Vanishing Caloric Density: QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958)

Before her there was only Peggy Hopkins Joyce. After her came all of cable TV. And now our first lady may be a secret Soviet 'handler' for a mole Raymond Shaw-style presidential sleeper agent blah blah, but who cares? She looks marvelous, darling. That bitch can wear a dress. Has a first lady ever been this glam?

In such an age as this, can we really afford to forget about Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Barely two years dead, seldom seen outside a scarce handful of cult movies (and a few forgettable 'good ones' like We're Not Married) it's easy to forget that her unique brand of 'empty' celebrity was once unique in pop culture. Well, we forget her at our own risk: she's the preface chapter to all of trash TV today. But she herself was not trashy. Along with her sisters and mother, she was Hungarian and a socialite and she got rich divorcing rich old men husbands and got famous for being famous without having anything to be famous about, which has been such a constant for so long now it's not even a novelty.

And yet, there's no one remotely like her today because she had that high-toned class that usually was seen in society pages rather than heard on game shows. She came from a time when TV was campier but less shrill, with relatively little of our current reality show 'loudest voice wins' 'diamonds-that-shine-like-rhinestone' ugliness. Instead, the blurriness of analog color TV signal and the Vaseline on the lens catching her every diamond sparkle, Zsa Zsa drifted along the talk show airwaves like a fabulous pillow feather caught in a cold Nordic draft. Witty enough to be engaging, beautiful enough to be beguiling, but nothing else, we jokingly imagined her as the harbinger of the TV future, the equivalent of what the food industry calls vanishing caloric density, her melt-in-your-mouth hungry ghost illusion left us with nothing, not even the illusion of fullness - only the vague epiphany that fullness itself was an illusion. She knew to play herself dead-on straight, like she didn't get the joke; she was able to be that paragon of social high-toned class that Joan Rivers, in her acres of furs, was a sly riff on. But Zsa Zsa knew she was playing a 'type' as stereoed-in as Charles Nelson Riley or Rip Taylor, yet it worked because she pretended she didn't know it. We were left to fathom what percentage of her schtick was pretense, and it's that which made her interesting. We could keep it up as long as she could.

The epitome of composed class and elegance: gowns and lashes for the ladies and gays, impressive cleavage for the straight boys, she was the sort of lady you bring to Vegas on your arm and know she won't embarrass you by getting hammered and pestering you to go upstairs, and if she has any 'needs', she'll make sure they're met, in austere Eastern European style (via some dashing parking attendant from Brazil who conveniently speaks no English). Her vanity and insecurity over her leggy competition might drive you to a nervous breakdown (as it did to the director of the film we're discussing today) but you don't have to worry about her mental health: you could bounce a truck off her old world European composure and worry only about the truck.

Television today has set the bar for glamor is so low it's down in the sub-basement. "Reality" stars sip Napoleon brandy mixed with Mountain Dew and end up splashing it on each other to signify a fight that will keep us watching past the next add for butt augmentation --but that's inevitable. That's science. It has to do with intelligence, education and the bourgeois pretentiousness of intellectuals, writers who never notice how their 'talking down' to audiences makes less educated audiences desperate to feel smarter than someone, anyone. While it's annoying being surrounded by idiots, maybe it's worse being an idiot surrounded by smart people. Reality TV is the chance for even idiots to feel superior. Happy now, smart person, knowing the success of Honey Boo-Boo and the election of Trump is partly y'all's fault? 

Problem is, those shows about dumb yokels are made by smart people, and the contempt they feel for their subjects is hard to hide, and contagious, and addictive. Brainy Harvard snob writers eventually start to show their contempt too broadly, like the smirky New York intellectual Walter Matthau in 1957's A Face in the Crowd (left), writing the corn pone slop in Lonesome Rhodes' show like he's doing anyone a favor when in reality his cynicism is what's dragging the world down around his ears. Watching that movie you start to think yeah, Lonesome Rhodes is a monster, but I don't want to punch him in the face as bad as I want to punch you, Matthau. This type of character, so common in the late 50s-early 60s, that thinks a pipe, white skin, glasses, a suit, college education gives them dominion over women, children, the 'working class,' and dogs. They don't respect the savvy craftiness of street smart 'hicks' or the intuitive 'soft touch' of women (though they presume their lascivious attention is always welcome). Their father can help get them any job they want and they presume they deserve them. These privileged 'wits' end up enforcing a straight white male intelligence on their non-white, non-straight, non-male and non-college educated subjects, who naturally suffer in strait-jackets of passive aggressive 'dumbing down' dialogue, the sort that used to be so common it was a kind of invisible normal that might make you slowly go insane but you were never sure why. 

