Angels of Groovy Death #IV: Lynn Lowry Special Edition

With her big cat eyes, button nose, wide toothy smile (innocent yet terrifying), long straight hair, and knack for being cast in future iconic cult gems, Lynn Lowry was a kind of unofficial poster girl for the post-Manson hippy- horror micro-genre of the late-60s/early 70s. She was the quintessential gone-homicidal-flower-child, the girl who Middle American viewers dreaded drawing as a babysitter. She was too sweet to say no to, but.... something about her made you uneasy - like she could charm an elderly neighbor at the front door while letting a coven of knife-wielding satanic bikers in through the back. She glowed with a kind of worldly ephemeral inner luminescence that somehow kept her innocent and free even as she was being gunned down by soldiers or cutting off a housewife's hand with an electric carving knife.

We, the small kids of the early 70s, all knew and loved a girl like her. When she babysat us, anything could happen: fun board games, seduction, arson, smoking-- all kinds of mischief, all with a spontaneous air that let us know any second-guessing or hesitation at one of her dares and she'd leave us behind, forever. You either ran with her giddy madness or got left behind to die in the dull roar of the TV flames. We learned to just say yes, no matter what.

Girls like her carried a bad rep. This was the era of a very popular urban legend of the hippy babysitter who was so high on LSD she microwaved the baby and tucked in the chicken. That may sound farfetched, and one presumes it was, but the legend was so embedded in popular consciousness of the time that it shows up in TV movies like Go Ask Alice (1973), in the scene wherein Alice finds out she's been dosed while on a babysitting job by vindictive ex-drug buddies, so rather than risk the baby's safety by succumbing to the lure of the Radarange, she locks herself in the closet. That the film doesn't even need to explain why she does this testifies to that legend's prevalence.

We kids weren't afraid, though. We wanted to have her over every chance we got. So when mom was making the calls, we prayed for all her first choices to fall through.


This innocent serpent flower child was a new kind of femme fatale. Not the sort to go framing you for murder or shaking you down with blackmail like in the 40s-50s; she wasn't even a new version of the old spoiled nympho drug addict waif like Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep. This new homicidal cultist was never spiteful or mischievous --her heart was too full of love; acid had burned out those small minded reptilian fear-desire tail-biting instincts that befell lesser mortals with base fears and wants. And it's this freedom from the usual fears and desires, above all else, that made her so dangerous and unpredictable. Along with everything else, acid dissolved away the morality and impulse control the rest of us took for granted. These tripping waifs belonged more in a comfy psych ward where they couldn't have long fingernails or access to sharp things like pointed scissors... at least until the drugs wore off. But instead of chasing butterflies through leafy fields they were trying to make popcorn --heating lots of oil in a big pot on the roaring stove while we hovered immediately below.

But we were innocent too, and in our love for her, all sense melted away.

Consider this, especially if you're a straight male: Look at that picture below left, for a few seconds, long enough to get a read on all three of their faces. Now... consider if these three girls were to come onto you in, say, the park while you were alone reading the paper on a bench on a sunny 'frisco day. You know that you'd have no problem resisting the ones on the left and right, they're more like sisters or aunts, but the girl in the middle, man, she's cute. If she wanted to go home with you, you'd take her. And you'd be dead by dawn, and she'd wake up snug in your entrails with no knowledge where she was or who you were. Then she'd shower off the blood, eat enough acid to send a rhino to the psych ward, then fingerpaint on the walls with your coagulating blood while softly singing "tralalalala." Does that make her evil? Or are you dumb for letting beauty blind you to danger signs? Were danger signs even there? If evil isn't present, merely a lysergic 'lack' of moral partitioning, then it's just 'temporary insanity' and that's nowhere near the same thing.

"We have no jelly donuts for you today... only death."

The 'Manson Girls,." singing and chanting as one, had become national figures around this time trials (1971) and though I was too young to remember the courtroom hooplah I do remember the fear associated with the words 'Helter Skelter', the baby/microwave thing, and the fear some crazy swinger devil worshippers down the block would put razors in your apples on Halloween. (So we all had to 'check' any fruit, not that we ever got any - if you gave out apples, you were automatically suspect).

This fear of hippies, and the serpent under the hippie flower, so to speak, goosed the 70s along and gave seemingly helpless little barefoot waifs selling peace buttons on the corner a kind mobster street gang clout. No one dared mess with them. And as a kid nosing through mom's record albums, the ones with similarly clad babes (like Peter Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas) all had a queasy bone-chilling dread about them that wasn't there before, and didn't last very long (by the time I became a hippie myself in the late 1980s, I'd forgotten all about it).

Then again, my aunt on my dad's side in Chicago ran off and joined a commune, and we went to visit when I was five, and man that was a hairy place - I tried cat food for the first time, and ran through lots of beaded doorways, and still remember the groovy art, and so forth. My aunt was dating her fourth guy named Randy... four Randys.... in a row... the mind boggled. My grandmother had disowned her.

My parents were just a few years too old for that scene, Ours was like in Mad Men, that bridge club wife swap 70s middle-class golf game / kids walk to school of our own accord / freedom to roam just stay within "Dinner!" earshot type.

We ran amok. We molested the babysitters, not the other way around.

And if you grew up kind of crushing on Susan Dey even if you rarely watched The Partridge Family (Danny was gross; the music horrific), then she might be who comes to mind the first time you see Lynn Lowry; with that downturned lip and sultry eyes and wavy straight hair, Lowry strikes me first as if she's Dey crossed with a cute alien hybrid drawn by a Disney animator unwittingly dosed by a CIA operative. Someone sure should have dosed the Partridge Family. God I hated that redheaded kid Danny, that plagiarizing ginger with his unheimlich neediness.... and wasn't too crazy about Shirley Jones and her sister-wife collars and androgynous hair. She was like that mom who eavesdrops as you try to pick up her daughter than snidely puts you in your place, loud enough for everyone to hear, so that you blush and stammer and run home to sulk with your comic books, and then you never come over again. People, c'mon get happy, yeah right --quit tellin' us what to do. You could tell Mrs. P was one of those hovering mothers that never questions why she's always grabbing things out of her daughters' hands and lavishing them on Keith, whether Keith wants them or not. Feeling badly, Keith waits til mom goes off to pray or something, then gives sis back her shit.

Nice, sweet doomed Keith. He'd make a good sacrifice for the solstice.

