Tuesday, July 27, 2021

The Tripping Cabalist - THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (1965)


You know a weird old Polish movie is worth hunting down when Jerry Garcia loves it to the point he helped fund its restoration. Even though its black-and-white, made behind the iron curtain, three hours long, even bedecked with the same 18th-century powdered wigs and tricornered hats most of us associate more with being bored to a caged frenzy in history class; even convoluted to the point of bedevilment, The Saragossa Manuscript rocks with elaborately trippy self-reflexive moxy. Singlehandedly discovering the then-emerging counterculture, it blows your mind via source material that was, so the legend goes, written on bar napkins over a period of many years by an old Polish officer of the Royal Guard who ended up shooting himself with a silver bullet to avoid becoming a werewolf. Far out! The movie centers around the titular book, discovered in a bombed out chateau during the outer framing device; it contains many stories about storytellers whose own stories include flashbacks to other stories being told, until eventually a character may well hear about the events that involved them only a few nights ago, enabling them to finally understand what the other person was shouting at them from behind a rock or something. Confusion will be thy epitaph! Oops, I mean, she wore scarlet begonias, lapped up in her curls, or whatever? 

It can be confusing, especially around the middle hour, but if you watch the whole thing a few times, over several nights, under the right frames of mind, the frame-stories become clearer; your brain starts to expand as it grasps a new form counter-linear narrative; you feel like if you had a white-board and a marker you could lay it all out like a family tree that moves forward and backwards in time. All roads eventually lead back to the same starting point - under the gallows. That would be, I guess, the roots of everything - alpha and omega. The bullet and the bite. 

From the first we're put in an unsteady place, an outer-outer frame occurring on a war-torn border/front shifting like an ingoing/outgoing tide, circa mid-1800s, following a slightly aimless senior officer during a heated street-to-street battle. He takes shelter in a bombed out salon, distractedly looking through the debris for things to liberate while his army races on ahead (only to surge back behind him in the other direction moments later. Within the wreckage doth the officer find a a strange, large book. He is almost taken prisoner by the opposition when the front line retreats back past him yet again, but he doesn't even look up from the book, not even when the opposing side officer tries to take him prisoner. The opposing officer to, curious about the illustrations, becomes obsessed too; their armies skirmish around them but the transfixed pair wave them away without looking up. One officer realizes the book is about his own  grandfather! This pair of opposing officers--their battle forgotten in favor of mutual awe and confusion-- themselves soon may well become images pored over by other descendants, for the book abides, with no clear single author. 

"Only an uneducated man who sees the same thing every day thinks he understands it"

The grandfather it seems was captain of the Spanish Royal Guard, Alfonse van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski), who one afternoon takes an ill-advised shortcut through the haunted Sierra Romena mountains, much against the advice of his two servants, who bail the moment he falls asleep. At the first woebegone inn he comes to a pair of sexy Muslim ghost-sorceress sisters invite him to dine and, alight with booze and lusty cheer, his eyes twinkling with a mix of 'can't believe my luck' and 'try not to blow it feigned worldliness that evokes Bob Hope with his Road to Morocco harem, is beguiled and seduced by their sexy willingness to share a man as only sisters may; but his wine must be drugged - BAM - 

Worden wakes up in the blazing light of midday, on a bed of skulls, under a sun-bleached gallows. He can't even remember if he scores with the twins in the oh-so-important-for-young-male-stud-vanity menage a trois biblical sense. Were they spirits? Were they devils? And where can he find them again? Set 'em up again!  

Well, the Inquisition somehow gets word he's cavorting with Muslim princess and he's soon captured and nailed into a steel devil helmet, only to be rescued by a the Zolta brothers, the hung gypsy bandits he woke up beneath only that afternoon, and their sisters, the two girls from his basement dreams (and after another dinner and slug of--presumably--drugged wine, he wakes up under the same gallows). Is there a direction through the Romenas he can take that doesn't involve being seduced and drugged and waking up under the gallows? Maybe a traveling cabalist can help. From there it gets even weirder; Worden first finds the book at the cabalists' lovely mansion; it's about his own father! A troupe of gypsy troubadours stop by to regale the gathered throng with their interlocking tales of courtship and woe, some of which involves Worden's father, a duel-happy aristocrat who spends most of his life either dying of sword wounds or being healed by water from a lovely wandering Muslim maid who would become Worden's mother (one assumes). 

Things go deep into the strange and yet mundane once we get to the cabalist's castle, which is visited by a flock of gypsy storytellers that night, leading to a melange of tales that Von Worden realizes all tie into him or his father, who marries a possibly Muslim sorceress (Worden's future mother?) who rescues him with a timely drink of water while he's suffering from a duel wound. Her sudden appearance out of the distance with a jug atop her head carries an even more mystically 'other' vibe than Alfonse's two Muslim princesses. It all makes sense only after a few viewings when it kicks in - Worden is cryptically half-Muslim on his mother's side. That makes him a kind of in-between figure - both sides try and claim him, or kill him, or initiate him.