It's cuzz city slicker douchebags with them pipes keeping us thinking each other is super dumb by writing our thoughts for us on TV, is why! Fight the real enemy. This asshole:

Slap the pipe out!
(from top: Matthau, A Face in the Crowd; Anthony Eisley, Wasp Woman

Another example: Anthony Eisley of 1959's The Wasp Woman who continually treats his boss--the CEO of his company--Janet Starlin, like a child who needs constant supervision lest she sell the empire for a magic bean. With his unlit pipe and bougie bow-tie it's only natural we pray a certain wasp stings him rotten.

Think I'm just free-associating? Our current shitty national situation, Zsa Zsa Gabor, empty fame, snobby Harvard writers --what do they have in common? QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958).

This is CinemaScope

As a fan of bad 50s horror and sci-fi movies (especially Mesa of the Lost Women and Plan Nine) as well as the wry work of Ben Hecht (who wrote the story, not that it's very original) and Charles Beaumont (who adapted it), I am supposed to automatically love this Queen, this presumptive sci-fi shaggy dog classic, this veritable remake of the story filmed first in 1953 (as the far 'superior', Cat Women of the Moon) then also in the same year (1958!) but in black-and-white, as Missile to the Moon. 

 (from top) the heavenly beatnik jazz dancer troupe of CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON; the celestial moon goddesses of MISSILE TO THE MOON; the tired front line of broads from QUEEN 

I love Cat and like Missile but loathe Queen. Meanwhile those films never show up on TCM when its time to fill some campy sci-fi slot in their schedule. Probably because it's in color and has Zsa Zsa Gabor. But I'd rather watch the surly sniping of Kip (Victor Jory) over Helen (Marie Windsor) being with dopey Laird (Sonny Tufts) instead of him, and the way they all play it totally straight, Jory's prima donna macho so 'itself' it becomes poetry, like watching Shakespeare act out his 14 year-old kid's metal album. The winky 'hey gang!A rocket is a phallic symbol nyuk nyuk' of Queen is the real enemy to bad movie lovers. I want to slap the pipe out of its smug Walter Mathau Face in the Crowd-mouth.  I like both its writers and love the film from which Queen 'borrowed' its wardrobe (the uniforms and a sparkly minidress from MGM's sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet) and it's got babes and a giant spider (there's also a giant spider in Missile and in Cat Women and even Mesa) but most of the time it's just Cinemascope-length assemblages of under-directed actors standing around on opposite ends of a crumbling high school theater stage, ever ready for either a attendance roll call or old-school rumble that never happens. The film plays like a box of cake mix, unopened, with an egg broken over it, left it a cold oven by a director who's too busy hiding in his trailer to avoid one of Zsa Zsa's on-set rages to light the pilot. Instead he lets the soundstage fill with gas, like Monty Clift under a Place in the Sun canoe. Maybe Hecht and MacArthur are just too intellectually snotty to take this seriously, lest their Algonquin friends accuse them of reading Weird Tales instead Ezra Pound. So they embed a satyric wink so overwrought not even a near-sighted bourgeois patron of the arts could miss it.

