Taste the Blood of Dracula's Prime: 12 Psychotronic Vampire films now streaming the Amazon

Weird times, man. I've been laying low surfing around Amazon Prime like a deranged 'American Picker' of psychotronic oddities to collect and lay at your feet like so many dead mice. It's become even wilder and weirder out there then ever- all sorts of groovy stuff can be found under the plainest of rocks, while classics are unwatchable thanks to terrible transfer/uploads. Llike with psychedelics or that 'other' Amazon, the one in South America's swingin' rain forest, you need the right guide.

I'm that guide, man.  Quick! Turn left!

As I've written (in my 5 Films on Amazon Prime for a new TrumpMerica), there's a strong need to be picky in here, lest your aesthetic sensibilities be dampened, so stay close.

PS - I'm not shilling for Prime or actually giving you a password. But especially as Netflix only seems to care about their original material these days and Hulu has terrible organizational skills, for the weirdness hunters amongst thee, Prime is, dare I say it, the new Kim's Video. 

All Images below are Screenshots from Prime Itself to give you quality assurance.

BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE

(1969) Dir. Al Adamson (USA)
** 1/2 (Image quality - B-)

Somewhere between the hick carny hustle of Steckler, the macabre jouissance of Wood, the amateur competence of Mikels, and the laissez faire shrug of William Beaudine, Al Adamson crouches and waits for the right rube to stumble past, then pounces. More often than not AA's films have been terribly preserved and framed and shot. Even when the transer looks good, like someone tried to correct the color and sharpen it up, it still seems like you're watching a home movie by a kid stealing shots from a far off film set, from around a corner. His cinematography is usually flat, but sometimes it gets accidentally moody, like when he does day-for-night shots at twilight, or he lucks out hiring a refugee like László Kovács. His sound mixing seems done by a deaf person and his actors do a lot of squinting past the camera, as if for a long lost cue card. And yet... sometimes I'd swear there's something magical about the cumulative effect. If you're in the right mood for accidental Brecht totemism--i.e, if you're delirious with fever or lack of sleep--and loved seeing all the Universal horrors on local TV Saturday afternoons as a small child, mixing them in your mind with the lurid R-rated devil movie local drive-in TV spots and Addams Family reruns--you just might tolerate Blood of Dracula's Castle.

Alexander D'Arcy (the 'music teacher' who identified Cary Grant's continental mind in The Awful Truth) is great here as the aristocratic vampire who tries to figure out how best to dispose of a Squaresville USA couple who've just inherited 'his' squatter's rights castle. Naturally it will save him from having to move out if he can, shall we say, 'have' them for cocktails? With the impressively bouffanted Paula Raymond as his loyal Bathory-ish wife, and John Carradine as, for some reason, the butler. Robert Dix (Richard Dix's son!) is an escaped (werewolf) lunatic relative. He's terrifyingly American, like he just murdered his way out of a George Axelrod movie. There's a "big" sacrifice to Saturn or some (day-for) night goddess out on the dunes, or something, at the climax. It's a mess, yet whatever piece you slice off it, there's a refreshingly dark and amoral aura here, like The Addams Family if they actually chained up women in the basement to torture and drain of blood, laughing all the way and expecting us to do the same. If it wasn't made in 1969 I'd swear it was ahead of it's time for 1964. Best of all, though the quality of the Amazon print is not strained, Kovács did the photography, which may explain why it falls down like the gentle rain of heaven, even if it bears Adamson's paw smudges all over the splices.

2. VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA 
(1960) Dir. Renato Polselli 

*** (Image quality: B+)
(In Italian w/ English subtitles)

Luisa (Hélène Rémy), the gorgeous platinum blond heroine in this atmospheric Italian horror film looks a lot like a less conventionally svelte Eva Marie Saint or Bibi Andersson --reason enough in and of itself for me to love this film, but there's also a whole busload of showgirls breaking down near an old creepy castle, a plot that wasn't old hat when this came out (1960), and for all its romantic subplot cliches, it's exciting to watch the ladies deal with supernatural incursions by doing improv vampire dance routines, and to dig the naturalistic way the plot coheres around seemingly random exchanges. Especially compelling is the natural rapport between Luisa and her equally platinum-blonde Nordic-ish hotel roommate Francesca (Tina Gloriani), conjuring weird parallels with Persona (which it precedes), especially after Francesca gets seduced by the vampires and tries to lure Luisa into the fold via weird quasi-lesbian bed sharing and head games. Noice!

As with Rome's still-alive neo-realist 'found value' approach to its countrys post-war ruins, fine atmosphere is hewn from the living rock of a bombed-out castle and its winding catacombs, so once sealed crypts are accessible by Third Man-style stumbles down piles of rocky rubble, and the transfer on Prime has got that pencil sketch black and white photographic richness that illuminates every crack.

Another cool aspect is the co-ed nature of the vampire clan: seducing duties are divided between the mysterious Countess Alda (Maria Luisa Rolando) and her bullying /subservient male consort (she acts all endangered by his macho control freak act, but it's more fluidly sadomasochistic than that). His face dissolves into a horror mask with ping pong eyeballs if he gets too  thirsty, but then he becomes younger and 'handsome' after drinking blood, and that's when his power dynamic with the countess shifts! It's an unusually smart touch that taps into the insecure amped-up vanity at the dark mama's boy heart of Italian manhood (his savagery will get you to stop laughing at them ridiculous eyeballs) . In prime pimp style, he drinks from his ladies once they've drunk from the men--cuz he's not gay or anything, and if his lovely young victims come back to life he stakes them, shouting "I'm master of my domain!" before kicking the coffins shut, the ultimate in macho tantrum. The Italian language being spoken over subtitles helps it all seem 'arty' and the score delivers both theremin-goosed passages for slinky vamp moments and terrible muzak-style filler whenever composer Al Piga can't discern the emotional tenor of a particular scene, which is often (oh oh, what Ennio might have done!) Either way, it's a classic Italy, back in the day when they were just beginning to dabble in horror, thanks to relaxing censorship, so the cliches are still wet, glistening in the moon, like blood, Luisa! The monster will strike again!

3. QUEEN OF BLOOD

(1966) Dir. Curtis Harrington 

*** (image quality: A-)

A tale of first contact with Mars, a world peace unified space exploration future is led by Basil Rathbone. They'll be escorting a female vampire alien ambassador from a Martian moon to Earth after her ship crash lands. Ready the launch! It's a case of reverse engineering as Corman protege Curtis Harrington intercuts footage from the cheaply licensed Soviet bloc sci-fi film MESTRE NASTRESHU with new footage starring Dennis Hopper, John Saxon and Basil Rathbone (among others. The combination works perfectly - allowing for a high level of special effects quality and, for devotees, a chance to marvel at the ingenuity Harrington used in matching the footage. The end result is not only aptmospheric and strangely sexy, it's coherent, and looks way more expensive than it was.
Best of all, you can now see it in blazing restored colors. (it used to be available only in faded ugly pan and scan TV prints/transfers). Now it glows much like its compatriot in ALIEN-inspiring, 1965's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (see: Growing up Alien). 

Acting as a fine mirror to issues of gender as well as Soviet-American relations of the era, the footage is matched brilliantly to its respective sides: the Dionysian and ornate deep red Russian footage for the female vampire Martian ship and the "Red" planet surfaces / the Harrington-shot Earth scenes and space ship interiors a nice powder blues  with cafeteria grays on threadbare Apollonian sets. John Saxon and Dennis Hopper are amongst the astronauts. Basil Rathbone stays on the ground by the monitors. Judi Meredith wears enough make-up for a dozen Soviet department stores but looks great in the ship dial reflections. Together it's like an unholy union written in the stars and read by lovers holding hands across the Berlin wall. Then, when the Red ambassador gets taken aboard the American craft, the hypnosis starts. The blood drinking and the orders from on high not to harm the specimen, no matter how many human astronauts perish like so many sailors on Dracula's London-bound schooner, all herald similar threads in the ALIEN to come  This time however, everyone but John Saxon agrees: save the queen! She has diplomatic immunity, so even if everyone else is bitten it's worth it. But one thing; if she wants to drink Dennis Hopper's blood better warn her first: the Thorazine is long gone!

4. CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD

(1964) Dir. Ákos Ráthonyi
**1/2 (image quality: B-)
Dubbed in English

Eurosleaze mainstay Adrian Hoven is a possible vampire aristocrat squaring off with a tourist detective over a hottie blonde (Erika Remberg) in this cool black and white German variation on the mid-60s neorealist Eurosleaze horror film. The real stars are the cobblestones, Remberg's lingerie, the crazy tunnels and some nice expressionistic shadows, including a weird silhouette of jazz hands at the window of prospective victims. Not quite as lurid as a Franco film or as procedural as a German krimi, it manages to have one foot in the aftershave-and-sideburns tackiness of its Eastern European swinger moment and another in the timeless Gothic past. As for the story, the vampire aspects are cleverly folded into a class resentment study and there are hints of the dream poeticism we find in later Czech films like Valerie and her Week of Wonders. The print/transfer on Amazon is okay, could be worse, kind of sepia-tinged, but whatever. Find the old Image DVD which has enough of a better upgrade to make it worth it, if you're the type for whom these things matter. All in all, while it's not quite as robust as Vampire and the Ballerina, but maybe sexy Remberg makes up the difference for any lack of leading man charisma or narrative drive.

5. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE 

(1971) Dir. Jean Rollin

**1/2 (image quality - A)
in French with English subtitles 

Marie-Pierre Castel, Mireille Dargent are a pair of cute young outlaw clown girls on the lam who wind up trapped within the spacious grounds of crumbling vampire chateau in this Jean Rollin classic. Mostly in exterior shots, we see winding stone stairs, mausoleum, graveyard, castle, and hilly grounds, and once entered there is no escape --all paths wind back to the chateau in prime dream logic 'no escape' style.  Like all Rollin films it's a kind of Ghost World for the Bataille set, but with vampirism taking the place of adult responsibility as the wedge that forms between the two plucky virgin heroines. In a rare moment of clarity, Rollin spells it all out when the head vampire orders the girls to use the promise of sex to lure men to their death at the castle, but to keep their virginity intact. One of the girls dutifully follows this instruction but the other falls in love with her quarry, losing her virginity to him, which she intentionally invites to save herself from vamp initiation (what a poseur!). She even endures a flogging by her once-bosom pal to get her to spill his hiding place (only to have him shove her out of the way and run off later like a prize douche!). 

