Up from the Meyer: GHASTLY LOVE OF JOHNNY X, EL MONSTRO DEL MAR, VELVET VAMPIRE, THE GIRLFRIENDS

The thrilling, dirty-kick drive-in fodder of yesteryear might be all that sustains we, the trash lovers, trapped like frozen rats in the cold digital now, so it's lucky for us the trove seems bottomless, and if we run out, it's possible to even go back into the past and make more. Dig those 'stressed' retro posters above and marvel - neither was made a day before 2010! Can you believe it? No ordinary cosmetic imitations, these! One finds a middle ground between 50s juvenile delinquent musicals and the Roger Corman aliens of Bronson Canyon; the other says fuck the middle ground and crashes a Faster Pussycat Kill Kill bomber into frickin' Loch Ness, like a kid bashing action figures of different scales into each other. Both fusions show a thorough love and knowledge of the films they're homage-ing, to the point that they make a solid post-retro double bill, or even a quadruple bill with two films from the actual drive-in era I discuss herein: a solid entry in the 'foursome of sexy babes hit summer vacation at a sunny lake hoping to score' genre, and a female-directed film about a female bisexual vampire...

But first... a note of caution: Handle with care and don't drop your guard.... . there are a lot of tough and sexy women going on in these films --their flesh soft, their curves wanton. And they will kill you.

EL MONSTRO DEL MAR

(2010) dir. Stuart Simpson

**3/4

Here, at last is a movie that actually delivers what all those lame stripper pole cash grabs like Bitch Slap and Cat Run promise - genuinely bad girls in groups, roaming loose. Starting out in Faster Pussycat black-and-white, the film erupts into color with the ladies' first throat slit (performed on an innocent male), letting us know right off that--while some 'bad' girls spend their time waiting for some sleaze bag to warrant their vengeance-- some girls consider any dude they meet fair game, an in-season blood orgy waiting to happen ---no provocation needed.

None shall escape, not even the kraken....

Needless to say,  we're in Australia. 

Occupying a punk rock zone between John Waters/Russ Meyer girl gang gutter camp and Roger Corman-Jack Hill strong female 'bare-breasted feminism', there's a refreshing amorality at play to help make up for the paucity of budget. By breaking the sanctified arrangement that says women protagonists can't kill without a reason (self defense mainly) and even then they have to cry afterwards, or be somehow damaged from it ("he t-t-t-tried to.... but I, I, I!"), the Monstro women say fuck that, they actually seem to have seen Russ Meyer and Jack Hill movies rather than being directed by them at the time. You can bet they don't carry soft drinks in their cooler, and if you get that reference, then you've probably seen Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! as many times as I have and will like this film. For example, these broads all carry folding knives in their boots, and when they sense danger, they just quiet down and walk towards it, silently reaching down, taking them out, and unfolding them, keeping them out and low as they slink, as naturally and subtly and without big music stings as you could ever hope for. It's so Hawksian I want to cry.

As the dark-haired leader, Baretta, Nelli Scarlett rocks a welcome drag queen edge - evoking Divine, Tura Satana, Mary Woronov, and Shirley Stoler, sometimes all at once; Karli Madden is in the Lori Williams role (the hard-partying semi-innocent still holding onto some measure of compassion); Kate Watts is the Haji (Baretta's right-hand bitch). They're all decked out in that retro 50s Trash and Vaudeville chic--bows, bangs, and black--which all might be too campy by half, but here it seems like their genuine style. Whatever thy are, they transcend time and fakery (this is all of their film debuts and they're joyously free of any kind of trite 'professionalism' or tedious polish). 

Remember your lines

While the it lacks Meyer's punchy editing, wild angles, film quality, and existentially gonzo Jack Moran dialogue ("like a velvet glove cast in iron!"), Monstro recoups somewhat via sheer perversity and the sense these girls must be pretty fun to hang out with in real life: their playful coked-up drunken banter and horseplay is naturalistic and real in the ways Meyer's wasn't. His women were big and strong, but it was clear they weren't deviating from an already gonzo script (the over-the-top acting worked because the lines were great: they could stand the tone-deaf shouting, they still hold up). Here, the lines are just okay but they feel natural, they're said, not read, yet you can feel the love of Meyer's film in their inflections. By the same token, these girls look like they drink a lot, and could fuck a man up no sweat and not even remember it the next afternoon when they wake up.

This kind of naturalism doesn't always work, especially if some old 'pro' joins the cast and can't tap into their same collective vibe. Unlike the great Stuart Lancaster in Faster, here the old man tied to this chair for life (Norman Yemm) is a little too old and dour to fit their rhythm, and so throws off the curve. Lancaster could do wonders with a line like "you girls nudists or are ya just short of clothes?" or "the train's late. Nothing's on schedule today!" he could match the larger-than-life action without overdoing it, and could contextualize and shape the less accomplished performers around him. Lancaster 'got' Meyere's vision perfectly. Here in Monstro it's clear old Yemm doesn't get it, or if he does he doesn't approve. Rather than going with the bend in the material he keeps trying to hammer it back to some kind of normality straightnes, like a dickweed pink instead of a stealth Bob Dobbs, gluing Humpty Dumpty back into an egg shape rather than --as the rest of the cast is making--a Julian Schnabel-style shell bit mosaic

