Angels of Death: 10 Favorites

I love chicks that are truly crazy, not the faux bad-assedness of poseurs like Winona Ryder in Heathers (who express remorse for their murders as if mom and censor are waiting just off camera) but those who are truly liberated, in a way that terrifies even the bourgeois tenured profs who presume themselves beyond knee-jerk anti-feminist patriarchal reactions. It's payback time for the Inquisition with these devilish damsels on the screen.

People come to horror movies to see their deepest, unresolved, pre-empathic infantile anger expressed and cathartically exorcised. Bela Lugosi embodied this rage for my generation, the egomaniacal genius who scorned society and its unconscious banality appeared to us through the fuzzy UHF signal like an alien ruler. We rooted for him even unto the closing credit flames. In his honor I praise the chthonic bitchez in these films, for they stomp all over 'safe' characterizations and trust the audience not to start killing everyone the moment the film's over. They use their claws.

I only wish I could mention the great female killers from certain gialli, but that would be giving away the plots and I would never....

Yoko Mimimada

HOUSE

1977

I need to see this film about a dozen more times before I'll be able to write about it, but whatever... it's paisley psychedelic strangeness with incessant, nerve-grating piano melody stopping and starting until it becomes torture. Minimada plays demonic doppelganger auntie to a gaggle of schoolgirls who are all devoured by her deadly... house. She's old and in a wheelchair but as the girls are consumed she becomes younger and more empowered until in a final showdown she's a picture perfect soap commercial model. This film may be too out there even for an 'enhanced' audience, but is the kind of thing you can freak out people of all ages with.

If you need to come down afterwards, try AUDITION!

Sue Lyon

MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD 

1973

Three things I'm crazy for: nurses, Sue Lyon, and mercy killing; all three are wrapped up in this piece where Lyon is a homicidal nurse who kills patients so they don't have to spend their lives crippled, old, or boring. Meanwhile a bunch of douchebags with tacky helmets, whips, and dune buggys pull some of the old surprise party ultra-violence on random families who are usually watching Clockwork Orange-related programming. You get the impression this Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia really loves his Kubrick (Sue was, of course, Stanley's LOLITA). She's aged well and if doing cheap Italian horror movies to pay the bills was a common thing for American actresses of the era, she's younger than most all of them, and still hot, especially in white, and red.

The incredible Kimberly Lindbergs champions the film over at TCM's Movie Morlocks thus:

...by making Sue Lyon his muse, Eloy de la Iglesia hijacks Kubrick’s LOLITA and leaves the audience questioning their voyeuristic relationship with the cinema and its effect on our own sexual impulses. Eloy de la Iglesia‘s Lolita isn’t a fictional ideal of feminine beauty or a hapless victim of the male ego and Sue Lyon seems to get a kick out of exploiting her character. By the end of MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD it becomes apparent that Stanley Kubrick’s films have been thoroughly deconstructed and put back together in such an unusual way that Sue Lyon is able to completely redefine her celebrated ’60s role.

Priscilla Lawson

FLASH GORDON

1936

People remember the monsters and Flash's wrestling tights from the brilliant original 1936 serial but not everyone remembers that at the core of all the derring-do was a hot love quadrangle: Ming's kinky daughter, Princess Aura, lusts uninhibitedly after the earth man, who stays true to Dale (Jean Rogers), the long-suffering earth woman who is desired by Ming (and Prince Baron longs for Aura). Dale is often thrown into very revealing gowns and pawed by hawk men and the a crab-clawed dragon monster while Aura arches her wicked eyebrows and pulls strings behind her father's throne like the Fah Lo Suee of Mongo. It was Princess Aura I had the hots for as a kid and Lawson is pretty solid and awfully kinky. I guess it was okay as far as the code was concerned to lust uninhibitedly in a 1930s serial if you never get your man.  If you can see the whole serial, see it. If you can't, see the edited together feature SPACE SOLDIERS. Either way, keep your eye on Priscilla at all times.