Prime used to have dozens of examples (though he really only ever made the same film, over and over) of Jean Rollin's lyrical dream-like vampire nymph art school neurotica but--as befits its title and somber resolution--this is the only one left. (Not counting Zombie Lake but why would you?). The quality is lovely if not quite magnificent, and should allow for some pleasant half-napping --the ideal state to watch a Rollin film (and their slow pace makes such a state all but inevitable). Stretches do seem to run by where you can feel Rollin not sure what to do next, so he just captures the rippling wind in the grass. For example: the girls' midnight initiation ceremony involves one if the girls sitting next to the main vamp lady as she plays a minimalist tune on the outdoor piano... for ten minutes... while the other goes into a red-lit mausoleum (visible behind the piano) and then comes out.  It all ends in one of those "party's over" speeches that seems to denote an auteur ready to declare the full breadth of his obsession exhausted. It's a bit of an anticlimax: exhaustion is already so close to his subject matter one wonders if he's kidding himself.

Why it's still great is that--even whilst drenched in sex and lurid violence-- there's not an objectifying or misogynist bone in its body. As Acidemic contributor Ethan Spigland writes:

"Despite the gratuitous nudity and requisite sex associated with the genre (and often demanded by producers), Rollins films never come across as misogynistic. In Requiem for a Vampire, the men tend to be either brutish, foolishly gullible, or impotent. The last vampire accepts his fate with quiet dignity, but possesses no sexual magnetism. His female vampires, by contrast, convey an erotic power. Though women are associated with the chthonic, we never sense the fear of the castrating phallic mother that one encounters in such films as Lars Von Triers Antichrist . Rollin seems to be in thrall to their ecstatic jouissance. " (more)

6. FEMALE VAMPIRE

(1973) Dir. Jess Franco

**1/2 (image: B-)
In French with English subtitles

The period of 1971-1973 was the peak for vampire lesbian movies coming out of Europe (thanks largely to the boffo 1970 box office of Hammer's Vampire Lovers which was among the first to seize the advantage of relaxed censorship). 1971 alone had about 42 versions, all with the surname of the lead vamp character Karnstein (ala Le Fanu's "Camilla") or Bathory (the real-life historical murderess). This one, bad as it is, is a Jess Franco masterpiece that can be found slithering under a wide array of international titles and ratings: The Bare-Breasted Countess, Erotikill, and Loves of Irina are all tailored to the needs of each country's censors and distributors. In some places, lurid gushing violence was cut and pornographic close-ups inserted; in other places vice versa; in this version--not in HD but still looking pretty spiffy--there's neither. Yet, the magic surprising prevails. Even in this toned-down version, the movie's still 100 minutes and has plenty of innocuous (and occasionally tedious) softcore gyrating. Titillating it ain't, of course, but it is rather hypnotic in a second chakra-vibrating miasma kind of way. Mostly, there's a lot of great weird Franco framing, odd touches, and misty morning standing around with Lina Romay (who's excellent and mute and usually naked) as the last countess in the Karnstein lineage. She's living in self-imposed exile on the strange island of Madeira (which is gorgeous, nearly Nordic in its willowy hills) where she's slowly decimating the population of libertines of either gender (she kills by biting the enflamed sexual orifices of her victims and feeding on their hormonal 'ahem' essence). Walking around in the early morning mist, clad only in her Vampirella-inspired costume, she's quite a vision.

Meanwhile--as a doomed poet, ever at his writing machine, pining for death and in love with Irina, before they even meet--Jack Taylor (Franco's regular, steely-eyed romantic lead) has one of his finest hours. Baudelaire himself seems to rise from the crypt and approve of his debauched artistic yearning. If you're sick and artistic yourself, you may fall as in love with the whispering wind and trees and glowing white sky of Madeira's mountains as he is. And you become in love with them both. Their weird romantic chemistry manages to be eloquently conveyed with barely a word, just lots of embracing and then running from each other, then pausing, paralyzed, and drifting back. Too saddened by their long-standing proximity to the void to not be agonizingly aware of the inevitable damage their love will bring upon themselves. They don't want to be together for the very reason that being together will prevent them from being together. How you manage to get all that without a single spoken word is a kind of misty twilight miracle. Taylor's piercing blue eyes seem legitimately haunted over that conundrum. He's a long way from the flatline masculine puffery he offered a few years earlier in Franco films like Succubus. If you're familiar with the all-consuming existential dread that alcoholism or drug addiction brings as the layers between you and the harrowing void begin to dissolve one by one, then you know what they're going through. You know what I mean. Having a full bottle or stash and being high as hell is a kind of sublime immortality, but the agonies of withdrawal are always right outside the door, growing angrier the longer you leave them knocking. Am I reading too much into it because I only ever watch this film when I'm sick and strung out on cough syrup? Maybe, but I'm glad they make such a potent combination.

Change the name to 'Kuersten' and she could be talking about me!

Still - if you're only a casual viewer of the 60s-70s Eurosleaze genre it can be hard to understand why anyone would give Jess Franco a red cent to make his godawful films, or waste a minute of time to see them. It took me seven tries to get even fifteen minutes into Female Vampire back in '00 when I covered the Franco oeuvre for a certain canonical search engine (now extinct). Even having seen and liked some other Franco stuff (mainly Succubus, and Diabolical Dr. Z), this one struck me as an inept student art film. But then, a decade or so later, the magic took ahold of me like a pair of velvet claws soggy scuttling below vaginal seas. I 'got' it... and it was glorious.

Maybe the key to understanding Franco's style is to inverse Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, i.e. Franco's films are an adventure, not of mind, but of sight and sound. If you've ever been having great sex and kind of go into a trance, where time seems to slow and stop around you and everything becomes profound as time and space are melting like a Dali watch, or a hole is burning into the celluloid of your life, then you will recognize the same effect with Franco's best films. You have to meet them halfway though, which is why they're much better on lots of drugs, or when you're half-asleep.

A lot of this kind of hard-to-peg existential ennui, which is so European vs. the rest of the world is perhas bred from language barriers in everyday life that globe-trotting filmmakers encounter. When the alienated/existential dissonance associated by daily Babel Tower struggle is taken as part of reality's fabric, the films of Antonioni, Rollin, and Franco start to finally make sense to American monolingual homebody eyes and ears. In our modern blockbuster era it can be hard to imagine the appeal of such messed up compromises, but remember that this was the era before hardcore pornography was street legal. These kinds of films were risque but still respectable. Sure, Female Vampire is an incoherent jazzy mess, but so is seduction, sex, love - no matter how airbrushed Maxim wants to make it. This is sex with a bush, baby. Franco isn't trying to woo you into some kind of Mulveyan eye sadistic gaze possession but to devour you from the outside-in via a vagina dentata clockwork zipper.

As far as music, though he's not Ennio Morricone, frequent Franco accompanist Daniel White proves--as always--Franco's most essential collaborator. This time he lathers on the swirly cacophony, the silken lounge lizard eyes-across-the-casino seduction, the breathy swooning hotel room breathing, and under it all there's a diegetic layer of constantly chattering birds, bats, peacocks, god knows what other animal noises. 

It's hypnotic once you listen deeply (and what else is there to do?); we're used to straining that shit out of our daily sensory input so when the animal calls suddenly stop we're left to wonder if its intentional, if Franco's foley guy just got bored and forgot to rewind the tape, or they ran out of noises or money. If you're nodding off in your easy chair, the blood beyond your eyes drained from either arousal or too many Turkish cigarettes, then you can nod off and be almost asleep when a peacock call sounds suspiciously like a human scream. By the time you wake up the noise is gone -- did it happen?

In that sense, Female Vampire isn't a movie at all really, but an X-rated writhing melancholy jazz riff on a movie, the way Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" isn't really a 'cover' of the basic melodic song. Instead of a movie, Franco gives us a be-bopping ghostly counterpoint echo/antecedent to a movie, a kind of negative space reverse-fill. This is a movie where a flying vampire bat is not a flapping piece of rubber on a string (as it would be for Universal) but a bat-shaped hood ornament on a car speeding down the Madeira by-way. Each isn't a real bat, so who cares what makes the wings flap? If you can dig that, you're finally ready to watch the works of Paine Dreying.  (2022 ed note: I've seen it since, sober, and been bored and irritated especially the nonstop jazz rendition of some vaguely familiar holiday parade-jingle sounding melody I can't remember the name of. Was I even seeing the same version? With Franco you can never tell. )

 8. DOCTOR VAMPIRE

(1991) In Cantonese w/ English subtitles

*** / Image - B+

What better way to follow two slow-moving, super artsy 70s Eurosleaze vamp pics than with this boisterous fast moving (albeit flatly-shot) Hong Kong horror comedy from 1991? The action follows a virgin medical intern as his car breaks down on a remote highway; he stops at "the Count's" mansion to use the phone, but winds up in the midst of a ritzy vampire happening already in progress. Instead of the tow truck he winds up losing his virginity (in both senses) to a cute young neophyte vampire (a scene that manages to be erotic, scary and touching at the same time) while all the other human guests are being killed downstairs. Returning to work, his sudden craving for blood (luckily he works at a hospital with a full 'bank') concerns his fellow (comic) orderlies. Meanwhile back at the mansion, the Count (he and his main concubines are all white, allowing for nice colonialist subtext) bites the wrists of his ladies to sample all the blood they've collected over the evening. Like a pimp getting his cut, or the British levying some new tax, but when he gets to our hapless car troubled hero's virgin blood from the neophyte vamp, mmm-mmm he finds it so delicious he demands the she find him and bring him back to the castle for a full drain, but she's young and maybe in love so wants to find him and warn him and/or run off together.  The stage is set for a hilarious, chilling showdown, Drac and his dames invade the hospital for a lengthy siege, like a comic-horror version of Hard-Boiled. It may be sewing with some familiar threads (Lost Boys, Near Dark, etc) but Doctor Vampire overflows with ingenuity and wit, especially during the parking lot Tibetan monk demon-repelling ceremony (allowing for everyone to don ceremonial garb and hide out onstage like some vague echo of On the Town) and tons of cool touches like the use of a surgical laser, an operating light shaped like a cross, giant syringes full of acid, and a magical Buddha statue the Count makes the mistake of spitting on.

7. GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE

(1972) Dir. John Hayes
Movie - **1/2 / image: A

Potent, lurid, unapologetic - even a tad disturbing in its Larry Cohen-style bluntness--GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE has a familiar 70s-thriller late night TV movie style that makes its lurid violence all the more disturbing. In the prologue, a newly unearthed vampire kills a man on a date and drags the woman into an open grave to sexually assault her, and bite her (of course). Newly restored to human-ish looks, he starts a career in disguise as a professor (night school?) while the traumatized woman winds up giving birth to a half-vampire that needs blood, not milk, from mama (so she dies). The baby grows up into a brooding half-vamp man (William Smith) with a huge collar, who vows to find his evil father and destroy him. Meanwhile, the professor vampire researches the occult, pauses now and then to bite sexy librarians who wont loan him rare grimoires, and seduces and destroys an array of sexually open hotties in his swingin' 70s neighborhood.

Though inherently depressing in its subject (sexual assault is always a bummer) and overly familiar in its iconography, there are a lot of elements that make it worthwhile, most notably the moody avant garde score by Jaime Mendoza-Nava and the fact that that the film's large female cast are portrayed and acted as adult women, with evolved 70s women's lib attitudes towards sex and careers (making an interesting counterpoint to the vampire's rapey misreading of their social cues). Despite rather goofy fangs, Michael Pataki is a scary vampire, doing a very cool thing with his eyes where they seem to go completely dead and impassive when its time to attack, like shark eyes. Best of all is Paul Hipp's cinematography: it's almost Godfather level dark, with deep moody blacks which seem to envelop scenes like a blanket--the tight angles and cluttered college townhouse sets gives scenes a familiar claustrophobia that should be familiar to any hip faculty housing alcoholic. It's this tight, realistic cramped feel that makes the final knock-out upstairs/downstairs brawl between father and son all the more familiar, cathartic and destructive.

But even then, beware! This is one downbeat picture. Make sure your SSRI meds are all up to date!

9. THE VAMPIRE'S KISS

(1988) Dir. Robert Bierman

**1/2 / Image - A

A lot of us genuinely debauched 90s New Yorkers wistfully thought of this film while being underwhelmed by American Psycho. Nic Cage is way crazier here, in more or less the same role, than Christian Bale was in that much better known film, and without trying half as hard. Maybe Cage's publishing house executive is less rich, but he's even more of a bully, especially after being seduced and drained of precious bodily fluids by clubbing vampire Jennifer Beals. But did it even happen? As with Ferrara's superior THE ADDICTION, because the vamp attack occurs in the anonymity of the big city -- and there are no witnesses in the boudoir-- we wonder if she's just a schizophrenic anima-projection mirage. Be it either way, vampire or hallucination, you'll laugh, cry, and kiss reality goodbye when you dig Nic babbling to the street pole at the end, as crazy as a bedbug and ready for his LEAVING LAS VEGAS Oscar. Young, hungry and hammy, Cage pushes nearly every scene way way off the deep end, torturing his bewildered, hard-working Latina secretary (Maria Conchita Alonso) and his patient, clockwatching lady shrink (Elizabeth Ashley) with his frothing head games and vicious misogyny. Sure, it can all be a little overly improv-manic, at times scenes seem to drag on just so Cage can get it all out of his system, but as a kind of male version of REPULSION as well as a vivid snapshot of late-80s NYC club-and-yuppie addiction-alienation, it can't be beat, even by a Bale-full.

Alas, Bierman's big directorial weakness is this compulsion to crosscut constantly, almost mockingly, ever back from Cage to the staid working class foil secretary and her drab proletariat life (riding the subway; giving $$ to beggars; family gatherings, etc.). I'm sure it's meant to contrast the two ends of New York City life--the privileged white twentysomething male who moved here after college (hey hey!) and the working class ethnic woman, a local NY native pushed to the outer boroughs by rising rents. Very admirable I'm sure, bro, but Alonso's goodness is just a series of cliches -- Bierman seems unwilling to lend any kind of real 'felt' depth to her parts, it's always clear where his heart lies.

Irregardless, if you hadn't realized back in '88 (when he'd just come off Raising Arizona and Moonstruck) that Cage was a staggering wild talent --genuinely edgy (as in the edge between genius and hammy terribleness)--you knew it after Vampire's Kiss. True manic craziness has seldom reached such heights, ever, and maybe not even here. Maybe I imagined it. 

10. DEATHMASTER

*** (image - A)

Lensed by the great DP, Bill Butler (JAWS, DEMON SEED) in great countercultural AIP semi-documentary style, part Kovacs elaborate pull focuses, part Gordon Willis darkness and wall paint texture, the film might be a bit shoddy special effects-wise but it looks great. (see full review here: Manson Poppins): 

11.  THE VAMPIRE BAT

(1933) Dir. Frank Strayer

**1/2 / Image - B

It's a PRC with a top shelf Universal sets --they must have had some weird deal to use them after they were through with them for the night. So there are lots of great old stairwells and finely painted rock walls, oil lamps and cobblestone streets in that grand, nebulous, everywhere and nowhere Universal small 'vaguely Eastern European' village tradition. There are even some of the same craggy character actors (like perennial bürgermeister Lionel Belmore). So even if there's no Bela Lugosi or real vampire, there's Lionel Atwill as a scientist who needs blood for his experiments and controls Robert Frazer through telepathy, Dwight Frye petting bats, and Fay Wray screaming on the operating table while homicide detective Melvyn Douglas pounds at the door! As Timothy Carey put it while strapping Linda Evans to the log splitter conveyer belt in Beach Blanket Bingo, I got a weakness for the classics, baby. If you do too, Vampire Bat is a fine point at which to weaken. Maude Eburne is the comic relief; murder-mystery barnstormer Frank Strayer directed.

12. THE BODY BENEATH

(1970) Dir. Andy Milligan

**1/2 / Amazon Image: B

If you too are rooster-level fascinated by the white chalk line between high-camp/low budget art (Warhol, Fassbinder, Waters) and junk basement DIY third-feature grindhouse marquee filler (Steckler, Lewis, Mikels), then maybe you know his name - Andy Milligan. Maybe you know him as hulking behind the skid row alley between the outsider sub-Sirkian soap smut of Kuchar, the drag grotesquery of Smith, the magickal grand Poobah butchness of Anger, the punk sneer of Jarman and the pulpy opportunism of Al Adamson. There he crouches, waiting patiently for you to run out of other chalky options, still staring and cockle-doodling, this pioneer from the days when grindhouse local NYC DIY bathhouse gay art movies were still considered easy busts by vice squads. Maybe it's his 'shoot fast and be ready to run off with the camera' whiplash filming approach that makes Milligan's films seem sometimes so urgent and important. This theater group-ish reworking of Dracula and House of Frankenstein, may not be one of those times. Washed-out to the point that all the whites have gone quite turquoise from the process of blowing up cheap 16mm to 35mm for distribution (known as "the Milligan sheen"), this Beneath has the look of stressed wood finish, which fits well the Gothic austerity of the decaying British abbey where most of the action occurs.

The story of a few nights in the life of a vampire couple--the soapily-named (and acted) "reverend" Algernon Ford (Gavin Reed), wife Susan (Jackie Scarvellis)--their hunchback servant Spool (Berwick Kaler), and assorted thuggish underlings--there's plenty of transfusions, betrayals (and in a surprising scene, an apology to Spool by Algy after he's unusually bitchy) and enough talk about royal bloodlines to awaken any dozing conspiracy theorists from their twitchy slumber (a Milligan home viewing inevitability). Chosen (female) descendants are forced into the job of breeding new vampire heirs, and, once imprisoned, they set about trying to befriend Spool so he'll help them escape. Spool conflicted! Meanwhile circumstance is compelling the whole clan to move to America; the bobbies are closing in.

Humans

Nicolas Winding Refn is apparently a fan of Milligan's and worked to get this film released (on a BFI Flipside) and so you may go ahead and consider this grungy overexposed 'Dark Shadows on quaaludes' un-masterpiece as high art and know you're not alone. The house in UK where it was filmed was supposedly where the titular Beggar's Banquet Stones album gatefold photo was taken, so the big banquet table, here awash in tints, diaphanous cellophane capes, cannibalism, fruit mashing, and impassioned monologues, all twisted around around into a solar flare candy floss daze, has Satanic rock history all over it. Milligan's camera whirls like it's being passed around the table at a real Satanic time travel bacchanal. There's a nice score of woodwinds (library cues?) and occasionally a buzzing heartbeat undertone that's quite effective. With all that Vaseline on the lens and all those layered canopies of cellophane colors, one finds the kind of off-the-cuff expressionism that--whether intentional or not--evokes an old-school two-strip Technicolor 'reeling in the centuries' kind of mood.

All in all pretty impressive considering Milligan was his own cinematographer, editor, and wardrobe mistress (using aliases for each job no doubt to make the film seem more 'professional' - we've all done it). Maybe my expectations were just so low, thanks to Michael Weldon's damningly faint praise in Psychotronic, but I admire Body's lurching camera, its strange edits, its occasional lapses into a kind of Masterpiece Theater arch hamminess, and the sudden cuts to the three witches/sisters/brides of the vampire (all in different color cellophane capes) emerging like a pack of silent hounds whenever a guy or girl is chosen for death. If you actually enjoy this film all the way through, maybe it's true what Weldon says: there's no hope for you. But since Amazon Prime also has Guru the Mad Monk, you will soon get over any delusions of being a new fan. I know I did. Blechhh!

Or you can turn off the TV before making that mistake. You can go out in the night... maybe there is hope yet. But there's so much more to see down here in the bargain crypt....of Dracula's Prime. And who knows when they'll disappear? By the time you read this they could all be gone... or worse... they could have come... for thee.

-------

PS. LATE ADDITION (9/29/16):

VAMPYRES 

(1974) Dir. Jose Ramon Larraz

*** / (Amazon Image - B+)

By the time Vampyres came out the lesbian vampire cycle had waned, but it's still one of the best. Less lyrical and lulling than Franco or Rollin, not as sweeping or narrative-driven as Hammer, it'z more satisfying than either, with good pacing (it's erotic but never falls into a softcore torpor) interesting offbeat characters (no cliche' types, even the mustached swingers have souls), a moody dark green patina (lovely indoor candle lighting and outdoor twilight gloom) and a scenario any man could relate to: being lured to the house of two hot girls after the pub closes (gorgeous blonde innocent Anulka Dziubinska and terrifyingly carnal Marianne Morris) getting drunk with them by the fire, passing out, and then waking up drained, robbed, and alone in the house, or worse, dead. In short, Vampyres proves an indispensable primer on the dangers of priapism no man (or lesbian) should be without.

