No Sex Please, We're British... from Space: DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS, FIRE MAIDENS OF OUTER SPACE

Watched the amazing GLOW on Netflix this weekend, great stuff, man. I got some advice though: if you're going to watch the show don't watch the documentary (about the actual ladies of GLOW) -- it's depressing. The cheap video quality of the original program has not aged well, and between the terrible 80s hair, all the talk about the bad gym smells and cheap hotels, it's depressing. Don't sully the beauty and amazingness of the series with the brutalism that is the source reality. Go instead to CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON, GHOSTS OF MARS, or STAR MAIDENS, or THE RUNAWAYS (and, presumably, the new WONDER WOMAN) and dig on how progressive and rockin' chicks can be when they wise up and finally take back the matriarchal council from hammy elder 'fathers' and dogmatic scientists.

A word of advice though, to those free ladies: if you're a bunch of space women from unfertilized matriarchies, who've (wisely) long ago killed your men (they deserved it, baby), and you're looking to boost your gene pool, come to America! Don't go to Britain, at least not in the 50s, where men are reserved under the cold tea-and-crumpet heel of something worse than fog, marriage, or censorship --that cold Brit upper lipped-stiffness so resolute they even wrote a show 'bout it. 

The following is based on a piece of mine originally published in the print zine Van Helsing's Journal, which focused on all British horror and sci-fi, with me providing a very British blend of gallows' humor and urbane drollery in covering these two films as examples of how the Brits might trim a shaggy dog story down to a single well-groomed wag. My grandmother was a daughter of the Revolution with several descendants hung in Salem (two escaped to less bonkers towns) as witches in the late 1600s, so I guess I can 'pass' in a Darby pinch and I know a mild bit about Brit horror. In fact, right now Hammer's black-and-white 1963 Bloch-chip NIGHTMARE plays behind me while I write this; the pained screaming of the heroine in the madhouse dovetails perfectly with some looney lady screaming like a possessed women on the stairs below my apartment. I love those kind of  coincidences, don't you? --they're absolutely mad, utterly bonkers! As for NIGHTMARE itself, the heroine's head is too wide. But Hammer's vampire stuff is good, in full-throated color, as seen in the other film on the disc, KISS OF THE VAMPIRE. So you'd think being so good with that end of the fantasy spectrum, with a little sex in it, that the Brits could handle sci-fi. But if I was queen of Mars and looking for willing earthmen to save my stale race, I wouldn’t look to England. A little 1953 sci-fi cheapie called CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (in 3-D) once proved America to be an ideal place from which a lusty moon matriarchy might order fit specimens. In fact, that film’s central theme, not exactly new in itself (a popular motif in pulps), prompted a slew of copycats: MISSILE TO THE MOON (1958), QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958), ABBOTT AND COSTELLO GO TO MARS (1953), even INVASION OF THE STAR CREATURES (1963). All of them are classics, worth repeat viewings, except for... well, any of them. I do love CAT though, for all the wrong reasons (see: The Moon, Cat-Women, and Thou). After all, the sexy insinuations inherent in the formula are nigh irresistible and more or less write themselves: phallic rocket ships, sexy cat ladies in curvaceous craters, underground lairs represented by some cushions and a statue of the dancing Shiva; a giant spider on a visible cable; stock rocket shots; hopeful young starlets willing to dress up in funny tiaras or black leotards with painted eyebrows; a stock cue library score, or--in CAT's case, they hire a newcomer kid like Elmer Bernstein, then just starting out, and man he does deliver. 

With all the remakes and rehashes of the formula, it’s no wonder that even the British would timidly try and climb aboard. And yet, it seems that the material is just not all that suited to the British nature. The two versions, of the tale--such as they are-- both fall into traps even the worst of the Yank versions avoid. As we shall see, the reason may be Britain’s shyness in the face of the almighty British Censors (though they're far less squeamish about sex than about violence), or of sex itself. But hang it all, why even start the grille if all you’re serving are the same old chips?

Let’s work backwards, getting the worst out of the way first: the 1956 Cy Roth opus FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE, a title that is bandied about in discerning circles as akin to ROBOT MONSTER or PLAN NINE (or my new favorite,  the 1957 gem ASTOUNDING SHE MONSTER). Friends, it is nowhere near in their league, maybe because it was so hard to find for so damned long. It seemed as if Michael Medved--who 'praised' it in THE FIFTY WORST FILMS OF ALL TIME --was the only one who'd ever seen it. I was on the lookout for it for decades, man, it would have been better I never found it. 

Once seen, it is absurd to even mention it in the same breath as CAT WOMEN and PLAN NINE. Those may be gaudy messes but are nonetheless engaging, with a reasonably brisk tempo and the courage of truly gonzo convictions. Neither one is dull and both manage to be strangely delightful in their offhand manner, especially at 4 AM. The best thing one can find to get excited about with the FIRE MAIDENS is the orchestral passage from Borodin’s “Stranger in Paradise" which accompanies the many ceremonial dances, sounding not unlike someone's listening to the radio in another room. One does tire of it rawther fast, however. Watching Roth in action, you'd never even make it to 4:10, only your irritation would keep you awake.. 

One thing FIRE teaches us, is there are levels within the idea of "terrible" in films and that all sorts of cheap effects--from visible wires to visible folds in the 'night' sky--are forgivable as long as you avoid being boring. Within the accidental Brechtianism induced by poverty row necessity emerges a a bag tricks and shortcut tactics we can use for our own films: narration over stock footage, for example, to eat up huge stretches of time without ever having to take off a lens cap. So you would think FIRE MAIDENS would make up for its badness by being a textbook example of how to cut corners and take advantage of what one does have, except the absent-minded Roth apparently threw the movie away and kept just the corners: so we have the most boring run of airport stock footage ever, and then a cheap sign to substitute for 'Heathrow.' We seem to following Luther Blair (Anthony Dexter)—an "American"—coming over to London to helm a space program. After another monotonous streak of stock footage (this time of downtown London), he and some cronies enter an outer office and proceed to act smug, entitled and sexist to a cute secretary before heading in to plan a big space mission with their boss. The mission should be, well, maybe, important, though Luther and company really seem to be planning a night out on the town with some potential investors: “Let’s just hope there’s some form of life!” Blair says, almost grumpily. It would be funny if it weren't so tedious and vaguely offensive, this important event shrugged off as a waste of time unless aliens show up. Alien life is, one expert announces, "probable but highly unlikely." Oh man, I hope I didn't hear that right. 

Then several miles of film are spent adrift in tediously repetitive montage to signify take-off: hands rest on levers, crew members look at instrument panels, people sit at their desks looking up at dials; consoles and flashing lights, buttons, hands on levers, more crew members, dials, people reacting, desk surfaces, buttons, more levers, instrument panels, button, flashing lights, buttons, etc. “All instruments check out; we’re approaching zero hour,” somebody says. You begin to realize that you are now in zero hour yourself, the decision as to whether you should fast forward. Whether or not the intention was some state of surrealist semi-conscious trance, the slow boredom lulls us to semi-consciousness but with none of the awe, love, or even respect for either sex or God, as we might get from other boredom purveyors like Franco or Tarkovsky (who would be subtly manipulating the ambient sound to further lull us).

Time to go.  As one of the disgruntled Earthlings says later, when a gaggle of women keep trying to fondle him, "OK - beat it, vamoose, skedaddle! Hit the road! Get lost!" When the notion that they'll be all expected to leave some children behind, if you get my drift, the huffy indignity of one guy ("I'm a happily married man...") negates the fantasy. Was Cy too much a wuss to keep his mom out of the writer's room? The correct retort to that would be, "bro, I don't think she's going to walk in on you." Instead this seems to be seconded all around. The only 'cheesecake' shots come from the girls' knees as they go walking past the camera. 

The sublimated sex of the film reaches its pinnacle long before the broads even show up, actually. In fact the sex seems to have already happened when the ship finally lands on Jupiter's 13^th moon (in a shot lifted from Bert I. Gordon’s King Dinosaur). The way the stressed-out astronauts sit around for minutes just smoking their pipes contentedly, looking at each other like a bunch of cats who swallowed the canary, well, they hammer the symbolic point home, hard - they've penetrated the atmosphere and landed deep deep down. They seem in no hurry to go out and explore, one thinks they're more than happy to consider this a job well done and go home. 

The moon's surface is a surprise, though: as manicured and pastoral as Kensington Gardens and there are actual women, so the astronauts exit the craft and spot--about a mile away--some cute bird in a short skirt getting mauled by some spastic janitor in a plastic mask. Even from that range one of the astronauts is confident he could “rescue” the girl with a shot from his pistol but their leader notes they shouldn't get involved. (It should be noted that, in order to capture the astronauts’ perspective, we never see a close-up of the girl or monster, they stay way in the distance throughout the scene.) So they wait and let maiden and monster slug it out, never trying to amble closer. Finally one man trots over and scares the beast away. Now she belongs to you! 

