Short Reviews # 2: Sci-Fi

Sunshine
(Danny Boyle, 2007)

Well I’m only, what, four years late finding time to watching this one? Relatively quick off the mark by the standards of this blog, even if its director has subsequently managed to win all the Oscars with some multi-cultural musical and make a movie about a guy who cuts his own arm off or something. Who knows, maybe I’ll get ‘round to watching those one day, although to be honest the idea of a good old no-nonsense science fiction movie appeals to me a lot more. I’ll admit I’ve got a bit of a soft-spot for the kind of earnest SF blockbusters that I used to dutifully troop off to watch as a kid, in the days before irony and ‘crossover appeal’ and CGI and Will Smith and ham-fisted ruinations of Phil Dick stories conspired to piss on my multiplex chips. And I’m happy to report that, on that level at least, I thought ‘Sunshine’ was pretty damn impressive.

Like most sci fi that sets out to be taken seriously, there were a few chasms of disbelief to be overcome from the outset. (Ok, deep breath: why would the sun suddenly be ‘dying’ as early as 2053? And if it were doing so quickly enough to jeopardise life on earth by that point, wouldn’t we have, like, started to notice that back in the 20th C.? Furthermore, assuming a +50 years evolution of our current technology that incorporates comfortable interplanetary space-flight, would we *really* need to equip a space-ship with a gigantic HAL 9000-esque computer mainframe that needs to be stored in a sub-zero cooling tank? Why would this minimally crewed mission, which doesn’t even include a medical doctor as far as we can tell, be assigned an additional ‘psyche officer’? And so on…) Once we accept though that Boyle and Alex Garland aren’t so much interested in trying to create a feasible future scenario here as they are in paying tribute to the older SF movies that inspired them, we can hopefully put such concerns aside and just enjoy the direct and indirect references to ‘2001’, ‘Dark Star’ and ‘Alien’ that litter just about every scene.

Although it’s far from perfect (some attempts at cosmic profundity fall laughably flat, and the final act’s shift into a kind of ‘space-slasher’ storyline seems clumsy and unnecessary – more or less the same faults that I recall sunk ‘90s Boyle/Garland joint ‘The Beach’, oddly enough), I found ‘Sunshine’ extremely enjoyable. Modern audiences may have baulked at the idea of a hundred minute movie without a single moment of levity, but I found the film’s straight-faced earnestness strangely comforting – there’s a rare sense of naivety in the Howard Hawks/John Carpenter solidity of the whole affair that helped draw me into the drama, helped me gasp in polite awe at the effects shots, just as much as I would have done as a ten year old. Shame that this one got a bit overlooked on release because, even allowing for its faults, I think it’s probably the noblest bit of popcorn-fodder I’ve seen in a long while.

Timeslip
(Ken Hughes, 1955)

Offering further dispiriting proof that the majority of lost ‘50s-‘60s British b-movies were probably lost for good reason, this borderline SF caper – released in the states as ‘The Atomic Man’ - concerns a nuclear scientist whose body has been exposed to so much radiation that when his heart stops for seven seconds on the operating table after some crooks attempt to murder him, his consciousness ‘slips’ seven seconds into the future, meaning that after he’s revived he finds himself answering questions before they’re asked, saying hello to people who haven’t entered the room yet and so on, thus confusing the hell out of everyone, audience included.

Have pity for the poor actor playing another scientist who has to deliver a straight to camera monologue attempting to explain the ‘scientific rationale’ behind thus unlikely occurrence.

But actually, even if you find this peculiar notion absolutely fascinating, its wider implications are barely touched upon by the film’s script. Instead most of the running time is devoted to the unravelling of a Scooby Doo-level mystery concerning a criminal conspiracy presided over by a stereotypically greasy and rotund South American mining kingpin seeking to maintain his dominance over the international zinc trade. Yes, you heard: he wants to stifle scientific progress in order to artificially inflate the price of zinc, the dirty foreign fiend!

Swiftly heading downhill from a promisingly moody opening, ‘Timeslip’ is one of those chintzy faux-thrillers where the cast all seem to be playing dress-up, pretending they’re in some hard-boiled American movie, with a screenplay full of cheesy pronouncements and third rate zingers to match. I’m sure there are still plenty of minor masterpieces to be found lurking in the waters of low budget British cinema from this period, but ‘Timeslip’ certainly isn’t one of them. Thoroughly tedious business all round really – an archetypal ‘quota quickie’ with little to recommend it beyond some nice nocturnal London location shots in the opening sequence. Nonetheless, director Ken Hughes certainly went on enjoy a rich and varied career, taking in ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, segments of ‘Casino Royale’, ‘Cromwell’ and the much maligned Mae West car crash ‘Sextette’.

The Terrornauts
(Montgomery Tully, 1967)

A far more enjoyable prospect, this modest Amicus programmer from b-movie warhorse Montgomery Tully is a partial rewrite of ‘This Island Earth’ on a Dr-Who-level special effects budget, introducing us to the plight of an intrepid astrophysicist whose funding for his search for extraterrestrial radio signals is under threat from stuffy superiors at a radio telescope facility. But the joke’s on them when our hero’s project accidentally attractss the attention of an alien spaceship, which proceeds to tractor-beam the control hut and its occupants (including Charles Hawtrey as a snooping accountant and Mrs. Jones the cockney tea lady), and whisks them off for an outer space adventure!

Not even remotely as salacious as the poster would tend to suggest, ‘Terrornauts’ is a delightfully cheery, old fashioned bit of interplanetary fun that could (and probably should) have been made ten years earlier, but executed with so much charm and visual invention that it’s difficult not to love it. A solid SF script from John Brunner (adapting Murray Leinster) ensures that the film never quite approaches ‘Fire Maidens from Outer Space’ level goofiness, but it’s still full of chuckles (intentional and otherwise), and also manages to tap into a rich vein of utter surrealism that’s only enhanced by the eye-watering faux-technicolor photography and spit n’ polish production design.

I really liked the stuff about how the heroic astrophysicist was inspired to take up his chosen profession by a vivid dream he had as a child, in which he saw a weird alien landscape with twin suns and standing stones. He has the creepy painting he did of this landscape framed on the wall of his lab, and stares at it questioningly in moments of doubt. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to call you at 1am with proof of my starry-eyed dream”, he declares when his grumpy superior demands results.

Too many other highlights to go through them all, but the segment in which the heroine accidentally stumbles onto a Star Trek style transporter pad and find herself transported to an alien world where she is chased and captured by green-skinned savages who want to sacrifice her to their gods is pretty classic. The hero jumps in after her, grabs a handy raygun, zaps the savages, rescues her and pops back home again with slightly tousled hair and a spear he nabbed from the savages. All this happens in about five minutes, and the other characters turn to them like; “what on earth happened to you, and where did you get that bloody thing?” – then they shrug it off and just get back on with pursuing the main plot without a word. Brilliant. Anyone with a passing interest in authentically weird British science fiction should find some time in their schedule for ‘The Terrornauts’, I feel.

Forbidden World
(Allan Holzman, 1982)

So apparently the story behind this one goes kinda like this: Roger Corman’s New World Pictures finished off their first Alien rip-off of 1981 (‘Galaxy of Terror’) ahead of schedule, and still had a couple of weeks booked on the sound stage where they’d built the sets. So Corman got Allan Holzman on the blower and said, hey buddy, how’d you fancy making your first movie – it’s gonna be another Alien rip-off, and it’s gonna have gore and naked chicks, and it’s gotta be done by the end of the month, whattaya reckon?

Holzman took the bait, and if ‘Forbidden World’ (I have no idea why it’s called ‘Forbidden World’) isn’t exactly a classic, there’s still no way I can imagine a film made under similarly compromised circumstances today being remotely as worthwhile. Sure, it’s cheap, stupid, derivative and sleazy (not to mention SHORT, just about scraping minimum feature length by way of obligatory recycled space battle and several ‘clips show’ montage bits). But it’s also fun, fast-moving, visually stylish and effortlessly watchable, aided by sharp direction, brilliantly resourceful production design and a cool Carpenter-esque synth score from Susan Justin.