How am I not My Self? - INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956, 1978, 1993)

Very few stories are so Piscean in nature that their subtext can either be pro-or-anti nearly any social or cultural system, side or issue: INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS first appeared in the mid-50s, the height of red scares (and red propaganda), conformity (and fear of conformity), and atomic fear (and fear of pacifism), fear of fear, and fear of fear of fear itself. The story of an invading race of placid, docile space pods with the ability to replace their barbarous human hosts, SNATCHERS touched a nerve and entered straight into the popular mythos where it's been since. Even people who haven't seen either of the three versions know what it means to be a 'pod person' even if they've forgotten why . There have been four films based on the original novel, a book celebrating the original film with essays by its devoted fan-authors, and countless dissertations such as this one. But this one is the best, the rest are imitations and some don't even get the irony. Think of it... no pain, no fear, no irony... superior in every way... everything old is new again, and no one says anything about the Emperor's New Clothes, or anything really at all. It's not that we're afraid, but we're afraid of the people who told him he had clothes on, we're just afraid he'll catch a draft.

In BODY SNATCHERS the aliens come to us in the form of ourselves, exact duplicates, only without the intangible qualities of the "real." Like Prada knock-offs, they're alike in almost every way, but by not being "real" they are enemies. Allegedly, these aliens are here to “save us from ourselves” and thus presumably to save us money, both in therapy and expensive brand awareness costs, or perhaps to rescue the money itself, to deliver it from our evil clutches. In this sense they are definitely communists, as they speak of total equality among the workers, and by extension the end of advertising. The humans who catch wind of the conspiracy and resist the pod people are the ones with prestige, highly educated positions of authority (doctors, EPA agents, etc.) and money-- they seek to hold onto the upper middle class status they studied so hard in expensive schools to earn. To keep the Prada motif rolling, they are the ones who can afford expensive designer bags, and they react to the pods flooding the market with escalating violence. Their fear and fury, the very emotions which the pods speak of eradicating, increases exponentially as the number of human survivors dwindles, until all that's left is one hysterical man, a blazing fire sale of human desperation.

If we take what the pods say at face value, then what they are doing will ultimately benefit mankind. That spiritual seeker Abel Ferrara, director of the third BODY SNATCHER version discussed here, even went so far as to compare the pods to Zen Buddhists. (p. 150). So what's not to like? Why run into traffic just to avoid a nice, quieting mental haircut?

This Roscharch ink blot of a story has also been interpreted as anti-communist, anti-anti-communist, anti-establishment, and anti-nonconformist. Horror icon Stephen King sees it expressing the middle American fear of neighbors not cleaning up their lawns; French theorist Jean Baudrillard would no doubt love the story as emblematic of the implementation of the pop culture "simulacrum." Andy Warhol based his soup cans on the “pod principle.” The list goes on and on, myriad theoretical tentacles that slither in all directions from Finney's original story. Ultimately, what they reveal in their infinitude is the fluctuating nature of man’s position in relation to the social order, how the individual is continually subsumed and expelled from the collective body of his current cultural zeitgeist in a tide as regular and merciless as the ocean.

Einstein’s pod law of physics goes as thus: For every action there is a reaction, which duplicates the original action and then takes its place, only with less verve’. Imagine it in terms of food: Imagine there's a rumor that the new world order will be getting rid of steak in favor of more potatoes for the hungry; everyone would a potato, no matter how poor or alienated they are. The money for this would come from the budget for steak which now only the middle class and higher can afford, potatoes on the side, while the poor have no steak and no potato at all

So that’s the new order proposed by the NWO: No fear, no hope, no sour cream --just eat your potato and forget your troubles. No need to worry that if you worked harder or pushed for it more, you too could have a steak. You, a voracious eater of steak, hear of this potato plan, and you fear for the future. You start guarding your plate of steak obsessively at dinner. At the block party picnic that weekend you notice your neighbors are all guarding their steaks, too. No one is sharing.

1993 version

Then one day, a stranger sits down at the picnic table with a plate full of potatoes and broccoli; no steak, he’s a vegetarian. In unison, you all jump up from your plates and lynch him. That night you sleep soundly, dreaming of a land where steak runs free, but the next evening at dinner your wife tells you she’s out of steak. Your plate shows only spinach and a potato, like a bad hand of cards. If you’re neighbors see this, you will be next on the lynch list. You eat hurriedly, draw the shades, sit down in your old rocking chair and start planning your next move. But something new is happening; you are feeling relaxed. Without red meat you’re less violent; you think maybe it’s wrong to lynch vegetarians. Weeks pass and some intellectuals start coming to your house at night to sip carrot juice and talk about the dangers of red meat conformity. You grow in number until you can't fit in the living room and so rent out the town hall; the next election is split between the green (vegetarian) and red (meat) parties. Green wins. The last steak eater in town runs down the street screaming “You’re next,” and around the track it goes. Thus the mob and the outsider are always changing roles. Eventually, even Frankenstein’s monster is handed a torch and asked to join in hunting down some newer threat. I remember this personally as a kid in elementary school - we'd pick on the new kid until a newer kid came along - then the kid we had been picking on joined us in picking on the newer one and so on.

This merry loop of conflict/resolution undergoes a major change however, with the advent of the high speed cable modem. The faceless mass that used to love targeting (and being targeted by) the outcast individual now finds itself dissolved. Everyone goes wandering along their private web thread into oblivion. Without the communists to threaten the borders, the iconoclastic “individualism” of rugged drunks like ('56 version script writer Sam Peckinpah), Don Siegel and Samuel Fuller grows suddenly outré, moldy with retro kitsch. Only Abel Ferrara (barely) survives with cool intact, and even his BODY SNATCHERS have to hang out at a military base to find any trace of conformity. Even there the pods have to wear identical sunglasses so they’ll “pass” as different.

I. THE BOOK

There was a time when America was a great utopia, when the still unpaved streets shone like asphalt jewels, and the iconoclast was revered for settling the country with such mercenary thoroughness. It is this appreciation for pre pre-fab small town American life that motivated Jack Finney to write INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, which appeared as a serial installment in Colliers Magazine in 1954. In Finney’s original story, the alien pods reveal truths about themselves that the movies never mention. For one, they confess they have no higher purposes other than to replicate and reproduce their pods all over the universe. Two, they are truly cheap knock-offs of the real thing, doomed to decompose rapidly and die within five years. Another difference is that Becky Driscoll doesn’t get turned into a pod at the end. She and Miles even ultimately triumph over the invaders by burning a pod crop, which almost makes them angry, which would be an admittance of true defeat, i.e. if you piss them off they're mad at themselves not you), so the remaining, un-hatched pods head back up to space. Miles rejoices in this victory: “We shall fight them in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” (Dell, p. 217). Wait, isn't that Churchill?

With or without the happy ending and weird Buddhist morality, independent producer Walter Wanger optioned the movie rights ere he read it and soon he and Finney were scouting locations. Don Siegel was hired to direct and Daniel Mainwaring wrote the adaptation. A writer of paperback westerns and hardboiled detective fiction, Mainwaring was the tough guy who wrote OUT OF THE PAST (1947), a classic of film noir, adapted from a novel he wrote under the pseudonym Geoffrey Homes. Siegel was a hardboiled character himself—he later directed DIRTY HARRY (1977). As if these two guys weren’t tough and iconoclastic enough on their own, Siegel brought his friend Sam Peckinpah on board as co-writer. The stage was  being set for a different sort of SNATCHERS; these guys weren't so big on victorious rejoicing and with their low budget preventing them signing marquee names they took a chance and cast the film with "real" actors: Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynters. These are adults, each with wit, intelligence, and energy. This was important, for in order to show the loss of emotion, they would have to be able to convey they had some in the first place. Most sci fi characters didn't have to show they weren't pods.

Befitting the noir edge they wanted, Wynters' character Becky was to become a pod--as cold eyed as Rita Hayworth in THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI—for the bleak, noir-nightmarish climax. The characters' emotions—and their lack of—are conveyed in lots of tight close-ups; lips quiver with unsubstantiated anxiety, wicked licentiousness darts across otherwise mannered and sophisticated smiles. Later their faces get pale and puffy from lack of sleep, red and irritated from amphetamines. What a far cry all this face change business is from the bland visage of the typical 1950's sci fi hero and heroine!

This attention to depth, despair and transformation will probably make this 1956 adaptation forever cutting edge. In his autobiography, Siegel wrote: “Danny (Mainwaring) and I knew that many of our associates, acquaintances and family were already pods. How many of them woke up in the morning, ate breakfast (but never read the newspaper), went to work, returned home to eat again and sleep?" It's these pod-person associates in the film industry that have made this film so eternally current, that blinders-on attitude that spells the death of original thinking and the birth of the play-it-safe box office brain-cooler; TAXI DRIVER is dead, long live TAXI DRIVER IV: SPORT’S REVENGE.

It's interesting to note that sleep is key to podliness. "They get you when you sleep," is the first thing Gabrielle Anwar is told in Ferrara's remake.  Siegel too notes (above) specific pod traits as "waking up in the morning, and sleeping at night." We all know what it’s like to have to sleep when we want to stay up all night writing or talking with friends. It’s 5 AM, we’re full of a weird kind of magical life, but we know when we wake up the next day all that magic will be gone. With this in mind, we can connect INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS not only with other films made by its creative team: WILD BUNCH (1969) or DIRTY HARRY (1970) but also to films about artists who employ dangerous sleep-deprivation/drug abuse tactics to help them break the pod-lock on their creative genius: POLLOCK, BASQUIAT, ALL THAT JAZZ, and CHAPLIN, to name a few. In westerns it’s about the lone scorpion gunman being slammed Gulliver-like down via the swarming ant masses of by-the-book law enforcement tedium. In artist bios, it’s the limits of the artist’s physical limitations (bad heart, alcoholism, cancer), buckling underneath the tireless spurs of innovative genius. With artists and writers it’s not evolve or die, but evolve AND die. All writers, including Jack Finney, have to fall asleep. Dreams may come, but the art may not come back.

