Shat on the Altar: HORROR AT 37,000 FEET, THE DEVIL'S RAIN

William Shatner, the Hawksian organizer of men in a far-flung future without currency. Shatner, determined player of crisis-bound priests, rock-like teachers, a race-baiting hate monger, an Esperanto-speaking Christian soul so pure he converts a succubus, and an Arizona sheriff named 'Dances with Tarantulas.' Shat, so so.. many things, all of them great, some of them even pretty good, but most so very strange that, if you look deep (and it's always worth looking deep with old Shat), you might find a whole other Shat self waiting below the gum line to spit forth a torrent of surprise micro-thesping! 

For your consideration: two films from the early 70s occult revival in which you will see him drink from a flask and scoff at God while on a flight frozen-in-mid air (at 37,000 feet!); and bare his chest and risk his family to hold onto a stolen devil book one minute but then drop his protective amulet the next. What a man is Shat! Courageous, callous, stubborn, fearful, pompous and pugnacious, he's a relic from when scientists and captains had resonant voices and one could be impulsive and brutish yet catlike and dancer nimble. The Neil Diamond of science fiction icons, Shatner is his name. And in the late 60s-early 70s, we kids couldn't have been happier about it - Bop Bop! 

I know there are those hardcore Trekkies annoyed by Shatner's macho fey arrogance as Kirk; using his cast mates hatred of his prima donna behavior on set as evidence, they disimiss him as a hammy egotist. They seem to prefer the dry, safe, nostril-breathing baldness of Patrick Stewart. I am not one of them, I am not even a Trekkie, but I do enjoy the first three seasons, the Kirk era. Shatner elevates the project to greatness. Stewart, as an actor, can be fun when snogging with Steve Railsback in Lifeforce or snogging with Wolverine in X2, but Stewart is too sane as Picard, too much Polonius and not enough Hamlet. Shatner's Kirk is a live wire. 

Maybe my loyalty to Kirk is because of watching Trek reruns every evening, as a small child in the early 70s.  To me, because of this familial connection, Shatner can do no wrong. He was to the TV as Neil DIamond was to my mom's album collection--a fact, a staple, a comfortable but sturdy foundation on which to grow one's taste and eventual collection. So it is with every generation perhaps. For mine, Shat's blowhard egotism is part of the charm. Kirk is always just a bit hammier than called for, his expressive resonant voice... his... unique... pauses...followedby... rapidcascades.... ofwords, have brought decades of amusement to a beleaguered nation. (See: Sex, Drugs, and Quantum Existentialism). And even when starring in dopey films like the two I shall discuss here, or artsy experiments like Incubus, Shat goes for broke, every time. Terrible or triumphant, he never phones in a syllable. Lugging Shakespeare-style oratory into the rarefied sphere of cowboys-vs.-Satanists, or fighting against ancient druid altars in the sky, he gives 100%, no matter how half-assed the vehicle.

So how half-assed does it get? Let's see!

HORROR AT 37,000 FEET

1973 - TVM / CBS

**1/2

In order to earn the primetime slot, a 70s TV movie had to explore at least three pop cultural themes. In Horror at 37,000 Feet, we get: 1) the curse attached to an ancient artifact (ala King Tut); 2) social commentary (i.e. the Salem witch trials); 3) the ensemble cast disaster movie, i.e. Airport. Swirl 'em all together and serve!

The ensemble cast was a huge staple of 70s TV, providing welcome work for familiar-faced old movie and TV actors, nearly-ran and upcoming starlets, and granite-jawed authority figures like Christopher Plummer or David Jansen or Chuck Conners. Since they'd meet as strangers coming together for the first and last time for a voyage, we got their full character trait dossier in a few friendly exchanges between passangers.

Many of them will get picked off and those who make it will end up bonded heroes (see also: Day of the Animals).

The vehicle this time is a jumbo jet luxury cargo-passenger "airplane" hauling a massively heavy Celtic altar exhumed from its sacred grove in Ireland, and but a small scattering of passengers. They make the weird blonde lady put her dog in the cargo hold. And the downstairs storage freezes --the dog is frozen solid! (Why did we need to go through that, so the studio could show off its frozen dog prop? It's upsetting!) And then, the plane become suspended at 37,000 feet, trapped in a crossfire of wind tunnels, providing an ingenious explanation of why the plane interiors never once give the impression of movement, or engine roar, or the inside of the plane being anything but a breakaway set. Luckily the stewardesses all wear hot white go-go boots. Shat, playing a bitter, soused ex-priest who lost his faith (zzz) rocks some writerly glasses while sewing, and sports a toupee far more natural than usual. These little things help and the film needs all it can get. I love Shatner unconditionally but man, is he terrible in this. Richard Burton might have got away with it, maybe it was written with him in mind. But it's painful to buy our Kirk as a misanthropic drunk bitterly ranting about "homo-sapien" as a bunch of savages and noting, prissily: "I didn't lose my faith - it lost me." He doesn't sound drunk, profound, or pleasant to be around. His bitter laughs sound forced and bitchy. He doesn't want to be in this film and is taking it out on us. Has he ever even had a drink or seen a drunk person? 

