Adrian Barett as "the Gamin"
2. DEMENTIA
(1955) Dir John Parker
****
One of the likely inspirations for Kursten's Disembodied, this surrealist, paranoid, high flyin' Bunuel meets Ed Wood-sy psycho-beatnik weirdness is a must see. And now, thanks to a great HD print on Tubi, it looks amazing.
Long forgotten after it fell afoul of censors, Dementia floated in the abyss until it acquired an Ed McMahon narration and was released as Daughter of Horror, where it became enshrined as the movie playing when the original The Blob attacks the local theater (for which it is perfectly suited.)
This version, the original, contains no narration, nor even a word of dialogue (only the occasional mocking laughter or hysterical sobbing). The wolfish and demented grins of the men, and the weary loathing in the eyes of the women transcend words. We start the night waking up from a dream in the fleabag motel room of a tough-looking beatnik chick, the 'Gamin' (Adrienne Barett) who then gets dressed (black turtleneck, sports coat and big round medallion, very beat), tests out the spring on her switchblade and begins her midnight creep through a desolate Venice Beach, CA.
Throughout her reactions are not what we expect: she stares at a neglected child sitting in her hotel's rickety stairwell; she laughs at a drunk being sapped by a sadistic cop on the street; when little person and real life news hawker Angelo Rossitto gleefully shows her the nightly edition: "Mysterious Stabbing," she laughs rather than winces; a smirking pimp sells her to a rich fat guy in a limo (Bruno Ve Sota!) and she doesn't even care! She dreams of a masked figure who leads who her through a graveyard where her dead parents are boozing it up and slapping each other around--the living room furniture moved to the the cemetery. She stabs her father after he kills her mother! She's followed by a detective who laughs at her confusion! Wait, he looks just like her murdered father! A demented looking flower girl's basket hides Ve Sota's severed hand! It's clutching her medallion! She pushed him over the balcony! The people who watch as she cut it off had no faces. Run, gamin!
All the while, George Antheil's weird horn-heavy score steadily amps up the noir tension and the wordless eerie whooping of Marni Nixon's vocalizing grows progressively unhinged. Paranoia is inexorably pushed past the point of endurance or even conceivable reality and even into the realm of black comedy. She hides from the cop in a jazz basement club where her pimp gives her a drink and a cigarette. Booze and nicotine cure her--doesn't it always? She literally throws on a cocktail dress and gets onstage to sing with Shorty Rogers and his Giants. At the tables, sleazy dudes grope drunken party girls and lonely old guys with five-o-clock shadow drink up. Everyone starts laughing at our onstage gamin, pointing their fingers. A cop shoves dead Ve Sota's head through the window bars, so he can dig the swinging Shorty sounds. After awhile, even the Gamin laughs between her screams. Bunuel fans will remember the climax of El as Ed Wood fans will remember the devil dream blackboard sequence in Glen or Glenda (which is on Tubi, colorized). If Glen's crazy finger-pointing snips and snails dream was extended to a full hour, given a whooping Marni Nixon soundtrack, and turned loose on the empty nocturnal boulevards of Hollywood, USA, after even the night owls are asleep, Dementia would result.
Watching it now you may wonder about why it could ever have run afoul of censors. There's no nudity or onscreen violence aside from all the beating and stabbing and blood and amputation. In a way I guess it's nudity of the soul that scared them-- to watch Dementia is to see the dark seething Freudian unconscious of America's urban spaces suddenly erupting out of every sewer at once, covering recognizable plotting of an average film noir with a flood of paranoid Maya Deren-esque experimentalism that easily could have warped 1955 reality so thoroughly it would never re-straighten. Those censors wanted their unconscious tucked nicely out of sight, their noir conventions used in the service of a romantic plot, nothing excessive. They wanted a mixer with their whiskey; Dementia is the straight up hard stuff. No futzing around with conventional plot trimmings, just a switch blade straight through the eyeball into the part of the brain where your dreams start to twist into smoke.
Either way, censors, you lost! 65 years later and reality is now officially bent beyond recognition despite your best efforts! G'head, Gamin! Carve your way to jazz freedom! Over and over and over....
Other Recommended Tubi Viewing: Glen or Glenda, Cat Women of the Moon, Mesa of Lost Women
3. GIRL GANG
(1954) Dir. Robert C. Bertano
***
There are so many boring 50s girl gang movies from the mid-50s that a hip viewer--a cat that's in the know, that's wise to the action--may want to shut the door on the whole sub-genre. Usually, there's some clean cut teen girl falling into vice whose parents are too busy to notice; the local chief of police lectures about parental responsibility in dry and lengthy paternal monologues designed to assuage the censors on the cautionary importance of the lurid druggy sex stuff to come. Finally one of the gang, now a junkie, shoots and kills a gas station attendant or a security guard and the "fun" is over. Sadly, even Ed Wood's The Violent Years (also on Tubi) falls into this well-worn rut.
