The Dance of Tripper Mimsy: RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP (1967)

Based on true events! The AIP/MGM police/hippie hybrid movie RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP (1967) reminds us that back in the 60s, LA's rock venue-packed Sunset Strip was once so clogged with amok youth that the lawmakers had to enforce a 10 PM curfew for everyone under 18. The kids took to the streets in protest, or were already there. Sonny, Cher, Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda attended to show their solidarity. Fonda got handcuffed! What a world.

Today, those of us who don't live in LA probably just hear the words Sunset Strip and prepare for yet another old rocker to start in about seeing the Doors at the Whiskey a Go Go back in whenever or how 'the man' made them change the name (to 'the Whisk') or how they razed Pandora's Box--the main all-ages (non-alcoholic) venue--to the ground. Or how Buffalo Springfield's inescapable "For What it's Worth" was written about the Sunset Strip riots. But I'll just say that you can draw a dotted line down the road of AIP counterculture classics, from the Strip to The Trip and then Wild in the Streets. And the year after that it's films like the (AIP-influenced) Easy Rider. And then Cult of the Damned, and Manson! It's all connected like a dashed highway line...going straight to hell! For fans of the scene, of LSD, of the Doors, and of Jack Nicholson, then, come and dig the Strip - and see the dance that lit the flame, the Salome of Hippie film Troy, the wig that launched a thousand swigs, Mimsy Farmer!

Hanging around at Pandora's Box, starting trouble

Released an astonishingly short four months after the riots happened, Riot on Sunset Strip alternates between the police and a sweet, innocent girl named Andi (Mimsy Farmer); she lives alone with her alcoholic mom - below, who starts out just digging bands with her girlfriend Liz-Ann (Laurie Mock) and their two nameless boyfriends as a way to get out of the house. Her slow slide begins when she starts smoking, gradually dressing sexier, craving some kind of parental structure but just getting mom's incoherent babbling (and dad nowhere to be found). Come on, Liz-Ann says, "it's a freak-out!" Andi says she's never done acid.  "Come on, Alice in Wonderland," says Liz-Ann: "You haven't lived!"

As we follow her descent, we also bounce back and forth to the precinct struggles of her absentee father (Aldo Ray), a police captain in charge of the youth problem. He doesn't want his men to start cracking heads, nor does he want the local business owners to form their own vigilante task force. In trying to be fair to both kids and adults, he pleases neither. That doesn't bother him though, when he gives interviews for local TV he preaches a modicum of tolerance: "These are your sons and daughters!" It's a fair point. But Aldo, what about your daughter?

above -Mom, in bed with her demons; Andi - smoking
(there was no age restriction on it then and damned if it doesn't make her look cool)

Andi, tired of being harassed by the cops, forced to call her teacher to pick her up from the police station rather than her drunk mother, acquiesces to the freak-out. But once there--even though she's vibing with the cute older boy who's got the sugar cubes, she still just says no - preferring to hang around the invaded home like a wet dishrag. This can be very frustrating as a rocket-boosted hormonal and very high male out to score. A girl like that seems--in their drugs-and-testosterone-addled brain--like she's 'asking' for something to overwhelm her. She wont leave the "happening" alone, yet she will not make the scene!

If she will not make the scene, then the scene--with its tendrils of long hair, and its medallion beads clattering like a clacking Cabeza de Lobo beach cub / billion beak castanet jelly donut death racket--will make her. 

Her old man, will he come rolling home?

Maybe none of this would need to happen, oh if he only would come see her, but he's too busy lecturing other parents about not spending time with their kids.

But then, for all their woe, whatever that is, we'd miss one key moment worth the whole damned film: Mimsy Farmer's sublime acid dance freak-out, one of the great peak pivotal moments in 60s LSD cinema!

Since it's only 1967, and the AIP countercultural LSD movie cycle is just getting rolling (if you'll forgive the expression), one could consider Farmer's dance to be the opening act in the huge paisley cavalcade to come, the way exotic dancers perform flame rituals in Arabian sheik's tents prior to taking tea with a bronzed Robert Taylor. Setting the mood and opening the gates, Farmer's dance shows how one might take a hackneyed, non-relevant 'breather'- as Laura Mulvey would call it --woman as a kind of narrative door-stop, creating the space for a kind of desire/possessive gazing on the part of the viewer--and reverse the flow so her madness seems to possess us by contrast. Her constant oscillating from one extreme emotion to the other forces us to be afraid of her, for her, with her, and without her, all in quick-cycling succession. It's still a milestone in trippy dancing few have equaled since (more sophisticated nuanced actresses just come off as ridiculous or overly maudlin, or merely stiff and vapid)

Overall, Riot is rather pedestrianly directed by (59 year-old) Arthur Dreifuss, but--though he's clearly a generic square--old Arthur wisely lets this one moment land with a keen eye for how dancing on acid feels in the moment. The vaguely mystical-tribal sun wall sculpture on the wall behind her evokes a subliminal temple backdrop; the pink lighting soaks into her golden skin and her form-fitting pink and army green dress makes her at times seem to appear and disappear. She wears what seems like three identical wigs all slowly growing, widening in a halo gyre, gradually getting wilder and more libidinal-schizo as she slinks to the ground and luxuriates like a cat rubbing against a corner. She notices her arms and hands as if the first time, alive to the joy of movement, and the horror of it, reacting to any stimulus with a second-by-second switch--from revulsion to agog fascination to cautious luxuriance.

 It's dead-on.

Andi sees her hands for the first time

Dreifuss captures every moment of her crazy dancing, from beginning to end, with just a hint of slow motion here and there, perfectly matched to the music, as if she's slipping in and out of linear time, floating in the ether somewhere between the vampire cult converts floating around in 1972's Deathmaster and the fairies in 1935's Midsummer Night's Dream. But always perfect in her moves, always in with the grinding bluesy generic rock beat.

If you've ever felt those kind of things while slinking around a living room in a surrendered-to joy of movement, then you may feel as I do while watching this scene: my palms start to sweat, my tongue tastes metallic, and my blood quickens as if in anticipation of the inevitable 'kicking in.' It's like getting all the sensations of going up a very steep incline, up and up and up, even as you're just sitting there on the beanbag chair, rolling joints in a Pink Floyd gatefold, watching as the blood rushing in your hands slowly starts to redden and glow just below the skin, like a latticework spider web, and they feel like they're trembling but they're actually steady as rocks.

But of course, the slimy lad who slipped it into her 'diet drink' has been keeping an eye on all this, waiting for the right time to slink up and make a move, bringing her upstairs with all the finesse of Sidney Berger in Carnival of Souls. It's clearly his and his buddy's MO to dose young girls and take advantage, en masse, once the girl is too zonked to complain or resist. In other words, loathsome date rape behavior wasn't solely the proclivity of frat boys spiking the grain alcohol punch with 'ludes and then giving it only to the girls, such as long been a practice and only recently been dragged into the headlines.

We didn't quite imagine anything so vile back when I was a freshman. "Date rape" wasn't a term until my senior year, circa 1989, too late for most of the girls I used to drink and trip with, most of whom had naive enough to drink the frat party 'girl drink' at least once. Luckily, that didn't stop them from drinking and tripping, though some were destroyed by it and went home halfway through their first semester, I never had time to know them -- my friends shrugged it off but never forgot the lesson, trusting only frat-hating lads like me. Salut!

Luckily, Andi, too, doesn't seem to be too traumatized afterwards. We never hear her complain or resist. We only learn she had 'entertained' five of them when she tells it to her father, who--of course--walks in on her in the bed, now totally 'down' from her trip, apparently. Telling him the details is, in a way, is her ultimate fuck-you, meant to drive him swinging pathetically into the night. It's the real fantasy moment in the film, the kind of thing a kid might imagine getting her never-around dad to witness, especially if he considered himself such a paragon of the law and responsible parenting.