Director Stuart Simpson also did his own cinematography (surprise surprise!), and while it's clearly just high-contrast HD video, it's nonetheless a welcome change of pace from that sun-bleached look SOVs take on when transferred to 35mm. His fellow retro-crap auteurs like Larry Blamire (Lost Skeleton of Cadavra) end up delivering what looks like a color video switched to black and white on FCP - there's no contrast or grain or silvery glimmer. Simpson, on the other hand, gives each setting its own look- it's clear he tinkered to get it right as best he could, so good on ya, mate: the black-and-white opener is crisp, the switch to color is cool and appropriate (ala the expanded version of Death-Proof), the scene of the girls stalking a noise through the shrubbery has a dreamy pastoral lushness that evokes Rollin or Malick; the seaside look is high contrast and darkly inviting; the interior of the beach shack feels like a real beach shack, the kind full of garage sale furniture and warped wood. Almost like the back of an Avenue B coffee shop, you can smell the dirty wet sand and sea water.  Moby Dick (Orson at the ship bow altar) is on the TV in one bit; Kyrie Capri who the girls introduce to drugs and alcohol so she'll grow up enough to tell her coward of a grandfather to fuck off (making her way cooler than the ever-cowering Susan Bernard in Pussycat). At night the ladies rock out to a cassette of Pinetop Smith and the monster is a mix of puppet and CGI rather than just the latter so what's not to love...or at least tolerate, como uno venganza? 

THE GHASTLY LOVE OF JOHNNY X

(2012) Dir. Paul Bunnell

***1/4

Bronson Canyon and its legendary 'Bat Cave' is a magical corner of Griffith Park that's been incorporated into hundreds of films, and never more perfectly than in the B-movie sci-fi of the 1950s where it stood in for Mars, the Moon, prehistoric Arizona, and so on, a perfect oasis of eerie prehistoric primordial wilderness in the middle of LA? It's not seen nearly as much these days, as green screens replace the world, but lo! Hark and looky here --out of the cool Bronson Bat Cave darkness and into the California sunshine comes a group of 50s gang members, the types with combs in their back pockets and matching jackets. Only dese guys is from space, hey? Hey, it's the legitimately weird and great retro 50s sci-fi rock musical from Paul Bunnell.

Shot on Kodak's lovely high contrast Eastman Plus-X Negative Film 5231 (Bunnell snagged the last rolls before it was discontinued), The Ghastly Love of Johnny X can stand proudly in that same super classy gorgeous black-and-white retro realm as Tim Burton's Ed Wood  and David Lynch's Elephant Man, which both got their black and white beauty from the same stock. In other words this isn't some Larry Blamire Lost Skeleton-style no-budget homage, where it's just HD video with the color drained out. This looks like a million bucks and it was (two in fact). So we're a long way from the basement.

The question is, how did such a cult classic-in-the-making wind up in the margin's margins? Maybe, like Plan Nine itself, it's just so far behind its time it's still ten years ahead.

The irrepressible De Anna Joy Brooks

Bunnell may not the first modern day auteur to reach into the tar pit of 50s low budget drive-in filmmaking--to fish out some preserved oil-slicked style and true rebellious anarchy still on the bone amidst the wealth of tail fins, tortoise shell sunglasses, tight skirts, jukeboxes, flying saucers and zombie frugging ---but there's no prize for first, especially in retro-homage. And while there's a smattering of musical theatricality with his cast, Bunnell is no fey poseur. His tale never backs down from the kind of dirt in the nice girl's face para-misogyny that would please Victor Jory in Cat Women of the Moon but would make Tim Burton loosen his skinny tie and blush.

You know me: my misogyny radar is rivaled only by NORAD, so if it doesn't go off for a film where a gang leader uses mental powers to force his exes face into the California desert parking lot, and who treats his adoring deserves-better second tier booty call like crap, then it's all good. It's like it would be with, say, John Waters, where the open-chested love is palpable no matter what horrible stuff is going on, so you're never worried or offended. As with Russ Meyer and El Monstro above, women are the strongest characters, like the tough Bobbi Socks (the too-cool Katherine Giaquinto), who (SPOILER) saves the day by dragging a Tor Johnson-meets-Bobby Moynihan skinhead named Sluggo (Jed Rowen) off a cliff. Yes Bobbi was my favorite, but then--as soon as she's off-camera, after dying to save Johnny... and Johnny!...  Johnny forgets all about her so he can mope over some (male) soda jerk too stupid to stay out of switchblade range. I wanted to scream at Johnny through the TV transistors, I wanted to scream "Hey Johnny! If you did sleep with Bobbi Socks and then let her take the literal fall to save you from the loathsome Sluggo then the least you can do is look down there and see if maybe she's still alive. Maybe shed one goddamned tear for Bobbi Socks! (I asked Bunnell about it and he says he kind of forgot about her when writing the script, but Bobbi Socks I got mad love for you! You deserved better). (END SPOILER). 