Another aspect the interlocked stories share is setting, with time and again the same inns, mountain passes, and city streets coming into play at different eras (with the sets aging, crumbling, and becoming young again, as the stories are told). Narrative tentacles touch on everything from the Spanish Inquisition to the tales recollected by gadabout balladeers, loafers, romantic idiots, and drinkers. We hear willingly of Alfonse's father's many duels. We hear of bed-hopping lovers and their drunken go-betweens. We meet inn keepers, pashas, monks, maniacs, merchants, brigands, and occult cabalists. Stories are told by characters inside stories being told to the later teller of a different story explaining the first, to the point Von Worden declares “I’ve lost the feeling of where reality ends, and fantasy takes over.” Totally, bro. Sooner or later we find the answer to questions posed by other characters well before the newer tale was begun. In this maze might one character hear, as illustrated dinner table gossip, of exploits they themselves experienced from a different angle only the night before, the mystery of events that went on that night only now finally making sense from hearing the other side of the encounter ("that could drive an experienced person insane!"). In one instance Alfonse is stopped from reading the titular book he finds in the cabalists' library (still unaware he wrote it in the future). "If he read to the end," notes the scorpion-haired cabalist to his buxom servant girl, "the events which are to follow will make no sense." You know it's all tripped out When the titular book one is discussing has already been partially written and sitting in the background of a scene it has not quite begun to depict.  


As a result of this and its non-linearity, the film takes several viewings to fully unravel. God knows how incoherent it must have been when Jerry saw it, though there certainly are stretches that, in my opinion, don't do much to help the overall narrative. Actually, depending on what was cut out, the version Jerry saw may have made more sense than this whole three hour affair. Honestly, it can be trying for first time viewers, especially after the more-or-less recognizable amorous maybe-ghost story, in the vein of A Chinese Ghost Story and Ugetsu of the first part gives way to a tangled amor-fou roundelay amidst the mercantile class, bringing to life images from saucy 17th-century European woodcuts and classical Spanish art while looping back around on its own intermediary-dependent 'storyteller telling stories about storytellers telling stories' loopy chain. The crazed synth score underwriting the ghostly seduction scene gives way to fruitful classical and the money begins to flow, to the point a banker ruins his fortune by suing an investor for not taking back his doubled investment. The son the banker sends into the world to return the money will have no interest in any of it, preferring to read romance novels and become a love-afflicted dilettante. Meanwhile ghosts and duelists, and survivors of duels relate the stories of the parents of the man they killed in a duel, or fatally wounded in a duel, and all in the same town or road. The work of Bunuel, Cervantes, Swift, Pierre Louÿs, Huysmans, and one's owns story's meaning goes into another's so that a man's penance is cut short when his go-between realizes one of his busqueros got the wrong window. Then there's the odious Count Pena Flor, a made-up character invented by the wandering-eyed gorgeous young wife to make her aging nobleman husband jealous, to the point he pays a handsome layabout to find and kill him; only for his young wife to later pretend to be "Pena Flor's" vengeful ghost to scare him into taking a long pilgrimage so she can get it on unimpeded... with the same handsome layabout! Genius, thy name is Potocki! Elsewhere, a wise old hermit monk tricks a giant into herding and milking his goats in exchange for exorcising him of evil spirits. 

 Some parts occasionally get bogged down in the crowd shots, with characters wandering from one set to another. But stick with it and what seems to be a voice from God, booming out in answer to questions about life after death asked during a crackling thunderstorm in one person's woeful tale turns out to be the voice of someone who misunderstood the question in another. Eventually things become an ever shifting dream; so that a traveler might find objects he left behind from the night before at places he just arrived at. 

