solemnity, sat poorly with me.

This then leads us neatly on to second big problem, which to be honest is the one that really irked me. Throughout the film, I found there was an uncomfortable disjuncture between ‘The Void’s ostensible identity as a gore n’ tentacle splattered, shotgun-blasting self-aware horror movie, and its apparent desire to simultaneously Address Serious Themes – an ambition it achieves only in a manner both humourless and heartless, badly harshing the buzz of the movie’s horror aspects in the process.

If I might broaden our scope slightly to make a more general point: although literary theorists in recent years have had a field day expounding upon the ego-crushing existential vanishing point of the ‘cosmic horror’ sub-genre pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft, it is nonetheless instructive to remember that, for those of us who enjoy these stories of universal doom and hopelessness, they represent a form of escapism just as potent as any sword n’ sorcery fantasy.

To not put too fine a point on it, when we find ourselves contemplating the slumbering survival of Great Cthulhu and the forthcoming epoch of madness and extinction, we have basically just found another way to temporarily excuse ourselves from the more day to day miseries of disease, poverty, loneliness and stress. Like losing oneself in a floor-shaking doom metal record – or, hey, why not a horror movie? - the darkness of an aesthetically stylised annihilation becomes a comfort blanket, much the same as any other.

By seeking to place issues regarding the grief that follows the death of a child and the subsequent damage inflicted upon relationships and/or mental health at the centre of their story, Gillespie & Kostanski cross the streams of this particular equation rather heinously, making it difficult to enjoy frequent cutaways to some “hey dude, remember that bit from ‘The Thing’?!” kind of scene whilst also leaving the ‘real world human emotion’ stuff feeling inauthentic and crass, handled as it is in the frowning, hand-wringing manner of a TV mini-series tearjerker.

That’s not to say of course that such subject matter can’t or shouldn’t be explored within a pulp fiction context – far from it. But there’s a way to do it and a way NOT to do to it, y’know?

For a particularly egregious example of the way that ‘The Void’ keeps flubbing it, look no further than the nigh-on-unbearable sequence during the build up to the film’s finale wherein, for a few moments, it looks as if a terrified, untrained medical intern is going to have to perform an emergency caesarean section upon a traumatised pregnant woman, whilst an elderly man with a hand weapon keeps guard against the faceless murderers who may or may not be roaming the corridors outside.

Now, I must declare a personal ‘thing’ here, in that anything involving pregnancy, birth and new-born children in a violent/horror context always twists my guts and freaks me out something rotten. As such, you will appreciate that watching this scene was not a terribly happy experience for me, but regardless.

The point is, when it is subsequently revealed that both mother and child are actually mutated minions of the film’s demonic/alien evil, I can’t imagine I was alone in experiencing not the shock and horror that the filmmakers presumably intended this (fairly predictable) revelation to evoke, but instead simply feeling relief that we were back in the fantasy realm of monsters and special effects, and no longer needed to deal with the more tangible reality of that other scene. Which is all pretty ass-backwards if you take a second to think about it.

On a more prosaic level meanwhile, whilst ‘The Void’ is undoubtedly shot and edited with admirable skill, its core visual storytelling often feels weak in a manner common to many 21st century films. Despite their painfully obvious veneration for the John Carpenter canon, the filmmakers don’t seem to have fully appreciated that, when a director like Carpenter staged this kind of tense action/survival scenario, he presented it to us simple, uncluttered fashion that allowed us to easily understand the logic of what was going down on the ground level.

I had initially composed several paragraphs of reactionary, old man griping on this subject, but... nobody needs that, so I've nixed them for now. Let's just say that, whilst of course I wouldn’t advocate a return to the freedom-crushing excesses of a top-down studio system, this is the kind of for-the-love-of-it indie movie that I find myself thinking could have benefited from some cigar-chewing exec locking the ‘creatives’ in the editing room until they got their shit together and gave him a sellable picture.

In writing this, I seem to have ended up being considerably harsher on ‘The Void’ that I intended to be. There is honestly a lot of good stuff here. It’s certainly a hell of a lot better than the most contemporary low budget horror films, that's for sure, but…. there’s nothing that invites a bad review so much as a movie that *almost* makes the grade, is there? One that has all the right moves but just keeps slipping up when it matters.

