Vanishing Caloric Density: QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958)

Before her there was only Peggy Hopkins Joyce. After her came all of cable TV. And now our first lady may be a secret Soviet 'handler' for a mole Raymond Shaw-style presidential sleeper agent blah blah, but who cares? She looks marvelous, darling. That bitch can wear a dress. Has a first lady ever been this glam?

In such an age as this, can we really afford to forget about Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Barely two years dead, seldom seen outside a scarce handful of cult movies (and a few forgettable 'good ones' like We're Not Married) it's easy to forget that her unique brand of 'empty' celebrity was once unique in pop culture. Well, we forget her at our own risk: she's the preface chapter to all of trash TV today. But she herself was not trashy. Along with her sisters and mother, she was Hungarian and a socialite and she got rich divorcing rich old men husbands and got famous for being famous without having anything to be famous about, which has been such a constant for so long now it's not even a novelty.

And yet, there's no one remotely like her today because she had that high-toned class that usually was seen in society pages rather than heard on game shows. She came from a time when TV was campier but less shrill, with relatively little of our current reality show 'loudest voice wins' 'diamonds-that-shine-like-rhinestone' ugliness. Instead, the blurriness of analog color TV signal and the Vaseline on the lens catching her every diamond sparkle, Zsa Zsa drifted along the talk show airwaves like a fabulous pillow feather caught in a cold Nordic draft. Witty enough to be engaging, beautiful enough to be beguiling, but nothing else, we jokingly imagined her as the harbinger of the TV future, the equivalent of what the food industry calls vanishing caloric density, her melt-in-your-mouth hungry ghost illusion left us with nothing, not even the illusion of fullness - only the vague epiphany that fullness itself was an illusion. She knew to play herself dead-on straight, like she didn't get the joke; she was able to be that paragon of social high-toned class that Joan Rivers, in her acres of furs, was a sly riff on. But Zsa Zsa knew she was playing a 'type' as stereoed-in as Charles Nelson Riley or Rip Taylor, yet it worked because she pretended she didn't know it. We were left to fathom what percentage of her schtick was pretense, and it's that which made her interesting. We could keep it up as long as she could.

The epitome of composed class and elegance: gowns and lashes for the ladies and gays, impressive cleavage for the straight boys, she was the sort of lady you bring to Vegas on your arm and know she won't embarrass you by getting hammered and pestering you to go upstairs, and if she has any 'needs', she'll make sure they're met, in austere Eastern European style (via some dashing parking attendant from Brazil who conveniently speaks no English). Her vanity and insecurity over her leggy competition might drive you to a nervous breakdown (as it did to the director of the film we're discussing today) but you don't have to worry about her mental health: you could bounce a truck off her old world European composure and worry only about the truck.

Television today has set the bar for glamor is so low it's down in the sub-basement. "Reality" stars sip Napoleon brandy mixed with Mountain Dew and end up splashing it on each other to signify a fight that will keep us watching past the next add for butt augmentation --but that's inevitable. That's science. It has to do with intelligence, education and the bourgeois pretentiousness of intellectuals, writers who never notice how their 'talking down' to audiences makes less educated audiences desperate to feel smarter than someone, anyone. While it's annoying being surrounded by idiots, maybe it's worse being an idiot surrounded by smart people. Reality TV is the chance for even idiots to feel superior. Happy now, smart person, knowing the success of Honey Boo-Boo and the election of Trump is partly y'all's fault? 

Problem is, those shows about dumb yokels are made by smart people, and the contempt they feel for their subjects is hard to hide, and contagious, and addictive. Brainy Harvard snob writers eventually start to show their contempt too broadly, like the smirky New York intellectual Walter Matthau in 1957's A Face in the Crowd (left), writing the corn pone slop in Lonesome Rhodes' show like he's doing anyone a favor when in reality his cynicism is what's dragging the world down around his ears. Watching that movie you start to think yeah, Lonesome Rhodes is a monster, but I don't want to punch him in the face as bad as I want to punch you, Matthau. This type of character, so common in the late 50s-early 60s, that thinks a pipe, white skin, glasses, a suit, college education gives them dominion over women, children, the 'working class,' and dogs. They don't respect the savvy craftiness of street smart 'hicks' or the intuitive 'soft touch' of women (though they presume their lascivious attention is always welcome). Their father can help get them any job they want and they presume they deserve them. These privileged 'wits' end up enforcing a straight white male intelligence on their non-white, non-straight, non-male and non-college educated subjects, who naturally suffer in strait-jackets of passive aggressive 'dumbing down' dialogue, the sort that used to be so common it was a kind of invisible normal that might make you slowly go insane but you were never sure why. 

It's cuzz city slicker douchebags with them pipes keeping us thinking each other is super dumb by writing our thoughts for us on TV, is why! Fight the real enemy. This asshole:

Slap the pipe out!
(from top: Matthau, A Face in the Crowd; Anthony Eisley, Wasp Woman

Another example: Anthony Eisley of 1959's The Wasp Woman who continually treats his boss--the CEO of his company--Janet Starlin, like a child who needs constant supervision lest she sell the empire for a magic bean. With his unlit pipe and bougie bow-tie it's only natural we pray a certain wasp stings him rotten.

