Acid Etched Damascus: MANDY

In MANDY, Nicolas Cage proves his levels of fearless crazy have no bottom (or top), and Canada's Panos Cosmatos proves his debut film BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW was no psychedelically-distilled Ativan one-off, like his next film would be a saga of a family coping with senility or something. Instead, he brings in the big guns: Nic Cage. The result is like pouring Godzilla's piss onto the blazing oil fire-for both Cage and Cosmotos have proven in their separate films that high art and foam-mouthed insanity needn't be exclusive. MANDY is the door-kicking explosion of cool we need right now. With its slowed-down sound, psychedelic movement trails, pineal-buzzing drones, rock and roll violence, and fantasy paperback chapter intertitles, MANDY pulses with a mix of what a lot of us would describe as heaven (a warm, mellow super-cool chick, lovely house deep in the old growth woods with a still small lake out back, cool lighting and music and art everywhere). And Hell as his ultimate destination. As Red, a woodsman (aka lumberjack, for the chainsaw hath replaced yonder axe), Cage starts out soft and intimate, deeply attuned to his lady faire and full of gentle weird jokes but over the course of the film he descends/ascends to the Cage we know and love. With his gut out, his butt lit, his eyes covered with shades instead of goggles when he uses his garage forge to hammer out a massive weird gleaming sword, guzzling his shower vodka in his underwear and pouring it over his open wounds, howling in a way that's totally new even for him, and like nothing cinema has ever heard the like of. It's not nasal and hysterical but deep, tragic and genuinely scary. He rides a demonic ATV through the wild north woods in the dead of night; he fights chainsaw duels; he burns churches. He does every drug in sight. Crushing skulls, losing his shit over a demon ripping his favorite shirt, saying wild shit like "a psychotic drowns where a mystic swims" (a Joseph Campbell quote) and telling super-cool Bill Duke he needs his crossbow back because he's hunting "Jesus freaks" (spoilers why). To paraphrase Mrs. Crummles in Nicholas Nickleby, he's  too... tremendous!

And so is the Mandy. It's saturated with a pleasing palette of deep reds and blacks, and propelled by Jóhann Jóhannsson's score, a bed of murky drones and synths both thumberling and quiscubescent (two words I just invented). King Crimson's "Starless and Bible Black" slithering like syrupy warm serpents down the river lane of the opening credits. Jóhannsson's score isn't quite as instantly riveting and tripped out as Sinoa Caves' for Rainbow, it's more varied, moving from romantic minor key Eno-ish dalliances to thunder god forge burbling, eerie droning. But when old Nic preps for war, joint or cigarette in mouth, goggles on, gut out, in flow pulse-quickening synth cycles that sound like an old flying saucer getting kick-started deep in the woods with no ears to hear it. We finally learn what that quiscubescent sound freels lorick! (New words for new sensations).

The plot finds us in--as the first chapter title explains 'the Shadow Mountains - 1983 A.D. That AD is a key right there, for this is a story that could be told in the wild west of 1883 or some Middle Ages Belgian schwarzwald (where it was films), aside from its one Piscean foot being in the world of Mandy's current fantasy novel, and her interest in the planet Jupiter. The Shadow Mountains are the kind of place so deep dwell only truckers, loggers, drug manufacturers, and the assorted good and evil forces and businesses they engender. It's a kind of old growth paradise, shot through with hazy lavender and pink sunlight streams which bathe the life and pad of Red and his artist wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) in haunting lights. Every frame of their existence is rooted but floating in the absolving caress of timeless space. Happy as could be, they live as any of us would at the time--if we could--with great sound editing capturing their intimate whispers as they natter on about Galactus, Erik Estrada, Jupiter, birds...  With her glasses and crow's feet proudly un-Botoxed, her Bette Davis x Peter Lorre eyes staring right into him across the water (they live "out on Crystal Lake") or their backyard campfire, distant howls or human moans too abstract to investigate, Jóhannsson droning over them all Vangelis Blade Runner "Love Theme"-ish dreamy, it's a new kind of paradise, all the sweeter because we can feel the glimmer of the nightmare nipping at their toes. We're deep in it with them, with Nic, staring at Mandy through the flames at the laid-back cool old lady of his come-true dreams.

Her mind alive to the infinite, taking weird Antichrist-style sojurns into the chthonic woods both real and figurative, reading a novel about serpents eyes and red skies, working on fantastic drawings, Mandy is perhaps open enough to the oceanic currents that her curious stare into the window of a passing van gets ensnared in the neural network of Manson/ Papa Jupiter (!)-ish cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roche) who takes it as divine right that he should have her as part of his 'flock' (They are called, as we find out in a chapter title, 'the Children of the New Dawn'). Soon he shall use the long the horn of Abraxas to summon a gang of evil demon bikers (somewhere between the Cenobites and the radio active ash-blackened New Mexican derelicts in the new Twin Peaks: The Return). And well, that's when it gets really interesting, because one thinks they have this movie all figured out as some variation on any of Nic's angry cult-busting, child or bride-rescuing/avenging adrenalin junkets, like Drive Angry--but the left turns start coming, we veer into the realm of deep dark Nordic and samurai myth. Red walks 'the demon path' like Lone Wolf, sans Baby Cart, the spirit of pure violence of some viking berserker possessing him like it did Dustin Hoffman in the last chunk of Straw Dogs, Shauna Macdonald in the last chunk of The Descent as well as, of course Max von Sydow in the last chunk of Virgin Spring. The side that didn't want war always takes the first hit--they never even see it coming, but the sting of the slap wakes their fury, and nothing's scarier than a civilized human who suddenly has nothing left to lose. That can be cliche or it can be the mythic frame solid enough to support even the most far-out of fictions. In short, Mandy is far out. 

Cosmatos' fantastic feature debut, 2010's  Beyond the Black Rainbow, built its trippy towers on the foundations of classic Canadian sci-fi horror films like Scanners, The Brood, and Blue Sunshine, here the influences seem to Valhalla Rising, The Virgin Spring, and the Canadian animated film Heavy Metal, but the style and mood harkens back to Rainbow alone. It's now the Cosmatos style: a slow druggy deep woodsiness where people seem to swim through the LSD atmosphere. And the Cosmatos theme: that  the difference between unbearable prolonged pain and euphoric timeless peace is largely a matter of dosage. No matter how happy and secure you feel, the gates of archaic demonic madness can open at the drop of a hat, or on the tongue or in the eye. And for Mandy we get a new Cosmatos concept: that fictions are always a reflection of your life in the moment:. Elements right out of Mandy's novel: the Loc-nar-evoking "Serpent's Eye jewel"; the 'Horn of Abraxas" that summons "the Black Skulls," the "tainted blade of the pale night, straight from the abyssal lair," monstrous demons slavering while they talk in rumbly inhuman voices, their ATVs roaring like otherworldly hellhounds, their LEDs beaming like the eyes of dragons, manifesting in the woods like Mandy is the gatekeeper of reality, the dream of the dreamer turned nightmare. Starlings smashed in sacks or set ablaze, all horrors doubling back along the Moebius ouroboros. Immersion in a druggy slow motion bizarro world, awash in deep ASMR whispery intimacy, creates space for both the stars, the page, and the woods to merge into one. 

Such reality bending and warping match the perceptions of the totally tripped out, take it from me. I was there. For every peak, a valley... and some of the valleys are so dark it takes getting even darker to find the light again.

Saturated in dark red and blacks, with all sorts of deep dish manipulations of light and sound, Cosmatos creates a magical zone where idealism has crashed into the trees and Canadian and US indie horror and sci-fi films from the 70s all find their sequel, a zero sum flashpoint. Just as Tarantino turns to the Shaw Brothers, New World's 70s-era drive-in Pictures, and 60s Italian westerns for his pastiche palette, Cosmatos turns to the wilds of Canada and NYC: Cronenberg, Lieberman, Barker, De Palma, Bakshi, Cohen; he also turns to Frazetta and prog rock album covers and to what Terence McKenna would call the 'heroic measure' of psychedelics for his inspiration. The wild fumes of 20x salvia divinorum and the LSD - ecstasy - amphetamine concoctions of trans-dimensional Berkeley chemists. The sort of stuff where you take it on Friday and by the following Wednesday your wife's wild mystical artwork is still moving on the paper, the wild willowing branches of the endless tree that becomes tentacles and tendrils reaching for the inner light. You wish you could sleep but the trails makes that impossible. In the meanwhile you make Gandalf seem like Gob Bluth. It might take a month to totally fade... but by then you've taken other things, kept the ball rolling...

Nic, powering up for battle (i.e. guzzling bathroom vodka and screaming).

These aren't your average hackwork stepped-on ecstasy capsules or weak-ass doses. These are special variants (like DOM, Roybal, and Ethyl) super-charged by Berkley chemistry majors going down a way more psychedelic rabbit hole than your profit-hungry meth cookers. Of course, many of use who went down that rabbit hole wound up lost in the woods, spinning like Susan Strasberg suddenly able to hear again at the end of Psych-Out--- 'til the right cult found them (Manson on the dark end, the Rainbow Family on the other). When I was doing DOM in the mid-90s, even Burning Man was still just an insular Wickery cult rather than today's midlife crisis tourist spot. The few who rode the snake all the way and--resisting the temptation to stay egoless in the ecstasy of blind guru-worship, joining the flower people, or 'the Children of the New Dawn' and following a failed acid folkie into oblivion-- climbed out of even the ego trip of egolessness and became themselves again, only shinier -- the gunk of the moment's residue cleared away by the acid bath. In Rainbow, Cosmatos shows the previous decade's deep dish mid-60s LSD experiencers--seeking to use consciousness to make inroads into western medicine--had by the early 80s lapsed into babbling junkies. In Mandy, we see how mystics and seers with their joyous followers in the 70s devolved into delusional cult members, too passive and fucked-up to question the ease with which some pitch-shifted LSD-spiked light show won their soul over to a charismatic psychopath. That was what acid users often weren't prepared for--the suggestibility that made them easy marks. There was a reason the CIA used it in mind control experiments. It left an unsuspecting person's hard drive decrypted and wide open for hacking.  If drugs didn't open their mind enough to see that it was their own mind opening, on its own, it was too easy to let a scammer take credit. I saw them all the time at Dead Shows in the 80s... only there in a more benevolent, large-scale way. The music dissipated the Satanic darkness the music engendered. It wasn't hard to see the power that band had, the way so many people were willing to be subsumed in the larger ego --a nice way to live if you're able to surrender fully, until you're exploited, which, how can you not be? Be it groupies letting themselves by horribly abused by Led Zeppelin up in the Edgewater, misled German boys charging into Belarus all amped up on Pervatin, or Manson's women singing at their own trial--total belief in false gods provides the ultimate in permissive highs, obliterating all traces of empathy, self-regard, and sanity in a giddy headlong rush.