On the other hand, Marcia Marcia Marcia was also pretty hot, and had similar straight blonde hair. And that whole family was way cooler, way less locked in their Mormon incestuous death grip. Much healthier sexually. If Mrs. Brady saw you clumsily putting some moves on fair Marcia, she wouldn't shame you, she'd probably just call you into the den, give you some hands-on sexual advice and then kick you back downstairs with a strip of condoms in your hand and lipstick on your forehead like a governmental seal of approval.

Why? Because unlike Mrs. Partridge, Mrs. Brady got laid, really laid. Even us kids could tell that, and her sexually satisfied glow kept the decade alight with a special baseline magic. Mrs. Partridge, if she ever saw how happy they were, would probably call Child Protective Services and make up some lurid lie.

David Lynch would make great use of this terrifying yet sweetly innocuous smile.  Lowry alone knows how to make her untrampled flower child joy indistinguishable from a flesh-rending maenad frenzy

I mention all this only to illustrate how the Partridge Family vs. Brady Bunch dichotomy provided parameters for our collective 70s pre-sexual psyche, and maybe that's partially the idea a Susan Dey archetype untethered from her prim bitch overprotective mom and ginger brother, running away with a Satan-worshipping boyfriend and winding up rabid (ala 1970's I Drink Your Blood --her first movie role) or foaming at the mouth thanks to some new STD (Shivers), chem warfare agent (The Crazies)--or just really speedy acid--rang so many popular unconscious gongs. The times demanded a girl who could slice off a woman's hand with an electric carving knife and still be an innocent, a free spirit cranked to eleven, a girl so pure the needle spins all the way around to the other extreme- batshit homicidal. If you've ever known and partied with the type then you know how rare and intoxicating they are, the sweet sudden shock of dread when what was once a feeling of smitten love and devotion to her sweet beauty becomes sickening blood-chilled dread, the realization you were so far on cloud 9 you made the mistake of letting her get between you and the exit.

give the lady a hand

A sweet, sweet Scorpio (born Oct. 15), she's the kind of friendly animal a Pisces like me would let ride on our back as we swim the channel, but I'm too savvy to ask why she'd sting me to death halfway across - it's not even cuz a man or a sexually transmitted parasite or water-spread virus told her too, or because of acid, it's just her nature. Her long straight hair like wind-stirred gossamer over a denim jacket picturesquely dabbed in a cop's blood, when she starts slowly laughing at the carnage going on down the hill in The Crazies there's a weird schism that marks a great unexplored middle ground between the sane heroes and the 'changed.'  Rather than turn zombie or something, where the line is clearly drawn between normal and 'possessed' or us vs. them, Lowry extends the 'in between' with her contracting and expanding organic circular breathing. She's already scans a "little" crazy, so going all the way crazy is no great stretch, nor is it quite clear the extent to which her incestuous dad's behavior is a result of Trixie (the virus) or just habit. Eventually she's too crazy to know to hide when the military comes. They end up surrounding her, guns drawn, like she's a dangerous maniac, even though all she's doing is offering them flowers and singing, just another flower child protester with no concern for her own life as she marches towards the bayonets with a flower in her hand.

Like some Innsmouth elder royal Neptune princess

With that air elemental aura (she'd make a great Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest), Lowry is both uncanny and inviting, innocent and corrupting, the babysitter from the 70s my little brother and I prayed for as my mom made her round of early evening phone calls. We only got her around 1/3 of the time but when we did our stomachs sank with queasy dread. Whether she'd be in the mood to play her dangerous Go Ask Alice-style games with us rather than staying on the phone all night or hanging out on the porch with some sketchy boyfriend was another story. But if Jupiter aligned with Mars and she was ready to focus her loving laser beam attention upon us, then it was like some magic new dimension was opened in the Kuersten house, like she alone had a key to a secret door in the hallway wall that led to where all the cool stuff was.

Lowry has that same vibe, an open book of forbidden but benign ambivalence that puts her past our reach even while making her as accessible as all outdoors; she can dive merrily into the depths of depravity and horror and escape unscathed, like Daniel in the lion's den. As long as we don't try to pull her out of it, no harm will come to either of us. If we step in, we'll get hurt.

Shivers - during the transformation from sexually available but professional nurse to uninhibited maenad orgiast.

Toots, my darling, I was only eight years-old and didn't understand but I still hated the implied ascension to older man leering implied in the your acceptance of a quasi-derogatory nickname (I was always trying to come up with a different one) clearly given by a much older man, like a pissed off patron of a table she's waiting on at a roadside diner. Toots, I hated having to say that name to address you, my froggy voice stringy anchored by sublime pre-sexual adoration.

Mom stopped volunteering at that runaway shelter when we moved to NJ in 1980, a fitting analogy. I was 13, so bye-bye cool wild flower power kiss you-on-the-mouth babysitters and hello slasher craze sober virgin final girls making sure we did all our homework and went to bed on time and then we lay  awake, terrified anyway. The early 80s: devil worship wasn't 'fun' with denim babysitters anymore, but the province of icky child molesters at day care centers. The slasher craze had even formerly-louche grade school swingers afraid to go upstairs at night unless mom was already up there, her sewing machine humming the "all clear". Only WW2 saved me from that fear. I stopped thinking about slashers with knives and started thinking about Sgt. Rock, Sherman tanks vs. Panzers, Messerschmidts, Spitfires, B-17s. I was invulnerable when being shot at over Berlin. Figures.

Was it some kind of EC/DC House of Secrets/Tales from the Crypt, post-code/pre-code comic book comeuppance, all this terror and tub-thumping? It didn't matter which side of the censorship barrier, what was once shag carpet and wood panelling vivid--once Thulsa Doom snake cult decadent--was now just postage stamp size color pictures in the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and John Buscemi Conan the Barbarian reprints. And that was how I wanted it. Whether the one led to the other, in grand macabre twist payback paperback style I don't know. But if both sides want a thing, at least on some level, and if no one else is involved or hurt, can it still be evil, even if it kills them?

It might depend who you ask, but frankly I'd trust Baudelaire as a babysitter over Cardinal Richelieu any day, for he who writes of evil needn't express it, physically. Either way, whether we felt it was evil or not, the fall-out was the same. We may wonder what happened in that Tenderloin peep both in THE HOWLING that caused Dee Wallace to repress her memories. Did that Fiona Apple "Criminal" MTV video cause me to revert back to savagery in the early 90s? Maybe, but by then I was an adult, strung out on a melancholy from never being able to get that delirious first MDMA peak high moment back again. Apple had that certain Lynn Lowry mix of childlike glee and physical corruption. Calvin Klein ran ads that looked intentionally like they were taken in some pervert's basement to send into Flesh World.  The important thing to understand is that dirty old man perversion of today was the gold chain hedonist swinger of yesterday, and if the girl is over eighteen and broke and hot and really into doing your drugs, is it a crime to get involved? Some people sure think so, irregardless. Lynn Lowry--or at least her archetypal hippie Mansonite--doesn't. She forgives you in advance.