Ah well, don’t take my word for it – give it a watch yourself and draw your own conclusions. If you’re interested in contemporary horror movies, it’s worth your time at the very least.

The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light by Arthur Machen (John Lane editions, 1894)

“Look about you, Clarke. You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchards, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things - yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet - I say that all these are but dreams and shadows: the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career,’ beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another’s eyes. You may think all this strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan.”

Clarke shivered; the white mist gathering over the river was chilly.

“It is wonderful indeed,” he said. “We are standing on the brink of a strange world, Raymond, if what you say is true. I suppose the knife is absolutely necessary?”

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Although unburdened for the most part by conventional literary merit, the fifty pages of Arthur Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’ somehow remain unique, and indeed shocking, reading, over a century after they were composed.

Now clearly I don’t ACTUALLY own an original edition of ‘The Great God Pan’ with Aubrey Beardsley cover illustration, but the great Welsh mystic writer has been on my mind a lot this week, so it seems a good opportunity to post some covers to his work that are more worth looking at than the volumes I do own.

Firstly, I was thinking on Machen because I’ve been reading S.T. Joshi’s The Weird Tale, which begins with an essay on his work. A nice drive through the rolling hills of Brecon and Herefordshire on the way to hunt books in Hay On Wye brought him to mind again, and upon arriving, I actually managed to grab a copy of a Joshi-edited Machen collection, incorporating both ‘The Great God Pan’ and his much sought after (by me, at least) weird novel ‘The Three Imposters’.

This collection (The Three Imposters and Other Stories) is published by the fiction wing of Call of Cthulhu role-playing game magnates Chaosium, a circumstance which initially seems bizarre given how little of Machen’s wider work has even the vaguest connection to Lovecraftian horror. One overnight re-read of ‘The Great God Pan’ later however, and the fact that Machen’s legacy is largely kept alive by Weird Tales freaks, despite his authorship of endless, rambling stories in which nobody does anything more exciting than go for a nice walk, suddenly makes perfect sense.


Aside from anything else, the vast influence the story must have held over H.P. Lovecraft as he created his Cthulhu Mythos tales is self-evident. Machen’s fragmentary structure, full of aimless digressions, portions of letters and detailed descriptions of drawings and architecture, his flat, utilitarian characters, his ‘nameless horrors’ that immediately drive men to madness and suicide, and above all, his endless dark hinting, hinting, hinting, bursting occasionally into orgiastic stretches of purple prose – all of these devices will be intimately familiar to Lovecraft fans, however baffling and poorly realised they must seem to outsiders.

Beyond that though, ‘The Great God Pan’ provides a perfect example of my frequently spouted notion that the best literary horror stories are always those that spring from unsound minds. For, moreso even than Poe or Lovecraft, Arthur Machen was, shall we say… a complicated man.

I first read ‘The Great God Pan’ in the Dover edition where it is printed alongside his later work ‘The Hill of Dreams’(1907), a thinly veiled autobiographical novel which, perhaps uniquely for a weird tales author, manages to be even more strange and upsetting than his horror stories, as he speaks in naive and almost self-delusionary terms of his deep loneliness and confusion with life, of his obsessive hatred of modernity, of his endless faith in finding transformative spiritual ecstasy within the landscape around him, and, most worryingly, of what modern readers can only interpret as his ‘punishment’ of his errant sex drive through frequent self-flagellation.


All of these themes can of course also be found bubbling away under the surface of Lovecraft’s writing, but the difference is that for Machen, the metaphysical ideas he made central to ‘The Great God Pan’ were actually very dear to him. Whereas Lovecraft’s cosmic horrors – though still incredible – were gradually formalised in his later stories into a kind of grand, archaic science fiction, Machen’s conception of the material world as merely a ‘veil’ that could be lifted from the eyes of man revealing the shining face of the ‘true’ universe were key to most of his life and work.