Allison Hayes

ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU 

1958

The best parts of this film are not even the hilarious underwater fights (slow motion with a bubble machine and blurry filter to hide the fact they're all shot on dry land under normal gravitational circumstance) but the scenes with Allison Hayes as the bitchy trophy wife of the rich fat cat big game gold hunt gambler Carl Denham x Capt. Kidd whatever come to these voodoo islands to dive for gold. In case you forgot, Hayes is the 50 FOOT WOMAN and a honey for the ages, always looking like she just slithered off the cover of a 1930s pulp magazine. And she turns into a zombie, in this film, and the idiot non-zombie people just won't even... well, let me turn you over to Day of the Woman's Britney-Jade Colangelo, who notes that Hayes, sports quite possibly the GREATEST bra that man has ever known. The hottest moment is when Hayes talks her fatcat boyfriend into insisting the handsome skipper (Gregg Palmer) kiss her! Right in front of him! Fatcat even has to insist!! G'head on Miss Allison! When she gets all zombiefied the film reaches it's big golden stretch (the lighting is almost Lewton-eque as she moves through the dark with her knife, above) but there's never a dull momnt along the way; see it back to back with Ed Wood's NIGHT OF THE GHOULS for yet another army of middle-aged-elderly extras marching through tight spaces as zombie avengers, but no one can compare with Hayes. 

Beatrice Dalle

TROUBLE EVERY DAY
2001

"TROUBLE fulfills the promise of CAT PEOPLE, which told of a race of humans who would turn into black leopards after making love and could turn human again only after taking a life. However in Paul Schrader's 1982 version these killings were kind of tepid, with the panther striking while the victim is lolling around in a post-coitus haze. None of that waiting around for Denis! The way Dalle continues to obliviously whisper and coo in her now dead lovers' ears for example, links to her a real cat, toying with her prey long after its dead. Such scenes are few and far between (a similar one was apparently edited from later cuts of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT), they make producers uncomfortable because they threaten the safety of their model of the cinemagoer as one already dead and presumed therefore impervious to attack, as if the image and the eye are tectonic plates and the idea of cinema is to promise contact yet prevent any actual buckling. Dalle's sexuality buckles it and triggers a simulacratic melt-down; the covetous eye is torn out in a fit of enjoyment that transcends all textual boundaries. "(cont. reading here)

 Mariclare Costello

LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH

1971

It's tough being a paranoid schizophrenic when everyone really is out to get you. This is what Jessica learns when she and her husband and some meathead move to an island off New England to get away from the big Apple's 70s crime. They find a squatter named Emily (Costello) living in their big manse, and are about to kick her out, but she's kind of cute and Meathead takes a shine to her. Jessica is just pumped that she didn't hallucinate Emily -- she really is there! And she plays the lute. And her picture is in an old frame in the attic dated in the 1800s. Uh oh... There's a really terrifying scene where Emily makes a pass at Jessica, and then kind of --- well, it's freaky, quiet, fucked up beyond rational thought, and awesome.

All the Ladies on the Isle

THE WICKER MAN 

2007

"Many critics label LaBute a misogynist but his remake of WICKER MAN allows him to portray plenty of very powerful, frightening, intelligent women going up against a coarse, unconscious, ineffectual male cop and that's the opposite of what a misogynist would do. A truly liberated, sexually aggressive, snarling female is one of the most terrifying creatures ever conceived of by - and I hesitate to say God because God is suddenly not even a "He" when they're around, and everything gets dark and scary and one's balls shrink and release hormones of queasy dread that hit us like an extra dose of gravity. And without the people of Summers' Isle kowtowing to his manly whims, Nic Cage's "A Child is Missing, damn you!" righteousness is revealed as the macho bullying it's always has been.  Cage here is like the sister's boorish boyfriend in REPULSION or the sleazy neighbor in CARNIVAL OF SOULS, only here he's outnumbered and roaring like an old pervert crushed to death under the headlights of a Russ Meyer supervixen. (Where the Wild Wicker Lieutenants Are, 1/7/10)

 Ruth Gordon

ROSEMARY'S BABY

1968

What Polanski dredges out of Ruth Gordon’s clown-cake make-upped old lady smile is an evil against which there is no rational defense if you've been socially conditioned --as a woman in the 20th century--to be nice and decent to friendly elderly neighbors. Since Minnie Castavet is old and perky and adorable there is no defense against her prying, manipulating, and ensnaring because according to the social doctrine old ladies must be obeyed while women Rosemary's age are treated like children too incompetent to know what's best for their own wombs.