The main romance for our Johnny though, is the other strong woman, Bliss (De Anna Joy Brooks) a badass chick spouting the kind of tough girl aggressive maneater dialogue that might make even Russ Meyer sit up and take notes.... in his coffin! She's been cooling her heels in Bronson canyon with Johnny, "and his pack of jackals, for forty days and forty nights." She's restless and wants to take a bite out of Chip (Les Williams) the blank-faced soda jerk at a nearby diner, or at least take him out for a spin in her "motor rotor." Kate Maberly (right) shows up later as a moist-eyed young faun, enthralled with the Cramps-zombie Roy Orbison rockabilly star who might be Johnny's biological father (played and sung by ex-Seed Creed Bratton [The Office]); Heather Provost is the cool brassy wife of the club manager King Clayton (Phantasm's Reggie Bannister). There's also a special cameo from Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) as an alien judge in a Devo hat who sentences Johnny to Earth for his rebel ways (though he gets to take his gang with him, not sure if that's a reward or punishment).

Not very tall, but at least better looking than Eric Von Zipper,  Johnny X, (Will "Tromeo" Keenan) has the sunglasses and facial structure of a (Warhol era) young Lou Reed and knows just when to overact and hog the stage and when to underact and let other cast members shine around him. I liked his moment of sad confession to a literally dead-drunk Creed in a truly beautifully-lit backstage dressing room. Shimmering in the deep black of the Eastman Plus stock, the scene glows with the same spooky smoky decay as the back rooms of Kubrck's The Killing.

Ego Plum (Frieda Kahlo's grandson)'s score-- full of theremins, booming brass, crashing timpani, wailing harmonies and lurid synth notes--is enough to make Danny Elfman hide under the bed and vow to never be retro again. As for the songs, they're about what you'd expect for the most part, trailing into fantasy numbers with Johnny and the gang: the choreography's groovy without being showy; the singing voices are properly mixed so you can decipher every lyric (a rarity, even in the best of these endeavors) and everyone's on the same jazzy theater geek page as they dovetail from 'reality' into Off-Broadway Expressionism with a faux-50s Grease (if Travolta's gang were composed of members of the Cramps) patina.

The best (diegetic) music comes from old Creed, who represents all that's wrong, weird and wondrous about this goofy corner of the desert world. His craggy face seems born to play dead under such brilliant black-and-white photography and he brings all his ex-Seeds rock star sadness to bear (and that sadness is mighty, believe you me) to this newly dead creature of the night.

Also worth mentioning: the special effects involving Johnny's crazy astro suit--powered up through the rock club soundboard, and/or zapping people: these effect don't feel CGI at all but retro analog delicious. Even without the stereo on you can feel the power surging in your belly and those rings of lightwaves are truly magical - all the more so for not being overused. In short, if there's a just god in the 50s ceramic oven of heaven, Ghastly Love of Johnny X--that cake of equal parts Wood, Waters and Grease, all wrapped in Roger Corman dough--shall finally rise to sainthood in the cult classics pantheon. Do herself a favor, friend. Go Ghastly.

THE ROOMMATES

(1973 ) Dir. Arthur Marks

***

The "quartet or trio of hottie young things having summer flings across a wide age/class spectrum" genre stretches back to the 30s' Gold Diggers series (and then disappeared some time in the 90s, only seen recently in Tarantino's Death-Proof), but don't let that stop you from believing it all began with The Valley of the Dolls when you're digging Arthur Marks' spritely 1973 masterpiece The RoomMates. The girls even use the phrase "beyond the Valley of the Dolls" in some of the Laugh-In derived, cut-on-the-punchline 'modern women sexual mores' soundbytes. Kind of a Russ Meyer for the normal proportions / hot bare midriff set, Marks knew the sexual oomph an alpine mountain setting could provide, that aggressive female sexuality could be portrayed in a positive way, and how to hit all the right drive-in points without sacrificing momentum, wit, and flair. The RoomMates comes in the middle of a three film roll beginning with Bonnie's Kids and ending Detroit 9000 (all the same year). All of them are good, but best served in the right mood: Detroit is for when you're in a Joe Rocco mood; Bonnie's Kids is for when you're in a Bolling phase; but RoomMates is for whenever you need soothing fir tree-flanked mountain lakes and eye-candy/crush-worthy distraction. 

That's what I need. Here, in fall of 2015, my girlfriend just moved out and the panic attacks a feminine presence never fails to allay come fast and relentless; the autumn darkness comes earlier and earlier; and now, alone now in my haunted mansion, the existential panic kicks in like an old familiar enemy --the blue devil Deborah Kerr speaks of in Night of the Iguana --the eternal nagging constant. 

Luckily, the free-spirited, sexually-active girls of The RoomMates are an eternal balm to that lonesome. And like Russ Meyer, Jack Hill, and Roger Corman, Marks loves strong women, and gorgeous mountain lake scenery. There are groovy 70s cars and giant old growth fir trees, and that decade's wondrously more open-shirted, less dehumanizing, approach to straight sex hookups. so what's not to live for? I went into it feeling cold, self-pitying, isolated and miserable, and by the time it was over I felt like I just got back from a casual vacation in the Catskills. 