What is terrifying about ‘The Great God Pan’ then is the way that it sees Machen’s pure spiritualism perverted (by the author himself, or by the imperfect human beings in the story?) into terms of chaos, insanity, darkness, mad science, deformity and Luciferian evil, with the monstrous sexuality implied by the figure of Pan looming large, if never explicitly referenced.

In fact, it could be said that the enduring power of ‘The Great God Pan’ lies in the fact that VERY LITTLE is explicitly referenced. Beyond the shortcomings of the story’s muddled narrative, Machen’s understanding of the power of suggestion is necessarily masterful, managing to coerce readers into drawing the threads together themselves, providing just enough leathery yarn for us to construct ourselves one ugly lookin’ pentagram, while Machen stands outside, his conscience ‘clean’, reminding us that HE never used any dirty words.

Perhaps Machen was even TOO successful in achieving this effect, as he still saw his tale roundly condemned as decadent garbage upon publication, with a reviewer for the Westminster Gazette memorably dismissing ‘The Great God Pan’ as “an incoherent nightmare of sex”, despite the fact that Machen is at pains not to make so much as a single reference to sexual relations or human physicality in the whole book. (Machen's early work actually attracted so many negative or baffled reviews that years later he published a whole volume of them, under the title “Precious Balms”.)


Nonetheless though, there is a lot more at stake in ‘The Great God Pan’s avoidance of direct explanation than mere Victorian prudishness. The central idea underlying the story is so vast in metaphysical scale, whilst its earthly expression in Machen’s imagination has become so cruel and sickening, that when the author commences his ‘dark hinting at nameless things’ routine, he is genuinely tiptoeing around ideas that he either wouldn’t (for fear of ridicule of his deeply held beliefs), or couldn’t (for fear of censorship and public disgust), state explicitly.

This genuine fear of revealing the story’s ‘truths’ is a rare thing indeed in horror fiction, where writers are more usually assumed to glory in their dark revelations, and Machen’s simultaneous fascination with, and repulsion toward, his own subject matter, itself the result of his obsession with atavistic mysticism crashing headfirst into his deeply buried sexual repression, makes ‘The Great God Pan’ stand out, for all its technical faults, as one of the foremost Cosmic Horror stories of all time.

VHS Purgatory:Hell Island (aka Slaughterhouse Rock) (Dimitri Logothetis, 1988)

Possessed of few immediate qualities beyond a basic, unassailable strangeness, 1988’s ‘Hell Island’ (US title ‘Slaughterhouse Rock’) is a movie that few people will find it in their hearts to love. It is after all a boring, confusing, aimless mess, lacking in any memorable imagery or directorial flair and featuring startlingly amateurish, cheap looking production values for a film distributed by a major studio in the late ‘80s.

But then, I probably don’t have to remind you that there are those of us out there who, when confronted by such a shambling, misbegotten runt of the cinematic litter, will have little choice but to give it a big hug and vow to take care of it forever. A little honest-to-god strangeness can go a long way in the formulaic world of ‘80s horror, and whilst it may crap out on just about every other level, boy oh boy does ‘Hell Island’ ever have some strangeness in store for you.

Well, ok, sure, it’s not THAT strange – I mean, it’s not like a lost Jodorowsky film or something - but we can definitely file it with that select group of fuzzy-headed obscurities whose failure to take heed of any known set of genre conventions renders them works of unique joy and puzzlement, ready to reveal their vague and inconsequential mysteries to anyone who dares stare hard enough into their eerie, pan-and-scan totality.

Happening upon a nest of unloved horror VHS in the basement of Music & Video Exchange in Greenwich, and wondering which of them might be worth a purchase, you can imagine my train of thought as I skim read the back of ‘Hell Island’ and clock the following;

* ”Inexplicably haunted by terrifying visions of a prison-like fortress..”
* ”A dream specialist persuades Alex to visit the island of Alcatraz..”
* ”..the imprisoned undead spirits of missing rock star Sammy Mitchell (Toni Basil) and her band..”
* “..under the spell of the prison’s sadistic Commandant..:”
* ”..a spree of murder and mutilation..”
* ”Music by Devo”

Yes! I know! Me too! Here is your shiny pound coin, Mr. Music & Video Exchange cashier. You can keep your third rate ’87 vintage slashers and vague, undistinguished exorcism flicks, and I KNOW there’s not actually a beserker in ‘Beserker’, but this one – this one’s coming home with me.

