Ballin' the Jacks: TRUCK STOP WOMEN (1974)

Fans of high-energy strong female-filled crime films from the 60s and 70s by guys like John Flynn and Arthur Marks will rejoice to note that--slipping unobtrusively onto Amazon Prime after being unavailable on DVD for.... ever... rolls-- Truck-Stop Women (1974). One of the better films from long-working Mark L. Lester (Class of 1984), it features the always alluring, ferocious Claudia Jennings, in one of her best roles. It's an air horn hoot, good buddy, with everyone doing their best to deliver more than a mere exploitation truck stop movie, but not too much more. It has no interest in pulling off the highway of cheap goofy asphalt thrills and down into any tar-roof shack cul-de-sacs of working class realism or veiled commie sermonizing. All this Godfather-meets-Mildred Pierce tale of a matriarchal crime dynasty is lookin' to deliver is 90 minutes of speed, bullets, Jacobean betrayals, and bouncing motel beds.

The Mildred is Anna (Lieux Dressler), the owner/manager/big boss madame of a remote New Mexico truck stop / diner / motel / brothel / hijacking ring, and she makes Joan Crawford seem coy. Presiding over a loyal assortment of button men, mechanics, and good ole gal waitress/load hijackin' prostitutes, Anna's operation roars along so smoothly there wouldn't be even a story except her no-good triple-timin' daughter Rose (Jennings) is mighty tired of life as momma's main hooker/hijacker. Oh, and Anna's long-stable mob connection out in Vegas has been shot, and her territory is now up for grabs, meaning goombas galore are sniffing around for a piece. Anna can handle whatever sore thumb wop might muscle her way, but Rose is one piece who wants to git.... anywhere with bright lights. To her the idea of Las Vegas alone is enough to make her betray her own kin.  As Rose is her one weak spot, Anna's whole criminal empire might just topple off its axis.

When word leaks out about a hijackable load of mob-stolen securities stashed in the back of a cattle truck roaring past in a few days, both sides realize it's gonna be the deciding factor in who keeps the territory as whoever gets it can buy enough muscle to rub the other out of business. Anna would rather not rob from the mob, but what else can she do? Thus begins a whole web of betrayal and counter betrayal, as we never quite know which of the two women is on top, if they're secretly working together, or just how it's all going to shake out.

It all hinges on who knows what and whether anyone in Anna's outfit is dumb (or weakened enough by seductive strategies) enough to spill Anna's plan to Rose. Does Rose even know who in Anna's group knows the actual truth and who's been fed bullshit to spill? Consider Curly (Dennis Filmple above), a lower level Anna employee, trying to hold back information from Rose while ostensibly keeping her under wraps in a motel room. He's going to tell her everything, sure, but did Annie presume that would happen? How many layers deep does this go?

We're dealing with levels of intelligence and subtlety far higher than we're used to in shitkicking trucker romps. As with the two Godfather films it may take even a few viewings to piece out these advanced-level connivances, but in the meantime we can just enjoy the action.

But what makes Truck Stop work so well isn't just the impressively high-stakes in-a-low-way plot but the ingeniously-staged, earthy crowded diner scenes at Annie's truck stop. The joint is humming with interlocking life and there's a great, vivid sense of people coming and going, eating, propositioning, overhearing, coffee-refilling, sleeping and scheming, at all hours of the night and early dawn. We feel like we really get a full lay of the land there, it's a kind of paradise of vice, where the motel rooms all have secret cameras so Annie can watch her ladies (including Russ Meyer regular Uschi Dugart) and listen in while they pump the drivers for information on their trailer manifest (i.e. what to hijack later). 

What really sells it all though is the aliveness of Jennings, so good as the restless morally bankrupt Rose it makes it all the sadder to realize she'd be dead in just five years --victim in an accident off the Pacific Coast Highway (at age 30). Here she finds a good match in John Martino as the mafia-dispatched goodfella "Smith" for whom she serves as combination hostage, conspirator, and lover. He should be recognizable as one of Clemenza's button men in the first Godfather. Here he brings far more wit and character than you'd expect, even earning our sympathy on occasion, and has some great chemistry with Jennings. The pair know just how to play a scene, making it always just a little ambiguous whether they're really falling in love or just playing each other. There's a magical scene in their motel room together in the morning after some indefinite period of late night boozy bliss where they're getting dressed and drinking tumblers of morning whiskey, and we realize maybe there is no difference between acting smitten for a (criminal) purpose and being smitten for real with a criminal.

The actors both convey this complexly cross-hatched devious/ developing love/respect without ever tipping their hands to us or each other. Love and trust and sex in films like this often are just asides, Mulveyan narrative dead-ends. But really great hook-ups like this come built-in with a certain element of performance and possible betrayal. Alas, aside from the thing between Connery's Bond and Luciana Paluzzi's Fiona Volpe in Thunderball--it's hard to remember a post-coitus dressing/drinking/nuzzilng scene so full of commingled warmth and danger as we have here between Martino and Jennings. When you belive either side could plunge a knife into the other at any second, even though they just hooked up and are acting lovey dovey then you know it's a true meeting of equals.