Think I'm just free-associating? Our current shitty national situation, Zsa Zsa Gabor, empty fame, snobby Harvard writers --what do they have in common? QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958).

This is CinemaScope

As a fan of bad 50s horror and sci-fi movies (especially Mesa of the Lost Women and Plan Nine) as well as the wry work of Ben Hecht (who wrote the story, not that it's very original) and Charles Beaumont (who adapted it), I am supposed to automatically love this Queen, this presumptive sci-fi shaggy dog classic, this veritable remake of the story filmed first in 1953 (as the far 'superior', Cat Women of the Moon) then also in the same year (1958!) but in black-and-white, as Missile to the Moon. 

 (from top) the heavenly beatnik jazz dancer troupe of CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON; the celestial moon goddesses of MISSILE TO THE MOON; the tired front line of broads from QUEEN 

I love Cat and like Missile but loathe Queen. Meanwhile those films never show up on TCM when its time to fill some campy sci-fi slot in their schedule. Probably because it's in color and has Zsa Zsa Gabor. But I'd rather watch the surly sniping of Kip (Victor Jory) over Helen (Marie Windsor) being with dopey Laird (Sonny Tufts) instead of him, and the way they all play it totally straight, Jory's prima donna macho so 'itself' it becomes poetry, like watching Shakespeare act out his 14 year-old kid's metal album. The winky 'hey gang!A rocket is a phallic symbol nyuk nyuk' of Queen is the real enemy to bad movie lovers. I want to slap the pipe out of its smug Walter Mathau Face in the Crowd-mouth.  I like both its writers and love the film from which Queen 'borrowed' its wardrobe (the uniforms and a sparkly minidress from MGM's sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet) and it's got babes and a giant spider (there's also a giant spider in Missile and in Cat Women and even Mesa) but most of the time it's just Cinemascope-length assemblages of under-directed actors standing around on opposite ends of a crumbling high school theater stage, ever ready for either a attendance roll call or old-school rumble that never happens. The film plays like a box of cake mix, unopened, with an egg broken over it, left it a cold oven by a director who's too busy hiding in his trailer to avoid one of Zsa Zsa's on-set rages to light the pilot. Instead he lets the soundstage fill with gas, like Monty Clift under a Place in the Sun canoe. Maybe Hecht and MacArthur are just too intellectually snotty to take this seriously, lest their Algonquin friends accuse them of reading Weird Tales instead Ezra Pound. So they embed a satyric wink so overwrought not even a near-sighted bourgeois patron of the arts could miss it.

The plot you know even if you don't: a shipload of smirking virile Earthmen head to a planet of all women where they help the good leader (Zsa Zsa) overthrow the bad one (Laurie Mitchell [who played a similar role in Missile to the Moon]) whose mask is even uglier than her ugly face. Va-Voom! Lots of girls in terrible MGM costume drama hand-me-downs getting freaky, guys makin' moves, and the captain tackling the biggest lay of his life.

sharp eyed fans may recognize Davis in Alta's 'decent' frock from F. Planet

Sounds like I'd love this film if it let me. But it loves its own smirky self too much to let anyone else share. Some of the girls are great (like Lisa Davis (right; below left) who rocks great lipstick and smoldering Gillian Anderson eyes) and the writing seems a decent framework for a more straight-faced mature approach (which would allow the magic of camp to cohere better). The problem is in the misogynistic direction and frat boy acting by the men, that pipe puffing smug-snarkiness where (SWM) actors and director think themselves too smart for their material so they think adding some bawdy audience winking will help put it over, which shows how wrong they are. Such smirky douche bag superiority has poisoned the film to never be a true cult favorite except in the smirkiest, douchiest, winkiest, most patriarchally self-important of ways. (The title + the star = a tourist version of camp, and not one to make a lifetime fan of it).

What makes the 'good' bad versions of this same plot (Cat Women of the Moon in particular) work so well as enduring 'camp' classics on the other hand, is the intent to do something straight and good but without the know-how or budget or the talent to make it, but with a genuine love of strong women. When these films are good we get the genuine eccentricity of lower rung Hollywood really trying to make nothing into something and of genuinely liking women. Unknowns and outsider artists mix with actors shunned or forgotten by the Hollywood elite and up and comers ready to try. They all take this last or first chance grab and nobly fight to stay in character as the set collapses around them. These oddballs and has-beens and non-starters are--to we classic horror / sci-fi fans--our family. They're the equivalent of the Bad News Bears, or the bar full of flea-bitten drunks in The Iceman Cometh, they're waiting us for us to come watch them again with Hicky eyes anew, to buy them drinks so they can live through the alcohol that is our eyes. They get that it's all over in well under 90 minutes, win or lose but so is the effect of an average double highball. Only the drunks survive, because thirst never dies. And neither does DVD. 