We, who were just in elementary school at the time, can't remember if those days were really that deranged, but there's magic and power in the wicked but sweet, terrifying but absolving cat sister mile of Lowry on film which will never fade. Whether succumbing to the mad slavering ecstasy-overdose insane group orgy hysteria of Shivers or giggling in progressive waves of insanity in The Crazies or playing with an electric carving knife in I Drink Your Blood, this strange wondrous actress evokes that 70s post-Manson 'girl next door' anxiety with a flair unrivaled. Some girls are just never far enough away from the fire to know they're burning. Bless them for that, and even if following them drowns you in cop bullets, hitting you like scorpion knife flicker stinging flames of razor wire cat o'nine tails water, how can you keep from singing? Tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....

FURTHER LOWRY READINGS:
"That's how you play 'Get the Guests'" SCORE!
SHIVERS! (capsule review)

Prepare for the Coming of the Hillary Matriarchy with these 5 Psychotronic Gems

From fish god cults to a cockeyed MAD MAX: FURY ROAD premake to maternal body horror so unseemly no one's dared try anything remotely like it in 30 years, these five psychotronic films predict the the new world orderless matriarchy of the Scorpio Sun / Pisces rising goddess Hulu-Ree Klinn-Tohn as handily as if they washed ashore with campaign bumper stickers in their rusty talons, and hammers to smash down the crosses from Middle America's fearful Christian churches.

My pick of Five Psychotronic Films on Amazon Prime for a new TRUMPMERICA post was such a hit I felt I had to balance the scale, so here it is. Evoking the coming liberal dystopia that can only result when a woman is or isn't elected president, there's less apocalypse and more matriarchy to worry about this time. A more inspiring future of liberal awareness, higher taxation of the rich, and massive un-deployment shall be enforced. With every new dead or symbolically neutered old white male voter we'll be sliding one step closer to socialism until we're so like Canada we'll forget how to pronounce "about" correctly.

PS - Dear Hulu: You should have a 'Resume' button. Instead we have to start over every time we press stop and that's crap (at least on my Blu-ray player). Also Hulu is a terrible name for a movie site. Don't try to seem playful! You've got enough dreary 50s-60s international art films on there to send even Ozu scrambling for the channel changer, and Hulu is a Hawaiian term, and some of us have never remembered to forget Pearl Harbor. So change yr name to FROGTOWN, and not just 'cuz there's so many insufferably French films on your site, but because you carry the one.. the only....

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN

(1988) Starring Sandahl Bergman, Roddy Piper 

**1/2

The lithe and lovely Sandahl Bergman and pleasingly self-effacing wrestler Roddy Piper roam the post-nuclear wasteland looking for wild women to impregnate in this cheeky but irresistible Full Moon hodgepodge. He's one of the few men still able to produce viable sperm (fallout has left most men dead or sterile) in a world kind of the gender opposite of Handmaid's Tale --post-apocalyptic, sterile, now a progressive matriarchy vs. lawless frontier. Put under the thumb (via a remote shock chastity belt) of a 'no nonsense' health official (Bergman), the Pipe's packed off behind border lines to 'liberate'-- and then do his duty upon--a harem of fertile 'passives' currently held captive in a frog mutant warlord's stronghold (a combination abandoned oil refinery and R-rated version of a STAR WARS cantina). And though they drive in a pink 'Medtech' station wagon, there's a badass chick (Cec Verrell) on a .50 calibre sunroof mounted machine as his 'bodyguard' to balance things out. She does a lot of bemused, lustful smirking at Hell's discomfort while cleaning her ordinance.

Frankly, there's no possible way--at this point--the film could go wrong.

The standout, for me, being of sound mind and a certain age, is the still-lithe Bergman as the health officer Spangle, able to project both carnal yearning and no-bullshit feminist authority (a very difficult combo to do right). This gorgeous, sexily assured ex-Fosse dancer is still as lithe, confident, graceful, strong and open-souled sweet she was six years earlier in Conan. Alas, Rodney's character is a bit on the broad side. Apparently--for some reason no sensible male in the audience will quite understand--Rodney is furious over his enslaved stud position, and keeps trying to escape! What a maroon, as Bugs bunny might say. Bergman merely touches one of her earrings and the explosive chastity belt shocks his nuts, but still he tries. Maybe that's why the scene where Spangle abducts--and then drugs--a wild fertile woman of the wasteland and compels Hell to mount her isn't as vile as it might have been. Instead it gets so ludicrously kinky on so many wrong levels, though, you just may remember, as I did, a whole mess of prepubescent sex fantasies you used to have in the first and second grade, before you really knew anything about sex so it was all tied in with leashes and master-slave dominance (but which the average 50 Shades-style film never gets right). With Hell expected to 'perform' while his two captors/guardian women watch with detached curiosity, ready to zap him at a moment's notice, we have a very satisfying inversion of the recent real life outrage with an all male government panel on women's sexual health. Here we have an all female team considering his phallus literally government property. It doesn't make things right but it's a start!


The big surprise though is Piper's ability to convey a surprisingly sweet and tender vulnerability in his softer scenes. Coming off a bit broad and flat when he's expected to play the sexist dingus, when he finally drops his guard, he becomes the most emotionally open character in the film! He's got a heart as big all outdoors!

If all this male subjugation gets to be too much then relax in knowing the second half of the film reverses the situation. As Sandahl goes into chains as an abducted slave led by Hell on a leash into Frogtown --their cover story is that he's there to sell her into the harem of the Frog warlord. Your feminist umbrage may start to kick in its stall but just know that the majority of the women characters in this bizarre slyly-satiric film are super capable and assertive, more physically agile and gutsier than any of the men, or frogs. In other words, rather than affirm male dominance, the film deconstructs the infantile frustrations beneath sadomasochism, harem-keeping, reptilian (or amphibian) sex slave mind games, and "dance! dance!" warlord cup-banging, revealing them all as pathetic attempts to reclaim the phallus from mighty Woman.

laugh while you can, monkey boy!

