Acid Etched Damascus: MANDY

In MANDY, Nicolas Cage proves his levels of fearless crazy have no bottom (or top), and Canada's Panos Cosmatos proves his debut film BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW was no psychedelically-distilled Ativan one-off, like his next film would be a saga of a family coping with senility or something. Instead, he brings in the big guns: Nic Cage. The result is like pouring Godzilla's piss onto the blazing oil fire-for both Cage and Cosmotos have proven in their separate films that high art and foam-mouthed insanity needn't be exclusive. MANDY is the door-kicking explosion of cool we need right now. With its slowed-down sound, psychedelic movement trails, pineal-buzzing drones, rock and roll violence, and fantasy paperback chapter intertitles, MANDY pulses with a mix of what a lot of us would describe as heaven (a warm, mellow super-cool chick, lovely house deep in the old growth woods with a still small lake out back, cool lighting and music and art everywhere). And Hell as his ultimate destination. As Red, a woodsman (aka lumberjack, for the chainsaw hath replaced yonder axe), Cage starts out soft and intimate, deeply attuned to his lady faire and full of gentle weird jokes but over the course of the film he descends/ascends to the Cage we know and love. With his gut out, his butt lit, his eyes covered with shades instead of goggles when he uses his garage forge to hammer out a massive weird gleaming sword, guzzling his shower vodka in his underwear and pouring it over his open wounds, howling in a way that's totally new even for him, and like nothing cinema has ever heard the like of. It's not nasal and hysterical but deep, tragic and genuinely scary. He rides a demonic ATV through the wild north woods in the dead of night; he fights chainsaw duels; he burns churches. He does every drug in sight. Crushing skulls, losing his shit over a demon ripping his favorite shirt, saying wild shit like "a psychotic drowns where a mystic swims" (a Joseph Campbell quote) and telling super-cool Bill Duke he needs his crossbow back because he's hunting "Jesus freaks" (spoilers why). To paraphrase Mrs. Crummles in Nicholas Nickleby, he's  too... tremendous!

And so is the Mandy. It's saturated with a pleasing palette of deep reds and blacks, and propelled by Jóhann Jóhannsson's score, a bed of murky drones and synths both thumberling and quiscubescent (two words I just invented). King Crimson's "Starless and Bible Black" slithering like syrupy warm serpents down the river lane of the opening credits. Jóhannsson's score isn't quite as instantly riveting and tripped out as Sinoa Caves' for Rainbow, it's more varied, moving from romantic minor key Eno-ish dalliances to thunder god forge burbling, eerie droning. But when old Nic preps for war, joint or cigarette in mouth, goggles on, gut out, in flow pulse-quickening synth cycles that sound like an old flying saucer getting kick-started deep in the woods with no ears to hear it. We finally learn what that quiscubescent sound freels lorick! (New words for new sensations).

The plot finds us in--as the first chapter title explains 'the Shadow Mountains - 1983 A.D. That AD is a key right there, for this is a story that could be told in the wild west of 1883 or some Middle Ages Belgian schwarzwald (where it was films), aside from its one Piscean foot being in the world of Mandy's current fantasy novel, and her interest in the planet Jupiter. The Shadow Mountains are the kind of place so deep dwell only truckers, loggers, drug manufacturers, and the assorted good and evil forces and businesses they engender. It's a kind of old growth paradise, shot through with hazy lavender and pink sunlight streams which bathe the life and pad of Red and his artist wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) in haunting lights. Every frame of their existence is rooted but floating in the absolving caress of timeless space. Happy as could be, they live as any of us would at the time--if we could--with great sound editing capturing their intimate whispers as they natter on about Galactus, Erik Estrada, Jupiter, birds...  With her glasses and crow's feet proudly un-Botoxed, her Bette Davis x Peter Lorre eyes staring right into him across the water (they live "out on Crystal Lake") or their backyard campfire, distant howls or human moans too abstract to investigate, Jóhannsson droning over them all Vangelis Blade Runner "Love Theme"-ish dreamy, it's a new kind of paradise, all the sweeter because we can feel the glimmer of the nightmare nipping at their toes. We're deep in it with them, with Nic, staring at Mandy through the flames at the laid-back cool old lady of his come-true dreams.