That kind of familial crisis is what lets you know that, though it was released by AIP (and has all the AIP earmarks on the surface), Riot is an MGM product. For AIP, family is broken, useless, but MGM can't let the 'father' go. Even when delving into lurid subject matter, the studio tends to employ a kind of roundhouse morality uppercut that dates back to their seemingly transgressive (secretly moralistic) pre-code films like 1931'a A Free Soul (left), wherein booze, premarital sex, and drugs aren't lines in the sand against the previous generation's antiquated norms, rather they're just the symptom of parent-daughter estrangement due to dad's addiction and/or absenteeism. The dad must fix his own character so the daughter will re-merge into the established order, the order he has undermined. In Soul, Shearer uses Gable for sex and thrills, but secretly hungers for the safe, flaccid decency of Leslie Howard and the long nights nursemaiding daddy in and out of alcoholic sanitariums. In Sunset, the dad has to stop worrying about the "kids" as an abstract social norm, and pay attention to his own. For her, drugs and sex are a cry for help. We're lured in by the sex and drugs then WHAM! Patriarchy reaffirms itself. Dirty tricks, MGM!

Dreifuss went from directing Riot to another AIP drug movie after this: The Love-Ins (above), a tale that functions as a Tim Leary roman-a-clef about a disillusioned college professor who drops out and becomes a cash-crazed LSD guru. I haven't seen it myself, but the insightful Chuck Esola notes the incorrect way acid use is depicted: "Not only are the hippies high on it all the time but one hit and the characters in the film are either flailing about wildly on the lawn, jumping out of windows or becoming convinced that they've become Alice in Wonderland (I'm honestly not sure which is worse)."

Hey, in the words of Bruce Dern's guide in The Trip, you're really into some beautiful things here, man. Just let it run on.

More (1969)

As for Mimsy, she would soon escape to Italy in the early 70s, where she was to specialize as totally cracked giallo heroines, as in Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), Armando Crispino's Autopsy (1975), and Francesco Barilli's Portrait of a Lady in Black (1974). Her character in these films was often the same kind of traumatized androgyne, as if she became so splintered by her LSD/rape primal moment in Riot (ala Streetcar Named Desire) that every mirror shard fell into a different film. Her characters all had the same short blonde hair, the same violent revulsion/attraction approach to male sexuality,  the same habit of talking through clenched teeth, voice cracking with a kind of exhausted rage. Walking the razor line between being a totally free spirit engaging in sex and drugs as self expression and destroying herself in a chemical spiral to escape the constant pawing of Italian males. She could turn an innocent German math student onto hard drugs and group sex one minute (as in Barbet Schroder's More) and rant for whole monologues about how she hates men and how her father wished she was born a boy, and brutalized her until she slashed him to ribbons, the next (as in Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet.)

Busted - for being teenagers

As for the film that started her off, Riot is an invaluable window into the dawn of the counterculture as a major force for societal disruption. The riots eventually grew Woodstock-sized and that's what we remember. The Sunset Strip curfew riots are forgotten, just a spark. Only the music they inspired--and that was heard on the Strip at the time--endures. Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, The Seeds, Love, The Chambers Brothers, and The Doors were all once bands in residence on the Strip. None of them either appear or are heard in the film. Instead, we get the garage rock of the Standells (they sing theme song, noting that "even parents are beginning to scare"); the Chocolate Watchband rips some raucous, royalty-free standard blues (probably the tune Mimsy dances to). But, like the AIP movies it stands with (Psych-Out, and The Trip, for example), the good bands are offset with a lot of dated paisley drippiness courtesy dull treacly sludge by bands like The Mugwumps and The Sidewalk Sounds, (who coo: "I want to make the music pretty / for me"),  not to mention a lot of generic library flute rock instrumentals. When you think of the great stuff being played at the time (like those Cynthia Weil/Barry Mann songs on the similar AIP gems Wild in the Streets and Angel Angel, Down We Go), it's kind of a drag to hear 90% of the Sunset soundtrack, like seeing a fictional movie made about Altamont and just hearing the Flying Burrito Brothers. 

Pandora's Box was a real club (above), at the center of the riots as it was
being demolished by the establishment for its role as a lightning rod in the disruption.

Still, it's great. Newly arrived on Amazon Prime and looking good (these screenshots are all from it), 

POST SCRIPT /ASIDE/ RANDOM THOUGHT

- HaPPy TRAils! 

Maybe it was because I saw it the morning after getting back from a mostly-overcast vacation in St. Maarten, but I was in just the right mood for Riot.  The crazy psychedelic dance of Mimsy is really a showstopper and caught me totally by surprise. I made the Hindu arm trail collage (above) myself, though there's nothing like it in the film. There should be, for 'trails' in tripping are a sign of transcending space/time and perhaps the origin for the multi-armed effect of Hindi gods and goddesses. 

And in a way it's too bad that neither Corman nor anyone at AIP ever figured out how to do "trails" correctly (they're aren't any in Gilliam's Fear and Loathing either). Very few films capture the true nature of acid hallucinations (they don't come out of nowhere; they build up through paredolia and a repression of our structuralist 'naming' blinders), maybe we're still waiting for just the right moment to come along.

Actually, I saw a great Mimsy movie on Prime last night that did some decent psychedelic trails, Autopsy (1975)! It wasn't acid but a melding of med student tiredness and solar eclipse-triggered mass insanity - but here you GO-go-o-go-go:

Tripper Mimsy finds the right dosage, at last...st..st

A Jet-lagged Hayride with Dracula: LOST IN TRANSLATION, THIS GUN FOR HIRE

"As for fidelity, should one not be faithful to all those whom one loves?" - Robin Wood  

Watching the weird nocturne noir chemistry cohere like a ghost from the black and white celluloid mist of This Gun for Hire (1942) for the zillionth time, I'm still trying to nail down the lovesick ache I get from Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake's mystical lost ghost frequency. Blonde, small (ten feet between them) and only flickeringly emotional, they're like a separated-from-birth version of Sharon Tate and David Hemmings in Eye of the Devil, or two alien-human hybrids who recognize each other from a past off-world life.

Neither fraternal nor sexual (as critic David Shipman notes, Ladd "never flirted nor even seemed interested, which is one of the reasons he and Lake were so effective together." [2]), their muted chemistry is so elusive, so void of frills and posturing, it resonates today as strongly as it resonated with wartime audiences. It's the "speak-softly-because-you-don't-know-who's-listening" wartime caution ("loose [or loud] lips sink ships"), the same shadowy skull reflection death drive cool low-key whispery savvy we find in Val Lewton's horror films and Sinatra's ghostly radio crooning from the same period (1941-45). There's a stealthy 'shhhhh don't wake the parents or the baby or the sleeping regiment' emotional intimacy that reaches out to include the listener/viewer like a warm blanket.

This was the era when every healthy able-bodied man was overseas facing death, and the women were expected to go into a kind of sexual deep freeze, working in munitions plants or driving cabs, and waiting for letters from the front, terrified of the arrival of an officer with an ominous telegram in the middle of the night. In the B movies from Monogram, Bela Lugosi abducted and froze the virgin brides and while men died powerless in their foxholes and idiot heroes missed obvious clues. John Carradine brushed their baby's zombie hair while they moaned powerless from their seats in the canteen.

But for all that, their woman's chastity was intact, somehow. We knew it would be all right as long as we kept our voices low. Sinatra's crooning soft from the radio protected them all like the giant wing of a feathery evening. Ladd and Lake's chemistry was perfect for this deep freeze moment. They pulled themselves from the gravity of their respective slumbering arcs and fully noticed each other, falling, with us, into a new kind of subtle dream.

That kind of subtlety is never popular for long however. Sleazy studio heads--perhaps used to a steady supply of eager would-be starlets ("Mr. Smearcase!" as per Lake's ingenue in Sturges' Sullivan's Travels) parading their wares-- were like John Travolta's snickering entourage in Grease, they want to know 'did they or didn't they?' Sympathetic wavelength entrainment and platonic pair bonding were to these slavering troglodytes just synonyms for cowardice in the face of zong zong zip zowie awooga!

Such men are a blight on Hollywood and human genomes. They're stuck there. But you! Oy, you can-a-dance-in-a-Manhattan, Vinny. All fornication will get you is VD or a kid, Vinnie. One broken condom at the drive-in ("feelin' like a fool / wonderin' what the kids will say / next day at school") and your career is over: child support, and diapers. Diapers, Vinnie! Or just whispers, shadows, cigarettes, and insouciant gazes. 4-ever.

