Death Drivin' America - Part 3: DEATHSPORT, CANNONBALL!

Trash fans like myself are finding--via golden hindsight and reverence for all things 35mm--that many of Roger Corman's New World produced ALIEN / STAR WARS / JAWS-imitations have held up and improved with age, and even the films of New World's mid-70s 'period-period' (the post-BONNIE AND CLYDE wave - BLOODY MAMA, BIG BAD MAMA, LADY IN RED, BOXCAR BERTHA, etc) still pack a wry punch, at least some of the time. Roger consistently had an eye for giddy high-octane satire (though apparently he didn't approve of comedy, so you had to hide it in uber-dryness). He also launched the whole (now largely forgotten) biker subgenre with THE WILD ANGELS and bankrolled the wacky DEATH RACE 2000 (1973). And so New World proved it could imitate itself as deftly as it imitated the big boys. Once SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT showered box office gold all over the two-lane blacktops of backwoods America, there was no stopping him.

In the best of these 'backwoods blast-offs', like TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE, there are sultry glimmers of greatness, and the worst, like SMOKEY BITES THE DUST (1981), there are at least some good crashes. But... remember a few miles back we talked about DEATH RACE 2050 ("the only movie that matters in 2017" - April Wolfe), and talked about how no film could match the original? Well, the original was such a surprise hit Corman ordered a whole slew of variants, futuristic car chase movies that, in their way, paved the lanes for the MAD MAX to come. He just, you know, didn't want them to be funny. Had he forgot about THE RAVEN?

And how's this for prescient: DEATH RACE hypothesized that in 2000 we'd be living under the thumb of a crazy trash-talking president (hey!) with a fun old-school (like Roman gladiator) sense of entertainment and population control. In the process all the tenets of 70s life were commented upon: road rage, gas crises, OPEC; America's big cathartic fuck-you to the next four days of work that was Monday Night Football; Detroit demonology (the grease pit grimoire with groovy names like Gran Turino, Corvette, Trans-Am, Mitzy Bishu Gallant, Suzy Bannon the Buick); CB radios (as discussed in the earlier piece on CONVOY) and revolution!

It's perhaps understandable why I-- who was a monster child in that time--would return now to the auto wreck bloodsport satire genre as if some rumbling unleaded Rosebud. For our crazy prez, for our crazy country, for the year of 2017, when America's Civil War turned so cold we grew more Russian than the Russkies, start your engines!

Hear the mighty engines roaring for America? Komrade, we need to rev it. Only by blazing fast and furious do we finally not stand stagnant.

CANNONBALL!

(1976) Dir. Paul Bartel

**

With the popularity of the car crash movie (perfect for drive-ins) well established, 2000 director Paul Bartel jumped lanes and drafted over behind the now-forgotten real-life Cannonball Dash, a cross-country race that was set up to protest the 55 mph highway law (set up in 1974). That race had caught the popular cinematic imagination to the point that in 1976 it congealed into films like GUMBALL RALLY (1976), SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT and--far less remembered--Bartel's CANNONBALL. In the original Dash and other race films, the issue of prize money, a bet, the importance of an honor system and all in the game camaraderie is easier to understand (a gum ball machine, for example, is a relatively worthless prize). For the inexplicable $100,000. prize in CANNONBALL, well, that's real money, and it's just too damn easy to cheat if all you need is an LA parking lot stamp at the NYC finish line.  One canny little guy flies his car in a big jumbo jet across country; other drivers sabotage rival cars (with racers too dumb to watch their vehicle or check under the hood); and so forth.

These things bother me; and the film is choked up with actors too much alike to tell apart with your glasses off, all made even similar-er-er for no real reason. Rather than tweak cliches to archetypal amok wresling-style comic book lunacy, here Bartel just delivers them flat, like dropping off laundry.  A smiling polite black dude (Stanley Bennett Clay) racing some nice Goy couple's car to NY for them (we know they're deserving of a smashed caddy because they tell him not to drive at night or faster than 55 mph - how dare they!); the amazing Gerrit Graham ambles along as a cowboy singer riding with his mobbed-up manager Mr. Redmond, who's hoping this event will boost his profile (how, exactly?) David Carradine is a 'legend' named Cannonball (so original!) who is breaking parole the moment his car leaves California. One speeding ticket and he's back in jail with the key thrown away! This is just one of Cannonball's terrible choices, the sort of self-sabotage that dirtbags often confuse with bad luck. Luckily for him, his parole officer (Veronica Hamel) is also his navigator/lover. But if you remember her from HILL STREET BLUES than it may not be so lucky for you: her character there was far too professional and competent in that beloved show to throw away her career following such a three-strikes idiot over the edge. Though it's nice to see her wipe the floor with a cadre of good old boys trying to hobble Cannonball (who watches from the sidelines), it's sad that she also seems dubbed... from far away.


Faring better in our esteem is the great Mary Woronov, who pilots a van carrying two horny blondes in the back (Diane Lee Hart, Glynn Rubin); David's little brother Robert and Brenda Belaski are also quite good as a pair of young newlyweds trying their luck for the prize. They seem genuinely in love, young and sweet (they even brought an acoustic guitar) plus the race makes sense in the terms of their character arc (elopement, money, youth, horniness) far more than in the others.

In short, ladies, the 'Trans-America Grand Prix Auto Race" is on! Just ignore the obvious nagging questions about logic and practicality (like how gas guzzling town cars are bad at cross country races, running out of gas way more often out in the cornfields at night), the contradictory rules (does Bartel [and his co-writer Don TOP GUN Simpson] even know how races or gambling odds actually work?), and the sheer idiocy of "Cannonball", his sycophantic copycat (so annoying), and Dick Miller as his bookmaking older brother, who sabotages other fast cars in the race but then, confusingly, seems to be out to sabotage his brother too (did he become someone else's brother in one of Simpson's rewrites?) He needn't bother in any case, for Cannonball is an easy mark. Never thinking to follow his enemies when they walk or crawl past the rear of his car on their way out of the parking lot, he's stunned when his jack later turns up missing or his lights don't work or his gas tanks been ice-picked. When he finally falls asleep at the wheel, you're like fuck, I'm rooting for the other guy.

I've barely scratched the surface with how purely stupid and incompetent Carradine's Cannonball (the driver) is, I can only presume crafty Bartel was going somewhere with the idea, some black comic joke between the 'lines' done with Simpson... now lost in the nasal cavity of time.

If you can ignore all that, well, go for it, as the car stunts are amazing. Highlights include: an awesome jump across an unfinished stretch of highway overpass and and plenty of wild spin-outs and crashes (all from back in the day they did that shit for real). A plethora of insider cameos helps as well: Corman himself plays the Los Angeles DA; Don Simpson is his assistant; Bartel a shady fey mobster (the type who play piano while their thugs kick the shit out of someone for not holding up their end of whatever). Martin Scorsese and Sly Stallone are the thugs! Yo Adrian! Joe Dante and Allan Arkush are mid-states tow-truck drivers who help out Cannonball with a new car (though I wouldn't trust that dork with my Big Wheel).