You won’t *quite* be able to take it seriously once the hilariously gratuitous nudity kicks in (despite finding themselves in a grimly utilitarian interplanetary research lab crawling with malevolent genetic mutations, the movie’s female characters demonstrate a disdain for clothing that rivals a ‘70s Jess Franco cast), and a few prize “that’s the stupidest piece of movie character behaviour I’ve EVER SEEN” moments don’t help either, but, y’know… it’s getting there. I’ve certainly seen far thinner screenplays than this attached to productions that presumably had longer than, like, a day to get their shit together.

As mentioned in the ‘Sunshine’ review, I grew up watching a lot a cheap (and not so cheap) sci-fi, and am thus starting to recognise the weirdly comforting kick I inevitably get out of post-Alien, pre-Starship Troopers space adventures like this one. Even though ‘Forbidden World’ considerably predates the period in which I was heading down to the video shop for a night’s PG-rated entertainment, the film’s dark tone and mixture of action movie tropes with genetic mutation and gory body-horror actually makes it seem strangely ahead of its time – more aesthetically reminiscent of an early ‘90s straight to video sci-fi than an entry in the Star Wars/Alien rip-off sweepstakes, perhaps?

Anyway, watching it today, I can’t help but draw unfavourable comparison between contemporary low budget filmmaking, and the way things were done back when they knocked out ‘Forbidden World’. Anyone who has ever taken part in any creative endeavour will know that when you’re aiming for ‘good’ you’ll hopefully get ‘reasonable’, but if you’re aiming for ‘average’, you’ll inevitably get ‘shit’. Throughout his career, Corman tended to make sure his people were aiming for ‘good’, even on a stupid and sleazy movie like this one, with the end result that ‘Forbidden World’ is still worth the entry price thirty years later, whereas the majority of post-2000 straight-to-cable/DVD efforts are so painful they’re difficult to even sit through for free on the week of release.

So long as you don’t think about it too hard, ‘Forbidden World’ is a great bit of pulpy fun that stands as a testament to Corman’s unrivalled ability to get the best out of people on short notice with minimal resources. You’d tempted to say Holzman seemed a director worth keeping an eye on after this reasonably promising debut, but sadly his CV on IMDB begs to differ, comprising documentaries, TV work and something called ‘Grunt! The Wrestling Movie’. Oh well.

Short Reviews # 1: Horror

I’ve been watching a lot of films thus far this year, so I thought that for a bit of a change of pace from the full-length reviews, I’d do a few posts catching up on some of the more interesting flicks I’ve seen recently that I’ve lacked either the time or inclination to give the ‘full treatment’ to. Hope that’s ok with everybody…?

A Candle For The Devil
(Eugenio Martin, 1973)

No candles and no devil to be seen in this rather grim Spanish horror, which essentially plays out as a variation on the ol’ ‘Beast in the Cellar’ / stuck-up murderous spinsters yarn.

Exemplifying that peculiarly wonderful ‘rusty’ look that Spanish horror movies specialised in through the ‘70s, ‘Candle..’ is also perhaps the most direct of the various genre movies that saw fit to comment on the explosion of tourist trade in Spain and the negative effect it had on the local culture during that decade, via the sordid tale of a pair of hysterically repressed guesthouse proprietors so appalled by the loose morals of the foreign hussies flooding their establishment that they’re forced to take divine justice into their own hands.

There are some extremely visceral and uncomfortable moments to enjoy(?) here, and a cool (unintentionally?) ambiguous ending, but whilst ‘Candle..’ may be a god-send for anyone planning a thesis on the underlying themes of Spanish horror, that sadly doesn’t save it from also being a profoundly unenjoyable experience for the casual viewer, thanks to its excruciatingly drawn out plotting, inconsistent tone, grimy locations, underlying misogyny and sub-H.G. Lewis characterisation. (I particularly liked the ‘slut’ character, who seems to dedicate her every waking moment to furthering the pursuit of sluttishness, at the expense of all other personality traits.)

Like a number of Jess Franco films from the same period, director Martin (who also helmed the fantastic ‘Horror Express’) seems to have a bee in his bonnet about religious hypocrisy, specifically in regard to Franco-era Spain (uh, the OTHER Franco I mean, obviously). But, lacking the intellect or subtlety of a Bunuel or Pasolini, it all emerges here as fairly tiresome stuff. Yes, religious people can be evil and abusive and fucked up behind closed doors – WE GET IT, let’s move on now. Word to the filmmakers for at least trying to do something a bit different and tie their on-screen nasties up with real world issues, but basically one to file under NO FUN.

Le Orme / Footprints
(Luigi Bazzoni, 1975)

Making its home video debut last year courtesy of the Shameless label, Luigi Bazzoni’s ‘Le Orme’ is a deeply obscure Italian oddity, notable for adopting an an aesthetic so nebulous that, despite nominally existing as a genre film, it effectively defies categorisation simply through being too uneventful to really commit to any of the available options. Is it horror? Giallo? Sci-fi? Arthouse? Well… none of the above really, despite hinting at all four from time to time.

Seemingly an attempt at a kind of vague psychological thriller dealing with the ambiguity of unreliable memory, ‘Footprints’ follows a woman (Florinda Bolkan from ‘Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’) whose attempt to account for several days of total memory loss leads her to an entropic island resort, where residents seem to know her by a different name and recall her getting up to kinds of inexplicable behaviour that seems to be pointing toward some unguessable secret life. Probably the strangest aspect of the film is the inclusion of a series of eerie, slow-motion dream sequences portraying an astronaut dying of asphyxiation on the lunar surface, whilst a uniformed Klaus Kinski sits in a cramped looking mission control, yelling inexplicable commands into a microphone.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Unfortunately though, the reality of the film is for the most part a tedious exercise in second-hand style and deliberate mystification that literally goes nowhere. There are a few nice shots and creepy moments, and the washed out ‘stored-in-the-attic-for-30-years’ look of Shameless’s print actually meshes very well with the hazy cinematography of Vittorio Storaro to create a real dreamy, nostalgic feel, but sadly none of it really amounts to much, as proceedings drag on interminably, any sense of momentum or purpose long since departed.

Viewers patiently waiting for some connection to be revealed between the memory loss plotline and the outer-space footage will be sorely disappointed as the film veers more toward a predictable exercise in pop-psychological borderline-giallo hoo-hah in the second half, failing to really expand on any of its stylistic eccentricities or suggestions of hidden depth. I’m unfamiliar with the ‘La Orme’s production circumstances, but basically I wouldn’t be surprised if Bazzoni simply took some footage from an aborted sci-fi movie and used it to liven up the rather boring psychological mystery flick he was working on.

I guess Euro-cult completists might get a kick out of this one out simply for its obscurity, general strangeness and applaudable disregard for genre convention, but the public at large would be well-advised to keep their distance.

Satan’s Baby Doll (Mario Bianchi, 1982)

Supposedly telling the tale of an innocent girl transformed into a murderous seductress by Satanic powers, the makers of this barrel-scraping Euro-sleaze item actually seem rather more concerned with following the story of some shlubby guy with a moustache as he wonders around his castle giving everybody a hard time. Sleazy without being fun, inept without being charming, incoherent without being weird, gross without being shocking, this kind of gothic softcore romp must have seemed impossibly hackneyed by the time it limped onto the market in ’82, and making it through the full 74 minutes proved a pretty thankless task, I’m sorry to say.

In a world where so many potentially gifted directors have trouble getting their projects off the ground, it’s always dispiriting to see a commercially backed picture helmed by a guy whose vision seems to extend to filming just about enough footage of sweaty faces, boobs and people standing still to scrape minimum feature length in the editing room, and some of the sheer laziness on display here is shocking, even by euro-trash standards.

Casting around for positive things to say, they did at least pick a really nifty castle to shoot in – even though I’m not sure the interiors match the exterior shots, I’m sure I’ve seen both before in other Italian horror flicks that I can’t quite place. By far the best thing about ‘Satan’s Baby Doll’ though is an absolutely kick-ass soundtrack by one Nico Catanese - 64 slices of Italian cheese in the noble tradition, reminding us of all the cool stuff in the country’s b-cinema legacy that the film itself so sadly fails to live up to.

Watching it sober was definitely a mistake I think. Under the right circumstances – chemically altered ones preferably - I can maybe see this flick taking on its own kind of lurid, hypnotic grandeur… but I wouldn’t count on it. A pretty rum do all round really – I’d be tempted to say ‘this really is the pits’, but one of the questionable joys of watching weird horror movies is that there are *always* further depths to be plumbed. (Deep sigh.) Bring ‘em on!

