Netflix of the Witch: ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, THE CRAFT, THE PUNK SINGER

From top: Fairuza (The Craft); Kathleen Hannah (Punk Singer);
Sianoa Smit-McPhee (Cheerleaders)

I summon thee, Netflix, unholy ghost streamer.

The Craft and now All Cheerleaders Die wait within you. 

Teenagers sleeping over and swapping blood, giggling over the Ouija;

love spell chanting and stiff-as-a-boarding.

Magic of entrained hormonal unconsciouses--

North, South, West, East. 
Ra Ra Ra - your light ignites us

But "something" older than the Sun, older 

than Isis, than Lilith, then Asherah

vibrates older than the first pom pom primitive beat.

Sometimes through summonings true 
to the ancient Mothers, or false 
to shady Aleister, or merely in image
 via LA hack-banged babble.

From dusty tomes to Xerox-ed grimoire,
goaded by lying boys, and flying traffic.

If no one else, 
this spell may scare 
your downstairs mom

 but below her are legions....

Director Andrew Fleming,

you made THE CRAFT and BAD DREAMS!

Andrew Fleming,
you seem respectful of women!

Hail to thee, Andrew Fleming! 
Solid and semi-trippy is your Craft,
if a tad flat and pedestrian, too.

 Director Lucky McKee,
you made ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, MAY and SICK GIRL!

Anxiously feminist, brazenly misogynistic--
Do you still insist there is no difference?

Don't both extremes overestimate woman's power? 
Don't both extremes underestimate women's power?

Get some therapy, Lucky - and unchain your anima.

She won't burn you,

beyond the first few flexes of her newfound flame.

Woman's power is nature's power.
Destructive beyond all your male characters' fathoming,
Darkness in light! Kali in Shiva! Destruction in creation!
Every suburban mama's frat boy litter
shall be cleansed by the blood-rage rag red torch
of her tidal elevator Overlook.

Her Period

will finally end mankind's long sentence.

Kathleen Hannah:
Your 'music' is like love-hate tattoos on Kali's Mitchum-y dukes.
Saying you're like Hopi from Love and Rockets in your riot grrl cuteness
is to to try and put you in just another frame. 
You're the splash page! Bleed your margins 
all over the murphs, frat boys, douches, and dickheads

standing, arms crossed, like rapey crusaders, in the front row,

blocking the little punkettes, the ones who read your zines.

Retaliate against their ugly, ugly urges!
You're hot enough that they have to listen. 
Your tubes are the chain whips that streak light through dark magic's 
screaming, streaming window face.

Let the smug douche face of night be streaked with the blood lash

 of the cat scratch early dawn. 

Kathleen Hannah!
Sans bitterness, sans pedantry,
sans food co-op meeting sanctimony,
but yet with fierce tribal howling: 

Smite them!

Kathleen Hannah, make slam-dancing safer for women! 
Kathleen Hannah, inspire legions of xeroxed fanzines.
KH! Flinch not as the AOR vultures circle,
or as the jerk-off termites from their knotty woodwork creep,
 even as nervous exhaustion hides 
a wrongly-diagnosed disease.

Ticks are everywhere, it seems,

even--sometimes--in nautre. 

Lyme disease of not,

Smite feminism's enemies with thy shrill feedback screams, Kathleen Hannah!
 Let your documentary move me to sensitive new age guy tears. (It did)
Guide my hand in chain-whipping, too, with words, the women-hating wallies,
the backwards baseball-capped unconsciously self-entitled douchebag tools of America.
Deafen them, Kathleen Hannah with the same amps they'd use to muffle your gender!
We are with thee, streaming The Punk Singer!
Praying, Chanting for your Re-Rising!