So forget all my annoyed kvetches with the pure idiot illogic of the script. What matters is that the good guys win, even if the good guys aren't always who you think. And a special shout-out to a grim gruesome freeway pile-up so out of step with what came before it chokes off even the most jadedly sardonic of laughter. Bloody, savage, out of place, it's like if Burt Reynolds wound up decapitating some old lady in his effort to Yee-Haw over the sheriff's patrol car and the bouncy harmonica just kept a-boinging (had Bartel just seen Godard's WEEKEND?) . Despite the whole Woronov sexy van thing there's no puerile snickering or silicone (Fred Olen Ray was still too young, thank god), The ever reliable Tak Fujimoto does a good job capturing the stonewashed pink of Cannonball's open shirt and the haze of the open road.

In short, America.

Even so, Don Simpson stopped writing and turned to producing after this, smart move, Don! Your idiocy and coked-up gumption will poison the 80s with a wealth of attention span-destroying military recruitment videos. He died in 1996, Bartel in 200, so there you go. Hell, there we all go...

DEATHSPORT

(1978) Dir. Allan Arkush, Nicholas Niciphor

**1/2

A film for the dirt bike-riding 16 year-old arsonist in all of us, DEATHSPORT was meant to be a DEATH RACE 2000 sequel but instead gives us moody crypto-poetry (including great lines like "you're not as good as your mother!"), blazing slow-motion fireballs, matte paintings of futuristic dystopian cities, and that old LA desert scrub being ground underfoot by tricked-out dirt bikes and hosses. So many dirt bikes blow up in this film it's almost a pyrotechnic's demo reel. The titular 'sport', like the Statham DEATH RACE remake or THE RUNNING MAN. The contestants are dissidents and the unlucky examples of super-crunchy sicario-style "guides" who shepherd them across the canyon scrub wasteland. They basically ride around a ring jumping through firey hoops, blasting each other, ideally winning freedom if they survive. With no sense of humor about its own absurdity (aside from little bits or wry business from Carradine), the mix of Arkush-shot action and Niciphor shot pretentious dialogue wizzes along but there are a lot of shots wherein a row of three to five tricked-out 'death bikes' whizz past the camera in single file to a 'zzzzzzZap!' sound effect (that's just the same effect loop over and over; when they go through tunnels there's a rip of the tie-fighter sound in STAR WARS, but don't tell George, shhhh). 

Criticism out of the way, I like the guns, which are like big Pringles can-shaped mini bazookas that fire huge laser bolts that vaporize opponents, and I love the thrift-shop dumpster dive approach to the costumes, and I'm glad the film never bothers to explain the game's rules. If we're part of the film's intended drive-in demographic, well, we're probably too high from huffing rush and snorting evaporated Nyquil to not think it's our own fault we can't follow what's going on. Blowing shit up though?! Hell yeah, and let the teachers and short goomba burnouts who wronged you in middle school get theirs by flaming proxy.

Claudia Jennings endures the torture of the light strips

Then there are other weird bits: cute girls who disobey the sleazy leader get thrown naked into the room of dangling light strips, or zapped on the color filter-lit table of abstract woe. It would be misogynist if it wasn't hilarious in its plastic abstraction and half-hearted wincing. I like that stuff though. Confidentially, I never understood this habit some of the newer movies have of making the pain and fear so vivid and realistic it leaves you shaken. (The worst of these? Noomi Rapace! She makes her character's pain so vivid it ceases to entertainment.)  Corman and company get that it's supposed to be pulp cover salacious and/or goofy, not traumatizing. It's one of the great truths of myth and acting: unconvincingly acted pain lightens the heart. Slimy monsters do the raping and the end result isn't therapy but ALIEN-rip living births. The electro-lightshow shock treatments given to Claudia Jennings don't leave a scar on our psyche but harken the whole mess back a few years to AIP's DUNWICH HORROR (1971) and Hazel Court's initiation scene in MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1968). The weird lighting and enigmatic presence of David McLean's 'Lord Zirpola' as the sick spectator / torturer gives these scenes a weird vibe reminiscent of the conditioning scenes in CLOCKWORK ORANGE or the jaded diners in CAFE FLESH. In this future it's hard to tell where meta-reality and the diegetic performances separate. Even in their plywood holding cells, still wet with white paint, Carradine and Jennings are on display before the all-seeing eye of Zirpola--this combination of paranoid despot and louche peeping tom.

David Carradine plays an amalgam of Kane from ABC's 1972-5 KUNG FU series and of course Frankenstein in DEATH RACE 2000; lupine playmate Claudia Jennings is a fellow guide and warrior (as in the best Corman stealth-feminism, she's as tough and wise and as combat-proficient as any of the men - and prettier too). Great as they both are at keeping straight faces amidst the madness, Lynch, as the bad guy / master henchman gets all the best lines, purred in a mellow emotionless forceful calm: "You call me animal? After all I tried to do to make you feel at peace?" Whatever his fall from grace, he's openly admirable towards the memory of Carradine's warrior mother, whom he killed in battle after she kicked him out of "the League"), giving him the ultimate warrior greeting: "Salute your mother for me." And it's always amazing the way Lynch seems to wind up in films full of fire effects, considering his history (3). In fact, I'm literally in awe of his fearlessness (2). Burn scars cover almost entire body, yet there he is, striding amidst the fireballs like it's just another day at the fair, saying oblique justifications like "man is a candle that radiates life - he must burn." (1)

Andrew Stein's synthesizer score provides a great minimalist mess of wind sounds, zaps, and sustained notes somewhere between the Bebes' FORBIDDEN PLANET and faux John Carpenter. His attempts at actual melody are terrible (they remind me of stuff I've made for my own films), but then Jerry Garcia starts noodlint in and around in the mix, coming and going at the darndest times. And as anyone who ever sat through a Dead show can tell you, if you depend on Jerry to lead you out of the caves of aimless noodling, well, you're going to be in there a long while and things might get weird before they start to see the light of melody. Here, weird is a good thing. 

Weirder still is the way faux-samurai ethos are folded into the stilted dialogue, creating an effect like stealing someone else's clean underwear at the laundromat: the narrator stresses the sacredness of combat, noting the range guides "ow(e) allegiance only to their foes." The greeting between range guides is "Our union is limited." Another keeper, delivered with the solemnity through which Carradine won the heart chakras of a generation of strip mall karate kids: "No one can touch myself." I wanted to write every line down, but my attention span is limited. And without that deep-set eye roll couched in Carradine's intonation, or the mellifluent low ebb Lynch gives to his, I can no more capture their wry beauty than a moon capture the dragon fly's wallet.