Don't look at the camera, oh fake George Sanders! (still from blu-ray.com)

We know we’re not in an American sex-and-space film when the next inhabitant of the moon who pops up is Prassus (Owen Berry) --a George Arliss-esque windbag--who proceeds to lay a lengthy spiel on the astronauts, using a tedious, self-bemused elderly tour guide tone, with enough slow hamming to put a high school theater director into an angry coma, he declares his 'daughters' to be from Atlantis. We collectively wrestle with our feminist ire (are all these hotties actually his real daughters, or Aphrodite's as he also says?) Either way, Aphrodite isn't there; he--an old white man-- is the boss of this planet, not some queen, and his way with the girls is smugly patronizing, like they're all mentally-infirm scullery maids who must be humored but not allowed to slouch. They all came over here way back when London was still just muddy druids and magical gnomes. Aphrodite's children must not perish from this 13th of all moons! 

At this point in the story I confess I fell into a doze which I awoke from just in the nick of time to see the old man finally wrap his speech up and the fire maidens come in and do their magic dance. Now if you’ve seen CAT WOMEN you know that the far-out mating dance the kittens do is the highlight of that film; it’s a beatnik interpretive group slink set to a nicely melancholic and very hip Elmer Bernstein flute-led jazz ---it's sexy, melancholic and narcotizing all at once. The fire maidens on the other hand seem more like a Catholic School marching band who made the mistake of huffing solvents right before the big parade ---in a bad way. The more they try to sync movements the worse they get.

Confident that it could only get better now that the flaming maids were around, I still dozed off. I know it breaks all film writer ethics for me to write about it since I missed seconds--maybe hours--in my mix of boredom, feminist umbrage, and general irritation, yet I saw all that may become a man. Who ere sees more is none. Even the occasional appearance of the "monster" cannot lift MAIDENS from its torpor. Even lacking the wide-eyed enthusiasm for its genre present, in say, Ed Wood, or good scoring, ala Elmer Bernstein's in CAT, it might be bearable were the sexual vibe not so snickering virgin-ish. When one of the astronauts mentions one of his brothers is "last in line" for a crack at one of the maidens--though it's clearly not meant that way--a grotesque SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE subtext bubbles up (these boys feel outnumbered in one-on-one sexual encounters). 

In the end, the girl who tries to help them gets to leave with the men, like Alta at the end of FORBIDDEN PLANET; the rest stay behind; I forget what happened to Prasus after he's drugged, not that his sudden Tourettes-like hails to Aphrodite will be missed. These weird male figurehead pimp types are outmoded anyway. The CAT WOMEN didn't need 'em, nor did any of the other Yank renditions. They knew.

FIRE is, in short, a rough ride. To expunge the blue-balled boredom from my psyche after finally finishing it the other day (I think I've now seen it all, though how can you really tell?), I put in Robert Siodmak's timeless 1944 classic COBRA WOMAN and lo--I was mightily healed. The restored Technicolor alone could restore faith even in a man who'd just seen MYRA BRECKINRIDGE. May it do so for your faith as well. Hail, Aphrodite! Oh look, the girls are doing more dancing around their little fire again...zz

"Giff me the Cobra Jool!"

---

Released two years earlier but leagues of ahead of FIRE in cultivated cool, DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954) is still shitty but has its moments. Like the louts in FIRE MAIDENS (or the stuffed-lipper explorers in PREHISTORIC WOMEN, for that matter - not reviewed in this piece, but very similar), these tavern lads would rather die trying to escape than mate with alien women, but at least there's one cool dude, even if he is only a wee lad.

 PREHISTORIC WOMEN (1967) Naturally our stalwart explorer can't wait to escape this Hell. 

It’s based on a play set around a remote inn on the Scottish moors, ala Edgar Ulmer’s polemic-burdened but mucho expressionist MAN FROM PLANET X (1951).  This one does offer some drollery and there’s the presence of (a rather conservatively dressed) Hazel Court for "traditional” sex appeal to counterbalance the dominatrix masculine side of the statuesque Nyah (Patricia Laffan), the devil girl from Mars herself. Clad in all shiny black vinyl, she's here to grab some virile specimens to take home for breeding and to show her around London, her original destination before she got lost in the fabled "pea-souper" of English fog.

Everyone is trapped in both her forcefield net (cast from her spinning top ship out back in the moors) and the ruts of cliche: a traveling old scientist sent by a clearly dismissive and downplaying government to investigate saucer reporting, snidely dismisses Hazel Court's mention of a flashing light in the sky, assuring her she either exaggerates or is just an idiot with no sense of size. He snidely claims this event “couldn’t possibly have happened,” even after it already did; when Nyah tells how on her planet the sex wars were real and that the women won by wiping the men out with a “perpetual motion chain reactor beam” he condescendingly shakes his head, inferring, this chick is just some costumed hysteric. There's a few welcome Brit character faces like John Laurie as the Scot innkeeper, but the 'Americanized' reporter Hugh McDermott commits the triple sin of being one, a narc (he rats out escaped convict--the beady-eyed, Garfunkel-haired Peter Reynolds) and two, being a smug bastard to women, and three, a terrible actor who hits his marks like he's sleepwalking through a drama school-style nightmare. I find him even more offensive than Joseph Tomelty's Blue Book-style ridicule-and-marsh-gas professor, or the conservative sudden parenting of McDermott trying to stop young Tommy from investigating the craft.

Though she's here to conquer, Nyah truly warrants our sympathy. It's a sin against nature that these men are (mostly) spared a violent death; certainly they don't deserve the attention of cute lasses like Court or Adrienne Cori as the tavern wench. In fact the only cool human male present is a young rascal of a lad, the wee Tommy. Nyah's sagging spirit is mildly buoyed by his genuine curiosity and fearlessness, for his curiosity bypasses the fear, denial, and hostility of the rest of the cast; for a wee minute, they kind of bond; Nyah's eyebrow, raised in mock indignity at his fortitude, indicates a snatch of Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth warming to the brashness of one of her Spanish ship-sacking pirates Then, sadly, she just leads him off camera; appearing soon after back to the tavern claiming he's being held as a hostage. She'd rather exchange him for one of the more adult males, despite the fact he's the most mature and bound to grow up.

One starts to gather insights into the way the adult egos continually turn encounters with the alien into fights, the way their imbecile behavior quickly turns the potential for a close encounters into war of the worlds ("all inhabited planets have wars!" Nyah declares proudly). But once again, the script refuses to dally with anything other than pure trite cliché and Hazel Court bashes McDermott's drinking even while she provides him with brandy, ("it is a required taste," he notes. "And I've acquired it.")

Nyah is--to some of us-despite her unflattering black headgear (it looks like a melted black rubber bathing cap), pretty sexy in a dominatrix headmistress kind of way --but it’s all too clear that the makers of this film are missing the point. They don't seem to 'get' the mythic current that, once tapped into, can make even the hoariest of cliches and effects roar to life; they can’t shake off the invisible shackles of repression, even in their escapist fantasies. When imagining chicks from Mars, they don't go for Lambda of the cat women or a vain control freak queen hiding her radiation burns under a Barbie mask, but a tall masculine disciplinarian schoolmarm dominatrix, who intones her lines as if correcting her understudy’s enunciation loudly enough to embarrass her in front of the back row. Is this a result of England's corporal punishment in the socialist education system? I got no issue with that, but if she's not going to be sexy AND strong what's the point? If her imperious manner is going to only outrage the gentlemen, not tempt them, the film makes no sense. AVENGERS' Emma Peel is proof England's women got that shit squared away (being sexy AND confident, competent and in charge). There's no excuse in this case, other than a bad script as a result of a writer being so beaten down by the system so that even his fantasies are stifled by paranoid moral lip-service. We see this in Hitchcock's worst films too -- his Catholic school guilt choking the oxygen out of the water in films like THE PARADINE CASE and I CONFESS, the kind of stuff where unless you're repressed by a strict Catholic school education, you're probably going to roll your eyes at the central 'problems' at the core of the film.

Johnny knows the score.

Maybe it's because in America we had the space to escape our parents into something new called the suburbs: the post-war suburban boom, coupled to the popularity of Freud and the sudden cocktail water cooler prevalence of the Kinsey reports (?), insured a greater sense of behind-closed-doors looseness. We had our cave inside the moon, our easy chair, our picket fence oxygen mask and a TV antennae. The poor British, on the other hand, at least in these films, get hostile even at a party without a parent in sight, like a nervous virgin freshman at their first keg party who refuses to drink, shouting how he doesn't need it to have a good time, but he clearly does - all shaking with paranoia as if a cop will sense he's underage from a mile away and barge into the party to arrest him should he even touch a beer. 