THE CRAFT

(1996) Dir. Andrew Fleming

***

Andrew Fleming hasn't made many films but he has a rare gift of getting the ambiguity of hallucinations exactly right: the way snakes seem to be writhing in every shadow as the underlying reptilian cortices of the DNA serpent-tongue universe entwine and unwind within your fever or alcohol-or-opiate withdrawal, or the mushroom-overdose you still can't come down from after 12 hours. Little turkeys with straw hats dancing in the shattered scream-filled shadows of Bellevue's alcoholic ward; the rats and the bats in the walls, Bim: terrifying but soothing compared to the convulsions... lost my train of thought. Fleming never does! The Craft's tight script never wastes a word on pointless chit-chat, and a strong cast rounded out by Assumpta Serna (a regular in Almodovar movies) as the white witch new age bookstore owner, and of course a dark star is born in the riveting breakout performance of Fairuza Balk--grown up from playing electro-shock Dorothy in Return to Oz--as the wickedest witch of them all. She's demonstrating legit real-life magick savvy--that's a given you can feel in the extremes of your toes. 

Now the debits: The Craft's cinematography is a little flat, as was the style for teen films of the era, with that LA smog draining the color from the girls' picnic ritual bus ride field trips, and the slippery slope morality play of their monkey paw gotchas feel rushed: The coven's swimteam black girl (Rachel True) uses magic to make racist rival Christine Taylor's gorgeous blonde hair fall out, but then True feels bad when Taylor makes a point of apologizing, suddendly sensitized by her fall from grace--as falls will do. Neve Campbell's horrible back scars magically disappear so now she's the hottest girl in schoo, but--as such sudden rises will do--the newfound popularity turns her vain and obnoxious. Their trailer-trash punk rock leader Fairuza Balk gets rich, but then her mom wastes the money on a jukebox and a high-rise deluxe apartment, etc. And it's never enough --and her worst psychosis comes roaring out, as sudden white trash wealth will do. If anyone's, it's all the fault of new girl Robin Tunney. Before her arrival they were just three outcasts goofing around with spell books and stolen candles and getting nowhere, but at least they were happy in their misery. Since Tunney's a real witch (descended from her witch mom who died in childbirth), she gives them a magick power boost which they're too immature to handle. 

That's all fine, what sticks in my craw (as someone who saw this at the multiplex in its initial run) is that poor Robin Tunney doesn't think to wish for deliverance from her crippling phobias and instead indulges her masochistic attraction to one of those backwards baseball cap-wearing rapey douchebags so endemic to teenage movies. Even worse, he's played by Skeet "the poor man's Johnny Depp" Ulrich. Man- and then she lets Balk walk all over her with some paltry snake 'glimmers' and some voodoo hoodoo evoking someone named Manon (though it sounds like she's saying Manos, as in Hands of Fate). Weird trivia fact: the witchery consultant didn't want them to invoke a real spirit, lest they offend a Wiccan or two, or encourage young girls to summon things they wouldn't be able to control --the way the proliferation of Ouija boards in the seventies led to a glut of summoned demons still keeping investigative ghost shows busy to this day! Balk tried to get as much in as she could, but didn't get to change her lines to mention a real god--which is why she buries the name in a kind of Spanish-sounding vowel blur. 

That's kinda the deal for the moral climax--waiting for Tunnney to grow a pair rather than whining and simpering while Balk overwhelms her darkened home with snake and bug hallucinations. (Dude, she'd never be able to eat dinner with my square parents while tripping on mescaline, not to brag). The almost DC comics-level morality hanging under all the karma has a troublesome subtextual implication that teenage girls can't be trusted with any kind of real power, presuming they'll throw it all away on petty revenge, vanity, financial gains and douchebag boys. Therefore renouncing all their magic and submitting to the more level-headed patriarchy is the real power. Fuck off, you second guess bad faith restoration specialist! We want to see the douchebag boys get thrown out of a second story window real good, and to see Fairuza tear it up (and she does; her summoning scenes have a solid orgasmic power). We don't want to see Tunney trailing after the mayhem in judgmental horror, just so girls watching will know that taking occult revenge against snickering date rapists is wrong, since you might hurt their feelings. In other words, while it's not quite as grrl-empowering as Night of the Comet,  it sure beats Tank Girl!