Such a thing might easily devolve into campy parody, but luckily everyone involved here has the good sense to play it straight. Even that semi-twee title is no obscurantist whimsy but strictest present tense fact: Piper's character is named Hell, and Frogtown is occupied by real frog mutants ("created as the by-product of your germ warfare") and the frog makeups/masks are pretty damned good.

That said, it's not perfect: a frog with a fez does a seriously terrible voiceover, there are too many close-ups (not Piper's strong suit) and it sometimes feels under-directed, but for every bad thing a good: Nicholas Worth pours on the sputtering malice as one of the frog warlords, Sandahl gets to do the 'Dance of the 3 Snakes' and lo and behold, there in the midst of the Frogtown cantina who should appear, but western character actor Rory Calhoun, wearing his good store teeth as a uranium miner!. During the big climactic wasteland car chase, when he's dying with his elderly head cradled in the laps of a backseat full of liberated pacifist concubines, a cute blonde warrior driving while a wanderer of the wasteland shoots from the passenger seat-- a horny mutant warlord in hot pursuit in his tricked-out, warrior-bedecked ride across the barren wasteland, you realize suddenly - holy shit! It prefigures the climax of Mad Max: Fury Road! Considering Frogtown is one of that slew of post-Road Warrior apocalypse road trip rip-off homages, it's almost spookily 'full circle' prescient (has George Miller seen this movie?)


Why Hillary: One look at the face of the odious frog king and you'll be reminded of a certain amphibious also-runner behind Trump. Sandahl is Hillary being sold to the Middle States ('can she dance?' asks the Frog Prince in he fez before voting/purchasing); the passive, fertile harem are the women voters of swing states looking askance at the brutalizing Handmaid's Tale future awaiting them under The Frog mutant's sway even though they've been trained to submit (one grand dame frog lady takes a shine to Piper and frees him, though it means her death -- she'd be the swing state independent female voting bloc). The matriarchy embodies the idealized Hillary future. Scruffy Roddy stands for the American midwest, reckoning the pros and cons between giving a woman control of the nation's balls, or else letting power-hungry toads run riot over our civil liberties. Some choice.

THE BROOD

(1979) Dir. David Cronenberg

***1/2

If you need a map through this genuinely strange, disturbing Cronenberg picture, I'd say watch his subsequent film, SCANNERS first. That film is a zippy mind-expander with solid acting, exploding heads, Michael Ironside in his best role (his facial expressions when he's scanning are beyond brilliant). Here in BROOD-land things are a little less pleasingly Hitchcockian and more gender/menstrual/reproductive disturbing. Oliver Reed is Dr. Raglan, the controversial creator of a very 70s form of gestalt therapy called 'psychoplasmics.' A method of focusing rage that causes the body to break out in spots... or cancerous tubers or worse, little homicidal blonde moppets, it's the Freudian 'hysteric complex' writ large upon the body (instead of a paralyzed arm, an extra one).  Wildly unhinged Samantha Eggar plays Raglan's star patient, so deep into his regressive therapy he won't let her concerned husband get in to see her. Their child, on the other hand, is brought in for weekends, but comes home traumatized and bruised. Weird and kind of ridiculous, it all goes down in another wintry remote experimental clinic (Cronenberg has a thing for private clinics operated in the wintry Canadian byways - socialized medicine, must be nice).

I don't want to spoil the plot, but what's going on in the subtext is kind of a post-feminist version of FORBIDDEN PLANET's Monster from the Id, making this a bit like KRAMER VS. FRANKENSTEIN. It's pretty yucky in spots but, for me, the hirsute actor in the beginning demonstration is the most disturbing part. He's so open and needy in that gross kind of harrowingly 'lonely man-boy who goes to 70s encounter groups or ecstasy parties so people will touch him' kind of way he gives me hives. Still, him aside, the scene where a cute possible love interest Ruth Mayer (Susan Hogan with a great 70s elfin hair cut) is hammered to death by two of the monster kids right in front of her horrified kindergarten class is perhaps the most outrageous and deeply disturbing scene in all of 70s horror. Dude, there's always SCANNERS if you're squirrelly. If not, hold on, for once Eggar gets a decent size piece of scenery in her hands she tears it up an industrial wood chipper.

PS - Seeing this again, I recognize my new favorite stealth character actor: Robert A. Silverman (above). Wearing a white towel on his neck to cover an awful mutating psychoplasmic affliction, he's so good in BROOD --and as Hans in NAKED LUNCH (above), and the artist in SCANNERS--well, he just knocks all Cronenberg's films up a notch. Why only Cronenberg seems to know of his genius is beyond me. Toronto experimental theater's gain is the cinematic world's loss?

Why Hillary: It is foretold in ancient texts: amok liberalism ushered in by a woman prez shall lead to the return of the 70s encounter group /EST craze. The nuclear family unit will be broken apart by an anti-patriarchal shrink who won't let the husband have control over his own wife. It's Canadian but you can argue that the human body being ruptured in The Brood is America itself: "Raglan encouraged my body to revolt against me," notes Silverman, "and it did." Asking why he's suing when he can't possibly prove Raglan's methods gave him cancer, Silverman says he's doing it for revenge! So people will know from the press that "psychoplasmics cause cancer." -i.e., global warming. The title 'brood' are the protestors disrupting Trump rallies. As with the Trump supporters themselves, it's not important whether or not the orange one is a genuine threat, it's enough that the protestors/children get angry thinking about him, and the anger justifies the reprisal. Imagine if all the rage spewed on internet comment sections was able to manifest itself as armies of homicidal moppets?

We'd all be hammered.

DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT

(1994) Dir. Linda Hassani

****

Shot through a haze of red and blue with just the right amount of imagination (neither whimsical nor grungy), this Satanic daughter love story is like THE LITTLE MERMAID x SPECIES with a refreshing lack of qualms about sex, God, or killing. The story begins in Hell: an Old Testament-style marching line of desert-wandering souls (ala STARGATE x PHANTASM) head to their fates, guided by pumping ominous-but-giddy Fuzzbee Morse liturgy. Angela Featherstone stars as the young, wistful demoness Veronica, who's about to come of age and take over torturing the embezzling bankers of Hell, but she dreams instead of seeing the surfaces of Earth and walking under the sky. Even thinking such a thing is forbidden by her sputtering, over-acting demon father (the "psycho's psycho," Nicholas Worth). Undaunted by his furious scourging lashes, Veronica sneaks up to the land of men and immediately fathoms there is much good work to do, tearing the spines and hearts out of rapists and racist cops, feeding their hearts to her dog Hellraiser, and shacking up with a handsome sweet-souled doctor named Max (Daniel Markel). And if any homicide detective tries to get in her way, she just shows him the hellfire behind her glowing eyes while making dire announcements about the grim future that awaits mankind. That's enough to keep him from digging any deeper. Besides, the chief doesn't mind a few less rapists and racists on the streets.