Let me close loftily:

Shakespeare wrote in MACBETH, of a ravaged Scotland "almost afraid to know itself." Can this not serve epitaph duty on FIRE MAIDENS and DEVIL GIRL, two films where--even though surely no one will take it as instruction for real life--the characters remain afraid to step one inch away from their stock type's glum English-version-of-American-ish stubbornness? Instead of celebrating (and gently laying) the strong man-eating, sexually brash and forthright babes of space, our dull British astro-ambassadors merely boast, sneer, try to escape and then dourly loin-gird. "We are all the slaves of a great and powerful civilization" DEVIL's hypnotized Albert notes. "Let us prepare for our rulers." Being conquered by some highly advanced foreign power with superior weapons shouldn't be a surprise for an empire-building, colonizing superpower  nation like England --they have no right to get indignant about it. There is a clear parallel between Johnny the Robot's laser beam blasting away at trees and a cannon barrage from Her Majesty's Navy cowing some native uprising --whether or not the filmmakers even realize it. Clearly they don't.  "None of this has ever happened before," the fugitive says to comfort his girl. Does England mentally block out the guilt of their devious colonizing, the way America used to block out the horrors of slavery and "Indian" genocide? Is that maybe the core of the British 50s space sex problem, England's refusal to "know itself," to look below the surface of their own native first world soil lest the zombie claws of the colonized erupt like weeds? Is DEVIL a movie about the coming of the 'fourth world' - when the 'first' world of white straight male privilege is unseated by racial, and gender, and sexual orientation equality? Such social change feels to us (SWMs) like we're being mugged in slow motion, or overrun by OCD commies ordering us around in our own house ala Dr. ZHIVAGO - we may consciously know it's for the best, but that still doesn't shake the feeling of being robbed. 

Well, well, why fight it, comrade? You can't argue with a woman, or an alien, they're too well-equipped. Instead, let's raise a glass of vodka to our future conquerors. For--as we learn in AA or under the unfair lash of God, Queen, electoral college, or fiery sexual passion--surrender is the only surefire victory. America, Na Zdorovie! Amazons of Themyscira, Arise! 1950s England, Adieu!

Portions of this review first appeared in Van Helsing's Journal vol. 2, 2001
For another of my auld pieces from VHJ, see: Reverse Oedipus: Village of the Damned 

NOTES:
1. (PS since this writing it's come out on an Olive Blu-ray. Meanwhile John Huston's FREUD is nowhere to found? Oh the mundanity!)
2. I went to the cinema in London back in '05 and they still had a smoking lounge with a bar. Not sure if they're still 'sigh' allowed.

"Come and get your yarbles!" ZARDOZ: British Acid Cinema v. 1

Once upon a distant UK future, or stretch of its past long buried in the bog and/or under small beach pebbles of Stonehenge-y time, savages in maskies roamed and rode, shooting and raping all they may survey, and worshipping a giant stone head that floated gamely o'er the rolling green Irish hills and occasionally spat them new guns and ammo in exchange for bags of wheat. And when it could get no weirder, the head would sprachen in a booming manly voice a kind of population control mantra, about how shooting semen from your gunny cock is bad and shooting death from a cocked gun is good, or raping must come with killing, lest more bullets in the future from thy future gun expend, and all like something passionately scrawled on the bathroom wall by a horny sophomore who'd just read Jung's "Man and his Symbols" while watching Wizard of Oz on acid. 

One of these masked savages, Zed (Sean Connery), is smarter and more dangerous than the others --rather than bowing to the head, gamely sneaks into its agape mouth, to go for a ride, killing the 'man behind the curtain' inside it, thus having the whole head to his own, only to have it touch down behind a force field and land him in the presence of a group of intellectually advanced immortals, eternally young and smart, living off the land in a perfect encounter group breathing exercise one-mind mime troupe sense of order.

Adorned only in taffeta robes (so clearly demarked 'Eloi' as to affront any rambling Bevin Boys' morlock-ish cognizance of couth), these fey libertines don't quite know what to make of our young thug from the other side of the bubble. Zed's mind has, it seems, been wiped in advance by some unknown power, so they can't "scan" him for what happened to their friend (the guy Zed killed). They have the psychic power to play a person's memories back like rewound tape and show them on the wall screen (very Black Mirror). They suspect the worst, but that part of Zed's tape has been erased!

They must investigate. Some of the girls--especially in the scientist ladies, and particularly lovely Consuella (Charlotte Rampling)--react with hostility to Zed's sexy shirtlessness. His pheromone-and-hair dye musky musk has upset the zero point population growth balance (no children for thousands of years) and gotten their eggs started all up again. Conseulla demands his immediate destruction, but other head scientist, May (Sara Kestleman) wants to probe his, ahem, "mind" first in case some part of the memory is still retrievable, so to speak.

To access this information, May may need to take Zed literally under the sheets. Shall we go then, you and I?

If, on paper, all this sounds randy and oh so 60s-early 70s sci-fi, with its mix of pulpy lurid adult sexuality and high-concept speculation, what's wrong with that? Unlike the smirky post-Porky's 80s and the inevitable feel-bad-about-smirking 90s, ZARDOZ is from an era all about psychedelic openings (especially concerning free love and eastern philosophy, the far-out writings of Castaneda, Jung, Leary, Watts, Dass, and Burroughs). If, after awhile, these free love soul openings became reduced to a giant universal mouth of macho hungry ghost gimme gimme, it's not to say it wasn't a noble experiment. For a time, when sex was plentiful, man--at his best--could finally move beyond sex. Before the hordes of leprous joneser seagulls descended, for a glistening period of around fifteen or so years, this beautiful eastern openness led to a form of macho beyond Freud's "one direction" sense of phallic symbolism, a kind of Jungian Arthurian 'good' macho, exemplified by Sean Connery's manly chest, Charlton Heston, James Bond, Don Draper, and Billy Jack. Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces led to Iron John and the men's movement. Yeah, the real men's movement, not dopey Alt-right trolls gone pale and blind and hunched over from too much time clicking in mom's basement, but hairy bigfoot-style dudes banging drums in the woods. Ugh. Maybe even then, it was a little lame, but man, did man need it.

Our psychology lacks even today, we're mired in Freud, not enough Jung. To Freud, a gun was just a penis, but Jung's break with Freud went the opposite way too, stating that the penis was also 'just' a gun (or a sword), i.e. neither was the be-all-end all, any more than a Tarot card is only paper and ink. "You can't fool me, this card isn't a Hierophant, it's paper and ink!" More than Freud's, Jung's symbolism is more enlightened, a less sex-obsessed frame of thinking. Jung's idea of "the phallus" wasn't necessarily tied to some infantile anxiety formed at the first sight of mom's "missing" genitals, but something truly mythic down to the DNA of life itself, the phallus as pure signifier, en par with the yoni / circle / zero, i.e the phallus was the '1' and the yoni the '0' of a binary symbolic code.

You can tell John Boorman knew and was heavy into all Jungian archetypal psychology. More than any other Arthurian filmmaker, he felt the connection; he was spearheading a new self-aware sexist macho psychedelia, one beyond the duality of shame/pride; lust/disgust, and even death/life. In fact, Boorman was so badass about it he'd even adorn Sean Connery in an orange diaper! He didn't give a shit, bro.

ZARDOZ, Zardoz, King of the emasculated Brittons!

 From top: Zardoz, Monty Python, Wizard of Oz, Zardoz, Tron

Clearly, Boorman understood, deep down, some of Zardoz was plain crazy. Yet it's stood the test of time. A loopy satire on the vanity at the heart of masculine identity, this fuck-all fractured crystal light show has proven mad prescient. Had anyone been listening to it at the time, instead of snickering at that diaper, Zardoz may have woken us up to the value of death as the only key to life.

But at the time, which was 1974, we weren't necessarily ready to have our yarbles handed to us with a stern warning and an extra magazine cartridge. We just saw Sean Connery with his black ponytail and traffic cone orange diaper riding a horse and a big stone head flying around, and--unless we were stoned--rolled our eyes in embarrassment. Of course, Connery would play the only fertile still-erect male in an isolated society of enlightened hot chick immortals --his big red bulges gazed upon lustily- flanked by a sparse sprinkling of symbolically neutered male elders and Bellamy-ish escorts. Of course the immortals stand around him, like buyers at a boat show, all in multi-colored robes that evoke one of those planets on Star Trek where some alien Aeschylus reads poetry aloud and the wardrobe person has a chance to air out the studio togas (in mothballs since the 50s biblical epic heyday). Add to that the kind of randy tosser pulp premise used already in everything from Ulmer's Beyond the Time Barrier, to Queen of Outer Space, Cat-Women of the Moon, Missile to the Moon, Invasion of the Star Creatures, and so forth. Not that I'm complainin!