Her mind alive to the infinite, taking weird Antichrist-style sojurns into the chthonic woods both real and figurative, reading a novel about serpents eyes and red skies, working on fantastic drawings, Mandy is perhaps open enough to the oceanic currents that her curious stare into the window of a passing van gets ensnared in the neural network of Manson/ Papa Jupiter (!)-ish cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roche) who takes it as divine right that he should have her as part of his 'flock' (They are called, as we find out in a chapter title, 'the Children of the New Dawn'). Soon he shall use the long the horn of Abraxas to summon a gang of evil demon bikers (somewhere between the Cenobites and the radio active ash-blackened New Mexican derelicts in the new Twin Peaks: The Return). And well, that's when it gets really interesting, because one thinks they have this movie all figured out as some variation on any of Nic's angry cult-busting, child or bride-rescuing/avenging adrenalin junkets, like Drive Angry--but the left turns start coming, we veer into the realm of deep dark Nordic and samurai myth. Red walks 'the demon path' like Lone Wolf, sans Baby Cart, the spirit of pure violence of some viking berserker possessing him like it did Dustin Hoffman in the last chunk of Straw Dogs, Shauna Macdonald in the last chunk of The Descent as well as, of course Max von Sydow in the last chunk of Virgin Spring. The side that didn't want war always takes the first hit--they never even see it coming, but the sting of the slap wakes their fury, and nothing's scarier than a civilized human who suddenly has nothing left to lose. That can be cliche or it can be the mythic frame solid enough to support even the most far-out of fictions. In short, Mandy is far out. 

Cosmatos' fantastic feature debut, 2010's  Beyond the Black Rainbow, built its trippy towers on the foundations of classic Canadian sci-fi horror films like Scanners, The Brood, and Blue Sunshine, here the influences seem to Valhalla Rising, The Virgin Spring, and the Canadian animated film Heavy Metal, but the style and mood harkens back to Rainbow alone. It's now the Cosmatos style: a slow druggy deep woodsiness where people seem to swim through the LSD atmosphere. And the Cosmatos theme: that  the difference between unbearable prolonged pain and euphoric timeless peace is largely a matter of dosage. No matter how happy and secure you feel, the gates of archaic demonic madness can open at the drop of a hat, or on the tongue or in the eye. And for Mandy we get a new Cosmatos concept: that fictions are always a reflection of your life in the moment:. Elements right out of Mandy's novel: the Loc-nar-evoking "Serpent's Eye jewel"; the 'Horn of Abraxas" that summons "the Black Skulls," the "tainted blade of the pale night, straight from the abyssal lair," monstrous demons slavering while they talk in rumbly inhuman voices, their ATVs roaring like otherworldly hellhounds, their LEDs beaming like the eyes of dragons, manifesting in the woods like Mandy is the gatekeeper of reality, the dream of the dreamer turned nightmare. Starlings smashed in sacks or set ablaze, all horrors doubling back along the Moebius ouroboros. Immersion in a druggy slow motion bizarro world, awash in deep ASMR whispery intimacy, creates space for both the stars, the page, and the woods to merge into one. 

Such reality bending and warping match the perceptions of the totally tripped out, take it from me. I was there. For every peak, a valley... and some of the valleys are so dark it takes getting even darker to find the light again.