Well, forget everything you ever saw or heard about those other 50s girl gangs and come join this one! It may end the same way (those poor gas station attendants!), but 'til then there ain't a parent or cop to be found.
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| Farrell (left) the proud papa |
Timothy Farrell (the psychiatrist who narrates most of
Glen or Glenda) is intensively memorable and eerily familiar (he plays the same character in a slew of other movies) as the pusher antihero, the Fagin to an ever-expanding rolodex of teenage junkie Olivers. Hosting a never-ending pot and 'H' party where the only the first shot is free, he nicely helps the kids pay (him) for their drugs via coordination of prostitution, blackmail, and robbery schemes. Extended scenes of his day-to-day drug pushing alternate between the kitchen--where the already initiated people shoot up and discuss business--and the living room where the new kids puff their maryjanes, make out, and fall asleep, well on their way to ruin. It's the exploitation equivalent to those
Warner Brothers pre-code big business satires, where we watch Warren Williams seduce his secretary, fire her boyfriend, pay off a chiseling ex-wife, and instruct a high-end prostitute how to entrap his rival, all while still in his pajamas in his boudoir over the course of a real time twenty minutes. Sure, Farrell wears a tie and has that authoritative voice, but he's far sleazier, and his 'ex' could care less if he's making out with the new talent, long as she gets her fix.
For those 'in the know,' this film will surely evoke the vibe of hanging around your dealer's apartment, trying to find the door while too high to stand up as he plays you his band's demo. "You got 'em comin' and goin'" says one of his girls, almost admiringly after he stiffs them on the take for their stolen goods, then takes it back to pay up their drug tabs. Wising up to the trap you're caught in, however, doesn't mean you are able to escape it. We also see Joe help one of his ace procurers tie off a mainliner in this kitchen (the boy's reward for bringing new kids over for their first reefers). Joe also makes out with the procurer's willing girlfriend June (Joann Arnold) before showing her how to do a "joy pop." Joe sets the newbies up with reefer cigarettes (and one to take home "on the house") which they smoke fiendishly before making out or dancing or falling asleep in his living room.
In short, Joe's apartment is also his place is his business --the kitchen even has a pay phone. Nothing is free. It seems like you're chilling after school at some hip older guy's pad, but really you're becoming indoctrinated, hooked and in debt. He keeps track of every hit and they ain't cheap. He also keeps a drunken doctor ("I'm... competent") on call, to show kids how to go the hypodermic route ("I don't feel like breakin' a kid in on a habit,") and --though we never see it--probably saving their lives if they OD. Most girl gang movies would have maybe a two minute scene of this stuff, then right back to the police station and the broken home for more tired soap opera and censor-pleasing polemics. Girl Gang wouldn't be caught dead around parents, cops, homes, precincts, or podiums. We like it at Farrell's apartment, and here we more or less stay.
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| June, realizing she'll soon be free of all the Jim-Jims in this town |
As a former addict (alcohol), I really relate to this movie. The weed stuff isn't quite believable (the kids smoke what look like cigarettes so savagely they seem to be suffering from nicotine poisoning rather than highness) but the heroin stuff seems pretty legit and I appreciate the level of close-up detail we get: Joe patiently explains how to cook the dope with a spoon and a match, drawing the liquid into the hypo, and the difference between mainlining (right into a tied-off arm vein for a very intense--"feel just like Jesus' son' but much shorter kind of high) and a "joy pop" (just under the skin, absorbed more slowly for a less intense high but one that lasts much longer and with a more gentle come-down). I can't think of any other gang movie that even comes close to this level of detail about all the aspects of being a drug user and a drug pusher. It's practically a how-to guide! The weirdly nasal but deep voice that made Farrell convincing as a psychiatrist talking about cross-dressing in Glen or Glenda makes even this sordid business sounds like a video you'd see in health class. Most drug dens in these movies are hilariously over the top, but Girl Gang's 'day in the life' extended scenes are never boring as the focus is all on sex, drugs and crime. One of the things the girls get up to is a special sorority they have where, in order to be initiated, you have to get your virgin card 'punched' five times by random guys. They all meet down at a school gym where they smoke reefers, bop around to a boogie-woogie pianist, and the girls grab the guys for seven minutes of whatever in the back room. You almost feel sorry for the poor guys, being treated like objects. "Not again," one of them pleads.
