Holiday Hide-out: Your CHARLIE'S ANGELS WTF Reader.

Is my credibility as an haughty film studies intellectual harpooned by my open-air breeching love for Charlie's Angels? And Kristen Stewart? Readers of the blog know I love them both, so ain't it passing strange I carry instant disdain for this apparently misguided 'reboot'. Is that maturity or just wisdom? Nothing dampens my love for the original show, not even itself, which can be often lazy, slow and self-imitating (especially after the first 10 episodes of any given season - though lets not forget back then the average season length was 22 episodes). But to see how great it is, one need only compare it to the 'McG' remakes, on whose shoulders the new remake-- rather than going for the more laid-back 70s procedural warmth of the original ABC seasons--seems to stand. Just the commercials are enough to dissuade me from this new reboot, regardless that a woman (Banks!) directed it. Based on the ads, mind you, if anything it's more like a mix of any number of Hong Kong girl spy unit movies and the female assassin wing of the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith. 

Man, I remember loving that first 'McG' Charlie's Angels movie, but now it just seems dumb and loud, like a big commercial for itself as evinced by the endless pop songs with the word "Angel" in their titles - oh how on brand, and soundtrack compilation CD ready!". The sequel was even dumber and louder. And each made the critical mistake of giving them boyfriends. Dude! 

In the Aaron Spelling playbook, the Angels never keep a beau beyond the episode he shows up in - he either dies or turns out to be a crook. It's the rules that allow male viewers to not feel threatened. No one wants to see a girl they crush on turn out to be happily with some idiot, And besides, for those who know how to dig for it, the clear pair bond of the show is between Sabrina and Kelly. Taken on that level, the lack of sex is a clear indicator of the closeted era, when gay people just seemed uninterested in sex altogether. The new reboot looks very gay (there's more than one giant closet!! It's a mix of weaponry, disguises, but mainly I'm sure expensive dresses, shoes and handbags) and racially harmonized (which is good, provided the non-white characters avoid the kind of pasteurized blandness that comes when stereotype traits are excised but nothing is added in their place). But none of the girls look like they can throw a punch, so it's more being impressed by Zoe Bell and her hair-in-the-face body double girl squad, and--hopefully--the green screen team, than any actual law-of-gravity-obeying action.

So convincing

It's barely even the same thing once they can defy gravity with super kicks. Now the Angels have  kind of super spy action hero level of vapidity disguised as Bondian fluency, the type where they can squeeze off three shots while doing a slow-mo somersault backflip to catch a passing helicopter rope in order to swing up right into a drop kick on some rooftop sniper. The original may not have had that level of PG carnage, it was real. If a car blew up or crashed, it really did, and was a highlight of the show. It meant something. You could feel the trauma emanating from the experience throughout the rest of the episode. The effect of the climactic and occasional violence and trauma was something the Angels felt and relied on each other to salve with their strong sisterly nurturing. Everything hurt, and violence was only the last resort. Luckily, once you had a gun in your hand and shouted "freeze!" the perps generally gave up, and meekly rolled along with the credits. But in the McG reboot, cartoon action is ramped up to the impossible levels demanded by viewers' numbness. We're all big budget action addicts for which every new movie must top all that came before it, until only CGI can even begin to capture it.

Meanwhile, I have stayed in contact with the original series, and it looks better than ever over the dusty muskrat musk of time. Aaron Spelling wisely kept them all single, in a kind of perpetual celibate sisterhood of the Charlie - handmaidens to the absent father; the dead father come alive

If you turn to your Moses and Monotheism, you'll see where Freud writes about the social order dawning when the jealous sons kill the primal father so they can have access to his harem. With the killing of the evil father comes the guilt, with the result that the men each take one woman for their wives, and stick to monogamy, sex without libidinal excess, symbolizing the renouncement of the odious arrangement still present in packs of apes, lions, and sea lions. BUT once killed, the murdered father is expunged of his odium and now venerated as a kind of symbolic holy icon, the ultimate signifier. In his absence he becomes a holy guiding light. Our guilt absolves him. His name, henceforth, shall be Charlie.

We earn our spot on the team by renouncing sex, the drive which caused us to murder him and drive him from our sight. For an spooked prepubescent child of the swinging 70s, a bit weirded out by the magnetic gravitas of adult sexuality, such a collective renouncement comes as a sigh of relief. These Angels stay the babysitters that would rather hang out with you playing the Star Wars board game on the living room floor than leave you alone while the go make out with their boyfriend or spend all night on the phone (they stay the Jamie Lee Curtis rather than the Nancy Loomis and PJ Soles, if you get my meaning). We can swoon free of worry.

