Bolling Straight: TRIANGLE, BONNIE'S KIDS and TRIANGLE

Tiffany Bolling--70s genius. With a body and face similar to Jane Fonda's in gorgeous freneticism and an Stone-y attitude of coy intelligent malevolence about her, Bolling's beauty, acting and sheer screen presence elevate near any project.

TRIANGLE (1970) would be some low rent dreck if not for Bolling's luminous presence and strong acting. She plays a hot, fiery heiress co-ed at a private girl's school that bland hunk Paul Richards teaches at. Meanwhile he's hunky enough to get the lascivious bisexual sculptor art teacher's eye and bland enough his gaydar can't pick up the signals. I assumed they were shacked up in the shadows of scissored scenes long since spliced onto some queer projectionist's private reel or burned by hateful rednecks. I'd think all that except for the luminous presence of Bolling, and a wild grape stomping orgy at the local vineyard, the sole moment which might give the film the 'psychedelic' tag it hath.

From the orgy, Dr. Paul is sent to rescue her (the cops were friends of her late father) and they spend the night wandering in the woods and love blooms. The big issue for hunky male educators everywhere: is it better to give in or fight when some unstoppable nymphomaniac keeps hitting on you?  Refuse and they could get their hell hath no fury scorn on and spread rumors you hit on them,  but if you do, they could 180 on you and start crying afterwards and in hindsight who knows what they might say? You could be part of some mad cycle where they seduce strange men and then frame them for the gallows. But wouldn't it be worth it? What about if they really need a friend? It's only our ever-shifting moral compass that, lately, damns these sorts of things when they're as old as education itself. Without the stigma, who knows what benefits might accrue for both of you?

What makes me want to descend so deep into this film is of course Ms. Bolling. She's got the cunning ability to cut through the song and dance of Sharon Stone while keeping the momentum (much as I love her in BASIC INSTINCT I never feel like I'm watching anyone but Sharon Stone doing anything but work for an Oscar in CASINO). But where Bolling comes into her own is in the way her border's transcend the limits of acting when needed and into the gutsy drive-in trash operatics that make Quentin Tarantino write your name down on a cocktail napkin in the drive-in dark. There's a special magic you need to play the drive-in. It's a kind of kabuki theater of over-the-top heaving and shimmying and angrily firing. Could she play Shakespeare? Don't ask me. But could Meryl Streep or Fonda deliver the goods like Bolling does in BONNIE'S KIDS? Hell no. If Bolling and Marks had made BARBARELLA I'd bet you my bottom dollar it would be as beloved as FLASH GORDON (1980) is today, by the fans who know.


There's another TRIANGLE from 2009, a weird mix of GHOST SHIP meets Poe's classic short story, "Descent into the Maelstrom," wherein a yacht full of himbos, beeyatches, and one slightly skittish blonde deer-in-the-headlights single mom of a kid with some mental illness (who she leaves "at school") pass through a strange electrical storm off the coast of Florida and wind up on a ghostly passenger ship. It would be wrong to tell you anything more, except that it plays nearly nonstop on Showtime Extreme, and it's the kind of film you can come in on anywhere, over and over, and it only fits the metatextual oomph of the proceedings to a Golgothian T.

But Bolling ain't in it. So let me just say by way of a Bolling bio that she rose to fame via a spread in Playboy, which she's since lamented as pigeonholing her as a sex symbol instead of an actress. To me, and no doubt Tarantino, too, she's better than an actress... she's nothing less than a psychotronic goddess.

Yes, BONNIE'S KIDS (1973) --"Thank God she only had two"- I was expecting streaks and flecks and scratches like any drive-in print but here is is on a beautiful anamorphic DVD from Dark Sky-- the image has probably never even looked this good before even at the drive-ins. Equal to Bolling and the image quality is the wild roster of character actors and a witty script along the lines of Elmore Leonard / FOXY BROWN. Bolling plays KID #1, Ellie. Her kid sister Myra is played by a gorgeous youth named Sharon Gless. The camera frames their long legs as they luxuriate across vast expanses of 70s furnishings while regular working character actors--including a rich, closeted lesbian-- drool and all but lean on our shoulders and whistle as we watch.  Meanwhile, the stepdad has just about had it and drinking whiskey to bolster his courage makes an ill-advised move.

The move is so ill-advised it ends up the girls take it on the lam, hit up a crime boss model agency uncle and start posing. Bolling is on unrepentent greed mode, hijacking a package delivery her uncle sends her on, with a dimwitted detective enslaved against his better judgment to comply by those heavenly legs and flawless middle and lovely hair, and eyes, and lips; who can resist her? I once dated a girl like this and she derailed my entire life before taking off. It was worth it then and it's worth it now to see Bolling pull the same crap on the guy who harassed Stacey Keach in THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (Steve Sandor).