Note: subliminal similarity to a multi-armed Hindu deity

That's the trick to staying cool in wartime: honoring the homefront sexual deep-freeze, the core of platonic alien jet-lagged love. To relish the anguish of sexual longing and sublimate it into art and friendship rather than materialize its carnal shadow and therefore obliterate it, this is the highest form of fraternal love. As I've written before on this site, in Visconti's The Leopard, Burt says "marriage is six months of fire, forty years of ashes," but with platonic love / friendship it's ten-to-twenty of slow-burning coal. Isn't that better, and way harder to find? Whether he's dead Fred from Night of the Iguana, an old wise film critic whose Cialis prescription ran out, a savvy Lacanian, or a sixty foot tall gorilla, the adroit, awakened lover is transported by beauty past the breakwaters of horniness and into accidental chivalry, into honor, the Hawksian code.

After all, she's got a boyfriend... over there... somewhere... it would be a kind of like Nazi sabotage to take advantage of his absence.

The first scene of This Gun For Hire tells it all: Raven (Ladd) rips the sultry boarding house maid's dress, not to ravish her but because she was mean to his kitten. Raven makes only two 'moves' on Ellen (Lake), the first to steal five dollars from her purse and next to march her into an abandoned building, not for vile molesting, but to shoot her dead as a witness, as someone he thinks is in cahoots with Laird Cregar. She gets away only by the timely return of two construction workers back from their lunch break. Her friend later tells her she looks like she's been on a "hayride with Dracula," an analogy which works well, as Drac's motives aren't carnally impure either. He's just in it for the blood.

The few times Ladd and Lake did hook up in a movie, their kiss happened only at the end, or after fade-out. We seldom saw the actual kiss. The Blue Dahlia (1946) for example, fades out on William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont looking over at Ladd and Lake, offscreen, who are by then presumably kissing. We've been longing for them to get together all through the film but now that there's nothing standing between them... well, who likes seeing their parents kiss, even if they're little blonde aliens? 

Aliens... I don't only mean extraterrestrial but also alienated. Foreigners in a strange land, unable to shake their dreamy disconnected jet lag ennui. When they finally meet a fellow traveler as alienated as themselves, like Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob Harris (Bill Murray) in Lost in Translation (2003) after so many lonely alienated hours, well, it's a special magic. Both unable to sleep in their ritzy Tokyo hotel, not speaking Japanese at all, or any other language, their initial reason for being there not taking up much of their time, their gaijin height and features contrasting them from the rest of the city as distinctly as giant Nephilim Nordic Vikings, they can either hang out together or with no one. They connect, but it's more about their sharing loneliness, as opposed to merging into couplehood --with all the associative baggage that implies.

I remember when I saw Translation at a Chelsea theater during its initial run on Thanksgiving in 2003 at with a cadre of AA people. I was in the throes of something so similar to the doomed bonding of Bob and Charlotte, I felt like the film was a continuation of my own life, with Manhattan doubling for Tokyo and Brooklyn for the States. I recognized too the dangers of this intense bond leading anywhere other than disaster, largely from the cautionary example of Steve Buscemi and Thora Birch in Ghost World (left), in which Johansson also co-starred just two years earlier.  We all in that AA posse recognized the same lost soul magnetism between Murray and Johansson in our own love for each other, the gorgeous ephemeral lost soul union known only to we who have heard the chimes at midnight fade into sirens and muffled EMT voices muffled across hurricanes of silence far over our heads as we leaned back against the flat bumpy pillow of the numb sidewalk and felt with our eyes half-open like we were standing, sitting up and lying down all at the same time: "Sir? Sir? Can you hear my voice? Have you had anything to drink or taken anything tonight?"

"Taken anything".. what a dumb expression, you think. No ossifer, everything's right where I found it.


Isolated in our space, cut off and adrift, our precious alcohol on the other side of a dangerous highway, when someone else comes along who gets that, someone also on that level--a sympathetic cute chick EMT rather than a suspicious cop eyeing your bulging gym bag--well, she's too precious to throw away by busting even some advanced playa move. You might rear back and think that's being scaredy-cat, but I know the follow-through too well. If it works, you have to make out for hours and blah blah, and if it doesn't and she leave, you die on the street, the average folks stepping over you like you're just another vagrant, and aren't you?

People say men and women don't know how to be friends but what they mean is they don't know how. Love can flourish more profoundly in a platonic friendship, irregardless of genders, or numbers. You needn't be monogamous or cockblock or judge or restrict or allow those things to be done to you. But first you need to have achieved a few of your life's most cherished desires, like crawling through the parched sand for days, finally making it to the far off mirage of a water fountain and seeing at last it's just a rock. Or in love's case, a goddamned diaper. Is anything more revolting than when love leads to a family? What's the use of being a hit man at all if they're just going to keep coming?

There needs to be some peace, a population evening-out, otherwise no one even has a chance to experience the grand crushing emptiness of making it to the water fountain and finding out it's just a fountain-shaped rock. To paraphrase Jim Morrison--no earth-shattering orgasm or greaser high-five will forgive you for the dawn you just wasted.


Breeder San Francisco homicide detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston - above) for example, wants to waste the dawn that is Lake's shimmering hair in This Gun for Hire by turning her into "a cop's wife," "I don't understand it," notes one of her fellow showgirls to him, "that girl is nuts about you," We don't understand it either.

Robert Preston? Whaaaat? Whyy? We can feel all the disembodied souls swarming around Lake like masked figures at a sold-out Sleep No More consider, at this news, breaking off to haunt some other gorgeous blonde. No point jostling with those other souls in the dark if you have to grow up with half the gene pool of this dunderheaded straight-edge who expects your gorgeous mom to cease chanteuse-ing, to perform instead for an audience of one, "darning his socks and cooking his (and eventually your) corned beef and cabbage." I love This Gun for Hire but when I hear that line I wince and want to shout, "all that horrid smelling steam will ruin her heavenly hair!"

No offense meant to Preston, he's great as the uber-gay promoter in Victor/Victoria, his winning performance did wonders for easing America's collective homophobia, but his detective is a safety-first putz fit to warm the Catholic Legion of Decency's heart, but annoy everyone else. When he sees lovely Lake slink onto the stage and do her number, this future fey Music Man can only imagine getting her out of that shimmery gown and into an apron; he sees her gorgeous hair and imagines how much better it will look wilted from the steam, leaning over a pot of fucking boiled cabbage all day. As Bugs Bunny would say, what a maroon. And is she any better?

I can only presume we're supposed to feel that way. In the shadowy option of the other side, Lacan's primal (or anal) father, is Laird Cregar, nimbly seeming both gayer and straighter than Preston, referring to his main vice as "backing leg shows" and by acknowledging the job's essential tawdriness, he brings it some counterintuitive class and legitimacy. He might be a lech, but at least he wants Ellen looking glamorous for everyone rather than Crane's super-menial "cabbage-cooker for one" alternative.

Oh well, even if she didn't wind up as a blue collar cop's wife role in her subsequent films and even if Gun would be the last time we have to have a square boyfriend for her (just noble dimwits or blustery gangsters from now on), we know her real love is always that lost cause with a broken wrist who claws at everyone but her. She looks at sweaty little crumb bums like Ladd's Raven or amateur mendicant-disguised Sullivan with compassion of the same sort Raven has for the stray boarding house kitten, not with disgust or judgment the way the rest of the world does, just one right guy to another, take it or leave it. The compassion in her eyes when she looks at Raven, especially on the train and when they're hiding out at the train yard, provides one of the great transcendental healing gifts of the movies. Hers is a look beyond sentiment, sympathy or some covertly judgmental altruism. It's a real feeling of empathy--it's lifted me out of many a post-bender shame spiral and made me, like Raven, her loyal champion. She's the dream girl for all us broken mugs who need a friend--her beauty acts like a healing opiated salve on our souls, and she's glad to radiate as long as we don't get Smearcase touchy-feely, which we're too shaky to try, anyway. 

"You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don't have to listen to his jokes. Just think, if you were some big shot like a casting director or something, I'd be staring into your bridgework saying 'Yes, Mr. Smearcase. No, Mr. Smearcase. Not really, Mr. Smearcase! Oh, Mr. Smearcase, that's my knee!' - Veronica Lake's character, a struggling actress who spends her last dime on who she thinks is a bum but is a slumming director who knows Lubitsch - Sullivan's Travels 1941

The same beauty Ladd and Lake capture in Gun is here in this diner between Lake and McCrea, the Hawksian self-awareness that keeps one so aloof from the shallow world finally being rewarded in a union of equals, and she's free from Mr. Smearcase and his grabby hands (in 1951's The Thing, Margaret tells Pat how much she likes him only when his hands are safely tied - Hawks knew, too, the two are connected).