No, my children, it's not Richard Lynch

Mandy's LSD-quaffing cult leader villain, Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roche) is reminiscent of Richard Lynch in God Told Me To more than he resembles Manson, or anyone else whose charisma is enough that their psychoses rubs off on their followers, giving people a feeling of 'permission' for their darkest violent impulses. Roche has some very chilling moments facing a mirror, where he goes from a kind of panicky infantile shame (we sense, as with Manson, a very rough abusive childhood) to a dead-eyed sociopathy that's truly chilling, as are some Mansoneque vocal cadences (in the sound mixing his voice seems to echo along several dimensions--slightly doubled and delayed--the way his movements give off trails. Some of the best druggy effects in recent memory occur when Mandy wakes from her abduction to find a solid dose of acid going into her system via forced eye drop and then a sting-- soaked in bizarre honey-style psychedelic honey--from a gigantic hornet, placed against her jugular ("the cherry on top"). It's so trippy that Laura Palmer's drugged excursions with Leo and Jacques north of the border in Twin Peaks seem like Normal Rockwell paintings. It's part of the reason Jeremiah's weird combination of seduction, initiation, brain-wash, flashing and insecure first date resume-recounting (playing his songs for her like an insecure weed dealer - hear his album on Spotify - Amulet of the Weeping Maze!) as he trues to lure Mandy into the fold, is so disturbing. This act has clearly worked before. But Many can see that--with all that influence over his weak-minded throng--he's still just a pathetic guy craving sex and adoration. His turning from semi-optimistic to darker than midnight is a riveting example of the way blind faith leads to atrocities, a psychopath allowing his flock entry into a dream state of us vs. them permissive violence, reminiscent not just of Manson but Naziism.

99% of all great horror/genre films remember people
watch TV, and they keep their sets on all the time.

The few non-cultists met on the journey include the still badass Bill Duke as a trucker friend of Red's who reports word coming down from "the big rigs", and the attuned-to-cosmic-purposes and wavelengths LSD manufacturer (Richard Brake), who sets Lizzy the tiger free in a scene that's open-eyed and openly acted in and around a hint of slow motion as to attune one to a whole weird electric plane. With the addition of the 'Cheddar Goblin' on TV (If I learned anything from Terence and Phillip it's that Canadians love their Kraft Dinner), the tiger, Night Beast on the TV, grizzly hallucinations, Jupiter, deep, dark mountainous tunnels, the Pagan Nordic warrior vs. the onset of Christianity original death cult, this dark fairy tale becomes part Mad Max in addition to Robert E. Howard, and every fairy tale wherein the remote isolation and woods absorb the screams and buzz of chainsaws; where planets and skies change colors and size, and thus wild outlaws can run around pillaging and destroying in the lord's name without a soul to stop them--except one man, made insane with rage and loss, who might fashion a Norse God-style weapon, retrieve his crossbow from Bill Duke, and ride into battle. Even then, mind reeling with blood loss and agony, he can still stop and stare mindlessly at a Cheddar Goblin commercial, repeating the slogan as if a mantra (2). 

Grief and suffering heat a man to a cherry red blade ready for an oil quench and a sharpness test. As on TV's Forged in Fire, it's not what the blade does to this railroad spike, it's what this railroad spike does to this blade. But forged in the anguish of murderous Jesus freaks, that spike is going down.



Though filmed in the wilds of Belgium, presumably the black forest region where Hansel and Gretl were chased by Suspiria witches, it's clear this is a film with the wild depths of the Canadian provinces in its heart - dark forest lands that maps can't do justice to, as if our entire USA is engulfed in old growth and chilly salmon-stoked streams, wilderness where meth and LSD labs and wild ATV-riding nightmares run amok. We forget how vast empty country is, our minds pull towns closer together like a wormhole. But if you've ever driven across country, in the North, Highway 80 or 90, you've seen it - the vastness, the emptiness, like it's a whole separate dimension. That vastness coupled to the deep old growth forest vibe is what makes dark Nordic folktales spring to life when enough residents are high as hell or have done enough astral voyaging in their lives that they can shrug off massive doses of the 'good stuff' and laugh mercilessly at the penis of their insane captor. And yet they are no different than people you probably know, that cool couple (4) who exist casually in that gulf between blue collar outdoors jobs and white collar education, the couple who love all the things they do and are humble and just out for the same things the rest of us are. The self-imposed dream exile of the Jesus freaks and Black Skulls, these makers of dark myth, are the real losers. Doomed and misled by baser impulses, peer pressure, and cheap meth.

That may be the highest auric ray inherent in the glow of Mandy, the idea that if the average dude with his 9-5 outdoor job, who just likes kicking back with his old lady on weekends, not starting any trouble, might feel outgunned, out-"lived," by all the wild and polyamorous maniacs out there, maybe it's really the reverse. The 9-5 job-working couples eating dinner in front of the TV are more mythically dense, loom larger on the horizon of glory, than all the murderous acid-addled hippie freaks out there, combined. If we 'normals' can slow our roll down, bring our Iron John larger-than-lifeness to even the smallest detail in our daily life (instead of letting it just evaporate in a boozy haze), if we can live so minutely that just taking out the trash can reverberate with druggy slow-tempo grinding, the analog synth score in our headphones filling each woodland shadow with dragonly menace, then maybe the glowing green gem we somehow lost during the 90s via Bjork, Portishead, DJ Shadow, Moby and Massive A.- all that spinal fluid-draining MDMA heartbreak (3) will turn up at last. Maybe the warm amniotic fuzzy completion that lies even beyond duality and total union with the OMmmm was just waiting out in the backyard for us to finish dinner, so we can race back outside and resume the game before it gets too dark to see the ball.

Maybe, deep inside some shrieking hippie's gut pocket, that ball is still waiting --back there in 1983 AD--back when we were still reading paperbacks and watching arial TV, still rocking to guitar solos on warm analog LPs and eight tracks, still smoking brown, seedy weed, and riding through deep forest canopy full of insect life; still made art on paper and canvas. Cut open that hippie dragon and pull that gem out, Nic Cage!

He has.

Always kind of half-assed around the edges, and hammy, as if he was fumbling around on a car radio dial of insanity looking for his 'One True Signal' - something deeper and wilder than anyone had ever tuned to before--never picking a station 'til he found it--he could drive the backseat passengers crazy. Well, here he found it- here he's busted through all that white noise at last. This is no longer a manic Crispin Glover kind of crazy or a method-worked crazy, but a crazy from the masculine diaphragm, laughing and hollering and roaring in the face of dragons like Blue Babe and Bunyan. From steel first softened via the Iron John nascent Men's Movement of the late 80s, hammered in the Forged in Fire of the anvil-ringing now, the Iron John wildman archetype Nic now embodies passes every strength and sharpness test, slicing through carcasses of false prophets and rows of gossipy phantasm apples. It's not what the man will do the world, it's what the world will do to the man. And Nic's edge isn't even dulled after a brutal leg chain chop.  He will cut. He will kill. The serpent's eye is lifted from the abyssal lair in the belly of the beast. Strange and eternal, Mandy of Jupiter ascends.

Dad, if only I ever got to see you working.

NOTES:
1. See SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (10/11/11)
2. The Cheddar Goblin commercial is very gross (he vomits mac and cheese on lucky kids' heads, but makes a great counterpoint to Red's horrible loss, and is made by the genius behind the beloved Too Many Cooks.
3. It took me ten years of mourning to accept that warm 'first night' rush would never come back. Craig got it all down so beautifully I cry to this
4. See also: The Devil's Candy (2015)

FURTHER:

The Acidemic Nic Cage Reader (Knowing, Kick-Ass, Drive Angry, Bad Lieutenant, Vampire's Kiss) 
Tales from the Benway Pharmacy (Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Machine)
Manson Poppins: The Deathmaster

Acidemic's Best Films of the 1980s

Jack Torrance wants to say hi - but you have to see him first. See him in there - dead center?

Ugh, February, the month of hassles and cold and weariness. Slogging towards March like a slouchy Bethlehem that evaporates on clammy handed contact. Another March 2nd means another year older for your humble narrator, another step closer to the grave. I've been looking for a way out, and I found one --the past! Thirty very odd years ago, to the 80s, a time when American became, once more, tragically uncool. NatGeo is showing their entire 80s series today - Sat. March 1st -- right now they're saluting Reagan. And now skate parks... I'm watching, in soggy despair. They're missing so much!

To me, the 1980s begins the now-forgotten Betamax vs. VHS war. Before there were video stores, when you rented tapes from the appliance store back room, and it was split half-and-half with Betamax and VHS formats. That's how it began.

My generation, the non-film critics, are currently trying to assemble a Best of 80s canon, mostly crap that evokes nostalgia to them, like Ferris Bueller (which I loathe on principle) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (or acts of admittedly brilliant but manipulative bromide pap like Tootsie and Terms of Endearment.  Someone, me, needs to step in and take the best-of list pencil away before these nostalgia-bewitched old yuppies hurt themselves.