And you believe he really does dig Rose. Who wouldn't? Jennings, sublime in all these scenes, really lets loose with all teeth and both hands in these scees, freely heaping abuse on his gross candy bar-eating trigger man as much as she kittens it up with Smith.



The third great element is the roster of great supporting cast of tough-as-nails women, longtime Anna employees, and their grizzled trucker friends, co-workers and off-on-the-road-again boyfriends, all of whom add a layer of real rootsy Americana sadness, the sort that hangs in the wee-wee hours of dawn (reminding me of the opening scenes of Some Came Running.)

That's not to say it's not Tarantino-by-Russ Meyer-esque grindhouse to its core, especially the scene where Anna pulls Rose out of Smith's pool room, kicking and screaming, throwing Rose over her shoulder like a bag of laundry. From there, an elaborate series of double cross counter-moves goes on, and if you're as left in the dark as I was as to who's got what plan underneath the other plan or why they're all meeting at a ghost town to split up the loot, well, sometimes it's nice to not be six steps ahead of the characters. Sure it ends tragically. You forgot it's a matriarchal truck stop hijacking/prostitution ring version of Shakespeare / Mildred Pierce? Crime doesn't pay - but it sure pays well until then.

Death Drivin' America - Part 3: DEATHSPORT, CANNONBALL!

Trash fans like myself are finding--via golden hindsight and reverence for all things 35mm--that many of Roger Corman's New World produced ALIEN / STAR WARS / JAWS-imitations have held up and improved with age, and even the films of New World's mid-70s 'period-period' (the post-BONNIE AND CLYDE wave - BLOODY MAMA, BIG BAD MAMA, LADY IN RED, BOXCAR BERTHA, etc) still pack a wry punch, at least some of the time. Roger consistently had an eye for giddy high-octane satire (though apparently he didn't approve of comedy, so you had to hide it in uber-dryness). He also launched the whole (now largely forgotten) biker subgenre with THE WILD ANGELS and bankrolled the wacky DEATH RACE 2000 (1973). And so New World proved it could imitate itself as deftly as it imitated the big boys. Once SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT showered box office gold all over the two-lane blacktops of backwoods America, there was no stopping him.

In the best of these 'backwoods blast-offs', like TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE, there are sultry glimmers of greatness, and the worst, like SMOKEY BITES THE DUST (1981), there are at least some good crashes. But... remember a few miles back we talked about DEATH RACE 2050 ("the only movie that matters in 2017" - April Wolfe), and talked about how no film could match the original? Well, the original was such a surprise hit Corman ordered a whole slew of variants, futuristic car chase movies that, in their way, paved the lanes for the MAD MAX to come. He just, you know, didn't want them to be funny. Had he forgot about THE RAVEN?

And how's this for prescient: DEATH RACE hypothesized that in 2000 we'd be living under the thumb of a crazy trash-talking president (hey!) with a fun old-school (like Roman gladiator) sense of entertainment and population control. In the process all the tenets of 70s life were commented upon: road rage, gas crises, OPEC; America's big cathartic fuck-you to the next four days of work that was Monday Night Football; Detroit demonology (the grease pit grimoire with groovy names like Gran Turino, Corvette, Trans-Am, Mitzy Bishu Gallant, Suzy Bannon the Buick); CB radios (as discussed in the earlier piece on CONVOY) and revolution!

It's perhaps understandable why I-- who was a monster child in that time--would return now to the auto wreck bloodsport satire genre as if some rumbling unleaded Rosebud. For our crazy prez, for our crazy country, for the year of 2017, when America's Civil War turned so cold we grew more Russian than the Russkies, start your engines!

Hear the mighty engines roaring for America? Komrade, we need to rev it. Only by blazing fast and furious do we finally not stand stagnant.

CANNONBALL!

(1976) Dir. Paul Bartel

**

With the popularity of the car crash movie (perfect for drive-ins) well established, 2000 director Paul Bartel jumped lanes and drafted over behind the now-forgotten real-life Cannonball Dash, a cross-country race that was set up to protest the 55 mph highway law (set up in 1974). That race had caught the popular cinematic imagination to the point that in 1976 it congealed into films like GUMBALL RALLY (1976), SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT and--far less remembered--Bartel's CANNONBALL. In the original Dash and other race films, the issue of prize money, a bet, the importance of an honor system and all in the game camaraderie is easier to understand (a gum ball machine, for example, is a relatively worthless prize). For the inexplicable $100,000. prize in CANNONBALL, well, that's real money, and it's just too damn easy to cheat if all you need is an LA parking lot stamp at the NYC finish line.  One canny little guy flies his car in a big jumbo jet across country; other drivers sabotage rival cars (with racers too dumb to watch their vehicle or check under the hood); and so forth.