The plot you know even if you don't: a shipload of smirking virile Earthmen head to a planet of all women where they help the good leader (Zsa Zsa) overthrow the bad one (Laurie Mitchell [who played a similar role in Missile to the Moon]) whose mask is even uglier than her ugly face. Va-Voom! Lots of girls in terrible MGM costume drama hand-me-downs getting freaky, guys makin' moves, and the captain tackling the biggest lay of his life.

sharp eyed fans may recognize Davis in Alta's 'decent' frock from F. Planet

Sounds like I'd love this film if it let me. But it loves its own smirky self too much to let anyone else share. Some of the girls are great (like Lisa Davis (right; below left) who rocks great lipstick and smoldering Gillian Anderson eyes) and the writing seems a decent framework for a more straight-faced mature approach (which would allow the magic of camp to cohere better). The problem is in the misogynistic direction and frat boy acting by the men, that pipe puffing smug-snarkiness where (SWM) actors and director think themselves too smart for their material so they think adding some bawdy audience winking will help put it over, which shows how wrong they are. Such smirky douche bag superiority has poisoned the film to never be a true cult favorite except in the smirkiest, douchiest, winkiest, most patriarchally self-important of ways. (The title + the star = a tourist version of camp, and not one to make a lifetime fan of it).

What makes the 'good' bad versions of this same plot (Cat Women of the Moon in particular) work so well as enduring 'camp' classics on the other hand, is the intent to do something straight and good but without the know-how or budget or the talent to make it, but with a genuine love of strong women. When these films are good we get the genuine eccentricity of lower rung Hollywood really trying to make nothing into something and of genuinely liking women. Unknowns and outsider artists mix with actors shunned or forgotten by the Hollywood elite and up and comers ready to try. They all take this last or first chance grab and nobly fight to stay in character as the set collapses around them. These oddballs and has-beens and non-starters are--to we classic horror / sci-fi fans--our family. They're the equivalent of the Bad News Bears, or the bar full of flea-bitten drunks in The Iceman Cometh, they're waiting us for us to come watch them again with Hicky eyes anew, to buy them drinks so they can live through the alcohol that is our eyes. They get that it's all over in well under 90 minutes, win or lose but so is the effect of an average double highball. Only the drunks survive, because thirst never dies. And neither does DVD. 

Maybe this is why (white male) barflies and has-beens tend to have more respect for women and minorities, since the men in these Z-grade films are as disenfranchised and thus less afraid they'll lose anything by portraying women as the badass goddesses they are. I know for myself, alcoholism humbled me down to the roots, made me forever grateful and in awe of the women who rescued me. And that's why we drunks, drag queens, punks, and other outsiders that make up the bad film-lover community aren't going to be drawn to such puerile contempt for either women or the sci-fi and horror genres. And thus no character in Plan Nine leers at Vampira and says some inane shit like "my coffin or yours, baby." No one in that cantina says to Tarantella in Mesa of Lost Women, "I bet you got a real sticky web." If there were such quips these films would be as ignobly remembered as this Queen. It's the celebration, the worship, of female strength, that makes them endure with stoic grace in the face of incompetence. It's there in John Waters, it's there in Russ Meyer, it's there in Roger Corman. It's not there in Queen of Outer Space. 

The 'space women need men' subgenre always has a giant spider - Analyze its symbolic meaning, write down your answer, then look at the oeuvre of artist Louise Bourgeois to see if you're right!

Only a few elements in Queen from Outer Space take the outsider/sublime approach vs. the Matthau-in-Face in the Crowd attitude, and one of them---believe it or not--is Zsa Zsa Gabor.



No matter what happens, she plays it dead straight. She should have been the evil queen- as the title and billing suggests, with her beauty being the mask and the ugly scarred face appearing after the face cracks off because she's too busy making out with the captain to moisturize. Instead, as the chief scientist and leader of the resistance, she brings that same feathery class to bear she'd bring to any 'real' social event only here it looks like the event happened five years ago and no janitor has stirred therein to sweep up. And the event was an afternoon ladies-only coffee clatch fashion show with a vague Robin Hood theme.

If it's not going to offer anything else, the casting of Zsa Zsa was brilliant touch just for marquee value alone, making Queen of Outer Space live in high camp infamy, a touchstone name easily recognized by programmers who know nothing of the genre. But it's not worth the camp adulation, for it is the kind of self-hating sci-fi that feels the need to leer and roll its eyes every five minutes.  They don't get that it's not 'fun' to presume a planet of all women is going to roll over the minute some douchebag puts on a moth-eaten blue powder and struts in like the kingdom can now relax - a man is here to take charge. It's offensive, man. You can't put women in masks deformed enough to scare Picasso out of the brothel (left) and expect them to thank you for it. You can't think some young captain bucko can topple an empire just by toying with the affections of a mask-wearing broad on Venus and have it not be so misogynist I could just scream! You can't!