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****

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THE PUNK SINGER 

(2013) Dir. Siri Anderson

****

A labor of love from some chick named Siri Anderson, The Punk Singer is an adorable little scrapbook-style montage of the life, bands, and illnesses of Kathleen Hanna, the original riot grrl, who wrote "Kurt smells like teen spirit" on Cobain's wall thus inspiring the big #1 track of 1991 and triggering a seemingly random cold cocking by Courtney Love backstage a little later. Cobain was enamored of her sexual provocateur snap-trapping (strutting around stage in her underwear while angrily ranting about the evils of the male gaze). Less attractive ccritics argued that this paradoxical combination sent mixed signals, which was missing the point. Just by being attracted to her, we (men) became part of the performance, both target and the subject. Her cute package was like shining a mirror in the face of Bro-Medusa (Brodusa?) and turning him to stone. We suburban white boys had the same eerie frisson after we fell in love with rap for the time. Brought up in a world of pop culture aimed right at us 18-35 year-old straight white males, bands like Bikini Kill, NWA and the Geto Boys gave us a new thrill - that of being the target of justified rage. Endangered, threatened, exposed, even from across the new medium called CD, we drove to or our pharmaceutical corporation mailroom temp jobs, blasting our cassettes and feeling like a horror movie was forming just ahead, women and minorities out to rip us apart, and we loved it.

Hanna first found fame as the key figure of the riot grrl movement via her many 'zines and bandsBikini Kill in the same approx. time. She would later also from Le Tigre, the Julie Ruin, and so in the film we learn how her fearless, raw, fuck you attitude was truly empowering to women and the anemic ectomorphs who love them. She'd get in the face of the mesomorphs who'd come to punks shows to mosh and openly leer at her sexy bod, ordering them to the back so girls could come up and dance in safety. Eventually she married Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz and is currently recovering from Lyme disease, made worse by being long misdiagnosed as simple exhaustion. The documentary's pretty short, too, and never repeats itself or wears out it's welcome. Hanna's in good hands with Anderson, and Horovitz seems a very compassionate husband. Their home, by a riverside, is modern yet homey. Can the pitter-patter of little feet be far behind? Will motherhood calm her down? 

That's a joke, son! Power to the childless, for they can say fuck you to maternity's conscripted gender bondage!

ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE

(2013) Dir. Lucky McKee

**1/2

It's a year after the accidental death of the cheerleader squad captain, and high school hierarchy is still in disarray: the late girl's beau, the narcissistic football captain, aptly named Terry Stankus (Tom Williamson) has sworn a vendetta against scheming lesbian hottie Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) due to her alienating the affection of a pretty blonde (Brooke Butler). Maddy's own ex-girlfriend Leena (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) is a real witch who mopes along the sidelines as the alpha douchebag and hottie lesbo square off in parking lot shoving match. He runs her car off the road and a few cuts later, Leena's fishing the drowned cheerleaders out of the lake and bringing them back to life with her witchy mojo. Now they're cold zombies with different colored gems in their bodies who feel each other's orgasms and blood lusts. But Leena's so stupid she leaves the key to their immortality hanging in an unlocked school locker rather than wear it around her neck (the equivalent of leaving your roll of thousand dollar bills safely on the boy's locker room floor).

Parts of this very McKee brand of gender comeuppance are more successful than the whole: the blood is tacky cartoon CGI; the glowing colored rocks are a corny addition; all the wrong people keep getting hurt (Stankus does a while movie worth of really abhorrent stuff yet dies only once).  Luckily the whole thing has a gonzo recklessness that keeps us with it, and Maddy lets loose such a brazen stream of insults at Stankus in that parking lot scene, one can only be reminded of Russ Meyer classics like Supervixens. Too bad he wreaks six pounds of misogyny to every vengeance ounce and even the murders are undercut in intensity due to the blood's Tex Avery elasticity. It feels like this movie at one point wanted to court a teen market rather than the Alamo Drafthouse crowd, and the sexy webcam underwear pillow fight element contrasts negatively to any grrl power message (Lucky, Kathleen Hanna you ain't).