This our Charlie is, the heavenly platonic pimp of angels, in a sense, provides. Speaking to them from beyond the grave, he spares them the sight of his conspicuous enjoyment up in his (presumably Beverly Hills) heaven, ever attended by smiling bimbos we get but a glimpse of (they are, clearly, ensured to be cute but never as beautiful as the Angels themselves). Thus he continues his obscene enjoyment, but it matters not for his image. We never see his face, nor do we see the women for long. Nonetheless it's these brief moments that people equate the show with, irregardless of the fact that 99.5% of it is the three Angels solving crimes, and they are seldom in bathing suits unless at the beach or on vacation or in disguise.

It matters little, the bawdy glimpses of Charlie's bilious private life are what the naysayers base their views on. Maybe The very fact it is three women solving crimes is threatening enough to the status quo that it gets reviled as "jiggle TV".  In critiquing a Taylor Swift video, my blood rite goddess Camille Paglia wrote:

" A warmer model of female friendship was embodied in Aaron Spelling's blockbuster Charlie's Angels TV show, which was denounced by feminists as a "tits-and-ass" parade but was in fact an effervescent action-adventure showing smart, bold women working side by side in fruitful collaboration." (Full)

I'm glad Kristen Stewart went for it, ca$h-wise, and that a woman is the director, but Kristen is too good an actress to be this kind of McG-ish super agent sexual manipulator. It would have been great to see a stripped-down analog return to form. Mind you, I'm only going by the commercials, which show a female Charlie (visible?), a female Bosley (?) and a horde of Angels of all races, shapes, orientations, gender identitites, and sizes, all around the needy world.

Meanwhile, available on DVD, streaming and--if you get METV on your cable--5 PM Eastern Time in daily rerun, the original series beckons. If you're hiding out from the world for the holidays, choosing to hibernate and lay around snug in your electric blankets, crying, sniffling, laughing in deranged happiness, or just unwinding with easily unnerved relatives after the kids are in bed, here are my capsule reviews/ratings of the first three seasons, episode--by-episode, to ensure a seemingly endless stream of mellowness and familiar guest stars (Dean Martin! Jamie Lee Curtis! Tiffany Bolling!) They got me through my last relapse, and they got me through my last recovery. They're there for you. Will you be there for them? They won't even notice you watching, so don't feel shy.

Season I (1976-1977)

Season II (1977-1978)

Season III (1978-79)

ALSO: 

Thy Name is Charlie

(August 2006)

+ Notes on Charlie's Angels

(August 2006)

A Tale of Two Sammies
(March 2009)

Kate Jackson was my Village
(March, 2009)

Happy Birthday Cheryl Ladd
(July 12, 2012) 

RIP, ANGEL BABY 

(July 2/2009)

NOW FOR THE BIG NEWS - if you are a fan, that is.
I'm working on an episode guide to seasons 4 and 5, at long last...

Stay tuned, Angels!

That's why all these pics of season 5 with aquamarine-eyed angel Tanya Roberts

PLUS

KRISTEN STEWART ROUND-UP:

Choose Death: Revisiting TWILIGHT's Junky Delirium

The Metatextual Exorcist's Assistant: CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Kristen Stewart in the Snow with Poison: SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN

All the Usual Vices: THE RUNAWAYS

"These bad boys mean Business" -TWILIGHT BREAKING DAWN vs. FACING EVIL with Candice DeLong

Bella's Big Bounce: TWILIGHT: BREAKING DAWN PART II

Someone to Fight Over Me: Feminism, S/M, and the Daemonic in TWILIGHT (BL 4/10)

TWILIGHTs Cinematic Ancestors

DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE vs. The Destruction Company

A black magic-dabbling Hollywood star from the 1930s named Lorna Love (Marianna Hill) reaches from beyond the grave to fuck up a couple of her married biographers in this priceless 1976 made-for-TV film. Kate Jackson and Robert Wagner play the couple, who move into Love's crumbling mansion (i.e. "Love House") to soak up the atmosphere and groove on the vast cache of mementos. With all the spooky stuff going on--including a ghostly projector showing Love's old films on the wall (wherein she seems to materialize out of the frame, beckoning to drunken Wagner), and a ceremonial knife that appears and disappears from random drawers--this biography is taking forever to start. Like any self-respecting writer, Wagner uses the thick atmosphere as an excuse to to drink and brood over the portrait of Lorna (painted by his own late father, cementing his connection to the subject) rather than write so much as a chapter heading. Like Dana Andrews before him, he's falling in love with a corpse. In a sublimely macabre Hollywood Babylon-worthy touch, Lorna's still-beautiful corpse is even kept on display in a glass case out in the backyard. Wife Kate Jackson better hope there's no Mrs. Danvers skulking about the grounds in jealous guardianship of all that their dead mistress once surveyed.