Tangential highlights include Casey Adams (NIAGARA) as a grinning traveling salesman "on an expense account" the short skirts and 70s decor; and most of all the swell rapport of the two guys chasing them--the heavily eyebrowed Alex Rocco and smoovly-suited Tim Brown. "Hear that Eddie? The girl said she's out of coffee" Their rapport is so funny, scary, and KILLERS-ish it inspired that of Jules and Vincent in PULP FICTION.

BONNIE'S KIDS is so good, in short, it has me dutifully poring through the whole oeuvre of not just Bolling, but Marks as well. In a great director bio video from Elijah Drenner (on the BONNIE DVD) we learn of a hard-to-find gem called THE ROOMMATES, a giallo-type slasher film THE CENTERFOLD GIRLS, and an all-but lost 1978 film called WONDER WOMEN. You can try to get into Al Adamson or Ted V. Mikels if you want, but it's a hike. Go for the guy who knows what he's doing, Arthur Marks, and follow Bolling straight to Hell.

And she had a guest spot a crazy snake charmer yogi in Charlie's Angels!
Check out this great 1991 interview with Bolling, reprinted over at TEMPLE OF SCHLOCK!

"You rolled, you really rolled" - ROLLERBALL and a 70s Bloodsport Overview

One of the advantages of age is added hues of golden 20/20 hindsight when discussing retro-futurism in movies and for me age doesn't factor into any retrofuturist film more than ROLLERBALL (1975). Today I finally actually watched the whole damned thing (it came on TCM), and understood it, and was thrilled by it in that low-key adultly 70s thrilled way. Why did it take me so long? Why?

ROLLERBALL was a film that seemed to come across the TV quite a lot when I was a child but frankly it seemed far too adult for me to understand. It helps in hindsight to understand the 70s, the last decade before cable TV and the VCR changed the fabric of American life. Prior to then there were only three major networks, plus PBS and a few local stations on the UHF antenna, and most of them signed off around four AM with the Star Spangled Banner. Football would dominate the ratings any night it was on - viewers almost had no other choice but to watch and it developed a dirty kind of bourgeois cache it doesn't have anymore. Now cable and DVD have made it possible for each member of the family to watch nearly anything at any time.

Another factor in rendering ROLLERBALL indecipherable was the inevitable cropping of the widescreen for TV, making the sports action hard to keep track of, just a lot of 'half images,' the limitations of ariel TV (non-digital, often streaky) and the 'editing for television' effect (in DELIVERANCE when I watched it one Sunday morning for example I didn't even see a single redneck rapist). If you wanted to hear people curse (listen for when they says 'shit' of 'fuck' in the shaggier movies from that era -- they pause like they're waiting for the imagine audience to stop roaring) or see gore or breasts, you had to go to the movies, and you had to be over 17 or accompanied by a lax parent. My parents, alas, were not lax.

One of the big novels of the era was a savage insider tale of drugs, sex, and violence in the NFL called NORTH DALLAS FORTY, which in 1979 was made into a very popular movie with Nick Nolte-- then a young hunk who'd rose to natural naitonal hotness via the mini-series called RICH MAN POOR MAN (1976 - above right). Nolte wore a big 'stache in NORTH DALLS FORTY like Burt Reynolds, then the #1 box office star in the country thanks to the huge popularity of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT (1976), which singlehandedly launched a craze for all things trucker-related: CB radios, diners, cowboy boots, biker bar brawls, convoys, sexy hitchhikers, and sped. Now I can re-examine these films from time's sweet retro distance (it all kind of creeped me out at the time) and what I especially find healthy about sports films from the era, launched by the NORTH DALLAS FORTY popularity is the irreverent amount of sex and drugs involved vs. the sanctimonious, sober, overcoming-all-odds feel goodism and urine tests in today's sports films. Burt Reynolds' roster of characters may have been smarmy shitheels but they were goddamned men. They weren't going to piss in a cup for you or anyone else.

From Top: North Dallas Forty; Semi-Tough

While these kind of off-the-cuff sports films weren't necessarily critically acclaimed they were beloved by all: they had ood-natured performances, tough locker room bonding, drug-induced hotel smashing, and Jack Warden playing weary coaches going up against shadowy team owners who would do anything necessary to pack the stadiums, including pumping so much cocaine into their star quarterback he can keep playing even on a broken leg. But for ROLLERBALL, director Norman Jewison is clearly aiming for something loftier. Over on Midnight Only, Jeff Kuykendall theorizes Jewison was trying to ape Stanley Kubrick and turn the film into a kind of Clockwork Football:

The problem here is that one could simply summarize the premise of the film, and the message would be inherent: society craves violence and leans toward corruption. The result is a film which is frequently pretentious: grasping at profundity and failing to glance it.Death Race 2000, directed by Paul Bartel and released the same year, ironically succeeds where Rollerball fails, tackling almost the exact same story but delivering it with such over-the-top violence and comedy that the whole achieves the sublime (and on a Roger Corman budget). Perhaps Jewison should have let go of the Kubrick approach; though it’s fascinating to see what happened when John Boorman took the exact same tack for the even-more-ridiculous Zardoz. (That will have to be the subject of another piece.) - Jeff Kuykendall - Midnight Only