Despite the cartoon blood, the disproportionate vengeance ratio and some vaguely skeevy undertaste to the hot girl-on-girl action, it feels like there may be some sharp insight to lesbian trials and tribulations, such as how if you're a lesbian you can swoon for a hot chick you see walking by at the gym before you realize it's just you in the full wall mirror (1), and just as you cannot escape your reflection you can never escape your exes, or her exes--that's just how it is in that circle--and so every party you throw is bound to bring in a  long daisy chain of former-lovers peering sullenly over each others' shoulders, or hooking up with each other to get back at you. Director Lucky McKee (May, Sick Girl) does make some use of that (he's known as a woman's director, i.e. he has strong but complicated female antiheroes in his films), and Leena makes a lot of twisted witchy faces which--with her pale skin, black hair, and i thick black eyeliner--make her quite the future camp horror icon, albeit here still in-pupae form and her 'killing people on school grounds is wrong' ethos--which is sooooo the worst part of Heathers (a clear formative influence)--keeping her from the hallowed halls of the Acidemic Angels of Death series.

I like a lot of stuff about this energetic film--such as great roving camera that is seldom in the right place at the right time--and I kind of look forward to 'part two.' if any, but if the film is way better than the average found-Netflix dreck, its still dreck, and very unsteady on its feet as it tries to serve too many demographics at once. So Lucky, hail to thee, but in the future don't be afraid to get a woman co-writer, like Diablo Cody, or Deborah Hill on  Halloween or Gale Ann Hurd on The Terminator, or Karen Walton on Ginger Snaps, be guided by their edits and all future skeeviness may be avoided. You never know if Kathleen Hanna is watching from her crystal oculus. A genuine badass such as her knows how to portray strong badass women, but McKee -- you're still just a very sick girl.

Escape from Heaven: BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF NEW ORLEANDS

Werner Herzog's BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS represents not just a triumph of a great European director over the cop film formula, but a triumph of drugs and the human spirit over the forces who've been playing them against each other for the last 70 years. With PORT OF CALL, Herzog raises the victory sign and lets the freaks know they can lay down their crack pipes and go home. In the face of maniacal Nicolas Cage, no locked-in-concrete reality stands a chance, particularly in post-Katrina New Orleans.

When all the world is underwater, fishmen shall reign.

Herzog's great victory here is over his own Germanic fear of unheimliche abject dirt and devouring nature, a burden welded to an explorer's soul that hitherto has led him all over the world, his anxiety never more than a few paces behind. Herzog seems to have been born without a nesting instinct, or thick skin, and the combination signals the same amount of pain Cage's bad lieutenant endures from his injury and withdrawal symptoms; the same manic highs of crack are nice mirrors to the highs of art. It's a perfect synthesis of fearless maniac actor, the right material, and a maverick auteur who has done more than most to erase the line between fiction and documentary.

With its weird non-sequitur scenes and throwaway framing (plenty of smokestacks and gutted pier backgrounds) it could just be random quirkiness but it works because in the case of both Abel Ferrara's original and Herzog's 'sequel' we have fearless men making movies about fearlessness, the holy grail of masculinity. It takes guts to go off the rails at will, and not edit out the embarrassment later. These are films that keep their noses close to the pavement, like a bloodhound or drunk slowly waking up on a hot Sunday afternoon to the sound of concerned passers-by, or waking up on your own floor, instantly sniffing the carpet for that one lost chunk of coke from the night before.

A lot's been written about the reptiles in this film, particularly the alligator's eye view along the highway, low and mean, mirroring our own as viewers, sunk deeply into our cinematic darkness. You imagine that gators feel not much pain, but plenty of joy, like a kid allowed to crawl in the mud all day in the rain, biting anything he wants, the murky, wet freedom. Then again, that gator is perhaps mourning its mate, leg still twitching with its guts hanging out on an off ramp after colliding with a car. For Cage's cop, the world of New Orleans is a seething swamp and, like that mournful gator, he carries pain that makes his mud-crawling joy sorely earned. It helps of course that his badge gives him power over nearly every situation, a power he abuses copiously, but we're never really meant to feel sorry for those he oppresses, especially rock-smoking yuppies and his call girl girlfriend Eva Mendez's dopey johns. Her sleazy exploitation would be played up with lurid, evil music and leering close-ups in less capable hands. But like Abel Ferrara, Herzog is way beyond such petty morality. In both their worlds, the deep-end net between mere sick druggie sex stuff and actual murder is the only one our sympathies aren't meant to swim cross

The way our hero earns promotions via planting evidence, and makes cash blackmailing football players shows that while America still wrestles with its emotional dependence on big brother and its unrealistic appreciation for nature as some warm, cuddly benevolent force that needs our help to survive one more day in its little hutch, Herzog and Cage have beat the rap and found contentment in the dog-eat-dog world of corrupt nature. Herzog previously --in his documentaries at least--recoiled from that corruption as much as he embraced it. Anyone can find a cute bunny rabbit cuddly, but that's not nature. If you can find an alligator eating a rabbit to be cuddly, then come hang with Herzog... but not too close, because you're a sick person.