It’s safe to say there’s probably enough of us out there these days who want a slice of the hoo-hah outlined above to gain this movie SOME kind of low level cult veneration regardless of its actual quality, but back in ’88 you have to wonder how many cinema-goers even made it past the torturously drawn out opening sequence. Here we see a heavy-breathing, monstrous creature of some kind shambling his way slowly through a dank, rat infested sewer, interspersed with shots of a pair of disembodied hands trying to free themselves from some rusty manacles before, presumably, the monster arrives. This vague unpleasantness goes on and on, presumably to build ‘tension’, the way that classes on directing movies say you should. Only in this case, director Dimitri Logothetis demonstrates a mixture of sheer incompetence and lunatic inspiration that we will soon come to know and love by sticking this grim ordeal right at the start of the movie, with no context at all, causing impatient viewers the world over to exclaim “fuck this” and go an find something more rewarding to do, or so I can only imagine.

Those who wait it out will eventually get to see the hands of the monstrous whatever reach the struggling human hands and…. BOOM, it’s a all a dream! A horrible, horrifying nightmare suffered by poor Alex, who is going to be our protagonist today.

Alex is a sophomore student who shares a conveniently cardboard-walled house with three of his crazy loser chums. You can tell they’re crazy, because one of them wears shades and a big coat and shorts all the time, and rattles off crap jokes continuously, and because they’ve got one of those sorta Cadillac bonnet shaped things in their living room where the fireplace should be. We know that their pad is filthy, because girls who visit loudly tell them so, making cheap cracks about cobwebs and the like. Yep, they’re crazy, crazy guys alright.

But even crazy free spirits need their sleep, and it seems that Alex’s violent nightmares and increasingly irrational behaviour is starting to cause the chums a great deal of hassle. As they’re striding around on campus one day, they raise the issue with Alex, and one of them reads aloud from a newspaper story about a well-known rock band called, uh, Bodycount (sadly not Ice T’s crew) who were recently found dead on Alcatraz island, having apparently engaged in some kind of gory suicide pact after sneaking away from a guided tour. How exactly Alex’s friends connect this up with his scary dreams I have no idea but…. y’know, it’s just that kinda movie.

What kind of movie exactly? Well specifically, the kind of movie where dreadful, mumbling feckless teenage actors have to deliver dialogue exchanges like…

“Are you hungry?”

“Does an accordion player wear a ring on his pinky finger?”

“Of course not. Are you hungry?”

And you’ll still be scratching your head thinking about accordion players when the action cuts to a neon-lit burger bar / nightclub set-up, where we’re given immediately given another example of the sideways genius of writer/director Logothetis, as, rather than taking us straight from the establishing shot to footage of our characters chowing down, he decides to let his camera roam free for a while, cutting between different tables and giving us random snatches of conversation for a couple of minutes before settling down to the business at hand. Now Robert Altman could do a scene like this, Quentin Tarantino could do a scene like this, but with Logothetis at the controls with his awkward editing and ham-fisted wackiness, you’re simply left completely disorientated, wondering what the hell is going on.

And it’s this constant, low level “what the hell?” factor that proves to be ‘Hell Island’s saving grace. Surprisingly, this wasn’t even Logothetis’ first time out of the stalls on a feature film (he helmed frat-girl comedy Pretty Smart in ’87, apparently), but the mixture of naivety and enthusiasm he brings to both writing and directing pays off wonderfully, allowing the film to veer off into flat-out weirdness again and again where a more seasoned hack would simply have turned in pure blandness. In some ways, ‘Hell Island’ has a similar feel to it to all those oddball movies Herschell Gordon Lewis made where he tried to expand his range beyond smut/gore. You may be aware at all times that you’re watching the work of a lapsadaisical, incompetent freak, but the whole shebang carries with it a joyous sense of random, whimsical humanity, and you just NEVER know what’s coming next.

