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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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

Some Kind of Mushroom: GO ASK ALICE (1973)

It's a heavy trip, being addicted to 'drugs.' In the case of the 1973 TV movie version of the 'anonymous diary' GO ASK ALICE, drugs are a vague mix of cocaine, amphetamine, quaaludes, Valium, marijuana, but mainly--weirdly enough--LSD. Moron says what, now? That's what happens to sweet Alice (Jamie Smith-Jackson, who's excellent) after she first blows off her nerdy high school friend to hang out with the cool kids. Her first trip occurs when she's passed a soft drink at a party. The kids around her chant "button button - who's got the button?" as they put the white cap-like object in their mouths. The cap, I guess, was acid. But how does that relate to the button-button? Alice notes in the diary voiceover later that night that once she let go of fear and symbolically died at that party she felt, for the first time, beautiful.

Dewey eyed lying in bed, she ponders (in her voiceover diary entry) never doing the drug again, or seeing the boy who gave it to her. Seconds after writing in her diary that she has no interest in ever doing it again, her new boyfriend calls and she goes running down the stairs and out the door and starts doing coke. A scene later and she is 'hooked' on a regimen of her mom's tranquilizers, speed, and acid. The confusion over what drugs she's doing might not be in the book, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is.A commercial break later and she's hooked on LSD.

It's right there one who is "experienced" smells a narc.

Do you know how hard I tried to be addicted to LSD in the 1980s? It's impossible. Those of us who tried to do it on a daily basis soon learned it just left us exhausted and stressed out (unless we micro-dosed every other day, like mature adults). There's nothing physically addictive about acid, and anyone knows that to be tripping your face off all the time would be horrible, we'd wind up like Jesus dancing on a tiny table top in the middle of a schizophrenic snake pit. And the idea of junkies shaking and scratching as they turn tricks to pay for their next LSD hit is ridiculous. Heroin or meth, crack or coke, sure - I've never been there but I can believe it thanks to to the spasming torture of alcoholic withdrawal symptoms. But psychedelics like LSD and DMT are totally different. LSD was used in the 50s as a cure for alcoholism. And yet 'acid' pills (?) are clearly the drug of choice in GO ASK ALICE. There's no mention of heroin, and when she's introduced to speed it's in pill form, which is the same thing as an upper, i.e. amphetamine, which the narrative states she'd been taking long before that. So what the fuck? Did this Alice, the anonymous author of the original tract, ever even see a drug?

the 'big' money

Certain scenes from this film were burned into my head from when I saw it in in school, circa third grade, in the seventies. None of these scenes make any actual sense (maybe that's why they registered with me as a kind of nightmarish alternate reality). They key thing I remember/ed is the brief bit where Alice and her fellow druggie runaway acid addict are in their nightshirts and on their knees on dirty grey shag carpet in some older couple's apartment, begging for LSD pills like doggies. Maybe I resonated because my brother and I played similar games with our babysitter, shhh, but that was for candy and, occasionally, stickers. Can you imagine wanting to do acid with leering adult perverts right in your own neighborhood, maybe in a tract home that is modeled the same as yours? Everyone seems like a leering adult pervert on acid to begin with. Also, it's the banality of the room and the look of the couple that make the scene so horrific, but it's also the wild, desperate, submissive look in the girls' eyes, their matching straight dirty blonde hair. It''s haunted me all my life.

But, as with the drug references, it's very (intentionally?) muddled. What pill exactly does the creepy sadist have in his hand if its not acid? Are the girls in withdrawal or just bored? What sick game is he proposing in his muffled voice, and why does one girl lunge at him while another spins around and races into the other room screaming? The effect is unsettling - as if the film is a nonsensical dream deliberately trying to upset and confuse us while making the crimes depicted impossible to duplicate, scrambling the details to a nightmare logic degree. The only other place one can find dislocated drug den space like this is in David Lynch movies, like the blue-light saturated, slowed-motion, after-hours coke parties at the local roadhouse.