So here's a rundown: AIP WIP blonde mainstay Roberta Collins thinks she's found love with an older rich divorced swinger, but she rushes it too much --with predictable results; Marki Bey (Sugar Hill) displays her witty brand of overacting while working for the summer at the local library, where she soon falls for a cool black cop (though it means dumping her white boyfriend - twist!); Pat Woodell sleeps with the same polecat married loser every time she comes up (as he sleazily mentions they've been having these trysts since she was sixteen); her younger cousin (Christina Hart) is staying there for the summer--and drawing the eye of that same sleazy pole-cat, much to Woodell's anger. She takes it out on an itinerant hipster handyman (he tries to get her to let her guard down but the pole cat's left her pretty jaded). And there's a killer on the loose.   

Hottest of them all though (my special crush - left): Laurie Rose - as a counsellor at all-boys camp. She pays 'special attention' to the boy too shy to make friends, but doing so in a midriff and form-hugging hiking shorts shorts camp ensemble, seems like the worst form or torture. What is she trying to do, drive those lads insane? She seduces one of her charges for no other reason than he's shy! What is the phrase about the happy camper? Sigh, remember when winning the heart of a cute older girl was possible solely by being shy and awkward? Oh, 70s, come back!

I was only five when The RoomMates came out, the slasher boom was years away, but Marks saw ahead: a killer at Camp Arrowhead makes for a great half-way through semi-side plot, offering both a genuinely scary (lots of good deep dark night shots) midnight knife chase and later a hilarious sniper massacre at a groovy country club party on the veranda. You'll guess the killer early if you're an astute cineaste, but it doesn't matter; the party never stops and everyone has enough material when they head back to school to "write ten books!" Yeah, says Collins, "but have we really suffered?" Weird last line, considering the massacre, but hey, those killings spice it up, aren't too vile or misogynist in their executions (rather reflecting yet another maladjusted attitude towards sexual desire), and the callous way that a rash of murders does nothing to dampen anyone's glib resort town spirit prefigures Scream and makes all Brody's fuss over closing beaches and mayoral meddling seem like girly hysterics.

The Gorgon Blu-ray (doubled with Marks' inferior --but still pretty good-- A Woman for all Men) is flawlessly restored, so Harry J. May's peerless photography and the gorgeous lakefront scenery can really reach out and smooth even the most ruffle-damaged of feathers, and I should know. Laurie Rose Laurie Rose... you are the 70s to me, just as seductive, just as natural, and just as gone.

THE VELVET VAMPIRE

(1971) Dir. Stephanie Rothman

***

The box office success of Hammer's 1970 Vampire Lovers proved to even the most conservative backers that the world was finally ready for an openly sexy lesbian vampire movie; and so they came, a cloud of blood-drinking bats opening the veins of 1971. Nearly ever one of them is an adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 lesbian vampire novella Carmilla (it pre-dated Stoker's Dracula by 26 years!). Like Dracula is now, at the time, Le Fanu's piece was public domain, so there was a pre-set blueprint. But of the many variations, The Velvet Vampire (AKA Cemetery Girls) is the only one I know of that's directed by an actual woman, Corman company regular Stephanie Rothman. That makes it special to begin with, and then it goes from there.

Celeste Yarnall plays the (bisexual) vampire, Diane LeFanu (!). She can move around in the daytime, which saves a lot of money on lighting (see also Franco's Vampyros Lesbos) and she likes couples rather than just girls, which ensures her take-out order for the weekend includes the interested and hunky Lee (Michael Blodgett) as well as his reluctant girlfriend Suzy (Sherry Miles). They meet at mutual friend Stoker's (!) gallery show and are promptly invited for a wild weekend to Diane's remote desert hideaway. Suzy is not keen on going to some mysterious femme's pad in the middle of nowhere. Neither would we, of course, in her shoes; but Lee's hooked, and Suzy doesn't want to seem either square or permissive.

I relate to her woeful misgivings about the situation. Especially since getting sober, I'm terrified of being stranded in the middle of nowhere. bored out of my skull but unable to escape, as some lecherous comfortable-in-his-own-skin host makes the least veiled moves on my girlfriend (or vice versa). (Mine was in Cordoba, Argentina. You know who you are).

Anyway, the drive out is very interesting, as the world of LA disappears in endless flat scrub brush and desert hills. Yarnall isn't the sexiest vampire lesbian (or even the coolest) but she can ensure some communal wild dream sequences which--a rarity--prove as important to the story as the film's core reality. They also succeed in proving that a floor length mirror standing in the middle of the desert is worlds of cool (though Rothman apparently borrowed it from Jack Hill after working with him on Blood Bath). If you add a Touch of Evil headboard, and Diane LeFanu in flowing red robes watching you in the conscious world through a two-way mirror sitting next to a skull as you sleep, you got a nocturnal blur between worlds I can get into. Perhaps a meta-echo of Rothman herself watching the rushes, layering her hungry staring together with their desert mirage-dream (which they wake up and share, realizing they had the same dream, like the lovers in Midsummer Night).