That brings us to the real scene stealer of the film: the lovely and very capable Joanna Arnold as June. Initially brought over as the girlfriend of Farrell's chief operator/procurer (and the guy who likes to mainline, so he always needs money) she becomes a very cool regular by the end, seducing Joe and earning a full "H" demo. Some of the girls in the cast are strictly amateur, but Arnold is as to the exploitation manner borne. Moving effortlessly from newbie to weed "addict"(!) to entrapping her nervous real estate manager boss, getting him to fork over big bucks for sex to pay for her heroin habit. Boom! She seems to love every aspect of 'the life. she's stumbled into. You may feel sorry for some of these enslaved kids but it's clear from frame one June is meant to be a master. Some who sell their souls become the tortured for eternity and some are badass enough to become demons, instead. June all but sprouts bat wings and soars. Look at her in the shot at top, eating an apple and showing off her lovely gams while her boss fishes $50 out of the safe (offscreen) for some afterwork presumable pleasuring. She radiates the confidence of someone who truly loves her work as an exploiter of male desire. She was Playboy's Playmate of the Month, May 1954! That figures. Figures too that Girl Gang was her only starring role (Imdb has most everything else she did as 'uncredited'). Joanne, you're too good for this squaresville world!
Rosie Perez as...
4. PERDITA DURANGO
Aka "Dance with the Devil"
(1997) Dir. Alex de la Iglesia
*** 1/2
By all rights Alex de la Iglesia should be a cult name like Tarantino or Jodorowsky. For those of us who were introduced to him via Dance with the Devil back in the late-90s (Perdita's idiotic US release title) it was like finding a secret vein of gold. Fierceness incarnate, Rosie Perez plays an itinerant hustler bringing her sister's ashes back to Mexico (or vice versa). Along the way she winds up in the van of Romeo, a totally infectious lunatic played with great zeal and sexual warmth by Javier Bardem. Suddenly she feels like she's home; so do we. The movie takes off with a romantic-dangerous whoosh and never looks back.
Back in 1997, most of us in the US had no idea who Bardem was, but if we saw this, we fell in love with him. He's since gone on to become an icon but we saw him first! Playing a kind con man / witch doctor, he's got charms galore and makes his money by holding Santeria ceremonies at his compound with his partner (Screamin' Jay Hawkins!!) and dug up corpses. After a tense van ride across the border, (Romeo has one of his exhumed corpses in the back of the van) Perdita sets up shop with him and together they come up with mad sick impromptu dares, like kidnapping a doe-eyed American tourist teenager couple (the girl is Heather Graham's sister Aimee) for a human sacrifice, bringing them along at gunpoint as they flee the federales and take a job delivering a truckload of human fetuses to an illegal rejuvenating make-up company. Yes! These two naive white kids get an unrestrained glimpse into the wild edge-of-seat desperado life, knowing all the while they could get killed at a moment's notice. Perdita's mothering instinct may kick in and free them or they may just get sacrificed to get them out of the way (like Harry Dean Stanton was by them (different actors) in David Lynch's Wild at Heart). Meanwhile, Romeo regails the gringos with his favorite tape, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass! Watching Romeo and Perdita bump and sway, delighted, to Herb's indelible but pasteurized rhythm while the traumatized kids in the back seat look on with white kid terror,? Cult cinema gets no better. Add Screamin' Jay Hawkins to the mix, rattling his skull cane and doing the voodoo shakes, and you don't even need James Gandolfini as a bruised FBI agent trailing Romeo and winding up hospitalized repeatedly due to accidents, all no doubt indirectly caused by el encantos de Romeo's abuela.
While Perdita is the one we follow, Bardem's charismatic Romeo steals the film and we feel the pain of his absence when he's not around. It's to Perez' credit she lets him run with it; more than able to match his intensity and let us feel her love for him as well as her concern, as the limits of her own bloodthirsty psychopathy are eventually tested against his reckless momentum. She's not used to someone who's able to match her crazy for crazy, and then some. Neither are we used to falling in love with characters so dangerous.
SIDE PRAYER:
I pray for Alex di la Iglesia to break through in los Estados Unidos. He seems to have been cursed by a witch who tells his parent companies to pick the absolute most stupid English titles they can think of, like Dance with the Devil (Perdita's original dump-to-video title) Witching and Bitching (Bro - Bitches' Sabbath was right there); 30 Coins (means nothing to anyone not overly well-versed on the New Testament), The Last Circus, which means absolutely nothing, - and so on. The result, he's the best kept secret awaiting any fan of weird darker-than-black comedies who don't mind reading subtitles and looking past dumb US titles that are either misleading, vague, bland or corny. Alex, next time drop me a line, I'll help you find a catchy title and you can finally break the curse!