In addition to SEMI-TOUGH and NORTH DALLAS FORTY there was the tangentially-related BLACK SUNDAY (1977 - terrorist blimp attack at the Super Bowl); TWO-MINUTE WARNING (1976- assassin at the super bowl); SLAP-SHOT (1977 - thugs in hockey, below); BAD NEWS BEARS (1976 -smoking, beer-drinking, cursing in little league); THE LONGEST YARD (1974- prison football team); hell, even M*A*S*H (1969, but popular in the 70s) ended with a football game.

And you can see the fundamental difference between today's and yesterday's sports movies with the remakes: The remake of BEARS loses the bulk of the profanity, smoking and drinking, which mind you in the original was done by the kids. Boy-man Adam Sandler replaces macho man Burt Reynolds in the remake of YARD.... so, a lot has frickin' changed. Sports movies are still semi-big today, but less semi-tough. The big heroes are less likely to be seen bedding numerous hotties and having big walrus mustaches, and shooting, popping, and snorting all sorts of drugs and more likely to be seen crying at bedsides of little dying kids, or scraping themselves together from poor neighborhoods and being watched over by magical sober godparents. You know, like they did in the 40s. In the 70s, you had games like this:

ROLLERBALL came out before both BAD NEWS BEARS and SEMI-TOUGH, but then again it's 'futuristic' and so is both ahead of the times as well as, now, behind them. Set in 2018, a lot of 'BALL's tropes have come true -- Caan pops in something between a DVD and an old mini-disc to watch home movies.... right there on the TV! In 1975! How did they know? And there's something like a TIVO and at one point Ralph Richardson kicks a big console computer intelligence that talks like a male version of Siri. And all the books ever written have been loaded into the computer-- though instead of being released as iBooks they're summarized, i.e. stripped of any offending content or ideas that might run counter to the edicts of the shadowy ruling corporation and everyone knows that, um, today shadowy corporations don't control us... riiight? But Jewison's 2018 is still a land without cellular technology and digital circuits so it's not that ahead of itself. They're still using punch cards and reel-to-reels and everything's huge and clunky. So in the real future we got rid of all that heavy stuff, but kept the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Woo-hoo!

In between the violent sports games, John Houseman lurks and makes grim decisions on behalf of his shadowy corporation not unlike our own Dick Cheney. There's a decadent party where jet set kids blow up the last few surviving trees for sport. And everyone pops these things that come in little Sucrets-style boxes that makes people totally wasted. And like SOYLENT GREEN, women have been reduced to vague chattel owned by the corporations. James Caan is first given Maud Adams as a wife but then some high ladder salaryman whisks her and he's pretty bent out of shape over it so won't retire when Houseman leans on him. Seems Caan's big warrior rep is conflicting with the corporation's idea of the game as showing the importance of a group effort (i.e. a North Korean halftime show). They keep upping the violence quotient of the game namely to get him killed so his impudence doesn't go unpunished.

As tough a warrior as he is you can tell Caan's not very bright, like the kid who'd rather kill all his friends than let them play while he has to go into dinner. He mopes around at libraries and computer desks trying to get some books about the corporations but none are forthcoming. He really can't understand the motives the corporation! He's OLD! Dude, why can't they just say it to his face. Caan's kind of grandiose behavior wouldn't fly in Hollywood no matter how many millions you were worth and in it's self-justifying, ample proof that the corporation had the right idea.

And there was a remake, with Rebecca Romjin (left), so apparently not only is the future much less macho at this juncture, it's also more hypocritical. Because no way is that enough armor for a woman to be on a rollerball rink with. And I'll tell you something else -- no one cares, cuz this is about ratings.

So what does it all mean. Yes the film is still pretty boring, but I managed to get through the 1975 ROLLERBALL yesterday during a TCM screening by keeping myself busy with chores while watching, and recalling the 70s, seeing it while similarly bored as a kid with my dad. In honor of him I constantly mentioned aloud the names of all the classical music dirges being played by Andre Previn's orchestra on the soundtrack, and my subsequent drug experience allowed me to understand the goofy chilled-out attitudes of the partiers, but most of all I liked the final ending, where we see Jonathan slowly skating around the corpse-strewn arena in a series of twisted freeze-frame close-ups, his face unrecognizably distorted, as if all the violence and death around him was something he'd been waiting for all this time, so he could devolve into a chicken killer rabid dog. This is a man who will always be the last one standing, a veritable Horatio holding the Hamlet head of dystopia in his hands as it dies, but then morphing into Roy Batty crushing the head of Tyrell.