Don't think I don't love some of the aforementioned too, in my fashion. I can quote them endlessly (because of the VCR), namely, Tootsie and Raiders (we had them both on tape). Here, can you guess which lines are from which movie (these all off the top of my head): Was ist los? Warum schläfst du!? Nobody cared... nobody showed; Blow it up! Blow it back to God; That is one nutty hospital; Too bad you don't speak Hovito, you might have warned them; I could have done without the dancing. Truth is... truth is you were okay company; Why don't you tell me...eh... where the ark is, ah right now?; Michael, I begged you to get some therapy; The charmer's name was Gaffe... I'd seen him around.

Wait, that last one is Blade Runner's now excised voice over, and thank god - how we hated that damned voiceover. We hated everything about the 80s, aside from the rise of the advent of the VCR. That was a miracle and we were saved by it. Then, in 1987 of course, when--in college sophomore year-- I discovered another miracle.

 We could escape the 80s altogether.

With the right set and setting we live in the 60s.

But now, in the 10s, the 80s, especially its cinema, which now glows with tactile pre-CGI analog 35mm celluloid brilliance, having been converted flawlessly to Blu-ray... for-widescreen-HD-TVs.

(the below descriptions are taken from past posts or are new - links appear where applicable). 

Top 15 of the 1980s (in reverse chronology)

15. PASSION  (1982) Dir. Jean Luc Godard

...Godard assumes his audience has seen many films, and so comes to his with pre-set responses to cinematic iconography (and that includes the meta-iconography of 'a film about filmmakers')--he riffs on these the way Ornette Coleman might riff on "Melancholy Baby." We're made aware of how dogmatically we're conditioned by a lifetime of filmgoing and story hearing. When a film adheres too closely to predetermined narrative formulations, we have cliche, When a film deliberately screws with them we have Godard: a medieval knight on a horse is seen trying to scoop up a naked, running maiden while racing a horse around a circular spinning scenery wheel --thunderous classical music on the soundtrack, hoofbeats, her frightened panting and shrieks--this generates a certain preconditioned response: Will we see this chick being carried off? Will we see the hero ride to her rescue? Where is this hero? Your stomach might clamp in suspense, used to a thousand permutations of the same immanent virginal violation. Suddenly the horse pulls up short so it doesn't bump into a moving camera; the naked maiden runs off set and hides behind the cameraman; the knight rides after her; she climbs up into the lighting rigging to escape; the knight dismounts and goes to have a smoke.. The Stunt Man is suddenly as bound up in linear single-line narrative reality as DW Griffith by comprison... (more)

14. AKIRA 
(1988) Dir. Katsuhiro Otomo

The quintessential cyber punk anime, Akira occurs in a riot-scarred "Neo-Tokyo" on the verge of some massive unnamed catastrophe and peppered with amok biker gangs, conspiratorial cops, cute anarchists, riots, flying vehicles, telekinetic mutants, and teddy bear hallucinations, all so gorgeously illustrated that time melts and even the tear gas flows gorgeous enough to leave your already-dropped jaw so low it distends off your skull and HDMI-ready flesh tendrils reach out, connecting your tongue directly to the screen.

The plot may hinge in the end on one of those typical Asian male friendships between differing misfits (one of whom goes crazy) but there's a cataclysmic beer-after-liquor-never-sicker sort of apocalypse involved this time, as the government-sponsored Methuselah syndrome psionics try to reign in Akira's crazy friend who's become godlike and fallen in love with smashing half the city. When things get quiet enough you can hear Walt Disney's frozen head explode deep in a bunker beneath Magic Mountain. 

13. MOONSTRUCK 
(1987) Dir. Norman Jewison

Does a mainstream ethnic humor rom-com film like this really belong on a disreputable but oh-so artsy list like mine, you ask? How dare you? What would you put instead, Tootsie? I thought about it, but I saw it recently and it hasn't aged as well. We've grown hipper about patriarchal subtext so we're wise to Dustin Hoffman's whole 'better woman than a woman' schtick, now (re: Molly Haskell). But Moonstruck eschews stealth-patriarchal pop and instead looks to the great Italian operas (and Dino) for its soundtrack, and Cher is luminous. If you never quite 'got' the appeal, see her in this and be a believer. Her chemistry with Nicolas Cage sizzles right through the cast iron skillet. She has the best walk of shame ever; watch how she comes wafting in to her mother the next morning and as soon as she hears her fiancee has returned, starts taking off her make-up and dressing back down from the opera and into a frumpy (but still glamorous) sweater, all while engaging in several layers of dialogue with Olympia Dukakis as her mother.

A relative unknown at the time, Nicolas Cage brings so much mushmouth ferocity to lines like "Gimme da knife so I can cut my froat!" and "Get in my bed!" that we all would have fallen off a cliff for him if he asked and given us one of those hooded stares. Never before had we laughed at and with and swooned over someone at the same time. Between this and Raising Arizona (also 1987) and The Vampire's Kiss (1988), Cage became instantly iconic, akin to what Brando must have been 30 years before but harnessed to wild John Barrymore-in-Twentieth Century level lunacy: that infectious mix of madness, heat, wit, beauty, and ferocity, unleashed at the right time, electrified the house like Castle's tingler. Interestingly enough, all three of these Cage films from that era are dark comedies, though Jewison's is only dark literally. Its beautiful palette of black clothes, red roses, perfect clothing (was there ever a more beautiful--uniquely Italian/New York City-dressed couple at the Metropolitan Opera?) and silvery  giant moon-lit nights helps balances the comic-earthy hues of the characters and brings tension without need for animosity and comedy without slapstick. It all climaxes in a family breakfast where all grievances are aired, love declared, and Olympia Dukakis steals all her scenes with little more than a series of resigned sighs. Forget Scorsese, it was this film that made me proud to be dating overlapping Italian-American chicks at the time. Seeing it today, it holds up way better. The more viewings the richer its mythic sweep, allowing all the myriad details to seep in. 

12. MATADOR 
(1986) Dir. Pedro Almodóvar

Already his fifth film, Matador marks the turning point of Spain's beloved Pedro Almodóvar from a post-Franco celebratory shock cinema queer anarchist to something infinitely darker, yet more tender and compassionate and above all, more brave in gamely crossing meta-borders vis-a-vis intertextual cinematic reference. After a disturbing credit sequence involving a toreador (Nacho Martinez) masturbating to a a tape editing together death scenes (from Bava's Blood and Black Lace and others I'm not familiar with), we find him lecturing a class on the proper way to kill a bull in the ring, intercut with a strange woman (Assumpta Serna) killing her lover in just such a way, piercing him in the back of the neck with a hatpin. Almodovar tacks on plenty of other links between serial killing, bullfights and sex, so we're not really sure if this is his attempt at a sun-drenched horror film. But then Bernardo Bonezzi's small minor key piano motif plays over it all and it becomes an almost Sleepless in Seattle-level romantic melancholy reverie. Suddenly we want, we need, these two sick fucks to meet. Avoiding last second 'life wins' interruptions we're in the zone between Lewin's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951 - also set in Spain with bullfighting allegories) and 1934's Mediterranean-set Death Takes a Holiday. With Hitchcock / Wellesian / Bunuelian homage, death drive-to-the-floor Freudian psycho-savvy, color-coded symbolism, a theater playing King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, and a solar eclipse, Almodovar strews roses on the path forward to a romantic lover's climax so free of the usual last-second morality and phony sentiment it restores one's faith in cinema. Dub it a downer if you want but then you'd best run back under the censor's skirts for protection, because cinema's true heart is darkness, not sentiment, no matter how remorseless beats the Spanish afternoon sun.

A very young Antonio Banderas plays Diego's psychic, vertigo-stricken protege; Eva Cobo is Diego's model girlfriend who dresses in red like she wants to be the cape waved by this once-star toreador; Almodóvar regulars Carmen Maura, Veronica Forque, Chuz Lampreave also appear in memorable bits, and the astonishing drag-ilicious Bibi Andersen is a flower girl; Almodóvar himself cameos as a fashion designer. Great as they are, though, the film belongs to Martinez's cobra-hooded toreador and the very sexy Serna's femme fatale, so voluptuously bloodthirsty Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct is but an ice tray-cracking naif by contrast. Most American fans of Almodóvar started out with the 1988 hit Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Todos Sobre Mi Madre in 2000, but rich, hilarious, brilliantly acted and subversively life-affirming as those films are, I'll take Matador... to the bloody grave!

 11. EXCALIBUR 
(1981) Dir. John Boorman

Time has been kind to this deeply Jungian retelling of the Arthur legend. It takes a few dozen viewings to really understand what's going on, especially if you see it only on a second generation pan and scan VHS dupe for 20 years. But thanks to the beautiful Blu-ray I have finally figured out most of it, and even if incomprehensible there's the beauty and the Wagner and the natural magic. A mythic interpretation of how lust can wreck the noblest intentions, it has something close to the stirring manly grace that only loyalty to a worthy king can provide, and may be John Boorman's most perfectly realized film, once you unscramble what kind of masculine Jungian shizz he's after. He also stocks the film with an array of dreamy class-A Brit thespians players incl. Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Nicol Williamson, Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart, Nigel Terry, all drinking the same Wolfram von Eisenbach-laced Kool-Aid through glistening glasses that make armor gleam like mirrors. See it and become a fan of "Siegfried's Funeral March" from Wagner's Ring cycle forever and ever. In homage, it made it onto the climax of my own Arthurian retelling, Queen of Disks (2005).