This surreal melting extends to non-drug interactions too: one day Alice walks in on her boyfriend to find him in bed with someone else (see below) My fellow third graders schoolmates argued over whether it was a boy or girl in bed with him, for months! Watching it now, some 30+ years later, I can't help but think the vagueness is deliberate, to muddy the waters, to depict the druggie world as it must look in the brains of children for whom adult realities are constantly shifting and getting harder to navigate, where gay scenes are so shocking we may very well instantly block them out with alternate cover imagery.

What Alice Sees before leaving

What we see after Alice leaves

Now that I'm able to stop pause and make screenshots (above) I can see it's a deliberate switch: first a very dark-haired girl is in bed, flashing Alice a weird, creepy smile, then it's her boyfriend and another dude with their shirts off). Either way Alice steals his money and grabs a bus to San Francisco with her Kay Lenz-ish friend.

William Shatner eventually helps her get clean. I remember her outburst at a drug counseling group when a fellow addict seems to be enjoying his tales of glue-sniffing just a little too much (and then he offers her something called "a mixed bag"): "He's getting high just talking about getting high," Alice says, after storming out of the circle. "And you're getting high off of his high, and I'm getting high off of your high. And it's one big contact high!" That line seemed to me, even at the time, seeing this in first grade, as the one kernel of truth, and it haunted me all through my first AA meetings. In fact, remembering this scene kept me out of AA for longer than it might have otherwise. The grainy TV movie image of her walking away triumphant from the myopic addict circle was my badge of resistance against AA's cult reputation.

One area wherein this ambiguity and deliberate fogging device works (to promote childhood playground discussion perhaps of what really happened?) is family dynamics: The parents are oblivious to how zonked the kids are at Alice's birthday party, even giving them champagne. Later they prove blind to Alice's pain, and dismiss her real concerns about druggie reprisals (after she rats out a tweaked babysitter) with rote speeches about standing up for herself.

The result: someone doses her soft drink while she's babysitting (we're tipped to her being drugged when Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy" starts playing on the soundtrack) and you know how the rumor goes about babysitting on acid (1). Alice locks herself up in a closet to resist the temptation (apparently overwhelming in 70s babysitters) to put the baby in the oven and the chicken in the crib. Luckily the lock holds and the baby is saved. When she comes out of it her hands are all bandaged from having tried to claw through the door, Poe-style. It's pretty ridiculous, putting herself through what would be hell even straight (rather than just watching TV and letting it pass) and leaving the infant unattended, rather than risk some abstract urban legend hazard, like now that she stopped doing it for awhile she suddenly believes the parental hysteria flame-fanning hysteria of the parent-baiting newscasters.

comes a straightedge

But for all that--the parents aren't the bad guys, which is sooo 70s. Parents were expected to have their own lives, and help their kids best they can, but not become dicks about it, or get all micro-managing and helicoptery. Therapists came with innate social stigma. If your kid was in therapy then your family had 'problems' and you were shunned, so you basically had to commit suicide before your mom would agree to send you a therapist, which is good and bad, I think.

At any rate, William Shatner is there to help her transition. Fake mustache or no, he's actually pretty wise, assuring her there's no easy answers, no specific thing she can just eliminate to get her life back on track. It's going to take ruthless self-honesty, work, and time. Damn, dude, time sucks.

Oh yes. That really is Robert Carradine, above, as the sleazy druggie boyfriend. Allow it.

In the end, for all its vague twisting and avoiding the gritty details, GO ASK ALICE was a major cultural touchstone of its time, seen by nearly everyone my age and that's enough to make it 'important' as a factor in the larger teen drug equation. It's the movie that taught us to fear psychedelics as much as we feared heroin, coke, pot, etc. and in the process taught us that our parents knew even less about drugs than we did.