The trouble is, nothing's ventured or gained in ROLLERBALL, just the half-baked aspirations to find out the obvious by a dimwitted star killer, and a gentle corporation just trying to hang onto its ratings as a prima donna tries to keep playing a young man's game. Based on the level of drug-free helicopter parenting done by the nanny state over today's athletes (disbarring an athlete for testing positive for marijuana, which is far from a performance-enhancing drug), the corporate masters in ROLLERBALL seem now to be the good guys. As Houseman's shadowy corporate ruler notes of Caan's mustached sidekick after the opening game, "You rolled, you really rolled." He sure did. Anyone try to roll like that now, boom! Tested positive for MDMA and out of the game! I say fuck the nanny state--that's the real enemy! A corporation that doles out drugs and applauds all the things they now profess to loathe, that's A-OK with me. So roll on, Big Daddy, roll on! You may have been druggy and sinister but you were part of that last gasp of cinema--the era before STAR WARS changed the landscape forever--a genre film that was genuinely adult. 

A Flick by Wes Carpenter: SCREAM, TERMINATOR: SALVATION

Saw SCREAM (1996) again last night. I never saw SAW but seen SCREAM four times now, and it just gets scarier every time, not an easy feat. Due to its metatextual knowingness, the way characters are hip on horror movies (and die anyway), the idea we're going to be killed while watching it only increases with each viewing. The only thing close to that kind of meta is THE RING, but a ghost girl coming through the TV is too literal. In SCREAM the danger comes not from where we're facing on the couch but from behind it. If you catch a knife's reflection on the screen, from behind you, then the scene onscreen switches to an audience watching you and gasping in fear, shouting "Look behind you!" And it's too late. Your watchers shrink in terror mid-popcorn shovel, especially if after SCREAM you watch HALLOWEEN (1978), which the characters in SCREAM watch (after that, watch THE THING (1951), which the kids in HALLOWEEN watch). And when the characters inside these films die, they switch sides, and joint heavenly-hellish living room of the entities watching me watch the characters in SCREAM watch HALLOWEEN --and the name of the film is 'real life.'

What was new in HALLOWEEN more than any other slasher trope was the banal suburban environment, and it scared us because that's where we lived. We didn't live in sororities or Bavarian ballet academies, or the woods, or Manhattan--and yet those place held the most killers: New York City horror movies weren't as scary unless you happened to see them there, but New York itself was scary back then--and I imagine going there to see a movie like MANIAC (1980) would be terrifying even before it started--but if we were out in the suburbs, we presumed we were safe. In the city you had sicko Vietnam vets and street gangs, in the country you had rapists and cannibals. Now, in the suburbs, there was Michael Meyers.

All the subsequent slasher films between HALLOWEEN and SCREAM tended to neglect that suburban element, even Canadian rips like PROM NIGHT wound up in condemned old buildings and high school attics, places no normal, repressed teen would have to go, by order of gym teachers and parents, not costume parties held on trains, or gold mines, or even sorority houses. Rhese films were only scary to us kids if it felt like being killed not only could but what was going to happen later that night. They weren't scary unless the whole movie felt like a cosmic message aimed square at us and we just sitting there, all unaware and unsuspecting trying to sleep and then some small noise downstairs, or upstairs. For me it was the branches against my 2nd floor windows, scritch-scritching, like little fingernails, in the dead, Central NJ silence.

If you were to die by fire the TV would show you The Towering Inferno the night before... the Cassandra signal. (Jason was the exception to the suburb rule and was scary because we all went to summer camp... sooner or later.) Even more than the suburbs, what the successful horror films know is that we all watch TV. And if you look at TV long enough you know it starts to communicate with you, it takes you over like a cult, making it impossible to turn it off without pangs of fear and alienation, making all your other activities--friends, school, kickball--fade into unreality, warping your mind like living too long next to a magnet; suddenly normal silence seems curiously empty, and scary, so you need to turn the TV on and just find something to watch with no slashers in it, leave the set up bright and loud and forget it.

If you live chained to the TV like I did in the early 80s and now do again you live with all of this death coming at you--interrupted only by endless commercials rattling off catastrophic side effects of prescription drugs; cancer patients finding a center that makes them feel like there's hope; twisted up old townies nearly dead from smoking croaking their ghastly warnings; abused killer whales gasping in the sludge; tigers hunted near to extinction; starving kids in Africa--it all gathers inside you like maggots on a rotting corpse, eating up your still healthy cells like greedy capitalists at a money trough. The single overall media message is clear: you are riding an eternal journey of ghastly mortality. You will never escape, so better get Geico!

