THE BIG CUBE (1969) - Lana Turner and the Unscrupulous Doser

Acid has long been considered a safe, healthy, happy, spiritually freeing drug  --at least by me in the late 1980s. But even then, as a mere sprat, I was conscientious and careful, ever aware of the mind-bending, never-ending roller coaster of terror that results from taking even a quarter-tab too much. This is not to mention the left-out feeling of boredom and missed opportunity that results from taking too little, which can lead to taking more before the first ones have kicked all the way in, bringing you from an enervating semi-glow to a terrifying descent in a flash.

A very, very powerful substance is our friend LSD: one drop can set your soul free to caper through inter-dimensional levels beyond time and space; two can make you god-like. Five drops and you better get sloppy drunk... fast --or, if no one can spare a Valium, you can always chug some Nyquil before the demons get you.

Imagine then, the danger when sending someone to heaven or hell all depends on the whims of an unscrupulous doser! The difference between 1-3 or 4-6 drops from a dropper, dispensed at a crowded beatnik bar; the person holding the dropper over your tongue is drunk, malicious, and mad at you for stealing his girl and knocking over his bong! He could send you to the psych ward just by squeezing a hair harder than usual.

Chakris advises his ant client on proper dosage

The CIA did some notorious experiments in that regard: much clawing out of eyes and off of faces ensued. Even if you know what you're getting into (which the CIA test subject did not) you're liable to claw your way through your face before you make it to the ER and its waiting drip of sweet, sweet Thorazine and/or sweet sweet Ativan.

Still, even the face-clawing demons can be 'an experience.' I remember one or two of my more depressed voyagers (the winters up at SU could be brutal) taking like half a sheet of blotter in a last ditch effort to break through the veil before the depression made them do something even more desperate (this being long before Prozac's popularity). Most who did this wound up hospitalized. Not me, though! I ended up watching Nightline on a goddamned crappy TV all night, no other channel tune-innable (we didn't have cable, or a VCR as yet), trapped in a black and white nightmare hell.. oh god, I can't even think about it. Like Scotty on the Vertigo ledge I feel like I'm still back there, stuck with Ted Koppel's voice as the same few stories played in endless loop through to dawn. Save me, Pamela Rogers!

Pamela Rogers (left) almost saves Lisa from being a stone drag 

A similar thing occurs with the maligned 'ropies' i.e. Rohipynol. Today it's stigmatized as 'the date rape drug,' in the context of--as assumed by the average anxious suburban parent--vicious frat boy parties where it's given to freshman naifs in grain alcohol punch without their knowledge. Yes, with too high a dosage it can knock you out and leave you to the mercy of horny misogynist dickweeds, but if the dose is right it merely removes all inhibitions and hang-ups --and only mildly impairing memory and motor coordination. And all our girl friends were into it. Starting an orgy without some in the mid-80s in my scene was almost unheard of. But then when you're that high, just rubbing against each other in a giant, semi-clothed pile, is pretty amazing. A half a pill makes for a dynamite Halloween party; a whole pill, however, makes it suddenly three days later, and you check your phone (or at the time I'm writing about, answering machine), there's 30 angry messages from your boss.

All of which is a preface to the candy-colored opus of bargain basement glitz and 'now generation' posing known as THE BIG CUBE. An underrated camp classic from '69, year of Manson, it stars Lana Turner as a former Broadway star living the high life in a Mexico-L.A. hybrid with her new wealthy industrialist husband (Dan O'Herlihy) and his sheltered 'pure' stepdaughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg), who dresses like she's still 12 and heading to her first church social.

Lisa reacts not well to the new step-mom, and in a passive-aggressive moment of naivete even takes up with a smooth-talking med student played by George 'you came with your mouth / open' Chakris and his gang of former lovers, hairy clowns, and hipster pallies, including the sly and sinous Bibi (Pamela Rogers). The blog by Captive Wild Woman (from whom I cribbed many of these screenshots) loves Pamela Rogers in this film, and I totally dig she digs it:

Saving it all from becoming a big snore-fest is Pamela Rodgers as Bibi... I could never convey the fantastic bubble-brained delivery she strives to deliver so expertly. I LOVE all scenes featuring Bibi and only wish the entire movie revolved around her. (more)

Alas, Bibi is only on the periphery, as the story has places to go, and people to drive crazy. Chakris' med student status apparently means he has unlimited access to commercial grade LSD and, since he uses it for evil, he's a dangerous mix of Manson and a SHAMPOO-style fortune climbing gigolo. LSD wasn't officially illegal until around '68 and before then was used quite successfully for all matter of psychiatric treatments (with great effect, making its banning the true crime), so at the time of the film it was no harder to get than, say, 4-Loco. And when the dad conveniently dies in an off-camera yachting accident the stage is set for the unscrupulous doser and Lisa to drive the already shaken Lana over the edge via a massive LSD infusion into her bedside Valium bottle.