Maybe this is why (white male) barflies and has-beens tend to have more respect for women and minorities, since the men in these Z-grade films are as disenfranchised and thus less afraid they'll lose anything by portraying women as the badass goddesses they are. I know for myself, alcoholism humbled me down to the roots, made me forever grateful and in awe of the women who rescued me. And that's why we drunks, drag queens, punks, and other outsiders that make up the bad film-lover community aren't going to be drawn to such puerile contempt for either women or the sci-fi and horror genres. And thus no character in Plan Nine leers at Vampira and says some inane shit like "my coffin or yours, baby." No one in that cantina says to Tarantella in Mesa of Lost Women, "I bet you got a real sticky web." If there were such quips these films would be as ignobly remembered as this Queen. It's the celebration, the worship, of female strength, that makes them endure with stoic grace in the face of incompetence. It's there in John Waters, it's there in Russ Meyer, it's there in Roger Corman. It's not there in Queen of Outer Space. 

The 'space women need men' subgenre always has a giant spider - Analyze its symbolic meaning, write down your answer, then look at the oeuvre of artist Louise Bourgeois to see if you're right!

Only a few elements in Queen from Outer Space take the outsider/sublime approach vs. the Matthau-in-Face in the Crowd attitude, and one of them---believe it or not--is Zsa Zsa Gabor.



No matter what happens, she plays it dead straight. She should have been the evil queen- as the title and billing suggests, with her beauty being the mask and the ugly scarred face appearing after the face cracks off because she's too busy making out with the captain to moisturize. Instead, as the chief scientist and leader of the resistance, she brings that same feathery class to bear she'd bring to any 'real' social event only here it looks like the event happened five years ago and no janitor has stirred therein to sweep up. And the event was an afternoon ladies-only coffee clatch fashion show with a vague Robin Hood theme.

If it's not going to offer anything else, the casting of Zsa Zsa was brilliant touch just for marquee value alone, making Queen of Outer Space live in high camp infamy, a touchstone name easily recognized by programmers who know nothing of the genre. But it's not worth the camp adulation, for it is the kind of self-hating sci-fi that feels the need to leer and roll its eyes every five minutes.  They don't get that it's not 'fun' to presume a planet of all women is going to roll over the minute some douchebag puts on a moth-eaten blue powder and struts in like the kingdom can now relax - a man is here to take charge. It's offensive, man. You can't put women in masks deformed enough to scare Picasso out of the brothel (left) and expect them to thank you for it. You can't think some young captain bucko can topple an empire just by toying with the affections of a mask-wearing broad on Venus and have it not be so misogynist I could just scream! You can't!

Grandma, what uneven eyeholes you got

Real camp would go the opposite way - it heaps a dozen dead male spacemen at the feet of its evil goddess. Great camp celebrates strong, badass broads. It loves them. It even gives them a magical beatnik free jazz dance to quietly haunting Elmer Bernstein flute music. For Queen the contempt is so thick they don't even have the decency to put some ornamental Vishnu statuary around the place, nor to attach the painted boards that make up the evil queen's mean-spirited rocket launch control platform, the kind of thing that would earn a frown from any high school drama coach. But to not even bother to make the eyeholes symmetrical on the glittery masks the queen and her coterie wear? Unforgivable even in elementary school.

Well, either way - if we don't like it- we have two others just like it for solace, each worse than the other and far better in their worseness as a result. Today, maybe the times have changed - we've been to the moon. We know there's no babes there. Or if there are, they're fast asleep (or as Rutledge says, their "condition: not dead, not alive"). Alien women are here, instead, on Earth, and their masks are human, but just barely. Sometimes I pass one on the street - they have deep light blue dazzling eyes and blonde hair, impossibly elfin. And I send them a telepathic message of the sort one passes to celebrities spotted in a crowd ("I know who you are, but I won't blow your cover by saying hello") The alien babes I spot don't answer me, but that's show business. Maybe I'm not smart enough to be worth 'sending' to. My genes aren't worth harvesting, so no cool sexy abductions or long snogs. I am not mad or jealous and I'm not out to topple any kingdom, certainly not a matriarchy, even if it's run by a puppet doofus via his hot Russian handler. I'll write whatever I have to in order to earn my sanity, to feel observant enough about the shit I watch that I somehow contribute to the collective evolution of dude-kind. Pass me my pipe and let's get the show started, and then cancelled! And take me with you when you go back to space, long as I can bring a DVD player, can count on constant normal gravity, and Cat Women of the Moon! 

It's because I know you won't bring me that I don't want to go. Hail Alpha! 

Greetings from the Bilderberg Jamboree

See also:
CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)
MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)
--
Acidemic #8 The Brecht / Godard / Wood issue

Avenger of Whatever: KILL LIST, QUEEN KONG

I started to write about Ben Wheatley's disturbing KILL LIST (2011) and how British cinema is so edgy and America's genre equivalents so lamely safe- but- if I think about KILL LIST too deeply my paranoia leads me past its jolly surface, to the depths of its SRA Illuminati-CIA mind-control symbolism, ala EYES WIDE SHUT meets MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. Then I got to write about the alleged 'entrance fee' into the inner circle (according to the paranoid fringe): child sacrifice or violation, which 'binds' one to the devil and subjects the victim to the dissociative traumas that necessitate split personality coping mechanisms. In other words, you join the 'elite' when you plant the seed of the Manchurian Candidacy in your own child through ritual Satanic abuse (SRA), which the kids--at least--forget... for awhile (until they read about it online or get hypnotized to help them overcome their bizarre nightmares and missing time). If you match the the outline of paranoid schizophrenic delusion to this tangent of conspiracy theory you get a perfect match, which isn't to say it's not true. If a shadowy sect really is out to control you via subconscious programming, what better place to hide their mechanizations from you from then within the fabric of your own certified paranoid psychosis?