10. POSSESSION

(1981) Dir. Andrzej Zulawski

Perhaps the only way to really understand and love this film is to be temporarily insane yourself, or at least to remember what it's like to have the terrifying freedom of flying fast and loose atop the ever-inward spiral of the maelstrom and have the experience now forever etched in your Silver Surfer memory. I'm thinking of Poe's story "A Descent into the Maelstrom," wherein a sailor finds himself on a damned ghostly boat hovering ever on the edge of a vast never-ending whirlpool wave. Our hero eventually escapes and is rescued only to find his ship mates no longer recognize him: "My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed." Sometimes that change of countenance has to happen: you've seen too much; you've peered beyond the veil and the veil has left its gnarly mark. 

Such things happen all the time, to those who dare to take the voyage into the maelstrom or walk that yellow "brick" road. Some of us are called to the curtain and bid look beyond, and some do, and they get white hair, if not a diploma. I've never seen a film before or since that made white such a violently post-modern wrenching force (not even in Kieślowski's WHITE or Argento's TENEBRE) except maybe in a humorous and romantic way, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, wherein white swallows up whole bookstores and kitchens of Jim Carey's memory. (MORE)

9. CONAN THE BARBARIAN 
(1982) Dir. John Milius

Fuck it, I'm putting this in. We now know that 1982 was the single greatest year for sci fi and fantasy, giving us Blade Runner, The Thing, Road Warrior, Cat People, to name just a few. But of them all, for me, Conan has best survived the winds of change and become a classic as enduring as that ancient king's sword. The dead set opposite of many of the artier films in this list, it uses all the narrative tricks modernism eschews but brings such a heady focus, such an enraptured attention to even the smallest details, that repeat viewings just continue to reveal facets--especially in beautiful widescreen anamorphic and with some cut scenes restored. And best of all, surprisingly enough, is the love story between Valeria and Conan, one so touching it's been making fanboys of a certain age weep for the last 30 years. (more)

 8. REPO MAN 
(1984) Dir. Alex Cox

Long before it split into a dozen subsets--straight-edge, goth, emo, and hardcore, etc--we alienated teens were all just one thing: punk, and the film that defined us was Repo Man. It had alien conspiracies (with roots in the real conspiracies rather than made up for the movie), oblique "lattice of coincidence" Greek chorus TV commentary ("He is risen!"), Emilio Estevez in the role for which we still love him (fuck Breakfast Club, man), consumer parody (everything's 'generic'), Harry Dean Stanton in the role for which he is now and forever considered cool by those who know, a Modern Lovers cover, and the Circle Jerks gamely going lounge. Along with Rude Boy, Gimme Shelter, and that great legendary T.A.M.I Show with James Brown and the Stones, this was part of a daily after-school TV party ritual for myself and my suburban punk brethren. We'd all imitate Dick Rude's whiny timbre, "let's go do some crimes" when going off to score booze or weed, and "I blame society" when we failed. When we went to work instead at our very first jobs, our very first taste of the grinding real world, Repo Man guided us like a drunk but cocksure shepherd. The Criterion Blu-ray finally reveals what we never saw on our ratty pan and scan taped-off-cable version, that director Alex Cox has a modernist knack for capturing not just the sunny desolation of L.A.'s seediest outer fringes, but its natural magic, each shot is like a piece of found object junkyard art. I still write within this film's kinetic but forlorn rhythms. And it made me a lifetime fan of the great Fox Harris ("I had a lobotomy, man!") - It's worth having Forbidden World (1982) on Blu-ray just because Harris is in it in kind of a similar role. It could almost be a prequel!

7. PLATOON 
(1986) Dir. Oliver Stone

It's impossible to describe the effect this had on America and me at the time but I'll try: I was a sophomore in college in 1986, in upstate NY, where psychedelic molds and tie-dyes grow wild and my hippie-ish posse and I were all in the class America in the 60s (which PS- I failed). We had to see it while it was still in the theater, as homework. We called for a cab, piled in, smoked a joint with the driver at his request -- and the mushrooms we'd taken an hour earlier were kicking in by the time we sat down in the dark - our heightened sense giving the amazing jungle foley work an extra 3-D surround boost. Every humming bug and footstep dripped with possible ambush menace; humanity's potential for raw violent evil felt palpable in the jungle shimmer. We howled with relief when Sheen finally finds some a tent where everyone's smoking weed. Later, my buddy Jason had to leave for awhile when Bunny says those immortal words, "Sarge, did you see the way his head busted open like that?" But by then, I was enthralled, the psilocybin in my brain giving me rare access to the feeling of "hell yeah kill 'em all!" like I was channeling the madness of Colonel Kurz as a kind of rationalizing druggy courage, the mushrooms short-circuiting my pre-set empathic response, making everything I saw seem brand new and sans social sermon. The soul fear terror of the jungle was so palpable to me that the soldiers' level of sociopathic anger and violence seemed the only way to stay sane, if that makes any sense. If you ever took 'too much' of anything maybe you know the feeling: without a warrior howl, a game face, courage screwed sticky side-down, you'd wind up strapped down to a gurney, or freaking out your parents at dinner.

and his hair was perfect.

Seeing it later, on VHS, over and over, zonked out on whiskey and 3' graphix, was never quite the same as that magical afternoon in 1986, but I still have sympathy for the hardened Tom Berenger character and think Dafoe's hippy sarge is way too naive. Some elements are downright racist, (the Asian characters are all extra-alien and inscrutable, though that works for creating paranoia there's no excuse for making the black soldiers mostly cowardly and the first to fall asleep on guard duty) and Sheen's tacky voiceover ("They're the best I've ever seen, grandma") is almost as bad as the one, now excised, from Blade Runner.

But I'd heard of vet's cathartic reaction to the film, and I actually saw a sobbing vet-age man in the audience on the way out of the theater that afternoon, and even in the low house lights I could see he'd been crying, a cathartic wave of inky aura was fizzling around him like a fading wall of gnats, replaced by a pink light. He'd clearly been keeping a dark secret venom up in his nervous system for the last 15 years, and it was now broken open, leaking all over the sticky floor. I walked out on rubber legs and gave him one of those overly compassionate shroom looks. With Platoon, the horrible secrets of a nation seemed at last exposed to light as if some glorious combination award ceremony and drug intervention. This wasn't some silly Russian roulette gambit, a Willard going up river, or a paraplegic Jon Voight, this was maybe something like what the kind of low-to-the-ground eye view only a writer-director who was there at the time, with a gun in hand and people actively trying to kill him, could tell. The last time we were graced with such a survivor's eye view was the 50s, with Sam Fuller's Fixed Bayonets and Steel Helmet. --each of which made a comparable, if less publicized, mark on a generation of vets struggling to unpack their own collective traumas. But those boys had always been heroes; before Platoon, the Vietnam vets had been outcasts. Now, at last, we could begin to welcome them home. If that sounds corny, I guess you had to be there... or emerged within a convincing facsimile.

6. RAGING BULL 
(1980) Dir. Martin Scorsese

I remember hearing a WBNC talk radio review of this film (I would have been 13) on my dad's clock radio one morning while he was in the shower and I was trying to think of a good illness to feign so I could stay home from school. The way the announcer went on I thought this landmark movie was going to crack open the world. I felt like wow, this movie sounds soooo adult and dangerous. It's sad that you don't hear that kind of literally unrestrained enthusiasm anymore, as if critics no longer trust their own instincts, or is it the pictures that got small? Maybe Raging Bull was the last time they really knew a masterpiece had landed brand new in front of their eyes. Yeah, maybe.

Flash forward a decade, Seattle, 1990: my girlfriend coming home from a traumatic day of work with a bad headache; me loafing in front of our tiny TV, drunk; LaMotta in a Florida jail pounding the wall shoitng "Dummy! DUMMY!" over and over while I drank; her raincoat angrily dropping onto the floor; I was hoping La Motta would stop beating the wall soon, as I could see what the misery of that scene was doing to her. But he kept pounding and screaming, and our apartment was too small to escape it. On and on the pounding went, breaking our relationship apart. I was to drunk to defend Scorsese's choice, or to find the remote and press stop, or remember how long that scene dragged on from past (also drunk) viewings.

We broke up. I drove to Syracuse in time for the block parties. When I came back to get my shit she was already dating a jackass hippie whose claim to fame was that he curated an open mic at the O.K. Hotel. He whinnied like a horse when he laughed and danced arms akimbo when he walked. But he was so terrified of me he ran literally the other way when he saw me comin' - I'm not gonna hurt ya! I shouted. Come 'eah!

Sure, despite it breaking up my relationship, Bull is a towering masterpiece but it's not fun, or perfect. And after the string of Leo-starring bros-behaving-badly films Marty's given us this past fifteen or so years, Scorsese's inability to depict a strong female character (even Alice should have just whacked Harvey Keitel over the head with a frying pan instead of running away) and his over-reliance on manly violence rather than exploring his castration anxiety head on and cutting through, if you'll forgive the expression, the bullshit, shows a willingness to use flashy editing and resonant masculine humor to avoid using the mirror for anything except lines, coke or poetry - makes no difference; they're the same, ain't they? Come 'eah!

The result is that now Jake LaMotta seems an odd choice for such artful storytelling. He's a thug, a bruiser, and might be suffering from paranoid derangement brought on by consistent head trauma. One last thing I remember from that relationship: trying to sleep at her place while I was in the midst of a terrible fever (Syracuse = always sick). She was in the other room, painting (VPA). I got up and in my delerium accused her of having a lover in the closet - then after I looked, I knew he was under the bed, I looked there too, nothing, but then I knew he was back in the closet. I kept looking in the closet over and over. I knew he was there even if he wasn't. Even while she was all alone in the other room I could hear her conspiring whispers and a man's voice, even though it was just a Billie Holiday album. I heard males whispering about me, laughing quietly with her about how easily they could snow me.  So when I see LaMotta all supernaturally jealous I wonder if head trauma would be the same thing as my fever.

That's no excuse though, and either way, the film is certainly rich enough with the language and pulsing rhythmic emotion of Little Italy it doesn't need great psychological insight, and yet... there's Cathy Moriarty laying out by a sparking community pool, being lured over to the wire fence by LaMotta (and in some senses the most courageous thing he does in the film) and in her breathy agreement, as much worldly romantic poetry as in any other movie on this list, .