These things bother me; and the film is choked up with actors too much alike to tell apart with your glasses off, all made even similar-er-er for no real reason. Rather than tweak cliches to archetypal amok wresling-style comic book lunacy, here Bartel just delivers them flat, like dropping off laundry.  A smiling polite black dude (Stanley Bennett Clay) racing some nice Goy couple's car to NY for them (we know they're deserving of a smashed caddy because they tell him not to drive at night or faster than 55 mph - how dare they!); the amazing Gerrit Graham ambles along as a cowboy singer riding with his mobbed-up manager Mr. Redmond, who's hoping this event will boost his profile (how, exactly?) David Carradine is a 'legend' named Cannonball (so original!) who is breaking parole the moment his car leaves California. One speeding ticket and he's back in jail with the key thrown away! This is just one of Cannonball's terrible choices, the sort of self-sabotage that dirtbags often confuse with bad luck. Luckily for him, his parole officer (Veronica Hamel) is also his navigator/lover. But if you remember her from HILL STREET BLUES than it may not be so lucky for you: her character there was far too professional and competent in that beloved show to throw away her career following such a three-strikes idiot over the edge. Though it's nice to see her wipe the floor with a cadre of good old boys trying to hobble Cannonball (who watches from the sidelines), it's sad that she also seems dubbed... from far away.


Faring better in our esteem is the great Mary Woronov, who pilots a van carrying two horny blondes in the back (Diane Lee Hart, Glynn Rubin); David's little brother Robert and Brenda Belaski are also quite good as a pair of young newlyweds trying their luck for the prize. They seem genuinely in love, young and sweet (they even brought an acoustic guitar) plus the race makes sense in the terms of their character arc (elopement, money, youth, horniness) far more than in the others.

In short, ladies, the 'Trans-America Grand Prix Auto Race" is on! Just ignore the obvious nagging questions about logic and practicality (like how gas guzzling town cars are bad at cross country races, running out of gas way more often out in the cornfields at night), the contradictory rules (does Bartel [and his co-writer Don TOP GUN Simpson] even know how races or gambling odds actually work?), and the sheer idiocy of "Cannonball", his sycophantic copycat (so annoying), and Dick Miller as his bookmaking older brother, who sabotages other fast cars in the race but then, confusingly, seems to be out to sabotage his brother too (did he become someone else's brother in one of Simpson's rewrites?) He needn't bother in any case, for Cannonball is an easy mark. Never thinking to follow his enemies when they walk or crawl past the rear of his car on their way out of the parking lot, he's stunned when his jack later turns up missing or his lights don't work or his gas tanks been ice-picked. When he finally falls asleep at the wheel, you're like fuck, I'm rooting for the other guy.

I've barely scratched the surface with how purely stupid and incompetent Carradine's Cannonball (the driver) is, I can only presume crafty Bartel was going somewhere with the idea, some black comic joke between the 'lines' done with Simpson... now lost in the nasal cavity of time.

If you can ignore all that, well, go for it, as the car stunts are amazing. Highlights include: an awesome jump across an unfinished stretch of highway overpass and and plenty of wild spin-outs and crashes (all from back in the day they did that shit for real). A plethora of insider cameos helps as well: Corman himself plays the Los Angeles DA; Don Simpson is his assistant; Bartel a shady fey mobster (the type who play piano while their thugs kick the shit out of someone for not holding up their end of whatever). Martin Scorsese and Sly Stallone are the thugs! Yo Adrian! Joe Dante and Allan Arkush are mid-states tow-truck drivers who help out Cannonball with a new car (though I wouldn't trust that dork with my Big Wheel).

So forget all my annoyed kvetches with the pure idiot illogic of the script. What matters is that the good guys win, even if the good guys aren't always who you think. And a special shout-out to a grim gruesome freeway pile-up so out of step with what came before it chokes off even the most jadedly sardonic of laughter. Bloody, savage, out of place, it's like if Burt Reynolds wound up decapitating some old lady in his effort to Yee-Haw over the sheriff's patrol car and the bouncy harmonica just kept a-boinging (had Bartel just seen Godard's WEEKEND?) . Despite the whole Woronov sexy van thing there's no puerile snickering or silicone (Fred Olen Ray was still too young, thank god), The ever reliable Tak Fujimoto does a good job capturing the stonewashed pink of Cannonball's open shirt and the haze of the open road.

In short, America.

Even so, Don Simpson stopped writing and turned to producing after this, smart move, Don! Your idiocy and coked-up gumption will poison the 80s with a wealth of attention span-destroying military recruitment videos. He died in 1996, Bartel in 200, so there you go. Hell, there we all go...

DEATHSPORT

(1978) Dir. Allan Arkush, Nicholas Niciphor

**1/2

A film for the dirt bike-riding 16 year-old arsonist in all of us, DEATHSPORT was meant to be a DEATH RACE 2000 sequel but instead gives us moody crypto-poetry (including great lines like "you're not as good as your mother!"), blazing slow-motion fireballs, matte paintings of futuristic dystopian cities, and that old LA desert scrub being ground underfoot by tricked-out dirt bikes and hosses. So many dirt bikes blow up in this film it's almost a pyrotechnic's demo reel. The titular 'sport', like the Statham DEATH RACE remake or THE RUNNING MAN. The contestants are dissidents and the unlucky examples of super-crunchy sicario-style "guides" who shepherd them across the canyon scrub wasteland. They basically ride around a ring jumping through firey hoops, blasting each other, ideally winning freedom if they survive. With no sense of humor about its own absurdity (aside from little bits or wry business from Carradine), the mix of Arkush-shot action and Niciphor shot pretentious dialogue wizzes along but there are a lot of shots wherein a row of three to five tricked-out 'death bikes' whizz past the camera in single file to a 'zzzzzzZap!' sound effect (that's just the same effect loop over and over; when they go through tunnels there's a rip of the tie-fighter sound in STAR WARS, but don't tell George, shhhh). 