The TV works you like any good cult brainwasher: terrorizing you and then comforting you, back and forth, over and over. In its overall guise as a continuing soap opera it hides the fact that it's your soul that's being soaped cleaned of its wallets and keys and sanity and precious dirtiness. Like raging waters in a flash flood that never ends the TV draws you under, promising any moment now the bubble bath soap salts will be added to the water and suds will life  you up from the lead albatross of your body, blocking the sight of all the flooded black oil death below, and leaving free you to wander in Elysian Fields of bubbles and to Wendy's and through the mall, and the monsters taking shape in the ominous twirl of water by the black void mouth drain...

See, you don't even need the suburbs if you have a TV in your horror film, because no matter where you live you are watching TV-- and filmmakers like John Carpenter and Wes Craven understand how to bring you back to the suburbs of childhood via their films, to re-capture the terror of adult ambivalence and antipathy towards your early teen life or death struggle, until you start to feel like you're drowning. Carpenter and Craven are all about taking advantage of their audience's kids up to the antipathy and numbness caused by excessive TV, and how a very real threat is buried under signs and THEY LIVE sunglasses. So in SCREAM even after many murders have rocked the community the kids go to school and tease each other with fake blood and knives because they can't quite take their own deaths seriously (unless they see themselves on TV as it happens). Thus there is no more 'real' in horror films after SCREAM made horror characters self-aware. We all imagined waking up in a slasher movie, figuring we'd survive since we knew the rules. And now we knew even that awareness was no guarantee.

If we see the film in the theater we have a moment's grace afterwards, a moment where we the audience are all safe in an exiting herd. we shuffle nervously out into the near-deserted mall parking lot, spooked cattle ready to stampede in giggling fits back into our cars the minute someone lets out a playful scream, and we sneak into our darkened homes to not wake up mom, and then we're finally all alone with the upstairs darkness of our frail, vulnerable bed rooms, full of easily broken windows and doors, flipping on our radio or TV or white noise machine just as fast as we can to drown out 'the house settling,' and the mirthless, accusatory voices calling our names from deep inside the layered silence.

Later I watched TNT's three AM presentation of TERMINATOR SALVATION, a film I wasn't overly crazy about the first time, out of loyalty to the underappreciated Nick Stahl in RISE OF THE MACHINES. But last night, the time was right. Saturday into Sunday, a time to reflect on old favorites, the DVD album dusty with photographic memories. We find even John Connor has the Sunday at three AM blues, listening to the tapes of his mom's guidance, which we ourselves heard her make back in the 1984 original. In other words, like us, John Connor, struggling to survive into further series entries, is addicted to the past, to childhood memories brought to life by old pictures and recorded voices, to a time when The Terminator was just a low budget sci fi film from Orion meant mainly to fill drive-ins, not change the world.

His passion for the tapes his mom made even has its own weird mirror in the trans-existence love affair between executed criminal (Sam Worthington) and terminal cancer patient (Helena Bonham Carter) that begins in our present day and decade later morphs into SKYNET Helena luring Sam--now an unwitting amnesiac terminator-- back into the mechanistic fold.

McG may not be a James Cameron but he handles the vast scale of T4 well: the depressing combat zone high contrast greys of the landscape are a respectful advancement on the Hong Kong blues and obvious miniatures of the 1984 original.  Then again we're not quite--in the time loop of events--up to the era that 'begins' the first film. T5 will hopefully bring us right up to speed, with Skynet developing time travel thus necessitating Connor's sending Reese back in time so he can ensure his own birth. As Connor said in 1991, "this is deep."

Deep? Maybe in 1991 but such time travel glitches are not even eyebrow raising in our age of a thousand screens seen swirling around wide-eyed families in 4G commercials, everyone plugged into their laptops and phones, reacting and laughing to different things at different times while in the same room, and seeing horror and science fiction movies over and over to the point they--creative visualization-style--make them happen in real life--via endless sequels and pop canon quotes slowly shaping one's reading of the world--like mini-religions. Just realize that if you watch TERMINATOR: SALVATION you ensure this fate will overtake us. If sooner or later we will master time travel, and rest assured we will, then time travelers are already here. We who watch sequels to films that won't be made until after we're dead know these things, and we keep quiet as a tomb lest plot spoilers destroy the world. Above us sleeps a giant mom, oblivious that we're up at dawn taping monster movies and surely disapproving of our slacker ways. But for now, she sleeps. John Carter, I mean Connor, I am your father. Put down your headphones and behold the soap of power! Shhhh, it has already begun.

NOTES:
Some screencaps borrowed from inside the Stale Popcorn

Happy Birthday Cheryl Ladd!

Today, it's Cheryl Ladd's birthday. Happy birthday to an underrated actress, sparkling beauty, sultry singer, and first-class Angel!


It's unfortunate that in between the Farrah-mania that erupted in the first season of Charlie's Angels--and led to her leaving to do movies, namely the ultra-bomb Saturn 3--and the later seasons with derided Kate Jackson replacement Shelly Hack and the decidedly awesome method-acting goddess Tanya Roberts in the still not-on-DVD season five, people forget that there was solid work regularly turned in by the steady presences on the show Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd.