The storyline is all over the place. It’s like Logothetis had all those ideas floating about in his noggin – the one about the Animal House style student who’s having psychic nightmares, the one about the rock star who dabbles in the occult and comes back from the grave to fight a demon, the one about the satanic confederate general whose spirit is trapped under Alcatraz island by resourceful Native American medicine men – and he just thought, what the hell, I can throw all these together into one movie, it’ll be awesome! And I’ll get Devo to do the music too – those guys rule!

That the finished film ended up being far less than the sum of its sloppily thrown together parts must have served as a cruel lesson to the young director in the chasm between thought and expression.

So anyway, in brief: Alex’s nightmares begin to accelerate to the point where dream and reality start to collapse, and he begins to manifest actual telekinetic phenomena and the like. This attracts the attention of one of his professors, who as well as being an, ahem, hot babe in the parlance of our characters, is also an expert in experimental parapsychology, the occult and… well, you know. “This book will explain everything”, she exclaims, thunking down a huge, dusty sketchbook full of authentic witchdoctor doodling. Nice one.

The Professor decides that Alex’s night terrors must be emanating from Alcatraz island because… well, I dunno, look at the picture on the front of the video box - where else would they be coming from? She decides that Alex must go to Alcatraz to… well, again, I don’t know exactly - to face down his demons, or to exorcise the evil powers, or just to look around, or whatever. Alex doesn’t want to go, because he’s a useless, boring, obstinate git (did I fail to mention that?), but naturally we’re not going to let his grousing spoil the flow of our movie any more than it has already, so off everyone goes on a midnight mission across the bay in a rubber dinghy.

And when I say everyone, I mean everyone. I know it’s a cheap shot to pick on barely coherent horror movies for this sort of thing, but really: if you were making an illegal midnight trip to an abandoned prison island to possibly confront some ill-defined evil entity, would you REALLY insist that all your housemates came along with you? And all their girlfriends? And your sorta-possible-future girlfriend, who’s still trying to work out how she feels about you being such a useless, boring obstinate git?

I suppose stretching a point, you could say they all wanted to go along to help out their friend, except that a) none of them seem to like him much (see the whole ‘useless, boring, obstinate git’ thing), and b) several of those present loudly and persistently complain about how they want to go home. What’s going on? Did somebody herd them into the boat at gunpoint?

Anyway, Alcatraz. Apparently it is spooky and deserted, and has no security measures whatsoever, so you and your pals can pitch up in your boat at any hour of the day or night and just sorta wander around. Who knew? Disappointingly though, it seems that, aside from a few moody establishing shots, ‘Hell Island’ was not actually filmed on Alcatraz, and the rest of the movie is in fact realised via a series of poorly lit backlot ‘exteriors’ and really dull looking sets. Dragsville, man.

Alex’s brother (the most physically imposing of those present) swiftly gets himself possessed by the big evil whatever, and turns into some kind of super-strong vampire creature that proceeds to spent the rest of the running time picking off the others one by one in a thoroughly tedious manner. Because after all, this is a cheap ‘80s horror, right? That’s what happens.

Don’t fall asleep yet though, because – hey! – here’s Toni Basil! Who’s she again, you might well ask, giving me the opportunity to snort with derision and point you in the direction of, like, the best song EVER, dude:



If we were speaking in person, I’d do the handclaps for you and we could all have a ‘Wayne’s World’ style singalong. In fact, Toni Basil did loads of great songs – check this one out! This also seems a good time to dredge up the perennial believe-it-or-not pop fact that she actually began her career as one of the girls in the graveyard acid trip sequence in “Easy Rider”! She also appeared in “Five Easy Pieces” and Dennis Hopper’s “The Last Movie”, and directed the video for Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime”, amongst other things. So yeah, before you instinctively start trying to work out how old she was when doing her pop princess bit in the early ‘80s, let’s simply agree that this woman is all kinds of awesome and move on.