But time has shown us that what really spooks us (in the US especially) about ZARDOZ is that it delves deep into zones that castration anxiety has deemed verboten --and it's perhaps that anxiety that kept us (okay, me) away from the film so long in the first place. Emasculated in jumpers, "them panties", or even (below) wedding dresses, the Boorman male protagonist never shies from (figurative) crotch shots (as in Walker's final punch to the gangster's crotch in Point Blank [1967]) or squealing like a pig. In facing the dread of castration anxiety so astutely, Boorman's films have Freudian breakthroughs right there on the screen, but first one must endure the squirming: before Burt gets a chance to shoot arrows at rednecks--or Richard Burton gets to throw Linda Blair against a wall and start to strangle her while half-molesting her at the same time-- there must be all sorts of humiliation and threats, from demons, rapists, and immortal hotties with brain freezing crystal rings. Running from the problem just gives it more juice--you got to clamp down hard and don't let go, like a pit bull on the schvonce.



Taken as an infantilizing hybrid of anal phase fixations then, Zed's macho hairy chest and that orange outfit might somehow tap into into the kind of revulsion most children feel for their own diapers by the age of three -- I know it turned me off at the time (I was seven in 1974). But now, grown into middle-age, Zed's infantile garb is as bemusing and unthreatening as it is for the immortals within the sanctuary. SSRIs have removed 95% of my sex drive and I couldn't be happier about it. Maybe that's why now I understand how the UK's weird macho fey switcheroo makes boys into men: by first making them women. Connery's Zed is somehow now all the more masculine for being so feminized, so objectified. Cleaning up the table and setting out dishes as the 'adults' discuss his fate at lunch (whether they should ice him or let him live), he's like disaffected puppy, his sexual heat is the equivalent of soft black velvet painting sad eyes. He doesn't have to do anything--he's like a woman on a pirate ship where only half the crew are 'gentlemen.'

DEATH BEFORE DISHES

Watching nature shows as a kid I remember I regarded all the death as merely fascinating. It seemed remote and cool (my friends and I 'playing dead' all the time), but now the endless stream of fear, hunger, death and birth that is the ecosystem of the ocean--my poor krill--makes Earth seem a brutal prison, one that takes hundreds of thousands of lifetimes to escape--if we ever do. With every gulp some whale is devouring enough little lives to populate a country. But it doesn't end there, for gobs of krill come alive in little eggs again, just to be eaten by something that will itself be eaten. How many times have we all died as tiny little krill or shrimp or plesiosaurs? How billions of deaths have we experienced? How many traumatic rebirths, all within that same salty gross ocean?

ZARDOZ helps us indirectly wonder whether our slow poisoning of the seas has been something the sea (as in the collective consciousness continuum of all marine life along the vast, endless food chain) wished upon itself, programmed into us back in our squid years and which has remained dormant in our DNA, moving us unconsciously towards our rabid pollution and destruction of our accursed, death-ridden ecosystem. Is man's pollution is the sea's reverse-Zed deliverer from endless centuries of fear, pain, heartbreak and hunger? Zed is named thus for a reason. Man is here, screams the ocean, there shall be no more arrivals! Our pollution is a liberator that will free the blighted hungry, scared, and dying from any more than another century of endlessly reincarnating woe.

HOOLIGANS OF SATURNALIA

If the male fantasy (BARBARELLA-ish) pulp aspect makes ZARDOZ too camp for the Kubrick set, what keeps it too Kubrick for the camp set might be the very things that hamstring Britain's past attempts to mine the same male fantasy vein (DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS and FIRE MAIDENS FROM OUTER SPACE). Here in Boorman's future, the 'eternals' are way past such tired schticks as reproduction, death, or presumably genital-based ejaculatory orgasm. Neither aging or reproducing, the only wrinkle is when one of them disagrees with their unified mind's opinion and refuses to acquiesce. He or she cast out, sent to some kind of eternal wedding/Princeton Reunion pavilion out by the stables, forced to endure old age (and the same scratchy old big band records they'd play in the Overlook's Gold Room) for all eternity rather than die peaceably. These "renegade" immortals are sometimes guilty of nothing more than bad vibes (which unnerve their 'group mind) and who could avoid feeling them in such a place, for so damned long? No matter how lovely it is in this little garden villa-all around a lake with an old castle commons, inflated dry-cleaning bags around various bushes to denote a kind of oblique The Prisoner vibe--staying longer than a few years must be Hell.

Luckily, the hour of their deliverance is at hand. The specter in Masque of the Red Death  fuses with Conan the Barbarian and Alex in Clockwork Orange to bring a needed violence to paradise. Zed is a tool that frees these liberals from their own peace, returning them to a time when hedonistic amphetamine-amped savagery simplified all our decisions. Fracturing itself along fault lines that fuse the grim black humor of Dr. Strangelove to the horny camp of Barbarella, Zardoz has endured as a continually renewing announcement to the world that he, Boorman, can be as much a macho priapic/cold misanthropic--less geometrically precise-but-still bonkers to the point of mind expansion/Dark Heart of Conradian consciousness--"genius" as Kubrick.

Can't he?

Maybe not, but you can tell he 'gets' it, and he gets down into the same deep well of repressed shit Kubrick made so indelible. Boorman doesn't peer over the fence into Kubrick's backyard well so much as borrowing a shovel to dig his own. He doesn't need to peek at his neighbor's work, the testicular vein is deep and connects all men. He doesn't even need Terru Southern to come over and point out the lewd savagery. Boorman's the sole writer of Zardoz.  Boorman follows his own drummer and if that drummer should veer of a cliff, Boorman's macho enough to beat him all the way down

We're all hooligans in the pre-empathic nursery

But, despite Boorman's savvy about the 'viral' nature of overpopulation and the paradoxical nature of symbolic castration, labeling ZARDOZ a masterpiece is bound to cause concern to those who trust your masterpiece-labeling competence. Boorman's themes and social concerns are largely forgotten, ignored, even maligned. To me that's weird, the elephant in the room as we wring our hands (when anyone's around to see) over global warming. The population of our planet has doubled from when I was a kid in 70s elementary school. In those groovy 70s classes our cool teachers warned about the dangers of overpopulation from the get-go. There were 3.5 billion people and that was too much, if we got any bigger the planet was doomed. Today we're at at 7 billion (and rising) and supposed to solve global warming. A massive plague may be our planet's only salvation.

Soylent Green had come out the year before Zardoz and fared better, made a lasting impression et al, but that film was American, with Chuck 'Moses' NRA Heston as the star--so even your bible-thumping aunt couldn't argue against it - and it had a 'gotcha' ending as potent as the Statue of Liberty in Heston's big Apes. Zardoz was far too much of too many things--too intellectual for the pulp crowd, too comic book priapic for the intellectual crowd, and it came out too late to catch the acidheaded 'enhanced' midnight movie crowd (PS - see comment at end of this post!), yet was too trippy for the pop dystopia pre-Star Wars crowd (Logan's Run, Omega Man).

Well, it's still a film without a double-digit cult, but it's found a fan in me, at last --it only took me ten tries, over the years. I guess I was waiting... for the key moment--I finally made it to the livin' end--not even noticing Sean's ill-advised dyed-black chest hairs and douche pony tail. I just had to be in the other room for the first half, listening while it played on TCM, writing and folding laundry. Not fully paying attention, not seeing the diaper. Just absorbing my way inward, like a louche amoeba.

What I noticed most this time was the spirited fey death drive of John Alderton (future star of Wodehouse Playhouse) as 'Friend' (who takes a shine to Zed and winds up ostracized to the Pavilion as a result) and the limpid mouth and layered freckles of Sara Kestleman as May (left). The chakral intensity of her lysergic breathing really got to me. Regarded with some suspicion (and veiled jealousy) by Rampling as she inhales Zed's pheromones, I knew this was gonna be great, almost Spring Breakers ASMR style. When she and Zed head under the sheets for a special investigation of his memories I finally knew I loved Zardoz. Kestleman's freckles and big eyes and mouth alive with lysergic breathwork under the colored sheet, generating cozy-sexy womb-ish magical sci-fi energy from little more than what looks like a faded tie-dye on an old queen-size 100 thread-count. Taking May's lusty cue, her cadre loyal lady 'scientists' line up to get laid by old Sean, and in exchange give him an Alexus-voiced crystal computer ring, which--like Google--contains all their combined knowledge (so he'll know how to destroy the thing that binds them to eternal life). Lo and behold, the similarity between that ring and an iPhone are almost insane!