Aside from Valeria's of course. DUMMY! 

5. BLUE VELVET 
(1986) Dir. David Lynch

I'll confess it took me a long way to come around to this movie. I found the violent thuggery disturbing and without a cathartic resolution. After a few decades of film theory and great books by Todd McGowan and Zizek helped me unravel my private relationship to its Freudian subconscious Oedipal separation trauma, that attitude began to change. Turns out the purple and blue velvet apartment where Kyle McLachlan spies through the closet blinds isn't merely his anger/anxiety over a woman being hurt, but a primal scene as understood through the mind of a child who mistrusts the animal grunts of sex and seethes with resentment over the dad's power to shut him out of the bedroom at a whim. The problem was mine not the film's - I myself was Frank as much as Kyle. Damn, that's deep. It prepped us all for Twin Peaks, and therefore the '90s.

Highlights include of course the beautiful Dean Stockwell, lip syncing Roy Orbison as a nightmarish gay stereotype (see CinemArchetype 18: The Aesthete) while Kyle behaves like a frightened kid hanging out with his drug dealer to score coke in order to impress some girl, all for the very first time. The initiation these terrifying people provide him is invaluable, and eventually he becomes a mature man through their loving abuse. Lynch's subsequent works would all point back to this key moment, some improving on it (Mulholland Dr.) some not so much (Wild at Heart - though that too is open to debate and changes as a viewer's psyche). But Blue Velvet is Lynch's first great 'cracking it wide open,' his Picasso's "Demoiselles d'avignon" his Pollock's 1947 drip stick moment. It endures and like a dream you'll find that it's never the same movie twice.

4. LOLA

(1981) Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder 

There can be no sleep for the German people unless they take Naziism as a bump in their record album and return to track one: the glory of the Weimar era of the post-WWI era. Fassbinder digs that and, for this candy-colored econo-comedy (set in 1957), he takes the mythos of the The Blue Angel (1929) and wraps it like a sticky carmel apple in a post-war restoration/corruption sagas, so that--as we do in Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)---we're watching the booming neo-Weimar weeds spring up from the WW2 rubble, leading to a whole new kind of Warners pre-code/Columbia-post-code Babrbara Stanwyck opportunity for the right kind of sauced neo-Dietrich seductress who doesn't mind pretending to be interested in Asian art if it means winning a bet for 30 cases of champagne. She just might fall in love with her mark's world-weary wisdom; he was a WW2 officer and still hasn't found a country to come home to (could she be it?) but can he forgive the way everyone already knows she's a slut?

It's perfect casting with gorgeous Barbara Sukowa as naughty Lola, whose drunken resentment of the incorruptible (but totally progressive pro-capital) Von Bohm ( Armin Muller-Stahl) leads to a typical night caught in the storm and spending 'some time' in an old barn (a pre-code hook-up spot) and a heartbreakingly sweet bit of church singing that takes them both by surprise. One of the most quietly disarming characters in the Fassbinder lexicon, Von Bohmm's gentle wit and limitless tolerance proves a perfect match for Lola, whose sloppy drunken abandon is always real and beautiful to see. A perfect third in the romance is her pimp /club owner/building contractor boyfriend Shukert (the delightful Mario Adorf) and the three of them somehow rebuild Germany through their 'only-in-the-Weimar' era level of tolerance (ala Rudi and Marlene). It's all for the best; nobody dies and everyone can get rich as part of the New Deal here in the West side of the Wall. Von Bohn gets to avoid having eggs smashed onto his forehead and crowing like a jackass; he winds up married to the lady with "the sweetest ass in all of NATO." Even the insufferably idealist protesting drummer accepts an expensive cigar and realizes there is no bad here, so where is Fassbinder aiming his cynicism? The neo-Weimar flowers are sweet with dolorous savors! (See Peter K. Tyson's great piece on Lola here and my analysis of the German economy, prostitution, the post-war black market and Blue Angel hier)

3. THE LITTLE MERMAID 
(1989) Dir. Ron Clements

If The Shining set the uncertain scary tone at the start of the 80s, then The Little Mermaid signaled the glorious start of the ending. Tapping deeply into the Jungian dream core of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, it reinvigorated Disney and sent them scrambling back to animation full time. The voiceover work is uniformly strong (the congested kid playing Flounder the only exception) especially Ursula the Sea Witch, luxuriantly voiced by Pat Caroll as a zaftig, tentacled hybrid of Margo Channing and Ethel Mermen. And what's most impressive, Ariel (Jodi Benson) breathes in the currents of the deep and her eyes dilate when she's turned on. Not to mention the prince is named Erich, all of which make Little Mermaid the best example of resonant Jungian archetypal myth since The Wizard of Oz. It's universal, yet we all feel it belongs only to us, that it's about us, and that's what myth does when it's working.

2. THE SHINING 
(1980) Dir. Stanley Kubrick

This is really a 70s movie, or rather the last movie of the 70s, virtually creating the 80s to come in its molten intellectual crucible. It even has a whole documentary devoted to critics exploring myriad paranoid deconstructions. (Room 237: See: Ripped Danny's Dopey Decal, baby). The film is open to almost anything because the space of the hotel is so vast the Torrence family each falls into a separate cabin fever --no direct link to each other, the social order or linear time/space--they dissolve into the archetypal time warp created by their own unconscious minds, which are, for our purposes, indistinguishable from reality, and from the ghosts and dark energy of the hotel... if any. They are like an iPod that must erase its current contents to connect with a new hard drive (the family name isn't 'torrents' for nothing). Danny is erased from his body altogether, to be replaced by his talking finger, Tony. Jack-- in his writerly determination to not be 'a dull boy'--can't figure out how to erase enough RAM and so is compelled to literally sever his family ties so he can reboot; Shelly's inability to get a 'normal' connection from either of the Torrance males drives her into hysterics. There's no new hard drive waiting to fill her memory, the social connection won't erase. With each new viewing she's less annoying and more genuinely heroic. (See: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror).

1. COME AND SEE
(1985) Dir. Elem Klimov

A stunning movie that changed me absolutely, left me literally trembling in awe, and yet I never want to see it again. It's just too beautiful and disturbing, taking the Munch-ish scream of Kubrick's Shining, flooring it to the ceiling and exploding through the wall of what is possible in depicting brutality and beauty at once, telling through a child soldier's eyes of Bellarus's suffering at the hands of the Nazis until it becomes a bizarre transhumanist poetry, staggering in the way it encompasses the best of Tarkovsky, Kubrick and even David Lynch and just keeps expanding from there, widening from the unfathomable horror of war wider even than insanity's parameters.

As a side note, one thing that's kind of deeply reassuring about WWII is the way the Nazis bound us to the Russians in a forced realization of our shared humanity. We knew they were human too because they felt the same soul-crushing trauma liberating the camps. There was no way not to shudder if you were human, and that bound almost the entirety of the world together in a common cause. In Come and See we are as viewers united in a similar way, watching the sparkle in this kid's eyes gradually replaced by a twisted Munch scream, something the boy and girl stars (Aleksey Kravchenko and Olga Mironova) were supposedly hypnotized to be able to provide, something beyond human, a face unseen before or since in any cinema, so haunting I can't even post a pic (except for below and top, folded into collage - can you guess which face?).  Still relatively undiscovered either here or overseas, Come and See dwarfs the more highly praised Hollywood offerings of Citizen Kane and Vertigo, or at least standing rightly amongst them, at peer-level, as the crazy genius cousin, the one whose mad artistic gifts threaten to tear the fabric between history and the present, life and death, art and reality, until it's all one giant X-ray eye.

So that's the 80s. It can be summed I think in the above collage - all those crazed purple stares into camera, the rationalization for greed and monstrous evil creating itself like Escher's sketching hands.

Genealogy of Flies: LORDS OF SALEM (2013), HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2008) + My own Salem Witch Connections

"Only bad witches are ugly." - Glenda

Much as I love WIZARD OF OZ there's something messed up about Glenda's shallowness. Look at these bangin' old broads (above) bringing tea and cookies, and hell yeah the tea's probably spiked with tannis root but when these sexy evil bitches show up at your door you should be fucking honored. They're not there to get all petty on you with who's good and who's bad, ugly or pretty. Glenda's the ugly one for perpetuating a stereotype started by the church to keep a sister down. In Salem, for example, a horde of hot witches were hung for their presumed evil, including some of my ancestors.

If they weren't evil before you hung them, they are now, o paranoid projector of your own subconscious devils!

Now they're coming back, in my DNA, arm-in-arm with every kid whose life was ruined for getting caught expanding his mind in the Reagan-era 80s. Fear us, then, o descendants of the evil and corrupt Salem and Texas judges, all smug in your hypocrite robes and stetsons. We are watching you as you sleep, through Meg Foster's crystal blue orbs. Your time shall be soon.

In other words, sons of sinuses blocked and lungs a-resinated, hail the new flesh and toad of newt, hail MacBeth, Val Lewton, the Cramps, Bob Dobbs, Nic Cage, Sammy Davis Jr., Lamont Cranston, D.H. Lawrence, and John Doe.

LORDS OF SALEM (2012), Rob Zombie's nearly abstract, post-vaguely-modern 70s devil film, tosses cauldron-ward the old 'conspiracy to impregnate unwitting chick with the devil's child' thing-- already tossed back a few years earlier by Ti West (HOUSE OF THE DEVIL - 2009)-- adds the actual Salem and spoon of film references, heats to overflowing, goes in the other room to change the record, becomes obsessed with finding the right cauldron stirring Velvet Underground song, and never comes back (1). Does it end up a stew? Well, what is it trying to be? If it was trying to do for devil movies what SCREAM did for slashers, then it failed. If it wasn't trying to do that, if it was trying to be a SHINING for New England, then why the tattoo-parlor ambiance? Why the vintage punk thrift store symbolism that means nothing? Why the EXORCIST-cycled dialogue, (bringing "cunting" back home)? Why the carny ride haunted house tableaux that go nowhere, as if we're meant to glance their way, gasp, clutch our date's arm, and walk on through the dry ice fog and strobe lights to the next attraction? Aside from the goofball cranberry juice elevator flood, and the climactic gold room of dusty corpses, Kubrick would never be so obvious. So what is LORD OF SALEM really trying to be, aside from a showcase for Rob's tattoo and customized neon artist Florida posse to display their wares?