In ‘Hell Island’, Ms Basil portrays the ghost of recently departed rock star Sammy Mitchell, who, if not exactly the most charismatic dead rock star in history, certainly brings a new spark of interest to what was otherwise looking to wind down into a pretty dull movie. Supposedly, Sammy Mitchell was a terrifying heavy metal vixen who “performed on stage with real cadavers”, or so we’re informed. In yet another idea that must have sounded good on paper, being a ghost allows Sammy to appear in every scene in a different, outrageous outfit. Unfortunately, filtered through the reality of the perpetually perky and not-at-all-metal Toni Basil and a costume designer with limited resources and a Boy George fixation, this character, who must have leaped into Logothetis’ imagination as some kind of flaming Siouxsie Sioux meets King Diamond spectre, emerges somewhat sartorially underwhelming.

Another thing that’s somewhat underwhelming is Devo’s score for the movie. It’s pleasant enough, but for such an idiosyncratic band, they haven’t half gone out of their way to produce some generic, one-size-fits-all horror movie music here. So they do a Frizzi-esque “eerie calm with synths” main theme, and they do some Goblin-esque “running around music” with rock guitars, and that’s about it really. Any Devo freaks checking out the movie for evidence of their heroes involvement are liable to come away disappointed, then as now.

It’s interesting to note though that the Toni Basil / Devo connection runs a lot deeper than just this movie – turns out she dated the band’s Gerald Casale for a while, and that she re-recorded a whole batch of Devo songs in the mid-eighties and did goofy MTV-friendly videos for several of them, as part of what seems to have been a concerted (albeit unsuccessful) effort to help the band break into the mainstream pop market. Which seems to beg the question: who brought who to the production of ‘Hell Island’? I’m guessing that Basil was probably on board first, simply because, whilst I’m not the biggest Devo fan in the world, I do respect their way of doing things, and I’d imagine that if they decided to get involved with a horror movie, they’d probably pick one a bit more distinctive and less crummy than this. That, and the slight and derivative nature of the music they produced for the film would also seem to belie an overall lack of interest.

Anyway, back to the movie, it soon becomes clear that Toni’s main role is going to be as EXPOSITION LADY, and as such she rattles through a double-quick, flashback-aided summary of precisely what the hell is going on, relating how Alcatraz is in fact haunted by the vengeful spirit of a satanic ‘commandant’ (did Civil War era American prisons really have ‘commandants’…? Oh, never mind…) who was burned alive on the island by Indian witchdoctors way back before the prison was established, and how she herself was once a mild-mannered, book-ish chick before an interest in the occult led her to take on the role of an exhibitionist heavy metal star, and how the crowning achievement of her magickal career was going to involve locating and taking command of the super-powerful evil spirit which the witchdoctors had buried in a vessel in a crypt on the island, only.. (pauses for breath)… only actually it was too powerful for her to control and got all unleashed and killed her and her band, so now she’s used beyond the grave dream projection to summon Alex, who, for some fucked up reason, has been chosen to banish the evil. Phew.

All of which is frankly a lot more interesting than watching more lethargic stalk-n’-kill sequences on boring, grey-painted faux-prison sets, so I wish they’d taken the time to expand on it all a bit, but no such luck.

Next we’re treated to a bit more script/directorial weirdness, as all the characters who have died thus far start popping up as ghosts that only Alex can see, and bitching at him as he tries to go about his banishing-the-evil-whatever duties, leading to lots of “huh? Has he done crazy? He’s talking to himself!” cutaways to the still living characters, and a certain amount of confusion regarding who’s dead, who’s alive and who’s turned evil, further stretching the coherence of a script that by this stage only makes the haziest sort of sense at the best of times.

And… well, so it goes on. If you guessed that the rat-infested tunnel / shambling monster footage from the movie’s opening sequence was going to make a reappearance at the finale, well done, you guessed right.

So, do you reckon Alex and his kinda-sorta girlfriend and the lady Professor will successfully banish the big evil?

Do you think he’ll manage to get over the fact that his demonically possessed brother just massacred most of his friends with surprising ease?

Do you think Toni Basil will duet with Devo over the end credits?

I think you know the answers just as well as I do.

Is ‘Hell Island’ actually worth tracking down or watching though…? Well, does an accordion player wear a ring on his pinky finger?