Marki Bey

SUGAR HILL

1974

"It's great to be rooting for a murderous voodoo priestess and not have to worry she's going to develop a conscience or let love weaken her resolve for deadly reprisal-making via a series of comic book-style death traps involving zombie massages ("Treat me easy, easy,"), a severed chicken foot that hops around on a string (a peak AIP moment), voodoo dolls ("When the doll is enflamed you will pick up the knife and use it on yourself!"), leg cramps, and hungry pigs ("Hope they like white trash!"). When the 'good' guys are the zombies, the bad guys don't have a chance in hell... and I'm in psychotronic heaven. (9/9/10)

 Lesley Tapin

LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL

1973

Sweet Lila Lee (Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith) escapes her creepy preacher foster parent and catches a midnight bus to Spookville in this low budget and all the more eerie for it thriller. If you ever used to catch those bizarre, faded color, cheap puppet and bad dubbing-infused German and Swedish 'kid's film' K. Gordon Murray imported on TV or in the local matinees in the 60s-70s then the threadbare theatricality of LEMORA will be like remembering a childhood nightmare. There's some vague lesbian resonance between the evil Lemora and Rainbeux as Lemora introduces her to a lot of weird perverse blood-drinking style shit, and I cannot reveal the awesome ending!

 For another great women in horror top ten, check out this from last February's Women in Horror Month.

Monster Capsules: GHIDORAH, PHANTASM II, KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS

GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER

1964 - dir. Ishiro Honda

***1/2

I'd seen a lot of Godzilla movies as a kid but I never... until lately. Man, GHIDORAH is the best one! Maybe it's Akira Ifukube's great, blowsy ominous-cool bassoon jazz score, which imbues the heaviness of the monsters with Falstaffian hep grandeur as they stagger around and down volcanoes and bump into matchstick apartment complexes. Ifukube's cues repeat over and over but that's fine, they hold up. Maybe too its the crazy 17th century 'ruff'-style collars the citizens of the strange 'small' country of Sergina still wear, even the gangster villains out to kill their princess: the more they try to look tough, the more those clown collars make them ridiculous. Only in Japan! Only in Godzilla movies do big budget large cast conglomerates of heavy duty Japanese actors wringing their hands intermix with ridiculous close-ups of puppet heads: Rodan and Godzilla each with fixed eyes and only one moving part on their head, a separate jaw which can move up and down giving them a kind of marionette shop crudity that, taken with all the gravitas in both the acting (Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura even has a bit part as a doctor) and the incredible music, makes for some jovial grins on the part of hip gaijin audiences, as well as squeals of delight for all ages of all nations.

So it seems a bunch of scientists have been having nightly meetings with UFOs, so they invite a lady reporter to come check out how cool they are. When the UFOs don't come the night she's there, they accuse her of sending skeptical brainwaves out into the atmosphere and scaring the aliens off! Skeptical brainwaves! When the reporter dismisses the idea that brainwaves even exist, the scientists smile patronizingly. That's cool despite being sexist because it shows the easy way science can flip-flop on issues, condemning non-believers with an array of defense mechanisms, from witch burning to shows like Fact or Faked and Myth-busters. One day they sneer at the 'nuts' who believe UFOs exist; the next day they sneer at the 'cranks' who believe they don't. Look at the scientist's desk above and you see the way science might have matured had not events like Roswell been so effectively hushed up.The dubbing is solid. The framing and colors are comic book perfection. GHIDORAH: Number One!

Anyway, later that bad brainwave night, the princess of Sergina (Akiko Wakabayashi) is abducted mid-flight from her private plane, by a UFO that telekinetacally steers her out the passenger door in mid-flight-- he instant before a terrorist bomb blows the plane to bits. The next day, scientists investigate a meteor that crashed in the mountains and left a huge Ghidorah egg. The princess appears at the dock, dressed in the clothes of an old fisherman and possessed by a Martian (below) for a dockside press conference: "I come from the planet you call Mars! (Ed note: Venus in the Japanese version). The Earth--your planet-- is on the brink of destruction, and you refuse to take it seriously." They laugh. She doesn't. And the hatching egg is their reward. Look who's come all the way from space to show you that three heads are better than one and that killing dolphins in your tuna nets is punishable by monster attack! Ghidorah functions here as a kind of anti-global terrorist bomb, sent to wipe out violent civilizations before they can become a threat to the Galactic Federation (which is a real thing, according to my in-the-know informants!) So stop sending bad vibes!