Grandma, what uneven eyeholes you got

Real camp would go the opposite way - it heaps a dozen dead male spacemen at the feet of its evil goddess. Great camp celebrates strong, badass broads. It loves them. It even gives them a magical beatnik free jazz dance to quietly haunting Elmer Bernstein flute music. For Queen the contempt is so thick they don't even have the decency to put some ornamental Vishnu statuary around the place, nor to attach the painted boards that make up the evil queen's mean-spirited rocket launch control platform, the kind of thing that would earn a frown from any high school drama coach. But to not even bother to make the eyeholes symmetrical on the glittery masks the queen and her coterie wear? Unforgivable even in elementary school.

Well, either way - if we don't like it- we have two others just like it for solace, each worse than the other and far better in their worseness as a result. Today, maybe the times have changed - we've been to the moon. We know there's no babes there. Or if there are, they're fast asleep (or as Rutledge says, their "condition: not dead, not alive"). Alien women are here, instead, on Earth, and their masks are human, but just barely. Sometimes I pass one on the street - they have deep light blue dazzling eyes and blonde hair, impossibly elfin. And I send them a telepathic message of the sort one passes to celebrities spotted in a crowd ("I know who you are, but I won't blow your cover by saying hello") The alien babes I spot don't answer me, but that's show business. Maybe I'm not smart enough to be worth 'sending' to. My genes aren't worth harvesting, so no cool sexy abductions or long snogs. I am not mad or jealous and I'm not out to topple any kingdom, certainly not a matriarchy, even if it's run by a puppet doofus via his hot Russian handler. I'll write whatever I have to in order to earn my sanity, to feel observant enough about the shit I watch that I somehow contribute to the collective evolution of dude-kind. Pass me my pipe and let's get the show started, and then cancelled! And take me with you when you go back to space, long as I can bring a DVD player, can count on constant normal gravity, and Cat Women of the Moon! 

It's because I know you won't bring me that I don't want to go. Hail Alpha! 

Greetings from the Bilderberg Jamboree

See also:
CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)
MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)
--
Acidemic #8 The Brecht / Godard / Wood issue

The Terrible Fists of Uwe Boll!: HECKLER (2008)

A great movie is out on DVD called HECKLER, and if you're a film blogger or nit-picking critic you may be surprised that sub-par comic Jamie Kennedy has feelings, and that when you trash SON OF THE MASK or MALIBU'S MOST WANTED you are trashing a human being. 'Bout time!

There are two types of critics of course, and it hurt my feelings when talking heads in the film note that there was great film writing--Pauline Kael--but that no great film writing is being done today. But dudes! That's not true. What about me??

There are a certain segment of us who don't want to injure Jackie's feelings as we trash his films. Back when I was writing for a respected search engine I was supposed to review films but simultaneously not say anything negative and yet not lie. What-EVER! But it forced me to realize that not every film is out to please me, and I think that's a problem with a lot of critics -- they pan a film if it fails to amuse them how they expected to be amused, and they hate having their expectations dashed in this manner. My task of trying to find positive things to say about second tier review assignments like LARRY THE CABLE GUY: HEALTH INSPECTOR, or BLOODRAYNE, or THE COOK-OUT, or 17 AGAIN forced me to realize there's something nice to say, always. Such crap films always seem to involve mobsters, often played by ex-Sopranos stars, and climaxes that take place at on-air tapings or live broadcasts, to ensure that judge, jury, and executioner are all bearing instantaneous witness to the mobster's confession before they fall into a vat of green slime, but hey, you know, maybe there was a single good performance or nice song on the soundtrack. BIKER BOYZ for instance has such a bangin' soundtrack the whole film was (almost) redeemed. And I liked the way the Italian mob boss in Usher's IN THE MIX doesn't even flinch at the thought of a schwartze dating his daughter.

My point is, if you're a critic, don't be a hater by nature, don't piss off people you might meet on the way up who may one day knock you back down. If you want to be good impartial critic, bear in mind your state of being before watching and plan accordingly. Make sure blood sugar is high for action, make sure you're high for comedies, and makeshshesh sure you've kept your expectations low.