If you're familiar with Cage's oeuvre you will undoubtedly realize this role is something of a mid-career capstone. He even finds his way home to the nasal whine he adopted in his uncle Francis's time travel romance, PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986). Lots of us back then who were in awe from him from BIRDY (1984), RAISING ARIZONA (1987) and MOONSTRUCK (1987) thought to ourselves where the hell he picked up this ridiculous nasal vocal style? Shit was so good it became ridiculous in PEGGY, it was too much. Now we know how he got it, from all the crack he be smokin' in the future!


Lastly is the brilliant way the film brings in sobriety as an option. Going off to AA and leaving your druggie mate behind to drink alone is hazardous to any relationship, an instant point of cataclysm usually seen from the sober person view (28 DAYS, CLEAN AND SOBER), but Herzog would never dream of following the sober person and leaving the crazy druggie behind. When everyone else is slinking away as the abusive crackhead rants and froths at the mouth, Herzog walks boldly in with his camera and asks said crackhead about his dreams. Herzog would be a great "guide" on an acid trip. You can see him getting all up in a cop's face over his charge's right to eat the flowers in Central Park or to bite the heads off slow-footed squirrels. And that's how it should be, maybe, in a perfect world.


The only possible bid for moral high ground with a philosophy that Nietzschean is selflessness, the root of Cage's addiction (he hurt his back diving into a flooded prison to save a convict) but Herzog dispenses with showing us the moment of the actual injury or Cage's early days of dependence, i.e. his first week of, perhaps, trying to stick to his prescription regimen and be a good lieutenant. Did he do drugs ever before he got his back problem? Or is Herzog agreeing with the conservative notion that a prescription for Vicodin leads to heroin and crack like rain leads to mud? It don't matter, because we want Cage to be messed up, and there's a refreshing lack of cliche to the New Orleans aspect: no Hoodoo doctor, no fortune teller woman who gets killed by her own cat moments after revealing some arcane clue to Mickey Rourke. In fact, the grandma in PORT OF CALL gets a magnum pointed at her head for being "part of the problem!" In other words, Herzog is well aware that with medicine prolonging life until its far worn out its welcome they're bankrupting pensions funds and Social Security. It's not really hear fault, this old bat, but I do agree with him, even though I know it's morally wrong to think so. But that's the gist of the freedom at stake here. With no moral high ground to its name, Herzog's story is left to fend for itself. It takes a long way to get not very far, but it's a got a great serpent's tail-eating-style plot -- once the events sort themselves out, the whole thing disappears.


Lastly, Jesus Christ will they throw away that market research report that said ticket buyers respond strongest to recognizable faces brooding in the foreground on movie posters? Look at the one on the left and you see a poster inescapably similar to 80% of the movie posters out there. One face in front, second face to the right, possibly a third even smaller one to the left, shrouded in ominous  darkness, with a crime scene in HO scale at the bottom, like something you'd see at Blockbuster and not rent. Now go look at the gloriously pulpy poster Russia gets up top, and weep! Weep for the chickenshit nature of our America's cinematic marketers.

Here's my idea, take any script and roll a set of dice for each character to determine who should be male or female, which would then determine if they were gay or straight. So in any film any character's gender could switch. Why not let Fairuza Balk play the Bad Lieutenant next time? She could even have played Cage's part and even kept Eva Mendez as her girlfriend! Que caliente! The only film in which I've seen Balk really rip the roof off with a fully formed lead role was in 1996's under-appreciated THE CRAFT! Shit, son, that was almost 15 years ago! She's still hot enough to melt rocks without an oven or lucky lighter. Give this girl a seat at the table and chop her up some lines of cred! Que Guapa ella!!