Thanks to a uniquely Eastern European sense or deadpan absurdity, these sunny Spanish tales-within-tales avoid the stuffy bourgeois airlessness that often accompanies 'respectable' film adaptations of revered satiric classics (i.e. the urge to cake the actors in so many wigs and costumes they can barely move or speak, or worse, move too close to the other end of the class spectrum, and cake them in grubby peasant realness). On The Saragossa Manuscript, we may notice the similarity between a shot in a tavern and a painting we recently saw at the Met, but what of it?- there's no big art highlight marker traces; no one is aiming for accolades - this is art skittering under the radar. Every scene is wild with rocky patterns into which one might hallucinate things into existence without the party censors even knowing they were there. Stories all take place at the same locations over time; the action regularly doubles back around to the same sets and rocky exteriors, passageways between rocky formations, such as the one below - framed by a Satanic-looking standing cattle skeleton, horns intact, the yoke still around its bony shoulders; in the middle ground, a cow or maybe mammoth rack of rib fossil indenting the rock at left; at right foreground , the splintered remains of a boat hull, or fallen roof? is it a giant loom, or a piano interior harp? Note the nearly transparent ghostly pitcher in the left foreground. Is it there or not there? In one shot, we see a discarded sketchbook in the lower foreground, their lines seeming to etch their way off the page and into the nearby half-ruined gallows (that's a different morning than the below, which has no sketchbook, but keep your eyes open to every corner). This use of cinematic space that is neither interior nor exterior but a place that refuses to be either in-or-outdoors, with walls dripping with trippy mold patterns, evokes Tarkovsky.


In the version Jerry Garcia had only seen in some Haight-Ashbury theater, the film ran only two hours; nearly an hour had been chopped out by American distributors trying to get i more focused on the supernatural menage-a-trois; a full three-hour version was hard to locate. Did it even exist? Garcia hooked up with fellow fans Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola to find (behind the iron curtain), restore and subtitle all the missing elements. Then, as if to punish him for his band's devil-may-care name, Jerry died before he could see the finished final three-hour cut. 

It's an irony that befits the irony-crammed film and writer Count Jan Potocki's original manuscript. The more widely read version, published in 1805, was shorter and more focused on a linear, lighthearted supernatural lighthearted version; the longer complete one, with more digressions and dead ends, which--tell me this doesn't sound ironically familiar--was published in its entirety only after Potocki's death (by silver bullet suicide to avoid the lycanthropic curse - for serious!). In other words, neither Jerry nor Potocki ever got to see the full three-hour version.  These coincidences are important to ponder in the meta framework which this frame story inevitably encourages us to incorporate. And if, at end of this massive tome, we're left with only the vaguest sense of narrative completion, with no real climax of denouement (unless you count a vague nod to the final shot of Von Sternberg's Morocco), and with certain last minute confessions seeming almost like a 'last call' hack-twist rather than a legitimate and satisfying wrap-up, well.... you can always try watching it again, real soon. Chances are, it won't even be the same movie. I've seen it three times now and the interwoven strands still lead me into knots, just trying to explain or write them down makes me dizzy in the best possible way. 
++

Friday, July 16, 2021

Shark Weeks and Triangle Weekends: An Acidemic Summer Reading List

 It's Shark Week on Discovery; and the ingeniously original "Sharkfest" on Nat-Geo (Streaming on Disney+!), in other words, more than ever, it's the right time to stay home in the AC, reaching to the slimy bottom of of your nigh-empty COVID excuse bucket to ward off pool and beach invites. By now you've gleaned summer is my least favorite season, I loathe the sticky heat (being half-Nordic). I am a big fan of doing the Huysmans A Rebors style beach trip, i.e. moving my easy chair so I can doze off with the afternoon sun hitting me square in the face through a (closed) window, coconut oil below my nose (to give the illusion of suntan lotion), eyes closed, the roar of the shark show surf swimming in my ears... the resultant sensory canvas all but gives me that sudden drop ghost feeling you get sometimes while dozing off after spending a long time frolicking in the surf, all with the AC blasting.  So you know the drill. I'm a big fan of the shark week and the shitty-CGI-hottie-scientist Syfy channel shark movies, which have been slyly crushing the Bechdel test right in front of the unwitting faces of 'the Man.' I could write everything I've written all over again, but instead, to make it easy for you, dear reader, I've rounded up a list of everything you need to surf.... safely limb-wise, but dangerously psyche-wise:

(Nov. 2013)

The point is, SHARKNADO comes along, and a Ferris wheel rolls into the side of a four story international style apartment building like it's no big deal. Charlton Heston might drag that Ferris wheel roll out to three hours, but this film rushes along past it. Sharks in the bar, sharks in the traffic jam; "It's like old faithful!" as water shoots up from the sewers. "We're gonna need faith to get through that" over a flooded dip under an overpass. A douchebag boyfriend of the sulky daughter says: "Even if it is the storm of the century, Beverly Hill's rescue services are second to none!" And then he looks out the window, sees a shark in the swimming pool and before he can react a wave crashes through into the living room and his head gets bit off. And there was much rejoicing. If you ever played the game as kids where you had to be halfway up the stairs or on a chair or couch to avoid getting eaten by a carpet shark then yes you are in bad movie heaven. If the leader of the survivors, Finn, is a typical bleeding heart idiot who has to stop to help everyone, even school buses that look empty. "This is your problem, Finn!" bemoans the weary ex-wife (Tara Reid) - and we kind of agree, but then Boom! Turns out --there's scared kids in there, and a TJ Miller-ish bus driver way out of his depth! You saved another busload from the shahks, Finn! (more) 