In case you can't tell, I got mad love for this terrible movie and all the deadpan jokes Carradine, editor Larry Bock, and replacement director Arkush, sneak little into the termite crevasses. Every so often Carradine casts a wry glance at the camera that Bock and Arkush leave in, and it counteracts the more pretentious serious art elements that no doubt the original director--fresh out of film school and full of self-seriousness-- shoehorned in. I love the way the mutants hide their faces so we don't linger on the awful yellow ping-pong ball eyes and I love how Jenning's unusual fox-like features are complimented by her white fur collar. I'm not a fan of the grating replaying of the same sound effect over and over during the endless shots of pursuing bikers but, after all, our union is limited. Noodle on, Big Jerry. Noodle on.

The Shout DVD includes a fun Bock and Arkush commentary wherein we learn that whatever Niciphor was intending with his initial version, it didn't work; Arkush was called in to direct new footage of fireballs, nudity and enough action to make Niciphor's high concept artsy parts less static, which Arkush did in spades. He pours anarchic pyromaniac anarchy onto the staid sci-fi conceptualism with some of the same giddy anarchic spirit he brought to ROCK AND ROLL HIGH SCHOOL and GET CRAZY. (that the latter isn't on DVD is one of the great crimes of the 21st century) and so DEATHSPORT becomes like the school project between the sanctimonious nerd who did most of the work and the cool burnout who only shows up on the last day but adds in enough cool random stuff that the nerds's portentious twaddle becomes at least palatable to the restless student body. 

To sum: with the scorched features and measured tone of the fearless fire elemental Richard Lynch, the always lovely and literally and figuratively foxy Jennings, the cracking wry fourth wall eye rolling of Carradine, the copious fireballs, the tricked-out bikes flying into the air, the sly way the actors cover up the budget limitations, sometimes with just their hands, and the Arkush commentary explaining it all when you need a break from the Zzzzap sound effects, well you're guaranteed a reasonably good time. Just don't watch the second feature on the Shout DVD, BATTLETRUCK. It might have Michael Beck but he's a long way from XANADU...  Aren't we all?  

SEE ALSO

Death Drivin' America 2: DEATH RACE 2050

Death Drivin' Ameerica #1: CONVOY 

Splitness in Motion: TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, CALIFORNIA SPLIT

NOTES:

1. Lynch also played a cult leader who encourages his flock to burn themselves up in BAD DREAMS, and an alien hybrid cult leader who burns himself up in a tenement basement in GOD TOLD ME TO. 

2-3. The scarred skin of Lynch's face is real --he poured gas on himself and lit a match while under the influence of too much LSD in the 1960s. I think youtube has some clips of him talking about it.

5 Awesomely Psychotronic films can Prepare YOU for the coming of TRUMPMERICA!

Even casual Americans will soon be called to bear witness to what promises to be the most bizarre election in the history of our frail democracy: the battle between the mighty Donald, his hair Reichstag-fiery as he struts and curses before his bloodthirsty throng, and a woman. How did America get to this?

Only the drive-in knows for sure. That's where it all started, whatever it is, and it's been slithering up from those tawdry mosquito-covered screens, across the abandoned strip mall Blockbusters and up through Amazon Prime, waiting, for you! Presuming you have the Prime (and if not, you should): walk tall, sit proud, and keep watching the skies for his shiny wings. The Russians are here; the werewolves are coming; the rats are leaving in droves.

Switch it off or turn to STONED!

Whiter your conscience allows you to vote for him or not, Prime has five films avail. to stream that might prepare you for his coming. At the very least, these grandiose offerings may remind us of headier days, a time when feminism was called women's lib and didn't preclude casual, unsafe sex; diversity was called black power and didn't preclude pimp strutting; and liberal caterwauling was called just a lot of radical hippie nonsense.

NOTE TO THE WISE: Prime and streaming alike be stocked with loads of cool niche pyschotronic cast-offs but 95% of it is crap, cropped, or corny. What you need, my friend, is the right guide, some madman who likes to sink his hand into the muddy mire, but has a jeweler's eye for hidden sparkle and would only recommend things in a correct anamorphic ratio, things shot on 35mm film! Donald wouldn't have it any other way. He can afford film, "people." Besides being more expensive and tactile, it's shinier, like the head of the Donald.... like the Donald... (you) like the Donald....

(PS - All screenshots on this post taken directly from Amazon Streaming for quality assurance)

1. THE ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE

(1967) Dir. Roger Corman
****

Never one to miss a chance for collateral production value, Corman utilized Fox's still-standing Hello Dolly! 1920s street sets, and added lots of comic book vibrancy and deadpan Paul Frees narration to tell the story of the last 24 hours in the lives of all the key Chicago players for the titular massacre: Jason Robards is too tall to be Capone and terribly hammy, especially when he chokes up his voice in Italian language curses, but seems to be having a blast and frankly, deserves it.  Ralph Meeker makes a good-natured, beery Bugs Mroan; George Segal turns on the smilingly sadism as a key North Side provocateur; for the nameless thugs there's Alex Rocco, Jack Nicholson, Dick Miller, and Bruce Dern mix with venerable greats like John Agar and Studs "Lloyd the bartender" Turkel - all cleaning their guns and waiting by the phone for the signal. Sexy Jean Hale (below) provides the perfect mid-film breather from all the toxic masculinity as Segal's sexy girlfriend. Her way-too-expensive new fur coat triggers an extended, lamp-bashing brawl that's a joy to behold. The print Amazon's been streaming is HD perfection. Sure it leaves you kind of 'so-whatting' once it's all over, but what a rush getting there! Isn't that kind of like the presidential run itself?

Trump Factor: Check Robards' eyes (above) as he prepares to 'fire an apprentice.'

Poe and Lenore on the open road (you can hear Johnny Depp stirring in his 
day care center nap room.)

2. GAS-S-S-S

(1971) Dir Roger Corman
***

Corman's final film as a director, this countercultural comedy (written by George MIAMI BLUES Armitage) functions as a kind of DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) meets WILD IN THE STREETS (1968), imagining a near future that a lot of hippies were hoping for, one where the military accidentally releases a poison gas that kills everyone over thirty, lifting the world out of the button-down conservative repression of the establishment and into some kind of San Francisco guerrilla theater troupe / Firesign Theater post-apocalyptic wild west. Far out.

Alas, not all young folks are groovy, man. What about rapey jocks and bikers? Well, we'll find out soon enough: across dune-buggy deserts and down tumbleweedy small town California streets rolls a ragtag group of sensible peace-loving (heteronormative) couples, regularly forced to escape the clutches of various agitprop start-ups and desperadoes. They also wind up at a Country Joe and the Fish show, which is somehow worse. God Himself narrates with a hammy Jewish accent, and--just so you know it's a Corman film--Poe, raven and Lenore at his side, rides up on a chopper to make worldly comments.