Relegated mostly towards playing a gaslit innocent, terrorized by a phantom in a purple devil worship ceremonial robe waving around that curved sacrificial dagger, Jackson looks quite sleek in her silk scarves and slacks, her straight black hair extra long, her youth all but crystalizing the air around her with fuzzy magic. A smart sweater worn over a collared shirt adds nerdy class to her beautiful 'smarts' and nurturing soul. We feel her pain, then, as she's way too sweet to be deserve being menaced by a phantom in a pentagram-covered purple robe who's either trying to kill her or just scare her out of Love House, and then to have her legit fears dismissed by dumbass husband Wagner.

He thinks it's her imagination, but it's his that's out of control. As he drinks booze in the den, moons over the Love portrait and screens her old films over and over via a home projector on the wall, he winds up distracted by conveniently-timed hallucinations of ghostly Lorna whenever Kate's in danger in another room. In the most awesome moment, Lorna comes to life in a slow motion, gold-tinted mirage, smiling and calling his name from inside the film he's projecting! As someone who--as a child--believed he could make Kate Jackson fall in love with him if he stared hard enough at her pictures in Teen Beat, I caught the meta frisson from this scene, big time.

But then, in real life at least, adulthood supplants our naive, hopeless wishful fantasies. Once we understand the way these fantasies are structured on the bedrock of their never coming true, the bedrock dissolves and we're set free to find a new illusion. But alcoholism returns the writer to the land of fantasy; the more Wagner drinks, the ruder, more patronizing, and dismissive of Jackson's legitimate worry he becomes. He thinks she's faking that someone is trying to kill her and has left a Satanic knife in her drawer and cut her own face out of their author's photo in order to get his attention. As Kate is so rational and intelligent, you start to imagine what Charlie's Angels would be like if every suggestion, clue, or even event the Angels reported was dismissed by Bosley and Charlie as womanly hallucinations and hysterics. Ick, right? They'd need more than an hour to solve the case, that's for sure...

Anyway, despite all that, the pace is brisk and there's a whole cavalcade of pre-war Hollywood stars in cameos: John Carradine shows up all evil-like as Lorna's old Svengali-style director; Sylivia Sydney is the nicotine-voiced housekeeper (prefiguring her hilarious turn in BEETLEJUICE); Joan Blondell is a deranged fan (and Love's fellow coven member); Dorothy Lamour... OK, I forget what she does. And holding her own as the ghost of Lorna is a leggy tall blonde named Marianna Hill. You may remember as Fredo's rebellious strumpet of a wife in GODFATHER 2, and she's in tons of other shit too, including a couple of STAR TREK episodes, RED LINE 7000 and MESSIAH OF EVIL. Hot damn.

Being a confirmed sadomasochistic Charlie's Angels fan as a child in the 70s, poring, Sternberg-like, over images of their loveliness, you can imagine how I longed to see DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE, which was mentioned on occasion in TV Guide, along with Kate's other big 70s TVM, the equally awesome sounding SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, both TVMs that came and went before I was aware of them due to my parent's strict bedtime laws. Their unavailability made imagining them all the sweeter; I desperately wanted a job at any school with a name like Love House or Satan's School for Girls. I'd even brush their hair for them, and do their toenails. Can you even imagine my weird semi-sadomasochistic / pre-empathic, prepubescent jouissance?

In the pre-Xerox, pre-video 70s, the only way to acquire pictures of your icons was to take them with a camera yourself, off the TV, or buy the magazine and cut the pics out, or trade them (i.e. Charlie's Angels trading cards, Tiger Beat spreads, etc.), or steal them (I'd rip the pics out of newsstand copies when the 7-11 camera had rotated the other way). If you had real money you could send away for real glossies. but they never seemed that cool to me.

As for owning films in the 70s, the best you could do (if you were a kid) was to get a super 8mm projector and buy little condensed reels from the camera store. They had one or two key scenes from the film edited together and running maybe five or six minutes. There was NO other way to see a movie other than at the whim of the TV channel or theater programmer and even then it was contingent on bed times and parental preferentiality.

I mention this for a simple reason: to stress the power of the image in the 70s. It was a power that its proliferation in our current era has decreased. Now one merely thinks of a name and they can find every picture ever, immediately -- we can download them and keep them forever. Kids today take that for granted but the older of us remember maybe how that inability to 'own' movies-- the sheer lack of access --made images more sacred, more ephemeral.