And lo and behold, I really relate to a lot of the crazy split-subjectives and all the mass mind meditation and heavy breathing. I mean I really REALLY relate. (Imagine me saying that last part while pulling hungrily at your collar). The Immortals' whole vibe is one of those 70s theater encounter groups, or any tight-knit acting class or troupe that does little weird everyone vocalizing and waving their arms in unison outcasting or accepting one of their number into the group mind via encounter group touching exercises. It's soooo 1970s.  It doesn't get any better.

DON'T DERIDE YOUR MAN'S ARCHAIC REVERIE

And for all its juvenile wish fulfillment, the one rooster in a big henhouse fantasy ultimately SHOULDN'T BE DERIDED as it stems from a very real archaic programming that nowadays is expressed only by splinter group Mormons, sheiks and walruses. To be the virile heterosexual male alpha specimen in some cool utopian colony -- all the women young and nubile and easily put under the sway of your fresh pheromones-- all competition sidelined, no virile male for miles... ah, what a dream. For lonesome men on the prowl, hunting in pairs--as young male lions often do in between the time the alpha male kicks them out of 'his' pride and the time they take over another's-- this fantasy sustains them. We don't act on it: we know it's too much work just dating one girl; two or more always find out about each other sooner or later and get pissed and you lose them all, and they and their friends and future friends spread shit about you forever more --you become untouchable. Hardly worth it. So in the end, the smart fella knows that if you're a straight male in a 'normal' community, it can only ever be a fantasy, a way to placate the archaic male drive without doing any real damage.

Zardoz expresses it, while at the same time undoing it, and that's maybe the thing that keeps audiences away. Our secret memories of those old sci-fi tales and Heavy Metal comics mustn't be exposed to the air and sniffed over by super intelligent women who could kill us with a wink.

On the other hand, if we don't flinch from their stinging gaze, we just might get lucky. Biology is a peculiar thing.

Dig this groovy statement by the iRing (their male version of Siri or Alexa) when discussing Zed's propensity for laying around in his cage, dreaming, a hobby which the Immortals find to be a huge waste of time: "Sleep was necessary for man when his waking and unconscious lives were separated." Any artist or writer or filmmaker longs to be free of sleep --inspiration always comes at bedtime, and in the morning it's gone. For the Immortals, their longevity is a clear explanation for their enormous power, their group mind telepathy enables them live in a life of perfect order and balance.

This utopia is the dream of every loving group of 'awakened' individuals who've ever collectively fallen in love over a psychedelic outdoor weekend together (set and setting being so crucial). If they have achieved 'total consciousness," then meditation takes the place of sleep and almost every other need. "Second Level" as the Immortals call it seems to be a communal shared alpha state of bliss. Upsetting this bliss through bad vibes can lead to your arrest and aging of up to five years. Ah laddie, there's always one wally or murph trying to drag the zeppelin down. If only my tribe back in the 80s could have spooked them off with collective humming, I might be immortal to this day. Unless of course, my own bad vibes leaked out. They often did... sigh.

I've told you about those glorious stretches of time I've experienced (this much later in my fisher king solitude) when unconscious and conscious lined up perfectly, as if in sublime eclipse, and I could see with my eyes closed or open, all was illuminated and inseparable. It's clearly what Boorman was going for that total consciousness of dreaming third eye / consciousness two eyes - all open at the same time. Of course, too much of that leads straight to the psych-ward unless you're so charismatic you're covered head-to-toe in protective cult underlings who make sure your every step is strewn with roses... and if that happens just try and keep your ego from running amok and becoming 'that' type of cult leader, the male lion who boots the young men out of the tribe so he can marry all the young hotties. Boom, his clarity is gone in a smoke cloud of self-adoration.

Either way, no eclipse lasts forever, not in our short life spans, surrounded on all sides by petty droogies and dimwit doctors. Such openness of mind relies on a complete suspension of all judgment, fear, and avoidance. This leaves you very vulnerable to oncoming traffic.

(Clockwork, Goldfinger: Paradoxically, these Brit cock-and-ball stories are way

more macho than Leo avenging (yet again) his murdered child and/or wife (below)

in The Revenant:

YARBLES, AND HOW TO LOSE THEM

Let's return to the subject at hand, castration or fear thereof. Successfully completed reproduction, from the 'gleam' in your father's eye to your firs sharp inhale, spanked by a hand almost as big as you are, kick-started into the world like a wonky television-- it's one looong castration. The schlong goes in, bur it don't come out. Welcome to the rat race, sonny.

Emasculation and neutering affect our British macho man at every turn, from the laser coming right at Bond's crotch in 'ahem' Goldfinger to Clockwork's Aubrey Morris clasping hard down on Alex's niblik back at the house where he's spatchka-accruing to be right as dodgers for this after. In America, home of the wee narcissist manchildren who need to stand on crates hidden under the frame and have ramps built for them to kiss their willowy ginger co-stars, our balls are so precious that we refuse to even mention castration, as if the word is serrated-edged. Puer aeternus complexes rouse Maria von Franz from a stone sleep; the ginger beer equation, set up by half-dead spouses, advocates a tired guilt over rowdy strutting. Just making flirty eye contact dooms a girl either to smash cut to foreplay-less rutting (on HBO or AMC) or stalking (HAIR, FEAR and whatever's on Lifetime). The only guys badass enough to 'go there' as in castration are Tarantino and Rodriguez (as in RR's Planet Terror). (2) 

As Leland says Mesa of the Lost Women, this is my order: The good I will protect. Be nice unto all ages, and sans sexual advances. Believe me man, if the girl likes you that way, she'll let you know. If not - presume she doesn't. The problem facing most guys is that when they're most desirable is when they're less likely to realize it, but also that--thanks to media--they confuse being attracted with being attractive, and the first problem invades the second, so that hearing a girl you like doesn't like you the same way makes you furious, for it forces you to be aware you're misreading signals. In other words, your ego is such a bitch it uses your own insecurity to turn you into a persistent douchebag. It makes it harder for every other guy and girl to get together when genuine attraction is constantly misconstrued and confused with random 'hitting on' girls by guys who just figure they'll play the numbers.

That this extends to middle age is what's most perverse, for filmmaker and artist males often have younger women mentees/assistants/lovers. My theory is that there's the person who says no to his drive to go cavort with the younger generation, and the guy who trusts the inherent goodness within himself and is willing to ridiculous to his wife and every other girl his own age in pursuit of artistic and aesthetic realness. He'll see the sour bitches his own age sulking on the sidelines, glaring from behind strollers as he walks with a girl young enough to be his daughter if he'd had kids at 20. Who does that old dude want to be with, a sulky harridan berating and belittling his every word and missed dish dirt spot, or some starry-eyed waif who thinks he's charming and sexy, even if it's only because she has an unresolved Elektra complex? The kitchen sink Leighs and the Loaches trundle home, not forgetting to pick up bread and the Guardian--reading in bed to the knots that they keep in a jar by the door, pursuing the 'reality' of the situation like good little aging males, while Kubricks and Boormans stay up 'til all hours dropping acid with these precocious hot geniuses and contemplating not their crags and sags and graying hair,--but their eternal faces--neither old nor young, neither virile nor withered, neither growing nor shrinking, nor strutting nor cringing, but the eternal face, as frozen as the angry godhead in Zardoz as blank and meaningless as the Godhead in you know what (I shan't spoil it if you haven't seen it.)

We in America don't have it, but we need it - DR. WHO and his companions --all much younger and cute but he's got no interest in sex. He's too old. But older women are a drag - their bones can't handle time travel. Is he a snake because of this? Or just free?
--

And when the going gets too weird and all the older women get out their claws, Zed eats a single leaf from Mama Mcree's psychedelic flower. One thing leads to another by a kind of parenthetical association that would be lost on American viewers the way it was me if I hadn't just seen High-Rise. But since I had, I felt awareness of some kind of weird British shared secret, the sort where psychedelic mind expansion, socialized education, and the BBC merge together to help the male psyche shatter, so that the phallus becomes the devouring vagina dentata instead of just being devoured by it, and this is truly the union. For your casual bullet had picked its immortal's brain pan destination before you were even born, my son.

IMMORTALITY, A CHUMPS' TICKET

The first thing the old man looking at his ageless self in the young reflection (and vice versa) realizes--be he the old codger played by Peter Ustinov in Logan's Run or the old Bowman looking at himself in the mirror in 2001 and seeing a young astronaut staring back--is that all of his ages are segments of a long, single organism--the head and tail of an ouroboros serpent; the young and very old are closer to each other than they are to the middle (which is why grandparents and grandchildren have more in common than the parents). There's no escape from the void of devouring, and no one shares that certainty more than the old man's soul energy entering the maw of the unborn child. No escape, for nothing to escape to, and nothing to escape in/with... no body, no memory, no persona, just I AM.