Yet for all that, ALICE still works: the performance from Jamie Smith-Jackson is spellbinding. She goes through so many changes so fast she barely seems like the same person from scene to scene (the closest comparison I can think of is De Niro's Travis Bickle) -- and there's no quick short happy ending, just one trial after another. It's because of these trials, though, that Alice endures, even grows as a person. Like the Airplane song goes, she is some kind of a mushroom, and so is the film surrounding her --both have adapted to find nourishment even in the mire of after-school message bullshit.

For if drugs were legal, Alice wouldn't be having these problems - that's the thing. If the deans just passed LSD out at graduation then the evil kids wouldn't have any more power to seduce, hypnotize, and destroy. Until adults stop demonizing what they don't understand, older kids with drug savvy will always have the most power; but if the parents have the drugs, and the kids want some, then forget it --they'll behave like angels.

As it is now, even if you have the most beautiful, spiritual experience in your life on acid, even if it brings you out of suicidal depression, you can't tell your parents because they'd just send you to rehab or call the cops. So the creeps who gave you the stuff become the only people you trust, the only ones who know the score, so when they say heroin and coke are even MORE beautiful, well the only thing holding you back are warnings from adults who warned you off LSD too. If you're taught to think all drugs are the same, and all bad, then all drugs become good once you have even a single good experience. And they're not. Some are downright evil.

I believe that if psychedelics and pot were legal a whole new shift in the drug war would take place and the scummy leeches like Alice's boyfriend would be down to just the nasty shit like crank and coke to make their living. Hell, I'd be anti-drugs then. But as long as you make spiritually transformative chemicals like DMT, psilocybin, and LSD as illegal and as demonized as the evil shit, it's like you're giving a bunch of grotty hairbag scrubs power over your kids, and then wondering why they're finding God for themselves in some rock venue parking lot, rather than being spoon fed God in some dozy Sunday sermon. Go ask Alice, I think she'll know... that you played yourself, America. You gave up logic and proportion, and instead trusted the shadiest drug dealer of all: the evening news, sponsored by Ortho.

NOTES:
1. The big urban legends on acid were 1) the kid who jumped out the 10th story window thinking he could fly, and 2) the babysitter who put the baby in the oven and the chicken in the crib.

All the Usual Vices: THE RUNAWAYS (2010)

From a very pedestrian viewpoint, the Runaways were a scruffy pre-packaged all-girl rock L.A. version of that original pre-fab/anti-fab combo, the Sex Pistols. The Runaways were aimed at a fucked-up demographic by nutcase impresario, Kim Fowley, just as Malcolm McLaren aimed the Pistols. But then there's the 'enlightened' viewpoint which was like whoa, these chicks rawk! And they did lots of drugs, and were lesbians! And broke up mere minutes after reaching stardom, like true fucked-up badasses. With both pedestrian cynicism and fanboy admiration, then, THE RUNAWAYS remains kind of confused about whether its a tired meditation on girl's voices LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS, sisterhood via semi-edited lesbian attraction ala, TIMES SQUARE or drugs, phoniness and flame-outs on the pursuit to one's own original artistic voice after being moulded, like ROCK STAR. What it is, well, is a little of all that, a film well-crafted to tell its tale, and maybe that's the problem.

It starts well enough as far as the rise: Joan's first guitar lesson; the band learning to deflecting tossed beer cans (a punk show problem) with their guitar necks thanks to manager Fowley's extensive training; cramming into small hotel rooms, dealing with hostile club managers, etc. In short, the girls pay their dues. Then, soon enough, they're on top of the world, then Cherie throws a hissy fit tantrum and the band is over. Little things add up to an uneasy feeling throughout. It's CROSSROADS if they welded on THE DOORS and FOXES and clanged the loosey-goosey 70s 'kids are all wrong' bell of OVER THE EDGE (still the greatest kids amok film after all these years) before running back to rehab.