Of course, the glee with which Japan is wiped out time and again has become dampened by recent cataclysms, but I still got to go with Ghidorah on this one, even if those cute singing Mothra handler sisters are around to sing their little songs to get Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra to unite against him. It takes a lot of singing on their part and cajoling on Mothra's (and she's still just in her larval state), but then that Ifukube drunken bassoon score really stumbles into low, low gear, and the rumble atop the volcanic jungle is on, reminding me that, as a kid watching Speed Racer, I used to root for the bad guys who I thought were super cool, all dressed in black and with dark glasses. Being a tot and inexperienced, I kept thinking "This time... this time they'll finally win." They never won. I eventually got really despondent and I remember my mom finally telling me the facts of life. The bad guys would never win. The race was fixed.

Ghidorah, I want Speed's Mach-5 racer crushed underfoot!

PHANTASM II 

1988 - dir. Don Coscarelli

***

Who knows where we go after we die? Coscarelli knows, or at least he dares to look in the same trans-dimensional direction as fringe theorists like David Icke and Nick Redfern. Like its predecessor, PHANTASM II involves the adventures of an unlucky orphan lad (here James Le Gros) with mental problems and an ice cream vending buddy (Reggie Bannister) pursuing the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) as he loots the graveyards of the western states for his neighboring dimension's slave army. A very bizarre but consistent mythos deconstructs down to reveal what it's like to see the warped mysteries of humanity's archaic funeral rituals through the eyes of a young terrified child wandering the mausoleum while the adults console each other, and being freaked out by the glint of the fading afternoon sun on the shiny marble walls. Suddenly a flying metal ball comes whipping around the corner looking for him, to drill out his pineal gland (the home of the soul) for use in bizarre fourth dimensional enslavement rites. The resulting slaves, crushed down to dwarf size (for the high gravity of his home world) dress like jawas. The bad guys bleed yellow embalming fluid. Paula Irvine plays the grown-up love interest (the granddaughter of the weird old psychic lady in the first film) and even Reggie gets a girl in the form of a groovy young hitchhiker they pick up named Alchemy (Samantha Phillips). The scene where the two couple link up while crashing in a boarded-up house in one of the decimated towns stands as one of the creepier and more desolate of the series, laden with termite psychometric details that feel like what life on the road in upstate NY really feels like.

As in the first, the creepy Carpenter-esque music and ever-immanent nightfall enhances the sense of suburban ghost town desolation. And then there's the underlying mythos.... considering all the bizarre accoutrements of the funeral trade, you can really imagine there being a hidden white room in each mortuary where corpses are compacted for rebirth in a dimension that eerily resembles near-death experiences of the unlucky ones who miss the white light (as thousands of youtube videos will make clear). Such people report their astral body/soul floating up to the white light and then being snatched by hands emerging from the dark shadows along the tunnel's sides, yanked into this prison of Hell as they march along a long trail through a desert-like plain led in front by a flying saucer that seems to be harvesting elements of their souls! Part Moses leading the Israelites through the wasteland for 40 years, part literal hell. Which is which?

Whoa, hey! Too much? Then just enjoy this low key TERMINATOR-meets-EVIL DEAD thrill-chill ride movie which comes with periodic in-jokes (the name on one bag of cremation ashes is "Sam Raimi") and pretend you're in a car at a crumbling, empty drive-in in the early 1990s, remembering when the parking lot around you was alive with youth, health, and bravado... all now dust scattered to the wind at a sterile ceremony attended only by an evil dwarf in a brown robe, texting furiously and all but ignoring the sympathy offered by your grieving friends. A poor thing but thine own. We named that brat Ghidorah!