Vamp
(Richard Wenk, 1986)

Well I don’t want this to be an ENTIRELY negative post, so having given a few of Shameless’s budget titles a kicking above [solely on the basis of the films themselves I hasten to add, I’ve got no problem with their presentation or general objectives], I thought I’d at least weigh in with some positive words for their sister label Arrow’s recent horror releases, beginning with this delightful neon timebomb from little-known writer/director Richard Wenk.

My first impression of ‘Vamp’ – with it’s tale of two wise-cracking college oddballs getting mixed up in supernatural carnage as a result of a fraternity initiation dare – was that it seems remarkably similar to Fred Dekker’s superb ‘Night of the Creeps’, released the same year. But frankly I could watch movies about wise-cracking college oddballs getting mixed up in supernatural carnage all day when they’re this well executed, and if Wenk’s film perhaps isn’t *quite* up to the level of ‘..Creeps’, it’s still definitely in the same league as a perfect bit of imaginative horror-comedy entertainment.

If you know anything at all about this film, it’s probably that it’s the one in which Grace Jones plays a vampire stripper, and indeed her hyper-stylised, neon-enhanced dance routine is an I-can’t-believe-I’m-actually-seeing-this highlight - a Liquid Sky level testament to high 80s splendour. Subsequently, Jones’ role is the film is rather limited, portraying the ravenous, animalistic queen of a brood of strip club vampires, but needless to say, her physical presence and astonishing appearance makes her a truly threatening figure throughout.

That aside though, there’s no shortage of other stuff to enjoy in ‘Vamp’, from a sharp script full of genuine laughs to some great action scenes and plenty of endearing inter-character shenanigans and such. But what really sets it up for horror-fan immortality (aside from Grace) is the truly spectacular production design. Eschewing any hint of realism in it’s creation of a ‘gritty’ urban environment, the film instead opts for a feast of extreme, Bava-esque lighting effects, filling the screen with over-saturated red and green, mixing it all up with ample neon, dry ice etc for a unique neo-gothic comic book look that’s just to die for.

(Oh, and for those keeping track of such things, the benign influence of ‘Vamp’ on the plotline of Rodriquez and Tarantino’s ‘From Dusk Til Dawn’ a decade or so later should be self-evident.)

Writing these capsule reviews, it’s a challenge not to just end each positive one with a variation on a cheesy, IMDB-esque ‘GREAT MOVIE, THUMBS UP’, but, uh: great movie, thumbs up.

VHS Purgatory:Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (Gordon Hessler, 1978)

PRICE PAID:

£1, from that odd furniture/junk shop just up from Brockley station. Man, that shop is so weird… I can never tell who’s a member of staff and who’s just a weirdo looking around… everytime I go there, everything seems to be a completely different price… I don’t know if it’s a charity shop or just some strange, marginal business venture… it doesn’t seem to have a name… when I walked past the other day, their whole back room seemed to be filled with smashed up bits of wood… but, er, anyway…

THE BOX SAYS:

“Mystery and mayhem with Kiss perofmring their greatest hits --- with spectacular visual effects!”

THE FILM DELIVERS:

So long, ‘Slade in Flame’! Get behind thee, Aerosmith tour video I watched when I was twelve! Don’t even think about it, ‘Abba: The Movie’! The ultimate ‘70s corporate rock cash-in movie is here, and I will accept no substitutes.

Produced by those loveable goofs at Hanna Barbera on behalf of the Gene Simmons Evil Mega-Corporation (or whatever), I expected ‘Kiss Meets The Phantom of the Park’ to provide a few chuckles and a lot of comforting boredom, and so was ill-prepared for the veritable fungasm that awaited my tired eyes when I hit play on this humble tape.

(By sheer coincidence, I think this is actually a very appropriate post for the 4th of July, even though as a stinking foreigner I myself care little for such festivities.)

A crude opening montage sees the members of Kiss super-imposed on top of night-time fairground footage. Inexplicably, Peter Criss is seen miming the drums on a roulette wheel. Drink it in, Kiss Army recruits, as this is the last glimpse of your commanding officers you’ll be getting for quite a while. Director Gordon Hessler (whose horror credits include ‘Scream and Scream Again’ and ‘Cry of the Banshee’ for AIP, as well as taking over ‘The Oblong Box’ after the death of Michael Reeves), clearly has other things on his mind.

Like FUN, primarily. Beautiful, sun-dappled, 1978 suburban American amusement park fun, to be precise. Thankfully I’m a bit too young and located on the wrong side of the world to be fully smitten by this full-scale nostalgia landslide, but anyone currently in about the 35-45 age bracket and raised somewhere in the Southern half of the USA should probably prepare themselves for paralysing wistfulness and bouts of uncontrollable sobbing, as gentle, smiling ‘Dazed & Confused’ teens fade in and out of focus, enjoying a summer’s day out in their local parentally-approved leisure complex. Costumed mascots caper and light aircraft spell out messages in the sky as bell-bottomed girls giggle over cans of soda. “Don’t forget to be here at 7pm for the first night of the KISS CONCERT”, declares the blaring public address system. Truly, it is paradise.


Not everyone is happy though, and in particular a rift seems to be developing between the park’s manager (a simple, business-minded fellow who wants to give the kids what they want, like rollercoasters and Kiss concerts) and the ‘creator’ (a brooding weirdo who lives in a hi-tech underground research complex and is primarily concerned with making crappy animatronic waxworks depicting macabre historical scenes). You can probably see where this is going.

Also seemingly less than satisfied with the status-quo is a small faction of scruffy, biker-esque miscreants with names like ‘Chopper’ and ‘Slime’ , who seem intent on polluting the wholesome atmosphere of the park with assorted examples of cruel, low-key thuggery.

Now before we proceed, I should state that I’ve never really felt comfortable with Kiss. Sure, a few of their records are cool, and their whole costumed character shtick is pretty amusing, but as a rock n’ roll group – even in the relatively debased mode of ‘70s arena rock – they have always struck me as a distinctly candy-ass proposition. I take the implicit ideology behind my rock n’ roll pretty seriously, and as such, the shallowness of the Kiss brand has always rung hollow as the cracked liberty bell for me, even as many of my grunge-era peers have sought to rehabilitate their cultural legacy.

This ideological disjuncture can immediately be seen in ‘Phantom of the Park’, via the portrayal of the aforementioned ‘delinquent’ characters as stupid and threatening figures. I mean, I ask you: what kind of self-respecting heavy rock band would seek to set themselves up in OPPOSITION to the plight of angry, disenfranchised loser kids? I’m afraid the only possible answer is: a really shitty heavy rock band. If by some quirk of fate you happen to be a grumpy older brother or sister reading this in the mid 1970s, then please, do the decent thing and provide your younger siblings with a Black Sabbath record, that they may see the path before them more clearly lit.


But anyway. As you might expect, this ‘gang’ (they dress like bikers, talk like sit-com beatniks and behave like prototype pseudo-punks) swiftly come into conflict with the eccentric park creator, during a highly amusing scene in which they flagrantly mock one of his dioramas, depicting a chained ape. (“Perfection? C’mon man, you call some baboon doin’ the herky-jerky perfection?” says Chopper). As punishment for their lack of respect, the ne’erdowells are lured into the park’s Chamber of Horrors, where they find themselves gassed or concussed by a series of cunning traps, their bodies deposited in the creator’s subterranean lair, where he has his wicked House-of-Wax style way with them. (Later we see him refashioning the female member of the gang as an automaton of a pioneer-era bride, exclaiming “I’ll make a real American of you yet” – the implied criticism of this transformation marking an odd deviation from this movie’s dominant anti-misfit/pro-conformity agenda.)

Mad though he may be, the park creator is nothing if not efficient, and by the time Kiss have concluded the first night of their residency at the park (we see them playing a forgettable number extolling the virtues of ‘partying’ and ‘turning it up loud’, presumably the opening cut from whichever album they were giving the big push to crica ‘78), he has already fashioned robot doppelgangers of the band to further his evil schemes!

Unfortunately though, the robot Gene Simmons goes haywire and is unleashed upon the world earlier than planned, as he (it?) breaks through a wall cartoon-style, duffs up some security guards and demolishes a lemonade stand! The stunned onlookers don’t know what’s going on. They thought Kiss were the good guys! It’s shocking!