There was no way my parents would let me stay up until 4 AM watching some rerun ghost TVM, at that age. but I was far from tired at 9 PM... so I was forced to lie in bed in a prepubescent miasma, imagining Kate Jackson in all these ghostly, Satanic, and love-death situations. If I knew about how good booze in sufficient quantities would have made me feel, I'd have been drinking like Wagner. But to me it was just gross stuff adults drank that made them act like dazed idiots.

 

Instead of going the child lush route, we obsessive, morbidly image-obsessed pre-teen pagans used our pent-up energy to dream DVD and the internet into existence. But, like booze, these image multipliers constitute a devil's bargain. The ensuing unbearable surplus--the vast expanse of internet sites, online books, streaming films, etc.--saturates the eye to the point of numb despair, robbing us of our grand masochistic longing, decreasing the value of everything.

Sooner or later, all our deepest fantasies end up in the $1.99 Used -- Very Good bin at Amazon.

So Lorna Love died, for there were no more image-starved minds to conquer.  The center couldn't hold and without that externalized desire. The subject imploded under its own horrid weight.

Don't believe me? Look at these recent revolting news stories about 'the Destruction Company' - where dumb rich kids pay someone else for the right to smash their own TV sets, and you see how universal availability forces a crisis of desire. The more stuff we have, the less it has value... and for the person who constructs their whole identity around ego and ownership this is a truth too horrible to face. The race is lost since you downloaded the finish line before it began. So rather than go back and bet on devout Non-Attachment in the Third, you just buy the horse that already lost the race and pay for the right to shoot it.

Such suckers are what DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE is all about. Rather than admit they can't get their youth back they try to stop time and freeze themselves in amber. They hope to go rigid in their glory rather than let go and flow in the current of anonymity, to relish the disillusionment that comes with attaining your desire in order to move into egolessness. Meanwhile, the aging stars from the golden era all show up as groundskeepers, real estate agents, and neighbors. They collect their checks, and shamble off back into the shadows. They're old and irrelevant, but man they know the score.

Of course, you can always pick your obsession more wisely - find something very hard to attain. Pine with me, then, for that legendary original edit of Orson Welles' MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), yet to be unearthed in some Brazilian vault, if it even exists.

As you may know, Welles' finished an original three-hour cut of the film while in Rio for the war effort. The new management at RKO who received it butchered it down to under two hours and dumped into theaters. Allegedly they used their own print and didn't touch his Rio copy, so maybe it's hidden somewhere in some Brazilian vault? While the version that sometimes shows up on TCM seems boring and indulgent, and leading star Tim Holt plays a drab and uninteresting fop. I pine and long for the day when the original cut is found... that is my film geek grail.

But! Confident they'll never find it, I'm spared the anxiety of having to actually buy it for $39.99 on Criterion Blu-ray if it is ever is found, and since I paid so much I'd have to endure all three hours of claustrophobic late 19th century sound and shadow. AMBERSONS is Welles' AMARCORD, his FANNY AND ALEXANDER, his STAND BY ME, but with the selfish rich brat who taunts Spanky in OUR GANG as the star, the type who would surely join 'The Destruction Company' so he could buy and then wail on Joe Cotten's prototype horseless carriage.

And what is that crazy translation of the Baudelaire poetry Wagner's reading? We get a long look at the page in his book:

Kisses will I give thee, chill as the moon
and caresses shuddering and slow,
as a writhing serpent uncoiling a tomb.

Like angels with bright savage eyes
I will come treading phantom-wise
Hither where thou art wont to sleep
Amid the shadows hollow and deep.

Alas, the only DVD version of this film--or SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS--comes from the odious Cheezy Flix DVD label. These rats with their douchebag logo release hard-to-find films on Public Domain multi-generational dupe-quality discs for premium prices and that's a disgrace. Occasionally some color shows up unfaded, such as the the succulent purple of Lonra's bedroom chamber (below), but mostly its awash in faded, sad mud.

Yet, perhaps that's for the best, again, for when desires are examined under a Blu-ray HD stethoscope, they tend to dissolve like million dollar ice sculptures in the fires of our hellish gaze. So at least we can still long for a 'better' edition of DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE and SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, the way Wagner longs for Lorna, and the way that longing drags her back from the grave, trailing blurry tracking-streaked clouds of shuddering, slow serpents (uncoiling from the tomb where thy parents think thou ought to go sleep, since it's four AM), shambling like a 'Very Poor (VP)' quality first printing of her own sad fanzine; a dupe of a dupe, hollering for her Usher ushers, her worshipful acolytes, and her sweet, sorry Fredo.