Criticism out of the way, I like the guns, which are like big Pringles can-shaped mini bazookas that fire huge laser bolts that vaporize opponents, and I love the thrift-shop dumpster dive approach to the costumes, and I'm glad the film never bothers to explain the game's rules. If we're part of the film's intended drive-in demographic, well, we're probably too high from huffing rush and snorting evaporated Nyquil to not think it's our own fault we can't follow what's going on. Blowing shit up though?! Hell yeah, and let the teachers and short goomba burnouts who wronged you in middle school get theirs by flaming proxy.

Claudia Jennings endures the torture of the light strips

Then there are other weird bits: cute girls who disobey the sleazy leader get thrown naked into the room of dangling light strips, or zapped on the color filter-lit table of abstract woe. It would be misogynist if it wasn't hilarious in its plastic abstraction and half-hearted wincing. I like that stuff though. Confidentially, I never understood this habit some of the newer movies have of making the pain and fear so vivid and realistic it leaves you shaken. (The worst of these? Noomi Rapace! She makes her character's pain so vivid it ceases to entertainment.)  Corman and company get that it's supposed to be pulp cover salacious and/or goofy, not traumatizing. It's one of the great truths of myth and acting: unconvincingly acted pain lightens the heart. Slimy monsters do the raping and the end result isn't therapy but ALIEN-rip living births. The electro-lightshow shock treatments given to Claudia Jennings don't leave a scar on our psyche but harken the whole mess back a few years to AIP's DUNWICH HORROR (1971) and Hazel Court's initiation scene in MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1968). The weird lighting and enigmatic presence of David McLean's 'Lord Zirpola' as the sick spectator / torturer gives these scenes a weird vibe reminiscent of the conditioning scenes in CLOCKWORK ORANGE or the jaded diners in CAFE FLESH. In this future it's hard to tell where meta-reality and the diegetic performances separate. Even in their plywood holding cells, still wet with white paint, Carradine and Jennings are on display before the all-seeing eye of Zirpola--this combination of paranoid despot and louche peeping tom.

David Carradine plays an amalgam of Kane from ABC's 1972-5 KUNG FU series and of course Frankenstein in DEATH RACE 2000; lupine playmate Claudia Jennings is a fellow guide and warrior (as in the best Corman stealth-feminism, she's as tough and wise and as combat-proficient as any of the men - and prettier too). Great as they both are at keeping straight faces amidst the madness, Lynch, as the bad guy / master henchman gets all the best lines, purred in a mellow emotionless forceful calm: "You call me animal? After all I tried to do to make you feel at peace?" Whatever his fall from grace, he's openly admirable towards the memory of Carradine's warrior mother, whom he killed in battle after she kicked him out of "the League"), giving him the ultimate warrior greeting: "Salute your mother for me." And it's always amazing the way Lynch seems to wind up in films full of fire effects, considering his history (3). In fact, I'm literally in awe of his fearlessness (2). Burn scars cover almost entire body, yet there he is, striding amidst the fireballs like it's just another day at the fair, saying oblique justifications like "man is a candle that radiates life - he must burn." (1)

Andrew Stein's synthesizer score provides a great minimalist mess of wind sounds, zaps, and sustained notes somewhere between the Bebes' FORBIDDEN PLANET and faux John Carpenter. His attempts at actual melody are terrible (they remind me of stuff I've made for my own films), but then Jerry Garcia starts noodlint in and around in the mix, coming and going at the darndest times. And as anyone who ever sat through a Dead show can tell you, if you depend on Jerry to lead you out of the caves of aimless noodling, well, you're going to be in there a long while and things might get weird before they start to see the light of melody. Here, weird is a good thing. 

Weirder still is the way faux-samurai ethos are folded into the stilted dialogue, creating an effect like stealing someone else's clean underwear at the laundromat: the narrator stresses the sacredness of combat, noting the range guides "ow(e) allegiance only to their foes." The greeting between range guides is "Our union is limited." Another keeper, delivered with the solemnity through which Carradine won the heart chakras of a generation of strip mall karate kids: "No one can touch myself." I wanted to write every line down, but my attention span is limited. And without that deep-set eye roll couched in Carradine's intonation, or the mellifluent low ebb Lynch gives to his, I can no more capture their wry beauty than a moon capture the dragon fly's wallet.