Saturated in dark red and blacks, with all sorts of deep dish manipulations of light and sound, Cosmatos creates a magical zone where idealism has crashed into the trees and Canadian and US indie horror and sci-fi films from the 70s all find their sequel, a zero sum flashpoint. Just as Tarantino turns to the Shaw Brothers, New World's 70s-era drive-in Pictures, and 60s Italian westerns for his pastiche palette, Cosmatos turns to the wilds of Canada and NYC: Cronenberg, Lieberman, Barker, De Palma, Bakshi, Cohen; he also turns to Frazetta and prog rock album covers and to what Terence McKenna would call the 'heroic measure' of psychedelics for his inspiration. The wild fumes of 20x salvia divinorum and the LSD - ecstasy - amphetamine concoctions of trans-dimensional Berkeley chemists. The sort of stuff where you take it on Friday and by the following Wednesday your wife's wild mystical artwork is still moving on the paper, the wild willowing branches of the endless tree that becomes tentacles and tendrils reaching for the inner light. You wish you could sleep but the trails makes that impossible. In the meanwhile you make Gandalf seem like Gob Bluth. It might take a month to totally fade... but by then you've taken other things, kept the ball rolling...

Nic, powering up for battle (i.e. guzzling bathroom vodka and screaming).

These aren't your average hackwork stepped-on ecstasy capsules or weak-ass doses. These are special variants (like DOM, Roybal, and Ethyl) super-charged by Berkley chemistry majors going down a way more psychedelic rabbit hole than your profit-hungry meth cookers. Of course, many of use who went down that rabbit hole wound up lost in the woods, spinning like Susan Strasberg suddenly able to hear again at the end of Psych-Out--- 'til the right cult found them (Manson on the dark end, the Rainbow Family on the other). When I was doing DOM in the mid-90s, even Burning Man was still just an insular Wickery cult rather than today's midlife crisis tourist spot. The few who rode the snake all the way and--resisting the temptation to stay egoless in the ecstasy of blind guru-worship, joining the flower people, or 'the Children of the New Dawn' and following a failed acid folkie into oblivion-- climbed out of even the ego trip of egolessness and became themselves again, only shinier -- the gunk of the moment's residue cleared away by the acid bath. In Rainbow, Cosmatos shows the previous decade's deep dish mid-60s LSD experiencers--seeking to use consciousness to make inroads into western medicine--had by the early 80s lapsed into babbling junkies. In Mandy, we see how mystics and seers with their joyous followers in the 70s devolved into delusional cult members, too passive and fucked-up to question the ease with which some pitch-shifted LSD-spiked light show won their soul over to a charismatic psychopath. That was what acid users often weren't prepared for--the suggestibility that made them easy marks. There was a reason the CIA used it in mind control experiments. It left an unsuspecting person's hard drive decrypted and wide open for hacking.  If drugs didn't open their mind enough to see that it was their own mind opening, on its own, it was too easy to let a scammer take credit. I saw them all the time at Dead Shows in the 80s... only there in a more benevolent, large-scale way. The music dissipated the Satanic darkness the music engendered. It wasn't hard to see the power that band had, the way so many people were willing to be subsumed in the larger ego --a nice way to live if you're able to surrender fully, until you're exploited, which, how can you not be? Be it groupies letting themselves by horribly abused by Led Zeppelin up in the Edgewater, misled German boys charging into Belarus all amped up on Pervatin, or Manson's women singing at their own trial--total belief in false gods provides the ultimate in permissive highs, obliterating all traces of empathy, self-regard, and sanity in a giddy headlong rush.

No, my children, it's not Richard Lynch

Mandy's LSD-quaffing cult leader villain, Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roche) is reminiscent of Richard Lynch in God Told Me To more than he resembles Manson, or anyone else whose charisma is enough that their psychoses rubs off on their followers, giving people a feeling of 'permission' for their darkest violent impulses. Roche has some very chilling moments facing a mirror, where he goes from a kind of panicky infantile shame (we sense, as with Manson, a very rough abusive childhood) to a dead-eyed sociopathy that's truly chilling, as are some Mansoneque vocal cadences (in the sound mixing his voice seems to echo along several dimensions--slightly doubled and delayed--the way his movements give off trails. Some of the best druggy effects in recent memory occur when Mandy wakes from her abduction to find a solid dose of acid going into her system via forced eye drop and then a sting-- soaked in bizarre honey-style psychedelic honey--from a gigantic hornet, placed against her jugular ("the cherry on top"). It's so trippy that Laura Palmer's drugged excursions with Leo and Jacques north of the border in Twin Peaks seem like Normal Rockwell paintings. It's part of the reason Jeremiah's weird combination of seduction, initiation, brain-wash, flashing and insecure first date resume-recounting (playing his songs for her like an insecure weed dealer - hear his album on Spotify - Amulet of the Weeping Maze!) as he trues to lure Mandy into the fold, is so disturbing. This act has clearly worked before. But Many can see that--with all that influence over his weak-minded throng--he's still just a pathetic guy craving sex and adoration. His turning from semi-optimistic to darker than midnight is a riveting example of the way blind faith leads to atrocities, a psychopath allowing his flock entry into a dream state of us vs. them permissive violence, reminiscent not just of Manson but Naziism.