For example, on behalf of film critics everywhere, let me tell you, it's one thing to love movies, another to have to feign interest in LITTLE FOCKERS just because your editor decides you need to attend the press junket so you can siphon sound bytes off Robert De Niro. If you got the job because you're a film snob it's going to be demoralizing if you're forced to watch stuff you object to on a metaphysical level, like the rote bible brainwashing of THE VEGGIE TALES. But you know what I said about the JONAH: A VEGGIE TALES MOVIE (2002)?

Adults unfamiliar with the series may be startled at first by the unusual combination of Bible studies and talking produce (as well as the high-pitched, Monty Python style vocalizing) but those already VEGGIE-savvy should get right into it. In addition to the goofy humor, there are lessons to learn about compassion and mercy, so parents might notice a lull in inter-sibling bickering afterward.

 See that? You'd never be able to tell that I spent the whole movie shuddering in a Ned Flanders douche chill. I submitted to the ickiness and actually came out of it feeling slightly more holy, even if I did have to scrub it off with a Silkwood wire brush when I got home.  Then there's Usher's big showcase film, IN THE MIX:

Director Ron Underwood takes his time going around the more edgy turns in the script, giving the actors room to stretch out and get comfortable in their characters and surroundings, and helping the film transcend its more formulaic elements (it's an obvious nod to the 1992 Whitney Houston/Kevin Costner chestnut, THE BODYGUARD). Best of all, Usher proves his game extends to the big screen, where he displays plenty of debonair warmth and easygoing charm

In this case, "debonair" and "warmth" are meant to quietly cancel each other out: "Easygoing charm" is meant to mean his charm goes away easily. But if you weren't paying attention, that would gloss right over you, and you'd never miss it. See? I stayed tru to tha game!

What's funny in HECKLER is that this is an intelligent, fast-moving film that fairly explodes off the screen, so important and obvious was it as a choice for subject. It becomes something that lives up to critics' expectations even if it is about the pain they cause. Obviously this stuff needed to be said. The talking heads here needed to get it off their chests, and it leads me back around to wonder what the critics got off their own chests by trashing their films in the first place. I think a lot of it has to do with one's perception of themselves an arbiter of taste, which is sometimes really a catalog of hang-ups.  After all, if my concert pianist uncle tells me he hated GET CRAZY then I know I want to see that film (so why isn't out on DVD?) but similarly if my classical music-hating brother tells me he really liked CARNEGIE HALL, I know he must really love the ingenious use of poverty under director Edgar G. Ulmer.

My point: film critics at press screenings can't often sneak out from really dismal films (the film's publicist is usually sitting outside the door with a shotgun) and so it's important their two wasted hours watching some real dreck at a midtown screening room isn't a total loss. Therefore they want to trash it as revenge and venom purging; to give back some of the headache it caused. But I say to thee critics 'tis far more productive to be a lowbrow holy fool and forgive and see the beauty in all things, even PLUTO NASH.

Another analogy: If you've ever been stuck talking to someone at a party who's just so annoying and enervating that you pray for someone you know to come by so you can introduce them, pawn them off or break up their monotonal sermon and you go home and even the next day you can taste the person's musty thoughts in your cranium, well, then you know why critics sometimes lash out at movie stars, athletes and so forth, as it to say 'how dare you infect my head like a bad 1980s synth pop song?' If you put yourself in the spotlight, you--as an actor, star, and person--subtextually promise that you will endeavor to at least measure up to a baseline expectation. If someone asks for a birthday clown and you show up determined to fix the roof instead then you're not edgy, just not the right man for the job. That's why I endeavor to do a little bit of everything I write about, to keep my hand in: a short film here, an voiceover gig there, a bizarre album (limited edition - four copies, unsigned) here and there, if for no other reason than it makes me better appreciate how hard these things are to do and savor them all the more when done well. Once you try and speak to a huge group of people with nothing but blinding hot spotlights in your face and the need to not sweat or shake the paper, then you no longer snarl at bad acting. Even being a bad actor is harder than it looks.