And then there's that hair. Gun for Hire is considered her big hair breakout, but if she owes her career to anyone it's not her hairdresser or Ladd or Raymond Chandler but Preston Sturges, for throwing her into a pool in Sullivan's Travels (1941), leading to the scene where she brushes her long hair out by the pool in her sexy white robe. A complex post-modern masterpiece on the bourgeois need to tell the story of 'the little guy' to the little guy who'd rather not hear about it. (3)  

There's only one problem: there are only a few Lake-Ladd noirs, and only a few other films that know how to situate Lake's rare gifts --and once you watch 'em all, where are you? A shivering alcoholic in the cold again, sifting through your stacks of DVDs like they're a bunch of empty bottles, wondering if there's anything left, anywhere, for that sense of Hawksian bonding or Lake-Ladd alien frequency, that golden healing opiated salve. Can Ramrod fit the bill? No. Her hair never leaves those western coiffs.

"It's really the repression of sex (think of old stories like Brief Encounter and Love Affair) and the acceptance of a carnal boundary that can't be crossed that becomes, in their eloquent silence-filled rapport, a form of love more life-altering than the sexual contortions now monotonously de rigu eur." - Molly Haskell (4) 

The tragedy with the couple in platonic love orbit in Lost in Translation, is that each party has already 'settled' for an approximation of what they considered 'normal' - the cop boyfriend or the star-chasing photographer, some banal 'normie.' Luckily, it's not a tragedy, as that obligation to be faithful to an undeserving other frees them from needing to drag the carnal along into their love affair. Courtly love was never about breaking up the marriage, which was usually arranged at the time. Sex was what triggered your disillusionment, not the other way around. It's the hesitant but undeniable attraction of doomed lovers in the lost moment, sharing the pain of remembering that loving bond, that matters. Anyone who's fallen in love from a distance--something all too common in the internet age where the lack of earthly parameters frees one to write acres of poetry and longing prose letters--vast forests of stanzas--that never need to be printed or even saved, anymore than their yearning urgency needs to be concretized in the carnal sack. The lover in your mind isn't usually even close to the actual person anyway. When you finally meet up, there's that awkward first few hours as you adjust your expectations.

In AA we say 'think the drink through.' Instead of just thinking of the drink and the sweet sudden feeling of completeness, of joy and fearless brio, the surge of coherence, confidence, inspiration, and jubilant love it brings, think it through to the need for the next one, twice as strong as the need for the first, but with only half the joy and completeness, and then the sodden depression when we're too drunk to do anything but drink more, and gradually we're too fucked up to do anything else but pour. And then... it's all gone, and we're too fucked up to get any more. We can't even find our goddamned pants, or even the phone to order delivery, let alone drive or stagger to the liquor store.

But it's the same for Bob as he's being drawn to Charlotte in Translation, that rapturous connection too delicate to risk with clumsy fumbling. In AA we also say "drink all you want, just don't drink the first one," i.e. if you don't have the first drink, you're free, and that's not a lot to ask, considering all the other drinks waiting. It's a trick, but it works. Same thing in the Bob-Charlotte or Lake-Ladd connections: if you don't make a first move you'll never lose her. Maybe she'll sleep with every single one of your friends while making eyes at you, but in 20 years you will be the only guy she remembers without anger and remorse when she's making her qualification in Sex Addicts Anonymous. And if you doubt your love is stronger without it, just check how peevish Scarlett is at Bill for hooking up with that lounge singer. Here they're both married, but the real devotion is to each other, and sex with other people is an affront, almost too close to the real thing.

It's a Catch-22. It's like death, in fact, and like death you are officially permitted to laugh it off, to stand pat, sound in your Lacanian ideal and self knowledge, using her loveliness to fuel your art. Forever. There's no greater bond. If Death chooses you, if Death makes the first move, then okay. But you don't have to make it easy for her. Death loves a good challenge! Pedro, did you put the girl on the stage or not??

No! she did not go!

It's that death drive as a platonic ideal that is why Johansson was so well cast in Lost and later in Her and the underrated Lucy and why it was so important she wanted to fool around with Captain America in Winter Soldier and later Bruce Banner/Hulk in Age of Ultron, but they were the ones who held back. Natasha Romanov, sexy seductress super spy: it's great that she wants to fool around with you, it's bad if you allow it, because this is a girl so used to having men she wants, of using sex as a weapon, of being constantly ogled, seducing and destroying, that the only way to win her respect is to not be one of her countless conquests. You can't risk the Hulk coming out when she dumps you, or sleeps with some KGB shithead as part of her job. In this way art thou noble, chivalrous, and tortured enough that your soul is forge-hot, ready to be hammered by God or the Devil into brave new shapes.

And if you love her, you want her respect more than the crushing pain of thwarted desire; if she doesn't call you back some rainy Sunday night, it won't be for anything you did wrong. Brits have this shit down with the relationship between Dr. Who and his companions, for them--with tons of platonic pair bonds--it's no big deal. Only America, where sex is such an obsession it's stifled in its cradle, does such steamy self-sabotage keep everyone lonely in that susceptible-to-advertising way so intrinsic to first world domination.

Take it from me, the pain's the same, either way. Things are only valuable once they're lost. So lose yourself and watch your price shoot up until you're smack center of the comic store window. So what if you're not in Near Mint condition? You're still Very Fine.

On the other hand, if she moves in, goes for that first kiss, you may as well go along because it's even better if you help. And it's rude to refuse a beautiful woman. And then that's probably going to be it, onscreen, so make it count. Censors, man. What you do after the fade out, or whether or not we pan to your buddies walking down the street, passing below the window, wondering if they'll ever get to be sheriff or mind their own business, or pull away from your conversation on the Tokyo street so we can't hear it ---that has to be your affair, private, for this all to work. There's only one solution to the bind Charlotte and Bob find themselves in at the end of Lost in Translation, for their final words together --Bob's whispering in the Tokyo throng while his car service sits in traffic--to be unheard by our corrupting microphone ears.

Anyway, we'll always have Facebook.

Here's looking at you/r kid/s.

NOTES
1. Robin Wood, Sexual Politics in Narrative Cinema, (p. 82)

2. Shipman, David. The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years. New York: Hill & Wang, 1979.
3. I wish had a making-of documentary extra, so we could see all these rich characters with expensive filmmaking machinery filming a bunch of extras as hobos hopping a freight train in a movie about how dumb it is for rich guys to film hobos running onto a train instead of Ants in Your Plants.
4. Molly Haskell "Melancholy Males or Movies about Men Turning 50" (The Guardian, Oct. 10 2003)

Poverty and Spit! Poverty and Spit! THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981)

 Those of us who were punk rockers at some point in the 70s or 80s now feel old as fuck, clutching onto last ditch coke straws and first canes; our weary eyes are trapped within withered faces atop middle-aged, vice-tainted bodies, our tattoos gone to gray, the safety pin holes in our ears and cheeks long scarred over, livers shot are from Hep-C and whiskey, but hey hey hey! as the kid who sang for Black Flag (before Rollins - below left) would snarl...

 I was just a suburban poseur moping around the all-ages City Gardens shows in Trenton in the early 80s, smoking myself into a coma while standing in front of the stage, waiting, waiting, waiting... for one crappy opening punk act after another, to get it over with, so I could see the Replacements, Ramones, Iggy Pop, Replacements or X, and go home. Pogoing and slam-dancing (as it was called) around until the skinheads took over and turned the whole front half into a 'mosh pit' (far different scene than some friendly slam-dancing where you're just whirling around bumping into each other like pinballs rather than "helicoptering" your meaty fists). Coming back to our parents' houses exhausted, battered, and alive, triumphant, relieved it was over, we took our shoes off an watched NIGHT FLIGHT on the USA Network or my duped tapes of RUDE BOY, REPO MAN and GIMME SHELTER for the zillionth time while carefully marking the water lines on dad's liquor bottles, so we'd know just what we could reasonably get away with. We knew of--but never got a chance to see--THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981), Penelope Sheeris' ground-floor documentary about the early days of the LA punk scene. We heard it was far far tawdrier than any other concert film, so tawdry it had and has never been on DVD or tape.... until this week....