99% of all great horror/genre films remember people
watch TV, and they keep their sets on all the time.

The few non-cultists met on the journey include the still badass Bill Duke as a trucker friend of Red's who reports word coming down from "the big rigs", and the attuned-to-cosmic-purposes and wavelengths LSD manufacturer (Richard Brake), who sets Lizzy the tiger free in a scene that's open-eyed and openly acted in and around a hint of slow motion as to attune one to a whole weird electric plane. With the addition of the 'Cheddar Goblin' on TV (If I learned anything from Terence and Phillip it's that Canadians love their Kraft Dinner), the tiger, Night Beast on the TV, grizzly hallucinations, Jupiter, deep, dark mountainous tunnels, the Pagan Nordic warrior vs. the onset of Christianity original death cult, this dark fairy tale becomes part Mad Max in addition to Robert E. Howard, and every fairy tale wherein the remote isolation and woods absorb the screams and buzz of chainsaws; where planets and skies change colors and size, and thus wild outlaws can run around pillaging and destroying in the lord's name without a soul to stop them--except one man, made insane with rage and loss, who might fashion a Norse God-style weapon, retrieve his crossbow from Bill Duke, and ride into battle. Even then, mind reeling with blood loss and agony, he can still stop and stare mindlessly at a Cheddar Goblin commercial, repeating the slogan as if a mantra (2). 

Grief and suffering heat a man to a cherry red blade ready for an oil quench and a sharpness test. As on TV's Forged in Fire, it's not what the blade does to this railroad spike, it's what this railroad spike does to this blade. But forged in the anguish of murderous Jesus freaks, that spike is going down.



Though filmed in the wilds of Belgium, presumably the black forest region where Hansel and Gretl were chased by Suspiria witches, it's clear this is a film with the wild depths of the Canadian provinces in its heart - dark forest lands that maps can't do justice to, as if our entire USA is engulfed in old growth and chilly salmon-stoked streams, wilderness where meth and LSD labs and wild ATV-riding nightmares run amok. We forget how vast empty country is, our minds pull towns closer together like a wormhole. But if you've ever driven across country, in the North, Highway 80 or 90, you've seen it - the vastness, the emptiness, like it's a whole separate dimension. That vastness coupled to the deep old growth forest vibe is what makes dark Nordic folktales spring to life when enough residents are high as hell or have done enough astral voyaging in their lives that they can shrug off massive doses of the 'good stuff' and laugh mercilessly at the penis of their insane captor. And yet they are no different than people you probably know, that cool couple (4) who exist casually in that gulf between blue collar outdoors jobs and white collar education, the couple who love all the things they do and are humble and just out for the same things the rest of us are. The self-imposed dream exile of the Jesus freaks and Black Skulls, these makers of dark myth, are the real losers. Doomed and misled by baser impulses, peer pressure, and cheap meth.