Once inside its scaly tunnels, the 'I AM' part of the surviving soul realizes that even death itself is just a chimera, a tunnel on the endless looping track. Familiarity with acid's perspective allows this 'we are one thing, split into infinity to get a better look at itself' as almost a side effect to the experience of 'frisson.' We get to see how different it would all go down were we unfastened from the signifier-signified chain of structural indemnity and allowed to float free and easy in the zero gravity of Mad Hatter tea party disruption, where word association no longer has any relevance as a game or trick or strategy. 

For example, in a game of word-association, the word 'chair' might provoke a 'sit' response, but the insane/hatter response would be "melon") / and 'milk' doesn't provoke "cow" but a terrified scream of "gloves!" (1) resulting from an archaic memory of touching Bessie's fleshy warm udder once with bare hands at the 4H Fair and how you cried and cried.

Half the time, they're not even real words, but two or three words Frankensteined together in a kind of accelerated overlapping wave collision between free association, bad puns wrapped into themselves like Russian dolls, and scrabble befuddlement. When given full controls of the voice, the subconscious can be terribly glib and--to a sober man--incoherent. To an incoherent idiot, however, cogent indeed, for the first time - he can understand. 

If you can breech that structuralist surf, I'd say Zardoz is a film that's the story of a male psyche having a split dialogue with itself and its own adult sci-fi pulp roots--the kind of 'adult sci-fi' that's long gone but was all the 70s science fiction you could ever see, prior to Star Wars. Of course its a dialogue that has no ending. It goes on in the hearts of coded dykes struggling in the heavy mantle layers of some giddy fake-Earth ending to some mid-70s episode of Charlie's Angels (the girl football team episode). (3)

COLLUSION: 

Why and why not are inevitably so linked as to be indistinguishable. Are you going to buy the next world a cup of coffee or are you going to act sulky, alone at the counter like a little bitch, until you're so old that it's considered obscene just for you to even hit on people your own age? A 990 year old in a 20 year old body we call a vampire, but a hit from the side -- end of knee -- end of career. We call that the 80s.

Are you 'winning' or are you awake? You can't be both.

Humility or cock swagger? That's a fine duality. But humble cock swagger? Now I know you're British.

NOTES:
1. Of course that's a reference to Crispin Glover in Wild at Heart!
2.We've already talked about this when I attacked the copouts in Hard Candy and Teeth. 
3. I apologize that this ramble ends with a discussion of the dyke presence in a girl football team episode of Chaelie's Angels episode 41 (season 2), "Angels in the Backfield" but it seemed trenchant at the time, to merge a discussion of men evolving into a male/female whole soul into a female-starring detective series from the 70s chronicling the struggles of a female football team (entering a predominately masculine arena) and one of those rare, rudimentary appearances of lesbians on prime time TV. Alas, while liberated in some areas, it was still very much in to consider gays and lesbians as freaks, deviants, easy targets for stereotyping. It was only the mixture of Anita Bryant's hateful rhetoric (which so turned most of us off we became sympathetic to the gay cause) and AIDs / Rock Hudson, that turned us around more or less for (hopefully) keeps.
4.  I love for example the party scene in Arthur Marks' The RoomMates, where the faculty and co-eds at a groovy college mix together, drinking and flirting but with no harm done, even when it gets down to the underwear. That scene would never play today - there'd have to be a sexual harassment or drug/date rape or some other sordid thing. But here in the 70s (and some of the 80s) sex wasn't so bi-polar, where it's either saintliness or demeaning rutting. Flirting and highbrow theoretics could mix over cocktails as everyone was adults, nothing had to lead anywhere. It was gorgeous. 

24-hours of Netflix Streaming Horror--A Curated List of 16 Weird, Spooky Wonders

The all-night horror marathon --a long-standing tradition wherever Halloween traditions are solidly entombed in the crypt of cinematic history. The idea behind it is simple: the longer you stay up, the more films you watch, the deeper into late night / early morning you go, the creepier it gets as more people fall asleep and the night gradually becomes yours and yours alone and consensual reality fades and you move inside the screen, and your date follows a creepy bunny out of the theater down the sleep arson rabbit hole, no wait, that's you, a half-dreamer / half-watcher and the movie and your unconscious merge and characters in the film look right at you, talk to you, freak you out. You turn around and when you look again you just see an empty couch onscreen, and you're holding a candelabra and walking down a dark hall. And there's no one awake to hear you scream, because you put the volume down low to not wake them.

At college they had one of these festivals every year and after the first few hours they stopped taking tickets at the door and half the crowd went home, weary and irritable. By dawn it was only the hardcore, and the people working the projector. Then I'd sneak in, armed with flask and dilated pupils. There was nothing quite as satisfying as creeping across a deserted campus at the first crack of dawn, coming into the darkened theater to find THE TINGLER had just begun... If you have Netflix though, you can skip having to out your boots on to slog across campus. All you have to do is clear your que and line them up: each film is hand-selected for each particular time of evening, night and morning and afternoon, and to follow one another organically, like a good mix tape. Because if you have a sizable DVD collection as I do, then you know it can become paralyzing to choose the next film, fumbling through your bookshelves, scrolling endlessly through your instant libraries.

It's also annoying when you stumble on a cool list of weird movies online, read about one you never heard of and want to see, but can't find it. So you put it in your Netflix que and by the time it comes you forgot why you wanted to see it! Well, with this list you can forget about the options, the Acidemic Horror festival has you covered (Presuming all or any of these films are still up on streaming by the time you get this) 

And special Note: there's NO torture porn or sexual assault or slapstick, or animal abuse,  just the spine-tingling spookiness (and occasional lesbian cannibalism) that carries the tingling electric current along the soul's angsty wires. So dig, trust, and stay up so late you're up early --and with a little clean-up (exchange the empty whiskey bottles for cereal bowls) no one will be the wiser. Heh.

5:00 PM - ABSENTIA
(2010) Dir. Mike Flanagan

Start with this one, right as the sun is going down-- and don't worry about it's deceptively slow pace at first. Flanagan's film takes it's time getting started but it lures you in via the lived-in natural rapport between Katie Parker and Courtney Bell as two sisters who've moved back in together since one of whom is pregnant, and in the final stages of declaring her first husband dead (after seven long years in the titular legal limbo). The younger one (Parker), recently off drugs, is there to help with the pregnancy; she also jogs every morning and her route goes through a mysterious tunnel that recalls Billy Goats Gruff in a deceptively innocuous way.  Turns out, well, I shan't spoil it, since the terror comes from the anxiety of not knowing entirely what we're dealing with. Special highlights include Bell seeing her dead husband everywhere but being conditioned by her therapist to just ignore him (which reminded me of my past delirium tremens). I saw it alone on Saturday as it just happened to be on Showtime while I was writing the first part of this post in the other room; overhearing the great rapport between the sisters, I was soon lured me in. I was alone in the house and it was getting dark faster than I was prepared for, and the film ingeniously dug deep into my ancient fears, the way only BLAIR WITCH and Val Lewton have ever done before. And Parker is so good, warm, intelligent, and gutsy that you just might fall in love, in a sisterly way (more).

And the scary, ambiguous ending will make the next film hit even harder:

6:30 PM - HOUSE OF THE DEVIL
(2009) Dir. Ti West

Ingeniously retro and unspooling in practically in real time across one overcast grey late afternoon into the late evening, it's Ti West's best film so far, and maybe one day he'll make something as good (if he remembers the value of tick-tock momentum) and trusts his instincts. The cast is mixed but Jocelin Donahue as cash-strapped college student Samantha is beautiful, believable, and courageous in her doomed grab for a babysitting dollar, and Greta Gerwig sports some great feathered hair and a cozy college sweatshirt; their late afternoon fast food scene brought the ache of an upstate New York fall winter back to my shoulder muscles after a 20 year hiatus. I could feel myself taking a nap with Gerwig afterwards on some crappy dorm twin bed as the sun went down at five 5 PM (before getting up at 8 or so for the evening's inevitable festivities). I could feel the sense of desolation creeping up like tendrils of cold around her broke buddy Samantha. The evenings upstate are so oppressive they don't need Satan lingering in the edges to be mega ominous, and while the film's not perfect (the men are kind of anachronistically miscast--one's too quiet and wussy; the other too Williamsburg hipster snotty) but cult icons Mary Woronov and Dee Wallace smash through to make up the difference in minor roles. The perfect film to watch in the early autumn evening, still recovering from the last film's chill. By the end it's too dark to go out and you'll be too rattled to break away, so just click the Netflix right on into our next selection:

8:05 PM - BLACK SABBATH 
(1963) Dir. Mario Bava

It's the only one of Bava's films, and the only trilogy, I find truly scary - the good, shivery spine tingle kind, especially the Wurdulak segment, which taps into the way family ties can become nooses you don't notice are strangling you 'til you're too oxygen-deprived to even struggle. Strongly suspecting their father (Boris Karloff) has been turned vampire, the family are too conditioned by their rigid social structure to rebel; and the mama can't resist running out in the cold to comfort her pale dead bambino, even stabbing her husband when he tries to restrain her. Did I spoil it? No man, I didn't. PS: The American version presented here is different from the Italian most fans know by heart from the DVD, in a different order, dubbed into English, missing a lesbian undercurrent, but providing instead Karloff's real voice (not in the Italian version) and "Sdenka" (Susy Anderson) is still sexy; so is Rosie (Michèle Mercier, above), gorgeously lit as she prowls the red telephone sequence. The lighting is so gorgeous it's all in a class by itself.