(August 16, 2014)

That Fin was an ex-lifeguard gave him an excuse for his chronic rescuing out west. His idiot desire to rescue his family before they knew they were in danger was offset with a Hawksian sense of real time and tidal surge momentum. We followed the incoming flood from his bar on the beachfront to the boardwalk, the parking lot, downtown, and inland and up into the Hills. A tangible rainy vibe was to be found in their impromptu getaway car; the windshield wipers and radio traffic delays, snarls and very LA dialogue about traffic ("I hate the 405") meshed perfectly with the conversation on where to go from there, creating a vibe familiar to anyone who's ever left a drunken party with a new maskeshift tribe piling into the car to head off to a second location.  We had John Heard as the comic relief, bashing sharks with his barstool; barmaid Nova (Cassandra Scerbo - above left) brandishing shotgun and shark scar backstory; wingman Jason Simmons helping with the heavy lifting and car rentals; Finn doing the posturing. Together they raced with the inward tide as it filled the streets and stalled highway traffic with sharks and flotsam, leading to exit ramp winch rescues, and various members of his party being eaten. 

In short, SHARKNADO had a lot of things going for it the sequel lacks. (full)

July 27, 2015
Subtextual pro-NRA ultra neoconservative Army recruitment tool or no, watching Tara Reid give birth while falling through Earth's atmosphere inside a giant flaming shark, Fin cutting a whole so the parachutes can get through, it's tough to stay mad at America. Reid's skin looks much better, by the way, than in previous episodes. And it's great to see Nova again, especially all militarized like that. I just hope the Syfy/Asylum brain trust wise up and give Nova her own local girl vs. shark series. She's that old animal flesh creeping back again, a thumb in the eye of the CGI Moreau! Second Amendment 4-Eva! (more)
(June 30, 2016)
It used to be just a hodgepodge of dull oceanographers tagging and mapping trans-oceanic migrations, puncture-aided by AIR JAWS, which was three or four great "strikes" of a whale-sized Great White breaching up and clomping down on a stack of seal-shaped tires, over and over, which is bound to be aggravating for the shark, wasting much energy (I always feel bad - were the sharks compensated for their effort? Were substantial fish subsidies paid from the stern?). But the whole week has been getting better every year, with shit aimed so close to me and stoners of a certain age group that it's like Discovery Channel has been reading our dinosaur minds or admiring the numbers on SHARKNADO. Every year there's more cool shit--including endless tie-in advertisements and cross-channel synergy-- aimed so precisely at my demographic that I feel like I'm getting high with all of America. Eli Roth hosts shark talk shows. Andy Samberg does weird trickster post-modern count-downs. SHARK CITY chronicles dishy encounters between a few residents of the local food chain in and around a sunken freighter. Mmy favorite so far: SHARKS OF THE SHADOWLAND and its trio of badass New Zealand government conservationist divers subjecting themselves to the ceaseless group attacks by weird-looking sharks called sevengills, all in the name of battling sea weed plagues!  (more)
(August 15, 2018)
Consider Angie Teodoro Dick as the wild neopagan she-shaman with the spear (above), leader of the rogue New Orleans voodoo style outpost, who deals with the advancing shark issue by a kind of savage STOMP!(TM) performance on the floating docks, drawing the sharks in so she and her warriors can stab them with old-timey whaling harpoons. The warrior's spirited growling and chanting and thumping goes on about three minutes too long, but the bad vibe created by their eventual senseless shark slaughter is interesting in context.. (more)
(August 2, 2019)
For reasons known only to them, Syfy isn't deluging us with their Asylum and Offshoot giant and mutant shark movies this summer. Maybe because they don't have a Deep Blue Sea 3- Blewing Deeper, or an Arctic Sharktadon vs. Lobsterdamus (the visionary lobster who predicts a scalding, buttery armageddon), or Sharknado 7 - Drowning Around. It doesn't matter, as no fan of this genre would remember having seen all their back catalogue, even if they had. And most are still either Syfy 'on demand' or Amazon Prime. So just play catch up and leave it to me to make the notes, together we'll remember everything worth remembering... which is nothing. Isn't it (finally) wonderful?..(cont)