This film aired frequently on early Saturday morning TV when I was growing up and I never understood what was going on in it, though the title promised a lot. I'm sure it was edited near to death and there was very little 'monsterness' as my dad called it, neither velvet nor vampires to be found, and I was too young to get any references, sapphic (which would have been edited out) or otherwise. All I remember is the yellow dune buggy and the blonde haired lad (Michael Blodgett) and his doleful girlfriend, lolling in bed, and the glare of the red dress amidst the desert scrubs. Now on a great Shout DVD, the red dresses worn by Diane and the yellow of the dune buggy really pop amidst the desert gold and brown, and the score--a haunting Jimi Page-style Middle Eastern slow tempo cycling acoustic guitar (an unbilled Grass/Dollarhide) with some rushing whoozy blood thinning synth drones--tap a deep psychedelic plaintiveness that makes those weird dreams vibrate on a whole other level. There's also a great old blues man (an unbilled Johnny Shines) singing "Hellhounds on my Trail" at Stoker's art opening.

All in all, Rothman brings a unique feminine energy anyone can relate to even if it throws some of us male viewers off our game. We're not used to seeing the gender reverse of Universal horror templates, with the heavy-lidded beauty of Michael Blodgett kind of put forth as the object of desire (ala say the shirtless boys in Twilight), and his girlfriend just the frosting, so to speak, rather than the cake itself. And the chief 'sadistic gaze' supplied by an ageless woman. 

What's more noticeable now, too, is how Lee's slowly mounting, increasingly desperate attempt to escape the house goes from distractedly dismissing Suzy's worry as mere veiled jealousy, to trying to steal Diane's dune buggy; Blodgett ably outpaces David Manners' similar escalation of panic in The Black Cat and this sequence proves itself the most indelible bit of the film, acting-wise. If you've ever spent a weekend as part of a couple invited to someone's remote house and then couldn't escape for whatever reason (I have), then you'll agree: Rothman's film gets it all very right. There's also a cool nocturnal chase climax that leads from the desert to the bus back to LA, and through the bus station as Diane relentlessly, patiently, stalks her prey.

The most remarkable sequence however is surely the one in Diane's bedroom where she seduces each member of the couple in turn, using the exact same rap, with the exact same sincerity, one after the other. Remember it the next time you see Tim Curry's sweet transsexual pull the EXACT same thing on Janet Weiss and Brad in Rocky Horror Picture Show a few years later. So way to go, Stephanie Rothman! This film may not achieve any notable greatness, or have a Rocky Horror cult pedigree, but it's just as gender-bent transgressive in its own way. Rothman gets top marks for being the first lady director of the Corman's New World, give a few slyly Byron-esque pointers on smoov to sweet transvestites from Transylvania, and going deep into the heady world wherein seduction and destruction are inseparable, even under blazing sun of the desert in the mirror, or the dead of day-for-night.  (2)

NOTES:
1. Five aces, partner (that's a whaddaya call a finesse)
2."I'm very tired of the whole tradition in western art in which women are always presented nude and men aren't. I'm not going to dress women and undress men – that would be a form of tortured vengeance. But I certainly am going to undress men, and the result is probably a more healthy environment, because one group of people presenting another in a vulnerable, weaker, more servile position is always distorted" - Rothman (1973 interview)

It's here, it's mindbending, it's Acidemic #8

This issue: Brecht-Godard-Wood, linked circlets connecting the search for freedom through 'dislodging' cinematic signifiers and turning bare soundstages into ghost ships and surrealist basements. This year's stellar line-up batted down the plate and strewn orchids on the grave of logic.

If through the issue you notice very little Godard, know this: Godard is in all things whether we speak of him or no. There is no going straight from Brecht to Wood. I tried. But my own understanding of film studies comes roundabout through Godard's dedication to Monogram Pictures (whose Return of the Ape Man is discussed) at the start of Breathless. 

Ed Wood by Mick Baltes

Also in this mighty issue: Peter K. Tyson decodes the Brechtian intertexutality of Fassbinder's Lola; teenage Molly Marie Wright rages against the empty-headed CGI of the Total Recall remake vs. the paravegan grandeur of Troll 2. Intertextual frisson erupts as Thomas Duke challenges Roger Ebert's perception of 'flaws' in Edgar G. Ulmer's poverty row classic Detour; Chris Stengl exhumes Pauline Kael's 'lost' review of Plan Nine from Outer Space, and I lament the dryness of David Sterritt's Les Carabiniers commentary track. Film historian David Del Valle discusses the joys and inaccuracies of Tim Burton's Ed Wood while acclaimed Nuyorican poet Tracie Morris expresses her misgivings over Burton's Dark Shadows and praises the original 1,000+ episode TV show. We get insightful probes into the basement surrealism of both Val Letwon's The Ghost Ship (from Ethan Spigland), and Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (from Budd Wilkins). Gregory Cwik discusses metatextual threads in horror via Cabin in the Woods, and I through Halloween.... and through the valley of the shallows of Brecht, we shall find Woodsy depth.

And we learn how Godard's Prénom Carmen explains the truth about UFOs, for, as the great Eros would say, "you didn't actually think you were the only inhabited planet in the universe? How can any race be so stupid?"

And check out Memento Mori, the staggeringly detailed historical action figure comic by our cover artist, Mick Baltes.