The big question still nags (especially if you've encountered (alleged?) SRA survivors in real life. Are the 'buried' memories they uncovered in hypnotic regression merely glimpses into the collective subconscious, reaching up like Satan's hoof through the thin ice created by the removal of the conscious mind's rational obstruction, the way, say, it does via fever hallucinations, sleep paralysis, the afternoon nap, childhood nightmares, or actual dissociative cover memories induced by severe trauma? (That last one of course being the most devious double bind in the Satanic Ritual Abuse canon.) If anyone knows for sure which is which, it's probably not the victim.  If they do know, the programming clearly didn't work well.

The LIST gist: Wheatley and his longtime collaborator and co-writer Amy Jump start with a mood of cheery beer-and-chips kitchen sink naturalism re-the friendship between two working class hitmen. Neil Maskell stars as Jay, the laziest hitman in town. He prefers to loaf around with wife and son rather than kill people, to the point he even dodges a lucrative job coming his way via his partner Gal (Michael Smiley), but Nordic alien hybrid wife Myanna Buring (THE DESCENT) wants him out of the house and back in the saddle. Then Gal comes by for dinner and lots of drinks with a strange new bird, Fiona (Emma Fryer), who marks the back of Jay's bathroom mirror with an arcane symbol... That's all I can say, except the super eerie drone score by Jim Williams gives even a simple torture murder a nightmarish edge far ungodlier than just seeing brains bulge out of a cracked skull!

Meanwhile, I've been having a series of mild panic attacks watching ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK Season 3. No one escapes the trauma of self-realization on that show, and it's too well-acted and written for my own good. If I watch too many episodes in a row it gets that I can't distinguish fantasy from reality anymore. I have to go to the bathroom, look in the mirror and make sure I'm not a woman in a woman's prison. And then I go to my Park Slope grocery store and see someone from the cast in there, shopping (they occasionally shoot in my neighborhood) or wait, do I? Am I being prejudiced or easily-influenced to think that? It's one thing to spot a celebrity at the coffee shop and another to think you recognize a minor bit player from a movie you just watched. And that brings me around to KILL LIST again, because that's what indoctrination is all about -- breaking down a person's mind and distancing them from the collective 'concrete' reality so they're receptive to programming in order to activate the inner automaton killer.

Not to jump tangents, but: Ever since being dragged to a dry frat rush as a freshman at SU I've harbored a streak of horror and hatred towards the baser elements of the masculine species. And when a man like me is all hopped up on depositions or depictions of rape and sexualized misogyny, I'm ready to go stomp anyone with Greek letters on his sweatshirt. Amp it up a little more, dissociate me so that I think I'm acting out th heroic role in a vigilante rape-revenge picture, and I'm ready to kill... ready and set and waiting for the starter pistol.

Where am I going with this? Movies, man, are dangerous mind control tools. Just look at the rash of Charlie Bronson Cannon movies in the 70s-80s. So much Bronson.

There's no word for this kind of ambient rage I feel thinking about those rapey frat guys. Its so intense it becomes a kind of TAKEN-esque homicidal fury that heightens the senses. It's instinct. A good male populace patrols itself, and if a pedophile or frat boy violates a woman or child it's the job of 'any man that's around' to destroy him, to make sure he burns, right there on the spot, rather than hope the law can successfully complete its myriad incarcerating hurtles before the victim is immolated on the pyre of humiliating defense lawyer cross-examination. 

This instinct to protect women and children is innate, I think, in all good men. Our blood boils and hands ball into fists at the thought of a child molester in our neighborhood. But then, only a few 'pushes' more and it approaches the same mindset as the lynching, the fascist rally, and the riot. The biological urge to protect women and children, and even animals,  taps our deep primordial homicidal well like a Plainview milkshake straw. Is that perhaps not the reason it is done? The fleeting sexual gratification if any is lost in cocaine and alcohol and idiocy and then hopefully, a lifetime of bitter regret and self-recrimination. 

How easily that straw can itself be tapped by sinister forces! 

Of course if it turns out the victim is lying, or the story is misreported for ratings, then we may have murdered an innocent man... Then it's no longer a drive-in trash spectacle but a self-important Stanley Kramer vehicle. We cut the rope, slink home, and wait for the inexorable hoot-hoot of Spencer Tracy's approaching train.

Bad Day at Black Rock 

I'm one of those guys who hate misogynists to the point of judicial blindness; I'd probably string up some of these rapists and molesters if I had the chance, and the safety of numbers, and was properly drunk or coked up (I hate frickin' coke almost as bad as frat boys). And so I need to recuse myself from writing about the Illuminati or Cosby, Polanski, and Allen. It gets me just too damn mad, for I have no target to vent this hostile rage upon, or the wherewithal. It just makes my blood pressure rise and my hands tremble with fury. And yet there are surely camps that might lump me in there, for I have sinned, and womanized, and broken vows, losing my head in the moment-as an alcoholic it's easy to do, our lows are lower and our highs are higher, so we lack middle ground. I have never been violent or fooled around with anyone below the legal limit of adulthood, but that doesn't make me less culpable. 