Maybe there are some folks who don’t want it to. Maybe the era of the sexless marriage--when TV parents slept in separate beds--seems a pretty oatmeal-ish time through the HAPPY DAYS rerun looking glass; maybe that gray flannel honky who once fought so bravely to keep his steak is as gone as the laserdisc, and good riddance. But maybe he should have fought a little harder; maybe he should have said yes to drugs and fought hippie LSD explosion fire with fire. Now his once nice clean suburb’s been overrun by foreigners who don’t clean up after their dogs or repair their broken windows. A Wal-Mart ate up Pop’s grocery store; it also ate the newsstand, candy store, soda shop, bowling alley, shoeshine shop, Owlin Howlin's arm, and several fruit carts. Indians outsourced his modem. Ugh. Now him out on Lazy Boy recliner reservation--living room called "man cave" now. Him got heap big drinking problem. Wife took his six figure job, confiscated his Lucky Strikes. No you die of COPD, she says.

Perhaps things are better as they are now-- “integrated,” with many cultures, sexual orientations, races, colors, and creeds inhabiting the same block, workplace, power position. But does this create a rainbow community or just merely alter the basic composition of paranoia so that it can no longer be “solved” via vigilante violence? People are almost blind from pretending their neighbor isn't different than themselves. Small talk over the picket fence must be sanded down until it's free of all cultural specifics, gender norms, biases, and inside jokes. Rumors literally don’t get around anymore; there is no longer a “townsfolk” to form a lynch mob with, there's no common language or common cultural property, so there can be no lone hero to try and stop them at the jailhouse door (or vice versa, if you are DIRTY HARRY). The 1950’s American value system stood for something and thus rebels had something to stand against. Since all the dads wore suits and ties--from morning until long after dinner--just wearing a turtleneck instead made you a beatnik. Nowadays, even if you get a tongue piercing and neck tattoo you’re just catching a trend that already left the station. When there are no pods in Santa Mira, all Santa Mira will be pods. You got that piercing at the mall- so it doesn't count, unless it's meant ironically, or--even more ironic--not meant as ironic at all. When parents try to emulate the teens, the teens are in deep trouble; the one-eyed child leads the blind-panicked cultural herbivores off a cliff, and by the time they land it's gone viral and sparked a backlash.

THE MOVIE (1956 original) 

I. The Peak of the Pyramid vs. the Sane Simulacrum

Siegel’s film opens with the mighty Straight White Male of 1950’s America, the city-educated doctor, Miles Bennell (McCarthy) riding into Santa Mira on his iron horse (the train). He’s been called back early from a medical conference because of a mysterious outbreak in town. People think their loved ones aren’t their loved ones and they need Miles to come fix things, but no idea how. He’s like Matt Dillon in TV’s GUNSMOKE, only Dodge City isn’t Dodge City anymore. It still looks like Dodge, just not the emotional, fun-loving, rowdy Dodge City it was before it fell asleep. We know in advance Miles won't fix a thing though, because in the studio-enforced prologue he comes crying in to FBI headquarters all dirty and hysterical. You think Sheriff Matt J. Dillon would ever get hysterical, no matter how many pods there were? He'd just shrug and reckon that as long as they're peaceable and ain't no corpus delecti, ain't nothing he can do, but poor Miles has to sob on the shoulder of Whit Bissell until his panting stops. The tone of Miles’ ensuing voiceover then grows calm and reassuring under Bissell’s authoritative blanket. We’re almost tempted to believe old Miles might be able to save Santa Mira after all, but no, the age of Matt Dillon is gone and we can only watch in horror as the what man grip on small town America tightens in panic, then gives way.

But what could have made this happen? There is no external force so violent and menacing that the forces of good cannot conquer it, whether by American ingenuity or the common cold. But the pod is an enemy so nonviolent and banal that good’s own “force” becomes the new menacing violence. This passive victor is so generous it even forgives, forgets and incorporates cantankerous iconoclasts like Fuller and Peckinpah into its tedious realms, processing them and radiating them back out, edited for content and re-formatted to fit your TV. It recruits the forces of Zenith, the local dope farmer, to plant pod-tatoes on every couch.

Media studies writer Michael Parkes sees this as a metaphor for post-modern simulacra, particularly in the scene were Becky and Miles drive to eat dinner at a nearby tavern, which is empty, presumably due to the pods lack of interest in a candle-lit dining environment. He notes that “Television’s effect on the service industry of America was immediate and harsh. The leisure sectors were the worst struck – bars and cafes slumped into decline.”

The only person they meet in the parking lot of the tavern is another medical professional, psychiatrist Danny Kaufman (Larry Gates) who is on his way out with another VIP --speaking to the resilience of the cultural elite at evading TV's magnetic draw. At the tavern, Becky and Miles ask about the live band that is usually on hand. The saloonkeeper indicates the new jukebox in the corner, which fills half the screen with an unworldly glow. Not enough interest in live music, he says, and the juke box is cheaper (another knock-off): “Humans," notes Parkes, "deemed redundant, are being replaced in this bar by a technological simulacrum. The artistry and individuality of the original band has been ‘snatched’ and replaced by an inferior technological substitute.”

Miles and Becky still attach import to the human connection, (a habit that prevents them from being so easily replaced), so they want to hear a band, and they want to eat out instead of in. Remember that the reason Miles was out of town for several days was to attend a medical conference—a practice of higher learning wherein information is relayed by live speaking voice directly to a present audience (as opposed to online classes of today). In college, attendance is part of your grade, part of your escape from pod-purgatory, as is staying awake in class. Blow off class to stay in bed (cuz you partied so hard the night before) and you’re a sitting duck for the pods; you’ll fail out of med school and wind up working at the fruit stand with Uncle Ira. You need to stay awake in a room with other humans; the TV doesn't count as contact, and if humans don’t touch you directly, the tendrils of the pods will.

This human touch is a big thing for doctors in general. They want you to "come in and see them," to let them touch you, without your clothes on, and this is supposedly for your own good. They can detect things in you just be listening to your heart, or tapping your because the great unwashed masses roll through the offices in the Professional Building where Miles pops them a pill and assures them that--by the power invested in him by the God and the Medical Community—their loved ones are not peaceful Buddhist knock-offs of their former, loving, abusive, intolerant Christian selves. Over the phone this would have no authority; they have to be in the same room, in the same frame, on the same movie screen at the same time. Anyone who is not present and swearing allegiance 24 hours a day could be a traitor. Move out of the frame, and the devil's got you.


The arrival of Becky into Miles’ office is a whole different matter. She comes not as a patient but as an old friend from college. She has returned to Santa Mira for a few months, from the city, to recover from a divorce. Like Miles she is cosmopolitan, she has been outside of Santa Mira and seen the wonders of the world. She has been divorced, a signifier meaning she places her individuality above the constrictions of the social order. Also, she enters his office wearing a stunning summer dress, form-fitted, with a bouquet of white frills spilling out of her chest (no knock-off this). Compared to the other women in the movie, she stands apart; a chosen goddess of the species. Her coming back amongst the “little people” to recover from a divorce implies that Santa Mira is relatively small potatoes, easy to conquer. A resident here wouldn’t be able to handle the rigors of life outside the town limits. Her beauty, dress and marital status are as valid a badge of superiority as the stethoscope is around Miles’ neck.

Actually, Becky has come to see Miles on behalf of her hick cousin Wilma (Virginia Christine -Princess Ananka in THE MUMMY'S CURSE) who is upset because their Uncle Ira (Tom Fadden) isn’t Uncle Ira (he seems like PA KETTLE). Before that, Little Jimmy Grimaldi (Bobby Clark) is almost hit by Miles’ car while he runs away from his mom (Eileen Stevens), a fruit-stand worker straight of central casting for THE GRAPES OF WRATH. In each case a hick prototype is being “taken over” (recruited to the party) as the pods move up from the cellar of the social order towards the roost of Becky and Miles. 

Their youth, beauty, education and childless marital status are all clearly adding up to make Becky and Miles the tip of the Santa Mira social pyramid, but everyone is connected - and since they are the top they are expected to share the benefits of their vantage point. But they are benevolent royalty, and thus their carriage doesn’t callously trample Jimmy Grimaldi when he runs out in front of it, though it certainly seems like the aristocratic thing to do. Rather, Miles slams on the brake and leaps out of the car—dusting up his fine city shoes--to try and calm poor Jimmy down. And when spinster cousin Wilma needs help, Miles and Becky put their flirting on hold to hang out in her dull suburban backyard and give her Uncle Ira the once over as he haphazardly mows the lawn. Seems fine from here... what could possibly be 'weird' about such a yokel? Moreover, who would want to horn in on such a hardscrabble existence, like robbing someone's compost heap or leaf pile. And moreover still, what exactly can Becky and Miles do about it, about any of it, top of the pyramid or no?

Their flirting also is put further on hold when Miles is called over to the home of his friends, Jack Bellicec (King Donovan) and Teddy (Carolyn “Morticia Addams” Jones). Jack is a "writer" and thus not quite in Miles’ doctoral league, but rather part of the emerging intellectual middle class, which is established by the “rec room” in his house. This locale is where a partially developed pod body has been discovered, growing on the pool table. (this is my parents' class, so I'm most comfortable with these people, EK). The Bellicecs are the middle of the pyramid types and the choice of the pool table as the first “exposed to the public” pod bed is very telling. Green and felt-covered, it represents the crossroads between the juke joint dirt fields and the cigar-scented parlors of the old rich. It is the field of play where colored balls of narrative bounce from surface into holes, or bedroom down to basement, flower down to roots, upper middle class artist down to proletariat pod. Miles is quick to rack up the various balls of evidence and realize that this is corpse is the future Jack Bellicec (who is now moving towards the side pocket for a deep rest) and that as Becky is already asleep at her house she must also be in danger. Before he goes racing to the rescue though, he tells Jack to call Dr. Kaufman.

But why?

How is a shrink going to be able to handle the pod situation better than a doctor like Miles? Will Kaufman diagnose the pod as manic-depressive?

II. Dr. Kaufman - Reality Repairman 

Miles wasn’t really expected to fix Uncle Ira or Mrs. Grimaldi, to hit them on the head with his little reflex testing hammer and restore them to sanity. He was called in as a "reality repairman," as an authority figure ordained with the power to redefine social reality when it no longer fulfills its function. When Miles’ own reality slips its gears (i.e. he begins to see and touch the pods) he has to defer to Dr. Kaufman, the ultimate reality specialist. If Kaufman sees and touches them, then they are real, they are there--because he will know the difference between the real and the  vividly imagined and whether the pod thing is an actual unknown alien plant or a pile of clothes overgrown with some basement fungus. Thus Kaufman--and by extension psychiatry—are the keepers of the gates of Hell, gently labeling each new demon that tumbles out of their patient's minds. Only they--the doctor of doctors so to speak-- can validate (and thus incorporate into social reality) an external phenomenon such as people not being themselves for real (rather than just symptoms of some schizophrenic break--the sort of thing for which electro-shock actually does work wonders).