In case you can't tell, I got mad love for this terrible movie and all the deadpan jokes Carradine, editor Larry Bock, and replacement director Arkush, sneak little into the termite crevasses. Every so often Carradine casts a wry glance at the camera that Bock and Arkush leave in, and it counteracts the more pretentious serious art elements that no doubt the original director--fresh out of film school and full of self-seriousness-- shoehorned in. I love the way the mutants hide their faces so we don't linger on the awful yellow ping-pong ball eyes and I love how Jenning's unusual fox-like features are complimented by her white fur collar. I'm not a fan of the grating replaying of the same sound effect over and over during the endless shots of pursuing bikers but, after all, our union is limited. Noodle on, Big Jerry. Noodle on.

The Shout DVD includes a fun Bock and Arkush commentary wherein we learn that whatever Niciphor was intending with his initial version, it didn't work; Arkush was called in to direct new footage of fireballs, nudity and enough action to make Niciphor's high concept artsy parts less static, which Arkush did in spades. He pours anarchic pyromaniac anarchy onto the staid sci-fi conceptualism with some of the same giddy anarchic spirit he brought to ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL and GET CRAZY. (that the latter isn't on DVD is one of the great crimes of the 21st century) and so DEATHSPORT becomes like the school project between the sanctimonious nerd who did most of the work and the cool burnout who only shows up on the last day but adds in enough cool random stuff that the nerds's portentious twaddle becomes at least palatable to the restless student body. 

To sum: with the scorched features and measured tone of the fearless fire elemental Richard Lynch, the always lovely and literally and figuratively foxy Jennings, the cracking wry fourth wall eye rolling of Carradine, the copious fireballs, the tricked-out bikes flying into the air, the sly way the actors cover up the budget limitations, sometimes with just their hands, and the Arkush commentary explaining it all when you need a break from the Zzzzap sound effects, well you're guaranteed a reasonably good time. Just don't watch the second feature on the Shout DVD, BATTLETRUCK. It might have Michael Beck but he's a long way from XANADU...  Aren't we all?  

SEE ALSO

Death Drivin' America 2: DEATH RACE 2050

Death Drivin' Ameerica #1: CONVOY 

Splitness in Motion: TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, CALIFORNIA SPLIT

NOTES:

1. Lynch also played a cult leader who encourages his flock to burn themselves up in BAD DREAMS, and an alien hybrid cult leader who burns himself up in a tenement basement in GOD TOLD ME TO. 

2-3. The scarred skin of Lynch's face is real --he poured gas on himself and lit a match while under the influence of too much LSD in the 1960s. I think youtube has some clips of him talking about it.

5 Awesomely Psychotronic films can Prepare YOU for the coming of TRUMPMERICA!

Even casual Americans will soon be called to bear witness to what promises to be the most bizarre election in the history of our frail democracy: the battle between the mighty Donald, his hair Reichstag-fiery as he struts and curses before his bloodthirsty throng, and a woman. How did America get to this?

Only the drive-in knows for sure. That's where it all started, whatever it is, and it's been slithering up from those tawdry mosquito-covered screens, across the abandoned strip mall Blockbusters and up through Amazon Prime, waiting, for you! Presuming you have the Prime (and if not, you should): walk tall, sit proud, and keep watching the skies for his shiny wings. The Russians are here; the werewolves are coming; the rats are leaving in droves.

Switch it off or turn to STONED!

Whiter your conscience allows you to vote for him or not, Prime has five films avail. to stream that might prepare you for his coming. At the very least, these grandiose offerings may remind us of headier days, a time when feminism was called women's lib and didn't preclude casual, unsafe sex; diversity was called black power and didn't preclude pimp strutting; and liberal caterwauling was called just a lot of radical hippie nonsense.

NOTE TO THE WISE: Prime and streaming alike be stocked with loads of cool niche pyschotronic cast-offs but 95% of it is crap, cropped, or corny. What you need, my friend, is the right guide, some madman who likes to sink his hand into the muddy mire, but has a jeweler's eye for hidden sparkle and would only recommend things in a correct anamorphic ratio, things shot on 35mm film! Donald wouldn't have it any other way. He can afford film, "people." Besides being more expensive and tactile, it's shinier, like the head of the Donald.... like the Donald... (you) like the Donald....

(PS - All screenshots on this post taken directly from Amazon Streaming for quality assurance)

1. THE ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE

(1967) Dir. Roger Corman
****

Never one to miss a chance for collateral production value, Corman utilized Fox's still-standing Hello Dolly! 1920s street sets, and added lots of comic book vibrancy and deadpan Paul Frees narration to tell the story of the last 24 hours in the lives of all the key Chicago players for the titular massacre: Jason Robards is too tall to be Capone and terribly hammy, especially when he chokes up his voice in Italian language curses, but seems to be having a blast and frankly, deserves it.  Ralph Meeker makes a good-natured, beery Bugs Mroan; George Segal turns on the smilingly sadism as a key North Side provocateur; for the nameless thugs there's Alex Rocco, Jack Nicholson, Dick Miller, and Bruce Dern mix with venerable greats like John Agar and Studs "Lloyd the bartender" Turkel - all cleaning their guns and waiting by the phone for the signal. Sexy Jean Hale (below) provides the perfect mid-film breather from all the toxic masculinity as Segal's sexy girlfriend. Her way-too-expensive new fur coat triggers an extended, lamp-bashing brawl that's a joy to behold. The print Amazon's been streaming is HD perfection. Sure it leaves you kind of 'so-whatting' once it's all over, but what a rush getting there! Isn't that kind of like the presidential run itself?