Now, I was kind of assuming we’d be introduced to Kiss-as-characters here via, say, a backstage scene where they towel off and swap banter of the “boy, tough crowd in these theme-parks” variety. But no. Because GET THIS: Kiss in the movie are not merely costumed rock stars raking in the nation’s pocket money, they are bone fide supernatural beings – mystical cosmic warriors with the ability to read minds, fly, fire laser-beams from their eyes and partake in gravity-defying kung-fu battles. Throughout the film, band members are never referred to by their real names: they are 100% in-character as Space Ace, Star Child, Catman and The Demon.

As higher echelon Kiss Army members will no doubt be aware, Kiss’s powers derive from a set of four golden ‘talismans’, each taking the form of an elemental symbol reflecting the role of each Kiss member within the group. Kiss keep these talismans in a lead-lined suitcase, which is protected by a forcefield installed in their personal accommodation. As they explain at one point to the film’s lovelorn heroine, each of us has the power within us to ‘materialise’ our own talisman and take on our own superpowers, joining Kiss in the ranks of the Ubermensch. We just don’t, that’s all. Because we’re lame.


Perhaps due to its complete reversal of expectation, the scene that does eventually introduce us to Kiss is perhaps my favourite moment in ‘Phantom of the Park’, from a choice of many potential favourites. Following the faux-Demon’s polite rampage, a deputation from the park management seek out Kiss to demand an explanation. They find the band seated at the far end of a hotel swimming pool, chilling atop high, tennis umpire style chairs, silver towels draped over their heads, in silent communion with cosmic forces. Kiss speak to each other in a kind of character-specific private language, casually chatting over the heads of their visitors, as if they were corrupt feudal princes receiving a deputation of peasants. The poor shlubby security dudes, who were presumably expecting to merely lay down the law to a bunch of run-of-the-mill hell-raising rockers, get all hot and bothered and generally just don’t know what to make of it.

Now that our lofty heroes have been alerted to the threat facing them, much of the rest of the film is comprised of lengthy nocturnal fight scenes, in which Kiss meet the minions of the park-creator in deadly combat. First they head to the interior of the splendid wooden rollercoaster, to fight some kinda monkey-headed creatures in rubber suits. Next, they move on to an amphitheatre, and fight a series of robotic samurais and kung-fu bad-asses who emerge one by one from an elevator shaft.

I realise I’ve conveyed those notions to you in but two short sentences, but please, take some time to reflect on the fact that these sequences go on for a long time, and feature laser-beams, anti-gravity slo-mo flying kicks and short-circuiting robots, set to a relentless soundtrack of chicken-scratch heavy ‘fight scene funk’, all of which made served to make me very happy indeed as I began to drift into early morning unconsciousness.


Meanwhile of course, the Phantom has sent a mind-controlled dupe to steal Kiss’s talismans from their hotel suite, so by the time the band enter the Chamber of Horror and start mixing it up with the Frankensteins and mummies and so, their powers have deserted them and they soon find themselves captive in the Phantom’s liar! (He keeps them in a big iron cage conveniently overlooking his, uh, computer consoles and stuff, that they may watch him bring his schemes to fruition.)

Naturally the Phantom’s first order of business is to dispatch his evil duplicates to replace Kiss at the next evening’s Kiss Concert. His plan, you see, is to have his Kiss clones perform violent and provocative material which will rouse their audience to a nihilistic fervour which will see them riot, destroying the park and discrediting both band and management!

This is a canny plan on the Phantom’s part, because as everyone knows, Kiss audiences in the 1970s were apt to literally act out the lyrics of their idols’ songs, as soon as they heard them, with no consideration for the consequences of their actions. This is why the band had to be extremely careful about their lyrical content, sticking strictly to discourse on such nebulous concerns as ‘partying’ and ‘crazy nights’, even as their heavy metal peers were free to tackle more challenging subject matter, be it drinking the blood of slaughtered innocents, shagging mermaids, discovering the ruins of lost Lemuria or Livin’ in a Ram’s Head. Kiss must have felt frustrated, being unable to tap into such potent and topical imagery for their own music, but with great power comes great responsibility.

And so, let us shudder as Evil Kiss take the stage and launch into a malodorous ode specially designed to propel listeners into a mindless, destructive rage! I mean, can you imagine it? A popular rock band playing grinding, monotonous music that urges people to “rip and destroy” and “tear down the walls”? It simply doesn’t bear thinking about. And, as sturdy examples of wholesome American youth, the kids in the crowd instantly smell a rat and are having none of it. Yes, the Phantom’s mistake was to underestimate the purity and singlemindedness of the Kiss Army, who now boo the Evil Kiss, turning away from their negative sentiments and demanding the return of their true heroes.


The Phantom’s other mistake of course was to leave the Real Kiss in a big cage within easy telekinetic reach of their talismans, allowing them to quickly regain their powers. Flying to the concert auditorium upon beams of stardust, they proceed to righteously kick the crap out of their doppelgangers as the audience cheers them on, reclaiming their instruments from the fallen clones and triumphantly launching into….. the exact same song they played in the earlier concert sequence! So Party On, Turn It Up Loud (but not too loud), God Bless America, and if you feel at all disgruntled with the corporate wonderland you’ve been born into, well… better keep it to yourself buddy, or some jerky House-of-Wax guy will probably pick you out to be turned into a mindless robo-zombie. Either that or Kiss will just turn up and beat your ass. I think that was basically the message. Something like that anyway – I dunno, I forget easy.

I’m sorry for lapsing so hard into interminable plot summation in this over-long review, but really it seemed the only way to express the wonderful totality of ‘Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park’. I mean, I just don’t really have much to say about the cinematography, y’know. It was good. I could see the colours. Most of the time I could understand what was going on. Hey, how ‘bout a Pepsi?

BEST DIALOGUE:

One of the best things about ‘Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park’ is that most of the dialogue sounds as if it’s been post-synced by Hanna Barbera voice actors, adding immensely to the overall charm of the endeavour, and providing a wealth of highly quotable, oddly enunciated nonsense for us all to enjoy. The aforementioned baboon exchange was probably my favourite, but I liked these ones a lot too;

#1: Star Child voiceover over shot of the park manager looking uncomfortable:

“He’s sweating the possibility we might pull out… he’s just plain sweating”

#2: Lovelorn heroine in search of her captured boyfriend asks two moustachioed security guards about the whereabouts of the park creator guy’s lab:


GUARD # 1: Oh, that’s underground.

GUARD #2: Yeah… waaaay underground.

I could carry on all day really, but the realisation that it’s a summer’s day outside and I’m sitting here transcribing chunks of the script from ‘Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park’ leads me to do the decent thing and leave it at that.

EXTRAS:

The corporate ident for Hendring, the Putney based company who put out this tape, is by far the most elaborate and confusing I can remember seeing. Basically it’s a sorta self-contained short film that features POV shots of a black-gloved burglar breaking into a darkened living room. There are Oscar silhouettes and pages from scripts on a glass table and a big VCR with a flashing ‘play’ button. There are a lot of different shots of these various elements. Eventually, the Oscars fall off the table. It’s sorta hard to describe, but probably worth the entry price alone if you happen to see any tapes originating from this presumably quite marginal operation.

(PLEASE NOTE: screengrabs in the above post are not mine. I pulled ‘em off other people’s sites, primarily this one:

http://happyotter666.blogspot.com/2010/03/kiss-meets-phantom-of-park-1978.html

and this one:

http://itsallforyoudemon.blogspot.com/2011/05/kiss-meets-phantom-yesterday-and-today.html

Hope nobody minds.)

Rollinades: La Rose de Fer / The Iron Rose (1973)

Having already reviewed a few of Jean Rollin’s more marginal and uncharacteristic films this year, I thought it was only fair that I should make time to cover at least one of his bone fide masterpieces before moving on to a few more oddities… not that Rollin’s masterpieces aren’t complete oddities by anyone else’s standards, but y’know what I mean. So where better to start than with perhaps the purest and most concise distillation of his particular approach to cinema ever realised – 1973’s ‘La Rose de Fer’.

Perhaps the most ambitious and personal work to emerge from Rollin’s creative peak in the early/mid ‘70s, ‘La Rose..’ also marks one of his only attempts to make a film outside of the constraints of the horror/exploitation industry. Entirely lacking in any of the usual genre signifiers whilst still staying true to the director’s established visual language, ‘La Rose..’ sees Rollin plunging headfirst into the kind of freely associative, imagery/poetry driven art film that his horror work had always hinted at - a move that sadly proved so commercially disastrous that he didn’t dare attempt another fully loaded avant/abstract film until 1989’s self-financed ‘Lost In New York’.