It's being Rob Zombie, the Kubrick of the Daytona trailer park, the Neo-pagan who goes on a killing spree at Burning Man, and everyone mistakes it for performance art.

Dude, they were so high, those who mistook it. Take it from me.

You can't take it from them. They're all dead.

Or hungover.

Left to its own devices, without all the post-modernist post-punk flippancy royalties can buy, LORDS does generate some hypnotic power, some echo of that great stretch of THE SHINING, set to the avant garde vocalizing drones of György Sándor Ligeti, involving 'the woman in room 237.' Zombie's own version of that same ominous inexorable creep towards some dreadful finish has a uniquely palpable abandon; the psychic force of the gathered middle-aged actresses--heavily and picturesquely filth-encrusted--creates a combined psychic release. Compare this with most lame attempts to create a Satanic ceremony: wherein half-asleep actors gather in black robes, read Latin, light candles and splay a topless virgin on the dais rather than do real research on altered states of consciousness achieved through hallucinatory herbs, smoked and drunk, taken in conjunction with prolonged periods of group chanting.. Like Ken Russell before them, those who'd depict witchy states of consciousness just show flashes of weird sick MTV images and a bloody Jesus and a nun naked but for bloody habit, strobed over a dosed pupil... and hope for the best.

Only bad witches are ugly... yeah, right (Glinda in the Jezebel fire) - collage 2015 by-EK 

Zombie does well in portraying this ceremonial ghastliness, the bad witch ugliness, but for it to resonate we need a stark contrast of beauty, which we don't get. In THE SHINING, the movie Zombie apes, the beauty comes from the hotel decor and from the devouring omniscient ambivalence of the Colorado Rockies. They loom like giant fangs, like the Overlook is in the mouth of a giant arctic Venus flytrap. They provide a stark coldness which makes even the unfathomable vastness of the cavernous hotel interiors warm by contrast.

But when a gold-flecked theater shows up at the end of SALEM (referencing Overlook's 'Gold Room' and MULHOLLAND DR.'s Club Silencio), though it offers quite a show, it conforms not to Kubrickian displays of mind control, nudity and submission/surrender, nor stark terror/beauty, but back to those old images of evil that are speckled with the cruel dust of the demonization process begun a thousand years ago by the Catholics. As Moncure Daniel Conway's Devil Lore book notes:

The great representations of evil, whether imagined by the speculative or the religious sense, have never been, originally, ugly. The gods might be described as falling swiftly like lightning out of heaven, but in the popular imagination they retained for a long time much of their splendour. The very ingenuity with which they were afterwards invested with ugliness in religious art, attests that there were certain popular sentiments about them which had to be distinctly reversed. It was because they were thought beautiful that they must be painted ugly; it was because they were—even among converts to the new religion—still secretly believed to be kind and helpful, that there was employed such elaboration of hideous designs to deform them. (c. 1879)

Of course Zombie makes sure that same damnation is applied equally to the hideous Puritan torturers, here re-imagined with big pointy caps and excessively unguided facial hair. In other words, both sides are twisted, evil grotesques. Then--in modern Salem--our protagonist Sherri Moon is supposedly descended from the judges, but is in practice just a smarmy, skin deep-pagan, and so is Zombie apparently, for he forgets we have to believe these torturers of witches were genuinely under psychic attack if the witches are to be actually evil, too. You can't have it both ways! If you try, the whole thing falls apart, for there's no clear 'side' you necessarily want to be on. Puritan evil vs. Heathen evil leaves no tension, so we may just admire the artsy detail of the tableaux, clutch our date's arm again and follow the crowd off to the next tableaux, already wondering where to eat after we leave.

The turf is ours by right...

This spectacle might keep our interest more adroitly if the lead actress was stunningly beautiful, like Jocelin Donahue in HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, or Mia Farrow in ROSEMARY'S BABY, or Cristina Raines in THE SENTINEL, or even just interesting, vivacious, charismatic, but the leading actress in Zombie's film is of course his wife, Sherri Moon Zombie. And she was all those things a few years ago, in HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES and DEVIL'S REJECTS. Now gettin' too old for this shit. As Glinda might say, a hard-lived life leaves no loveliness.

Decked out like a Williamsburg hipster, Moon's character, Heidi Hawthorne is an enigma only to herself. Way too old to either believe in the supernatural or stop dressing like an extra in ALMOST FAMOUS. She considers herself a badass, clearly, and has a good job as a Salem radio station DJ. She still snickers like a dirt bag middle-schooler at any hint of genuine insanity, balls, magic and/or evil--such as when the metalhead from the band Lords of Salem is a guest on her show. She's the type of girl who has Celtic symbol tattoos but openly sneers at anyone who tries to point out what the markings mean. She is just the sort of person any self-respecting punk rock contingent recognizes as a slumming poseur and ostracizes a priori just as she des the truth behind all the witchy symbols she surrounds herself with. She's got nothing going on but thinks she's all that, and that's the biggest red flag of all.

Of course we know why we're supposed to be so intrigued by Heidi: the director still loves her, and he mistakenly presumes we're as bewitched as he is. Well we were, Rob. Ten years ago, she was freakin' sexy as all hell. But Rob we're fickle. Ain't no ring on our finger. And that's part of the problem when you cast your wife all the time; sooner or later she's going to be too long in the tooth to play the babe she still thinks she is, and you're going to be the one to have to tell her, and then you'll have to start auditioning younger leading ladies all while dodging hurled frying pans.

This kind of short-sightedness is all over SALEM; we can tell what 70s devil movies Zombie likes and wants SALEM to be but he misses key subtexts. Like a carny trailer camp cargo cult, he imitates the surface and adds his own trashy aesthetic and crosses his fingers the two will gel into a religion. I'm not knocking him because I admire him for that last part. He clearly loves all this shit. His obsessive yen to recreate these lightning moods is admirable and must be appreciated by any classic horror fan. It's the meaning that eludes him. For example, he goes for an Antonioni/Miike vibe in longly held static long shots of Heidi walking her dog on a lonely street or in a park in late-afternoon or playing records with her bearded buddy, but fails to inject genuine observation and complexity into these long shots the way Miike would, nor can he generate uncanny frisson even in his Kubrickian Steadicam POV shots, injecting them instead with anemic attempts to make Salem a goth Austin with just a smidge of Detroit decay. He misses the chance for some great 70s-80s Italian synths in the LORDS' score, and instead goes for an annoyingly minor key two-note piano of the kind that made the back half of EYES WIDE SHUT so annoying. He misses the chance to make Heidi herself interesting: she's supposed to be a recovering drug addict but any AA or NA person will roll their eyes at how un-an addict she is. She even drinks at one point, super dangerous behavior from any kind of recovery (did Rob not bother to learn that?) though it doesn't strike the film as a big deal; and her apartment is way too clean for someone in early recovery. Why isn't she smoking or chugging coffee like a real AA-er counting days? I got a headache just watching her get up and walk her dog without a coffee first. If Heidi's an addict I'm John Paul Jones (the Zeppelin bassist, not the seaman... you got a dirty mind).

The Moon wanes: 1000 Corpses (2003), Rejects (2005), Salem (2013)

I mean no disrespect to Sherri Moon. I love her in DEVIL'S REJECTS. Her line after bluffing a room of hostages with an empty gun ("it's all mental!") is my personal mantra. She displayed a great relish for evil in that film and had great stringy-sexy hair and a flash of gleeful malice in her eyes and nice curves and an ease with using them to drive a man so crazy he forgets to defend himself (you could see why Zombie married her). Her thin lips weren't even an issue then, but now they're even thinner, too thin for the big screen; she seems tired, and way too old to be riding on an URBAN COWBOY-style electric goat in neon flames (her poor bones!), or going down on strange priests in the midday pew (unbecoming!). She seems to be a middle-aged woman trapped in a tricked-up spiral of horror iconography, determined to stay unaware of the maturity that at last has found her.

I know what it feels like to make out with thin-lipped women. It's like kissing a skull. Scary! Is that why he puts her in skull makeup paint? I hope he's trying to convince her to use some collagen. None of these 18 paragraphs would exist had she done so. You think I'm a fucking lippist now, but if not me, whom? And who else are collagen lip-augmentation shots for if not for her? Who but a classic horror fan may say so, may hold her to the same barroom benzedrine social standard the rest of stardom is bound unto? I'm no fan of collagen but just 'cuz some girls overdo it to ducky extremes doesn't mean a small dose should be shunned by those who need it. Her later skull make-up helps her look like some scraggly skate punk who got caught in the rain on his way home from a Stockholm death metal show (below) muttering "fråga inte!" to his parents as he drips up to his bedroom." as he passes his parents on his way upstairs. But I doubt that's the look she wanted. It's just the look she had, so she ran with it - again not an un-admirable motive, that old Buddhist saying: when you're falling, dive.

Pastiche Without Purpose

Maybe SCREAM auteur Wes Craven had it easier since he focused on 80s slasher films, so ignored horror history prior to HALLOWEEN and after SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Zombie goes back to the silent era's HAXAN through to the occult crazy 70s, Kenneth Anger's LUCIFER RISING, ALUCARDA, every Spanish and Italian Exorcist rip-off ever made, then buzzes THE HOWLING, and various old films Heidi watches while asleep in her apartment like KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL and CAPTAIN KIDD.