So close to Heaven: MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)

Spider women, giant spiders, Angelo Rossitto (and other little people), Dolores Fuller (supposedly), babes with mop wigs and antennae shooting people up with hypos at the telepathic command of Jackie 'Uncle Fester' Coogan (as the mysterious "Dr. Aranya"), a sexy barefoot Latin dancer with lovely big dancer legs doing the tarantella at a vividly-etched cantina: an escaped lunatic with messianic leanings who hijacks a rich man's private plane and--as Michael J. Weldon puts it, does a weird Elmer Fudd impersonation, and some good drinking moments, the sort that seem written by a  drinker, the way Hawks' movies are, (when these actors take a swig out of a bottle, they wince, shiver, and exhale in a gush of sudden medicinal warmth --the sort of shot-taking reactions one almost never sees in movies, alas); befitting the drunk/hungover (or 'drunkover', as in the 'hellevan' that comes with a long 'bingebender'), almost no outdoor scenes are shot outdoors (aside from the desert landing field and a few mesa exteriors), the 'mesa exterior itself is all on a big set which a crashed plane characters walk in and out of. Add these astounding elements together with random disregard for audience sanity and if you're lucky, you get The Mesa of Lost Women! It's by the amazing Ron and Mrs. Ormond, whose tentacles, the Astounding B-Monster notes: "tap into everything from 'adult' sex-dramas, like Please Don't Touch Me, to a string of Lash LaRue westerns released by PRC in the late forties," and evangelical films too. I've seen very few of those but seen Mesa millions of times and love it more every time. It rocks, like the flat-topped tower of stone from which it gets part of its crazy name.

I forget the writer, but someone wrote of the Rolling Stones' 1972 album, Exile on Main Street: "It kicks ass though it can barely stand." Mesa of the Lost Women is like that: it can't walk, though it has eight legs; it's got no bite, yet oozes tasty venom. It's up there with the greats. When I was drinking, I used to watch it over and over, on a 6-hour VHS tape I made that ran as follows: Brain that Wouldn't Die (missing the first 20 minutes), Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, Spider Baby, Mesa of Lost Women, Cat Women of the Moon - the best 6 hour tape ever! rewind - hit it again, laddie, and open another bottle of bourbon, another six hours of spider women, cat women, crazy women... life was so good.

Well, it's still good, even sober. The high is insane; the cool night air of the desert is invigorating. You just need to use it only when needed, as it will get you through any crisis. Just listen to drunken Lyle Talbot's ominous narration and learn how miraculous it was that within the vast wasteland of the Muerto Desert you were found at all. Let the oil prospectors sweep you up into their jeep, give you some water and salt tablets, and hear you spin this woebegone web of a tall 'table land' tale. It's the best elements of both drinking and AA meetings rolled into one. 

The Image DVD I have is apparently sourced from the film's only surviving print, one laden with aesthetically pleasing emulsion damage, jarring scotch tape splices, jumps and scratches at a level of near-Brakhage abstraction. Who knows if any scenes are missing? The music too has a kind of Burroughs-style random tape collage expermental accidental artiness: two-fisted piano bashes it out with a weirdly-miked Spanish guitar. They circle around each other in a mix of slowly giddy creeping around and pouncing on each other with a sudden lurch.  Also used in Wood's Jail Bait, it ranks with the ominous thunder chimes of Elmer Bernstein's Robot Monster score in its ability to trigger a medicinal rush of pleasure to any experienced Woodsman.  I could listen to it all my life, and have!  Though cited as 'bad' by some, it may be, in a lot of ways, just that but it is still worth watching a dozen times.

I could go into detail: Lyle Talbot delivers a stirring voiceover about its perils.  At the oil company office, the girl, Doreen (Paula Hill) sacks out on the couch and the man relates their incredible story to beloved drinking partner Lyle Talbot (in a pith helmet). It's the ragic saga of endocrinolotist Dr. Leland (Hammon Stevens) and his arrival at the mesa of the mysterious Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan). Deep in the middle of La Muerte, Aranya has transplanted glandular secretions and made spiders into tall women and women into giant spiders. Leland is horrified. That's a shame for Leland. 

Years or minutes later, Dr. Leland escapes the Mexican insane asylum he's been residing at, somehow (I like to think it's the same one SUSANA escapes from) and gets a drink ("the very best") at a local cantina where a spider woman named Tarantella (Tandra Quinn) does her namesake dance for agog patrons. She has big toned legs like a real dancer and struts barefoot around in the sawdust, her moves corresponding tightly with the music -another rarity.) Leland shoots her. We're not as shocked as the others since he recognizes her from Aranya's lair. Tarantella dies lonely and forlorn while horrified patrons stand around, not helping her, and George (George Barrows), Leland's handler, tells everyone not to rush him as he's a dangerous loon.

In Psychotronic, Michael Weldon calls Leland "a lobotomized scientist doing a weird Elmer Fudd impersonation." It's not really a Fudd impersonation, but having read and re-read that sentence many times as a kid before actually seeing the film, it's tough to think of Leland any other way. And he lives up to and succeeds my years of expectations. With his endlessly off-kilter accentuation, Reid Fleming square nose and a mouth that freezes in a toothy smile in every scene he's in, he becomes the dispassionate existential core of the film. One mis-accentuated Leland quote which always pops into my head at odd moments: "Now we will all fly!" or "this is my order" or "the sick I shall heal!" He makes a good contrast with the other, human, people in the plane: the handsome hero Allan Nixon, the bald older millionaire, bitchy trophy wife-to-be, aphorism-ridden Asian houseboy, and George ("I'm his nurse, miss.")