I ain't complaining about how bad it is, though. I love a kind of zero point surreal experience where some smoke wafting up from a hole in the carpet and the occasional Val Lewtonian shadow substitutes for any kind of monster or concrete threat (which is great, since the whole point of the 'mounting menace' is to keep you glued through the commercials, worried you might miss the monster). The strange fascination with sub-zero temperatures on a plane (just touching the door makes pilot Chuck Connors' whole arm go numb) goes well with the array of locked-in ensemble types waiting for their chance at a terse "Why doesn't somebody do something??!" line. Playing like the unrehearsed table read of an off-off-Broadway one-act drama, directed by someone who has never been on a real plane, there's a sense of disaster always about to happen, as if a dozen actor tantrums are edited out between each line. And what kind of stewardess would confiscate a first-class passenger's flask, and not bring him a sip of champagne? That's taking it too far! 

Shatner is just one of many characters though - no one person really stars. There  Chuck Connors as the square-jawed pilot; Shatner the boozy priest who lost his faith; Lynn Loring his Mia Farrow-ish wife; Russell "The Professor-and" Johnson; Paul Winfield as the nattily-dressed physician whose dogmatic rationalism will soon be put to the test; Buddy Ebsen a cranky millionaire always ready with a homespun witticism; and--providing the bulk of the supernatural exposition--the baby-voiced Mrs. Pinder (Tammy Grimes). A wild-eyed pagan with straight dirty blonde hair and aversion to fire, she knows all about the stone's colorful human sacrifice-enriched past and makes the most out of every evil syllable of dialogue. Her dog, named Damien, stored below by the altar is clearly given no ketamine, the swines.

The only real sore spot is Will Hutchins as a spaghetti western B-cowboy with a terrible towhead mop top wig and rodeo shirt and a habit of shouting all his lines. Yeesh Watching the pathetic way he hits on one of the lady passengers is the most terrifying thing in the movie. Thank 'god' for Mrs. Pinder and her crazy eyes and straight dirt blonde hair, Connors and his  granite jaw of Connors, and of course, the Shat and his faux-drunk sneering at his fellow passenger's atheist-in-a-foxhole panic. Determined to be utterly worthless, he snaps to life when the other passengers contemplate child sacrifice. As Mrs. Pinder says, it just pisses the evil one off by trying to trick him (they try to switch the girl with her doll first). What the altar and its attached warlock wants the blood of one of its ancestors, the psychic girl (Jane Merrow) whose rich architect husband (Roy Thinnes) brought the altar as a souvenir from her ancestral home, against her wishes. The very fact a cargo plane has such a big cabin, and is flying passengers as well as a 11,000 pound altar seems very odd. Does this kind of flight even exist? Seems like that altar should be shipped by a freighter. But hey, it saves on passenger manifests (i.e. no extras needed) and allows more room for the camera and later, the possible child sacrifice fire in the now frigid cargo hold. Will the terrified passengers commit the ultimate transgression or be turned into green puddles before the dawn can come up in time to save them? But first a word from Alpo.

Horror at 37,000 Feet moves pretty fast without the commercials, and fans of Italian horror can luxuriate in the colorful red lights of the cockpit and everyone can appreciate the wild-eyed hysteria with which Loring rises to the occasion, furiously cutting off Jane Merrow's hair to wrap in the child's doll and wrapping it up in her clothes. "And some of your fingernails," she raves, as if possessed. When that doesn't work, it's time to actually sacrifice the child! Great hammy stuff with Shatner wobbling around and all the actors wondering what do in this under-rehearsed closed-in space to 'portray' their types without any directorial input. Shatner out matches Buddy Ebsen in the finger bending department. "Here, take another pain killer,' says the co-pilot to Connors, "no pint in saving them." Shatner realizes he can terrify Mrs. Pinder by waving his Zippo lighter in her face. "Fire... To burn.... witches!" Yikes! He's  not very PC --he even sneers at people who "believe jimson weed will make them immortal!" Dude, take it from an old jimson weed-head, no one thinks that. But Shat should know, having counseled the first and only 'mixed bag' drug addict that same year in Go Ask Alice.