Burnin' up his fuse up here alone

There are a million ways these textual links could have been made to resonate, such as having Heidi actually evince some knowledge of classic film trivia, to be able to quote them or talk about them, to fold quotes into her lexicon. Instead they seem like these tapes were all left behind by an ex-boyfriend and she just has them on to remind her of him, and because she's too passive to pick a channel.

That's what made SCREAM so unnerving; these characters knew what was coming--they'd seen it in the movies. As kids kept awake at night all through the slasher 80s, vowing in our slasher-fueled anxiety that we would never drop the knife by the killer's prone body, we resonated with those SCREAM kids. SCREAM used the dread inspired by those earlier movies, which had by now settled in our collective dream unconscious, and re-activated it, showing even a kid who knows HALLOWEEN by heart and has already thought through his bedroom defense, might be killed anyway. It was a terrifying thought.

Zombie can only admire that collective unconscious and that terror from a safe distance. He's a fan, not a player. He doesn't know why he likes them - so he just apes the box covers. He's the R-rated Tim Burton, i.e. for a director he makes a good set designer. They both gravitate towards familiar narratives--remakes of their favorite films--because they have no gift for story structure or pacing: they just want to create the fantasy setting they dreamt of inhabiting as children. Once they do, it's like one of those Halloween parties where people in fancy costumes just stand around awkward all night.

Luckily Zombie is free of the awful whimsy-packed orchestral pomp of those Danny Elfman scores Burton uses. Now you think I'm whimsist!? Fuck yeah, because it pollutes the real madness. Whimsy is the way an insecure artist of the macabre, or MST3000, chews your food for you.

Oddities seems such a lonely world

Sadly, what the mise-en-scene of Heidi going through her day most resembles is the Science Channel's reality show, ODDITIES. I've got nothing against the Oddities Store itself (down the street from where I used to live) but the customers and employees on the show are way too sane and boring, which makes their yen for weirdness strangely sad (to me anyway). They cover themselves with tattoos and piercings and wear red white and blue dreadlocks, old-timey mustaches, and tall stovepipe hats and fang implants, but when push comes to shove, perhaps, some of them might be overcompensating for an inner lack of... what? True insanity? Nic Cage only needed one symbol of his individuality in WILD AT HEART, his snakeskin jacket. But Cage 'really' is a badass ---the eyes, Manolo, they never lie. Some people choke themselves with symbols of badassery and yet turn pale at the sight of a cigarette. They'd have been too scared to use the bathroom at CBGBs, but then they'd be wearing their CBGB souvenir T-shirt proudly for the next 20 years, they'd even wait in line for tickets when the same (now cleaned and laminated) bathroom shows up as an exhibit at the Met, and recall the good old days when punk music was, like, real.

Now you think I'm an anti-faddist. Well no. It's just that I'm really crazy. And while I don't trust carnies and their little hairy hobbit hands, their undiagnosed Hep-C and permanent smell of diesel oil, I trust normals even less. Dude, the truly crazy try to be normal. They fail! And the result of their failure are the real eccentric tics; the vice versa are only sad - or am I jealous of 'stability?' Around 1983, vefore I started wearing black fingernail polish, growing my rat tail, and wearing combat boots with white circles I painted on them in white-out, I guess I was similar. Are you calling me a poseur now? Yeah, maybe.... but I escaped it, through psychedelics, alcoholism, and being in a band, and... hmm, no, that's it. Just those three things. Goddamn it! I was depressed, is the thing, undiagnosed - as was all the depression not suicided over. That level of depression will make you reckless in what you do, you scramble for the intense experience, and CBGBs and City Gardens are like soothing beach trips. When you're a drunken acidhead, it's the same, but now you're free.

CBGB's: Smell on Earth

Rob Zombie's clearly a real wild man in that sense, but he covers every inch of his mise-en-scene with so much hillbilly dirtbag neo-pagan blood chic you wonder what lack of true insanity he's hiding. None of what he films looks like a real place, with age and use proper to an old city like Salem, the way the sticky thickness of 30 years of rock band promo stickers and graffiti are layered like redwood rings at real college dives. And too much detail all 'of a piece' as they say, looking new and pre-fab rather than real isn't scary. Carpenter created the first HALLOWEEN with a spray-painted white Shatner mask, a trash bag full of painted leaves, a butcher knife, a knitting needle and a few suburban houses.  Zombie had carny parents. He lived on the road; he didn't know from suburbs, so he's excused in that sense. Carnies vouchsafe their authenticity only through their oddities collections, like sheepdogs for a sheepherder. And who cares if the more obnoxious gawkers get sewed screaming into the next exhibit? Rob Zombie understands if we don't, either.

But Heidi is a tourist.

There some indications here that Zombie can make the post-modern jump, and that's what's frustrating. He jumps but doesn't stay on the other side of the line long enough for the ref to take a measurement. He just decorates the jump-off point in punk rock iconography and gestures off into the fog and whoosh -- he's gone onto the next wild attraction. But in one great scene, Heidi is chilling out at her friend's house and suddenly she's coughing up blood, and faceless doctors appear in the room and Charles Laughton's voice on the TV jibes with the demons almost as effectively as in MYRA BRECKINRIDGE or the films of Nicolas Roeg or Alex Cox. "This just may be to your benefit," Laughton says, as the merciless CAPTAIN KIDD (above). For this tiny stretch, it's sublime work.

Later her bonding with the weird fat devil baby (whose lopsy-topsy mutatedness is a perfect dark evil mirror to Laughton's leering image onscreen) mirrors that of TV and viewer, umbilical extension cords plugged right into us and hell, and with its embryonic red eyes and slit middle you'll wonder if this demon embryo is a metaphor for an abortion or if his froggy face is supposed to be the ski mask in TORSO, and the priest looks like he might be a reference to the stitched-into-eternity Dr. Freudstein in Lucio Fulci's HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (1981)... but we have no clear idea why or if its conscious on Zombie's part, or the make-up guy's.

Top: Salem / Bottom: House by the Cemetery

My Mary Easty/ Rebecca Towne Nurse Connective Genealogy 

(on my Dad's Mother's Mother's Side)

For an aside: I have to mention, as always when discussing Salem and genealogy (characters here are descendants of the hung witches and/or judges and executioners) that all these descendant movies are fascinating on a personal level for me because the one side of my family tree that kept immaculate records is from Salem, having arrived in Boston in 1631 (with fellow passenger Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island): This side of my tree includes nuggets like these (copied direct):

The family of John Perkins 1583-1654 - freeman 18th May 1631
Married Judith Gates, born Newent, Gloucestershire, England
Children:
1. "Quartermaster" John - b. 1614 0 d. Dec, 14, 1686
2. "Deacon" Thomas 1616-1686 (not the witch hunter, he died before that)
3.  Elizabeth 1618-1700 / married William Sargent (5 children)
4. Mary 1620-1700 - "She was accused of witchcraft, sentenced, but the execution delayed and the citizens recovered from the delusion." (+5 more)

The Family of Elisha Perkins (born - 1656 - Topfield) died - 1741 in Methuen
Married Catherine Towne - 1680
--
Children:
(9 total), including: John (third son) born Aug. 12, 1685 - died June 22, 1750
married Mary Easty (whose mother Mary Easty and Aunt Rebecca Towne Nurse were hanged for witchcraft) --etc.

I have other relatives farther up in the years worth mentioning: Joseph and Ichabod Perkins, who "were in Capt. James Jones' Company which marched to Concord at the alarm of Paul Revere in 1775. And 34 other Perkins of Topsfield and Ipswich and cousins of Goulds fought in Revolution (MP)." Etc. I didn't even know Ipswich was a real place! I wish there was a reason for me to research a paper there, and find the population to be a hideous bunch of fish god cult worshippers. And then grow gills m'self and swim off with a fine bonny lass!

This branch of my family tree owned a lot of property and decent fortune up in the Boston area, but lost it all when it was inherited by two brothers who whored, gambled, and drank away in a few years what it had taken their forefathers five generations to accrue. If women had been allowed to inherit property, I might be a rich scion making my own damned horror movies today!

Alas, the same streak of olde Enlgish alcoholic mysticism that would help me be a 'good' horror auteur prevents my actually getting it together to do so. My whole freaking life is jerry-rigged in this fashion.... how is that for a lingering curse and/or inherited magic, o Rationalization Guru? Do you not see yet the link between chemical dependency, magic, and right-brained visionary artistic ability? Why are all great writers tripping alcoholics, and all hacks cursed by sober sanity's boundaries?

Top: Horror Hotel / Bottom: Alucarda

I know that in all likelihood these ancient aunts of mine were not really witches, but falsely accused by the children of a family wishing to possess the Perkins' wooded bordering acres. But like most Fordians I say print the legend. Maybe my ancestors and the other witches were likely just sexually repressed settlers who found an outlet in the darkness at night, dancing and humping trees. But that's not as fun to imagine, and what else gives history any interest aside from the possibility for something still unknown, something still hidden from us by the dry, dusty historians who get to mould our past? We wouldn't even care today if they were just falsely accused of, say, adultery. So if they weren't necessarily witches back in the day, time has made them so, time and three dozen horror movies that let me know as a 300 years-later ancestor the grisly events might repeat themselves any moment --that all I'd have to do is draw a pentagram on a solstice and Aunt Mary Easty would come roaring up from wherever to make me party with her on her persecutor's grave like in the under-appreciated WITCHOUSE and countless others. Not that I would, because what if it worked, or worse, didn't?

From top: THE DEVILS, SALEM, SHINING, SHINING, SALEM, SALEM, ROSEMARY'S BABY, young Ruth Gordon publicity shot.