Finally America is ready. Spheeris' wrist-openingly grim post-op LA moldy-carpeted clang of a howl is here and man it lives up to its rep of sheer tawdriness. Onetwothree-GO! Our whole fucking life is a wreck! It seems we got so complacent, having no genuinely tawdry film live remotely close to our imaginations' now upscale, gated neighborhood, that now, when one finally busts in and pees on our mattress, we're at first so shocked we think it's raining. Dude, last time we were the ones peeing. Now somehow we're the ones holding the sheets? How'd that happen? Did Spheeris wait til we were too old to identify with these skeevy brats on purpose?

Darby, sings into 'the mic' 

Irregardless! The full skeevy glory of Ms. Spheeris's no-holds barred musical documentary can finally be seen and heard. Not only are music rights all aligned but the band's limpid corpses have grown so befouled from punk rock sell-out options no further degradation can e'er befoul them. From the apocalyptic audience-bashing and riot-starting of Fear's Lee Ving to Jon Doe giving out jailhouse tattoos, this grotty full-frame 16mm film is never going to look like Kubrick or smell like Delmonicos, but the sheer poverty-stricken messiness of the punk lifestyle is better experienced at arm's length anyway, from within that City Gardens nicotine coma. It was meant for those teenage Night Flight Saturdays, blurry from arial static and USA network watermarks, not Blu-ray.

I always needed to take an inch down my dad's Old Crow water line, and a Silkwood shower, after a trip to City Gardens. It wasn't a matter of punk rock energy but of feeling skeeved out. I'd forgotten about that ritual, til this 'film' came rushing up the televisual sleeve like a rough, unlubricated hand job. What a shitty bunch of human beings these punks are, after all! I, of course, presume they're putting on a bit of a show for Penelope's camera. After all, the real message of the film is to sell the anarchy and dirt of punk as a performance, as a kind of artistic anti-movement, to live up to the tawdry hype that so infected our early 80s poseur punk imagination.

Naturally, when disparaging the citizens on display in this film, I don't mean the artists from band X. To call them the most charismatic of the cast is to damage the word 'charisma' through comparison. Let's stay they are only the ones you'd want to rescue if the club was burning down. As for the rest, Slash writer Kickboy is the most coherent and 'forward-to-Goth'-looking, and Darby of the Germs is the most long-range offensive (just seeing his inward-twisting townie teeth near a plate of eggs is enough to send me windmilling out of the room in concentric spewing arcs). Perhaps fascinated by his sheer loathsome mania, Spheeris gives us what feels like six hours of a Germs show in what looks like a parent's basement where the carpet was has been subjected to at least one flood. The whole vibe seems to slow into a druggy time warp as Darby crawls atop speaker cabinets like Harpo Marx in the stateroom scene of NIGHT AT THE OPERA, his vocals dragging behind the 'rhythm' of the band like Angel behind the Generalissimo's automobile in THE WILD BUNCH. Too many film references? Jon Doe wouldn't think so. He references PERFORMANCE and GIMME SHELTER after a tussle breaks out in the similarly orange carpeted basement of Club 88. You think he gives a shit about how bad that carpet smells? If he does, he keeps it to himself. He's such a trouper. Even his teeth are straight, like a real gentlemen's.

In fact, Doe's such a presence he keeps Darby from looking like some trainwreck intersection between Sid Vicious and pre-sobriety Iggy Pop by association, and Spheeris' kind use of subtitles for the lyrics, all cute in the iron-on decal style Cooper font of the period, makes up the rest. It's an unusual and welcome touch, especially considering the snarling incoherence of the shouted vocals.

Then again, the speed and downer mess of the Germs is like the frickin' Beatles compared to Slash Magazine writer Kickboy's godawful band 'Catholic Discipline" which we see play to an audience of around six bored people in a Chinese restaurant (deliver us, Generallissimo Tso!). The 'Discipline' do what feels like 23 songs that plod so monotonously through the middle of the film they make the Swans seem like Matmos. What? Too 'Other Music' for you? Fuck you! Onetwothree-FOUR! By the time you read this, Other Music has probably long gone (PS - 2/16 - it has). And anyway, Billy Zoom wouldn't think so. Billy, why are you so serene? Even in the midst of skinheads bashing one another inches from his amp old Billy never seems like he's anywhere but on a peaceful hayride in the country. Good old Billy! But then... you left, didn't you, Billy! And X released "See How We Are," still chasing that AOR rainbow. 

At any rate, the most disturbing bits come towards the end, from some cute young boys giving black and white talking head interviews, utterly terrifying in their calm discussion of punching out girls and breaking other kids' jaws with a tire chain. (Yet their own teeth are perfect --hmmm, are they just shining Penelope on?) and the vile gay-baiting rhetoric and unsubtle combative-for-the-sake-of-combativeness of Fear's Lee Ving. Looking/acting like the unwanted child of Travis Bickle and Sean Penn, Ving's hate speech might be just an act to get everyone's punk rage blood up for the camera. A girl declares herself a dyke and lunges at him, but it's never clear if she's just throwing down in the spirit of the thing, or is really gay and pissed).

That's the insidious thing about hate speech. Fox News, after all, uses it to sell air space. If they mean half of what they say, they'd probably be dead from the toxic fumes of their own vitriol. It's a show. If it's not, excuse me if I pretend it is so I don't die from the toxic fumes of my own vitriol. Whatever virtriol even means, it's a killer.

Fear ("You talkin' to them?")

But again (or for the first time) it's all worth the slog if you're a true X fan, for the on-again off-again marriage/romance between Jon Doe and Exene Cervenka is realy something to see. Even when they're at emotional odds, their music only flourishes from the friction. Singing as frankly and honestly as an entire Sam Shepherd play rolled into one playful glance and howled lyric, theirs is one of the great punk rock love stories of our time. Doe was the inspiration for me becoming a bassist. Aye, his bass guitar slid like a serpent across the dorm room and around my leg while the rest of the band was lamenting the loss of the band's old bassist during an all-night acid test. That very next night I was playing in front of more people than the goddamned 'Catholic Discipline' ever saw.

Even giving ratty jailhouse tattoos before the show, there's no doubt Jon Doe is destined for stardom, or at least a future side gig as a supporting actor; and Exene is like a relaxed Lady Macbeth whose target isn't King Duncan but the entirety of narrow-minded American adulthood. I remember seeing X at City Gardens in 1984, right up against the stage, Exene smiling beaming above me as the shoving whirl of slam dancers careened around, knocking me forward and back, then I was about to get clocked by this giant skinhead, I saw her watching as this other skinhead, even bigger, gently moved me away and shoved his fist right into the guy's face, showering me in the skinhead's nose blood instead of vice versa. The bouncer grabbed them both and shoved them out the door and there I was, bloody and OK, and I looked up and Exene was beaming down at me with a huge smile, like the punk rock virgin Mary at my punk baptism.  (PS - See my lovingly detailed X discography "See How They War") Punk. It was a big tent.

That was a real moment - but there are moments in the footage when we wonder just how much Spheeris is being put on by these clowns about the words, lingo and culture of the punk scene. Claude "Kickboy" (harumph!) Bessy especially seems to consider himself some kind of spokesperson for the punk movement. His sneering hatred of everything and everyone provides the entirety of the punk movement with its voice, soul, and spine--he thinks. But there's the feeling too that he's performing this iconoclast routine for Spheeris' cameras. When someone's a real brawler, they look like Mickey Rourke, or a toothless Glasgow soccer hooligan. They're certainly not all pretty and unmussed like these lads, at least not for long. So is this just say, 80% bullshit, just like most suburban punks themselves (i.e. me, in the early 80s) were?

X marks ze Monster

I dropped punk-poseur look from my repertoire in 1986 when I found out all my 'Cure-Smiths-Siouxee' fan friends were gay and hadn't told me because they didn't know if my jammed gaydar was a result of being just naive, closeted, or legitimately homophobic. Thus I peeled out in search of acid and hippies. When I windmilled back into City Gardens over breaks. Slam-dancing and pogoing had become moshing. By then I was old enough for a wristband, so I drank in the back... sticking my head out only now and again to see what was going on. Eventually my band even played there, opening for the Spin Doctors. But that was the early 90s. Punk had split into a dozen warring factions by then and white boy punk-funk was the pre-grunge rage.