Great Women of Horror: An Acidemic Top Ten

So many of the top horror film bloggers are women it's not even fair to just say 'it's your month, baby.' Because they rule! You got Tenebrous Kate, Stacie Ponder of Final Girl, the original as far as I'm concerned (she was my introduction to the world of blogging back in 2006), Jinx from Totally Jinxed, and the immortal Day of the Woman's BJ-C.  and others... but hey, Acidemic is always down to celebrate badass horror chicks! The below list doesn't include the more obvious choices I've already covered, such as Jill Banner and Beverly Washburn in SPIDER BABY (here) and Natasha Henstridge in SPECIES (read my big SPECIES / GHOSTS OF MARS piece here) or THE RING (here):

Nastassja Kinski in

CAT PEOPLE

1982 - Dir. Paul Schrader

A movie for the sweaty palmed thrill of waiting to meet what may be a new lover: the danger--heady and intoxicating--taking over and trumping all other states in the electoral college of the Electric Self. The sense of incredible longing coupled to intense anxiety about the hazards involved is one most teenagers get to know all too well, and I was worse than most, unaware that my relentless longing was not sexy to behold... How great then, a movie that champions sexual stasis? Nastassja Kinski is afraid to surrender because she knows she'll turn into a panther if she gets too excited, and won't turn back again until she kills someone. The touchingly open ending hints at the dawn of an inter-species love affair with the mix of sacral chakra-moving low synth beds and "See these eyes so blue / I could stare for a thousand years" from Bowie all letter perfect. I hummed that Bowie song all the way through the rest of high school. You can argue Lewton's 1942 original is better, but why bother? I've seen them both dozens of times and Kinski is so perfectly cast I swoon just thinking about it. Look at her up there, like the love child of Ingrid Bergman and a leopard, which is nearly true. Meanwhile Annette O'Toole is her perfect foil in the Jane Randolph spot: all-American, busty, good with animals, and sexually available as all hell to John Heard, who may not be perfect but is better in every way than dopey Kent Smith in the original. Jeeze, when Annette O'Toole is your back-up booty call, you know you're in clover. (see also - Blank like a Panther - Blu-ray Review)

2. tie -Alison Hayes / Dorothy Neumann

in THE UNDEAD

1957 Dir. Roger Corman

My favorite Corman movie. For sheer ballsy Halloween lunacy, nothing beats THE UNDEAD. The whole film feels like it was shot in sequence over one long night in a single empty soundstage full of black toxic mist (and it was!). Pamela Duncan is hypnotized to travel through the sea of time to her past lives, but she ends up derailing the scheme of things when she's able to whisper advice to her about-to-be-beheaded for witchcraft Middle Ages incarnation. Her prior self escapes the axe, and while her loyal suitor and the palace guards give chase, the hypnotist joins her in the past to try and correct the matter. I saw this when very young on TV and the scene were Duncan seeks shelter at the witch's house is to me the eternally definitive Halloween moment, Neumann the definitive witch (see photo top of post). She's a good witch, despite her crooked nose (putting to rest the libelous claim of Glenda in OZ that "only bad witches are ugly"), and I love the casual way she asks the stranger at her door "Are you from this era or from a time yet to be?" as if hypnotists from the future were not uncommon.  Alison Hayes is awesome as the va-va-Voom-level hot 'real bad' witch with eyes on Pamela's man. And then the devil shows up! Sign the book, brother, and put this on real DVD... now!!! Do you hear?.... now.... now... now...