Too bad about Dakota, though... tick-tock. RUNAWAYS misses some grittier possible marks in order to coddle blonde "Cherry Bomb" lead singer Curie's bratty myopia, a bad decision considering Fanning's half-hearted blank slate interpretation. Or is it just that Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett rocks so much harder and mopes so much mopier that the movie grows lopsided? See that picture above, of the real Cherie? She may be acting as coy as Carmen Sternwood but those eyes are feral and dangerous, like a wild tigress I have known, like Carmen Sternwood (the nymphomaniac druggy sister in The Big Sleep) in fact.

Now look at poor Dakota below, blank as the freshly fallen snow. Carmen Sternwood wouldn't even waste a bullet on her.

I say this as someone who loves Dakota, or loved (past tense). Despite the cliche-bound script I was touched by her gut wrenching a capella "Hound Dog" in 2007 (my review here), but here she's just a shell of a phoned-in blank nothing, snarling on cue and looking cute but lacking any kind of self-assertion. There are 16 year-olds out there who are going on 23 and there are 20 year-olds out there going on eleven. Dakota was an eleven year-old going on 30 but now the age of twelve seems to have caught up with her. Maybe the studio hoped Fanning would mature during the filming, that maybe she wouldgrow into the role, but there are ways that girls can delay womanhood's onset. I shudder to think that Dakota's following in so many young girls' DSM IV-certified child actor anorexic stunted growth footsteps, but in THE RUNAWAYS she's still just a half-starved deer in the headlights, not yet a she-wolf, eating that deer, as nature intended. Fanning lets Kristen Stewart do all the eating while she sits in the corner, sucks her thumb, and looks coy. Is she even having fun? Does she still like to pull the wings off flies? Are you getting all these super-droll BIG SLEEP references?

Despite the Dakota handicap, THE RUNAWAYS has things going for it, like an awesome soundtrack dialed cleverly to the left of cliche'd expectation, opening up on Curie's first menstrual period, reddening in a gas station bathroom to the tune of Nick Gilder's "Roxy Roller." Meanwhile Joan Jett's jamming to Suzy Quatro's "All my life I wanted to be somebody now here I am! I'm the wild one," and huffing glue with her less-than-Cherie-level-hot girlfriend. Now that's rock and roll. Cherie, meanwhile. is cutting her own bangs and punking out her lingerie before hitting the high school talent show in a glam rock Bowie lip sync, getting cheered on by the sisters and booed by the fellas. But hey, all she's doing is lip syncing and posing, Joan at least learns guitar, though her first teacher is a clumpety old man who wants to teach her "On Top of Old Smokey." Which alas impels a walk through the empty parking lot as "This is a Man's World" nods sympathetically from the soundtrack, and not the James Brown version, but MC5!

Again, cliche' sidestepped, by a sole-scrape.

But, even though Cherie lights a cigarette at the wrong end and dances around dressed as Stevie Nicks, we're still never quite sure what drugs she's doing or what kind of rock star she really wants to be, if any, or what kind of actress Dakota wants to be, for that matter. Stewart's Joan fills her squirt gun with vodka and urinates on the douche bag headliner's guitars --she really is the wild one, and you hope some of that wild stuff might rub off on Fanning's Currie, and eventually...  for awhile... it does. When their plane's about to land in Japan, the pair quickly wolf down their coke and pills in the airplane bathroom to avoid trouble with customs and suddenly the film speeds up for the butterfly stomach sweaty-palmed high of being cranked-up onstage, twirling under the hot blazing lights, merging like a playback pitchshift melt with the slow-downs of their first kisses in the dark of post-show euphoria, drenched in crimson light and scored to a slowed, druggy  "I Wanna Be Your Dog" that makes you ache in rock and roll remembrance of the first trip on acid or the first trip on ecstasy, the first kiss backstage or first time on stage on acid playing and singing while the microphone spreads out before you like an insect highway --the blazing red stage lights in your face forming a fiery Bosch triptych funnel around the microphone and your mouth becomes the size of a black hole in outer space, spewing flaming lyrics into the clenched alien insect fangs of the hatched web of the microphone, and outwards in waves of pink that wash over the melting-faced fans. It's a first kiss that starts as a gentle shotgun from a joint and slowly tentatively becomes a supernova of blinding white light. From their first gig all the way to Cherie finally passing out in Japan, the film is alive with pleasure.