Well, either way in the early 80s I was too mellow to go full thrash, too uptight to be a squatter, too hetero to be what today would be called goth or emo, and too louche to be straight-edge. Without the black nail polish and eyeliner (as one used to wear) punk was just being British. Now hardcore was called 'thrash' and then grunge splintered it still further, and today the kind of vitriol spewed by the likes of Fear would be considered deeply problematic. "Let's have a war / so you can go die! / Let's have a war! We need the money! / Let's have a war: We need the space!" is just one hair away from Skrewdriver or Prussian Blue, which is an insider Vice magazine way of saying white supremacist.

Then again, hearing of all these boys' preference for rough masculine contact and their general aversion to girls, it's not a stretch to peg the whole punk thing as stemming from a kind of Jenner-esque macho burlesque, the safety of punching over the terror of embracing, or as Florence of the Machines sings (and BRONSON suggests), "A kiss with a fist is better than none."

Florence and the Machines, incidentally, would have been classified punk in 1981, as was Patti Smith, Television, and REM and, believe it or not, Bob Marley (thanks to UK bands like The Clash).

That's so punky: Eugene decries the violence of his scene before confessing he's punched out everyone he knows

I haven't pored through all the extras but already think the end shouldn't have been Fear's gay-bashing rhetoric but the 'X signing their Slash contract' a super 8mm extra wherein we finally get a glimpse of Penelope Spheeris herself, with new wave punk-approved but-soon-to-be-New-Wave-only oversize suit jacket and panic-blonde hair and the righteous sense that a lot of the pointless steam-vent fight club anarchy of the film we had just seen might be at least a little bit just semi-insecure throat pouch puffery done by insecure teenager and at any rate you can't keep both your street cred AND a record contract, so let the worthless one former go. Street cred? Shit cred, mate. What matters is a seven figure hit count; DIY has never been more alive than now, even if the 'alive' part is mostly virtual. The sell-outs are enshrined and the hold-outs are dust in the wind. If that's all they wanted, bra-fuckin-vo.

Spheeris, still smokin'

Times have gone moldy as that punk show basement carpet but it's not just us or that long-tossed shag who've aged, it's the vampire celluloid of the film. These vampire forever-youth reverse Dorian Grays-- throwing their coiled squatter angst upon the pyre that destroys nothing--seem younger than I ever was when I was their age. To think I once looked up in awe at the 'adults' Cervenka and Doe as they passed Budweisers out into that all-ages throng like proud parents at some kind of unholy graduation. Spheeris' 1981 film takes place four years earlier and they're like any other fresh-faced kids. Artistic, drug-addicted, boozed-up, bisexual or semi-insane, not getting enough sunshine or sleep, playing their hearts out under florescent lighting in community hall basements, giving themselves terrible home tattoos --they were playing every lousy gig like was the last show on earth--but boy were they wrong. OnetoothreeFour!

Manson Poppins: DEATHMASTER

The Age of Aquarius... remember when it dawned? Wast thou there in that dawning yawning chasm, a new kind of exploitation film to find? If you can keep your mind while everyone around you is losing their Hair --then Claude to the Zodiac amore; flowers in the heads and nails in their hands and minds of easily swayed runaways huddled shivery in the candle-lit squats of Haight, ready to follow anyone with long hair and confidence; one tin soldier writhing away in a mangy corner, writing what is only a masterpiece while the ink's still wet and his pupils too dilated to read. Girls with beautiful blonde straight hair dancing like Prakriti in the flames of Bruce Dern's burning sculptures and sister Strasberg's childhood treasure box, spinning like a sparkling pinwheel in that basement furnace memory. Old SF Haight-Ashbury or Laurel Canyon mansions with paisley-painted steps, cults emceed by shirtless longhairs with an eye for the young and clueless, bumpkins desperate to not seem so rube-like; ready to follow anyone who looked the part (fringe and facial hair) and deigned to feed and water them; Peter Fonda, wandering in search of lost Lenore or Salli Sachse; college campus foyers choked with seated radicals; dirty thrift stores and new age bookshops run by Dick Miller in a paisley vest.... Remember all that? Even if thou weren't thar? 

All of it, all of it gone, sliced away, by the arrival of the hard shit, meth, coke --the killers of empathy, the murderous exploiters of these pie-eyed specimens, the sexual predators following their nose from all points east towards the 'free love' they read about or saw on TV. Needy middle-aged male sex drives like a tidal wave of pollution rolling towards an Edenic spring. All it needed was a match and it would burn like the Cuyahoga River. Charlie Manson putting the lysergic blood hex on the forehead of the sleeping Virgin Tate through his remote control hot chick assassins; armed acidheads kicking up violent dove sediment as they snake upriver towards your peaceful Kurz-ish lagoon, their self-righteous conviction leaving the ears of the fatherless young exposed to the sound of the barefoot rainbowed piper (1). Anyone willing to lead them, be it off the lemming cliff, or into their parents' bedroom to write 'acid is groovy' on the walls in their baby brother's blood, anyone with long hair and confidence... all you have to do is take the consequences, and their money, if they have any. 

(They don't).

Just as the alchemical conjunction of the late 60s created the runaway shelter squatter cult free love commune utopia Woodstock, the early 70s was spent reeling from the gate-crashers at Altamont, who all wanted someone to give them 'the scene' they had envisioned when they ran away from home. Satanists, warlocks, scheming crooks, vampires, and the devil himself all put in bids after the parents put the older leaders--Leary, Ginsberg, Kesey--in jail, left them crucified on the altar of 'drug laws.' Timothy Leary in jail for 20 years for possession of two roaches; Ken Kesey forced to tell everyone the acid test was over and 'everybody passed.' To name but two. Yeesh, but was he so far wrong? Acid was too powerful a thing to be played with by dumbass 16 year-old hicks who could barely read a set list. Naturally, the minute they felt they were gonna die they went to the hospital - which is about the most stupid thing you can do on acid, and on acid if you do go through that spiritual / transformative death... if you just roll with it, you get to the other side where the bliss is. If you don't, bad trip city, the hospital is no place to come down. But if no one was there to tell these snots that, yeeesh. Yeeeeachhhh! Just thinking of these wallies now I can smell the mustiness of their flannels, their lame attempts at facial hair, their crap tattoos and terrible tie-dyes, the pleading puppy desperation behind their Saran Wrap-thin bravado.

Manson accepted them, when no one else would, and in the process stained the face of every long-haired date brought home late to worried-sick suburban parents in the early 70s. There were so many moonies, Hare Krishnas and other 'options' available that studying to be a cult deprogrammer seemed a viable career. Even in elementary school we were taught about brainwashing, although we had a pretty literal conception of it (I pictured it literally, the brain removed and massaged with soapy water - I didn't get how they could put it back in so easily, or where the soap went).

In 1978, Jim Jones replaced the occult-LSD hippie cocktail with cyanide Christian Kool-Aid as the cult beverage; but between '69-'77 cults were still signified by chants and robes-- Krishna to Zeppelin to Crowley to EST swirled together in a haze of drugs and chanting--and back in the dawn of the 70s even upscale college grads and suburban parents were opting for the communal living style (including my own aunt). And if some Pagan love rites were included, so be it. We even had a Parker Bros. Ouija board in the closet with the goddamned Monopoly. Who didn't?

Meanwhile, at the drive-in, the national post-Manson hippie backlash brought in a psycho guru murderous long haired cult gusher... Manson clones by the dozens, including this very special leader...

DEATHMASTER 

(1972) - Dir Ray Danton

***

The 'other' self-help guru vampire character Robert Quarry played in the early 70s (the first being COUNT YORGA) DEATHMASTER got no love from the critics of the era, who sneered at its dated look, but like a rainforest serpent crawling up from the depths of the Amazon Instant Video riverbed, it bit me at just the right time and place, and so I  love it. Also, the print on Amazon Prime looks damned good (which is--if you've surfed around down there you'll know what I mean--unusual in and of itself). It's special, man -- a real gem in the rough. All these screenshots are from it. Savor them, my children.