3. Susan Cabot in

THE WASP WOMAN

1959 - Dir. Roger Corman

I reviewed the entire Corman canon for Muze search engine back in '01 and as a result fell madly in love with Susan Cabot. WASP was her tour de force, but she was also featured in Corman's MACHINE GUN KELLY, VIKING WOMEN AND THE SEA SERPENT, SORORITY GIRL and CARNIVAL ROCK. She's good in every damn one, but nowhere is she is awesome as when she's half-wasp half aging cosmetics line CEO, putting male chauvinist pig executives in their place by day, and by night injecting herself with a radically experimental wasp enzyme in order to restore her fading youth and save her company from going broke. Never before has vanity and heroism gone so well together and so wrong in results. Eccentric scientist Dr. Zinthrop (Michael Mark) first tries the serum on a cat, but when it later sprouts wings (hilarious knitted little puffs) and attacks him, Zinthrop realizes that hmmm, the formula might not be market ready. Unfortunately, he winds up hit by a car and struck with amnesia before he's able to warn Starlin of the ghastly side effects. Soon she's buzzing around the building at night, attacking and devouring her enemies and janitorial staff. Maybe her mask is the usual cheap ass Corman affair but it has a certain art nouveau parasol-eyed fabulousness, Corman's firing cylinders like all wick candles lit from the middle and ends at the same time; the film never lags - I like that it rarely leaves the office / lab, as if it's her hive, the queen working woman's field of battle and harvest, except for a trip to the emergency room (with a young Corman in a rare cameo as the doctor) which looks the same as everywhere else (the window overlooking the city is a photo that doesn't even bother trying to look real, which is awesome). What's admirably feminist about the film is how Starlin is portrayed as intelligent, powerful, and sympathetic and really comes alive when she's suddenly young, and the way her secretary (Corman regular Barbara Mourris) has a kind of maternal concern --Starlin never snaps at her or backstabs, they have all the tender rapport and chemistry, while the men are all condescending buffoons.

 

4. Lilyan Tashman in

MURDER BY THE CLOCK

1931

I'll defer to Amy Jeanne's sublime and trenchant vintage fashion blog, It'll Take the Snap out of your Garter, where I found the above picture:

Murder By The Clock (1931) is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time. It was fantastically creepy in every way possible. Irving Pichel (a Harvard Graduate, no less!) plays a disturbingly deranged young man who gets 3 murders pinned on him. His mother refuses to leave him the family fortune and instead leaves it to her nephew, whose wife is the wonderful Lilyan Tashman! Lilyan was a complete evil BITCH in this movie and I loved every minute of it. She masterminds three murders including her husband and her lover. She also flirts shamelessly with the detective on the case and the deranged Irving.

Damn why ain't this on a decent DVD?

Anna May Wong in

THE DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON

1931

Wong is delectably beautiful, haunted and tormented as the late Fu Manchu's daughter, torn between loyalty to his dying demand for vengeance and her own wish to just be a fabulous dancer at posh clubs. Too bad her fate is pre-ordained. Fah Lo Suee would later be hit out of the park by Myrna Loy in MGM's THE MASK OF FU MANCHU (1933). DAUGHTER is a much cheaper, lower key take on the character., but since I've already written about my love for Loy's sadistic rendition, I thought I'd cover the seductive and sensational Wong.  Naturally, despite her lack of experience, she takes to murder and torture as it's in her blood, and this includes acid in the face! Meanwhile it's delightful to watch some dumb, lovestruck Asian detective bend every rule on her behalf and ultimately get nowhere, conjuring complex racism. Alas, none of her plans goes off in time, and odious little Bramwell Fletcher escapes unharmed since she grows to .... ew! love him? That little pischer? Alas, there is no justice... for mighty Fu.

Kate Jackson in

SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS

1973

Hey, whatever man. We all have our weaknesses, things we love because they hit a certain nostalgic longing, like our first tele-crush. For me, it's the booksmart sexy of Kate Jackson, and no film was as out of reach for my longing ten year-old brain than SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, which was always only shown in late-night reruns, before VCRs existed, so I could just read the blurb in TV Guide and feel my prepubescent mystique-ridden polymorphous jouissance entwine inwards in pre-sexual sexual frustration. Anyway, what fantasies I conjured up from that title! Cut from the same Aaron Spelling mold as Charlie's Angels (Cheryl Ladd's in the film too!), the same dry dirt bike L.A. exteriors, makeup trailers doubling as mansions, flat lighting, glistening teeth, 70's encounter group fad mentality, terrible taffeta scarfs and delectable hip-hugger jeans. I would not change it. If only there was a decent DVD dupe - but the terrible 16mm emulsion damage is I guess part of the charm.

Valerie Leon in

BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB

(1971) ****

The first time I saw this I fell madly in love with Valerie Leon. It also helped that I'd just read Bram Stoker's novella--The Jewel of the Seven Stars-- not knowing the film was actually based on said novella until about half-way through, and since the story is all deja vu and murderous spirits embodying beautiful women rising from the ashes to kill those who dared desecrate her tomb, et al, it was a perfect meta moment for me - what are the odds after all, that I'd read a super obscure Stoker story right before seeing this relatively obscure Hammer film? Could I in fact be the reincarnated Bram Stoker?