(Sept. 18, 2019)
...if the Jennie the Mermaid element of the film was all done as some kind of Harvey-Walter Mitty style fantasy, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. I would have never watched it. Unless it's Sherlock Jr., I have no interest in movies about the cinematic dream lives of workaday schmucks. Instead, by revealing nothing whatsoever the Depths delivers the full mythic power of an actual dream, the kind spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to. The Bermuda Depths is one of the few films to ever tap fully into the true power of anima projection. The filmmakers know that if there was some big twist at the end, i.e. a mad scientist is behind it all and/or it's a scam (and the scammer would have got away with it if not for those rascally kids), or if the film relied on any rational or even metaphysical 'explanation' for the mysteries, it would be totally lame. But the way it's all filmed, the way the story goes down, it never loses its Jungian "on-the-one" beat, where the film itself is a dream from which there is no waking, only a renouncement of one layer of the dream, which may or may not be a transition to adulthood, for another. (more)
(8-12-2019)

"Furthering the sunglasses and turquoise Florida ecstasy-dilated forward kinetic momentum of Spring Breakers, Korine keeps rolling even though he's too old to party with the club kids. They're exhausting, and so violent, so he's moved into the headspace of a grizzled old stoner, bopping down the Keys, click-clacking the words, and spreading poetry instead of violence. Unless you count poetry as violence, or think the occasional cold cocking a disabled person somehow immoral. Moondoggie (Matthew McConaughey) doesn't and if Harmony disagrees, he ain't 'breakin." He and the Doggie are sailing with the ocean wind at full speed and damned the too torpedoed to keep up with the headlong momentum of a poetic madman high on an everything that comes his way,  Swapping out Breakers' Saint Pete for the party-hearty Key West - a 24/7 raging town where everyone knows and loves the Moondog (no relation to the famous NYC street musician - except perhaps subliminally), the mood is strictly amniotic and delusional. Here's a guy famous--in Florida no less--for being a poet!" (full)

(re; UP FROM THE DEEP): Longtime Corman scriptwriter Charles B. Griffith directs with a nice leisurely (i.e. fairly inept) hand, figuring that if he follows the Jaws chalk marks while sneaking in hipster gags and soaking up the tropical charm (it's shot in the Philippines, but set in Hawaii), he can coast by without barely doing a thing at all. But his camera is so sloppily placed it seems like half the movie is going on in the background while the foreground lingers on a couple of tourist stereotypes shooting the shit (post-synced) at the lobby pamphlet rack. The action picks up once the death toll is so high that greedy hotel manager Forbes can no longer hissy fit it away so he ingeniously offers a cash prize for the monster's head, prompting a run on the Tiki lounge's decorative spears; visiting the gun counter at the local pawn shop. That's when it gets real Mad Magazine: a Japanese salaryman busts out a samurai sword, doing moves out on the rocks while two guys in full frogman suits walk backwards down the hotel stairs, and so on. It would almost come off like a savage satire of American second amendment zeal if it was filmed with a bit more panache. (more)
(7/10)

(on BLUE CRUSH) "The common critical response to the film at the time was that the awesome photography more than made up for the trite story and bland acting, but most (male) critics have a hard time accepting truly free girl characters. If you can look past the surface colloquialisms this is practically a Howard Hawks film for young women: overlapping dialogue, strong camaraderie, a good sense of continuity, issues of courage, maturity and professional nobility. Best of all, the issue of romance getting in the way of your dreams–yeah you heard me, ladies: romance getting in the way of your dream, instead of romance being your dreams-–is handled with care and ballsy skill." (more)


Monday, July 12, 2021

Free to Be You vs. Me: SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983)


There's been an exciting upswing in the media presence of trans and/or non-binary young people these days, not merely activists or carpetbaggers but genuinely cool, free, unique types better than both boxes checked together; I wouldn't dare name some and by error omit others, but I think they can perhaps be measured in their coolness by their response to Sleepaway Camp, which in today's climate might be deemed 'problematic' in its association with what is and isn't horrific (or further, how a girl might change her sex due to a boat propellor or if that even fits into anything.) I think it bodes well for the future that the heroine of the film is also a murderer and has gone on to become a kind of gender-bending icon, as well as a kind of de facto female Freddy/Jason for the slasher set. We need more like her! 

There's a lot going on in this strange, intentionally disjointed film we choose to call Sleepaway Camp, especially the much ballyhooed shock ending. I only recently finally saw it, having lifted my self-imposed ban on all early-80s slasher films (the feminizing scars of my squirmish 80s boyhood finally healed) and was amazed how well it captures the vibe of my own experiences at summer camp. Watching one lazy Sunday afternoon, I fell under its spell and began to feel like I was actually there, thanks to its languid pace and crowded mise-en-scene. Most importantly, it gives us the coolest pair of kids in all of camp slasher moviedom: Ricky--played with  tender but unshowy ferocity by Jonathan Tiersten--and his catatonic cousin Angela (the indelible Felissa Rose), who barely know each other but are packed off to summer camp as one unit by their very weird guardian (Desiree Gould, who makes Deborah Reed in Troll 2 seem restrained) after a weird boating accident. 