Like some Satanic bible school instructional video, this confusingly-titled (there are about 100 shows and movies named Dark Angel) female-directed little miracle has become one my go-to favorites the last few years, thanks to its dreamlike grungy fairytale threadbare quality, its incongruity of set and setting (everyone speaks English but it was clearly filmed in Romania), its Shelly Duvall-meets-Val Lewton-in-Ed Wood's basement mythopoetic aesthetic, its great cast and its dusky red and black color scheme (ala another favorite, Ghosts of Mars). Sure, Featherstone isn't the greatest actress in the world, but what she lacks in chops is surpassed by what she has--the ability to project complete confidence and emotional vacancy at the same time--is unteachable. Her flatline reading of dialogue like "I've always wanted to witness people coupling, Max, but I never thought it would move me so much," is so spot-on you realize better (or worse) actresses would never be able to match it. They'd either try to be sexy (and come off campy), imperious (and come off stuffy), mean (and come off bitchy) or tough (and come off jokey), but Featherstone's assertive confidence and deadpan demeanor is so despite-itself sexy she gets away with the actor equivalent of murder, which is just right for Matthew Freeway Bright's genius script (full of great lines like: "I don't require the blessing of the one true church to engage in sexual relations, Max.") And when she unfolds her true form--wings, horn, tail--after orgasm--while luxuriating out in the bed, it's somehow very reassuring, as is her matter-of-fact way with wrapping human hearts in newspaper to feed Hellraiser. I've only ever seen that kind of deadpan female genius--commanding both adoration and respect--in German science fiction film female characters from the 70s (as in STAR MAIDENS in the west, ELEOMA and IM STAUB DER STERNE in the east). It's sad America has never been able to duplicate it. Even Featherstone and Hassani had to go Romania to show it. Why there wasn't a sequel (judging from the title more than one was planned) I don't know, unless of course it's the damn patriarchy, the same one that stops STAR MAIDENS or those other films from being released, yet gives us no end of sequels to horror films starring men and/or puppets.

Why Hillary: One of Veronica's first assignments down in Hell is to come up with creative ways to punish the lawyers and bankers, mirroring Hillary's promise to clean up Wall Street. When Veronica kills two racist cops after they beat up on a black guy she mirrors Clinton's support of Black Lives Matter.  Predictions of a hellfire future for sinners mirrors Hill's certainty that global warming will haunt the future of big oil consumers. Also, Veronica tells a nun "she cannot enter a church" as she "would surely combust' --depending on whom you ask, neither can Hillary! 

In Hell, the cinema has cold, unpadded wood seats. 

DEMONS

(1985) Dir. Lamberto Bava 
**1/2

In the land of Trump it's all about the thermonuclear family, be it ever so "humbly" nouveau-riche (I don't want much," as Groucho Marx would say, "just a little place where I can phone my wife and tell her I wont be home for dinner.") But this Italian film, shot in Berlin, in the 80s, sums up life in conquered Axis countries after the death of disco. It's the story of a demonic theater showing a film about a silver mask triggering a demon outbreak, and there's a promotional display silver mask in the theater lobby that actually causes a demon outbreak. When a brave prostitute seeing the movie with her cool pimp tries it on, the mask pricks her skin and she becomes patient zero for an outbreak of demons running around in the theater ala MONSTERS CRASH PAJAMA PARTY.

If you saw DEMONS in the same theater as the characters seeing the movie in the film, with the same actors all in the theater (as might be at the premiere) then I can imagine this might freeze your hard drive with its meta refraction, i.e. the folks at the advance screening midnight show of DARK KNIGHT RISES in Aurora, Colorado. But at home, decades later, it's just a dumb hair metal stoner kind of good time. Produced and co-written by Dario Argento, with the help of director Michele Soavi (STAGEFRIGHT), featuring sublime boom operation by Angelo Amatulli (SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS), and music from Claudio 'Goblin' Simonetti, it's truly an Argento-Goblin-Bava Jr. family affair, by which I mean nowhere near as good as 70s Argento but nowhere near as bad as 00's Argento, and still nowhere near as meta as the best Soavi.

Genius is fleeting --even in the best of us.

Michele Soavi - showing his good side

Lamberto Bava, though bless him, never was/is a genius, nor even a terribly decent director. I don't envy having the pressure of such an iconic legitimate genius father (Mario) to measure up to, but with no talent for either blocking, pacing, or storytelling, Lamberto must get by with a little help from his talented friends. Argento lends him the brilliant red and blue lighting gels from SUSPIRIA; a selection of MTV-ready rock songs by Billy Idol, Rick Springfield, and Mötley Crüe adds just the right note of 80s 8th grade 8-ball of crank snorting dirtbag shop class idiocy; Soavi himself plays an enigmatic robot with his human mask half-gone (or a human with half his robot mask gone). Meanwhile, a carload of coked-up punks drive around downtown Berlin, eating up the running time with out-the-window-B-roll as they snort their coke through a straw in a Coke cup. Is that genius or idiocy? Exactly. Once a full-size helicopter drops through the ceiling of the auditorium after the surviving couple have ridden a motorbike riding up and down the aisles killing demons with a samurai sword, then you finally realize maybe you love this dumb film. It took over an hour to get there, but there you are. For me, though, the best section is the slow lead-up to when the first victim in the film-within-the-film and the first killing offscreen match up in their anguished noises, and a giant close up of a flashing blade on screen seems to be cutting the (normal size relative to the audience) 'real' girl's head off. But once the film-within-a-film runs out, and everyone realizes they're trapped, that kind of meta weirdness fades in favor of long stretches of typical (but nonetheless diverting) demon attacks. There are way too many special effects shots of facial postules dripping food coloring green goo, but stick around. And don't leave during the credits - the film just keeps on rolling.

And give thanks to Hulu, now you can watch it on your phone in perfect safety (the screen is too small for any demon to climb through).