Anyway, it's not great, but what helps the rough stretches is that Leon's mod fashion choices are spot-on. I'm a sucker for the pale skin, black hair, black velvet choker look, which she rocks. I love her assured gutsy diction and voice (and the sly way she underplays recklessly in a double role, with that uniquely British sense sexy imperiousness (ala Diana Rigg) when she pretends to be or is Queen Tara; I love her weird rapport with James Villers as her evil archeologist confidante, and I love her sleepy bedroom eyes. Just look at that awesomely haughty ambivalence in her eyes above! In short, this movie was made for me, by Hammer, when I was just four years old. It was waiting all this time, like a long buried scroll, for the right writer (me) at the right age (now) to do it justice. It's like Leon even knows me, knows I'll be watching this film over and over over and over and over. Just as she "happens" to be given the Jewel of the Seven Stars on her birthday, when her body is ready to be inhabited by the ancient mummy who just happens to look identical to her, so too do I live and grow older just to bask in her rock and roll-meets-Emma Peel swagger, to savor the way her mere mod presence so intimidates and terrorizes a legion of B-list British character actors that they cease fumbling through old age postures, and die of fright or phantom animal attacks. "It was her--as large as life! She who has no name."

And what a gay bestie she has in James Villers, a swaggering wag who'd be right at home blackmailing Oscar Wilde after hooking him up with fancy boys at tea parties where the porcelain cups are just right. "I have guided these people towards my tomb," notes She who cannot be named -ah that makes sense. She knew even before Margaret Fuchs was born she was to be the "one" to re-inhabit. And even if that same decade would see this story remade dozens of times, in honor of lapsed copyright status of the Victorian Age, it all fits, like Leon's insanely perfect black nightgown (and a later pink one too - divine). Occupying the only two woman roles in the cast (aside from a museum or asylum assistant here and there with barely a line) she terrifies middle-aged British actors of no small talent or stature, the way no woman did before or since (until Mathilda May in LIFEFORCE). Ripping into the material that's still as fresh as it was a century ago, the ancient beautiful 'beyond good and evil' force swelling within her is so spot-on that even if she's dubbed by another actress (a not uncommon Hammer practice) it's a stand-up-and-cheer goddess that Ursula Andress could never pull off in SHE. 

Vanessa Howard is

GIRLY

(1970) Dir. Freddie Francis

Rocking the scoiopathic jailbait look, Vanessa Howard captures the spirit of wicked evil, her eyes alight in unholy mischief, in this horror comedy. Her legs are lovely, and always on display in mod skirts, including a beech-skin cowboy costume. Her straight blonde hair demarcates a princess and her simmering red schoolgirl uniform is like a pomegranate-squeezed hallucination against the perennial dim fog of the green, brown, and all-grey English countryside.  She bites into her character with such a cunning glee that you want to lick the juice off her chin, though she'd assuredly bite off at least half your tongue..." (more here)

Ingrd Pitt in

THE VAMPIRE LOVERS

1970

The year 1970 was a very good year for horror movie women in England as it was a time of relaxed censorship standards, but not yet just softcore Maxim-style boredom. In other words, there was still the sizzle, and some of the steak too, with a high level of proper adhesion to narrative and atmosphere in addition to the sapphic nudity. The relaxed vibe of the sex fits Pitt's drowsy old European manner to a T-- her lapsing into jealous piques, her possessive European simplicity vs. the more refined Brit chicks she seduces - it's all of a piece. In the land of the repressed the libidinal hottie is queen.

Mabel Karr and Estella Blaine  in

DIABOLICAL DR. Z

1966 - Dir. Jess Franco

One is the daughter of a mad scientist, the other her robotic killer henchmen in a sexy see-through spiderweb bodysuit. When her dad dies of grief-- after receiving a dissing at the medical conference for his wild theories about turning criminals into robots--daughter Karr goes on a spree of revenge against those small-minded scientific sneerers. First she scars her face and burns a same-weight hitchhiker up in her car, to fake her own death. Don't ask why, either. I won't go into the nasty things she does to fake her own death, but let's just say she's not fucking around. A hot girl (Blaine) she first spied doing a web-dance seduction of a mannequin is then mind-melded using dad's technique into being a poison fingernail-wielding sexual assassin.  In other words, yes, it's typical Jess Franco 'storyline' torn from some lurid pulp magazine cover, but all Franco fans and detractors alike agree it's one of his most focused and inventive works, made back before he became a softcore quantity-over-quality art/hack. There's even a few actual tracking shots as opposed to his usual lazy zooms! And both women are luscious and stone cold creepy at the same time. As Michael Weldon would say: Essential viewing. Some unpleasant scenes of animals in tiny cages, and a lot of annoying beeping and buzzing in the brain burning scenes might keep it from being a hangover cure, but it's all just so damn weird you got to throw it a pass for any transgressions.