See also Di Iglesia's: Day of the Beast and The Last Circus - also on Tubi! Que rado!
Sabrina Siani as Okron
5. CONQUEST
(1983) Dir. Lucio Fulci
* / But for Bad 80s Italian Movie Lovers: ***
It's blue bow vs. boa boa in this severely cracked and cloudy gem from Italy's early-80s sword and sorcery binge. In a world that is still, apparently, cooling down from its volcanic conception (the foggy air is almost opaque throughout), a young hero named Iliad (Andrea Occhipinti) from a magic utopia is given a magic bow and bid to travel across the water, that presence may spook the druggy dreams of a brain-eating lady sorceress named Ocron (Sabrina Siani). Naked but for a metal mask, black feather-collared fur cape, and a slithering boa constrictor (that 1981 Nastassja Kinski photo was still 'in') she sends wave after wave of her wolf-and-ape-headed minions out into the fog to bring her back the tasty brain-filled head and magic bow of plucky Iliad before he can fulfill his prophecy. Iliad too gets help, from wandering hunk named Mace (Jorge Rivero), who is loved by all animals but has no problem killing the men who kill them, then easting the animal that the person he killed has already killed --a guilt-free PETA-approved carnivore diet if ever there was one. A hawk overhead warns Mace of approaching monsters; dolphins bite off his bonds when he's crucified at the bottom of the sea, etc. A nice guy to have around, he can make bombs out of a few leaves wrapped around a rock, and he uses a kind of bolo nunchucks as an unbeatable weapon. Naturally the pair decide to travel together... Iliad will teach Mace of the magic bow; Mace will teach Iliad the tricks of this new land; the animals shall look out for danger and the monsters shall come at them, fast and furious. And always... always... in a cloud of murky fog. What could go wrong?
It's a nice little mess, this Conquest, highlighted by the weird druggy brain-eating rites performed deep in Ocron's misty cavern lair. With her strange metal helmet and naked body, she's a whole web of strange semi-aware objectification. Of course she does a lot of gyrating on her black feather and fur-covered stone bed, dreaming of Iliad without. a face. At one point her wolfheaded underlings pass around a weird combination coke straw/toothpick/joint from nostril to nostril. We never learn what is in the straw, but the passing the straw vibe evokes the extended drug orgy scenes in Abel Ferrara movies! Way to get super high, dream of faceless archer boys, and eat brains, Ocron! When her hairy minions attack they do a lot of slow motion jumping in the air with their limbs akimbo and making "Grrr" and "Greaaa" sounds in their rampages of brain harvesting and Iliad hunting. And if they come back alive having lost the battle, they shall be tortured on the hot rock in yonder sweat lodge.
Despite her alienating (and rather overtly misogynist) metal mask, we come to kind of root for this evil brain-eating sorceress named Ocron and her grunting supplicants, at least I did. Pulling off limbs and heads of their 'conquests' (!) and falling into druggy reveries after eating their brains, they are way cooler than Iliad and his boyfriend who can't seem to open up about their burgeoning feelings. Yes, like so many of these films, human women don't have much of a presence beyond victims or sex partners or more likely both. Luckily there's Ocron on the bad guy ends, and a groovy homoerotic subtext on the other. Hunky Mace knows some rivers are best left uncrossed; he's even too repressed to suck venom out of each Iliad's leg wounds the way, say, Xena and Gabrielle would do just a decade later.
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As most of the mise-en-scene unspools behind that crazy white misty fog, it's important the soundtrack pick up the slack, and man does it ever: Goblin's Claudio Simonetti gives us a lake-dragging mellotron, echoing flangers that evoke his work on Argento's Phonemena while a medley of distant animal grunts, names chanted in druggy ecstasy, howls, and distant hollers--a lot of which is picked up only if you listen in on good headphones--meld and merges with the tinkling arpeggios. The result: otherworldly embryonic warm sludginess that makes what could have been a wearying slog through an outdoor steam room into something like drug dream poetry, especially if you watch it through half-asleep eyes, with headphones on, and glasses off so you can't tell if it's the onscreen fog or your baked eyes making the blur.