Trump Factor: Check Robards' eyes (above) as he prepares to 'fire an apprentice.'

Poe and Lenore on the open road (you can hear Johnny Depp stirring in his 
day care center nap room.)

2. GAS-S-S-S

(1971) Dir Roger Corman
***

Corman's final film as a director, this countercultural comedy (written by George MIAMI BLUES Armitage) functions as a kind of DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) meets WILD IN THE STREETS (1968), imagining a near future that a lot of hippies were hoping for, one where the military accidentally releases a poison gas that kills everyone over thirty, lifting the world out of the button-down conservative repression of the establishment and into some kind of San Francisco guerrilla theater troupe / Firesign Theater post-apocalyptic wild west. Far out.

Alas, not all young folks are groovy, man. What about rapey jocks and bikers? Well, we'll find out soon enough: across dune-buggy deserts and down tumbleweedy small town California streets rolls a ragtag group of sensible peace-loving (heteronormative) couples, regularly forced to escape the clutches of various agitprop start-ups and desperadoes. They also wind up at a Country Joe and the Fish show, which is somehow worse. God Himself narrates with a hammy Jewish accent, and--just so you know it's a Corman film--Poe, raven and Lenore at his side, rides up on a chopper to make worldly comments.

As with similar odysseys (CANDY, BARBARELLA, WEEKEND, BLACK MOON)--moments of brilliant sociopolitical satire run episodic counterpoint to tiresome stretches of draggy, dated, sexist puerility. Luckily, as with CANDY, the best segments have an air of priapic death rattle desperation and historical savvy which ages far better than GAS'ss tedious post-HAIR backseat fumbling. For GASS the best stretch occurs about  a half hour or so in, when our gang is ensnared by a deranged college football quarterback and his marauding band of teammates and cheerleaders. His rousing pep talk--a fusion of big game college football cliche with plans for rape-and-pillage marauding--brilliantly bends all the smug hippy criticisms and evasions back into itself so that it disappears like a devouring ouroboros. Like the violence in CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the football rape and loot practice sequences are genuinely anarchic, our laughter chokes in our throats. As a metaphor it's vastly superior to  the doctors and nurses  shouting "Kill! Kill!" during their football game in the much more favorably reviewed M*A*S*H (1970) of which this is clearly a kind of Mad / National Lampoon attitudinal spinoff. 

The next great chapter finds the heroes ensnared by an outlaw biker gang who've taken over a Palm Springs golf course/country club. Their biker leader assigns them groundskeeper duties, and takes them on long golf cart rides for at-length talks about how they need to start lifting themselves up by their bootstraps, working their way up to caddyhood, etc. Armitage's sociological double-entendre dialogue in these two sequences really takes flight with these savagely American moments. I think Paddy Chayefsky or Terry Southern couldn't do it half as well. 

 If GAS-S-S-S stayed at that dark comic level, it could have been a great absurdist assault on the cinematic conventions of bourgeois patriarchy. Taken as a whole, while it might be blind to its own male chauvinism, at least it's also realistic about the difficulty of staying peaceful and nonviolent when your community is threatened by an outside force. That it actually finds a solution without a deux ex machina or 'statement'-making SOLDIER BLUE-style massacre is far more radical than just hoping for the arrival of some enigmatic drifter (In case you forgot, BILLY JACK had made a tidy bundle that same year).

Alas, the next dune buggy montage is always just around the corner.

 Ach! So many dune buggies, so many strobe light show 'sex' scenes, so much Country Joe.

Not helping matters any is that the self-apppointed head of the hearty band of heteronormative buggy-riders (Bob Corff) is a wan little long-haired ginger with a high little voice and no discernible charm. Probably cast because, thanks to THE GRADUATE, everyone wanted a blank naif as their Candide, Corff might well be a nice person in his way but, for free love to not seem skeevy, we have to believe the guy getting all these cute babes is charming enough he wouldn't need to play that card; if not, ala Corff, he comes off as just a 'free love' carpetbagger. Was he the son of Corman's golf partner or something? And when there are so much spry future stars playing along the sidelines-- Ben Vereen, Talia Shire, Elaine Giftos, Cindy Williams, Bud Cort --one wants answers why we don't see more of them instead of this irritatingly smug little pisher and his gift for turning any air satiric line into a self-righteous smarmy lodestone. Oy Vey! God, vot were you thinking?

'Whew', glad I got that off my chest. Living in smarmy Park Slope with all its anemic hipsters clearly has really gotten to me. Show me your fangs, children! 