The set-up for ‘La Rose..’ is pretty minimal: a girl (Francoise Pascal) catches the eye of a boy (Hugues Quester) when he stands up to recite a poem at a boring wedding reception. Making each other’s acquaintance outside the event, they agree to go for a bicycle ride together next Sunday. Thus they meet amid abandoned locomotives at the fog-shrouded ‘old station’, and proceed to get cycling. They are full of beans and enjoying themselves, and everything is going swell. In fact it all seems far too affectionate for a first date, but hey - they’re French, I’m British, what the fuck do I know. Controversially, the boy suggests they enjoy their picnic amid the picturesque surroundings of a large, dilapidated cemetery they happen to be passing, and the girl, though initially reluctant, agrees. They decide to explore the cemetery, and spend so long mucking about that they fail to notice that it’s getting dark, and the caretaker has locked the gates for the night. Condemned to spend the night alone amid the graves, they go through some changes.

And that’s about it really.

Not much to work with perhaps, but ironically ‘La Rose..’ actually sees Rollin pushing his preferred themes of sex and death more relentlessly than in any of his sex or horror films, as the emblematic plotline quickly gives way to what is essentially an extended visual poem, exploring … uh, well… y’know - the fresh air and energy of young love contrasted with the constant erotic pull of the tomb, the shivery fascination of funereal imagery, life and sex and death and all that heavy shit.



As you can perhaps appreciate, ‘La Rose de Fer’ is an extremely difficult film to write about. It is capable of provoking a powerful reaction in receptive viewers, but that reaction can be a very fleeting and complicated one, almost impossible to describe or quantify without drifting inescapably into the realm of witless purple prose.

So, let’s try a different approach. ‘La Rose..’ is an unusually personal film, and as such, it seems only fair to respond with an unusually personal review.

Going back a few years, to when I was (cough) a younger man than the one you see before you today, for a short while I was really into those Richard Linklater movies, ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Before Sunset’. Y’know, the ones with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy traipsing around picturesque European cities exchanging a load of quasi-meaningful blather and so on. Nowadays, I’d probably be inclined to dismiss them in a heartbeat as a bunch of sanctimonious, masturbatory, half-assed indie-schmindie lamo wish fulfilment bullshit and get on with my life. Because, y’know, I’ve got better shit now, and more important, not at all lame or masturbatory things to do. Like watching ‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ again. But back then, when I was a bit dumber, a bit more earnest, a bit less cynical and judgemental, they… uh, well, like, y’know – they meant something, man.

If questioned at the time, I’d probably have come out with some claptrap about how these films presented the pure connection between two human souls, the act of falling in love as it should be, unfettered by ego or social constraints and yadda yadda yadda. But what I’d really have meant was: WOW, how much would I love to stride elegantly around some romantic old world city, exchanging deep n’ meaningful platitudes with some beautiful, intellectual French chick? That would be the BEST. And frankly, I’d be tempted to suggest that anyone who claims their enjoyment of those movies stems from anything other than similar base-level wish fulfilment is probably lying.

But the point I’m trying to make is: at one point in my life, those flicks seemed unique, and spine-tingling, and such. Then stuff happened, and I changed, and they don’t anymore. Now I watch ‘La Rose de Fer’ instead. Thanks Jean!



Similar logic of course applies though. It would be foolish to try to claim otherwise. How can I try to quantify the appeal of ‘La Rose de Fer’? Well…

Item # 1: if it is possible to say as much without immediately sounding like some teenage goth, I really like cemeteries. I liked them when I was a kid, visiting deceased relatives I was too young to even remember. Carrying the flowers and helping clean off the headstones, and running around picking up shiny stones from the paths between the graves, wondering whether they had some special power or something, but being very careful not to tread ON the graves, because that was bad luck, and just seemed, y’know… an inherently wrong thing to go around doing.

I still liked cemeteries many years later when I was moping around watching those Richard Linklater movies, and I still like them now. Whenever I’ve got some spare time and fancy a bit of a walk, I’ll often head out to one of London’s beautifully decrepit garden cemeteries. I like looking at them, I like being in them. I like the atmosphere, and I like the quietude. I like the sense of the past, the feeling of reverence. I like the strange architecture of the graves, and the overbearing imagery and… I don’t have to go on do I? You get the fucking point. I just really like graveyards alright, get off my case.

So when I watch ‘La Rose de Fer’, with Jean-Jacque Renon’s rich night-time photography (the way the couple’s red and yellow shirts stand out amid the dark green and brown hues of the graveyard is just lovely), and Pierre Raph’s almost subliminally low-key score (simple a cappella vocal melodies and ecstatic choral drones), I would be perfectly happily just watching a plotless documentary about the cemetery in Amiens for ninety minutes really.




I would say that the fact there’s a story of some kind going on often just seems like some added bonus, but that’s not really fair. In fact, one of the weird ironies of ‘La Rose..’ is that, for all that Rollin films tend to be labelled as nonsensical or surreal, the almost total lack of a story here actually inspires him to construct quite a gripping narrative from the elements at hand. The film’s thematic consistency creates a strong sense of internal logic, and the screen is full of action and movement at all times, the soundtrack given over to near continuous dialogue, helping the couple’s journey toward their strange fate avoid the kind of exquisite boredom one might have reasonably expected of a film like this. There are even some pretty funny bits, if you can believe that.

Anyway, Item # 2: I also like going camping in remote places and walking around after dark, breathing in the night air, and stuff. Yeah, that’s the best. And as for Item # 3, it should be noted that I’m still far from adverse to the company of dreamy, poetically-inclined young French girls.

So basically, when about halfway through the film the boy starts getting all angry and agitated and kicks up a fuss, I just feel like shouting, ferchrisake, what are you doing man? This is about the best way to spend an evening that could possibly be imagined! Give in and enjoy yourself, you idiot! You’re the guy I’m supposed to be identifying with here as I take vicarious pleasure in this exquisitely lyrical situation your character has got himself into – stop screwing it up!



If most of the action in the film is, as it seems, at least semi-improvised, then perhaps Hugues Quester’s irritating refusal to get with the programme is fitting. None of the backstage stuff I’ve read about 'La Rose..' has anything very kind to say about the actor. Pascal says she hated acting opposite him (see Jeremy Richey’s interview here), whilst Tombs & Cathal note in ‘Immoral Tales’ that “..Rollin also had a lot of trouble with the male lead” (p.152). Some kind of disagreement led to Quester insisting his name be removed from the posters, and he is credited as ‘Pierre Dupont’.

But no matter, Quester’s apparent belligerence never becomes a major problem, as Pascal holds the fort with an incredible performance, variously ignoring or tormenting her wouldbe lover as the film progresses, as her character finds herself moving inexorably from the reluctant innocent who initially wants to leave the cemetery into a wild and ecstatic participant in the world of the dead that surrounds her, as, in some sort of atavistic revelation, a concept of a wholly different relationship between life and death seems to explode in her mind fully formed, an absurdly romantic, anti-materialistic celebration of the mystery that lies beyond that strange horizon…

Sheesh, what was that I said about purple prose..?



The majority of the world’s populace would be forgiven for considering ‘La Rose..’ an insufferably pretentious, confounding exercise in god knows what. Sure, fine, whatever. It goes without saying that I love every second of it.

The film’s standout sequence comes when Pascal’s character experiences a vision of herself, naked in the surf on – where else? - the beach at Dieppe, the instant transition from funereal darkness to bright (ok, actually it looks a bit overcast) daylight creating a striking visual reflection of the girl's instinctive and weirdly compelling 'death = life' revelations. Wielding the wrought-iron funeral cross of Gallic tradition as the waves crash against her, she recites the Tristan Corbière poem that helped inspire the film. It’s really breathtaking. It is the heart of all of Jean Rollin’s body of work, the perfect distillation of his vision, from which all of the symbols and ideas that compose his cinema flow. It is near insanely beautiful, enough to stop the breath in your throat, to make you want to sign of the dotted line and join the girl in death’s loving embrace.






As you might imagine, people in 1973 didn’t quite see it that way.