Ladd worked long and hard, from seasons two through five, and never wavered. Factor it all in and she's second only to the super-sweet Jaclyn Smith for being on the longest. And no offense to Smith, but Ladd was always able to go a little deeper, to invest 3-D life into a 3-D character.

Cast as Jill's sister Kris Munroe, Cheryl Ladd was an ideal replacement for Farrah, of whom people tend to forget brought sparkling athleticism and sweetness to her iconic Jill Munroe. As her little sister Kris, Ladd tapered the same qualities to a little sister point and wowed in a brown bikini, swimming up and around to jack a gangster's yacht to rescue the kidnapped voice of Charlie in a wow of a Hawaii season two opener. She had a pop album out, modeled in the style of the mega-successful Olivia Newton John. She got to do some synergy singing/ plugging on the show. I remember taping it with my my audio cassette player and even though she only sang a few bars of her song "Take a chance on me / love will never be / for chance" I still know it by heart, 30-odd years later.

Another peak Cheryl role came a few decades later, in a film that saw Drew Barrymore being super sexy and seducing TV op-ed newsman and bender enthusiast Tom Skeritt (his sneaky morning vodka pull is straight out of my own life at the time). Cheryl Ladd is the rich, pampered wife upstairs, terminally ill but still achingly gorgeous, a kind of still-breathing REBECCA. Ladd is great in her few scenes, conveying huge amounts of woe and regret at having spent her life in front of a vanity mirror instead of learning a skill or developing a literary passion. In the process she turns what could have been just a marginally above-average Skinemax-ish potboiler into something truly marvelous, digging up surprising gravitas. I have a burnt-in memory of seeing it on my friend's couch, where I was crashing having left my wife for a girl very much like Drew Barrymore's character. We had just come back from a monster con in PA where I didn't win the Rondo. We drove straight to Saint Mark's and I got a tattoo, and we were breaking up. It was a once-in-a-lifetime midlife crisis kind of day, and POISON IVY turned it into poetry...  

Here she is with Waylon Jennings. Just look into her naturally loving and open eyes as she looks up at this sexy, noble beast of a man. It's enough to make you go country on the spot.

People love to pigeonhole and over the years the original Charlie's Angels has been maligned with accusations of it being mindless T&A, but if you watch these shows now, as an antidote to the super flashy crap of today, these angels are extraordinarily intelligent and skilled. Over their careers they pose as everything from professional ice skaters, race car drivers, circus folk (above), rich illegal baby adopters, poor bumpkins looking to buy bootleg motorcycle parts, and helicopter traffic ladies... of course they've also gone to the less athletic side, posing as masseuses, prostitutes, fashion models, strippers, belly-dancers, and Playboy-ish bunnies (cats instead), but through it all they're always sweet and kind to the nice guys. Figuring out which alleged playboys are all talk by coming onto them and watching them shrink away, they flirt with kindly old men and talk nice to troubled girls; they show you can be capable, badass, wear awesome flare slacks with turtlenecks, and still be warm.

I'm grateful to the show for being on DVD and on cable. I'm grateful to Ladd, for having lived up to the possibilities Kris Munroe embodied, and beyond. So happy birthday, Cheryl! You have helped make this world brighter for we who dwell in darkness. You have seen our slimy, slothful troglodyte hearts, and instead of wincing smiled and forgave our obscene mental trespasses, refused to see anything but the heart of a knight under our monstrous criminal hides. And all the while, your smile has lighted the world, in illumination, and in load.

Rage of Huberty: CHRONICLE (2012), CARRIE (1976)

The film CHRONICLE (2012) is a teenage daydream of telekinetic power acquired from an alien source and like few others it explores the motivations fate itself might have for bullying kids into becoming homicidal agents of vengeance. There's an invisible Kali goddess strolling through both films, monitoring the bullying and torment, the way a brewer might monitor fermentation. Kali wants 70s sci fi telekentic horror revenge CARRIE nation twelve ways to Doomsday, but there's a problem: CHRONICLE has goody-two-shoes types, like Alex's popular but sappy cousin Matt Garetty (Alex Russell) who also has powers and who wants the film to be the touching tale of a dude getting back together with his nerdy 5th grade sweetheart-turned-senior class hottie video blogger (Ashley Hinshaw) and sticking by his bullied bud. Meanwhile their nonthreatening African-American pal Steve (Michael B. Jordan), a student body president candidate, just wants CHRONICLE to be a badass superhero film where he gets laid a lot.

The sci fi element of a glowing subterranean alien blob of intelligence melds aspects of SPACE CHILDREN (1958) with  THE VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960). In CHRONICLE, the powers are given when Steve and company find a big hole behind a rave and descend with the loner Alex since he brought a camera thereto. They behold a big glowing blue orb, touch it, and are Kubrick obelisk-like transformed into dudes with massive telekinetic skills, thus fulfilling their destiny, Kali-style, if only they all had the balls and psychotic tendencies to be as wanton in their destruction as Alex.