WARUM DIE HILL?  Filmed in Germany, that land where a single demonic prick started an outbreak of inhuman violence that swept the continent, it's waiting for just the right moment to bubble up and burst anew upon the acne-scarred facial landscape. And, to make it all about this moment in America, a woman starts all the madness off by insisting on trying on the mask in the lobby (cuz ladies always be tryin' on strange display masks in lobbies, am I right fellas?)

DAGON

(2001) Dir. Stuart Gordon

***1/2

We of the Lovecraft cult have become quite used to being disappointed by big screen adaptions. Maybe it's because the pantheon of his elder Gods like Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath and their hideous half-human offspring--all summonable via the unholy bible of black magic, the Necronomicon--reverberate far deeper than ordinary mind's eye boogeymen. No 2D or 3D representation can compare. Seeming to cohere out of the electric blur behind our eyelids, these indescribably leviathans urge us forward through Lovecraft's prose as if his writing had its own dark power to transcend the very limits of fiction, so that just reading the story we might waken the elder behemoths from their slumber in the timeless ocean below our archaic collective unconsciousness. Naturally no film is going to be able to capture that feeling. Carpenter's IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS was about that feeling, but didn't create it, and suffered from bad 90s clothes, hair, and acting. Corman made a decent stab at it with Vincent, but the results weren't quite up to his Poe stuff. Thank the Mad Arab, then, for Stuart Gordon, whose FROM BEYOND and RE-ANIMATOR are easily the two best Lovecraft adaptations. In each he wisely keeps the events flowing in something like real time, over a single night or weekend, so there's seldom time to get or need a 'third eye' complete picture. Seeing protagonists being chased along progressively more surreal avenues without ever stopping for a dissolve captures just what the stories are like: snapshots of Hell barely developed before they're already burning, the terror of nightmare momentum, racing across a dangling rope bridge over the yawning chasm of alarm clock death/waking.

For DAGON, Gordon adapts Lovecraft's quintessential "Shadow over Innsmouth" moving the locale from New England to an ancient Spanish fishing village, and having the action go down over one long rainy afternoon into late rainy evening, capturing the strange disorienting nightmare of trying to procure help after a freak storm rolls in and hurls a passing yacht--helmed by American investment wizard Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden)--onto a rocky outcrop, trapping him under the onrushing flood of water from the hull. Guests Paul and his Spanish girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Meroño) rush ashore to get help, are immediately separated by a seemingly friendly priest and... well, the weirdness never lets up for a moment, nor does the rain.

As a fan of the original story, I balked at the substituting contemporary Spain for olde New England but the language barrier actually adds a nice gateway frisson New England would lack. In the terror and confusion of panic in a weird town, the locals may very well start to resemble fish monsters even in the best of circumstances. I was lost in Prague once and the same thing happened!

All in all, DAGON comes as close as any adaptation yet as far as capturing the eerie mood of the fish god cult mythos, and the feeling that some wild recurring dream is coming true and that, between these nightmare wafers, is a wet (literally) dream cream filling, the sort of nightmare magic that happens when the dreaming male's conscious ego meets his mermaid-esque unconscious anima (Macarena Gómez) and it's as if time stands still and you 'wake up' from reality. The truth of the dream and the moment stretches across all time and space; the world around you vanishes; the dichotomies of dreams and waking, of past and future, real and surreal, are momentarily--maybe permanently, fatally--transcended. All dichotomies re-submerged: childhood and adulthood / life and death / male and female / mammal and cephalopod...

Wait what was that last one? Kiss me, baby, and never mind.

POR QUE HILÁRAYE K'LIHN-TOÑ: An evil fish god cult priest incites the elders to smash the iconography of the Christian church? The locals kill a Rupert Murdoch-esque yachtsman (offscreen)? Hell yeah. And the open ending suggests the future depends on the Democratic Party's ability to adapt to weird new paradigms as the only viable answer (vs. the Republican Party's resistance to change). As with the other films on this list it's ultimately about a sort of high Precambrian matriarchy. The plethora of Spanish speakers stands as a mockery to the the anti-immigrant Trump supporters who consider it a violation of their civil rights if you try to explain the difference between Spain and Mexico.

+ 5 RUNNERS UP:

 SHIVERS

(1975) Dir. David Cronenberg

***

I disgust la SHIV in an oilier post but fack it. Spiked with livid, funny gross outs and a red kidney thing hopping inside any old orifice, here's a 'careful what you wish for' example of 70s singles swinging rather too successfully. As the wild orgy heats up, maybe ask yourself: is this how the red states really think we behave up here in the blue beyond? Or is it just how they would, were they not good decent Christians? Either way, you may never want to have sex again, and--on behalf of our stressed planet--thank you for that. Looking almost sex ed film crummy, it really should be shown in every high school health class, for it would chasten the louchest Hefner. The performances are deceptively brilliant; the moments of freeze frame slow motion unique and effective; the scenes of orgies breaking out in the halls and stairwells remind me of drug parties I've... heard about... on Fox News. Just thinking about Fox News in fact should answer your question why this film is 'Hillary-esque'! After it's over, you'll be grateful for all the repression that makes social order of any sort possible.

THE DESCENT
(2005) Dir. Neil Marshall

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS

(1970) Dir. Jaromil Jireš

GINGER SNAPS
(2000) Dir. John Fawcett

SHE 

(1935) Dir. Merien C. Cooper

---

 

"I wrote 'fertilizing the eggs,' Gene."

The Metatextual Exorcist's Assistant: MAPS TO THE STARS, CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Film as a medium isn't old enough that it has a set response as to how to handle the 'problem' of aging A-list actresses. But two 2014 films both recently released on DVD have shown the 'old' way can be made 'new' again through post-modern tweaks. The sexy young bitches of the 80s-90s have found work playing middle-aged actresses fighting to stay young and relevant, the way hot bitches of the 20s-40s did in the 50s-70s, by playing faded stars who go insane from being cooped up in their cobwebbed minds and mansions while the pictures (and cars) in the world outside get smaller, junkier, younger. Going 'Norma Desmond' allows for a kind of ageist exorcism which then makes the aging actress playing the unbalanced aging actress seem balanced by contrast. So Billy Wilder makes Gloria Swanson seem cool and Robert Aldrich makes Bette Davis seem fearless--they boldly go into the depths of their own potential madness as Hyde versions of their own personae. Skulking around their eerie mansions as theremins goose their every mirror-ward hiss, the well-aging actress playing the semi-well-aging actress playing the unwell (delusional) aged actress is cathartically freed from her own gerascophobia, exorcised with the help of a Chanel-scented strait-jacket (starring Jessica Lang as Joan Crawford). (1)

Maps and Clouds stars in an important drama about Alzheimer's

Now that we're all feminists again, the kind of lurid madness that made Baby Jane and Norma Desmond so indelible is too objectifying, too freakshow, for squeamish PC Hollywood. Age and narcissism mustn't be reduced to just another carny attraction-- not that Hollywood wouldn't make it so if we demanded, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle. So the producers must instead paint a sensitive portrait of Alzheimer's or some real-life tragic figure's descent to madness. They must be educational, touching, and earnest instead of high-camp shock-value horrific. We associate aging with importance now, middle-aged actresses with serious drama. In this way, filmdom solemnly leads them out to pasture rather than letting them shred the walls of a cinematic padded cell. With all projects not good enough for a dame of their stature, they wither from underuse.