Tiffany and friend

KINGDOM THE SPIDERS

1977 - dir. John "Bud" Cardos

***

This loose remake of THE BIRDS, this spawn of the post-JAWS hell (replete with that old 'you can't cancel the such-and-such festival --the town needs those tourists!' bit), this environ-amok (DDT's the devil!) whirligig of desert sand and webbing, stars the always underrated William Shatner as a small town Arizona veterinarian, and the awesome Tiffany Bolling as a big town arachnologist sent out to help when the toxicology report on a dead calf reveals an inordinate amount spider venom. A sly feminist update of Melanie Daniels (she even has a convertible and driving gloves), Bolling even has a worthy Annie Hayworth in the form of Marcy Lafferty (Shatner's real-life wife at the time). The Bolling-Shatner meet cute is at a gas station instead of a pet store, and the genders are reversed, but a lot of the other BIRDS boxes are ticked off: there's the holing up at the local bar (this one adjunct to a set of cozy rustic cabins instead of a hotel) to hash out motives and options; an crashed plane takes the place of gas pumps for the fireball (though I guess they ran out of money for that one). The big attack with people running around in panic with little creatures on them is adorable, and the Arizona scenery is beautiful with mesas like the ones in STAGECOACH, or rather the same exact ones... as STAGECOACH.

The first to get it eaten is, wouldn't you know it, a black rancher (Woody Strode) fearful of losing his livestock in a quarantine ("he worked for seven years to get that bull!") He's allowed much dignity and concern, so we're slowly climbing up the stereotypes from Best's cowardice to this over-serious humble sobriety... still a cliche, though, since his wife's so dumb she blows holes in her own floor and shoots her own hand rather than just getting a broom and sweeping the spiders out the door. That's a real self-reliant homesteader you got there, Woody. God knows what she'd do if she so a mouse.

It's also pretty dumb that the white folks decide to go on a picnic after finding the dead black couple lying in the grass covered with arachnid bites. Dumb... but typical.

But hey, tropes stop with Tiff: when a tarantula--with scary library music cues filling the soundtrack--slowly climbs up onto Bolling's desk and into an open desk drawer while she's in the shower, KINGDOM comes into a greatness all its own, because when she sits down at her desk and sees it she doesn't freak out. She just smiles like she's found a kitten, picks it up, strokes its hair, then releases it gently outside. She's like if Jill Banner in SPIDER BABY survived, nd went on to get a doctorate in arachnology. I love the way she towers over little Bill Shatner in their scenes together, and the way she gently mocks him when he tries to seduce her, while still letting him continue to try. showing his mammalian fumbling the same calm loving detachment she showed the spider. Her reputation amongst the Psychotronic set is well-deserved! I'd never really caught the fever before this, but I instantly ordered BONNIE'S KIDS and rented TRIANGLE (1970) after watching (See my review of both: Bolling Straight).

Bill Shatner earns his cult, too, especially when he does an awesome high-stepping dance while running around the yard, trying to not step on any of the spiders. He sometimes does step on one, of course. Can't be helped. But no hairpieces were harmed during the making of this movie.

Stung by the Belle: FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: Jailhouse 41 (1972)

No one "beats" the Japanese when it comes to sadomasochism in cinema: They whip each other right out in public; they rape everyone in sight while grunting and frothing at the mouth; they engage in uninhibited gang violence, glue-sniffing and arson. In American exploitation film we seem to be at a loss to "ahem" measure up, perhaps due to our (relative) lack of repression. Even our recent torture porn phase is really offshot/borrowed from 'J' (and 'K') in style and substance. We can do sleazy (the OLGAs and ILSAs) and we can do titillating (the Tweeds and Mundaes) and we can do violent, but but the Japanese know to turn over the apple cart and start humping it like a dog. Their films transcend words like 'transfigur-titiliation,' 'pop-arterial' and 'hypno-dermal,' and FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION series remains a stellar example. It leaves you dazed, disturbed, clammy, depressed and worn out, even strangely exhilarated. Its sexual fever cruelty opens up your cranial shell, and then the pop art color patterns come in and blow out the previous contents until all that's left are nerve endings. And yet, the Japanese are often terrified of body hair. Hilarious!

With their over-the-top butoh style acting ever diffusing any sense of adult sexual reality, Japan's Scorpion series becomes strangely cathartic, and undeniably artsy. The suffering of post-war prostitutes in 1950s Suzuki films merges with the Sergio Leone western's sense of surreal absurdism and subtextual anti-authority, with Scorpion's ability to "take it"--her capacity for suffering without ever 'breaking'--so astounding in its deadpan feminist disaffect that it becomes its own form of dishing it out.