9:30 PM: ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
 (1976) Dir. John Carpenter

It's the HD version and it sure looks good. There's no supernatural element, but just seeing the cop (the brilliantly named Austin Stoker) driving alone through the deserted eerie battle zone of East L.A as the big red sun sets and Carpenter's simple, brilliant theme make it all ominous enough to qualify. Not to mention a gang member shoots a kid through the eye for asking for sprinkles during an ice cream truck hold-up. There was some real concern in the late 70s that gang violence was going to destroy America, so groove on the scariness of the film's moment and how we never hear any of the gang members say a single word. Even here, before HALLOWEEN, Carpenter knew that once a monster talks, smiles, or even laughs, it's over. The small but perfect cast includes Laurie Zimmer as the last truly Hawksian heroine, and Darwin Joston as the cigarette-strapped Hawksian outlaw Napolean Wilson; Carpenter would revisit the concept and reverse the gender/races in in GHOSTS OF MARS, which would make a great choice on this list, too, so be lookin' out for it. 

11 PM: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD 
(1968) Dir. George Romero

Two horror films in a row starring a black man? Are we dreaming? No, just lucky--and is it a coincidence both films are classics worth endless repeat viewings? In fact, I got the whole idea for this post while spending the weekend in Harrisburg, PA (a stone's throw from where NIGHT was filmed) and turning to NIGHT via their cable's 'free on demand' channel as a last resort after everyone else was asleep, and even wrongly formatted and badly digitized, and having seen it countless times, on the big screen and in better formats, it blew my mind. From the start it's been the kind of movie that can reach a viewer right through any televisual limitation, surviving in potency even through a million second generation public domain VHS dupes. Aside from a rather wearying stretch of road with a bald uptight dad going on and on about how "the cellar is the safest place" there's nary a dull moment. Even if you just saw it for the 100th time; see it again, Karras, in here... with us.

12:30 AM: LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE 
(1973) Dir. John Hough

Dark, thick atmosphere, decadent art design; red bathed Bava-esque level of warm, dusky, painterly light; the translucently pale skin of two beautifully alive in the firelight reflection of the rose red wallpaper women; the throbbing echo-industrial drone breathing, the score like one long auditory hallucination, sexy as hell and brilliant, creepy, untamed, assertive--it's ideal for the midnight hour of any festival (see more here) when you might be getting as surly as the characters here (the leader starts bickering, belittling and bullying from the get-go).

Or if, like me, you just saw it.. go for (also in HD) and full of crabby yelling...

12: 30 AM (alternate) DAY OF THE DEAD
(1984) Dir. George Romero

1985 was a year of great zombie contention, according to a hazily remembered source, between Romero and co-NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD screenwriter John A. Russo. The result was two different zombie movies coming out at the same time, back when there were NO other zombie movies, outside of Italy, of course, certainly none that would make it a first run cineplex instead of a decaying drive-in. My punk crew and I saw both in one weekend; we loved THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, which really jibed with our then lifestyle (the whole thing with zombies going "Braaainnsss!" is from RETURN). But we found DAY a downer. Half the film is spent in irritable bickering between gonzo scientists (demanding more test subjects; trying to isolate what makes zombies tick) and a bunch of crazed military guys getting understandably tired of being bossed around by civilians. The pissy yelling and soldier Gary Howard Klar's evil snicker-giggling get annoying, but the idea of Bub (Sherman Howard) the first sympathetic zombie, being trained by one of the lead scientist (Richard Liberty) is tellingly Romero, who's always gone more for the social critique underlying the zombie menace and less the comedic self-awareness and suspense generation of most of his imitators. And perhaps the split from Russo hurts them both equally--the humor and speed could help with the social message stuff and vice versa-- the military and the scientists need each other after all. Meanwhile, a cool Jamaican chopper pilot (Terry Alexander) and and an amiable Irish drunk (Jarlath Conroy) have the right idea: set up some inflatable palm trees around a camper at the edge of the mine shaft and grow ganja. Humanity is saved.

2 AM - THE VAMPIRE LOVERS
(1970) Dir. Roy Ward Baker

Not only does it open on one of the worst matte painting castle exteriors in history, it also stands as a great British horror crossroad, straddling the decades with unrepentant 70s sapphic nudity right alongside all the typical 60s Hammer vampire Gothic trappings: florid dialogue, gorgeous Brit actresses, Peter Cushing, all that. Especially if you have a good HD TV, it's worth its precious 2 AM time slot because the colors are sublime. Once you see Peter Cushing's blazing red tunic in the post-credits dance scene, you're like DAMN. That ballroom looks 3-D, and then in comes Ingrid Pitt as Marcela Karnstein, and then two gorgeous fertile looking virgins just waiting to get knocked over like bloodless ten pins. You can float for days. And the time slot is just right for such 'ahem' moments, as guards are beginning to come down.

3:30 AM - THE AWAKENING 
(2007) Dir. Nick Murphy

So now it's late, and all that's left after VAMPIRE LOVERS is a yen to see and hear more British women--so effortlessly smart, confident, commanding (yet not bitchy), sexual (yet not slutty or self-hating) and relaxed compared with American actresses-- as they engage in candle lit supernatural hallway walking and weird noise investigating. Rebecca Hall--as a professional ghost-debunker lured to her existential Waterloo-- fits the bill. The movie around her aims in the direction of THE OTHERS, THE INNOCENTS, DEVIL'S BACKBONE, and THE WOMAN IN BLACK, and she aims for the stalwart company of Olivia Williams, Rhona Mitra, Kate Beckinsale, and Kierra Knightley. Bullseye on both counts. The setting and photography are evocative: a real old mansion of marble and crumbling plaster, greenish blue hues make it seem forever a cloudy dawn. Dominic West is suitably Rochester-esque as the superintendent. There's a kid with a distractingly awful haircut and a creepy dollhouse. You'll guess the twists a mile off, but that doesn't mean you don't like guessing. Just means you're good at it. So drink deep!

5:00 AM - PONTYPOOL (2008)

Dir. Bruce McDonald

It might not be as cold where you are as up in Pontypool, Canada (for the film's set in the dead of winter over one crazy-early morning local news radio time slot) but otherwise there's a lot of eerie meta sameness if you watch this film as the sun comes up outside: the special feeling when you and maybe none or two of your mates and only a few early risers and very very late-to-bedders are up and about in your time zone. You can at five AM spread you auric tentacles out and bask in the collapse of concrete consensual reality, which is like a whole alternate dimension, neither an asleep dream nor a conscious consensual reality. What really makes PONTYPOOL work so well in this mindset/time is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth in a frozen Ontario small town in the ver early early morning --still dark out, and no one else on the street, for the most part... Disgruntled talk radio host Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) begins to think the locals are all fucking with him as the calls coming in from early risers, each new call being more and more panicked, incoherent, and violent. Mazzy is a bit of a crusty handful and his producer (Lisa Houle) shows the wear and tear of humoring such a charismatic, witty but bitter and paranoid dude on a regular basis. The unfolding morning events are so organic it all unfolds in real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing any lapse. As the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality. Since we never leave the basement station, we're left to imagine most of the carnage in a kind of WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast in reverse.