Sensing an opportunity to fill the gap, however, scrappy maverick independent filmmakers circle the wagons around the A-list divas with a little money saved up (or will work for scale to get their attached to a truly edgy and 'now' product) who want to sink their teeth into something bonkers for a change, to work with talents unafraid to plunge into new dark depths behind the camera, irregardless of the PC putsch that so paralyzes mainstream Hollywood when it comes to bitches over 40. Canadians like David Cronenberg and Frenchmen like Olivier Assayas, keep the luridly self-reflexive spirit of Billy Wilder and Robert Aldrich alive, for they know a secret denied the average Hollywood hack: the 50s-70s 'horror hag' spirit need only be taken one meta-level further to resonate in our new century's junk TV-addicted consciousness afresh and leave the stigma of exploitation behind in the process: Julianne Moore and Juliette Binoche shall play Gloria Swansons playing Norma Desmonds now, instead of just playing Norma Desmonds trying to play Salome. Brian Oblivion would be so proud! 

THE CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Dir Olivia Assayas (2014)

***

Olivier Assayas uses the post-modern lesbian corporate thriller the way Jean Pierre-Melville used the French New Wave gangster film, as a gateway between high art and low genre for anyone with a Gauloises and Steadicam to glide through behind him. In his Boarding Gate, for example, scenes of Asia Argento walking through a vast bustling Hong Kong mall-flea market--each booth/stall a vast tapestry of electronics, contrasting languages and music all whirling together one after the other--are perhaps the most ear-boggling use of post-modern affect in all cinema, but then... what is there to when from why? We're left feeling cheated, confused, even irked.Assayas' biggest weakness has always been his endings, since demonlover, even. His best works, like Irma Vep, end in pure abstraction. His worst endings feel like betrayals - like he led us on, like seducing us into bed then running away going "I forgot I'm married" and runs away last minute.

Before something like that happens, Clouds of Sils Maria covers several layers of a power trio of strong female leads ranging along the All about Eve axis, each playing versions of themselves and their personal assistants in screens-within-screens. The catsuit Les Vampyres S/M gone corporate bitch-in-the-boardroominess of his dEmonlover and Boarding Gate coalesce against Summer Hours pastorale realness as two women play characters studying to be themselves and each other; the same weird mix of back-stabbing and compassion with which younger executive assistants are shepherded by older female employers into the abyss of self-awareness and ambition, breaking them down and being broken in turn in some twisted--even if initially altruistic--identity merge/melt-down. They have youth; you have power. But they can get power, what can you get, except older?

From the ongoing discussion between Maria (Juliette Binoche) and her assistant Val (Kristen Stewart) about Maria's character in the play that made her famous (she's now shifting from the ingenue to the older lesbian mentor, and she ain't happy about it). Maria's nihilistic interpretation of the character during rehearsals and discussions jibes with Val's hip youthful (American) interpretation of Maria's interpretation, which Val sees as solipsistic, as glorifying youth based on one's rose-tinted memories and attacking her own aging dignity. And Val isn't backing down even against Maria's contemptuous laughter which might have worked on her when she was Val's age, but Val is somehow more grown up than that.

It makes sense then that Kristen Stewart steals the show as Val, handling her personal assistant duties with startling cool, knowing just how to rile, soothe or otherwise push Maria's buttons while juggling deals and cars and hotel rooms and interviews and meetings with photographers, all without ever seeming to break her detached stride or smash her incessantly ringing cell phone. Chloë Grace Moretz plays the rising star playing the younger part in the play (the superhero masochist in the comic book film they see) who Val and Maria meet with later for drinks, along with the young dumb boyfriend, a writer whose wife tries to commit suicide and...hmmm.

If that's confusing, it's my fault. Let's just say it's Bette Davis' The Star meets Petra Von Kant rehearsing a lesbian corporate boardroom version of The Blue Angel in the isolation of Faro (where Bergman filmed Persona) so hey, that's a lot a layers of reference. What makes it work even if you don't know those films is the way the pair of actresses connect with such quiet force (we understand immediately why Stewart won the César) and the dialogue of the play they're working on resembles their characters' own relationship--and perhaps Stewart's real-life relationship with PA Alicia Cargile (left)--so much it's (intentionally) impossible to tell where one (the lines they're running) ends and the other (their actual relationship) begins, except that the line-running they do feels real while their sudden lurches into directly discussing their own relationship--Val complaining as Maria laughs at her impressions of the play's subtext--seems sudden, hamfisted. It's as if direct confrontation would be too much, too theatrical, so they just endure all they can like it doesn't bother them until they just bail. It begs an interesting question: how does one deal with having acted all kinds of break-up scenes with someone when you're suddenly actually breaking up with them, without it feeling cliche? Atsa lotta layers, Olivier! Maybe ats too much...

Maybe yes, for then comes that terrible Assayas anticlimactic 'resolution.' As the Binoche-Stewart personae (see what I did there?) merges into itself like a sssnake. along with the two characters they're rehearsing (via the actress and personal assistant they're playing), there's a sudden mystical shift that... well.. it doesn't work. Oh Olivier, you just had to keep adding layers until the whole thing deflated like an overdone soufflé... again. 