Summer camp is terrifying until you get through the first few nights; after that it becomes a mix of giddy anarchy, boredom and relentless dirtiness. If you've already been there, maybe you aren't so apprehensive. Ricky was at the same camp last summer -- he's a legacy! He made friends there! But it's the first time off in the boonies for cousin Angela. Not exactly shy or terrified per se, while Ricky renews acquaintances, Angela just sits around, quiet and unassailable as the Mona Lisa, doing, saying, and eating almost nothing. She doesn't even seem to be miserable, she gives the world around her nary a clue as to her inner life, causing most of the other campers and counsellors various degrees of consternation. Initially attracted by her mystery, the more hormonal idiot males circle her like predators, irritated by her lack of reaction to their overtures and provocations. The girls in turn are irritated by the attention she gets from the boys they mistake her impassivity for snootiness. In one way or another, everyone is provoked and then irritated by her serene disinterest. Counsellors try to make sure she's fed and unmolested but even they wind up on the outside. If they push too hard, bad things tend to happen. If they just let her be, no one mysteriously dies.

Ricky, in the complete opposite camp, comfortably ensconced with his rowdy but cool boys-only clique, doesn't care if his cousin doesn't want to engage. Whatever she wants is all right with him. He lets her sit there, and only steps in if someone starts bothering her. He protects but doesn't engage. This rote proximity-respectful chivalry is a great character detail that gives Ricky a kind of untarnished nobility. He doesn't have to understand her. As far as he's concerned, she's all right as she is.

Being a slasher movie, plenty of offensive people at this camp don't respect Angela's space, and soon end up dead. But it's not with the murders that Sleepaway Camp earns props from me; it's not just because of the 'shock ending.' 

For me, it's the curious way the male counsellors are all Italian muscle guys in super tight  shorts and white tube socks (the style of the time). It's the campers, the vivid ugliness of the way white socks look with grubby sneakers and shorts, over legs just beginning to sprout hair; it's the young cast's richly lived-in semi-improv vibe; it's the slovenly look of the group cabins--awash in snack bags wet bathing suits, towels, floor stains, clumps of clothes, late sleepers--and the almost von Sternbergian way kids race in and out of the ratty screen door at the edge of the frame, to quick grab their swim suits or baseball gloves, laughing at something we didn't hear, and then racing out again. The many daytime scenes and lived-in mise-en-scene make it more of a summer camp movie with slashing rather than a slasher movie with camping. Its characters breathe and bicker like actual people and when they die it's not because they have 'transgressed' but because they wandered off the real people reservation. When they cease being original and real and become a camp stock cliches--bully, pedophile, mean girl, date rapist, blackmailer, etc.--it makes the subsequently inflicted violence more rewarding than scary. Unlike most slasher of the era, the moral is not 'stay a virgin' (these kids are too young for that), but stay a true character, fluid and 3/D--keep it real or face the consequences.
---
TIRADE ONE:
WHEN I WAS A KID, WE WERE TOUGH AND BLAH BLAH CIGARETTES AND FIGHTING

Ricky, especially, never falls into cliche- and he stands as a refreshing holdover from the kids of the 70s movies, who were often badass little punks (see CinemArchetype 23: the Wild Child), like Matt Dillon, Jodie Foster, and Jackie Earle Haley, i.e. the days when characters like that were the good guys. This was a time when junior high schools had student smoking areas. It wasn't until E.T. that kids all became doe-eyed saints. Before then we would have taken Tobey Maguire and kicked him into a trash can. It's no wonder most of us (male moviegoers) wind up conditioned to wince whenever a new boy shows up for his first day of school in a movie. He's generally pushed into a locker before he even gets to his first class. Never is there a boy we can identify with and admire and trust to take care of himself regardless of whatever new hell he's packed off to. But now and again we have a scrawny nerd who relishes the chance to throw down against some idiot twice his size--ala Dreamcatcher, Over the Edge, Bad News Bears, Brick --and man, it's such a relief! A kid like this may get their ass kicked, but they never lose their moxy or our respect. All bullied kids need to see such things, to learn it's not if you win or lose it's that you're not cowering, or avoiding, or pussying out--that cowardly avoidance echoes throughout the remainder of your life as the default settings for your behavior when forced into any threat or conflict. Even picking himself out of a trash can, Bad News's little blonde Tanner (Chris Barnes) is more of a badass than all the Karate Kids combined because no matter the size or number of the other kids, he won't back down. They have to throw him in the trash just to be sure he doesn't follow them and slash their hamstrings with a homemade shiv.

Nowadays, this fighting spirit is so repressed and shunned it can only explode in ballets of high school gun violence. Even then it's only by armed loners, never by fed-up masses of kids determined to fight back against curfews and petty institutional persecution or over-parenting. In fact, these kids today, they don't know how bad they have it, because they're whisked into child therapy the moment they fight back. 