I'm not joking about that fog, though. I hear a lot of the kids who rented this back in the day actually thought the tape was defective it's all so foggy. Fulci used mist/fog to a great effect in his earlier films (The Beyond, City of the Living Dead - both on Tubi!) so what went wrong this time? Was it the weather? Lack of a wind machine? In the words of Tim Gunn, make it work, people!
It might not be 'great,' but there's nothing to keep me awake or bum me out in Conquest... as long as I don't look too close; I don't want to put on my glasses and see some close-up of an oozing pus wound but lucky I know where those are. And a stilted tint to the screams here makes them more like some kind of ritualized breathwork, or cursing, rather than something liable to wake one up. There is so little dialogue that when someone speaks it carries weird charge as if words have only recently begun to form amidst the growls, honks and ostentatious breathing. Ocron's voice sounds far away though she is right next to the camera: "only great Zora can help me find the wanderer!" she says between boa constrictor-grinding orgasms. Suddenly a panting white dog is right by her side (Zora, I presume?). Were I fully awake I might go WTF, where'd that dog come from? But half-asleep I know. It came from the foggy zone between consciousness and dreams, where the mind fills in every blank foggy white space with anthropomorphic shapes. Look up at the rolling clouds while half-asleep and you'll see Zoras in every twirling puff.
As with all the films on this list, the occasional breaks for ads on Tubi actually help the experience. When the sight of a woman torn in half is interrupted for the comforting sight of a sloshed threesome on the couch ordering from booze-delivering service Drizzly.. (oh Drizzly, where were you when I needed you?) - then bouncing back to the severed head, all is right with the world.
That's the key - that's when it all comes together in some divine Woodsian masterpiece. The platform, advertising + half-asleep eyes + pareidolia fog + the Brooklyn accent of the voiceover artist doing Iliad's dub (the same guy who does Trash in
1990: The Bronx Warriors), the primordial synths, the
Clan of the Cave Bear make-up on the cute girl who lives just long enough to (almost) shag Iliad, the web people emerging from their cliffside crevice, looking like Pillsbury snowmen and talking like Herve Villechaize ("where is your friend?" he asks Mace after Iliad cops out. "I have no friends." Herve shouts "you lie!"), Ocron with her snake, wolf men and "great" Zora, the feeling of manly friendship, the sudden surprise beheading, the way Iliad goes "yayayayayayaya" when batting away at the bats (Fulci loves the bats), gross close-ups of Iliad's venom and pus-engorged dart wound, it's all still here, for all time. Will Iliad turn his widdle waft awound and go back to save Mace? No need to answer. Just dig the weird sand-blown rocks and dunes and the way the webbed snow boys blend in with the sand dunes. Or the way Iliad comes back and shouts up at his crucified friend "I'm not
afraid!" before firing his magic multiple laser bow which instantly kills everyone all at once in a web of blue light.
Fulci also adds lots of weird angles to artsy the film up: the camera is seldom at eye level. Usually, it is kept low so the boys loom as giants with the magic hour sun behind their heads, or it swoops high up on a crane, as if some friendly giant beaming down at their foggy folly. If you need an aesthetic reason, honey you're in the wrong place. He does it to keep it interesting, because he's Italian and even bad Italian films are interesting. We can barely even see what's going on through all the fog (did they get water on the inside of the lens, is that what happened? And they didn't realize it because it at the time, so they pretended they meant it that way, and that the land was enshrouded in fog in those pre-Ice Age times?) ]
I don't care what the answer is because I'm not giving Conquest my full attention either, that's why it's such a gem. As Stephen Thrower puts it in his Fulci book: "half the fun of sleeping pills is in fighting the effects, staying awake to experience their weird pharmaceutical slurring: but few would want to feel that way whist trying to crawl through a Conan the Barbarian rip-off. " (183). Count me as one of the chosen few, Stephen! Fulci Forever!
Considered one of the better peplum out there, this big budget easy-going but occasionally disheartening epic has some impressive sets, outrageous events, and Reg Park as the mighty Hercules. Most peplum on streaming services are unfortunately dodgy full-frame or non-anamorphic widescreen, but Tubi's s pretty good, and the recently released Film Detective" HD Blu-ray using the alternate title,
Hercules and the Captive Women is even better, with a great peplum documentary attached.) Both titles are correct, as Hercules trashes Atlantis
and rescues a captive girl from a shape-changing monster (
left). Fay Spain plays the wicked Queen of Atlantis who is also the captive girl's mother and the one who ordered her to be the sacrifice! The prophets say the girl must die or Atlantis shall crumble into the sea! Yikes. Talk about evil mothers. After Herc brings her home, the queen sends her daughter out to die
again while trying to mate with and/or drug the mighty Hercules. Keep trying, o evil queen!