Maybe I'm wrong or nitpicking --it's just that jibing to Stewart and Binoche's chemistry through most of the film as I was, I felt genuinely saddened by the sudden flight into Peter Weir-ish fourth act mysticism. The big comparisons critics have been making of course are to the endings of Bergman's Persona and Antonioni's L'Aventura, but the former was abstract from the get go, there the weird ending made sense and in the latter they at least talked about the disappearance --it even obsessed them for awhile, until they forgot about it, and we didn't much miss the missing girl anyway, since it was Monica Vitti we were collectively falling in love with even at the start. Here in Sils that love equation is reversed, like L'Aventura if Vitti just left without a note toward the end and we spent the rest of the damn movie with the smarmy Sandro (Gabriele Farzetti). Some critics hypothesize Val kind of morphs into Chloë Grace Moretz, playing the tabloid-branded scarlet letter marriage-wrecker of years ago (see: Kristen Stewart in the Snow with Poison), but to me they're making excuses on Assayas' behalf. Mention art cinema 'modernity' vs. vérité realism if you want --it just plum doesn't work... for me at least. In interviews Assayas says he wanted to give the audience something to think about, but it feels to me like all he did was take something we were thinking about away. 

The scenery is staggering. I love this mountainous zone where German loftiness, Nordic depression, and French intellectual aesthetics sizzle together and align like a constellation. I was imagining what if Bergman were directing, that he might go full-on post-modern and we'd maybe get an interview with Alice Cargile in between takes of the film within the play about a pair of women in a play. That might have worked, but whatever - the Melville of post-affect cinema transcends such things as satisfying destinations. As with Irma Vep, Boarding Gate, Carlos and demonlover, the trip is where he works his magic. Once arrived, he's all out of rabbits.

MAPS TO THE STARS

(2014) Dir. David Cronenberg

***1/2

One can't imagine either Hollywood or the Sils Maria European bourgeois "artist" community making a film like Maps to the Stars. A lurid, slow-burn haunted-Hollywood saga of pyromaniac schizophrenics, hot young ghosts, egomaniacal stars, and abusive life coaches, it could only come from a Canadian indie auteur who doesn't need pretentious vanishings to craft a Brechtian dissertations on aging actresses being intimidated by the endless incoming waves of amber ingenues. As in Sils, the idea of female 'performance' leads to meta-split mirroring, passive-aggressive sabotage by the older insecure actress against her younger personal assistant, the Twilight connection (Stewart in Sils, Pattinson Maps), Stewart co-starring with Maps star Julianne Moore in Still Alice the same year (top), like an eerie reflection across continents, genres, and post-modern layers. 

Thing is, of the two films, only one is genuinely subversive and ballsy. Only one goes to places the jugular didn't even know it led to.

In both Sils and Maps there's the idea of being subsumed by another's ego, of being a young female assistant, trying to have her own life while working for a solipsistic middle-aged actress who's going insane from dealing with the dwindling roles / loss of youth, and so bullying their younger incarnation in an attempt to exorcise their own inferiority complex. In Sils the assistant takes revenge in the must cowardly way possible, by merely vanishing without even two-weeks notice; in Maps, well.. I can't spoil it, but it's far more satisfying. There's a sense of unyielding magnetism in Cronenberg's film that Assayas' was too high in the Alps to feel: the inexorable magnetized streak of insanity running deep in the fault line crust of Los Angeles, and the most expedient, direct way to drill down into it.

Sordid show biz underbelly chronicler (and Castaneda mystic) Bruce Wagner (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) knows every inch of what his script is chronicling, and he can match the darkness, stab-for-stab. Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska) arrives on Hollywood Boulevard by bus after being released from some juvenile mental hospital, and--like Melanie Daniels at Bodega Bay--her mere presence triggers the vengeful furies, here a series of ghosts: Her new employer, fading star Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), is haunted by her crazy star mom Clarice, who set their house on fire when Havana was only a child; Agatha's estranged brother Benji (Evan Bird), a bratty child star, finds himself haunted by a girl who died before he could grant her Make-a-Wish Foundation request. Meanwhile, a new biopic is being made on Clarice's storied life and daughter Havana is  fighting to play her, even while claiming she was molested and abused. Ingeniously, the ghost of Clarice is played by luminous hottie Sara Gordon (above, in the bath),  and of course, it makes sense--why wouldn't a vain ghost want to appear younger than her own grown alive children? It's just the right kind of weird twist that shows a real subversive instinct that Maps has in abundance, the kind Assayas ultimately lacks even as it covers the same ground.

It's all in the genes.

With the kind of naive prepossession that does well in Hollywood, Agatha-- on meds and working the steps, tries make amends with her family, but that doesn't go over well with her bitter father (John Cusack) who still hates her for setting fire to their house as a child and feeding Benji a near-fatal overdose of pills. Since that ordeal, Cusack has risen to make a fortune as a platitude-spouting gestalt masseur (with clients including Havana whom he clearly hasn't told about Agatha or vice versa). He has demons of his own, clearly, exhibiting the typical violent denial self-help gurus often display towards their own hang-ups. 

Ultimately these two interlocked pyromaniac-and-narcissist-choked LA families crash into one another in a shocker climax so effective and satisfying it becomes the polar opposite to Assayas' Sils's (we saw them as a double feature this past Friday night - I'd recommend you do the same, in the order presented). We just don't expect such a shock because for awhile there Cronenberg made us forget we were watching a Cronenberg film and not some piece of Hollywood self-regard and near-whimsy about how all we need is a bus ticket and a dream. That's the Cronenberg touch at work, to be good enough at the one thing you forget it's the other. Stars has courage to go deep into the abyss from off a steep, high diving board, while Sils only splashes around a bit then crooks a finger towards Lars Von Trier's receding light. Even Maps' ghost appearances aren't trite or cliche. Although they're presumed to be just psychic projection, it's a movie first, so we understand that being actors anyway the haunted A-listers are conditioned to let their imagination get the better of them, to confuse their script with their life in ways only we were confused by in Sils Maria. In other words, even as actors playing characters who are actors, characters will mess themselves up in the name of a good performance, with the understanding that--above all--they're still in an "actual" film as well as a film about film, even when they know within the context of the (outer) film that the (inner) film is just their reality and not even a film-within-the-main film!

If that's confusing, consider the contrast: in Sils, Binoche is playing an aging Marlene Dietrich remaking The Blue Angel as a butch Emil Jannings, heading back to her classroom to sulk after her younger wife hooks up with the strongman. In Maps, the better option is finally presented: kill them both and burn the whole fucking cabaret to the ground! Clarice and Agatha, I tell they, by the power of Chuck D, Hollywood sur le feu!

NOTES:
1. PS - when I wrote this that AMC show FEUD hadn't even been announced! Was it ushered into existence because of this post? I like to think so (5-16-17).