Those of us who were around in the 70s and remember seeing this with the family are far less likely to wince over all this stupidity. We might care though, that the film can no longer hide its poverty in an analog cathode ray blur, or hide its lack of logical sense via the amnesia of regular commercial breaks. For those of us who were kids at the time (I was seven), Horror is a fond touchstone for those days when everyone watched the same shows (there were only three channels and no VHS and families only had one TV) and it gave the all something to laugh about together. For us this is as precious a memento as a family album. Maybe more so.  For us, though the clarity doesn't do the film any favors, the DVD is a must. If only Satan's School for Girls or Death at Love House would one day get the same respectful remastering treatment they too deserve1. May Cheesy Flix die a thousand deaths fo blurring Kate Jackson worse than a bad reception! Still, better than nothing.

 Though I hear 'nothing' is getting better all the time.

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THE DEVIL'S RAIN

1975 - dir. Robert Fuest

**1/2

I've seen hellfire and I've seen face-melting rain/ I've seen green puddles with air bubbling up through them / and it wasn't impressive, even via nostalgia's glowing tolerance. But if you were a kid in the 70s, The Devil's Rain falls into the unholy and powerful relic category of stuff unseen yet dreamt of. Its TV spots were an inescapable part of local prime time TV in 1975, when I was eight and very impressionable and into monsters and devils. I still remember the weird the melting faces, Borgnine with goat horns, and the robes - both kind of a turn on and scary at the same time. I also remember I had a bizarre childhood dream I was part of the coven, melting under the rain, and even now a lingering prepubescent jouissance echo hits me imagining it. Those of us on the playground heard from our older siblings Devil's Rain was lousy, but my dream was amazing, and if I wasn't so savvy about Satanic cinema even at eight years-old, and it was the 80s instead of the 70s, and a careerist child psychologist heard me describe my dream, he'd probably think I was abducted by Satanists and arrest my parents and teachers. But in the 70s it was anybody's game, a whole Middle America demographic had gone to the devil with touchy feely sharing: cocktails, bridge, Jaycees, smoking on planes, turtleneck and medallion conclaves of wife-swappers, communes and encounter groups; there were all-night block parties leading into softball breakfast picnics of still-drunk adults and kids high on their very first sunrise and sleep deprivation. It was grand indeed, total freedom, and even the devils were cool. And church was just an excuse to act rambunctious.

That sub-sexual supernatural power of not being able to see a film like Devil's Rain as a kid is of course a substantial amount of the appeal for me and my Generation X comrades, the last group who experienced the high of unavailability, of R-rated movies being forever out of reach (once they left the theaters) and so projected upon with our most lurid imagination. Just seeing the TV commercial for an R-rated horror movie was enough to give us sexy nightmares and make the world seem full of strange telekinetic magic and unimaginable 'adult' terror. Our constant imagining created a parallel subconscious repository so powerful it later spilled over into our adult reality, dragging us by our budding sexual drives towards a dreaded obsession that finally led to the 'satanic panic' witch hunts of the 1980s and the rise of nervous overprotective brand parenting we're still hurting our children and ourselves with today.

Turns out, in real life, seeing it now on DVD as an adult, I realize the film is too strange, too 'off' and too slow to be scary or sexy, but it is creepy, kinda. The daytime Satanic ceremonies in the Arizona desert, the boarded up church in the middle of a nowhere ghost town, the upside down pentagram stained glass window, the ultimate futile weakness of Shatner's moxy in the face of Borgnine's mojo, the weird Psycho-style mid-film protagonist shift, it all generates a collective creepiness. as does the idea of looking for your parents and finding they've become life-size animated black-eyed wax effigies urging you to bring them 'the book'.

Earnest Borgnine is an odd choice for the head Satanist, but Shatner is great as the cowboy whose parents are sucked into the coven, which has taken over the whole ghost town. Meanwhile Joan Prather is psychic for no good reason except to allow her to 'see' the flashback to colonial times by looking into cult member John Travolta's dead black eyes, and to provide an interesting scene where she performs an EKG for a crowd of psychology students while Dr. Eddie Albert explains that ESP is very real and he's in the process of discovering what brainwave controls it. Tom Skerritt is her husband and eventually wrests the lead away from Shatner like Sylvia Miles from Janet Leigh.  

Any film that gives Hieronymus Bosch and Anton LaVey screen credit deserves some halting respect but I love lots of other things about this screwy picture, from the ESP angle right down to the way Scientology and plastic surgery are precognitively critiqued by the sight of a ceremonial robe-clad very young John Travolta's face melting in the rain. My only complaint is the unnecessary, depressing final 'twist' so I try to remember to stop watching beforehand, like somewhere during the last 20 minutes which is all just rain and melting. I still like it better than Fuest's higher praised work, like Dr. Phibes. Mighty Shat makes shit shows like this soar, son! Drink to that... or be damned like a black Cadillac chasing James Brolin through the dusty desert... with no driver!! Now that's a movie, even if it ain't got no Shat screaming on its altar.

See also: KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS! 

DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE vs. The Destruction Company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.