Lensed by the great DP, Bill Butler (JAWS, DEMON SEED) in countercultural AIP semi-documentary style, part Kovacs elaborate pull focuses, part Gordon Willis darkness and texture, the film might be a bit shoddy special effects wise but it looks great.  I dig that once the pre-credit coffin on a river sequence is over, you'd never even know it was a horror movie until around 45 minutes in. Before the biting starts, while the sun is out, Butler pulls focus along interweaving groups of bikers, free spirits selling trinkets outside at the 'Patagonia Market' parking lot, and that coffin being driven past in the back of an old pick-up fits-right-in, like 1968's PSYCH-OUT (which you'll remember also has a coffin) meets a non-musical HAIR divided by WILD ANGELS x BILLY JACK + an after school message movie where I was expecting William Shatner or Keith Carradine to up to deal 'death,' i.e. acid which is just as addictive as heroin according to, say, GO ASK ALICE (1973)

I think of course that that's the way all countercultural-aspiring movies should be watched, with no clue what genre they're even in. This happened to me with CULT OF THE DAMNED (1969), which I thought (due to Netflix's use of the wrong icon art) was about Jim Jones --I still think it is, even though Jones never shows up. Would the movie have blown my mind the same way, otherwise? No, but not knowing what the film you're watching is called, about or what genre it's in, is liberating. If something's a comedy, tragedy, horror film, anti-drug message movie, or parental paranoia exploitation film we come to it with pre-set expectations. Not knowing, but committing to the film anyway, as I did (I put it on, then forgot what it was, as I was writing some other post, it kind of sucked me in). I'd go so far as to say not knowing puts you in the mind of what acid is actually like when you're on it. (1) It's the same thing Antonioni was after in his films from L'AVENTURA onwards, or Godard, or Brecht... where our brain's habit of organizing random information and layering expectations on a story (going back to childhood with mom reading our favorite books over and over), is thwarted and altered, so our dusty grasp on a symbolic register vanishes and we see the lunch as the nakedness it is, so to speak, resulting in a kind of existential cosmic ecstasy.

On that note, since you might otherwise never notice this gem while paddling down the Amazon's datura root-webbed banks, be aware that the cover they use--with its faded monochromatic red bearded face like some hungry mental patient getting stabbed in his eyes with a thousand acupuncture needles--might be an instant turn-off, conjuring disheartening memories of 80s shot-on-video gorefests starring bearded fat guys in gore-stained bibs. It ain't like that, man. It's a safe place to hang out, get a free meal, read some of our groovy literature and maybe think about joining us at sunrise for morning chants. Interested? You just might find what you're seeking, and if that momentary joyous white light total acceptance cooks down to selling flowers barefoot in the street to keep our little family in tambourines, robes, candles, mushrooms, and dime store Dracula fangs, well, it's a chance to serve the cause. No matter how weak and susceptible not eating meat leaves you, granting the great leader your essence--your mortality's platelets and plasma--will actually give you life in his taking of it.

Only an idiot would say no to being bitten by love, by the source of eternal life and so DEATHMASTER needed an idiot, and for his sins, they sent him one. His name was Pico, and Bill Ewing was the actor (if that is the word) who played him.

(L-R: Reese, Jordan, Tree, Ewing, Dickson)

We first think DEATHMASTER is going to be a biker film (maybe it's the name of a chopper?) when old-school dirtbag Monk (William Jordan) brum-brums into town with his old lady Essine (Betty Anne Reese); his brusque savagery and thuggish behavior at the Patagonia Fair soon pits him against Billy Jack-style Kung Fu 'peacenik' straight-edge hippie Pico (Bill Ewing) and his girlfriend Rona (Brenda Dickson) who's secretly turned on by Monk's outlaw swagger. The much smaller Pico knocks Monk on his ass, but no hard feelings because they all end up on the run from the fuzz and Pico, ever the Zen dude, invites Monk and his chick up to this groovy squat, where the kids hang out.

Up there, in that house on the hill, these kids are making it work, you know, with no electricity but they got candles, love, and a big bowl of what looks like chicken nuggets. And while the kids sit around in the dim light there's a melancholy, haunting flute playing, slowly the buzz seems to dwindle, the gathering storm, the candles seeming to barely put a dent in the darkness. The flute gets more and more mournful. As the resident guitar guy, Bobby "Boris" Pickett says, "Hey what's happening? We're all hung up on some kind of gloom."

Pico, the ever square Paul Walker-esque narc conscience of the clan says "We're hung up all right, but always the same old thing, looking for our damn head, man"

Khorda, manifesting in the party, as yet unnoticed as anyone
other than another tribal scene maker

Rona: (singing like nursery rhyme taunt): His head, his head, Pico can't find his head!
Pico: (wearily) round and round we go
Khorda (unseen, a voice in the shadows behind Pico, sitting cross-legged, having just kind of appeared in the dark morass of hippies, not speaking directly to them but in that same offhand to no one in particular way close-knit groups have of batting ideas around, like he's a teacher in the Socratic style)
... like living in limbo
Pico: yeah, that's it- - a treadmill
Khorda: ... gets to be a bore.
  Pico: Right, a goddamn mother lovin' bore.
 Khorda: The thing to do is to break away... find  a purpose
 Rona: I got a purpose --love... (gets up, starts  dancing around)
 Khorda: Love power... something to cherish. To  hang onto.... But to know love one must first be  alive... live
 Pico: That's just my point, we ain't living.
 Khorda: Perhaps you need a spark, to light the  fuel within
 Pickett - Far out - you mean like a miracle or  something?
 Khorda: why not? (Claps hands - lights come  on)
Rona: Did you see that? What's with that guy?
Pico: Hey man, this is a weird scene!

(they pause, notice the flute player, Barbado [LeSesne Hilton] a big-afroed zombie-type, blowing like a hypnotized cobra /snake charmer combo all the while, casting the gloom mood in the first place most likely)

Bobby Pickett: What's with him?
Khorda: He's achieving his future 

(Barbados continues his memsmerizing drumming)
A hippie: Get in there, Barbados (Barbado keeps playing)
Another hippie: Yeah. Lay it down, man

The kids begin gather wide-eyed around Khorda, like he's Manson Poppins, wanting him to say more, man. Say more about the stars and love and the power of purity of essence (POE). Fix the place up first, he says. Clean house and switch to an all-living things diet (like a vegan Renfield) and he'll be back later to discuss further the ways of things. 

Then, dig it, baby, he vanishes. 

It's like whoa. The 'now generation' patter continues once the cleaning montage is over. 

If I could I'd write it all down, I wouldn't, cuz it's so spot off it might lose its essence. When he returns, Khorda says he's from 'The Isles of Maybe" and languidly picks apart a flower, accusing its beauty of a conceit "as ephemeral as man's wish for immortality." 

But then he loses his cool over Monk's iron cross pendant. Ain't nothin' holy 'bout that cross, Khorda! What does Khorda do at a KKK rally cross burning, have a stroke? If he's going to find god there he may just as well shrink from a tire jack. Fuck this bullshitter, says Monk, and announces he's going out for some steak... and some whiskey!! Damn right. Seeing this, again kind of randomly--still not sure what it even was--I rose up and cheered. I generally dislike bikers in AIP films as they're always destructive rapists, but sometimes they speak much wisdom. Like Heavenly Blue's telling the priest they want to get loaded in THE WILD ANGELS.

But there's something amiss that Monk, for all his abrasiveness and thick stupidity, is hep to, reminding us of the speech about 'needing the assholes' at the end of TEAM AMERICA. When Khorda returns with Barbado, this time playing the conga, he puts the bite on Essine, and the kids hear her scream upstairs. Where is she? They run up to investigate. When they come back down, Essine's there dancing. The music "consecrates them to immortal life." But the second sign something is wrong is that Khorda doesn't like when you try to skip out on the scene. He's made his move, and shit just got mad fascist, that quick. 

Like any effective cult, you only realize there's a trap once you're already trapped.

Pico and Rona figure they better split fast, especially once everyone else starts dancing too--in slow motion!!  Khorda is taking them outside time-space, as any good guru is wont to do, and the scene with them dancing in slow motion, as normal-time Pico and Rona watch aghast, carries a uniquely weird druggy vibe that lets you know, yes, Khorda may be sucking the blood of today's youth, but unlike Nixon and everyone else doing it less literally, Khorda is delivering the spiritual goods in exchange --he does make them immortal. 