Kate Jackson was my Village

I've been in a gloomy funk lately, so gloomy I had to turn to my ultimate solace: the first two seasons of TV's Charlie's Angels. As soon as it hit the airwaves in 1976 it was an instant sensation, especially amongst us children, many of whom couldn't even stay up to see it, but we saw the Time cover, the TV Guide cover, and were smitten en masse. I was a preternaturally perverse nine years old and the sight of Farrah Fawcet Majors, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith on the cover of TIME in their cute red and white glitter costumes sent me through the roof with polymorphous jouissance. This being the era before the internet and video, we kids didn't see pictures like this too often, at least not right out in the open, right there in the mailbox.


Young as I was, I was not unlike the insane stalker obsessive who felt that by accumulating photos and tidbits from magazines, I could somehow imagine my way out of my mundane childhood and into the show. My dream was simple: I wanted the Angels and I to live together in a cool house in my same neighborhood (instead of living with my parents and little brother), then maybe Kate Jackson and I could hold hands on the porch. Of course in the meantime I'd settle for just being allowed to stay up late and watch it (my bedtime must have been 9 PM - I couldn't even see SWAT, which my schoolmates all watched beforehand and talked about at recess with even more enthusiasm than the Angels). I was too young to understand that not being allowed to stay up to see it was what made it so desirable.

There's something about Jackson, especially, that appeals to me, to the youth. She married a guy seven years younger than her in real life, and made her big TV splash as the itinerant free spirited girl who hangs out with a much younger runaway (Lance Kerwin) in the TV movie, JAMES AT 15. I never saw that movie, but I saw enough of the later series to be jealous of Kerwin.

Man what a time! To just give you an example of how cool the 1970s were: James loses his virginity in an episode (not to Jackson) and from then on the show is called JAMES AT 16! It still only lasted a season, but damn; If you were 9 or 10, and it was the late 70s, you felt you really had a lot to look forward to.

You were wrong, but how could anyone have predicted AIDS?

Kate's appeal is not sexual, it's deeper, it predates the orgasm, she is the figure of sisterly nurturing and hints of wickedness that comes between infancy and puberty. She and her friends on CHARLIE'S ANGELS never seemed to need, think about or otherwise want anything physical from anyone other than the occasional shoulder rub or make-out session (and if a guy got to make out with an angel, he usually wound up going to jail by the end of the show) and that's why we could all safely fall in love with them. Spelling's natural grasp of viewer psychology allowed us to fantasize ourselves into the show without the Oedipal frustrations of some new boyfriend, "Sorry Charlie, Sabrina's got a date with the Chad tonight" or some other toad-ish claim. It's like GUNGA DIN, with Cary, Doug and Victor as the Angels, and no young British lass waiting to try and abduct Doug and make him have tea on doilies, and then have kids of their own, which we kid viewers would then feel alienated by (for the same reasons we hated Robin, and Superboy, and most DC superhero comics as opposed to Marvel's; DC's war and horror comics were good though).


Decidedly less voluptuous than Farrah Fawcett Majors and Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson's Sabrina was a mix of older sister, protector, nurturer and friend, and sexy enough to be more than that, "when you're ready." I still turn to her in times of trouble and still get a warm glow off her wry grin and twinkly eyes, her faint southern drawl and old-fashioned girls school etiquette, her lanky form moving with quickness, ease and grace in her stylish 1970s clothes. Before ANGELS she was in The Mod Squad, Dark Shadows and two low budget TV movie titles: Satan's School for Girls and Death at Love House! I've still never seen either one, but if you're a strung out sugar addict nine year old in 1976, there were no two titles hotter to imagine on your cold prepubescent winter nights.

"The smart angel," Sabrina never shows any skin and is usually wearing turtlenecks (part of her contract, I think) but it works, as the midriffs of the Jaclyn and Farrah or Cheryl Ladd become even more revealing by contrast; and ultimately the show is not about sex, it's about beauty; and it's not about crime, it's about mystery; and it's not about violence, it's about skulduggery. All the sex and violence is filtered through a child's conception of same; adult talk has the same abstract meaninglessness it does for children; the dialogue focuses on plot line and the script is underwritten, so there's a lot of standing around, just like in real life. And tantrums get results. Negative attention is better than no attention. Many's the time Kate will calm down a killer, sweet talk them off the ledge by guessing their fixations and neuroses and providing a nurturing shoulder to cry on. But if it comes down to it, she'll pop a cap in your ass from her snub-nosed .38. Needless to say, she's a Scorpio. What was it Johnny Depp once said? "Kate... I love you, Kate..."