That may be the highest auric ray inherent in the glow of Mandy, the idea that if the average dude with his 9-5 outdoor job, who just likes kicking back with his old lady on weekends, not starting any trouble, might feel outgunned, out-"lived," by all the wild and polyamorous maniacs out there, maybe it's really the reverse. The 9-5 job-working couples eating dinner in front of the TV are more mythically dense, loom larger on the horizon of glory, than all the murderous acid-addled hippie freaks out there, combined. If we 'normals' can slow our roll down, bring our Iron John larger-than-lifeness to even the smallest detail in our daily life (instead of letting it just evaporate in a boozy haze), if we can live so minutely that just taking out the trash can reverberate with druggy slow-tempo grinding, the analog synth score in our headphones filling each woodland shadow with dragonly menace, then maybe the glowing green gem we somehow lost during the 90s via Bjork, Portishead, DJ Shadow, Moby and Massive A.- all that spinal fluid-draining MDMA heartbreak (3) will turn up at last. Maybe the warm amniotic fuzzy completion that lies even beyond duality and total union with the OMmmm was just waiting out in the backyard for us to finish dinner, so we can race back outside and resume the game before it gets too dark to see the ball.

Maybe, deep inside some shrieking hippie's gut pocket, that ball is still waiting --back there in 1983 AD--back when we were still reading paperbacks and watching arial TV, still rocking to guitar solos on warm analog LPs and eight tracks, still smoking brown, seedy weed, and riding through deep forest canopy full of insect life; still made art on paper and canvas. Cut open that hippie dragon and pull that gem out, Nic Cage!

He has.

Always kind of half-assed around the edges, and hammy, as if he was fumbling around on a car radio dial of insanity looking for his 'One True Signal' - something deeper and wilder than anyone had ever tuned to before--never picking a station 'til he found it--he could drive the backseat passengers crazy. Well, here he found it- here he's busted through all that white noise at last. This is no longer a manic Crispin Glover kind of crazy or a method-worked crazy, but a crazy from the masculine diaphragm, laughing and hollering and roaring in the face of dragons like Blue Babe and Bunyan. From steel first softened via the Iron John nascent Men's Movement of the late 80s, hammered in the Forged in Fire of the anvil-ringing now, the Iron John wildman archetype Nic now embodies passes every strength and sharpness test, slicing through carcasses of false prophets and rows of gossipy phantasm apples. It's not what the man will do the world, it's what the world will do to the man. And Nic's edge isn't even dulled after a brutal leg chain chop.  He will cut. He will kill. The serpent's eye is lifted from the abyssal lair in the belly of the beast. Strange and eternal, Mandy of Jupiter ascends.

Dad, if only I ever got to see you working.

NOTES:
1. See SHINING Examples: Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (10/11/11)
2. The Cheddar Goblin commercial is very gross (he vomits mac and cheese on lucky kids' heads, but makes a great counterpoint to Red's horrible loss, and is made by the genius behind the beloved Too Many Cooks.
3. It took me ten years of mourning to accept that warm 'first night' rush would never come back. Craig got it all down so beautifully I cry to this
4. See also: The Devil's Candy (2015)

FURTHER:

The Acidemic Nic Cage Reader (Knowing, Kick-Ass, Drive Angry, Bad Lieutenant, Vampire's Kiss) 
Tales from the Benway Pharmacy (Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Machine)
Manson Poppins: The Deathmaster

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

Great Acid Cinema: ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO (AKA Cult of the Damned, 1969)

"Screw anyone who hates killing!"

Hard to find, AIP's renamed CULT OF THE DAMNED (AKA ANGEL ANGEL DOWN WE GO) deserves a damned cult already, but it's still hiding under different posters.  That's how I found it, clicking on what I thought was a Jim Jones documentary on Netflix. But no, this film offers a whole different kind of dosed Kool-Aid. First held back from release due to the blowback from the Manson murders in 1969, it was eventually released CULT OF THE DAMNED to capitalize on them, waiting just long enough for the "too soon"-ness of it to die down. But by then, its cautious HAIR-style peans to freedom didn't ring quite right - we couldn't put the genie back in the bottle. Suddenly an innocent hippie musical that just happened to be about killing your parents was seen as something very dark, which the film's satirical tone was maybe just too frazzled to support; so they changed the name to CULT OF THE DAMNED, but it's hardly that either. If four people count as a cult then oh, crazy lady crazy lady.