Top: Chronicle / Bottom 2: Space Children

Instead, CHRONICLE really stands for something. The handheld camera thing isn't just laziness or copping a Blair Witch feel, it's actually used with some poeticism and with none of the grain and odd greys of real HD video. The result is that the celluloid shines and yet the DP is free to move from all sorts of angles, and sudden poetic and interesting jump cuts. Eventually police 'copter and car footage, the camera of a cute blogger whom once had a childhood sweetheart he left behind when he got too popular, all enter into the found flow. There's some great tricks with mirrors and the whole conceit about Alex's ability to film himself via telekinetically-adjusted angles, the camera employed like a magical Tinkerbell to his Peter Pan.

And thanks to bullies in school, a dying mother, bullies on his block, and an abusive bullying father who drinks up his disability checks and gives his son a hard time, Alex doesn't get far into the realm of being accepted by the cool kids due to his powers before he shrinks back into his peevish shooter shell. It seems Kali is sparing no expense in ensuring Alex's ensuing rampage!

 The end result is that the survivor of the three is the one who gets to decide what tone the movie is taking, what footage will be used and when, and I won't spoil the ending. But just imagine the troubles that might have arisen if Amy Irving in CARRIE (1976) also had some telekinetic abilities and could give Carrie a run for her money? It might not have gone off so perfectly. And that's the real element of greatness in CHRONICLE: it's ragged at the edges as in a real friendship where each person is conflicted and pulling the others in a different direction than the one they want to go. None of them get the movie their demons or angels were hoping for.

I relate with that. As a teenager I started out an Alex, isolated, no social life, days spent in as many study halls as possible, reading endless violent adventure stories, ala Mack Bolan "The Executioner" novels (above left) and entertaining vicious vigilante fantasies towards anyone who ever crossed me, no matter how minor an infraction. My best buddy at the time was just one level crazier. As I was getting out of the whole WW2 thing he was buying guns from the back of Soldier of Fortune.

Right at the height of his rage a certain James Huberty killed a mess of people at a San Ysirdro McDonald's, and my buddy was enthralled; he soon knew the exact arsenal Huberty had brought with him, the order of the victims, the final stand-off, the anti-immigrant underpinnings, and he expected me to honor Huberty in my heart as well. Rest assured he made sure I knew every detail during our long car rides to nowhere. Finally I pulled way back from the whole serial killer phase thing after this, pulled away from him, and got into drugs and Lou Reed instead. He wound up who knows where, but when Columbine happened I knew it could have been us who went ballistic in that library. God knows we thought about it and fantasized about it and drew pictures 'chronicling' it. If he had pushed me to join him in a cathartic rampage I may even have gone along with it. You know how teenagers are.

The chronicling aspect is also an important part CARRIE, a film so iconic now it's basically our century's Red Riding Hood. In director De Palma's hands the camera circles and swoops and looks down with a telekinetic blood bucket-blue eye, or slows down or splits the screen and fractures into diamond-insanity or big clever close-ups. De Palma flew onto the map with this film, demonstrating the patience to let the build-up to the big release come with agonizing tick-tock momentum of real school life. It all seems to occur in an alternate dimension much slower than real time. Carrie's victorious climb up the steps to the stage to receive her crown takes so long, for example, you feel as if De Palma is playing a merciful God, allowing her big moment to stretch into infinity, slowing the clock down so those few seconds of 'acceptance' Carrie feels last a lifetime.

Red is her color, so I see the film now and wonder if she couldn't have just rolled with the punches and laughed it off, a good-natured sliming ala the Kid's Choice Awards, only red instead of florescent green. Instead she sees, Bunuel-style, everyone in the audience laughing at her, even the one person who was nice to her, even though they are just shocked, for the most part - her Kali-endorsed madness ensures she sees them as all laughing evilly.

Just as with the the feeling of belonging and togetherness that happens, for a brief time, with loner Andrew and the cool kids Matt and Steve, it's clear Kali is deliberately sabotaging Alex's life in order to indirectly inflict outward damage. The whole cast of high school faculty and students around Carrie is being manipulated, after all, by an unseen director to prod and abuse Carrie so her powers can be used later to annihilate them. This fits very well with theories about telekinesis and poltergeist activity being the almost exclusive domain of teenagers reaching sexual puberty and dealing with huge amounts of repression:

The first part of our theory is the most well-known, childhood/teenage puberty is the cause of most Poltergeist activity and is more often than not caused by a young female in emotional or psychological "crisis". In many cases, this young girl doesn’t even realize that they are causing the disturbance. The poltergeist uses this person to transmit and transform their paranormal energy to move objects and oftentimes cause damage or harm to people and items around them. It is not a possession of a human, but merely the human being used like a transmitter for the psychic energy.