Fanning's good in these moments of stoned triumph and good much later as a zonked junky in the grocery store, using her cart for support as she glides through the aisles, trying to buy two large onions and a liter of vodka from a skeptical cashier who looks distrustfully down at her blank eyes, bruised arms and shitty ID. We like that she steals her dying aunt's medication, and that she plays mind games with her copycat sister, but it's one thing to be believably fucked-up, another to turn that fucked-uppedness into rock and roll gold. Brando was a believable working class slob in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, for example, but that's not why the role made him an icon. He brought ferocious animal grace, he made the brute sexy in his savagery. Fanning needs that kind of ferocity. She's still eerily mature like she was in I AM SAM, but now she's clinging to a blank DARIA-style po-faced apathy. She's the FUGITIVE KIND Brando, trying to stare down adulthood in the mirror while passive-aggressively parodying her character's archetypal punk oomph.

Well, who can blame her, considering the horrors she's seen herself go through on film? Speed, anorexia and self-loathing keeps a girl 'forever young' until one day she just turns to dust or goes to rehab, or is saved by rock and roll. Yeah baby, rock and roll.

But Dakota: if rock is to save your life you have to at least give a shit about it. You have to thank it, bathe in it, love it unconditionally. Otherwise you're just a poseur looking for a validation hand-out, the addictive high of adulation is an excuse that prevents you from actually interacting with lesser (and everyone else is lesser) mortals.

In the end, Kristen Stewart pulls off being a rock and roll survivor just like the real Joan Jett because she taps into that feeling of how passion and genuine interest in something (getting better at guitar, for example) is a lifelong pursuit that saves you from all self-defeating distraction. Fanning / Currie never learns this, never deigns to look outside the mirror for her raison d'etre.  But in Joan Jett/Kristen Stewart's case it's a love of one's craft that I call the Keith Richards life preserver. She has her guitar, and she'll never need to look farther than its strings to find her own backyard.

No this same guitar playing focus is what keeps death at a respectful bay for Keith Richards. It's what lifts him above the druggy waves that drown lesser rock mortals, that lets him soar past the trials of bad trip overdose and grubby hangers-on that drag other rock stars down. His guitar is his magic charm, like Tamino's Magic Flute in Mozart's same-name opera, steadying him through trials that would panic and drown rock stars whose focus drifts to groupies, money, fame, or the terrors of bad trips and relentless dehumanizing crowd adoration. Joan loses all her fame and rep when the band crashes and she burns, and she's so young and overwhelmed she can't pull herself out. BUT once she's suffered and lost her mind and got it back through writing "I Love Rock and Roll," she has found her Keith Richard life preserver and earned the right to be a rock goddess, the way she hadn't while on the fast track through Fowley's hype machine thresher in the Runaways. She suffers and survives by grabbing onto the Keith Richards life preserver, focusing on her guitar and the craft, the playing. It keeps her afloat above the AOR sharks, big money, fame's rises and falls (and the only thing more jarring than sudden fame is its sudden absence), romantic love (which women are taught should be their 'ultimate'), and drug abuse. Guitar - it's a creative outlet she can practice and play on forever and never stop improving, a focus that keeps her head down and her attention rooted on the next step ahead, instead of all the side distractions. She can bring it everywhere and never stop playing. That guitar lifts her from both sinking into the mire, and from floating away into space. It's like a crack in a prison wall and you know that the more you scrape at that hole, the wider your glimpse of daylight 'til one day you can just walk right out (just don't forget your trowel).