Another redeeming trait of the film is just how GILF-ish are the three witch sisters (see CinemArchetype #20): Judy Geeson (GOODBYE GEMINI) has still got it and delivers her bloodthirsty lines with relish, as only a saucy older Brit lady can -- you should check out her amazing half-forgotten 70s sci fi TV series, STAR MAIDENS (my analysis here); also slamming it home with crisp hot fire, Dee Wallace (THE HOWLING) and Patricia Quinn (the gonzo maid in ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW) as the palm-reading sister Megan. And as the dirtiest and most evil witch coming back from the past, Meg Foster. As we've seen them in younger incarnations (doing the time warp / "again"), their aged state seems temporary; soon they shall drink the blood of the 'young' and--with a mere press on the magic wand DVD remote--return once more to their former lovely selves.

WELCOME TO ARROW BEACH (but too pretty to eat) 

I also like that Zombie's main idea of 'a devil' seems to be the aforementioned Baby Bok Choi, a two umbilical cord-cabled Weeblo of the highest order, cunting up the idea that Satan is the original Nephilim rebel, the James Dean of our ancient creators: Lord Enki to some, maybe Merlin, maybe Im-Ho-Tep or Amon Ra or Set or Odin, to others. Here he's more like the failed abortion attempt of  a Nephilim, a baby the Watchers tried to drown with the Great Flood but succeeded only in burying under so much silt he just ended up tunneling downwards and finding sanctuary in firey subterranean caverns, which he decided he'd call "Hell" and rule in, because that would really piss off his parents. Hey his mother still lives up on the moon! Don't believe me,  feast your ears and eyes here!

From top: Moon Maiden Mummy Mother of Lucifer; alien grey, LUCIFER RISING, 2001, LORDS OF SALEM, TWILIGHT, Aborigine drawing, 2001, SALEM

Also, check out my review of the History Channel's documentary, The Gates of Hell, which I loaded with pretty intense photographs from the 70s occult revival.

As for actual Hell, Zombie does well imagining the way our own death is linked to rebirth and transfiguration instead of just the same old Heaven/Hell polarity there's some aspects of Buddhist mythology with Hell being a bardo wherein impure souls are like dirty swords cleansed by thrusting deep into a fiery forge. It's not permanent--it just feels that way if you fight it. Submit to the flames with compassionate non-attachment and soon you will be hammered anew into shape for admission into Valhalla, or wherever (now I've moved over to Conan's riddle of steel but whatever). There's a little of that concept floating through Zombie's film, but it would have been better if he'd bothered to have one unsoiled image, one un-ugly person, one heavenly beauty.

The only sympathetic characters are an exposition-mouthing scholar and his wife, living in a beautiful apartment that looks like it will resume being a Brentano's as soon as filming is finished.

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I'm no fan of Ti West's, not after he subjected me to the awful hipster hair and cheap shocks of THE INNKEEPERS (2011), but HOUSE OF THE DEVIL has a few things going for it, some ideas which Zombie might have gleaned but didn't. The main thing Zombie really needed, which Ti West is clearly a proponent of, is tick-tock momentum. That's the 'honest' way of building suspense, wherein dread builds through the careful setup of a particular place over a single evening or 24-hour period, in linear time with no flashbacks and minimal cuts across time and characters. As in its most textbook example, the original HALLOWEEN (it stems from Carpenter's main influence, the great Howard Hawks). After a prologue or night before or a few set-up scenes, the momentum of the remaining bulk of the film usually starts in late afternoon as the sun begins to wane and cast ominous shadows, and the editing seems to slow the progression of time down. Rather than the constant flashy cross-cutting back and forth and sudden wake-ups from nightmares that 'cheat' on situations, tick-tock momentum is a style of storytelling most horror filmmakers never pick up on, even when they rip off HALLOWEEN. West, however, does. Zombie doesn't. Yet these two films have such similar plots they warrant close comparison. They should get together and compare notes.

For example, unlike the relentless "oddity" parade of SALEM where it all seems weird but isn't (the definition of tacky), in HOUSE the setting seems normal but isn't (the definition of the uncanny). All the believable little early 80s-late 70s details are there, and the film is twice as creepy because of them. In SALEM, by contrast there's something a little too lush, too big for Heidi's pad to believably be part of a quaint boarding house, and unless she has a maid there's no way a recovering junky like her should have such clean floors. And she would smoke cigarettes and drink a ton of coffee, or something...

The girls in HOUSE by contrast are believably tied up in petty matters that seem huge to them because they're broke and/or just starting to take care of their own finances. They're believable, and they're girls in a dark autumnal college in upstate New York, where every sunset comes earlier and earlier and bring a deeper and deeper chill the moment the night falls (with a thud).

The girls in HOUSE rule: Gerwig sports some great feathered hair and a cozy college sports shirt and in her late afternoon fast food joint scene with Samantha (Donahue) you feel the ache of an upstate New York fall winter in your bones and want to be able to curl up with them both in a cozy dorm room and not have to go anywhere; you feel the sense of desolation creeping up like tendrils of cold around her broke buddy Samantha for needing to take this babysitter job so badly. Mary Woronov and Dee Wallace (double dose of Dee!) are on point, stunt casting-wise, of course: they were born to this

Alas, in HOUSE the mean fail. The 70s-80s Satanic panic tick-tock momentum vibe of West's mise-en-scene is undone with the sudden arrival of a distinctly modern crustpunk (A.J. Bowen), who comes rolling up on Gerwig's car like an angry Williamsburg hipster fresh from teeth gnashing class. And another anachronistic blow follows with the the old man who hires Samantha, played by Tom Noonan, who is just way too mumblecore, too naturalistic. He has that 'gentle' voice no actor in the 70s or 80s would ever use at least not when trying to sound normal, like a man, like an adult. His blank slate stare and flat wispiness worked in MANHUNTER, where he was trying to seduce a blind girl by being all Fred Rogers, and it might even have worked in SALEM as one of Sherri Moon's dopey fans, but not HOUSE, which is already too subtle.

The combination of him and Bowen derail all the careful build-up provided by the women and setting. Add this pair up alongside the insufferable twerp (Pat Healy) with the terrible hipster hair in West's follow-up, THE INNKEEPERS, and you get the feeling he is insecure around his male actors. They seem like they didn't get the memo of whatever the film is about, or what upstate NY is about, or what the 70s-80s was about, or what acting is really about, outside of twee mumblecore rom-coms. They know nothing about projecting themselves into a room or a situation. Ti West should just keep all men out of his films, like I do, until he finds an actor with some gravitas he's not afraid of, like Scorsese found De Niro, or Tarantino found Samuel Jackson.

The Right: Greta Gerwig note correct hair and clothing)

The wrong: A.J. Bowen (note anachronistic townie hat, beard, and clothing)

Both the scores are also problems: I would love HOUSE OF THE DEVIL twice as much if it had some Carpenter-style synths instead of its creepy but familiar orchestral passages; when analog synths do come across its clear the composer is overthinking them, and doesn't know how to underplay, minimally, and that electric guitars are never good for establishing retro-80s mood. LORDS has moments with kind of making like a Morricone and other times of just sucking with a banal two-note minor key piano. But the hypnotic devil album they play is pretty great, like it's trying to break your sound system and leap through the room and crack open a cold-brewed abyss --a whole slew of great ideas in regards to how one might use the radio to impregnate listeners' minds with Satanic brainwashing come washing across us like a growling Juno synth wipe.

 But then Zombie shuts that aside, too. Maybe he presumes we've already seen PONTYPOOL? We haven't!

In the end, West may be too cool for his own good, and cowed by manly-voiced men; and Zombie is still a music video maker who hasn't yet figured out the rhythms of narrative, but hey! Kudos to both for their subject matter and attention to detail. West's HOUSE wins handily as the post-modern devil pastiche of choice, though LORDS is solid and gorgeous to look at, with more consistency in the cast. These old Brit ladies give it their all and make us gradually lose all interest in the by-then scabby and deranged Heidi as she moves forward into the Satanic mass as via airport moving walkway. Indeed I can see this film ruling like hell if 40 minutes were cut out and Sherri was ten years younger, and the whole thing was timed to the complete Velvet Undergound and Nico like LUCIFER RISING is timed to Bobby Beausoleil's masterfully celebratory soundtrack. But otherwise, what are you left with, in either film, besides admiring Zombie for finding the true Satanic Mass sturm und drang of "All Tomorrow's Parties" and admiring West for his loving recreation of a time and willingness to plunge deep and impressively into tick-tock momentum despite a composer and two male stars with no idea what decade and state they're supposed to be from?

So my advice: West, don't be afraid to put some real men in your films once in awhile, and Rob, that narrative momentum thing will come your way yet. You're already better than the late great Ken Russell. Almost. At any rate, you're already way better at mix-tape movies than Cameron Crowe (see my rant on mix tape movies, Aural Drag). And West, you're the only guy doing tick-tock momentum these days, period. Not even Carpenter still does it!

So, be proud.
As the shrouding darkness crowds the burial mound
and the score carpets the surrounding ground, and the sisters wake
and bake
and bait the beguiled bear to deep and dark despair, be proud.
Peel the newts and stir the baby bok choi in its bubbling cauldron bathwater, til tender
enough to breathe to life. And dry behind / the door.
No witch or cultist ever ages except between shoots (or after shots); no soul is worth stealing once its stolen a million times over by the camera. Magic disappears with the ability to constantly rewind. availability and scrutiny creates demystification. Karl Malden has all the time in the world to lift the shade from the lamp to get a good look at Blanche's wrinkles. Only one place is left where the black arts still occur: that foreboding wet hot jungle corridor deep within each of us...

Long as we're women.

PS - The dog lives! Kinda!

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NOTES:
1.  A descendent of mine, a Boston seaman in the War of 1812, was also almost "eaten first, due to his young tender flesh" when he and his crew were shipwrecked. Apparently that's what one did back then, ala the Donners. Only one didn't make such a fuss about it. Luckily they were rescued almost at the last minute before they actually killed him. I'm sure that trip home was plenty awkward. Anyway, I can joke about it now.... because my family lived through it. So this sheet says.