So, for the crime of being stuck in a limbo where BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, HAIR, AND HAIRSPRAY fans can't find it (they'd love it), the film's been rolling around in a time warp obscurity ever since, ever since now, crazylady crazylady!! And now, it's on Netflix as GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED, where I just watched it thinking Jim Jones is going to show up any minute.

But he doesn't! Seriously, I was so confused just now watching this. I kept thinking "now they'll fly to South America to join the commune.... any minute now..." But they don't. DAMN IT. It's even better without old Jones, sweating in his fatigues. Fuck that guy. But maybe the reason I loved it so much was because I kept thinking it was about to veer into danger and madness at any second.

See Netflix put up the picture at left, for GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED, so when I clicked it I expected to see that film. While this CULT, the one Netflix does have... turns out to be a counterculture 1969 AIP gas(ss) filmed in Los Angeles, California that might even be better than 1968's PSYCH-OUT or HEAD. If those names mean nothing to you then, dude, why are you hanging out here? Go see them at once! CULT isn't really like them, plot-wise, more like THE BIG CUBE meets Pasolini's TEOREMA. Either way, whether you're an AIP fan or just a cinematic "experience seeker," you should take the CULT trip and instead of pinching yourself to see if you're dreaming, pinch your mom, shout obscenities at passing pigeons, and howl at breadheads passing by on the Sunset Strip. Your lips frothing, your pupils wildly dilated, meaning to say hello to your boss and his wife as they pass on their way to Justine's, you start just laughing insanely instead. He's French, he'll just shrug it off. Hopefully.

That's the kind of scene I mean, man. You will definitely have, as they say, totally lost it, and then you'll "know." Bogart Petery Stuyvesant's mad vision of an America that's eaten itself down to the overweight health crisis bone has come to pass.

The man is a prophet.

CULT OF THE DAMNED originally had the much more sensible (relatively) title, ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO, referring to one of the psychedelic rock songs performed by the skydiving rock impresario, Bogart "as in the real Humphrey!" Peter Stuyvesant (Jordan Christopher). A genuinely great singer, he's thinking of calling his new group 'Rabbit Habbit.' They're a trio consisting of Lou Rawls ("Everybody knows black is better, baby!"), a cute blonde flower child Davey Davison ("Birth control can be controlled by the mind!") and Roddy McDowell! ("I heard alcohol is coming back!") Their songs are full of groovy organ, Jew's harp, and funky but non-slapped bass lines I could totally play if my bass wasn't so far away, and out of tune, and I don't wanna. The songs are all penned by the Brill Building-esque song-writing team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, clearly aping the oft-aped style of the musical 'HAIR.' And since the main character/narrator, who joins with the group and finds her groove as Bogart's lover, is the curvy full-body typed heiress Tara Nicole Steele (Holly Near (she meets them when their band plays at her coming out ball), it becomes a kind of HAIR/SPRAY mind-meld, sans the terrible smell of permanents, but with the pungent incense of the Manson killings to come ("My mom always told me the next war would be between the blacks and the whites!")

The film begins, still trying to make me think it's about Guyana. There are lots of jungle noises in the beginning to bear out the assumption that we're watching the right movie (at least for me, who always thought Guyana was in Africa) but as it goes on it gets very Joan Collins plays Mommy Dearest as written by Valerie Solanis channeling Oscar Wilde. While narrating her backstory, Tara hallucinates disturbing collages of her riches-to-riches family tree, where "everyone dies on schedule, beautifully." Jennifer Jones is the faded mom, who shouts at her: "You are a fat girl, you idiot! I don't know why anyone would even touch you!!" When she throws Tara Nicole a coming-out party it's like a champagne bottle missile... aimed straight at the head.

Little could mom know, Tara's going to be losing her virginity to the rock star they hired for entertainment that very night, out in by the lake outside the mansion.

But the real show-stopper: Tara's slow motion walk down the stairs during the druggy prelude to the title song ("Angel Angel Down we Go"). After spending the first chunk of the movie suffering along with Tara over her mother's ceaseless verbal harangues we wonder how Tara is ever going to get som self esteem. So when she walks down the stairs, right as the very druggy, very very psycedelic title song begins, it's magic. The people around dancing or talking in slow motion around her are oblivious as she enters the magic domain of the Rabbit Habbit.