As with similar odysseys (CANDY, BARBARELLA, WEEKEND, BLACK MOON)--moments of brilliant sociopolitical satire run episodic counterpoint to tiresome stretches of draggy, dated, sexist puerility. Luckily, as with CANDY, the best segments have an air of priapic death rattle desperation and historical savvy which ages far better than GAS'ss tedious post-HAIR backseat fumbling. For GASS the best stretch occurs about  a half hour or so in, when our gang is ensnared by a deranged college football quarterback and his marauding band of teammates and cheerleaders. His rousing pep talk--a fusion of big game college football cliche with plans for rape-and-pillage marauding--brilliantly bends all the smug hippy criticisms and evasions back into itself so that it disappears like a devouring ouroboros. Like the violence in CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the football rape and loot practice sequences are genuinely anarchic, our laughter chokes in our throats. As a metaphor it's vastly superior to  the doctors and nurses  shouting "Kill! Kill!" during their football game in the much more favorably reviewed M*A*S*H (1970) of which this is clearly a kind of Mad / National Lampoon attitudinal spinoff. 

The next great chapter finds the heroes ensnared by an outlaw biker gang who've taken over a Palm Springs golf course/country club. Their biker leader assigns them groundskeeper duties, and takes them on long golf cart rides for at-length talks about how they need to start lifting themselves up by their bootstraps, working their way up to caddyhood, etc. Armitage's sociological double-entendre dialogue in these two sequences really takes flight with these savagely American moments. I think Paddy Chayefsky or Terry Southern couldn't do it half as well. 

 If GAS-S-S-S stayed at that dark comic level, it could have been a great absurdist assault on the cinematic conventions of bourgeois patriarchy. Taken as a whole, while it might be blind to its own male chauvinism, at least it's also realistic about the difficulty of staying peaceful and nonviolent when your community is threatened by an outside force. That it actually finds a solution without a deux ex machina or 'statement'-making SOLDIER BLUE-style massacre is far more radical than just hoping for the arrival of some enigmatic drifter (In case you forgot, BILLY JACK had made a tidy bundle that same year).

Alas, the next dune buggy montage is always just around the corner.

 Ach! So many dune buggies, so many strobe light show 'sex' scenes, so much Country Joe.

Not helping matters any is that the self-apppointed head of the hearty band of heteronormative buggy-riders (Bob Corff) is a wan little long-haired ginger with a high little voice and no discernible charm. Probably cast because, thanks to THE GRADUATE, everyone wanted a blank naif as their Candide, Corff might well be a nice person in his way but, for free love to not seem skeevy, we have to believe the guy getting all these cute babes is charming enough he wouldn't need to play that card; if not, ala Corff, he comes off as just a 'free love' carpetbagger. Was he the son of Corman's golf partner or something? And when there are so much spry future stars playing along the sidelines-- Ben Vereen, Talia Shire, Elaine Giftos, Cindy Williams, Bud Cort --one wants answers why we don't see more of them instead of this irritatingly smug little pisher and his gift for turning any air satiric line into a self-righteous smarmy lodestone. Oy Vey! God, vot were you thinking?

'Whew', glad I got that off my chest. Living in smarmy Park Slope with all its anemic hipsters clearly has really gotten to me. Show me your fangs, children! 

Trump Factor: You can't get more Trump than those bikers on the country club links!  The "free-spirited outsiders trying to make peace with those still clinging to the crumbling hetero-white-Christian-male authority" illusion is-- based on all those Trump rally disruptions--an important lesson I hope we remember soon. If you're a liberal isn't it kind of your job to put the gun down first? Otherwise you're just a second rate conservative, no matter how many flowers you wear.  

3. UNHOLY ROLLERS

(1972) Starring: Claudia Jennings. 

**1/2

An early capitalizer on the 70s' lady roller derby craze (Raquel Welch's KANSAS CITY BOMBER came out the same year) this is a fine example of what I've just now termed 'libsploitation,' i.e. a film about a bloodsport hottie who feels outraged at all the sexual harassment she has to endure on and off the track, all while the camera ogles her undressing in the locker room before and after games. Luckily the late, great super brawler and Playboy superstar Claudia Jennings is the star of both film and team, and she tears into both the sex and loathing with admirable relish, becoming the bloodiest, most combative female roller derby player in town. The team owners would shut her down except the fans go nuts for it, goading her on to ever wilder displays of violence that eventually leave the track and erupt in the crowds. And when the PR hypocrisy finally gets to be too much, she just bashes the team owner over the head with her trophy and goes on a parking lot rampage, rolling down the rink parking lot and onto Main Street like she's three stories tall, ready to roll over the cars rather than the other way around.

It probably sounded better on paper, but even though it seems kind of ridiculous, it works because Jennings really lets it rip, taking full advantage of the opportunity to lunge for banal consumer-driven bile-spewing mainstream America's jugular like a rabid but very sexy monster. We wouldn't see such a batshit go-for-broke attempt to punch a hole through the wall of first-world consumer society hell until 2002, with Mickey Roarke rampaging through the grocery aisles in THE WRESTLER.

What a cast! Victor Argo is the team's trainer! Roberta Collins Jennings' nearly-as-fierce teammate. It could have been a classic in the hands of Jack Hill, or good in the hands of Steve Carver--but it's in the hands of hilariously amateurish Vernon Zimmerman (who only made one more feature after this, the portentously-titled FADE TO BLACK).

But, hell, anyone who was a kid in the 70s has a 'soft' spot for this type of film, for it's the kind of thing you can follow even when you're too drunk or young to understand half the dialogue. Often we can't tell who's supposed to have punched who, for fights are not well choreographed and shot. But they still rock.

Side Note: In case you don't remember, under the inter-sibling play fighting accord of 1971, all slow-mo fake punches are created equal. No matter how much smaller they are than you, or how widely they missed, you have to react like they really nailed you, falling down or staggering backwards etc. It's a rule that kept our childhood aggression always on the surface, where it could be quickly expelled and evaporated the moment it bubbled up.

I'd forgotten about that great rule until I saw UNHOLY ROLLERS. Fuckin' A. Claudia Jennings brings the same glint of genuine madness she brought to the insane and divine GREAT TEXAS DYNAMITE CHASE (and TRUCK STOP WOMEN). As she brawls her way around the great rotating roller rink of heaven, let us pray for her soon return -- to kick more ass in whatever form she chooses to occupy!

TRUMP-Factor. - Turning a public event into a shouting match for the sake of ratings and whipping up the blood frenzy in rowdy audiences? Here Jennnigs says and does anything she feels like and her managers can't argue since her outrageous behavior gets her more and more fans, i.e. no such thing as bad publicity. As her momentum builds, her rivals become more and more abusive to try and keep up, and the crowds grow more and more infused with bloodlust, until even her handlers wonder if they've created an uncontrollable monster. Sound familiar, CNN?