Alas, there is no 'out' to escape to, but you can take comfort in the fact that you'll never run out of scraping; the scraping becomes the spiritual practice --that's the Robert Johnson crossroad devil's bargain. Joan Jett and Kristen Stewart signed the Satanic contract (Stewart with acting - continually seeking out good directors, scripts and new challenges) but Cherie and Dakota (through phoning it in) just fold the devil's contact up and ask the devil if they can hold onto it and "think about it"...  until indecision becomes their whole persona, and that's death if you're in a rock band. You may as well bring your mother along on tour, like Cameron Crowe in fucking ALMOST FAMOUS. Yeccch!

As a child actress coming into adulthood, Dakota's heading into some treacherous waters... she needs a Keith Richards life preserver. She seems to have forgotten she used to have one in acting. She's a lost little girl and making personal lostness part of the role isn't the same as playing a lost little girl in such a way as to make us swoon from the cinematic complexity of your acted lostness and thus to recognize cathartically our own lostness. Instead, it's not just Cherie throwing a tantrum of indecision, it's Dakota throwing a tantrum by draining Cherie's tantrum of cinematic resonance.  She's become like another child star whose precocious genius has seemed to fade, Christina Ricci (as Nathan R. writes about on Film Experience). If moviedom was their parents, Christina and Dakota would be going through a phase, a kind of passive aggressive tantrum, like Richard Burton in EXORCIST II. Sometimes too, as with Burton, if you have a rep of being a great actor, directors are skittish about telling you how bad you're sucking. And you go on auto-pilot, not realizing future generations will be cringing over your hammy bad vibe hangover of a performance for eons to come.

Since we never see the Currie spark in Fanning, we never really see what it is she lost, or if she even lost it. We can only discern that that some people were born to rock, and others to fold napkins at a gift shop and occasionally dress like Stevie Nicks. I'm not knocking napkin folding or Stevie Nicks. Most of us--myself included--leave the rock world for folding napkins sooner or later. Maybe napkins are all we can handle. Only a few go the distance like Joan and Keith, for whom no drug will ever supplant their rooted allegiance to rock, which is why they're free to do as much of them as they want. The rest of us may have rocked and had a good time, but love of rock never really supplanted our love of drugs, our love of the stage, fans, and jamming out never supplanted our longing for creature comfort. We'd rather stay home and listen to music and get high than go out on the road and deal with afternoon sound checks in barrooms still reeking of smoke, booze, sweat and vomit from the night before. We'd rather not have to worry about staying more or less sober until after the first set, which means approximately five hours in some bohunk town with nothing to do and nowhere to go except wait in a smelly bar that reeks of booze and you're not allowed to drink until a half an hour before the first set, so you sit there in the corner and the pre-show jitters and last night's hangover make every hour stretch like days.

But then, Boom! A double shot of tequila, lemon, hit the stage and it's all worth it. That's the rock and roll experience, or it was for me. So I quit, because a beer-soaked, cigarette and vomit-scented bar is a terrible thing for a sober person to have to smell for hours on end, with nothing to do and nowhere to go until the set starts (a bass is pretty easy to set up), just forced to just hang out in a bar and not drink while coping with the twin anxieties of a) what if no one shows up? and b) what if a lot of people do and you suck? It's a nerve-wracking strain that has your whole psyche screaming, hour after hour, smelling that stale beer/puke/urine/sawdust smell, staring at the shelves behind the bar, shivering in the cold caused by the wet-mopped floors.

All worth it with that first flush of the double shot before the show starts, sure, but the strain!

Man, it's hell getting up to heaven. For me it wasn't worth it, so here I am. I hope Dakota doesn't cop out if acting is her passion, but if not, well, you can't hang in the doorway forever deciding if you want to endure that horrid 5-hour wait in the vomit-and-beer smelling soundstage, all made up and clutching a sweat-stained script like the hand of your mother when being led to the doctor's office for your first shot.

As for the real Cherie Curie, she finally found her own Keith Richards life preserver... chainsaw sculpture!

Saw strong, big sister! Saw that shit STRONG!