And yet the opposite holds true as well: beware hurling accolades on something that looks like it's safe to praise, i.e. made by a canonized 'genius,' set in the 19th century, etc. And write from a place where you see the forest for the trees. As you get more sophisticated as a critic, even stuff you used to love can seem juvenile and vice versa. Just because 2001 is a masterpiece doesn't mean FULL METAL JACKET is above critique,  but lauded circle-member critics don't dare be the first to say there's no clothes on emperors Malick or Kubrick.

To get back to search engine, there's a time, every once in awhile, when I got lucky, and was assigned something I was fully expecting to be as bad as LARRY THE CABLE GUY or Russia's FATHER AND SONS, and it turns out to be frickin' hilarious, dark, twisted and urgent. An example would be, of course, the films of Jody Hill, like OBSERVE AND REPORT:

Rogen projects a surprising amount of unstoppable force as the delusional, compulsive, bipolar Ronnie, while also displaying tenderness for his alcoholic mother (Celia Weston) and a genuine desire to protect the perfume-counter girl (Anna Faris) he loves (even though he ends up getting her wasted and taking advantage of her in a controversial scene). Even with such stiff competition, Michael Peña manages to steal almost every scene he's in as a lisping, sycophantic co-worker. Ray Liotta plays a "real" detective, and Hill regular Danny McBride shows up in various amusing cameos. Inexplicably released the same year as PAUL BLART: MALL COP, this is the darker one--the raging id, the heavy-hitter version--with a vengeance.

Now, if I hadn't been assigned the film who knows if I would ever have seen it? If I had been allowed to trash films in my reviews I might have figured out my negative review before even sitting down in the theater, and would have hated to have to change it. but in fact I loved the film, and it made me do a 360 on Seth Rogen, and as a critic it became my job to attempt to point out the route by which this film could be appreciated, not as a dumb comedy but as a dark twisted satire of America.

So.... HECKLER: Jamie Kennedy narrates, and calls his hecklers backstage to ask them why they do it, and even interviews his harshest critics. But the best parts are when random celebs get to fire back at their critics, and none more savagely than Germany's most incompetent director, Uwe Boll. Even critics who hate BLOODRAYNE (2002, top) will enjoy the footage of Boll beating the shit out of his snotty hipster critics (see below), especially because said critics prove by accepting the challenge that they haven't seen GUYS AND DOLLS (and thus wind up with saspirilla in their ear). Me, I've seen it thrice, so when I had to cover BLOODRAYNE I made sure to like it:

With all its swords, chained breasts, gushing arteries, and severed heads, BLOODRAYNE seems more like a welcome throwback to those great early 1980s drive-in sword and sorcery flicks. In between the slashing and gouging there are torch-lit castles, nefarious booby traps, blurry flashbacks, and aerial camera shots that swoop down through the gorgeous Carpathian landscapes. Loken, with her fangs and low-rider leather chaps, looks pretty gorgeous herself, and there's a surprising number of name actors in bit parts (...) It's directed by Uwe Boll, the man who gave us the video game adaptations of HOUSE OF THE DEAD and ALONE IN THE DARK. Cult cinema fans should take this one to--and through--the heart, especially for the chance to see Madsen's period costume and long hair.

and HOUSE OF THE DEAD before that, which was so bad it made BLOODRAYNE look like BEN HUR:

Uwe Boll's HOUSE OF THE DEAD, based on a video game, manages to capture the goofy, giddy flavor of the drive-in features and Saturday morning cartoons of the 1970s. The story involves a sextet of attractive, romantically entangled Seattle hipsters who hire a boat manned by a salty sea captain (Jurgen Prochnow) to take them to an island rave. (...)  By the time the gang lands, most everyone at the party has already been killed and joined the ranks of the living dead. Fortunately, the captain is also an arms smuggler and soon the dwindling survivors are geared up with heavy artillery, blasting their way through the hordes in high video-game style. Pumping hard core techno rap fusion, swooping MATRX-style camera moves, manic editing, ample gore effects, clips from the actual video game, and a dash of nudity all coalesce to keep things lively, those who like their horror a little on the cheesy side may just find themselves in zombie-movie nirvana.

So there you go, Uwe, don't hurt me!  Though now that Muze is gone and I'm contracted to no movie search engine, hey Uwe! You SUCK!!