The trick of all gurus of course is that, once you surrender your will and believe whole-heartedly in the cause, you do feel a deep egoless bliss and connection to the eternal now. It's liberating. But at what cost?!? You've also just let someone else take over your whole existence, and now you can't escape the guru's clutches even if you realize you're now a slave. You need your parents or someone to come rescue you in the dead of night, whisk you back to Iowa and hire a capable deprogrammer.... or send you to a 90-day detox facility if we're talking an addiction metaphor...  sheesh, nevermind. What a choice.

Now a small
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You see them every day, on the street, their hollowed out eyes, rotting teeth, dirty clothes, pock-marked skin, abscess arms... the shivering, pleading, twiching. Hoping for one more shot to take them through the day. Well, now you can be their hero. Now YOU can make a difference in some poor junky's life. For just $300 a day--that's less than the price of a small used car--you can help a junky get the sustenance he needs. 

Won't you give.... all you can? Including your TV?

Aside from the excellent cinematography by Butler, what makes DEATHMASTER so supreme in the annals of AIP horror-hippy hyrbridization is the marvelously off-the-wall cast and their unholy raiment: Like Dean Stockwell in PSYCH-OUT, Ewing's long black hair/bangs/Native American headband combo is probably an all-in-one wig leftover from AIP's western unit (it may even be the same one). His pretty face resembles a young Robert Conrad, and though he can't act, his bi-polar veering from super-hammy to super-low key finally pays off when he 'snaps' into a weird bug-eyed maniac at the climax. 

As his girlfriend Rona, Brenda Dickson has these big expressive blue eyes, n Ellen Burstyn meets Jaclyn Smith facial structure, and a lithe, pale midriff that all combines to make her accessibly naive girl-next-door accessible yet sexually mature and strangely cool all at once. Her eyes dilate with desire and contract with concern when appropriate; she seems genuinely thrilled to be on camera, no matter in what capacity, all but fluttering and twirling around the periphery of any group scene. Her infectious energy seeps into the corners of the film like helium and lifts the whole first swath of the film into a strange world where you don't know what you're watching. It could be a Billy Jack vs. bikers movie, it could be a youth in revolt kinda thing, a romantic soap, an after-school special, a valentine to the Santa Monica Pier flea-market, you just don't know. 

Alas: she disappears for most of the second swath, the 'Khorda shows his fangs' secton, and her absence creates an anxiety in young Pico that we feel too. It helps motivate his return to the house, the way Valeria's death in CONAN or Kim Cattrall's in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, helps us thirst for a return to the dragon's den, a final fight, despite our feeling the hero is delusional and outgunned. 

As the Van Helsing of the piece there's Pop (voice of Pooh) Fiedler, a mousy middle-aged little balding capitalist in a hippie vest and sandals. An iffy father figure/librarian to the kids in the neighborhood, it's to him Pico runs when he realizes the truth about this suave new guru.

Naturally, when some long-haired faux Native American boy barges into your store, foaming at the mouth and raving about vampires, you just assumes he's having a really bad trip. You find him a beanbag in the back so he ride out the peak in relative safety. Maybe you give him an orange, keep the music earthy, electric and soulful, and let the trip run its course til he's sane enough to walk out on his own power. 

But you don't believe him.... do you?

I mean, who hasn't been tripping at a party and had some hip, charismatic know-it-all older dude show up and--with a single eight-ball of coke--turn what was only an hour ago a  'peace and electric love' mammalian group mind happening' into a 'dirtbag-studded festival of foamy-mouthed sex-obsessed reptilian egotists'?  You figured you were with your tribe and safe for the night, and quick as you like your tribe had joined the evil clan, and sk so you had to run, disillusioned, disoriented, scared, freaked out and confused, into the night you presumed yourself safe from navigating? I used to rant myself hoarse trying to convince Johnny Spliff that his perennial townie couch guest Doug E. Fresh was a crank-snorting dirtbag who could give him nothing but IOUs, lowered whiskey bottle waterlines, and hep-C. Johnny would just look at me slack-jawed and do nothing. He was an easy mark. For us both, I guess. But I was cleaner!!  And bought whiskey rather than just drunk it. Suddenly I had to find a different couch to crash on.

It was a nightmare.

Believe it or not, Pop's convinced, eventually, (his dog gets drained of blood as a warning) and soon they're examining a paperback on magical cults through the ages together. Ah, used bookstores on the west coast! Those same books are probably still there, well-thumbed and never purchased by the dirty broke Santa Monica flower children, now grown paunchy and burnt out. 

Dude, I bought a used paperback of Gravity's Rainbow at one of those bookstores, and was raving to my friend Beth about all the reptilian comfortable-in-their-own-skin evil swine around us at Reggae on the River out in Humboldt County, CA, summer of 1990. She thought I was hallucinating too. Why wouldn't she listen?? I barely understood a word of Pynchon's prose but I kept reading all through our road trip, hoping she would be impressed. She wasn't. She stuck with Robertson Davies. It was the summer of 1990, there was a massive draught so no campfires were allowed, and Operation Green Sweep was in full effect. Ever try to camp without a campfire, or enjoy reggae without weed, or share close quarters while traveling platonically with a gorgeous Connecticut hippie girl? Or read an 800+ page book with no comprehension of its presumedly rich historical subtext, in a time before internet or cell phones to look up dates and big words? On shitty acid? It would have been enough to make anyone see vampires everywhere. I was ready to drown myself, but could barely afford enough whiskey to make it worth the drive into McKinleyville. And--worse--if I did, when I got it back to camp, the seagulls would descend, all those thirsty hippie mouths. Or were they more like vampire bats? Every drop of that 1.75 of Ten High should have been coursing through my grateful bloodstream instead of theirs. But I was too young to be selfish. Either way, no matter how much got I drunk, it never was enough. I'd just pass out and when I woke up, the same misery + interest was waiting for me -- and not a drop left.

If a Khorda came for me then, I would not have wavered in my surrender. If he bought me steak and whiskey.

And that brings us to the final marvelous performance in the clan - the 'adult' in the group, the great Robert Quarry. As COUNT YORGA he played self-help guru to a slightly older and richer enclave of California swingers, but there's apparently no relation to his incarnation here, which is fine, because I like this film much better than either of those (probably thanks to the great Butler cinematography). Though I know full well even the RETURN OF COUNT YORGA is far better reviewed than DEATHMASTER. I am not swayed.

Cinematography makes all the diff.

Quarry, for his sins, doesn't ham it up or phone it in until the very end, but when the time comes, look out. He drops one of the fakest and worst evil laughs-turned-screams in horror history, which is followed almost immediately by Ewing's wild-eyed farewell to Lorna, where he seems to be passive-aggressively sabotaging his own already incompetent performance like it's the 100th take and the director's been screaming at him all day and--rather than finally getting it right--he just snaps and does a burlesque mockery of the director's instructions. And the director thinking it's better than what he was getting in the first 99, calls it a wrap. Not a great way to go out, but hey!! The photography is beautiful. 

His name isn't fresh in the zeigeist like James Wong Howe or Vilmos Zsigmond, but it should be. Even with something as innocuous as Deathmaster, it's easy to see why Bill Butler would go on to be considered--by the people in the business--one of the best, and winning two Oscars. There's a kind of Gordon Willis'Godfather-style earthen duskiness at work here in this crazy hippie house and Santa Monica scene. He catches more than a few great magic hours, and that abrupt switch from the PSYCH-OUT hippie house vibe to full on psychedelic uber-cheap vampire film is well turned, becuase it all looks so good it catches you off guard. Rather than anticipating what's happening next, you fall into a state of aesthetic arrest. 

All that said, there are many annoying things about the iflm, like that Pico is such a genius with booby traps but then forgets to use his kung fu on Barbado, twice, and forgets he managed to defeat him the first time by just painting a cross on his chest in blood. Also, like so many idiot vampire hunters, he never even thinks about bringing a real cross with him, or to bring a priest instead of the cops, fucking narc that he is.

I kept hoping that it would turn out that the only way to defeat Khorda would be for Pico go get a crew cut and a job. That would have been so cherry, bro. 

Well, you can't have everything.

But, if you have Amazon Prime and a tolerance for plastic fangs, you can have 90 minutes with the DEATHMASTER. May the joy it brings add fruitful notes to your blood's bouquet! Ave Santa Sangrardo! 

NOTES
1. see my story of tripping to FLATLINERS