One drawback is too much of Herc's pastoral family life at the start which leaves us feeling kind of Ulysses-style guilty while he's off fighting and rescuing. Usually I can't wait for our hero to escape home obligations and start the quest, but this time we're kind of rooting for him to stay home. It seems like his poor wife and family can't get him for a moment, and he clearly doesn't want to go either, his 'friend' has to drug him and basically shanghai him. It's pretty comical to think of Thebes as so full of cowards and duty-shirkers that the king can get only convicts and shanghaied demigods to save their country from vague prophesies.
I dig this movie, for the most part, but it never quite becomes delightful --too much sideplot of the youth fearing the wrath of their respective parents: Herc's son, replete with anachronistic pompadour, stows aboard the ship and hides away in the cargo area to avoid his dad's wrath (he forbade him coming); the cold, loveless reception the queen grants her own heartbroken daughter isn't the kind of camp fun we get in something like (in my mind the best of the lot), Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). Things are a bit off-kilter, like how during the obligatory sexy dance of the maidens (entertainment at the feast of welcome), the camera follows not the comely maidens but the shape-changing lead male! What? Seems like a real opportunity missed for the straight males in the audience to finally be able to ogle some non-beefcake. We don't get it. Don't we matter anymore? The princess is too young to ogle (presuming we're not creeps or 17) and the queen is too evil. Where is the gorgeous Sylva Koscina when you need her? Sylvia! Come home!
Luckily, Reg Park's deadpan comedic brilliance saves the day. Once Herc knows who his enemies are, and commences his mighty column toppling, all is well. I like Park's interpretation of Hercules best as you get the feeling he isn't afraid of anything and doesn't give much of a shit, and that's in a nutshell why I prefer his version to Steve Reeves. Blasphemy, you say? Hey, man, Reeves is great too, but is much more into posturing, ever alert to his own mythic nobility; he's always trying to imitate a statue. Park's Herc on the other hand is a little lazier and fun to be around. Rather than pose and flex all day, he'll seize any chance to drink and eat and laugh, even at himself, albeit in a very deadpan, cool (non-slapsticky) kind of way. If you watch him closely, you can even see one of his disbelieving cheats to camera before the scene cross-fades.
With a pretty big budget for massive sets and extras, there's a lot to see and do here: cloned, hood-eyed super soldiers; gas chambers; a shape-shifting monster; narrow escapes that rely on the level of strength not granted mortal men; Uranus as a meteoric alien rock ready to rain blood upon the Grecians; iron bar bending; multiple counts of attempted filicide; a floor that slides open to reveal an acid bath ala House on Haunted Hill; a girl half swallowed up in stone; volcano footage from other films and some shot specifically for this one, including--and this is pretty daring since Hercules causes the eruption via his mighty feats--a woman and her child slain in a lava deluge; a very impressive and well-lit giant cave set for Herc to climb, and a great deep red reception hall with all sorts of shady black pagan god statues.
For those new to the Italian 'peplum' tradition, or those who may be eternally turned off after trying to watch badly cropped, dubbed and faded prints on TV back in the day, there's never been a better time to get your feet wet. If you're looking for the gateway drug, the way Sergio Leone's "Man with no Name" trilogy is the gateway to Italian westerns, start with Hercules in the Haunted World, (1961) then go for this one. After that, try to find a good source for the un-as-yet restored Hercules (1958) and Hercules Unchained (1959) and --though this one is super rare even in an unrestored letterboxed version -- Goliath and the Vampires (this last one was supposed to come out as a blu-ray but the company that announced it pulled it due to Covid, Please sirs, resume thy labors!)