The Southern Pole of the magnet is the young female starting up the "baby making factory". As she projects her emotions outward (as most teenage females do), the poltergeist pushes its own energy toward her. The two energies repel each other often causing objects to move or harm to others. The stronger the stress she feels, the more this spirit will want to feed off of her emotions, the move likely the poltergeist activity will increase. As stated above, the spirit is using the young female as a transmitter to project its energy outwards. 

It has been brought up by Italian researcher Pierro Brovetto and his colleague Vera Maxia that this action of opposing energies can result in teenage telekinesis (a possible excuse for object movement). Brovetto and Maxia believe that the extra fluctuations triggered by the pubescent brain would substantially enhance the presence of the virtual particles surrounding the person. This could slowly increase the pressure of air around them, moving objects and even sending them hurtling across the room. - Theory 4

But of course, De Palma's film does the same for us, and that's important. We in the audience initially aren't necessarily on Carrie's side. Her overreaction to her first period,--shrieking like some kind of NELL-ish hill person--is such that even the kindly gym teacher slaps her. From that one incident flows the entire film, and after seeing the traumatic abuse suffered by Carrie from her crazy Christian mom, we're completely on her side, even as she goes ballistic and kills even the nice gym teacher (who she sees, in her madness, laughing maniacally at her blood situation, as if she was in on it the whole time, some long twisting joke of humiliation).

In CHRONICLE, Andrew's gradual turning back into madness happens not because abject material--pig's blood or green slime--was dumped on his head, but because he involuntarily dumps his own, vomiting all over his last shot at happiness. Any loner-writer type will relate, that feeling of being held back by one's own self-sabotage from full participation in the sense of group camaraderie, as if driven to return to your lonesome ruminations the way a vampire must return to its native soil. CHRONICLE's big pig blood moment occurs off camera and is caused by Alex's own anxiety, skeeving out a girl who was ready to take his virginity and sending her running, and spreading the news - Andrew becomes his own worst John Travolta. The betrayal blood of the lamb/pig baptism of Carrie, or the winners at the Kid's Choice Awards is inverted, and the effect is twice as horrific yet anticlimactic, a mere fuse lighter rather than the bomb itself.

In each case the offending 'abject' telekinetic is finally destroyed but remembered forever, by someone like Amy Irving, who's altruism in sending Carrie to the prom is always slightly suspect: her heading to the prom in her normal clothes to spy on her boyfriend and Carrie makes no sense. How could this end for Carrie in any way other than heartbreak? Does she even know smirky William Katt is already making out with Carrie on the dance floor? Couldn't Amy have talked someone else into asking Carrie? It's to the film's everlasting credit that we're never quite sure, even when Amy spots the rope and figures it out, is she maybe just trying to cover her own ass? Certainly Carrie suspects the same, otherwise she wouldn't be pulling her down into the grave.

Similarly, the 'friend' cousin with the need to constantly express his feelings in CHRONICLE, Alex (Matt Garetty) ends the film--which has held onto its found footage-style narrative structure with great tenacity and awesome results--by speaking directly to Andrew in the final closing 'captain's log'-style letter, attempting to bring closure to his experience. There are atypical bullies in both CARRIE and CHRONICLE but Alex and Amy Irving represent a unique kind of villain--the 'good-intentioned' road-to-hell paver. Certain kids decide to carry the moral weight of the world on their shoulders, lord knows why, and they take it on themselves to stop the evils they perceive in their peers. In refusing to let the evil flower, they stunt its growth and the root system rises up to level the town. These do-gooders somehow never see it's really all their fault.

Or maybe I'm just telling myself that to excuse my own walking away from the budding evil in my gun nut friend. He never went ballistic, as far as I know, in the biblical sense. But he could have. And on his walls the cops would find his tacked up pictures of James Huberty to prove his madness with.  Who knows what I may have provoked him to do had I gone all noble on him, demanding he throw out his Solider of Fortune collection and renounce his violent convictions?

Instead I just left him, for college, where I eventually found a true posse of cool hippie kids and finally felt accepted, extroverted, and washed clean in the blood of the lambsbread. Thirteen years later he was finally doing everything I used to, but I had by then whiskey and orgies and was in AA.

But for all the negative things people say about drugs, the right ones, the good ones, have a way of raising your evolutionary perspective, and the haters who demonize have usually never tried them, and that's contempt prior to investigation. They don't believe in UFOs since they've never seen one, so how can they believe drugs are bad if they've never tried them? If the Columbine kids had a joint instead of Luvox would any of the carnage have had to happen? God forbid a natural drug like pot be legal. It might curb the homicidal urge in a whole damned generation... no longer the CHRONICLE but the chronic. No longer Carrie White burns in Hell, but Carrie White burns spliffs, and sells trips, and is loved. So kill all the people who want to ban what they don't understand.  Line them up and... oops.

See how easy it happens?