4. TERRORVISION

(1986) Dir. Ted Nicolau

***

Good natured mid-80s MTV/New Wave/mall culture/punk horror/sci fi comedy in the vein of EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY, NIGHT OF THE COMET, REPO MAN, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, and BUCKAROO BANZAI, this Charles Band joint is the story of an ugly but hilarious blob-crab-style alien materializing via a then state-of-the-art satellite TV of swinging Malibu parents Mary Woronov and Gerritt Graham. Diane Franklin their Cyndi Lauper-ish teen daughter; Chad Allen plays the younger kid, a tow-head young gun nut under the tutelage of his crackpot survivalist war vet grandfather (Bert Remsen) who lives in the adjoining bomb shelter. TV horror hostess Madame Medusa (Jennifer Richards), a pair of fellow swingers (Alejandro Rey and Randi Brooks) and Jonathan Gries as the daughter's metalhead boyfriend ("too rude!") drop by to round out the stellar cult-ready cast of dinner. They're all on the same page, sitcom-from-Hell overacting-wise, which makes it all click together deliriously. With its loud 80s colors and bizarro decor it might be a nightmare under the influence of household solvents, but underneath the gross-outs and decadence lurks a loving spirit that triangulates its genial signal somewhere between 60s John Waters, 80s Tim Burton, and 50s Roger Corman (I kept expecting Dick Miller to show up as a door-to-door salesman or disgruntled neighbor). 

Trump Factor: I could make some parallel with the all-devouring monster coming out of the TV and Fox News (and Hillary as the other--benevolent---alien trying to clean up the mess and get the family's attention but not being heard over the din), but I'd rather just consider it a pleasing reminder that the extended American nouveau riche families of the 80s weren't all insufferably materialistic or rabidly conservative. Some still wanted to swing, baby. And they made good parents - there, I said it! Zeroing in on the macabre heightened reality in the cracks of mall culture (rather than just being 'quirky'), TERRORVISION brings back memories of the early days of VHS when whole families would get together to watch the X-rated movies mom had rented from the back room of the local appliance store, all rather curious and innocent. 

It didn't last of course, we never watched more than one or even a half as a family before turning it off kind of ashamed, to never speak of it again, the shame net of the early 80s closing around us like a shroud. The word 'inappropriate' began to swirl in the back of our minds for the first time. I'm always wondering if it was this sudden access to excessive sex and violence after so many decades of variety show pap that helped turn once-swinging free-spirited middle America into the panicky prudes we still are today, or whether we're just trying to reclaim our lost innocence so we can have fun re-losing it (i.e. the highs are higher when you've been sober for awhile). Maybe Trump doesn't drink or do drugs (neither did Hitler, or Osama bin Laden) but he'd fit right in at the Caligula-like marble jacuzzi room of this crazy family, despite his half-assed nods to the conservative Christian sect. 

Because right or wrong, this is America, baby, and no matter how virulently we shout across the lines tomorrow, we can still party together tonight. 

If we sometimes forget how hard we rock, it's only 'cuz we rock so hard. 

5. THE VISITOR 

(1979) Dir. Giulio Paradisis 

***

The crowning plume on Italy's many-feathered Omen / Close Encounters imitation helmet, this tale of a telekinetic devil child named Kaity (Paige Connor), caught in a bidding war between ancient alien forces of good and evil, has nearly everything that made the 70s great: devil spawn children (ala Omen, Exorcist) peregrine falcons (we kids all dreamt of owning one), mall ice rinks (malls were a new thing), NBA basketball (Wilt Chamberlin or someone like that has a brief staring contest with the evil Kaity in the front row before missing a 3-pointer), 'pong' (the herald of something brand new called 'video games'), gymnastics (Nadia Comăneci rocked the world in the '76 Olympics); giant old school projector TVs (with the three primary color orbs) and big casts of aging former-A-list stars (always with Shelly Winters and/or John Huston, or both) mixing with young up-and-comers, here Joanne Nail from Switchblade Sisters as the mom with the cosmic devil womb;  Lance Henriksen as her rich team-owning lover / pawn of a Satanic board of directors (headed by Mel Ferrer) demanding a male child (the antichrist still can't be a girl, Satani is sexist) from Nail's womb (but she's not into it, terrified already of Kaity). Glen Ford is a suspicious detective killed by Katy's peregrine familiar; Shelly Winters is the astrology-guided housekeeper; Sam Peckinpah (!) is Barbara's abortionist ex-husband, called upon in secret after she wakes up pregnant (the board of directors, tired of waiting for Henriksen to get 'er done, abduct her off the highway in a UFO style impregnating surgery vehicle); John Huston is God or Lord Enki, or the substitute babysitter, gone to Earth after Jesus (Franco Nero) alerts him to Kaity's presence. When not babysitting, Huston spends a lot of time walking up stairs with legions of bald guys in robes, lighting up cosmic landing strips on building rooftops while Franco Micalizzi's funk-galactic score effectively conjures memories of 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind as re-imagined by Meco. Man oh man! Nick Redfern should love this movie!

If all that wasn't 70s enough, there are car crashes, bird attacks, ferns, escalators, kids using curse words (Kaity tells Ford to go fuck himself, but haltingly, like a real kid would in the 70s when foul language still had some mystical power), and--in Omen-honoring tradition, pushing a wheelchair bound Nail headfirst through the wall-size aquarium. 

Most 70s of all: the script fuses ancient alien theory, with Gnosticism and Buddhism to underwrite its cosmology (showing the filmmakers much more disposed towards Erich von Daniken than William Peter Blatty). If you've read my 'other' blog, Divinorum Psychonauticus, you know I support that decision. In his electric yellow hippie wig, Nero makes a helluva great Jesus, and! 

Trump Factor: As a scheming CEO pressured into a virulently pro-life position by Satanic illuminati benefactors, Raymond lacks only Trump's ambivalenza vulgare to grease his polls. Still, no matter how persistent and bluntly the devil woos us, even if he arranges 'accidents' (ala the Reichstag burning) to make us feel desperately dependent on him, we needn't vote his way. God, aka Lord Enki (alias Jerzy aka The Visitor) is clearly pro-choice, but also insists that, before he takes you to his heavenly realm, your selfish malice (and hair) must be ripped from your soul by cleansing bird swarms aka paying higher income tax. 

Have you paid yours yet, dear reader? Capone didn't. Does he look worried?  Salut!

See also (avail. on Prime) and reviewed on this site: 

THE DEATHMASTER (1971)
SHIVERS (1975)
MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)
LISA AND THE DEVIL (1974)
PUMPKINHEAD (1988)

Thurs. the Looking Glass: NIGHT OF THE COMET, LIQUID SKY + Mary Woronov

INTRO:

Thurs. the Looking Glass: a new series covering 1980s science fiction and horror films which may have crept through the myriad mirror mazes of time and eluded deserving viewers. Many are being rediscovered now, thanks in large part to the stunning work of Shout Factory's new Scream! offshoot (see my praise piece on Bright Lights) which has been giving these half-forgotten treasures snazzy hand-painted new covers and the kind of film-specific attention to detail only a fan could bring, conceive, and appreciate. Scream Factory, we hail thee.