For my generation--who ran wild in the 70s with a degree of freedom that would terrify parents and children of today--badass kids in films gave us ideals to strive for; they provided a compass for the chaos. Jan Michael Vincent teaching Jackie Earle Haley to drink beer and to drive a futuristic tank-trailer in Damnation Alley; Jackie Earle Haley tooling on his dirt bike,  and smoking a cigarette in Bad News Bears; Claude pounding a 1.75 liter of bourbon on his way to a party in Over the Edge... Nowadays? the Haley equivalent can't get on a motorbike without a helmet and elbow pads, even if the diegetic child protective services is long-since nuked.


A lot of the lamer adult filmmakers think kids identify with, and like to see, other kids in movies. It's one of the great tragic mistakes of pop culture history (and that goes double for sidekicks - i.e. Robin, Short-Round, etc - any kid who has a poster of Short Round, or Robin, or Superboy [1] on his wall - run.). There's only one kid we--as kid viewers or badass adults who remember being kid viewers--want to identify with:, the Wild Child. We saw them running amok in films like Logan's Run and--of course--the "Bop! Bop!" street gang in Star Trek. We don't want to identify with the goody-two-shoes kids our own age. We want to be older. We wanted to be Han Solo, not Luke. We may identify with the scared first day kid getting passively shoved against the lockers, but we don't want to. And we'll hate any movie that tries to shove this little pisher down our throats. The badass wild child, on the other hand, he's all right. He's got guts, and sometimes guts is enough, even if he ends up getting beat up and shoved into a trash can, he's all right. 
===
END TIRADE (sorry, ahem)

Why this is all worth mentioning is to praise by contrast a dirt-encrusted kid like Ricky, who can get along with most of the kids without being either the showboat center of attention or a bully, is a great fresh air blast in a sea of one dimensional stock kid types; he had a girlfriend the previous summer, and she's back but dating another dude, so he's hurt but tells her off and gets over it. He holds his own against the bully contingent--he bullies the bullies, if you will. Neither a nerd nor a Ferris Bueller smartass, Ricky quickly re-establishes his pack of cronies and starts going about his summer camp activities, keeping his troubled cousin always within eyeshot, but always leaving her to do her thing, which is...what? Sitting still and watching? It's her thing, man, leave her alone!

Is she in a kind of fugue state? What's Angela's deal?  Is she doing some weird act in a VC Andrews style plot? It's as if the camera hypnotizes her in place. She only comes alive when the camera isn't looking for her or at her, at which point the killer's POV takes over, craftily hiding in tight spaces and waiting for the perfect macabre "accident"opportunity to present itself: a drowning, a hornet nest tossed into the shower, scalding vat of hot corn-cob boiling water in the camp kitchen... all befalling the deserving. When it can't be blamed on freak accident anymore, the knife comes out. People get it right through the thin lining of shower stalls. Meanwhile Angela's taciturn disaffect seems like a red flag cape, inviting hormone-amped teens to charge at her, which in turn gives valid reason for their deaths. It's a kind of hormonal Mona Lisa Venus fly trap of projector screen anima-bivalence.

Man, those socks are so on point.

Ricky is no saint either - and in a unique centerpiece we see him and his boys play a very relaxed softball game that seems to go on for about ten whole diegetic minutes of the movie without building to a victorious climax or agony-of-defeat downer one way or the other (it's lulling without being dull). Getting the real rhythm of a summer camp softball game is hard--the way the distances between players necessitate different styles of throwing, the hit-or-miss at the bat, the satisfying 'thwump' of a base hit, etc., the bucolic real time of it casts a nice mood we wouldn't get in either loudly-scored exaggeration like Bad News Bears or misty Rockwell nostalgia like The Sandlot.  We're spared even the cliche of the kid busy playing his electronic game and missing the key fly!  Here he actually manages to put his boxing game away and go "oh shit!", put his glove on and catch the fly -- all without slow motion and cheering and swelling horns.  If anything, the victory is in the way it captures the leisurely stillness of an actual game, the peculiarly laid-back rhythm of the sport itself. In fact, to make it all the better, Ricky's a bit of a bad winner, rubbing the losing team's face in their gambling loss, deliberately inviting retaliation from the other camp's team so he can have something to retaliate back to, getting into a brawl for no reason other than the game's yin demands an uproarious yang. Watching I could feel that itchy constant of phantom wet socks under grass stained pebble-soled Keds. 