I've always been in awe of Japan's Sadean way to wrap prurient transgression in candy-coated shells of guilt, feminism, deadpan drollery, and existential despair. When the French do S/M, you can tell they're clutching onto their copies of Bataille as defense against Catholic-school guilt, and as a result a creeping bourgeois airlessness sometimes suffocates the sleeping beast of voyeuristic-Gallic masochism in its cradle, but the Japanese crank the Masoch-volume down to minus-eleven and get you laughing in delight at the sheer absurdity of all human expression, from grimaces of ecstasy to grimaces of agony, showing that our deepest most profane desires, fears and unendurable pains all look the same from far away, and are as ridiculous as anything else when exposed to light--even fake pink cinema light-- and so the Japanese find their way to Bataille almost by accident, and that has made all the difference.

Nowhere in my experience is this more balls-out perfect than in FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41 (1972). It takes the cake because its candy crazy colors suggest that intense prolonged pain and incarceration--indeed that being a female unwilling to bow her head to the rutting Japanese male's petty tyranny--might lead to pop art candy color satori. As the title arachnid, Meiko Kaji has such a firm nail on her world-weary but mercilessly resolved "Girl with No Voice" type of avenging dark angel, even in a role that's mostly nonspeaking and barely moving, that we feel her menace. Just standing there, waiting to strike, we're wary and--if feminst by temperament--also hopeful that this perennial victim of double crosses, sexual harassment and unjust incarceration will get some balls in her treasure sack and crimson on her hatchet, as no saying goes. No matter how much humiliation and brutality she endures, her Scorpion never flinches or weeps, and her hair is perfect. Freshly washed and combed, it blows from her own private offscreen fan.

Kaji also sings the theme song in that great bluesy lounge pop style of the movie's moment and there's some great surreal interludes, including a  Japanese kind of "Biwa" (the ancient Japanese folk ballad tradition) version of "Cell Block Tango (He Had it Comin')" from Fosse's Chicago. The musical score itself is a constant Greek chorus-style counter-response of swelling, trombone-heavy crime jazz; Jew's harp "boing boing" western leitfmotifs, bassoon and reed sustains over close-up staring contests, all suggesting the Sino-Morricone-Leone connection courses throughout... or did Leone borrow the bold comic book style from the era's films or both from manga?

Thankfully, though it's certainly traumatic to watch, the sexual violence is highly symbolized, even abstracted. There's no doubt these Japanese filmmakers are on the feminist side as they so keenly convey the level of sexual enslavement most American males deny exists. They help it go down smoother with a huge dose of self-conscious satire, a complete capitulation of all sympathy and dignity on the parts of all males and most females-- both cops and prisoners--everyone in fact, but our protagonist antihero. She keeps her dignity to the bitter end. The roaches will have inherited the earth and the stone Buddhas will crumble before her stony glance softens to a bearable g/cm3.

If you've ever been an alienated self-conscious new kid in school you know what it's like to suffer. Humiliated and horrified as you try and find your home room; no one notices or cares about you and yet you feel them judging you anyway. At lunch they resemble pigs at the trough and simian brutes in gym class. Well, if you still perceive your fellow man that way then Japanese pinku films are your revenge. Just as "the final girl" survives the horrors of slasher-filled cabins and lakefronts by her rejection of sex and gender differentiation, so we are encouraged to take a final girl approach to the entirety of Japanese patriarchal society and regard human contact itself as inherently corrupting. We're better off without sex, alone in our little trichophobic apartments. We had no idea, going into these films, that--as intentionally turning away from patriarchal social mores to become fledgling hikikomori--we were doing something noble. Isn't this what cult movies do, after all, validate our not going out to play with others and commune with nature?

Thus, we see and participate in a kind of Technicolor ritual where sexual violence--revealed to be a tool for subjugating and demoralizing women in order to strengthen patriarchal rule--is itself subjugated. The more violence is done to her and her fellow women the more karma weaves its spell and Matsu waits like the patient spider-scorpion for the karma wheel to slowly turn her way. Sooner or later she'll get a chance to strike. She won't miss.