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| Fans of Mario Bava will drool imagining the painterly beauty of shots like this one --from his work on HERCULES (on Tubi) --restored to its former gorgeous glory ala the recent Bava Blu-rays of Erik the Conqueror and Blood and Black Lace. Come on, someone! If Arrow did a double of Hercules and Hercules Unchained as gorgeous as their other Bavas, you can bet it would be a hit. With Tim Lucas, of course, doing the commentaries! Zeus, hear our collective plea! |
Further Tubi Viewing: Erik the Conqueror (1961), Hercules (1958)
Angela Featherstone as Veronica Iscariot
7. DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT
(1994) Dir. Linda Hassani
****
I had to put one of the many Full Moon semi-precious gems on here; Tubi is rife with them! I'm no fan of 90% of all that stuff, i.e. the Puppet Master series, not that I've given it much of a chance, but I love this so much so that this is the hundredth time I've written about it!! Shot through a haze of red and blue with just the right amount of imagination (neither too whimsical nor grungy), this demon daughter-meets-human doctor love story is like The Little Mermaid x Species with a refreshing lack of hangups about sex, God, or killing. Hell, we learn, is part of God's kingdom, and God hates sin so much he punishes it with eternal damnation. Thus, demons do god's work! They're an important part of the heavenly plan. Into this world comes Veronica Pisces Iscariot (Angela Featherstone) who's about to come of age and take over torturing the embezzling bankers in Hell. Instead she dreams of seeing the surfaces of Earth and walking under the sky. Even thinking such a thing is forbidden! Her spittle-sputtering, over-acting demon father (the "psycho's psycho," Nicholas Worth) lashes her in indignant horror, but Veronica and her dog Hellraiser ignore his outbursts and sneak up to the land of men after he falls asleep. Soon she's tearing the spines and hearts out of rapists and racist cops, feeding their hearts to Hellraiser, and shacking up with a handsome sweet-souled doctor named Max (Daniel Markel) who takes care of her after she's hit by a car. And if any homicide detective tries to get in her way, she just shows him the hellfire behind her glowing eyes, while making dire announcements about the grim future that awaits mankind if they continue to sin. After that, they're in no condition to arrest anyone.
Here's what I wrote in older review:
Like some Satanic bible school instructional video, this confusingly-titled (there are about 100 shows and movies named Dark Angel) female-directed little miracle has become one my go-to favorites the last few years, thanks to its Shelly Duvall-meets-Val Lewton-in-Ed Wood's basement mythopoetic aesthetic, its great cast and its dusky red and black color scheme (ala another favorite, Ghosts of Mars). Sure, Featherstone isn't the greatest actress in the world, but that's why she's perfect. She has a unique ability to project complete confidence and emotional vacancy at the same time. Better (or worse) actresses would either try to be sexy (and come off campy), imperious (and come off stuffy), mean (and come off bitchy) or tough (and come off over the top), but Featherstone's assertive confidence and deadpan demeanor is such that she gets away with the actor equivalent of murder, which is just right for Matthew Freeway Bright's genius script (full of great lines like: "I don't require the blessing of the one true church to engage in sexual relations, Max.") And when she unfolds her true form--wings, horn, tail--after orgasm--while luxuriating out in the bed post their first hook-up, it's somehow very reassuring that he accepts her instantly, just as he accepts her matter-of-fact way with wrapping human hearts in newspaper to feed Hellraiser. I've only ever seen her kind of deadpan female genius--commanding both adoration and respect--in German science fiction film female characters from the 70s (as in Eleoma and Im Staub her Sterne) and in Christine McConnell, whose Curious Creations with Christine McConnell was unfairly canceled after one short season. It's still on Netflix though, and should be seen asap.. I will never forgive you for cancelling Christine McConnel after just one season, Netflix. And I will never forgive you Charles Band, for not commissioning 12 more Dark Angel sequels, each written by Bright and starring Featherston (and keeping Markel, he's great too - never tries to oversell, overreact, judge, or otherwise hinder the way 99% of other male characters surely would.) Special shout out too to Michael C. Mahon as homicide detective Greenberg, who manages to make his every reaction funny, intelligent, deadpan cool and warmly alive all at the same time.
SMALL PRAYER
Oh Charles Band, oh Matthew Bright, please make those sequels happen. You could have Featherstone and Markel as being older and having a wayward half-mortal daughter, one who longs to go down to Hell the way her mother once longed to go to the surface world. She could also take a secret order to infiltrate heaven and expose a ring of sinners or something. Please mighty hands and winds of Full Moon and Freeways, make it be so...
Also Check-out on Tubi Freeway and if you dare (it's far, far darker) Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby (both written/directed by Bright.) and other Full Moon gems: Trancers, Trancers II, The Lurking Fear, From Beyond, Re-Animator, and Dagon
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And for another movie where the human guy acts just like what any cool guy would do when the girl in bed with him turned out to be a daemon.
8. KISS OF THE DAMNED
(2012) Dir. Xan Cassavettes
The smoldering eyes of cool, reserved, bearded screenwriter Paolo's (Milo Ventimiglio) meet those of the alluring but stand-offish Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume) at the local video store one night. They're both impossibly gorgeous and both giving off very lonely vibes. They're perfect for each other. They both love movies. Every lonesome dude at the video store fantasizes about this happening one night. But they can only hook up if he chains her to her bed, as she finally tells him, because she grows fangs and glowing eyes when aroused. After an impressively short bout of initial disbelief, Paolo obeys, but once he sees she's for real h's just too turned-on to care; let the bites fall where they may. It's like when you're so in love you don't bother with a condom.