In other words, while not being specifically super-duper scary, and always kind of funny (even romantic), at other times nearing almost over the line into full-on literary pretension, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and affect even your seeing it. It's like you could call in to Mazzy's show and maybe he'd answer onscreen, and tell you to turn down your TV, and you'd both realize you'd probably fallen asleep. It's okay... it's okay... itsooo kayyyy (more)

6:30 AM - HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959)

Dir. William Castle

William Castle prided himself on being the dime store spooky matinee knockoff Hitchcock, and his palpable love of his audience, spookiness and a good time for all help his films endure, like hazy childhood memories of parking lot haunted carnival rides --cheap and loud, but innocuous, fun, and capable of delivering the perfect aftershock of spooky-nostalgia. This his masterwork, as subtle as a skeleton on a string zooming over the heads of the popcorn tossing kiddies (a process called "Emergo" pronounced "emer-joe") and six degrees of terrific. Like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD it has a punchy energy that endures past any amount of public domain dupe streaking. Netflix's copy is adequate (you don't really want it to look too good) and, take it from me, six in the morning is the best time to see it, ideally with a ten year-old kid who just woke up and is sitting on the floor because you've been asleep, taking up his whole couch. Dude, where are you? What happened?

Elijah Cook Jr. gets drunk and babbles the grisly exposition; Vincent Price plays deadly games with his scheming wife (Carol Ohmart); the elderly caretakers, frozen in papier mache poses of carny ride menace, roam around in the dark on wheels; pistols in little coffins are handed out as party favors; there's two severed heads, and an animated noose. (see my first ever site, Dr. Twilite's Neighborhood, which includes this as part of its 50s Canon)

 8 AM - MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1971)

Dir. Gordon Hessler

The Grand Guignol meta effect is pronounced here, as it was in PENNY DREADFUL after it, and MAD LOVE before it. A movie about people performing dastardly deeds onstage is bound to echo. Here the troupe is re-imagining Poe's classic story: Now the ape is the hero and Herbert Lom gets acid thrown on his face (again?) but the audience of semi-bemused royals presume it's part of the show. If the ape looks familiar, it's because it smashed bones for Kubrick in 1968, spooked Joan Crawford as TROG in 1970, and now here it is, much the worse for moths and wear but still the only sympathetic face in the film (Did England have only one gorilla suit? Was it because Hop Toad burned the other one in 1964?).

Either way, it's a great mask, and it's director Gordon Hessler's finest hour, which doesn't say a lot. Unless you like fake mutton chops, ratty period costumes, a script that's just a few dull eps of THE AVENGERS taped together (without the actual Avengers - just the bad guys and their victims) juiced up with lurid tortures, and boozy British actors pretending they remember their lines and marks. Well, the Demoiselles are stunning and dressed in dusky reds and black lace chokers which radiate lovely haunting power in this HD print (making their acid scarring all the more painful); and even at low wattage, sleepy star Jason Robards is better than most; and the period mise en scene is at least at Hammer level toasty; and the budget relatively big (were they poaching other films' sets?) and there's galore post-modern leakage, which is why it's after PONTYPOOL. And if you fall asleep, well dream your way right in.... into the cage, that is, with Erich, the gorilla!

9:30 AM - BLACK SUNDAY (1965)

Dir. Mario Bava

I could do without the schmaltzy concert piano score or the misogynist torture of the opener, but the rest is great, and it's perfect Halloween fare. Lots of long pans and dollies across acres of ancient castle griffins and Barbara Steele standing or lying with eerie alien stillness and holes in her face. Even the 'good' Steele is spooky looking, like a reverse Rondo Hatton! This was Bava's big American calling card, and it's a perfect breakfast movie once the ugly taste of Catholic metal spikes is out of your mouth. The print used here is just so so, but it might inspire you to get the Blu-ray, to better savor the tactile, brilliant cinematography and dreamy dark fairy tale poeticism.

11:00 AM -HELLRAISER  (1987)

Dir. Clive Barker

This was just an innocent list but it's become about the actresses of Great Britain, more cigarette resonant and unabashedly sexual than most American girls depicted in films. this chick Julia (Clare Higgins) has the balls to ask for a brandy from her husband when she's sick, rather than refusing one with a dainty little 'eh' of a sneeze like a Yank bird; and it's pretty great the way she plays with a sadistic smile after her first kill, traumatized but hardly succumbing to the American tendency to play the glum martyr --though even now she says she's afraid of thunder, and worthless husband Larry is like, "I'll protect you!" not realizing she's already done and seen things that would turn him ashen. To bring his brother (her lover) back from the Cenobiteverse, for example, Julia gamely lures a string of grotty 70s-looking British business men on their three martini lunch hour up to the attic, where she bashes their heads in with a hammer so her love can slowly absorb their blood and put some meat on his bones, as it were. Her stepdaughter meanwhile (Ashley Laurence) is getting wise, and endangered by angler fish-esque demons and shit. She's cool too but with her beyond-morality pursuit of pleasure, unapologetic wit and intelligence, and her mature handling her body, Julia's exhibit A in what's lacking in so many similar American ladies, who tend to be youth-worshipping baby doll types until it's too late to dodge the Baby Jane mirror headlights (click this searing yet lovingly indulgent list that tracks them from Lolita to cougar). Think Julia gives a fuck her man's got no lips or skin? She'll shag him anyway just as he wouldn't care if she was in the thick of her period. Fookin' A. Oh yeah, the Cenobites themselves: not my bag, but I respect the analogy towards the masochism of the horror marathon viewer! If you've seen it lately, HELLRAISER 2 is pretty good too, even #3 is watchable, but it's a steep slope, human!

12:30 PM: LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1985)

Dir. Ken Russell

Keep the British lady thing going with this gem from Ken Russell, the colors on the Netflix are gorgeous. Amanda Donohoe is a tour de force, never camping or vamping but nailing, in every possible permutation that verb can be permuted, the most intoxicating upper crust broad since Stanwyck as the Lady Eve. Her snake goddess is what Auntie Mame always aspired to be but could never shake her ostentatious Americana baggahge. Familiar Scottish face Peter Capaldi is a summering archeologist who unearths a dragon skull; Hugh Grant, in his film debut, is great as the local lord-inherit who inherits too the burden of a giant white worm; the two local blonde sisters at the inn (Catherine Oxenberg and Sammi Davis) are fetching, smart, and crafty; and even the hallucination scene has a disturbing potency-- "she had a bad trip" -- notes Grant, after one of the sisters accidentally touches some of hallucinatory snake venom. No one ever says no to a drink anywhere in the film, thank god. Between this and his Chopin opposite Judy Davis in IMPROMPTU, Grant was melting hearts like only Cary Grant used to before him. There's also the hottest older woman-on-paralyzed younger boy seduction in film since Creedence Leonore Gielgud's in TROLL 2. So forgive the occasional silliness, such as the absurd fangs and charmed dancing of Paul Brooke, be charmed yourself.

2 PM - INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS

(1977) Dir. Phillip Kaufman

Let's face it, you're never going to make it this far in this bizarro festival -- the 'you' who began doesn't even exist anymore. A slough of cells, a weariness, probably passing out, falling asleep, and when you wake up, the you back in the cool raro moments at the crack of dawn with HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL are long gone. It's cool. I get it. Move on if you must, but make sure it's still you and there's not a shell of a being that was once or will be you under your pool table or cooling in your sauna, or in your garden, or in the crawlspace, or under your bed. And then put this on the 'stream and join the flow of ditrates and bata. And then read Poe's William Wilson. And weep...

And let's just say the HD print on Netflix looks damned good, which is important as Michael Chapman's photography is of that great 70s urban texture dilapidated period (he also did TAXI DRIVER), filled with great moments of alienation. San Francisco makes an ideal crucible for the dehumanization of 20th century society, the urban disconnect from your closest neighbors, and the cast includes: Leonard Nimoy as a pop psychologist; Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland as health inspectors on the run; Jeff Goldblum and a pre-ALIENS / post-BIRDS Veronica Cartwright as their mud bath-slangin' friends; and even Kevin McCarthy and Robert Duvall in moments of cameo stunt casting. See it with someone you love and then wonder...

4:00 PM - YOU'RE NEXT (2013)

Dir. Adam Wingard

Let's end on a cheerful, non-supernatural note... Scrappy Sharni Vinson is a great final-ish girl, full of wily Australian gumption in this tale of a besieged family reunion in the woods; it works because it recalls not just classics of the 70s and 80s, but classics of the 30s, i.e. the old dark house full of secret panels, greedy relatives gathered for the will, lightning storms, scary masks, strong female leads, no one who they seem, ironic karma, sudden twisting violence, moody Carpenter-esque synth soundtrack, and a refreshing lack of any moral compass. (MORE)

If you've recently seen any of the above, do substitute GRABBERS, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, SCREAM, SCREAM 2, BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, RE-ANIMATOR, JOHN DIES AT THE END, EVIL DEAD 2 (though it's got some slapstick, fair warning) and/or CABIN IN THE WOODS, CANDYMAN, or WITCHING AND BITCHING, or see them all later. And for God's sake, stay alert, lock your doors, keep watching the knobs and clutching the butcher knife or fire poker, and turn on a white noise machine or Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast to block the spooky noises of trees against the window, because they're not trees....