"Virgin child," Bogart sings right to her (he sees her). "it's time you tried to fly."

All through the film, I presumed Tara Nicole was going to go off to Guyana and join Jim Jones to escape her mom's cold clutches, or something, and that an angry reel of camp atrocity footage would be tacked on at the end, intercut with Tara Nicole freaking out in close-up so you couldn't tell she wasn't really there. But then, left turns start to righten, and go, baby, go, until you're freaking out in the best free love acid flashback kind of way, with just a little dab of Manson-esque foreshadowing to keep everything from getting too Partridge Family.

That's how it goes though, in AIP land: Bogart lays Tara by the lake and she fantasizes weird Freudian melt-down bloody Bluebeard forbidden stained-key-style virginity adieus. But soon Bogart's band shows up on the scene; they too accept her, and sweep her back to their pad and into their world of forbidden pleasure and love, love ("Freedom, Mama Angel!"); pillows are piled on the floor around the hookah, purple gel accent lighting and LSD and a groovy old LP player and reel-to-reel playing their gone tracks. Bogart even records a song on the spot in ode to his newfound 'large girl' love about how "growing high and going wide gives you lots of 'room' inside."

Tara gets confident with all this attention. And she has a lot to offer them. For one thing she has a pilot's license so he has her fly his plane and they all go skydiving ("No one skydives 'cuz it's safe!!"). Tara learns to dance free and easy like Mama Cass as a reward. Back at home, Tara works up the nerve to tease her mom about her obsession with expensive jewelry, her reliance on pills and booze. With a little research Tara learns that fat used to be the height of beauty and that "Twiggy only dates back to Buchenwald." Whoa, baby... That's too much. When Bogart decides to get with Tara's pill-head mama ("maybe you'll adopt me, maybe I'll adopt you, but oh crazy lady crazy lady!") Tara freaks out and starts crying up on the ceiling. Mom hangs by the pool and notes: "He is the sort that makes you take all sorts of tranquilizers before breakfast, isn't he? And wash them down with bloodys." Cheers, Mrs. S.!

"You drive, I dive! We all die!"

With the Original Humphrey around, bloody's always for breakfast.

Needless to say, Mom gets her own song, too:, in a slow grinding bluesy vamp:

I just met a mother -
ain't gonna tell you her name.
I just met a mother -
she puts us all to shame.
Well the bigger that they are,
the harder they fall.
Looka here, what do we got?
the biggest mother
of them all!

Bogart can just magically come up with some cool thing to sing and instantly move the whole cast in and out of his recording studio to belt it out in a cleverly edited montage of Bogart actually singing it into the microphone, lip-syncing to his already recorded track while hanging around in the living room, just listening to it, and/or having it play in the background as they drive around in his groovy car --all within the course of a three minute song! Meanwhile, photos are everywhere, on all the walls, keep it all weird, man, a nonstop light show of Hollywood icons, authors, and politicians in ways that prefigure similar light shows in NATURAL BORN KILLERS and MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, like below:

So, if you haven't seen ANGEL ANGEL on Netflix (again, where it's mislabeled GUYANA) streaming, you haven't seen "it" baby lady. This film is so "it" they had to hide it, twice. See this stone groove motherlover timeless remembrance of the days of cults and parental anxiety about drugged-out rebels that talked too fast and sang too much.

For Squaresville adults it was like looking right into Medusa's hazel blue eyes. Mother Lover! Here comes Charlie!

PS - remember, the only way to find this film is to look for another film on Netflix under the similar title, GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED -- and somehow, that makes the actual film even better, for even if they never actually get to Guyana, this damned cult's Kool-Aid still packs a 'Lovely Sort of Death' in every sip, so drink up, tune in, and dive, cannibal America, dive!

(PS 2/18/15- It's not on Netflix anymore but it did just come out on DVD via Kino Lorber!)