Preface: To be a teenager in the 1980s was a terrible nightmare of dwindling freedom and choking sameness. We started out the decade as children running wild, puffing our Winston Lights and Marlboro Reds at the designated junior high school smoking area, engaging in unprotected everything, wiling away the hours at Spaceport or just driving around in our inherited Ford Mavericks looking for empty parking lots to break up or make up in, to smoke a bowl, at the drive-in. But old Nancy Reagan didn't like that and by the end of the decade we were getting busted right and left --it was a war on teenagers and we'd get handcuffed just for drinking a beer on our front porch, or having a feathery roach clip hanging on our rear view mirror. And making it worse, our metal head buddies only told us they'd laced the joint with PCP after it was too late to just say no.

We wouldn't have said no anyway, fuck Nancy Reagan, but it would have been nice to have the option. We had to drive a long way to get home, and it was a Friday night, when the cops were out in full. Watching our freedoms dwindle one by one in the name of the angry distraught mothers of MADD. There was nothing to do but go to the mall... again.

1982 ad for Montgomeryville PA drive-in, where I saw too much. 

But we had the movies. Horror and science fiction films in the 80s didn't have to shell out zillions in advertising and PR to barely break even; everything was tactile and urgent --stuff seemed at stake, and films weren't groupthink second-guessed into cliche'd oblivion like they are now (though occasionally they'd force a film to have an R2D2/ET mascot like that stupid owl in Clash of the Titans). Distributors could just buy a few local TV spots (ideally during Creature Double Feature) and just ease on into one independently-owned theater for a week or two. Enough oddball films had become huge hits-- Star Wars, Alien, Terminator, Road Warrior, Conan, Halloween --that producers were willing to roll the dice on pretty wild shit.

What's most to love is that there was no CGI in the 1980s: no rules, no format. Compare that to now, where everything is just the same old zombies and torture chambers and video game-ish land sharks, and wince for today's lost teenagers - who now never have to leave their rooms to see things that would have turned our 80s blood cold.

NIGHT OF THE COMET

1984 - ***1/2

One of the stealth 80s heroines of sci fi, Catherine Mary Stewart (top) looks like a younger more Jane Fonda-poised version of Linda Hamilton and works as an El Rey theater usher who dominates the high score list on the lobby Tempest, eats Twizzlers for breakfast, and sleeps with the projectionist (Corman-Tarantino go-to douche bag Michael Bowen)--more out of boredom and not wanting to go home and deal with her bitchy stepmom's comet party than any kind of love or desire--but doesn't even have to feel bad about it next day, no big deal. She's cool, in other words, in that 80s way girls were, you know, before "The Rules." The next morning, though, everyone's dead across the world because of the comet, turned to dust... only the occasional zombie remains. Luckily, Stewart's fearless, assured, kicks ass, and shoots straight, thanks to a Special Ops father who taught her and her sister self-defense before heading off to deep tactical cover in Nicaragua. When she tells her first zombie foe, "I don't know what kind of scene you're into, but I've been trained - and I don't want to hurt you," honey, she means it, just as she means "The Mac-10 submachine gun was practically designed for housewives." and longs for an Uzi. It's no bluff.

So it seems the survivors of the comet dusting are the ones who for some reason didn't bother seeing it, who missed the show, and kept safe behind steel walls (like a projection room, truck cab or a storage shed). The partially exposed are devolving into homicidal mutants and/or Omega Man style crumbling vampire zombie pale, shades-wearing mall stock boys turned new wave machine gun killers; and there's a cadre of sinister underground bunker scientists racing for a cure, turning into shades-wearing Omega Man zombies. The empty LA orange and red skies and streets are a great magic hour wasteland and there's cozy use of an automated radio station all done up in swaths of new-wave color lighting. Eating Raoul co-stars Mary Woronov (as one of the reasonable scientists) and Robert Beltran (as a sexy truck driver) are great, but it's clearly Regina (Stewart) and Samantha (Kelli Maroney) who carry the weight of the film, displaying a believable rapport that includes cool sibling rivalry-support banter, shared laughter, commiseration, sororal bickering, and Mac 10 target practice.

I can't say enough great things about these two leads: Maroney shreds every line as the little sister, wavering from girly cheerleader one minute, telling off the stepmom the next, realizing slowly and believably the world's over later, and coming to terms with grief over her dead friends and blown possible lover opportunities with a wistfulness already beyond her years, yet is still able to rock an amok consumer post-apocalyptic department store montage set to "Girls just want to have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper. Sure that all sounds really 80s-dated dumb but hey, the song had just come out the year before (and the Girls Just Want to Have Fun movie wouldn't come out until the year after), so it's not the film's fault that the song and the trying-on-clothes montage have become inescapably and inseparably cliche. We might wish for a world in which it was cliche to have super cool, capable girls like Regina and Samantha in horror and science fiction films, but they're almost impossible to find in any genre. They're like Hawks heroines as teenagers in the 80s. They'll steal your gun, knock you off the high score list, jack your whip and then kick you in the nuts if you sass back, but if you're cool... man are you in luck.

The weirdest part of the film is that nowhere in the credits is there a sign of Paul Bartel, John Sayles, Lewis Teague, Penelope Spheeris, Joe Dante or Alan Arkush, all of whom worked for Corman and inherited his flair for feminist-but-sexy beatnik wit, a finger on the pulse of the youth (this movie was the punk rock poseur Breakfast Club - fuck John Hughes!) and the knack for feeling subliminally connected to the universes set up by bigger-budgeted films. But if there are no Corman or Bartel connection, why are there two leads from Eating Raoul, and a conspicuous movie poster for Death Race 2000 on the theater door?

Oh well, the film has a genial mellowness is all its own--I even forgive its last scene slide into conventionality as Regina enforces a midnight curfew on her sister and makes the rescued kids wear itchy clothes. It's a very 80s veer towards the family unit as 'the burden of civilization falling to us' but on the other hand, they grew up military brats with expert Ranger training, so maybe the conventions are almost subversive in their way. I can't excuse the dated light-FM closing song, though. Some sounds just haven't stayed fresh, that's for sure. Before this, writer-director Thom E. Eberhardt's did only one film, Sole Survivor, which prefigures the Final Destination films by 20 years with the same plot (PS -and rocks; and a film called The Night Before after. Never heard of that either? What about Captain Ron, which is way better than you'd expect --it's got great Goldie Hawn-Kurt Russell chemistry --they're still together in real life, and never got married (PS -nevermind, I was thinking of Overboard).