There is only one pair of eyes whose gaze she seems to profit from: ours. She never addresses the camera directly, as, say, her 2009 British male counterpart, Bronson (from the 2009 film of the same name) does, but the effect is the same. As purely cinematic subjects, they each represent a distilled essence of masochistic cinema viewing. Without our gaze, their suffering would become unendurable. It's as if she senses our eyes and is trying to illustrate how she feels about school, work, and family in a ritualized distinctly-Japanese feminist performance art.

It's good sometimes to remember "it's only a movie," and this comic over-doing it also does much to undercut any potential over-identification with either side, so we can realize that at the core of these films lurks a deep revulsion for one's secret shame/desire; a need to pull out at the last minute from over-identification; the shame and guilt contorting their bodies even as the crime is being committed. Only in the later Scorpion films is the violence highly sexualized in a less academically applaudable state, as if the initial shock of seeing your most debased primal fantasies played out has worn down to a hollow numbness, requiring ever more dangerous dissolving of the boundary between the masochistic (ala Steven Shaviro) and sadistic (ala Laura Mulvey).

One's opinion is bound to be personal, but to me, Jailhouse 41 isn't misogynist but misandric, and overall just pure masochistic fantasy. If soap opera martyr movie emotions had their own pornography, this would be it, a protracted defiance of death, Antigone caught in a Fujicolor prism. The western Gallic-influenced torture porn of SAW and company tends more towards the fearful anticipation of pain/gore and self-conducted limb amputations, but the frisson in the Scorpion films comes more from existential weariness as garishly violent beatings--replete with amplified, echoed whacking noises--stretch into abstraction, and we begin to re-imagine our whole earthly existence as one long stretch of watching someone get fake whipped on TV (i.e Videodrome). The Scorpion films project this as the ultimate reflection of a bad acid trip, where every event, color, action, word, gesture, even act of shifting weather patterns, seems geared to illustrate that modern life is a smokescreen for eternal hell, a boot camp of agony designed to either break our spirits or turn us into cold-blooded scorpions.

The only deciding factor is our ego -- the more we cling to ego the more the pain hurts, but if we release ego and surrender to our higher self, we can endure the suffering and wreak a vengeance made all the sweeter by the cauterizing flames that have cored us like an apple or the insides of a junky taking an opiate receptor blocker to hasten (and hopefully shorten) the inevitable stretch of agonizing withdrawal, the 'crucifixion cruise' all alcoholics and junkies inevitably suffer, either intentionally or not.

In a scene filmed atop and around a recently-erupted volcano, Matsu and her fellow escaped female convicts run and creep around the ashy slopes, dressed in gray cape/shawls, all while bassoon and Jew's harp twang and moan, making us expect Macbeth and Banquo to come riding past, or a dinosaur to come roaring down from the sky. It's important to realize this innate sense of connection with primal, tribal forces is much more pervasive in the Japanese mindset than in, say, USA's melting pot blood-splatter. With their insane eyes and gnashing teeth, the other women convicts are representations of a pure, undistilled feminine animism. Presocialized erotic apparitions pummeled by Apollonian logic into barely recognizable caricatures of longing and fear, they are personifications of the chthonic stain that endures no matter how much carbolic acid and electroshock bleach beatings are poured onto it. The volcano itself is a perfect metaphor for this Dionysian primordial archetyping and while the female prisoners seem perfectly part of the landscape, the cops and dogs are out of their element, both menacing alien others and buffoons, easily stuck in the ash or falling victim to Matsu's booby traps. These figures of law and order seem to sense that they've been led to a place where patriarchal law has no jurisdiction, and that their whole purpose in the film is to be swallowed up by the unconquerable feminine force that Matsu embodies.

At any rate, SCORPION suffers from a very limited emotional palette including passages of death throe squeak-speak and screaming contests that drag on for minutes. I envy those who can watch these films on a regular basis and not become warped and misanthropic, or at least not get a headache. The color coordinated trash dump scenes are pretty awesome, at any rate, and when she slashes at the bad guys, she tears the celluloid itself in half... it's artsy like that!