Is that not the whole point, perhaps, of all this evil in the first place? To provoke a response that will enable us to kill people on command (via post-hypnotic trigger word activated false accusation)? In movies like TAKEN, the filmmakers tap that sac knowing we'll instantly be deeply focused on the narrative, that milkshake straw twisting like clockwork. In real life the same is used, but in the Illuminati sects, and decadent Hollywood, it's also used to get recriminating videos of you doing illegal things to make sure you 'play ball' with the 'ballers' on their ballistic terms. Dance, puppet! The world is yours, now that we conned you into ruining it.   

In 70s films, the vengeful vigilante as hero was born, guiltless and unbroken, while the liberal D.A. would rather harangue him or Paul Kersey than the hoods running around unsupervised. The biggest, meanest, most New York of all the 70s urban vigilante movies (for a few months anyway) DEATH WISH, a huge hit that led to a score of imitators, the best of which (not that I've seen many) Abel Ferrara's MS. 45. (above) where her violence branches out to include any men who tries to hit on her, or even looks at her, or any man, period.  And she's not wrong! 

Sorry to go off like that. This kind of shit really gets my goat. Besieged and eaten away by death, money, and employment, all elements ever-changing and shifting, riding the lifeboat of the televisual, these unresolved issues really stir my hackles with rage for reasons I have just now edited out of this post (there were about ten embittered paragraphs I just spared you- you're welcome) Today, aware of my raging sensitivity, I still have never seen LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, IRREVERSIBLE, FUNNY GAMES, TAKEN, any white slavery documentaries, THE HUNT WITH JOHN WALSH on CNN, etc. My girl and I watch a lot of DEADLY WOMEN, though. One thing I've noticed... these women con dumb bleeding hearts like me into killing husbands and fathers all the time, via, what else? Fabricated stories of systematic abuse. Man oh man...

Luckily I live in an age where it's easy to cocoon oneself in a unique televisual patchwork quilt of one's own curation. The result is, I watch a lot of El Rey channel and TCM, avoid all button-pushing true crime abuse-of-the-innocent sagas, and listen to mixes I create that never end and can't tell one ninety-pound chalk-white dude in suspenders and tiny fedora or Children of the Corn hat playing a standup bass or mandolin from the other. Now that it's such a serious crime to harass wimps-and there's no cigarettes around to make them cool or deepen their voices--these high-voiced needle-legged hipsters get all uppity and rat you out to HR for forgetting a pronoun. Where is their goddamn crippling anxiety and self-loathing? Why did Courtney Love even bother getting sober?

Oh I must not judge. That movie KILL LIST really shook me.  And so I run... I run so far away.... all the way to QUEEN KONG. No British double feature was ever so strange, yet so right. 

QUEEN KONG

(1976) Dir. Frank Agrama 

**

God bless British women, British Actresses... for they are an inspiration to men across the USA that not all women are either passive-aggressive bores or dysfunctional harridans. There are very few shrill Annette Bening types in Britain (at least in films). American women (again, this is all in films, mind you) are mired in an either/or dichotomy. In England, with its rich history of sadomasochism, women are badass and still sexy -- they smoke and drink and don't sweat their carbs in shallow pools of gossip. While American woman is browbeating her husband for having a faint odor of cigarettes on his clothes, Brit women are saying ah fuck-off ya wanker and light me one before I break this bottle over your head.

Didn't we know all this as kids when we first beheld the toothsome Emma Peele in THE AVENGERS? And now, rather late in the game (De Laurentiis sued to hold it up), is QUEEN KONG. Let it happen. Judge not! 

Its young hot female cast is sublime -- barely a man in the whole thing - which is such a relief. BUT QK has two slight problems: 1) its bawdy brand of cheeky humor doesn't translate well upon leaping across pond and decades; 2) it may have the lamest ape suit in all movies --like it's just a bunch of fake fur throw rugs stapled together.

I don't care. Damn it, this movie is just what the world needs now.

Movies with reversed gender types were big for a few minutes in the mid-70s, but then got the kabosh and now those reverse gender fantasies are almost impossible to find anywhere, even on faded VHS dupes. We must cherish them no matter how bad they are.

The reverse gender fantasy I should point out is different than the whole men in drag thing, which gets old fast and seems more and more sexist as time goes on (with their idea that women need men disguised as women to teach them how to stand up for themselves). Movies and TV shows where sexy broads are the dominant strong class and men just objects of beauty to be protected and objectified are, on the other hand, rare and precious and need to be rediscovered. Chances are, you have never even seen one. There were only ever a few: ALL THAT GLITTERS (Norman Lear's ill-fated 1977 soap opera imagining this same women-in-charge world) and the British-West German co-production STAR MAIDENS (1976 - same year, tellingly, as the QUEEN). Clearly 1976-7 was a high watermark in the exploration of realities where women were the dominant gender. All three examples are either unavailable or despised. That's quite telling. Our sexist world is clearly slow to change its patriarchal mindset, scared to even imagine an alternative. None of the three are on DVD or even VHS. QUEEN is on Prime almost by accident, as if at any moment someone might notice it and take it down.

Don't shoot me, but damn: Valerie Leon in PREHISTORIC WOMEN

and of course below, the BLOOD.