To quote ‘Immoral Tales’ again;

“Rollin decided to present the film in person at the 2nd Convention of Cinema Fantastique that April in Paris. […] Patiently, he explained to them the genesis of the film and how he had tried to do something different, which he hoped they would receive in the right spirit.

The film had hardly begun before the walk-outs commenced. Pretty soon it was obvious that he had a disaster on his hands […] Cinematographe recounted how both he and his film had been roundly booed by the audience, in a way that the writer had never seen a director booed before. So much so, in fact, that for the next few days whenever Rolin was spotted he was given a wide berth and the comments and catcalls repeated. Ecran Fantastique […] in particular noted how the dialogue had given much cause for general hilarity.

Rollin was devastated. The film was now unlikely to find a distributor willing to take a chance on it. All the money he had made on his earlier films was invested in ‘Le Rose De Fer’. Now he had probably lost that too. Eventually the film was picked up by an arthouse distributor, but failed to find an audience amongst the devotees of the ‘cinema d’auteurs’, while its status as a film permissible to anyone over 13 made it anathema to the horror crowd.”

Those goddamn small-minded snobs. Fuck ‘em. They wouldn’t know great art is it punched them in the face. Henry Miller and Anais Nin and Baudelaire would have fucking LOVED this movie. For the moment, I love it too.

Maybe I’ll look back in a few years and cringe. Maybe I won’t. But for the moment, I can throw this in the DVD player and go exactly where I want to be. That is all.

Awesome!

Hey, look what I got in the post today!

Infernal Hails (that's a good thing) to Tom Farris and VHSflix, for they are legend. I can't wait to experience "Blood On Satan's Claw" as nature intended. With Bill Murray in it.

Oh, and I'm still here in case you were wondering. Got pretty sidetracked in the past few weeks, as stupid stuff like work and travel and having a social life has cut viciously into the time I'd naturally prefer to spend sitting in the dark watching stupid movies and writing about them on the internet, but plenty of stuff in the works I hope, so, uh.. watch this space.

VHS Purgatory: Transylvania 6-5000 (Rudy Deluca, 1985)

PRICE PAID:

£1, I think? From the used furniture shop up the road from my old flat, I think?

THE BOX SAYS:

“Fear meets hilarity head on as two less than competent reporters attempt to unravel the mystery of modern day Transylvania. During their search they meet a bizarre assortment of loonies and throwbacks.”

THE FILM DELIVERS:

Before we get going on the slightly more highbrow VHS haul I wrote about last week, time to take out the trash. And if you can honestly say you don’t have room in your life for a mid-80s horror comedy starring Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley Jr, well, you’re a better man than I. If you can actually make it to the end of this thing though… well I guess that makes us about even.

The set-up is thus: Goldblum and Begley are reporters for a supermarket tabloid. Jeff is the wouldbe suave, wisecracking one who wants to be a serious journalist. Ed is the bungling son of the editor, eager to impress his dad. The paper has acquired a videotape that shows some dudes apparently being attacked by Frankenstein’s Monster (this footage is actually one of my favourite parts of ‘Transylvania 6-5000’, if only for the fact that it kinda reminds me of Jess Franco’s ‘Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein’). So, the editor wants to dispatch Jeff and Ed to Transylvania to come up with a front page expose on Frankenstein in three days, or else.

At this point, some questions will invariably trouble the inquisitive viewer. Why would a tabloid editor order his staff to make up a nonsense story irrespective of the facts, and then insist they travel halfway across the world in order to achieve this? Why would you go to Transylvania to look for Frankenstein anyway? And most pressingly, why does the film’s sub-Huey Lewis & The News theme song, in which the name of the film is frequently repeated, completely fail to make any reference to the Glen Miller composition from which the rib-tickling pun is taken? I mean, that would seem like the obvious thing to do, right? And if the reference was deemed too old-fashioned or esoteric for the movie’s target audience, well WHY DID YOU NAME YOUR FILM AFTER IT?

Anyway, I realise this sounds kinda alright so far (ok, it sounds completely stupid, but y’know what I mean). Before we go any further though, I should make clear: ‘Transylvania 6-5000’ is terrible. I guess I’m usually not too demanding when it comes to screwball comedies, but rarely have I encountered one as comprehensively unamusing as this. Blame it on a combination of corny script, woefully poor timing and actors clearly losing the will to live, but suffice to say, every attempted witticism, every moment of slapstick japery, falls straight to an undistinguished death. And, this being broad Mel Brooks/Zucker Bros style humour, when the gags fail, there’s nothing left. Just an eerie silence, and occasional moments of accidental weirdness to stop us losing interest entirely.

Following our obligatory plane flight montage credits sequence, Jeff and Ed arrive in Transylvania. Apparently back in 1985, Transylvania was a sovereign state that existed outside of the influence of the Soviet Union, and had a populace who all spoke perfect English. The ‘capital’ of Transylvania also looks a lot like a small town in rural France. Crazy stuff, huh? Anyway, at the very least we can give thanks to the filmmakers for choosing to forego the obvious notion of portraying Transylvania as some kind of spookshow monster paradise, largely sparing us the pain of ninety minutes of soul-withering claptrap about vampires with toothache and werewolves going to the barbers and such. Unfortunately however, they instead opted for the next-worst idea, populating their whimsical Eastern European locale primarily with sub-normal comic relief characters of the most odious kind, each of them determined to batter us with their one joke shtick until blissful unconsciousness sets in.

When Jeff and Ed arrive at the castle/hotel where they’re staying, they are greeted at the front gates by the goofball butler character who, in what might just be an inspired bit of meta-commentary, is an incompetent slapstick comedian whose shtick is that he is constantly trying to impress the American guests with his poorly-conceived, prop-based routines. When he opens the door for them, he is clowning around with a creepy ventriloquist’s dummy. “Ah, hahaha, you see, it is funny, yes?” he yells desperately, as our protagonists look on silently – a perfect microcosm of the whole experience of watching ‘Transylvania 6-5000’.

When this butler guy was first introduced, I thought he was just about the most obnoxious character I’d seen in a movie for some time. But as the film progressed, his senseless enthusiasm and sheer bloody-minded persistence actually began to win me over, until I ended up thinking he was just about the best thing in this movie. At one point, he physically attacks a terrified looking Begley, dragging him across a courtyard in order to force him to take part in a banana skin slip-up routine. Later, Begley is searching the castle in search of a secret passage when he opens a door and finds this inexplicable cretin confined in a closet-sized space, riding a mechanical bull. “What the hell are you doing?”, asks Ed, not unreasonably. “Meditating”, the guy replies. I wouldn’t go so far as to say any of this is funny, but at least it’s really weird, which counts for something. I thought that butler-guy looked pretty familiar, and the endearing oddness of his character began to make perfect sense after I looked him up on IMDB and learned that he was none other than Michael Richards - Kramer from ‘Seinfeld’. But of course.

Trawling my memory for other positive things to say about ‘Transylvania 6-5000’, it is probably pertinent to mention a memorable cameo by Geena Davis as a vampire lady in a sexy Vampirella-esque outfit. I, uh… I thought she was pretty hot. Which is an admission that’s alarming on all kinds of levels, now that I think about it. Let’s pretend I never said anything. Also, much of the film is shot in some cool, dilapidated Eastern European locations that are sometimes quite atmospheric, if you can ignore the stupid stuff that is actually happening in them. I guess it’s much like a latter day Charles Band film in that respect.

Towards the end of the movie, assorted monsters turn up – a Frankenstein monster, aforementioned vampire lady, a mummy, a wolfman, a mad scientist – and for fifteen minutes or so they all run around causing light-hearted havoc… which is fine, depending on how much you’ve had to drink, and how much you like early ‘60s-style ‘monster mash’ antics. Naturally, it transpires that all these monsters are simply misunderstood individuals suffering from unfortunate conditions of one kind or another, and that the mad scientist is merely a nice guy trying to help them. Oh, such heart-warming hilarity. As you might expect, all these final reel ‘explanations’ are pretty cringeworthy, the most uncomfortable being that of the mummy, who under the bandages is – get this guys – an UGLY GIRL, who the philanthropic doc has helped out via the application of full body plastic surgery, so that now she’s popular with the village yokels who previously shunned her, and thus happy. Ha ha - it is funny, yes?