This movie gets that. It's a level of romantic attraction that can no sooner stop for 'sanity' than a tidal wave pause to spare a sandcastle. "I know it would be wrong to stop it," Djuna says, "for both of us." So now he's one of 'them' and who are they? They've covered the entire plot of the first four
films without even getting out of bed. They're legal adults, and they're
, so it's all ok. It's paradise. She has a great place and wants him to move in - he even has an office for his writing overlooking the bay, The only problem is - Djuna has a sister - a bratty out-of-control monster who likes to kill club boys so she can feast on all the drugs in their system. (Djuna prefers hunting deer in the forest, which is kind of a cop out but whatever). Wait,
Maria Rohm as Wanda
9. VENUS IN FURS
Aka "Paroxismus"
(1966) Dir. Jess Franco
***
Made in swinging 1966, this is one of Jess Franco's most accessible films a wide gateway. If you take only his first features in black and white (Awful Dr. Orloff, Diabolic Dr. Z, Attack of the Robots) plus a judicious selection of the films he cranked out in the mid-late-60s-70s: Venus in Furs, Succubus, Vampyros Lesbos, etc. you'd have a picture of a pretty psychedelic, kinky cinematic genius whose works seem designed for the kind of deep dish acid trips wherein you feel trapped in an expensive European bordello, waiting for buddy Klaus Kinski to come back downstairs so you can escape. You're way too stoned to be able to get out on your own though, and you don't want to make Klaus mad and have him come to your hotel two hours later frothing at the mouth that you didn't wait for him; and maybe you just saw a girl you thought was dead--you saw her body! you saw her killed for kicks by three jaded jet-set freaks (Dennis Price, Margaret Lee as a sadistic lesbian photographer and your buddy Klaus as a decadent aesthete) at a jaded jet-set party where you were blowing some crazy trumpet. And now she's back, in various wigs, with a fur coat and nothing underneath, seducing and destroying those three swinging, drugged-out, jet set murderers, one at a time, via various druggy trippy seduction tableaux.
Meanwhile you continue blazing away on your trumpet with jazz combo that includes the composer Daniel White on piano and Franco himself on trombone. Every night she comes in a different wig, seducing and destroying each in turn,
Each erotic kill seems to stop time itself in a languid and very Franco way. Afterwards, the blazing soul anthem sung by co-star and romantic rival Barbara McNair comes rising up ("Venus in Furs will be risin' / when the moment arrives.") a soulful anthem of phoenix style vengeance and affirmation. Nair is the one likeable person in the whole film and we feel her heartbreak at losing her trumpeter boyfriend to this living dead avenger in the fur coat. McNair's need for warmth and connection runs like a live heating coil through an icebox, giving great balance to the cold dead inexorability of Rohm's Wanda.
But then of course, Rohm is gorgeously lit and Jess's camera doesn't Jess doesn't how to accentuate her weird beauty; her thick black eye make-up give her harsh face a kind of tribal mask intensity; her wiry breastless brown body can only do so much and though her voice is amazing it is used too sparingly. The music is sublime as always with some really knockabout live jazz moments courtesy Daniel White (and Franco on piano) and her title song is so good I wish it was a CD,
The whole film moves like some dreamy jazz until the druggy Daniel White plodding comes in and everything changes color and moves to slow motion. Slowing things down in a unique and vivid way while saturating the colors until time stands still onscreen and in your mind, Franco shows you the effect Corman was going for during all those color-tinted image distorted dream sequences in all those Poe films. Those sequences didn't really work but Franco's do. They capture the sluggish druggy dragging clock-melting tempo just right.
The late inning addition of a cop named Karinne from Istanbul adds a curious note - as if Franco felt it needed a car chase (the chase is clearly just driving down the Istanbul streets sped up--all the people on the sidewalk are moving very fast). There are a few good hairpin turns and Daniel White's jazzy score adeptly folds itself around the same key as the car horns to create a kind of gooey meta perfection. And when Daniel White's jazzy score adeptly folds itself around the same key as the car horns to create a kind of gooey meta perfection, all eventually leading to a kind of color-styled slow motion finish--suddenly blessed with a chanting yogi in the corner of one of the weird red room at the club; the lovers held to the walls as if in a Gravitron while Jimmy slogs through the red and blue filters calling Wanda's name-- that makes it the perfect film with which to close out the 60s just as Corman's
The Terror is the perfect one to open it.