As far as imperious, but available: Valerie Leon--so imperious and sexy in BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB--appears in QUEEN as the leader of the Amazons! Hardly recognizable, she's lost some weight and is wearing disco-level make-up, spouting offensive ooga booga lingo, (and I have a feeling she was dubbed by Hammer- they do that) and the print on Amazon Prime is royally messed up.

But hey, better quality would probably make it worse. At least the plot allows for some nice views of the Portobello Street Fair and we have the cheeky Ray Fay ("eat your heart out, Elton John") as the love interest, and great snatches of diva dialogue between Ray and the local girls prepping him for sacrifice: "Why does she want me?" asks Ray.

"She wants you to because you look like Doris Day." 

"Who's he?"

The Carl Denham character is named Luce Habit ("the biggest producer.. of B-films.. with "love interest"... in the business") and played by Rula Lenska, Britain's answer to Zsa Zsa Gabor or Peggy Hopkins Joyce. At least that's what we figured back in the 70s when she got off a plane like we were supposed to know who she was in an Alberta V0-5 ad. Our not knowing set a chain reaction to the point she was canned by her agent or fired him first. Here we learn she's a grand comedian if nothing else,  drugging Ray after catching him stealing a KING KONG poster in the Fair, slinging him over her shoulder in a sack, and making for her tugboat party vessel like she just scored a bushel of temporary legal psilocybe mushrooms [10]). She even carries some joints for him, like Denham's Ketamine bombs.

In short, Lenska's Luce Habit--"-is a great camp diva delight. In fact, her wry delivery of intentionally terrible lines reminds me a little bit of my own! Shhhh.

Of course QUEEN eventually wears out even adoring viewers like me after awhile, thanks to its unrelenting cheekiness I liked the JAWS dance but when a lame shark shows up with lipstick and breasts it's a good sign this shitshow's going to collapse long before it's officially over. I confess that I stopped watching after two tiresome monster battles after Ray is abducted by the Queen and carried into the 'jungle (the scene with her wrestling a pterodactyl seems more like she's trying to open an overly taped-up Amazon package). And there was one too many leering Benny Hill ass shots and just too damn much of that damn moth-eaten 'lady' ape suit (the suit in KING KONG VS. GODZILLA is pure chinchilla by comparison).

and yet - how often do we get a movie that's nearly all female - just a few baggy pants weirdos aside in a cast that's all Luce's chorus of leggy bikini models or the all girl Nabonga tribe.... it might be gayer than John Waters and campier than 60s BATMAN but it's got strong British females up the gooma humma barooga.

Still, I just couldn't let it go on. I had to stop and take a nap. That's show biz.

But the point is, thanks to the QUEEN I was delivered from brooding about the diabolical paranoia-fueling brutality of KILL LIST and its all-knowing savvy about mind control, and how maybe that's what all this shit like A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, is for... MK-ULTRA programming of male assassins... to get us all riled up to go stomping whomever we're conditioned to think is raping and abusing our innocents. (And we all know who's next on the kill list... if you saw the Trump speech in Atlanta).

And hey, both QUEEN KONG and KILL LIST are British so it all ties together. I wouldn't go so far as to say its tied "wonderfully" but because my brain is always making connections to random unrelated events, and its susceptible as hell to the mad loop of conspiracy theory... but it's tied, of that I am certain, so let's just... relax. One salves the other, for unless I'm about to charge into battle I prefer the death where the dead person gets up a moment later and takes a bow.  It helps avoid trauma to see the fakery of death. And no monster needs more than a simple mask with some fangs to serve it's purpose. In keeping the film world looking our narrative immersion dissolves and we're symbolically freed from the drama of our lifetime movie.

When we decide our movie's a comedy, any grim circumstance is just the jet black ink on the page. Past Buñuel and Kubrick, the sans-eyes darkness devours all but your whistling, so make the tune brave, lads. Something from Joyce or Yeats, mayhap. Oh I was a day in Portlairge, there was wine and punch on the table. God hears our complaints and can only roll His one red eye and hope none of the other mothers at the supermarket judge Him for having such brats as we. Our complaints that it's not fair and we didn't ask to be born--and all the evil, suffering and destruction in the world--is all heard by Him as whining about an early bed time or booster shoot, or ye auld yucky Brussels sprout.

As far as God's concerned: the phrase 'no atheists in a foxhole' justifies war's entire existence.

And when we take off our straw demon masks at the end of our shitty elementary school play, we receive His indulgent applause. He plays the patient mother, with only the merest of notes. Godard would know how to save QUEEN KONG: Have Kong slap the pterodactyl's head off (above), or rather the headpiece, to show a saucy human girl inside (ala Ms. Dietrich in BLONDE VENUS) but THEN --have the fight still go on. The girl rampages through the jungle, as if still gigantic. She slings Ray over her shoulder and hauls him up into the sound stage catwalk. Queen Kong looks up as they disappear into the shadows, shrugs, sits down on a screaming native and starts smoking a cigarette, pausing to smash a miniature tank which explodes in a ball of fire. All meaning is meaningless once exposed to the meta. Through this alone, salvation. Don't believe the man behind the curtain is real or fake. It's in the ambiguity alone that we finally get to CUT!