Trump Factor: You can't get more Trump than those bikers on the country club links!  The "free-spirited outsiders trying to make peace with those still clinging to the crumbling hetero-white-Christian-male authority" illusion is-- based on all those Trump rally disruptions--an important lesson I hope we remember soon. If you're a liberal isn't it kind of your job to put the gun down first? Otherwise you're just a second rate conservative, no matter how many flowers you wear.  

3. UNHOLY ROLLERS

(1972) Starring: Claudia Jennings. 

**1/2

An early capitalizer on the 70s' lady roller derby craze (Raquel Welch's KANSAS CITY BOMBER came out the same year) this is a fine example of what I've just now termed 'libsploitation,' i.e. a film about a bloodsport hottie who feels outraged at all the sexual harassment she has to endure on and off the track, all while the camera ogles her undressing in the locker room before and after games. Luckily the late, great super brawler and Playboy superstar Claudia Jennings is the star of both film and team, and she tears into both the sex and loathing with admirable relish, becoming the bloodiest, most combative female roller derby player in town. The team owners would shut her down except the fans go nuts for it, goading her on to ever wilder displays of violence that eventually leave the track and erupt in the crowds. And when the PR hypocrisy finally gets to be too much, she just bashes the team owner over the head with her trophy and goes on a parking lot rampage, rolling down the rink parking lot and onto Main Street like she's three stories tall, ready to roll over the cars rather than the other way around.

It probably sounded better on paper, but even though it seems kind of ridiculous, it works because Jennings really lets it rip, taking full advantage of the opportunity to lunge for banal consumer-driven bile-spewing mainstream America's jugular like a rabid but very sexy monster. We wouldn't see such a batshit go-for-broke attempt to punch a hole through the wall of first-world consumer society hell until 2002, with Mickey Roarke rampaging through the grocery aisles in THE WRESTLER.

What a cast! Victor Argo is the team's trainer! Roberta Collins Jennings' nearly-as-fierce teammate. It could have been a classic in the hands of Jack Hill, or good in the hands of Steve Carver--but it's in the hands of hilariously amateurish Vernon Zimmerman (who only made one more feature after this, the portentously-titled FADE TO BLACK).

But, hell, anyone who was a kid in the 70s has a 'soft' spot for this type of film, for it's the kind of thing you can follow even when you're too drunk or young to understand half the dialogue. Often we can't tell who's supposed to have punched who, for fights are not well choreographed and shot. But they still rock.

Side Note: In case you don't remember, under the inter-sibling play fighting accord of 1971, all slow-mo fake punches are created equal. No matter how much smaller they are than you, or how widely they missed, you have to react like they really nailed you, falling down or staggering backwards etc. It's a rule that kept our childhood aggression always on the surface, where it could be quickly expelled and evaporated the moment it bubbled up.

I'd forgotten about that great rule until I saw UNHOLY ROLLERS. Fuckin' A. Claudia Jennings brings the same glint of genuine madness she brought to the insane and divine GREAT TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE (and TRUCK STOP WOMEN). As she brawls her way around the great rotating roller rink of heaven, let us pray for her soon return -- to kick more ass in whatever form she chooses to occupy!

TRUMP-Factor. - Turning a public event into a shouting match for the sake of ratings and whipping up the blood frenzy in rowdy audiences? Here Jennnigs says and does anything she feels like and her managers can't argue since her outrageous behavior gets her more and more fans, i.e. no such thing as bad publicity. As her momentum builds, her rivals become more and more abusive to try and keep up, and the crowds grow more and more infused with bloodlust, until even her handlers wonder if they've created an uncontrollable monster. Sound familiar, CNN?

4. TERRORVISION

(1986) Dir. Ted Nicolau

***

Good natured mid-80s MTV/New Wave/mall culture/punk horror/sci fi comedy in the vein of EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY, NIGHT OF THE COMET, REPO MAN, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, and BUCKAROO BANZAI, this Charles Band joint is the story of an ugly but hilarious blob-crab-style alien materializing via a then state-of-the-art satellite TV of swinging Malibu parents Mary Woronov and Gerritt Graham. Diane Franklin their Cyndi Lauper-ish teen daughter; Chad Allen plays the younger kid, a tow-head young gun nut under the tutelage of his crackpot survivalist war vet grandfather (Bert Remsen) who lives in the adjoining bomb shelter. TV horror hostess Madame Medusa (Jennifer Richards), a pair of fellow swingers (Alejandro Rey and Randi Brooks) and Jonathan Gries as the daughter's metalhead boyfriend ("too rude!") drop by to round out the stellar cult-ready cast of dinner. They're all on the same page, sitcom-from-Hell overacting-wise, which makes it all click together deliriously. With its loud 80s colors and bizarro decor it might be a nightmare under the influence of household solvents, but underneath the gross-outs and decadence lurks a loving spirit that triangulates its genial signal somewhere between 60s John Waters, 80s Tim Burton, and 50s Roger Corman (I kept expecting Dick Miller to show up as a door-to-door salesman or disgruntled neighbor). 