Once crash landed on the mesa, the gang all have a stiff drink which from the airplane bottle, which ---when you're drinking alone while watching at five AM (the best way to see it)--is a great cheery scene; then they wait around by the fire, exploring strange screams in the darkness, going out to investigate one at a time, or holding hands in a long kind of conga line reminiscent of the constant foreground walking in a row done by the astronauts in Cat Women of the Moon. so they can get killed off by mismatched cutaway shots of leering little people, a giant leaping tarantula, and blank-eyed beauties culled from the dustiest recesses of Burbank. Every time someone else dies the survivors return to the fire and drink some more. Each time it is a great cheery moment to drink along with.  The dwindling survivors wish they had some food, and Leland seems to think he's still at the hospital with a tray of dinner due to arrive any time soon: "George will bring it." 

"He always does."


Suffice it to say, Mesa is the best. The sick it shall heal. 

For more Ed Wood Blogathan, dig also my NIGHT OF THE GHOULS piece on Bright Lights
The Cinema Styles Ed Wood roster is here
Post Script 3/11/16 - Just discovered Doug Bonner's great piece, w/ full movie streaming here)

The Patron Saint of UHF

(Part of the Ed Wood Blogathon). Like many of the older Ed Wood fans out there, I first came to him via those weird circular UHF antennae that existed long before cable and VHS. Back then you had to tune in the UHF channels -- local channels that showed the news, the local TV shows, and lots and lots of great old black and white horror movies -- like you would a radio station. Sometimes the picture was bad, sometimes it was worse, and standing there twisting tin foil around to connect the antennae to the your leg for example, was not uncommon, especially during bad weather.

Many of the horror films they showed regularly were really boring, especially if you were too young to understand 90% of the plot. Many directors for poverty row were drunks and lazy asses, like William "One Shot" Beaudine, so most of the time they just had a newspaper reporter smirking while they tried to keep him in focus. If you were lucky, maybe there'd be a gorilla suit or a guy in a mask towards the end. There was a film they always showed called The Invisible Ghost. The trick title's no lie: ain't no ghost, just Bela waiting until people fall asleep and then killing them by waving his coat over their heads. It's torturous to see that sort of thing on a sunny Saturday afternoon when you should be out playing. Before you learn there's no ghost you have long commercial breaks to wait through and you hold on thinking a monster's got to show up eventually, but one never does... and then dad comes home and flips it to golf.

Ed Wood wasn't like that. He was the bright shining light amidst all that sadness, the patron saint of UHF, cramming enough monsters in every film to rocket any five year-old straight into monster heaven. That was the 1970's, though... and once Wood made it to digital, and we grew up, then what?

In the forgiving fuzziness of bad receptions, the strings holding the UFOs in Plan Nine are invisible; you can't see the folds in the black cloth that constitutes the graveyard turf. In the clarity of DVD, however, Wood's threadbare aesthetic enters a whole new realm of sadness, beyond the bleak heartache of The Invisble Ghost and into some shit so Brechtian even Brecht would cry like a frightened little Deutsche bitch to see it. When you can see every brush stroke on the painted rocks walling Lugosi's laboratory in Bride of the Monster, then you have seen too much, not unlike the witnesses at the real-life Plan Nine of Roswell 1947. It's the bad movie lover equivalent of going into a black hole.

It didn't matter that it looked fake --what came through the TV was blurry enough to begin with. When you're a kid in the 1970s, and CGI is still a few decades off, you don't care that things aren't realistic, you don't even know what real is, you can't tell--unless you mean the bugs you're looking for in the dirt under the porch--everything else is vivid imagination--if it can fill in every creak of the stairs at night with evil boogie man whispers, and can invest a handful of different sized army men with a grand adventure schematic using a twin bed as the cliffs below the Guns of Navarone, then you don't care if the saucers on TV are hubcaps --you barely notice. What you care about is that--while 90% of the monster movies you love is just filler--waiting for the monster to show up--because you don't understand or care about adult 'dialogue' or 'themes' --then when you have Dracula, Tor, a hot chick vampire AND flying saucers and aliens all in one movie--brother, you have a new favorite. With Bela and Tor Johnson together, for example, you didn't even need a giant octopus, that's why Ed Wood was so awesome -- he made sure you got one anyway. PRC and Monogram sure as hell weren't about to sneak into some other studio's prop department and steal an octopus, not when they felt they could get away with Lugosi and an overcoat, some grown dull men in grey fedoras and a few threadbare mansion rooms and then just blah blah blah til goddamned enough time has elapsed to call it a B-.

Like all the other horror films in UHF rotation, Plan Nine and Bride of the Monster were shown usually on early weekend mornings, while you were still supposed to be in bed. Nothing was better than getting up before everyone else on a 70's Saturday morning and finding them waiting for you, hours before the cartoons began-- just you -- no one else probably up for miles all around, but light enough the real monsters in the hallway and closet were all long gone. With the combined fuzziness of the picture and your still half-asleep mind, it was literally a weird kid's dream come true.