NOTES
1. Shrooms were briefly legal at the Street Fair due to loophole that was soon closed - I nearly fainted when I saw all these massive purple stems right out in the open at one of the booths, but I was only a few years sober and very AA (c. 2004) so I didn't get any; but that image, straight out of Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH, of those fat purple stems on that black tablecloth right out in the street like that, still haunts me. 

Sandahl Bergman vs. the Helots: SHE (1984)

I don't care what the haters say, BATTLESHIP (2012) is awesome. Maybe it's because I stayed home sick the day I saw it, so was both more relaxed and delirious than usual, or because I had a tolerance for the awesomely named Taylor Kitsch but I haven't seen a junk film with a greater sense of how to rock this cocktiquely since GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA (my praise here). But I didn't come to talk about expensive board game-based sci-fi cinema. I'm here to talk about SHE. No, friend, not the 1935 SHE starring Randolph Scott as a dull Arctic explorer resisting the alleged charms of snooty Helen Gahagan and I don't mean the 1965 Hammer SHE starring a genuinely charm-packed Ursula Andress dealing with a flock of snooty Brits. I mean the Italian 1984 SHE, the one you've probably drifted past a dozen times on Netflix's streaming list, with poor Sandahl looking up from a dingy corner of the cover, sword ready, waiting to be helicoptered into your field of  vision. Well, drift past no more! The helicopter stops here. This is the SHE for me.

You would think it's based on the H. Rider Haggard novel, but this trip follows its own drummer the way BATTLESHIP follows theirs, and only touches on the Milton Bradley source. Here we have post-apocalyptic post-modern meltdown world full of every prop they could scrounge: leftover World War Two ordinance, plastic fangs, and feathers and the feeling a lot of this was shot in the producer's back yard and orgy room section of his mansion. Anachronistic sights include: a bunch of youthful aesthetes listening to an old-fashioned gramophone and having a big Roman orgy before waking up in the middle of the night with plastic fangs to eat their guests; a swimming pool with unattended beach balls; girls with swords; goth rockers operating like Humongous times Caligula; a giant dude in a tutu and feather boa who keeps people trapped in bird cages; flagellants; fog machines; tuxedos, gladiatorial combat arenas, guns.... And there is great dialogue:

Shandra: "This doesn't make sense"

Aisha: "Shandra, this has nothing to do with sense."

I know I'm not alone in my "appreciation" for SHE. On the trenchant lurple.com, DF Dresden says: "Like me, you’ll be wondering how much LSD was dropped during the writing of this cheap, crazy post apocalyptic production.’" I didn't have to wonder, lurple. I just knew.

Indeed, for in addition to its borrowings from just about every corner of the prop department, SHE has a countercultural vibe that recalls another post-apocalyptic sci-fi film, GAS-S-S-S (1971). The last thing Roger Corman directed before he left AIP to form New World, which later produced a bucketload of films like SHE in the wake of CONAN's success, it's got GAS-S-S's nicely deadpan hip anachronistic tone (after the bomb, there is no more linear progress, so all centuries of fashion are fair game). Both are full of "wait, did he really just say that?" kind of moments, perfect to share with real or invisible Robotripper friends. And there's hot chicks from the era before plastic 'enhancements' turned every New World rack the same, if you'll forgive the expression. SHE's a trip, all right!

What SHE of course lacks that GAS-S-s-S had in spades are long stretches of music by Country Joe and the Fish, but that's a good thing. Instead there's Motörhead and lots of fuzzed-out Rick Wakeman synths. Much "better".  Still, GAS-S-s-S would make a good double bill with SHE, though, and Godard's WEEKEND (1967). All three have that episodic anachronistic structure, where heroes wander the post-apocalyptic landscape encountering various seriocomic factions and anachronistic historical characters they must battle or get held prisoner by, or fall in love with, terrorized or tortured by, or lectured to by... about communism.

 

The thing is, we know Corman's funny, clever, hip and Godard is all those things and more, but the makers of SHE are an unknown quantity. GAS-S-S-S had Edgar Allen Poe on a chopper; MONTY PYTHON had a limbless black knight still game for a squabble; SHE has a sailor-suit wearing bridge guard who looks like Paul Tomas (yes, that Paul Thomas) with an eye patch, yellow bandana, and the word 'Texas' written on his forehead, doing impressions of (I wrote them all down, impressed and aghast): Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields, Popeye, Mortimer Snerd, Adolph Hitler, Walter Winchell, Jackie Mason, Harry Von Zell, Senator Cleghorn (from the Fred Allen Show!), James Cagney, the Black Knight (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail!), in that order. He also becomes a whole chorus line, because he keeps multiplying. Oh yeah, and he sings a snatch of the theme from "Green Acres."

"Great" as all that is, without Bergman, wearing an array of sexy and cool costumes, showing off all the sword skills she learned for CONAN and generally making you sometimes believe she's in a better movie, it would be one hell of shitshow. But as I wrote in my praise of CONAN, Sandahl was the love of my adolescent life, and if you were like me--a Bergman fan who made super 8mm CONAN-inspired movies very similar in found object aesthetic to SHE--then it's SHE you I will. (That's a Yoda impression--hey where are you going?!)