I don't know how or why Hitzik figured a slasher film could really benefit from all this real time softball business, but it works. Each daytime scene is crowded with kids running around in and out of the frame in an almost Von Sternberg level of movement from all directions and angles; every cabin is laden with a very real-looking color-blind melange of socks and discarded camp shirts, sleeping bags and kids crashing in and out of the front screen door to pick up or drop off jackets, change into swimsuits, etc. Campers race into the bunks to either shed a sweater or grab one depending on the weather change, then zip out as if they're keeping a game waiting, all hopped up on kid energy for the activity at hand. Friendships are struck or missed out on in each brief contact. On the whole, these campers are nice, normal, trying their best. Most make an honest effort to break through Angela's haze, and don't hold it against her that they can't. It would be much easier to just have a few campers in each shot, but this camp is thriving and on the whole, benevolently run without being mawkish or overly "nice." The head counsellor, is a muscle-bound Italian-American dude in tight shorts who looks like he should be bullying a guy named Eugene or combing his hair in a gas station mirror but he's actually a stealth sweetheart who makes a concerted effort to find Angela something to eat in the kitchen after she refuses to eat anything at dinner. He seldom leaves a medium or wide shot, just materializes in and out of frame to try his best to make Angela comfortable, then sails on in a seamless Hawksian flow. 

Even the few bad apples are--a few loathsome creeps aside--really just restless, seething with hormonal surges they can't control, taking out their energy in a way that, deep down, is probably well intended. Her enigmatic silence proves such a challenge to the hormonally unhinged older male campers they all but try attack her yet they barely make a dent on her serene distance (not sure if that was written into the character other than making it seem like actress Felissa Rose was struggling to keep a straight face. It's so refreshing not to worry about either of these two groovy wild kids: they take care of themselves just fine. We're put in the position of feeling bad for boisterous, creepy, bitchy, and horny idiots who unwittingly sign their own death warrants just because they can't abide that sphinx impassivity. It's so refreshing it's like a plunge into a cold lake after seemingly decades trapped in stale unairconditioned cliche classrooms.

Other characters in the film also defy cliche: I like that the camp manager Mel (Mike Kellin) with his cigar is cool without being callous, and amiable without being soft ( He watches the boys fight while talking to some counsellor girl - barely interested in either the fight or chat with the girl but keeping an eye on everything- to let the drama play (he'd probably intervene if they brought out weapons or he saw real blood). 

That's another great thing, the welcome anti-pedophile sadism, as when the scalded would-be rapist cook screams in agonizing pain and the other cooks and the camp manager just kind of stare glassy-eyed--without knowing for sure he had it coming just sensing it by the unseen audience's rapture-- and all the doctor can do is leisurely imagine the agony he must be in, lamenting that his morphine can't cover all the pain at hand. It's icky but soooo much nicer than getting there through the cathartic engine most exploitation filmmakers rely on, wherein they have to 'out-traumatize' each other in depicting misogynistic ultra-violence in order to 'earn' the climactic cathartic revenge (as in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Here we get the correct ratio - a pound of retribution for an ounce of offense. 

Us cool nice dudes know that being castrated in the movies invariably implies you deserved it.

To paraphrase Naveen Andrews line in Planet Terror: We don't need the reason, sweetheart, just your balls.

The counsellors (the nice Italian stallion head counsellor Ronnie --Paul DeAngelo-- is in the red track suit)

The killer of Sleepaway Camp operates on a modus even more precise than the alienation caused by watching your friends or older siblings drift off for casual sex, leaving you--the only one who senses danger all around as you're not yet blinded and deafened by horomones-- alone at the campfire, or out swimming, or trick-or-treating. This hormonal call was Jason and Michael's trigger switch, their knifing and slashing marked a steadfast refusal to enter the realm of adult sexuality, either as an a priori rejection or a post-shaming after some fumbling attempt to alleviate their budding biological imperative. (The final girl's own pre-sexual wariness made her more aware of the killer's).  Blaming the killer's socially stunted sociopathic inhumanity on stunted sexuality is to get it backwards. What makes us 'human' is our resistance to the harsh whip and carrot of our body's biological urges. The scourge laid onto our backs is never consistent enough to become mere background noise. Our only salve is sex or killing, either is a welcome relief. Meanwhile, grace of kindness and support comes from somewhere more benign, not a carrot but a salve that reminds us we're more than just sex drives and latent violence. Like Ricky watching out for Angela--a higher power keeps us from reverting fully to the savagery our body relentlessly craves. 

But at the same time, why else are we at this stupid camp if not to kill kill KILL? Angela gets that. In the end, she is us, and her own spectator, which is why her kills are all conveniently POV. We can't even be sure she did them. There's more than one way to get a head.... or other appendage. 

NOTES
1. Marvel doesn't have kid sidekicks --Stan knew the score, there's almost no recurring children characters in the whole MCU
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