Tedious, annoying and morbidly chuckle-free throughout, if ‘Transylvania 6-5000’ achieves anything, it is probably to remind us how lucky we are to have both ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘The Man With Two Brains’, and to increase our admiration for the way those films actually manage to do this kinda thing really well. Still though, there is a certain inept enthusiasm to ‘Transylvania 6-5000’ that makes it difficult for me to really hate it as such. Partly I guess, it’s just the fact that, as a fan of numerous directors whose work most of the world would tend to write off as incompetent and/or incomprehensible, I’d probably prefer to reserve my bile for films that are cynical or conceited or nasty, rather than ones like this that at least seem to mean well, no matter how badly they fail.

I don’t know much (or indeed, anything) about director Rudy DeLuca, but watching his efforts here, I sorta got this notion that maybe his own story mirrored that of Ed Begley Jr’s character – like, maybe his dad was an old time bigshot in the movie industry, and Rudy was the failing son desperately trying to get a foothold in the business. And his dad said, “well if you want to be a part of it so badly, why don’t you just go and make a picture?” So Rudy went off and hired some reasonably well known actors… and made this misfiring screwball comedy in which a bunch of guys in monster suits run around for fifteen minutes at the end. Then maybe, a few months later, he approached his dad at some industry event.. and his dad just walked away.

Probably it didn’t go like that. But I’d like to imagine it did, if only to add some underdog pathos to the 100 minutes I spent in the company of this tape.

BEST DIALOGUE:

The only genuine laugh I got out of the script came from the mayor/hotel manager, whose one joke shtick is that he’s constantly attempting to use American phraseology and getting it slightly wrong. “So d’you expect to get a lot of business here?”, Goldblum asks him. “Yes, we will be beating them off with rakes, as you Americans say!”

Yeah, that’s about as funny as it got.

EXTRAS:

A New World teaser trailer for… wait for it … GODZILLA 1985! It was awesome.

A Poor Man’s P2P Torrent Site.

Supplies for the weekend I brought home today: milk, coffee, bread, beer, butter, orange juice, and 27 VHS TAPES.

The library at the university I work at has finally decided to start clearing out its collection of ‘obsolete’ visual media, which is being deposited bit by bit on the clearout trolley for 20p a pop. 20p! That’s ridiculous! For those of you unfamiliar with British currency, that’s what? Like 30 cents? Half a Mars bar? You do have Mars bars in your country, right? No? Well you get what I mean.

Belonging as it does to an educational establishment, it stands to reason that we’re mostly looking at arthouse/avant garde/classic Hollywood fare from this collection rather than horror/exploitation shit, but still, as of 17:00 hours today there were still copies of “Sante Sangre” and “Valerie and Her Week of Wonders” sitting unclaimed… and I thought the students round here were meant to be hip! Jeez!

Anyway, I don’t know whether anyone out there has a particular fetish for watching international art cinema on fuzzy mono VHS, but if you do, check out the haul I just picked up for roughly the price of my lunch:

The Red Desert (Antonioni)
The Outsiders (Coppola)
Help! (The Beatles one)
Blood Simple (big box!)
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger)
Dreams That Money Can Buy (Hans Richter)
Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?
The Dead Zone (Cronenberg / Stephen King)
Videodrome (how could anyone POSSIBLY watch this on any other format? I think I already have a copy somewhere, but, uh, I liked the cover art for this one..)
La Samourai (Melville)
The City of Lost Souls (Takashi Miike)
Hard Boiled (John Woo)
The Exterminating Angel (Bunuel)
Stalker (Tarkovsky)
Accident (Losey)
Bad Lieutenant (Ferrara)
Day For Night (Truffaut ; Warner Home Video big box! I love black & white era Truffaut more than I can possibly express, but saw the trailer for this one at the BFI and thought it looked pretty bad actually – like, the point at which he completely lost the plot or something; but hey, Nike Arrighi from The Devil Rides Out is in it!)
Juliet of the Spirits (Fellini)
Fellini Satyricon (Warner Home Video big box! Smells like an old man’s armpits..)
Treasure of Sierra Madre (Bogie! John Huston! Warner big box! Man, I love this movie, I’d buy it any time…)
The Trial (Orson Welles ; Thorn EMI big box!)
Gimme Shelter (Maysles Bros)
Theorem (Pasolini)
Woman of the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshihahara)
Suture (Scott McGehee / David Siegel – remember reading some good stuff about this some place..)
Klute (what the hell is this movie again? Donald Sutherland / Jane Fonda, some kinda ‘70s movie about… I have no idea what it’s about. The blurb on the back features the phrases ‘high-class call girl’ and ‘vicious, psychotic killer’, and it’s another funky Warner big box, so yeah, 20p well spent I hope…)

Some of these are movies I saw when I was younger, studying film in FE college and watching just about everything they had in their very-similar-though-smaller library, so it’ll be interesting to see ‘em again, but many others are completely new to me. I’ve already been trying to make ‘classic movie Sunday’ part of my weekly routine… might have to extend it to Monday, Wednesday and Thursday ‘til I get through this lot. Maybe I can start some kind of rating system, judging how each one stacks up in comparison to two hours of my life and half a Mars bar? If only I had more time.

Anyway, more to come next week I hope – I just KNOW they’ve got some horror/weirdness buried in there somewhere…

Night Tide(Curtis Harrington, 1961)

As an unusually subtle and low-key independent b film emerging from an era in which sensationalism was all, Curtis Harrington’s first commercial feature ‘Night Tide’ seems born to be UNDERRATED - an epithet used in probably every capsule review of the movie ever penned, raising the question of precisely how far an underrated film can go before it becomes officially ‘rated’, and perhaps eventually overrated - witness the fate of the two films to which ‘Night Tide’ probably bears closest comparison, Herk Harvey’s ‘Carnival of Souls’ and Jacques Tourneur’s ‘Cat People’.

In fact, maybe one of the factors that has helped keep ‘Night Tide’ under the radar for so long is the sheer weight of the debt it owes to the aforementioned Lewton/Tourneur film. To lay it down straight for ya before we get all mystical later in this review, it must be noted that ‘Night Tide’s storyline is an almost an exact rewrite of ‘Cat People’, with the action moved to the Santa Monica sea-front, and Simone Simon’s potential cat-woman replaced by Linda Lawson’s potential mermaid, Mora.




Drawn into Mora’s orbit when he clumsily tries to pick her up in a beachside jazz bar is Johnny, an impetuous young navy recruit played by none other than Dennis Hopper. Already well-known by this point for his bohemian lifestyle and tough guy/troublemaker screen persona, it is to Hopper’s credit that he manages to make himself so believable here as a fresh-faced innocent, away from home for the first time and awkwardly trying to engage with the world around him. Fusing the character’s eager-to-please naivety with his trademark nervous energy and disconnected stare, Hopper makes for a goofily endearing protagonist, just as Lawson, looking like she’s just stepped off the front of a Les Baxter ‘exotica’ LP, plays the doomed, ethereal, forever unknowable heroine to perfection.




Even the most strident movie-tech snob (is there a movie equivalent of the term ‘muso’? suggestions on a postcard) would have to cop that Harrington’s direction here is excellent too – beautiful, bright photography and eerie, graceful camera movements a speciality – and his scripting’s none too shabby either, aforementioned ‘Cat People’ debt notwithstanding. From the outset, ‘Night Tide’ is clearly the work of a guy trying to position himself a good few notches above yr standard drive-in fare.

Best of all from my point of view though, ‘Night Tide’ excels in that particular kind of careful, hypnotic pacing that that so often seems to accompany films shot in sea-front locations, as events seem to ebb and flow with the tide, imbuing the film with that unique feel of disconnected seaside weirdness that I’m always going on about here.




Were that the sum total of ‘Night Tide’s charms, we could file it as a well made / well acted variation on ‘Cat People’ and get on with our lives, but what really gives the film such an uncanny resonance is it’s setting and unique cultural background. Although it is never directly addressed in the film as such, the rich occult/bohemian/art scene and strange atmosphere of the L.A. beach communities in the late 50s/early ‘60s seems to breath through every pore of Harrington’s film, every detail throwing up a new, unexpected connection that makes ‘Night Tide’ fascinating viewing for any student of mid-century American underground type bru-ha-ha.