SHE came out in Italy the same year as CONAN did, which on its own shows you 1) no one makes imitations of successful films faster than the Italians, and 2) There's no real 'market' for excellent dancers in genre movies unless post-modern peplum sashays back into popularity, and 3) Bergman's typecasting as a sword and sandal type served her in rapidly diminishing returns. But even diminished she shines. Heroines like Xena, Buffy, and Beatrix Kiddo today just get stunt woman Zoe Bell to do their more dangerous work (once you notice their hair is always in their face for the high kicks, it's hard to notice anything else -- so don't), but Bergman did all her own fighting in CONAN, and it makes a huge difference; seeing her size up two opponents with her scimitar, for example, you know from her look she's got the strength to wield it, that it's not some plastic wavy little shard; she's amazingly toned, and when she swings into action her hair's not in her face; we see the fury and dancer's tolerance for muscle tension in her eyes. She snakes through the whole film with such a lithe grace that we get mighty, mighty mad when she's killed. The vengeance is sweet in the way it seldom is in the more staid and formulaic revenge excuse scenarios. We genuinely wanted her in the picture longer, we wanted more scenes. And so to see her so quickly typecast and forgotten as someone who doesn't really have a future outside of the Conan cultist realm or in little dance parts here or there (ala XANADU) hurts us like a Thulsa Doom asp. Oh Sandahl, why why WHY did you choose to play the boring villainess Queen Gedren instead of the (also boring, but more active) lead in RED SONJA? Was this your version of Lugosi refusing to do FRANKENSTEIN and thus forever marking him in producer's secret ledgers as 'obstinate' and ensuring a long downward spiral of crappy parts in crappy pictures? Was it because your features didn't work with red hair? We would have been find with a SANDY BLONDE SONJA I assure you. Either way You left that movie like a snake without a head.

On the other hand, SHE is world's better than RED SONJA, no matter which role Bergman would have played. SHE's sense of agape jaw aesthetic arrest is helped, not hurt like so many claim, by the backyard junk post-apocalypse post -modern cheapness. The relatively big budgeted ($18M) Richard Fleischer-directed RED SONJA on the other hand is a dud no matter how sick you are while staying home from work. Believe me, I've tried.

For example, consider the helot. I'm referring of course to Frank Capra's MEET JOHN DOE and Walter Brennan's rant about the helots when trying to convince Gary Cooper to give away the fifty dollar bill he's received. As you read the upcoming quote (spoken with great gumption by old Walter), imagine he's talking about the freedom of making a low budget no-CGI early 80s Brechtian free-for-all like SHE vs. enduring the producer interference and studio pressures that come with all the millions it takes to craft bigger budgeted junk action movies out today, like THE AVENGERS (the BBC one) or CONAN THE DESTROYER:

"All right. You're walking along, not a nickel in your jeans, your free as the wind, nobody bothers ya. Hundreds of people pass you by in every line of business: shoes, hats, automobiles, radios, everything, and there all nice lovable people and they lets you alone, is that right? Then you get a hold of some dough and what happens, all those nice sweet lovable people become helots, a lotta heels. They begin to creep up on ya, trying to sell ya something: they get long claws and they get a stranglehold on ya, and you squirm and you duck and you holler and you try to push them away but you haven't got the chance. They gots ya. First thing ya know you own things, a car for instance, now your whole life is messed up with a lot more stuff: you get license fees and number plates and gas and oil and taxes and insurance and identification cards and letters and bills and flat tires and dents and traffic tickets and motorcycle cops and tickets and courtrooms and lawyers and fines and... a million and one other things. What happens? You're not the free and happy guy you used to be. You need to have money to pay for all those things, so you go after what the other fellas got. There you are, you're a helot yourself."

Were SHE made today it would no doubt have endless CGI dragons and some fresh-out-of-helot-school rich man's son producer who would insist director Avi Nesher pick an aesthetic - make it ancient or post-apocalyptic, but not this weird limbo where WW2, hippy counterculture, the Inquisition, and ancient Rome all live side by side. But it was made 1982 (the height of my own post-apocalyptic barbarian moviemaking career) and so the tactile delights of using actual props and monster makeup are just baller enough to steer SHE into the timeless, anti-establishment, no-CGI forbidden zone where films which kill careers and get no love anywhere are suddenly aged into anti-helot relevance. With an American star, Israeli director and mostly Italian crew, SHE is one of those rare international productions that turns its tower of Babel culture-drain into an advantage. When your movie is going in six different directions at once, don't reign it all in, shoot for twelve more!

On that note you might make an all night anti-helot Netflix stream festival with Nesher's SHE as the middle feature between GAS-S-S-S and the amazing Caroline Munro-starring sci fi (Italian Star Wars ripoff) STARCRASH (1979), and top it all off with a GHOSTS OF MARS or THE WARRIORS chaser, and at last you will know that the aesthetic of super 8mm backyard cinema lives on, as Big Daddy Mars, or a Baseball Fury, or a Joe Spinell, or a Texas-branded Paul Thomas clone impressionist, or any other kind of gaudy patter-spewing, scary make-up sporting gunsel... so don't fuck around with us Nork, and keep your pecker dry and the world will turn... into a post-modern/apocalyptic thrift store prop wasteland... where Sandahl lives.