Note also that while Miles fears for Becky’s safety since she’s asleep already, it never even occurs to him that as Dr. Kaufman’s already asleep, he too may be already taken over, or be harboring a half-formed Dr. Kaufman in his wine cellar. Miles sees Kaufman as his intellectual superior—therefore he trusts that Kaufman is still Kaufman, and that Kaufman can repair any crack in reality that Miles himself cannot. When a doctor cannot handle a situation, he calls in "a specialist" who would then call in another specialist and so on, there can never be a "specialist endpoint" lest the whole system collapse. And since the vines are creeping up the pyramid from the base (in Miles' direct experience) Kaufman will be among the last to go.

At any rate, Kaufman can’t help them. The phones are in the hands of the pods, as are the cops. It’s well known that Siegel’s original ending was of Miles screaming “And you’re next!” right into the camera, his blurry, sweaty, bleary face taking up the whole screen. This was a very gloomy finale. It's so traumatic that even Manger’s enforced FBI epilogue doesn't fully lay the anxiety it causes. In the novel, Miles’ violent tantrums finally try the pod people’s patience to the point where they let him have his world/steak/control back. But the sad fact is, Siegel’s pessimistic ending was the more realistic. There is simply no way humanity can triumph in the face of such unstoppable non-violence. This Gandhi knew, and this is also known by anyone who's had to watch as his hip downtown block is overrun by families and investors looking to get in on 'the hot new neighborhood' until all the cool stores are priced out and all that remains are banks and chain stores (i.e. like every other 'dead' place).

FRIENDLY ENEMIES 

or the GI Bill don't mean your co-pay at the gastroenterologist's (cue laugh track)

A common enemy is the glue of all social fabric; abortion bonds the Christians, Saddam bonds the rednecks, Bush bonds the hippies; Israel bonds the Arabs. Jason Vorhees bonds the screaming teenage audience. When your group runs out of enemies, they may need to look internally for the next one, and this means YOU! YOU’RE NEXT! Thus revolutions turn to dictatorships, and the closeted gay kid in high school bullies the the out one in his misguided bid for straight acceptance.

But there’s no such thing as a gay pod, for that would imply there is a straight pod to be different from. The pods refuse to play fair; they won’t come after Miles with lawyers, pitchforks, and picket signs no matter how many times he assaults their lack of values. Instead they come bearing lovely tranquilizers, and soft words about nonviolence and the soothing benefits of shut-eye. No more wondering if the 1950's was closer to the giddy freedom of George Lucas' AMERICAN GRAFFITI, or the soul crushing conformity of Todd Hayne's FAR FROM HEAVEN. That heads-or-tales coin humanity’s been flipping since the game began will be melted down into a nice, plain silver blob.

Whether it be gravity, royalty, religious oppression, or a bossy in-law, the American pursuit of freedom means not just ducking its authority, but incinerating it. Thus, the cheap tract home, and the ideal of nonstop after-work barbecues with beer and tikki jazz music spilling from the window. Finally and forever free of their parents (who are still using lamp oil lights and pshawing exposed ankles), these youngsters--he fresh from the war; she tired of mom’s antiquated curfew--ditch the old world and blast off into the 'no money down' tract home GI bill mortgage of the future.

Ah but what price freedom? As their own old age sets in, the “greatest generation” sees the effect that growing up in a more permissive, modern era has on their children. The sugared version of austere discipline their visiting grandparents present these tykes by contrast is refreshing and habit-forming, a worthy weapon to rebel with against parental permissiveness. When an issue like Vietnam finally comes along, these kids use grandmas’ pre-war piety (the 20s pacifism following the disasters of trench warfare) as a tool of liberalism, thus uniting the worst of both worlds. Thus the 70s parent groovy wife swapping spawns the barbarian hordes trampling Thulsa Doom's orgy.

That is where the family values vanished in the nuclear schemata: the mini van and the soccer team, the computer game and the basement rec room, it’s all there and it looks like a family and it acts like a family but it’s just not a family. If they think about, no one is even sure what the nuclear family values are. If they did, they’d buy that big Victorian house back, get both sets of old folks out of their rest homes and start back at square one. Not interested? What a shocker.

If we have the choice between being a free pod in Paris, or part of a close-knit “family” with rigid dogmatic rules and devotion to outdated codes of conduct and the wearing of scratchy linens, we will naturally choose the pod option, unless we are masochists. The trouble is, when we are all pods there will  be nothing to hide, so the dark secrets will be all out in the open, dirtying the street.

In this context, Miles proves to be an agitator on the level of William Shatner’s hatemonger in 1962's THE INTRUDER. When a society becomes totally non-conformist then there is no sense of belonging, thus rendering the outsider experience worthless. There is no one to hear Miles screams, because everyone is busy screaming about their own damn pod problems. Someone shouts “You’re next!” and the response is “Is that a threat? You talkin’ to me? I don’t see anybody else here....”
---

THE REMAKE (1978) 

By which I mean, man, the urban paranoia of the 1970’s, or: “Life in a world where everyone is a pod but you, and even the you in the mirror looks suspiciously like a pod but what are you going to do, shoot the mirror with a .357 magnum?” Maybe the mirror's the pod.

Michael Chapman, the director of photography for TAXI DRIVER (1976), FINGERS (1978), HARDCORE (1979), THE WANDERERS (1979), was clearly on an urban alienation roll during the period he worked on the 1978 Phillip Kaufman remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. Whatever else you may say about them, these films are all poems of grime, desolation and evil inherent in decaying urban architecture. It’s as if Chapman somehow imprinted the archaic patterns of sidewalk soot, the black flat blobs that once were chewing gum, the million overlapping stains, onto the Ektachrome like a narrative version of Brakhage.

By this time, the 70s, the American “small town value” that Finney had so much confidence in--for it found a use for stubborn iconoclasm in the same way, say, Fuller finds use for it via Gene Evans--was long gone; but maybe San Francisco --with its pop psychology and expanded consciousness, could present a viable contender? As was the style of the time, Kaufman’s plan was to make the whole urban environment seethe with menace. A slowly rolling office chair, an unbilled Robert Duvall as a priest on a swing set, even a pair of stereo headphones could be, with the right soundtrack and cinematography, something alien and hostile.

To find out why everything was so alien and hostile, let’s compare 1956, year of the Siegel film, with 1978, year of Kaufman’s. The late 1950’s was when that greatest generation—the young men of the war and their Riveting Rosies—were aging their way into position as political leaders. By 1978 their kids—the Vietnam Protestors and their flower girls—were similarly growing into middle aged governmental positions. This was certainly true in San Francisco, land of Harvey Milk, Gateway to the East, refuge for Chinese immigrants, gay sailors and drag queen dance hall dames. If the pod people were going to settle in a land where they might be accepted despite their lack of difference, it would surely be here (or New York City). One can almost see them carrying "Pod" Party banners and shouting "Legitimize Pods!" But without the requisite self-righteous anger to add inflection, no one would notice them.

The character of Miles Bennett is now called Mark Bennett—and is not a doctor but a restaurant inspector from the Board of Health. Played by Donald Sutherland in his heavy corduroy sports jacket, thick curly hair and droopy mustache phase, Mark is--in sharp contrast to the mature divorcee played by Kevin McCarthy in the original--a bit of a bozo. Though the city of San Francisco has granted him some authority, Mark clearly lacks the respect of the citizenry; he misuses his power, and has only limited ability to “create” reality in the same reassuring way the old Miles or Dr. Kaufman could. We see him intimidating the chef of a five-star restaurant for no apparent reason, poking through the kitchen getting in everyone’s way as he searches for health violations with the glee of a kid about to watch his little brother get yelled at. What the cook defends as a caper in his simmering sauce, Mark fishes out with a tweezer and labels a rat turd. When the cook disagrees Mark dares him to eat it, again evoking the schadenfreude of the little brother. While Miles in the original could dispel entire pod invasions in the minds of his people by labeling it rampant hysteria, the territory of which Mark is a master could hardly get much smaller or more repellant.

We see his pettiness and immaturity further when he makes a late night call to his assistant Elizabeth (Brooke Adams), urging her to come in early to work the next day. There is no apparent reason for this off-hour request, other than his excremental enthusiasm. Maybe this was okay in the 1970’s but in a modern context this behavior would be considered sexual harassment; it’s clear he's trying to force a pissing contest between him and Elizabeth’s current boyfriend, Geoffrey (Art Hindle), an alleged dentist who wont even take off his super size 1970's headphones when he and Elizabeth are coupling. It seems almost a relief the next day to see Geoffrey wandering around in a glassy-eyed robotic haze.

On their car-pooling way to work, Elizabeth complains to Mark about Geoffrey’s odd behavior. As they drive, evidence accrues, VERTIGO-like, through Mark’s cracked windshield (via a disgruntled cook no doubt): businessmen, old ladies, and construction workers conspire in low tones on street corners, and if that weren’t enough, there’s Kevin McCarthy jumping in front of their car screaming “You’re next!” Mark seems determined to think it can all be explained away by his shrink friend. The reality restorer they're driving to see. When Kevin's hit by a car around the corner, MIles spends several scenes trying to report it to the cops even forcing his way onto the phone at the crowded book signing they're attending, the cops could give a shit - what is he going to report anyway, that he heard a thump? It makes no sense, but it illuminates a key difference between himself and Miles in the original, which is even more tellingly borne out in the rather juvenile romantic situations of Elizabeth and Mark vs. Becky and Miles in the original version. 

In 1956, the institution of marriage--that golden bedrock of “family values”--had yet to be shattered by free love, only chipped at here and there.  Newly divorced (as is Becky), Miles ruminates (in Finney’s novel): “It was wonderful to be free, but just the same, the breakup of something that wasn’t intended to turn out that way leaves you a little shaken…but we’d each been through the same mill.” This mill that the two of them have gone through has left them both in rather good shape, maybe because that mill is still pretty clean, seldom used, not indicative of system-wide failure. By 1978 that mill is more like a slaughterhouse assembly line, spitting out stoop-shouldered singles like Mark and Elizabeth, who don’t get a snazzy convertible but rather a dirty sedan with cracked windshield. Where Miles and Becky could enjoy the thrill of rekindling a romance with no prior commitments to worry about, here Mark sublimates his attraction for Elizabeth via ordering her around at work. Meanwhile she lives with her boyfriend but doesn’t make it clear to Mark she is unavailable, sublimating the coldness of her handsome affluent lover Geoffrey is a dentist (she lives in his house and it's fairly nice - there's a housekeeper). She’s not that committed to Geoffrey, but in no mood to leave him either. In 1956 if you loved a woman, you knew it; looked her in the eyes and told her so, and you got married the next day. In 1978 if you love a woman, you look at your watch, shuffle your shoes, and hang around her kitchen until her boyfriend leaves, or the situation gets to intense and scary that making a move on her seems easier, you have no fear left with which to self-sabotage or stutter.