LIQUID SKY

1982 - ****

A genuinely great performance art science fiction hybrid experimental 16mm oddity from the downtown NYC heroin chic fashion poseur scene, Liquid Sky is what Bowie probably hoped The Man who Fell to Earth would be. Russian ex-pat Slava Tsukerman co-wrote it with the star, Anna Carlisle, who plays both Margaret, a disaffected model in Day-Glo face paint and a surly junky male model named Jimmy. If this was a guy playing both roles it might just be the usual camp drag theatricality but Carlisle brings a depth of wry deadpan wit and existential sad resolve that's Weimar Cabaret-level decadent without ever descending to camp, belying her tender age of 26 with a sophistication worthy of Dietrich and an androgynous punk edge worthy of Tim Curry. When she announces she's from Connecticut ("Pilgrim stock!") in one of the film's key and classic scenes, we realize Connecticut is America's Valhalla-gone-Gomorrah and Carlisle is the persona we all hoped Edie Sedgwick would be in Ciao! Manhattan. She takes both her male and female roles over the edge, even going down on herself while fashionistas (before there was such a phrase) jeer jadedly.

O, those effete women and mildly manly men who spend their 70s-early 80s nights milling around tiny black box combo art gallery / fashion studio storefronts downtown, engaging in never ending private fashion shows in vain attempts to stand out from a stable of similarly face-painted and ennui-and-opiate-withdrawal-driven clotheshorses, this is what the East Village NYC in the late 70s-early 80s was all about, before Giuliani and the internet fucked it all up. Meanwhile a German scientist named Johann (Otto Von Wernher) has followed a tiny spacecraft (about the size of a closed George Foreman grill) to the roof above the East Village penthouse flat Margaret shares with her knife wielding Valerie Solanis-style performance artist heroin dealer lesbian girlfriend Adrian (Paula E. Shepherd, below).

The plot follows Margaret as she tries to do some coke, but winds up raped by a sleazy goombah who force feeds her goofballs (i.e. roofies). She fights back, pulls a knife, but at the same time barely gives a fuck (not enough to get up off the bed at any rate)--she knows she'll get him back whatever he tries to do, and she's patient as a cobra; Jimmy meanwhile is withdrawing from heroin but has no money and Adrian won't front. A fashion designer promises 'him' some lines if he shows up to model the next night at a shoot on Margaret's roof. Meanwhile the alien is floating his giant solarized color style eye thing around, observing all the action through a color-twisted prism and killing those who dare reach anything so jejune as an orgasm. It maybe hides behind the white mask in the center of the weird neon hula hooped painting in the center of the apartment. When Margaret's lovers come, a cigarette burn in the celluloid behind their head sucks them right out of the film, leaving her free to resume her high fashion Fassbinder-ish moping. Her own inability to have an orgasm (due to either drugs, ennui or some combination) saves her neck, and even allows her to notice her little alien guardian. Though she never sees it (them?), they form a bond as touching as that between the disembodied Virginia Leith and her similarly unseen closet monster in The Brain that Wouldn't Die!

In short, a beautiful time is had by all, especially if you don't mind repetitive synthesizer percussion noise that resounds on high decibel pitch-shifted frequencies like an angry outsider filmmaker's first and only melody on his first and only Korgi synthesizer. Highlights include: Adrian's inspired spontaneous beatnik poetry rant (using Margaret's dead, naked acting teacher as a bongo); the odd but natural way two people hanging out in bed can devolve into attempted rape and/or stabbing without either one particularly feeling the need to get up; and Margaret's inspired final monologue, delivered as she applies intense glow-in-the-dark face paint in pitch darkness, like Kali, Warhol, and a stoned Annette Haven wrapped up into one very, very cool, droll, WASP fashionista.

But there's also a different kind of New York coolness in Susan Doukas as Jimmy's sex-starved mother in the apartment across the street, especially in her guileless moves on Herr Johann when he uses her apartment to spy on the UFO and check out all the deaths and sexes. He continually ducks out on her without putting out, maybe saving both their lives in the process (they'd get zapped at orgasm even from this distance), though sexually frustrating her and myself (I hate to see a fine older NYC lady go hungry). She may have to do without but Doukas does a hell of a job at conveying the homey warmth and welcome forwardness (even if its tinged with desperation) one hopes for from sex-starved middle-aged Manhattan foxes with big American NYC apartments, the type who know their Chinese food deliverer by name and with whom you can probably crash for a few weeks while you look for your own pad or finish your book. Dude, I'm grateful to dames like that and they deserve to have their needs gratified, if for no other reason than that they are bold enough to admit they have them in the first place, and this film is a gem.

---------------------------------

Mary Woronov, with the Velvet Underground and her co-whip dancer, Gerard Malanga

Lastly, a shout out to the beautiful, tall and cool Mary Woronov, the living legend link between the great schlock cinema of the 70s-80s and the 1960's Warhol / Velvet Underground scene.  Check her above, snuggled up with mighty Lou Reed and giving the camera a badass stare. Edie Sedgwick may be the one everyone gushes over, but its Woronov who's a true rock and roll survivor. She's still got it! Here she sheds some insight on why she's seldom left the niche cult market and taken parts in big Hollywood films: 

"Let's face it: women's parts are gone. Women are gone. They've disappeared from the movie screens! You know when I was working with Warhol there was no problem because it was a homosexual atmosphere. But in Hollywood it's a heterosexual atmosphere, and they do not like to see strong women. So instead of actresses we've got hostesses. 'May I show you to your seat, Mr. Schwarzenegger?' So that's why I keep doing...these other movies." (1990 Cornell Cinemas)

-----

Damn girl, it's Hollwyood's fucking loss and the gain of all weird movie lovers... 

Postscript: I wasn't sure why I put these two films together for this inaugural Thurs. the Looking Glass entry, but Woronov is the key. Sure she's not in Liquid Sky but her grrl strength and Warholian style is, and both films are rare in that they star strong, capable women with boys way, way to the side. In fact, the genders are almost reversed - the women are in charge in both films, recalling in their way Star Maidens and Norman Fell's almost-forgotten All that Glitters! Neither of which are on DVD, tellingly. Release them you 'fraidy cat censorial sexist pigs! Release them or feel the kraken tentacles of the Kali Woronov Durga's vengeance, and mine own! (See my article about them in Acidemic's Nordics issue)

Columbine Queen: PJ Soles in ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL

Part of the PJ Soles Blogathon on Day of the Woman

The blowing up of one's school was a sacred fantasy to us sugar-crazed kids of the 1970s. We imagined a big explosion (either after we left or before we actually stepped within blast radius). We imagined gym mats and sneakers raining down in slow motion all over town and everyone cheering in giddy rapture. It was long before empathy, guilt, or responsibility; it was long before ADD, Columbine, or Anthrax; a little pyrotechnic destruction of one's school was expected, allowed, respected, hallowed. Contained in fantasy--with never a thought of actually trying to build a bomb or anything--it was a harmless outlet for pent-up id aggression. And that fantasy came to life twice in 1979 (when I was in 6th grade!), once in OVER THE EDGE and once--more joyously, to life to a Ramones soundtrack--in ROCK 'N' ROLL HIGH SCHOOL. EDGE was shelved for years and never really released into theaters - it was considered too dangerous. So SCHOOL was really the only one to get away with it, and it's never since been depicted before or since with such strident rock defiance.  If ROCK was released now, well... it wouldn't be released either, so why even ponder? As it is, we'll always have 1979.