If there was a line between life and death, it's where Matsu, Sgt. James (HURT LOCKER) and Bronson all dwell. For some warriors, it's bleached Iraqi deserts; for others, dank prisons and heaps of volcanic ash and garbage; for an unhappy few, even their own household has become a battleground. The question is, when will they stop cringing in fear rise up as fearless, unfazeable warriors beyond the illusions of life/death duality? Or as they die, die, die, die, when will they scream, in slow mo pitch shift squeakspeak, instead: MATSUUUUUUUUUO!?!?!?!?!

(Thanks Aria at Muse's Garden, from whom I ripped some of the above beauteous screenshots - read her insightful and much more expositional review here)

Shroom Amongst the Stars: MATANGO: AKA Attack of the Mushroom People (1963)

A bunch of Japanese libertines on a yacht get lost in a freak storm (ala Gilligan's Island) and wind up marooned on a strange island populated only by a derelict cargo ship run aground along the rocky coast and.. a population of growing, giggling, intelligent super-fungi. The derelict ship's log reveals the mushroom in question has harmful "nerve" effects, but man, is it filling and delicious! Those who take a nibble soon go insane and like to frolic in the rain with their red-capped brethren. PS- there's nothing else to eat on the whole damned island.

The best scenes in the film involve the mushroom people with their pitch-shifted slow mo laughter and the amazing, corrosively sexual sight of the mushrooms growing out of the moss, larger and larger, breathing in and out, like inflatable penis dolls. Whoa, was that too much association for you? Grow up, these are Japanese! The first girl to get in the groove talks about Japan's familiarity with "the laughing mushroom" and tales of how local natives would take them and dance by the fire.  You know what Cibo Matto sang:

We were born in the 60's
You made war with the Vietnamese.
We love LSD! We die easily!
Can we just say c'est la vie?

Do I digress? Cibo Matto are my age, they know the drill. We were born in the late 1960s and we're still wondering where the hell the party or the war or the drugs all went. MATANGO, dig, was made even before the party really started even for the hipster parents of Cibo and me, 1963.

Alas, those awesome scenes of the breathing shrooms are only a small portion of the film. The psychedelic aspect is kind of subsumed into the horror of transformation, as those who eat the fungi become the fungi, but wait... not to kill the others, but to kill their souls... slowly... and rather than explore that change we concentrate instead on the intolerant last man standing, the narrator relating his story in the Ishameal-esque framing device. Thus we sidestep many lightshows and hallucinations (though there are a few) to focus on quick-moving, exposition-filled narrative, one familiar to horror fans: a yacht with class-related tensions between crew and rich hedonist owner; a freaky sudden hurricane-level storm; an uncharted, seemingly uninhabited island; mounting sexual tension; and hidden monsters. True to horror movie form there's a lot of exploring - we spend quite a bit of time looking around moldy freighter interiors, and fighting over dwindling food, the lack of nutrition bringing out the worst in everyone, except for some reason the square hero. but there's lots of great outdoor rain scenes of everyone digging roots or hoarding turtle eggs. And then the monsoon rains come, and the shrooms grow big.

Overall, the greed and "collapse of decency" elements trump the trippy stuff more than I, personally, would like; on the other hand, the end more than makes up for it all with a blatant pro-drug message that succinctly damns modern society as being far more corrosive and wrong than any entheogenic Japanese version of ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS mind-meld (and this was 1963, a solid four years before the Summer of Love-- did I say that already? And I quoted Cibo Matto? Dude, my brain...).

I remember seeing this on late night UHF TV a lot in the 1970s, in a butchered, dubbed edition known as ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE at a cool all-night slumber party with the kids upstairs working the Ouija and the truth or dare and the parents swinging and swapping below and us all welcoming the dawn together, so it has a special spot in my heart, even though I was too young and disinterested to follow it. But seeing MATANGO now on beautiful widescreen DVD, I wonder what the hell was going on in that old Philadelphia local TV UHF version? Was it on purpose that it made no sense? Then again, I was very young, and usually half-asleep; the slow-mo shrooms seemed to us to be following American GIs into their tents, which means the lateness of the air combined with the stamen's lacivious breathing infatable motion to hypnotize me into a moldy funk. If you were ever funky like that, you'll want to score yourself some MATANGO.

PS - It would make a 'good' triple bill with SHE DEMONS and MESA OF THE LOST WOMEN! Don't ask me how I know... Oxnard