DR. KIBNER - REALITY ERADICATOR

So Mark and Elizabeth drive over to Mark’s psychiatrist friend, Dr. Kibner’s (Leonard Nimoy) book signing party to report seeing Kevin McCarthy being chased by pods and presumably killed. Kibner, with his short black bangs and dark crimson turtleneck is clearly a figurehead for the new “post-conformity.” This was the time--the 1970s--when national fads would burn through the cultural landscape like wildfire: EST, Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, the Guyana Kool Aid Acid Test. The hippies had knocked one out of the park as far as seizing the reigns of American culture, but Manson turned out to be an Apache and slaughtered the innocent, and no one could find a bugle to sound revelry, cuzza weed, man. And even with cult danger on everyone's mind, the spiritual pillars of contemporary society were suddenly up for grabs; Christian priests were loosening up to connect with the rudderless younger generation; the face of God was melting into your lap at the Church of the Higher Consciousness. Jesus was alive and playing banjo (dubbed in by Jerry Garcia) in the park outside your office. Your old lady neighbor could have you pregnant by Satan or pimping the Baghavhad Gita in airports before you even had time to thank her for the strange tasting coffee. Thus, just by writing a book, Dr. Kibner becomes an authority on "what's happening."

For me the most uncomfortable part of the whole film is when Elizabeth, hearing a woman complain to Kibner that her husband is not her husband, tries to rush up assure the woman she’s not crazy. But Kibner--ever the showman--blocks her path. He turns his back to Elizabeth, keeps his eyes focused on the woman with the problem, and reassures her that her husband is indeed her husband in a groovy, gravelly, Spock-the-hypnotist voice. When Elizabeth tries to interrupt he holds her at bay with an outstretched hand, and says “Please.” This repeats over and over: anything Elizabeth tries to say, Kibner interrupts with “Please, Please!” and continues to spout his platitudes to the doomed woman. She’s powerless to resist; Kibner’s ego is so huge it will not allow any other outcome than for her to be soothed by his commanding aura, and see things his way.

It’s a scary scene because unlike Kaufman and Miles in the original, who were fighting to maintain the democratically elected illusion of social reality, here in the remake’s post-modern San Francisco there is no longer any such thing. The doors of perception have been kicked open; the demons are out; it's the wild west all over again--only on an intra-psychic level--and Kibner has elected himself sheriff. In telephone terms, Miles and Kaufman were Bell Telephone repair people. Kibner is an MCI representative in a post-monopoly era, using his most authoritative Spock voice to preach the gospel of the lowest bidder.

Reading Finney’s book now, when a character expresses concern that her uncle has “no emotion—none—only the pretense of it” (p. 21), it seems almost quaint. The prognosis would merely be to cut his Xanax prescription to half, or otherwise adjust his meds. Even by 1956 and Siegel’s film, emotion was already draining—like cheap dye—out of the human fabric. By the time Antonioni’s BLOW UP came around in 1967, sincerity was synonymous with square. By 1978 even the squares knew better than to act sincere, so sincerity was almost cool again. Thus, Kibner’s question about the pod panic isn’t whether people are faking being themselves—that’s a given--but why is everyone suddenly so aware of it? Has detachment gone too far? Is this some new trend he should be aware of? He didn't get to ride the cultural zeitgeist by not chasing every new spontaneously occurring group mind schizmatic rhizome like some gonzo wack-a-mole barber.

POST-MODERNIST REFRACTION 

(or 'That San Francisco Sound might be the Echo of a Dead Can')

Like so many post-modern films, Kaufman’s remake ends up going literally “nowhere.” This is the same root of the urban paranoia in Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION, or the films of De Palma and Antonioni. In these vortexes of the real, not just the plot, but the hero of the story himself, is likely to disappear halfway through (also in fiction, as in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow). One of Mark’s many boneheaded attributes in the 1978 film is how he is utterly unable to "wake up" out of the haze of reliance on illusory authority. He can't stop calling up governmental agencies even after he knows they're pods; it's an addiction. Even after the almighty Kibner has decided to believe Matthew about the pods and to do all he can, Mark still insists on calling reporters, FBI agents, and governmental watchdogs for help. He’s dying to tattle on the pods and can’t let go that there is no one to tattle to. He hits the streets, the payphones, so they "can't trace him." Voices begin to reach out to him from passing pay phones as he staggers down the street. Chapman's handheld camera follows him through a wobbly series of shots that mix POV angles of various San Francisco streets --downtown to the Tenderloin, until we get the impression Mark is chasing himself, or has eaten his own tail. In a post-modern touch, Matthew/Sutherland becomes aware of, and scared of, the camera/viewer, which in turn mirrors his paranoia via crazy angles as it captures his image. Thus the passers by in the fish eye lens look over at him as if to say “Hey, that’s Donald Sutherland, is this some kind of a movie?” and he reacts to them as if they are pods who figured out he’s not human, and his shocked look right out of the screen into the viewer's eyes makes you realize he knows you know, and it's a trip, man, if I may use the vernacular of the locals.

Forgoing any attempt to connect to the more exploding color aspects of the Haight or anything, Chapman’s camera makes San Francisco throb like some giant alien embryo in these scenes. The recently completed Transamerica Pyramid Building looms in the background, an immobile Martian automaton waiting for Nimoy to activate it with a Klaatu Barado Nikto type command. Chapman’s camera leaps forward and devours Sutherland’s image for a few minutes and we see things from his eyes, hearing him hear phone calls overlap into each other, hearing his own voice played back at him, things happening, but then not happening. A meeting is arranged with a deep throat-style mole in the park who gives him a packet of info, but then the packet is gone. Each new payphone rings louder than the last; a Washington official urges him to keep vigilant. Automated voices overlap until they form the sounds of a crowd. The lights of the city flash like saucer landing strips from the furnace-like doorways of peep shows. First Mark, then Chapman’s camera, then the viewer, all slowly drown in a sea of urban information.

You are Totally There, But There is No "There" There

 Abel Ferrara's 1993 re-remake. 

SO.... the military family hurtles all around the country, blowing like the seed of space to whatever corner of the continent offers dad the best salary. Ask the kid in the back of car how he feels about losing his hard-won friends every few years, and he'll tell you it's alienating. This is especially noticeable by 1993 and Abel Ferrara's remake, the third version of SNATCHERS film, with its most traumatized of all the alienated space fliers, the military brats. In this version the good guys are the aliens, drifting onto the uptight military base like a bunch of pre-Reagan hotties. The dad is an aging but still full hair-headed hippie named Steve Mallone (Terry SAVE THE LAST DANCE Kinney), his daughter from a first marriage, Marti (sizzlin' Gabrielle SCENT OF A WOMAN Anwar), his second wife Carol (lovely PSYCHO 2 star Meg Tilly) and their cuddly, tow-headed six year old son, Andy (Reilly Murphy).

It's not really fair to give Abel Ferrara's remake the bad rap it has, if for no other reason than the amazing cinematography of Bojan Bazelli. The man behind the unique look of Ferrara's KING OF NEW YORK, and such films as THE RAPTURE (1991) and DEEP COVER (1992), and lately, RING 2. His work radiated through even in the days of VHS but on HD widescreen it bumps anything it touches up a star. With the action framed through window slats, fences, window panes, blinds, curtains, dissolves of window reflections into other window reflections which then pull back to the other interior, and so on, the shots are bathed in haunting hues and even the pods glisten with complex beauty. More than almost anything else in the film, his cinematography unveils the "meaning" of this rendition of the snatchers. 

Unfortunately, while it ably conveys the dissolution of the American mental fiber (constantly affirming the sense of split personality) it doesn't really help us get involved with the horror element and Ferrara --taking this job on for the cash and restricted as to improvisation and all his other favorite approaches--isn't able to really show off a knack for narrative suspense beyond the merely 'above average' competence. Aside from Anwar's ability as an actress to draw us in and make us worry she'll be bored, dumped unceremoniously on the lame-o back streets of the makeshift suburban world inside the prefab suburban military base (a behind-the-fences neighborhood that's probably equal parts families of the military, and witness protection), there's not much going on. The pods seem to have taken over long before--or right as--the Mallone family arrives. Thus their arrival seems to trigger the menace; they bring the menace with them in some abstract sense, like Tippi brought THE BIRDS to Bodega Bay.

This whole aspect of strangers in a strange land steady getting stranger makes for an interesting comparison when measured against the other two films. Siegel's 1956 version takes place in small town where everyone knows your name; Kaufman's in the swinging 1970s where names don't matter, cause we're all the same soul (but really everyone's alienated and alone); Ferrara's is in the glum early 90's on a suburban military base in the Deep South, where no one even has a name to know, or a soul that hasn't been warped in basic training. Though setting the film at a military base wasn't Ferrara's idea, it nonetheless works, at least as a basis for an interesting comparison, a yardstick with which to measure the pod's progress in real life, a halfway point between the 50s rise of the suburban prefab tract home picket fence and our modern alienation where all cultures are right next to each other as strangers but united via earbuds that cut their hearing off as if alien face hugger coils feeding them any chosen sensory stimuli.

Marti narrates the events of the film, in a convention borrowed from the 1956 version, one that automatically allows for a certain measure of security in the viewer (we know she will survive from the outset). She intones gravely about fate, as if she was "chosen" to encounter and--presumably--survive, her inevitable run-in with the pods. "I guess things happen for a reason," she says, and adds "In the end it had to happen." The feel of all this is reminiscent of TERMINATOR 2, which came out two years earlier, and the images of the family on the road to EPA dad's new post possess an eerie post-apocalyptic feel. Nothing bad has happened yet, but the family is already alienated from each other and the landscape is desolate and scarcely seems to know itself. Marti and her sexy young step-mom are locked in an unspoken stand-off over dad's affections. The kids are obviously pissed off at having to go live on another military base just as they were "beginning to make some friends" at the last one.