In fourth grade, I remember running home to get a baseball glove on a sunny, lovely fall afternoon and noticing BRIDE OF THE MONSTER was on. One look at those crazy tentacles and suddenly I had to stop and stay, ignoring my friend's angry calls and the pull of the sunshine. In that key moment, the dark path towards this blog was begun. When I saw Nightmare of Ecstasy on the shelves randomly at a bookstore in New Hope, PA, around 1991, I thought I had died and gone to sweet velvet curtained hell. No one was really celebrating him much at the time. Tim Burton must have felt the same way, because that book became the basis for the movie. I remember clenching my flask on a dim routine Saturday matinee of Ed Wood, and when the crowd cheered as Bela tossed the bottle and jumped boldly atop the lifeless rubber octopus, the whole audience broke into applause. I cried. My basement hero had made it to the top of the tower. Say what you will about his later years penchant for alcoholism and pornography, Ed Wood was a king among men, his strange stories real and true. He stuck to his weird guns and now he's immortal. And don't even doubt that he's an American hero. Landing at D-Day is one thing, but doing it in ladies underwear, now that's guts! Sometimes guts is enough.

And liquor.

(Read my Christmas 2008 celebration of Plan Nine here)

A Plan 9X-Mas

There's something timelessly relevant about Ed Wood's Plan Nine From Outer Space, which makes it perfect holiday viewing for the entire family (once the eggnog has worked its late night magic). I've seen this film all my life in one form or another, my first big memory of it being on UHF TV at around six in the morning when I was probably six years old. You couldn't argue with a movie like Plan Nine if you were that young, and if any film was meant to be tuned on via the weird UHF TV antenna that used to sit on top of the TVs before cable, this was it, wavering in and out of reception, the white noise obscuring the cheapness of the production. It had everything I loved in one film: science fiction mixed with vampires, zombies, Lugosi, Vampira, Tor Johnson, Criswell, all perfectly entwined in a plot so outlandish only a kid in his pajamas, up before his parents on a Sunday morning, could ever possibly hope to truly understand it.

Over the years, Plan Nine has only grown in stature, thanks to the efforts of Tim Burton (Ed Wood), horror magazines, and maverick film critics like Michael Medved and John Stanley (though they both seem to despise Ed Wood for "mocking" Lugosi's legend via the "can" of old posthumous footage). Much has been written about the Plan, much has been celebrated. But we've still got a long way to go before we get it right. That's what we're here for, to learn.

For one thing, there's a great pace and focus on the "good stuff" in Plan Nine. Unlike Wood's other films, there's no long pointless police station scenes and annoying comic relief. Sure, there's Wood mainstay Paul Marco's bumpling Kelton the cop, but even he is relatively under control. And anyway, we all love him (Marco, if you're reading this, your signed photo is on my wall) And if you are both a fan of movie monsters, and a fan of Godard or Brecht, you can revel in the lovingly mismatched day-for-night shots, the ridiculously sparse sets (the space ship interiors are empty sets with old ham radio junk on top of card tables, like some popular mechanics flea market of the damned) and that just makes you appreciate it all the more. It's like a present that comes to you already opened and played with--one of the arms may even be broken off--but for some reason that doesn't negate its value. Since it's no longer hermetically sealed it's connected to the vast panoply of other things under the tree. In receiving an opened present you essentially receive all of the world. Is this not, in the end, the fullest realization of Brecht's post-modern aesthetic? In accenting rather than concealing the theatricality, the narrative is mysteriously deepened in importance rather than lessened. What better gift for a six year old Prometheus than such precious alchemical irony?

You could argue that the hubcap spaceships are cheesy, for example. But why would you do that? They look cheesy in real life, as the recently declassified photos make evident. And the most amazing, topical aspect is still that what you have seen in heard not only has happened, but has yet to happen but will in fact happen in the future. As the Obscurantist rightly notes:

"That Plan 9 uses the most B of movie tropes to convey its message adds a layer of self-performative complexity which puts much high artistic output to shame. Looking back, we realize that the questions posed by the worst movie ever made”have resounded with sinister power across the socio-political landscape of the last half century."

Back in 1959 Ed Wood was the first to declare that the government was suppressing UFO knowledge, and that craft had been shot down by the government in battles over Hollywood and Washington DC. Would this horrifying truth be withstandable in any other format but Wood's midnight claptrap Hollywood spookshow? It would not. I lost this great book I used to have (by Bruce Rux) that postulated the government clandestinely employed Ed Wood to make this film intentionally bad while telling the truth, as part of a campaign of disinformation. It's totally crazy. But I believe it. So should you, and when pressed for the perfect late-night drunk-on-eggnog family film, may I recommend you should reach for Plan Nine from Outer Space? There may be no better way to prepare your family for the coming calamities. As Criswell once said:

"We once laughed at the horseless carriage, the aeroplane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio, and even television! And now some of us laugh at outer space. God help us… in the future..."

My pharmacist dad STILL laughs at vitamins, but aside from that, it's all good, all true and yes, Virginia, as long as that truth is told in spookshow basement B-movie form, the Plato's cave shadow, Perseus's Medusa mirror format, then yes, your heart can stand the horrible truths about... graverobbers from outer space.