Vince Lombardi High School's fate is sealed with the arrival of a Ramones-hating principal (Mary Woronov, drawing on her experience playing cruel prison wardens in other New World films) determined to weed out the bad kids and their devil music. Ramones devotee Riff Randell (PJ Soles) meanwhile, is oblivious to this looming threat, as all her attention is focused on.... the Ramones. Riff knows if she can get her songs to Joey Ramone he'd sing them; she thinks he's dreamy (and if PJ Soles can think a hunched-over big schnozz beanpole doofus like Joey Ramone is dreamy then there is surely hope for us all). Other Lombardi High students include an insecure jock (Vince Van Patten) who pays for make-out lessons from the school's drug dealer, and there's a cool teacher to balance Woronov's malice - Paul Bartel (who else?) as a music teacher who ends up joining the revolution, declaring that "if Beethoven were a student at Vince Lombardi, he'd be a Ramone!"

Though it was relatively unknown in my own hometown (all the bad kids were into KISS, normal kids liked Fleetwood Mac), it turns out the music of the Ramones provides the perfect pogo-ready soundtrack to the angsty arsonist years of high school. Their songs infect the entire rhythm of the film, gradually pulling the narrative away from Riff and Co's high school persecution at the hands of scheming Woronov and into total celebration of rock and roll, and in particular, the album Road to Ruin, which Riff Randell plays while relaxing with a joint in her bedroom. She puffs and rocks so righteously that the Ramones even appear... Joey even serenades her in her shower!

This fantasy sequence has a surprising magic: Soles, in her foxy orange undergarments, maintains an admirable mix of the edgy and innocent that's a perfect encapsulation of Arkush's special directorial gifts. A joint is no indication of sexual activeness in Arkush's knowing milieu: it's rock music that rules the holy trinity, not sex or drugs; and the band's too busy playing to ever submit to the petty lusts that drag other rock stars down. Soles and her Ramones are puritans of punk, replacing sex with destruction--not of self, but of phony institutional restrictions, and when the Ramones come to the local rock theater, and Joey reads Riff's letter on stage, asking them to come play at Vince Lombardi, well, it seems natural he'd take her request seriously. Of course the Ramones will show up at the school! Hey ho! Let's go!

While bouncy teen groupies are a fact of life on the road, we nonetheless admire how Randle's almost spiritual devotion to their primitivist rock energy transcends any rote deflowering--she's an incarnation of their music and they know it--it's a two way streak of muse-manship. She's like a punk Mary Magdalene and they become a groovy flotilla of leather jacket Jesuses.

The success of PORKY'S the following year (1980) alas undid the progress of Arkush's holy rock arc, and once again sex and boys were all girls were allowed to think about. Girls were back to becoming objects for smelly hormonal rapey teenage creeps to leer at and try to get drunk (or to slip a "Spanish fly" in her drink). In 1979 they still understood that rock and roll is a holy thing - and rock is itself beyond gender, beyond the phony promises of adolescent biology and American advertising. When sex is sublimated into rock, instead of vice versa, everybody wins!

This is awesome because, without this kind of sublimation, the female adolescent fantasy cannot survive and teenage girls become mired in boytoy mirroring and anti-objectification/prurience dichotomies like LITTLE DARLINGS, FOXES, and FOXFIRE, where every man is abusive, groping, desperate, stalking, a degenerate charmer out to steal their allowance, knock them up, and split to high-five with their boys (GREASE). But not here, baby. Under the Ramones' benevolent primitivist purity, the animus stays safe between the ponies of childhood and the teenage boyfriend. And these Ramones know it, and they're into it. Punk is their unified field, delivering them from harm amidst the chaos they wreak. With perfect love comes freedom from fear. Abuse that trust and you're no longer a rock god, just another sad lecher,

So what a joy to find this kind of thing in a rock film since--in addition to the verboten celebration of blowing up the school--letting underage high school girls take a shower with mature punk rockers skeeves would raise so many eyebrows today that the laws of self-fulfilling prophecy would take effect. Parents would protest a movie like this before it even came out, then secretly go see it and feel cheated when there's no gang bang.

What finally unmoors the movie from traditional sex comedy orbit altogether is the wild frenetic anarchy of the all-ages punk rock show centerpiece of the film. Director Alan Arkush had worked as an usher for the Fillmore back in the day so both this and his unjustly unavailable 1983 masterwork GET CRAZY capture that real-life sense of being there, of being caught up in the excitement of a real rock show, from back when rock shows were real.... smokey. Arkush's concerts are vivid alive affairs--they reek of pot, cigarettes, dry ice, and a thousand crushed-together perfumes, like real rock concerts smell. Hey! Hey! I watch these films and get a giddy sensation in my toes I don't get in any other rock movie. And the kids can come too, that's the important thing. The all-ages show is never taken lightly, Arkush respects and reveres the teenage need to rock --he finds the healing redemption in goalless anarchy. I saw many all-ages Ramones shows as a teenager (City Gardens, c. 1983-5) and can assure this one is better than being there. Arkush sustains the excitement most concert films (and concerts) only touch on scattershot, and he builds it up, and then farther up, to levels no other director can reach because they've never been there themselves.

Unafraid to be infectiously goofball rather than dully sexy, Soles, who so often played the best friend whose goofy, strident, horniness made ber blond danger (such as in HALLOWEEN)--lets fly as Riff. Her little lithe body bouncing around covered in the bright shiny colors that had not yet come to signify the encroaching 1980s, is sexy in its utter lack of sexuality. Her tendency to make funny faces, bug her eyes out, tighten and purse her already thin lips all help to keep her vivid as real-life teenager rather than jail-bait. Never adding more smarts than a normal teen would have, and twice as much heedless momentum, she's a tangle of sincerity, giggles, self-satire and genuine ferocity. I'd be scared to date her. But I'd want to be at parties she was at. That's the kind of girl every high school needs. And her kind would not come again.

All of which I say to preface the fact that PJ Soles rocks and if you have problems getting through the first bits of this movie, with ancient Og Oggleby as a school official in a boardroom and all the typical teen sexcom clownery, hold fast. Go pour a drink, and then return to let the rock of the Ramones work its magic. You might end up as I did, bouncing around your living room to their protean punk and PJ's awesome bug-eyed purity while your flatmates look at you with quiet annoyance. But hey, Riff's got a chainsaw with their name on it. Blitzkrieg Bop, and BOOM! Let the falling limbs and gym mats be as an absolving blackened blanket.