While at a rest stop en route, Marti is accosted in the bathroom by a crazed soldier who tells her "They get you when you sleep" before he vanishes. Later, Marti hears the same thing from a terrified Andy. The poor boy has just had a weird day in class where the teacher kept trying to get him to take a nap, and all the kids made the exact same finger painting (cool touch!). Meanwhile the adults go about their business, resolutely oblivious to the kids' suspicions and worries.

The idea of "who makes reality" takes an interesting downturn here as well. R. Lee Emery (FULL METAL JACKET) plays base leader General Platt, and he's far less intimidating than he thinks and is unable to make the bespectacled hippie dad, Steve Mallone, cringe and want to be out of there post haste, but Steve just challenges him with the smug self-righteous assurance of Sutherland at the restaurant in the beginning that if there are any leaky drums of toxins floating around, oh yes, he will find them. While standing around in a ditch taking samples Steve gets accosted by the third reality steerer, Major Collins (Forrest Whitaker, even more over the top than he was in SPECIES), the camp shrink. Obviously hip to the alien spore takeover, Whitaker stutters and struts and frets his minutes upon the stage with his paranoia. He and Kinney gets into intense dialogue about what's happening; people could be thinking their family members are not their family members due to some sort of toxicity in the water. "It's not part of the systemology," says Steve, like he knows what that means; and another intriguing spin on Finney's concept, that this time around the takeover might be a result of neurotoxins in the ground water--a sentient neurochemical!--is shortly shot to shit.  And which came first - the toxin that changes people or the toxin that makes people think other people have changed.

That's the thing really --all the pods would have to do if they wanted to avoid all the hassle would be to just instantly and pre-emptively accuse the remaining humans of not being themselves - of trying to imply they're the ones having the nervous  breakdown and so forth. It's the kind of reverse mirror gaslight logic that sends even sane minds around the bend.

Meanwhile Marti is almost abducted by some weird soldiers who inform her she's trespassing as she walks home along a fence, but the general's daughter, Jenn (Christine Elise) rescues her in her shiny new convertible (that symbol of individuality and freedom from the 1956 film) and spirits her away to cool kid places, like off to the one cool bar in town, where she meets her spur-of-the-minute boyfriend, Captain Tim Young (Billy Wirth). This bar scene is interesting in how well Ferrara captures the stifling deadness of a mostly empty bar, the jukebox is here from the first film, but also another drunk raving about how they get you when you sleep. At this point the movie still seems like it could be really good, especially when Tim and Marti take a romantic walk through some woods that are lit by Bajelli in an almost storybook manner.

Alas, such moments are a sort of false alarm as this is the last 'clean' landed beat of the film. Any further character exposition is quickly shunted to the rear in favor of cramming the film--which barely makes it to the 90 minute mark--with unrelenting action. We don't get much chance to even unpack Marti's things before pods are dropping from the ceiling like maggots in SUSPIRIA. No time to go check whether Uncle Ira is really Uncle Ira now; aint no Uncle Ira anyway, hell there ain't even a half-formed Jack Bellicec for the family pool table. No time, as if Ferrara's checked his watch and realized the invasion is behind schedule. Schnell! Schnell!

As all the invasion stuff unfurls there are plenty of twists to the old formula to make it toothsome for fans. Best of all is probably the doses of Ferrara-brand, Catholic-sin tax-stamped sex. Steve discovers his wife's dusty corpse right as the very nude Meg Tilly pod emerges from the closet in a sort of coming out party wherein she discards the role of mother and becomes a cunning, ambivalent, highly sexual figure. Hell yeah we'd have a hard time getting our bearings too.

Meg Tilly really shines in these scenes, as if her character didn't really even exist before becoming a pod, as if in becoming a pod she has found herself--which is perhaps intended. Tilly is very sexy and at ease in roles that require her to be emotionless; she packs more allure into unfeeling zombiedom than almost any actress this side of Sean Young. Her body is slammin' (her sister Jennifer was an unbilled body double) and she gets off the film's most memorable lines as well. She woos Steve up to the bed to give him a massage in order to put him to sleep and when he says "I love you," in a dorky way as thanks for the rub down, she answers, "I love you too, yeah." In a way that suggests that yes, the pod formerly known as Carol does love Steve, why not? It’s not that big a deal to summon the sort of low-res love Steve is capable of.

Steve proves his limited capabilities, his emotional stunting, when Marti comes home late from her evening out and he races out to the front lawn to make a big scene over her being "three hours late" when she is no more than an hour. As this is going on, the camera tracks from the bitter, pointless battle between daughter and dad over to Meg, staring placidly across the yard, over at a black woman with a crying baby who is looking out the window back at her. The deep but emotionless sense of connection between strangers that contrasts wonderfully with the infantile attempt at concerned parenting that is Steve's yelling at Marti, a kind of guilty stalling.

Marti goes to take a bath, and Carol Pod lures Steve back to bed to put him out and let him get taken over. Up in the attic, Marti's pod is forming and about to drip on her as she dozes off in the tub. Steve's is forming under the marital bed. In this version the pods attach long tendrils to your nose and mouth and sort of suck up your saliva, presumably to run a full DNA screen. There are some amusing burbling sounds as if the pod is drinking the bodily fluid, burping and so forth. The pod body then gets too big for the cheap ceiling insulation and it goes crashing through the ceiling into the bath with Marti. Her subsequent screams wake up Steve, who's got pod tendril problems of his own.

Thus the shit hits the fan, and never lets up for the rest of the picture. The highlight moment of the film comes with Meg/Carol/Pod trying to talk the hysterical (crying like a little girl) Steve down, so he'll relax and accept the situation, by telling him there's nowhere to run, nowhere to go to:

"Go where? That's right, go where? What happened in your room...Are you listening? What happened in your room is not an isolated incident. It is something that is happening everywhere to everyone. So where you gonna go? Where you gonna run? Where you gonna hide? Nowhere, because there's no one like you left."--

Then she adds, "we'll be connected, we'll be close" as if to seal the deal.

I'd write about this shrink as arbiter of reality but look at him, he's crazy as a bedbug

As if to contrast this, he's soon trying to become an action hero, hiding Marti and Andy in a storing area and sneaking into Major Collin's office while all around people are dragged out of their homes and forced to sleep by the pod soldiers in scenes clearly echoing Guyana. Whitaker has acted himself up into a fine old frenzy: "We got to fight 'em! We'll show 'em what the human race is really made of!!!" His hysteria makes an interesting contrast with the calm of Meg Tilly in the other scene, and when Collins is visited by R. Lee Emry's General Platt we see the general is suddenly all mellow, even calmer and more hippy-ish than Steve was in the earlier scene when they squared off in his office. "Relax major," Platt says. "Look what your fear has done for you…" There can be no doubt about it, the pod takeover is a very effective tool for combating anxiety, an invasion of psycho-pharma.

Genius - especially considering the relative newness of SSRIs and Xanax. Sweet Xanax.

An interesting new plot device this time around is that the pods have to use mind games to tell whether other people are pods or not. Tom tries to go steal the surviving humans a helicopter to escape with, a task which involves acting unemotional before the guards, as if he's already been taken over. To test to make sure, one of the pod people, his buddy before the takeover says, "I fucked your girlfriend." When Marti and Tom are sneaking through the confusion trying to find her missing brother they run into Jenn who gets Marti to react by whispering, "I saw Andy." The "are they or aren't they" anxiety is played up as high as it can, but with such a truncated first act it's hard to tell or care.

Of all three films this is also the only one with a clear climax of explosions (beyond Donald's petty sabotage climax of the 78 version) as the pod menace is supposedly legitimately halted by our intrepid heroes; for the audience of the late 1980's and early 1990's really demanded no less from their horror action cinema --or so the filmmakers seem to think. But the three-way split of the film's diegetic reality, personified by Platt, Collins and Malone, never coheres, and with all three gone, the reality producing mechanism lies somewhere over the rainbow. Tim and Marti, the sole survivors, who have blown up tons of military equipment on their escape are believed over the radio that these things were pods, and are given clearance to land at a "friendly" base. With all the authority figures destroyed, the film enters the land of dream. The sunglasses of the signalman on the base implies he might be one too, but implying is okay, no nightmare take-home.

Again a Taxi Driver comparison is apt; the ending of that film found Travis somehow completely exonerated and a hero after his mission of slaughter. Pauline Kael famously theorized that Taxi's ending didn't make sense compared to the rest of the film if taken literally, that it should be read as a dream of Travis's, a macho-saint fantasia. In real life there would be no Cybil Shepherd crawling into his cab begging forgiveness that he could blithely ignore, no letter from Iris's parents proclaiming him a hero he could keep on his fridge; he would be in jail. That final, startled look he gives the rear view mirror is an indication that he has suddenly realized this happy ending is all a dream, as if he sees the electric chair warming up for him through the bars of his alarm clock cell, the way Jimmy Stewart suddenly sees the drop of the building face outside Midge’s window in Vertigo, or the soldier feels the buzzing gallows in Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. 

CONCLUSION

The iconoclast, the lone gunman, the man against the machine, is always in danger of vanishing (with no one to notice), of falling asleep at the wheel. "I'll drive anytime, anywhere," Travis says at the start of the Scorsese's film, but he has to fall alseep some time. An insomniac, he's wisely afraid to wake up a pod (and maybe in the end he has). Marti and Travis each have to face the realization that they may well have fallen asleep despite their best efforts or--even weirder--, that dreams have crept into waking life to find them (i.e., if Mohammed won't come to the mountain...) Either way, the illogical realm of dream has come in and we're never sure if we've fallen asleep or not (the last breadcrumb on the trail is gone). In a land where they've 'won' and all is well, how can they tell they're themselves? Is raw terror and alienation the only way to tell if you are an awake artist in this sea of sheep? Is a regular sleep regimen really the first sign of artistic decline, or is that just the amphetamines (so easy to get in the years following WW2) talking? If you answered yes, then maybe you're a doctor, and can prescribe for thyself. Must be nice... for the rest of us, the jonesers, dreams come flitting in like moths in the wake of a forest fire. Let us run, while we can, before the light takes us.  (3-23-05)

PS - This essay was finished before the recent Kidman vehicle, which from what I've seen of it (the last hour) is pretty terrible and tries to tack on some child-will-lead-them resolution, so for all porpoises, I'm deeming it a variation not a remake

PPS - Also, I lost the bibliography - sue me. It was originally intended to be published by Scarlet Street, right before the editor and chief Richard Valley passed away, RIP