If the film’s artier moments seem to recall the languid Cali-mysticism of Maya Deren’s ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’, well perhaps that’s no accident - prior to moving into the commercial film industry, Curtis Harrington was a big name on the West Coast avant garde scene. He assisted Deren and Alexander Hamid on ‘Meshes..’, and worked with Kenneth Anger on ‘Puce Moment’ and ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’, appearing in the latter as Cesare the Sleepwalker, as well as producing his own portfolio of experimental shorts, notably ‘Fragment of Seeking’ (1946) and the heavily Anger-influenced ‘Wormwood Star’ (1956), a portrait of his fellow ‘..Pleasure Dome’ star Marjorie Cameron.

Bridging the gap between this avant/occult scene and the (relatively) mainstream world Harrington was trying to find his way into at the start of the ‘60s, Cameron reappears in ‘Night Tide’ as the mysterious woman who haunts Mora, calling her back toward the ocean, and it is her unmistakable presence that will immediately have any occult bozos in the audience sitting up and paying attention.



A figure of almost mythical hip/esoteric fascination, Cameron’s legend dates back to her days as the wife and muse of Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder and Crowleyite magus Jack Parsons. An active participant in Parsons’ American branch of Aleister Crowley’s OTO dring the ‘40s, Cameron became the central focus of Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard’s infamous ‘Babalon Working’ in the Mojave Desert – a doomed(?) attempt to realise one of Crowley’s more apocalyptic notions by conceiving a supernatural ‘moonchild’ whose existence would help hasten the end of all creation, or somesuch.

Understandably perhaps, Cameron seems to have dropped out of sight for a while after that. But a few years later, following the various magical and financial battles that resulted from the rivalry between Parsons and Hubbard, culminating in her husand’s much-publicised fiery demise, it is little wonder that Cameron went on to build a reputation for herself as the flame-haired Scarlet Woman of West Coast occultism, a reputation that was immortalised forever by Kenneth Anger – whom she apparently schooled in Thelemic practice – when he cast her as Kali, the claw-handed destroyer in ‘..Pleasuredome’ – an image that I *guarantee* you would recognise from somewhere, even if you have no interest in this stuff whatsoever.

Perhaps it is the resonance of this backstory, or perhaps just her naturally striking visage, but each of the brief appearances Cameron makes in ‘Night Tide’ is pretty thunderous. In some ways, Harrington seems a bit like a reformed alcoholic in the making of this film, trying to stick rigidly to the straight n’ narrow of a linear, narrative film, whilst Cameron seems like some demon on his shoulder, pulling the film back toward the otherness of abstraction and magick, just as her unnamed character seems to want to drag Johnny and Mora back into the subconscious depths of the ocean.







Watching ‘Night Tide’ with knowledge of Harrington’s background, you can almost picture him desperately trying to convince distributors that he’s a regular guy plugging a regular movie, but all in vain. Despite his best efforts, there is something here that is just off; not just the dreamy atmospherics or the suspicion that he’s taking all this psychological ocean-ambiguity shtick a bit more seriously than is really becoming for a shlock movie guy, but just in telling details like the fact that this is probably the first horror(ish) movie I’ve ever seen that actually features a believable tarot reading. Sure, the seaside carnival’s resident Countess Romanov type gives it some theatrical hoo-hah, but she’s essentially laying down the cards for Johnny in exactly the way your old how-to book on the Tarot told you to, with typically perplexing and long-winded results for the, er, ‘uninitiated’ (read: BORED) viewer.

(I thought it was pretty cool that Hopper’s ‘fate’ card is The Hanged Man – a result that oddly doesn’t fit his character in the movie very well, but suits the weird path of his later life and character pretty perfectly.)



The scene is which ‘Night Tide’ relapses most severely into the realm-of-the-weird comes when Johnny tails Cameron’s mysterious woman, apparently following her all the way to boho-haunted Venice Beach – a locale that the film presents as being some kind of treacherous, spectral zone that physically resembles a deserted Turkish fishing village or something – where he traces his quarry back to – where else? – 777 Baabek Lane.




Knocking on the door, Johnny is surprised to find himself greeted by Mora’s business partner/adopted father Captain Sam, who denies all knowledge of any mysterious woman, but is nonetheless happy to fill Johnny’s head with all kinds of wonderfully creepy blather about the ‘sea people’ and Mora’s true place among them – a great, forboding scene and a great performance from Gavin Muir.


Captain Sam himself is another bohemian beach community archetype of course – a kind of avuncular Henry Miller figure, drinking away his twilight years with anyone who’ll hang around long enough to listen to his bullish reminiscences. Even aside from all the magickal stuff, ‘Night Tide’ has a nocturnal boho charm that’s hard to define, but impossible to ignore.

The modal jazz being played in the cellar bar (‘The Blue Grotto’) in the opening sequence is fucking good, and characters seem to drift randomly through the day, staring out to sea, drinkin’ coffee, drinking in the silence before the crowds arrive for the funfair. Another perfeact example of those strange, self-contained horror-movie worlds that I just want to go and live in.


If one thing denies ‘Night Tide’ it’s richly deserved ‘cult classic’ status though, it is probably the ending. After the slow-burning dream-feel of the rest of the picture, the conclusion seems perfunctory and stupid on first viewing, giving every indication of a crass, producer-enforced happy ending that fails to even honour the basic Weird Tales convention that demands a naive protagonist be darkly changed by his or her uncanny experience.

Initially it’s a real disappointment - but thankfully, the crucial ambiguity remains. Johnny might have decided to bail on the story for good, cutting his losses and exiting stage-left with a nice new gal to pal around with, and Captain Sam might have delivered his stock confession to the fuzz and resigned himself to a life behind bars, but no moderately imaginative viewer is gonna take that shit at face value. Marjorie Cameron is still a no show – who WAS that strange woman, and what was the alien language we heard her speak in the opening sequence…? Mora herself may be conveniently ‘dead’, but the circumstances strike me as pretty vague. We are not privy to the results of the inquest, or to the details of her burial. Given her obvious love of the ocean, could she have been buried at sea, by any chance…? Harrington and his producers might have called time when things hit the last reel, but somewhere off screen, Mora’s tale continues.


Although it’s a solid movie in almost every respect, for me the fascination of ‘Night Tide’ stems from it’s role as a kind of prism, reflecting the psycho-cultural landscape of the L.A. beach towns, and foreshadowing the immense changes that were about to be wrought upon their hermetic cultural development in the following decade.

Somewhere just down the way, The Beach Boys were probably getting warmed up, and Sandra Dee was probably busy shooting ‘Gidget Goes Hawaiian’, without the faintest idea that she’d be reduced to orgasmic altar-writhing in ‘The Dunwich Horror’ before the decade was out. Bob Markley, future tragic avatar of ‘60s L.A. weird, was probably down there somewhere, hustling chicks and playing bongos on the beach in his faux-beatnik, pre-Law School get-up (and probably with markedly less success than the beach-bongo dudes who appear in another one of ‘Night Tide’s great moments of super/natural peril).


Dennis Hopper himself would of course go on to become emblematic of the shape of things to come, as the man on the scene when the ‘weird’ culture that seems so marginal, so exotic in the world of ‘Night Tide’ crashed headfirst into Hollywood and every other damn place, reaching it’s grizzly end a few short years later as the bloated carcass of what became ‘the counter-culture’ collapsed under combined weight of chemicals, ego and miscellaneous abuse. And if seeing Hopper here as a holy innocent is perhaps not entirely out of keeping with the quixotic travails that would take him on the strange path from ‘Easy Rider’ through ‘The Last Movie’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’, it nonetheless seems especially eerie to see him young, clean and sober, wetting his toes in the waters of the weird for the first time (or at least pretending to).

One thing’s for sure: it would have been a hell of a lot easier for a young goof like Hopper’s character to get mixed up with salty characters and mystical hoodoo in the Santa Monica of 1971. But it just wouldn’t have been half as much fun, would it? That wide-open feeling would have been long gone, the truly weird creatures having long ago returned to the shadows.




’Night Tide’ is public domain, and my screengrabs are taken from a surprisingly nice looking print you get find on archive.org. Frustratingly though, the audio track on this file doesn’t sync right, rendering it pretty useless. If you want to turn the sound down and just enjoy the visuals, I found that Grouper’s ‘AIA: Alien Observer’ album and side two of Miles Davis’s ‘E.S.P’ make for an excellent alternative soundtrack. If you’d prefer to actually hear the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths and follow the story though, you’ll have to resort to roughing it on Youtube I’m afraid. Or you could always be swish cat and find it on DVD I guess, but jeez, do I look like I’m madea money..?