Trump Factor: I could make some parallel with the all-devouring monster coming out of the TV and Fox News (and Hillary as the other--benevolent---alien trying to clean up the mess and get the family's attention but not being heard over the din), but I'd rather just consider it a pleasing reminder that the extended American nouveau riche families of the 80s weren't all insufferably materialistic or rabidly conservative. Some still wanted to swing, baby. And they made good parents - there, I said it! Zeroing in on the macabre heightened reality in the cracks of mall culture (rather than just being 'quirky'), TERRORVISION brings back memories of the early days of VHS when whole families would get together to watch the X-rated movies mom had rented from the back room of the local appliance store, all rather curious and innocent. 

It didn't last of course, we never watched more than one or even a half as a family before turning it off kind of ashamed, to never speak of it again, the shame net of the early 80s closing around us like a shroud. The word 'inappropriate' began to swirl in the back of our minds for the first time. I'm always wondering if it was this sudden access to excessive sex and violence after so many decades of variety show pap that helped turn once-swinging free-spirited middle America into the panicky prudes we still are today, or whether we're just trying to reclaim our lost innocence so we can have fun re-losing it (i.e. the highs are higher when you've been sober for awhile). Maybe Trump doesn't drink or do drugs (neither did Hitler, or Osama bin Laden) but he'd fit right in at the Caligula-like marble jacuzzi room of this crazy family, despite his half-assed nods to the conservative Christian sect. 

Because right or wrong, this is America, baby, and no matter how virulently we shout across the lines tomorrow, we can still party together tonight. 

If we sometimes forget how hard we rock, it's only 'cuz we rock so hard. 

5. THE VISITOR 

(1979) Dir. Giulio Paradisis 

***

The crowning plume on Italy's many-feathered Omen / Close Encounters imitation helmet, this tale of a telekinetic devil child named Kaity (Paige Connor), caught in a bidding war between ancient alien forces of good and evil, has nearly everything that made the 70s great: devil spawn children (ala Omen, Exorcist) peregrine falcons (we kids all dreamt of owning one), mall ice rinks (malls were a new thing), NBA basketball (Wilt Chamberlin or someone like that has a brief staring contest with the evil Kaity in the front row before missing a 3-pointer), 'pong' (the herald of something brand new called 'video games'), gymnastics (Nadia Comăneci rocked the world in the '76 Olympics); giant old school projector TVs (with the three primary color orbs) and big casts of aging former-A-list stars (always with Shelly Winters and/or John Huston, or both) mixing with young up-and-comers, here Joanne Nail from Switchblade Sisters as the mom with the cosmic devil womb;  Lance Henriksen as her rich team-owning lover / pawn of a Satanic board of directors (headed by Mel Ferrer) demanding a male child (the antichrist still can't be a girl, Satani is sexist) from Nail's womb (but she's not into it, terrified already of Kaity). Glen Ford is a suspicious detective killed by Katy's peregrine familiar; Shelly Winters is the astrology-guided housekeeper; Sam Peckinpah (!) is Barbara's abortionist ex-husband, called upon in secret after she wakes up pregnant (the board of directors, tired of waiting for Henriksen to get 'er done, abduct her off the highway in a UFO style impregnating surgery vehicle); John Huston is God or Lord Enki, or the substitute babysitter, gone to Earth after Jesus (Franco Nero) alerts him to Kaity's presence. When not babysitting, Huston spends a lot of time walking up stairs with legions of bald guys in robes, lighting up cosmic landing strips on building rooftops while Franco Micalizzi's funk-galactic score effectively conjures memories of 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind as re-imagined by Meco. Man oh man! Nick Redfern should love this movie!

If all that wasn't 70s enough, there are car crashes, bird attacks, ferns, escalators, kids using curse words (Kaity tells Ford to go fuck himself, but haltingly, like a real kid would in the 70s when foul language still had some mystical power), and--in Omen-honoring tradition, pushing a wheelchair bound Nail headfirst through the wall-size aquarium. 

Most 70s of all: the script fuses ancient alien theory, with Gnosticism and Buddhism to underwrite its cosmology (showing the filmmakers much more disposed towards Erich von Daniken than William Peter Blatty). If you've read my 'other' blog, Divinorum Psychonauticus, you know I support that decision. In his electric yellow hippie wig, Nero makes a helluva great Jesus, and! 

Trump Factor: As a scheming CEO pressured into a virulently pro-life position by Satanic illuminati benefactors, Raymond lacks only Trump's ambivalenza vulgare to grease his polls. Still, no matter how persistent and bluntly the devil woos us, even if he arranges 'accidents' (ala the Reichstag burning) to make us feel desperately dependent on him, we needn't vote his way. God, aka Lord Enki (alias Jerzy aka The Visitor) is clearly pro-choice, but also insists that, before he takes you to his heavenly realm, your selfish malice (and hair) must be ripped from your soul by cleansing bird swarms aka paying higher income tax. 

Have you paid yours yet, dear reader? Capone didn't. Does he look worried?  Salut!

See also (avail. on Prime) and reviewed on this site: 

THE DEATHMASTER (1971)
SHIVERS (1975)
MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)
LISA AND THE DEVIL (1974)
PUMPKINHEAD (1988)