An interesting comparison can be made between this film and the AIP title ANGEL, ANGEL DOWN WE GO! (1968), which also concerns a sheltered heiress getting too involved with the now generation and letting a charismatic young cult leader type convince her to arrange the death of her rich parents (Jennifer Jones fills the fading trophy / absentee mom role in ANGEL) and let his gang move into her mansion. ANGEL kind of loses momentum by the time it decides to critique materialism; CUBE ends up going the self-reflexive meta-epiphany Freud route (the only way to 'cure' Lana of her "strange affliction" is to write a play about her boating accident so she can make peace with her drowned husband).

The moments with Lana on acid are freaky enough, but the really scary moment is when Chakris spikes the drink of a guy he's annoyed with at the club--a big brawling bearded guy--who freaks out, starts tearing up the joint and is thrown out on the street raving like a foam-mouthed, face-clawing lunatic. As someone whose been there I had a lot of sympathy for this clown, though he was awfully annoying he didn't deserve that. No one does. If you've been there, good lord, you know what I mean. As I said earlier, taking the right dosage can be like being lifted up the ladder of your own evolution, while too much is like having the ladder shoved down your throat while Hell's full roster of demons climb up from it and peel your skin off and every kid who ever hurt you in grade school materializes like accusatory ghosts to laugh at your extreme skinless nakedness.

Acid in CUBE is, unfortunately, employed almost purely as a weapon, but like firearms maybe these drugs are too dangerous to be left to criminals. Legal, it could be diluted to the point where overdose would prove a difficult task. In the twilight world of schedule-one substances, however, it's a risk in the best of times. So... know your dealer, stay away from sleazy gigolo med students, and err on the side of prudence til your batch's strength is tested. Or you could just say no, but don't you want to see what Hell looks like before, you know... you move in?

Great Acid Movies #52: THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR (1970)

The weird thing about acid (and its affiliates) is just how life-changing even one experience can be. If our mind can be likened to a big old Victorian house, most of us just live on the first floor. The basement is locked; the attic and second floor bedrooms boarded up. Who knows if rats or squatters are living there? Better not to open them up just in case. Eventually we become convinced the boarded up doors are just walls. Any attempt to open them just fills us with fear, the whole downstairs seems to quake in separation anxiety --where are you?? Come down this instant!

Then, one night, LSD comes along and kicks open the boarded doors, and unlocks the basement and attic, forcing us through the whole house on a sweeping grand tour. It turns out the rest of the rooms in the house aren't dirty and dusty and empty as we thought - but teeming with art, carpets from distant lands, incense and peppermints. Even if we never see those rooms again after we come back down the stairs, we at least know they're there. If we have a bad trip of course, he shows us the basement, where all the slimy monsters live; but there's another set of stairs there that leads down... to the attic - you come out on top, in a spiritual awakening.

Dogmatic shrinks might tell us those newly discovered rooms are all hallucinations, but honey - until you've tried it, you don't get a vote. If a hallucination seems more real than reality, it's at least worth examining, especially when quantum physics shows us just how impossible true objectivity is. I could tell you Portugal doesn't exist. After all, I've never been there. Bush ran his presidency that way and still got a second term, In fact, the appearance of matter is a hallucination anyway; if we could see the world as it really is we'd see not a chair but a frequency spectrum, vibrating waves...

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR (1970) operates along this line of philosophy, detailing the way LSD's door-kicking habit disrupts the don't ask/don't tell dysfunctional denial-based cohabitation of the all-American middle class family at the end of the 60s. It strikes me as the sort of film where the writers started out as anti-drug 'there is nothing real beyond the first floor' types, the 'I know every inch of my house so don't ask me what's behind those locked doors because there's nothing behind them, ok? Nothing!' types. But then, in the interest of fairness and perception, the filmmaker/s took acid halfway through preparation for shooting and changed their whole attitude. The result is a film divided. It still has the look and feel of an after-school special coupled to an earthy fly-on-the-wall semi-documentary style (ala say, MEDIUM COOL or ZABRISKIE POINT) but runs a deeper, stranger game. It takes the rare arpproach of truly progressive acid movies, and judges both sides as fucked, and runs off to start a whole new thing, balanced without judgement or condemnation, just trust in one another and the ability to fucking listen to each others' true pain.

Must be we're in Canada.

Eli Wallach and Julie Harris play the Masons, high-strung suburbanite parents of acid-dealing musician Artie (Stephen McHattie) and his naive sister, Maxie (Deborah Winters). After a big fight with the family, Artie gives Maxiee her first trip and her parents later find her freaking out in an upstairs closet. Recognizing symptoms of what they've been reading about in hysteria-mongering tabloids, the whole flock rushes to counseling and then bring it all up the next time they get together with their neighbors, who are steeped in enough adulterous affairs and debauched drinking they're bred to ignore and deny--in clouds of pointless self-righteous indignation--that there's a problem, until the patient therapist finally cracks some ICE STORM-style ice and lets the sunshine in.

That said, for all its acumen, PEOPLE NEXT DOOR can't stop beating a dead horse as far as making sure we compare Wallach's sweaty angry dad constantly validating his right to drink, smoke cigarettes (these are the socially sanctioned choices of their generation) and plow pertinent wives vs. the bladerunning between rock and roll Buddahood and psych ward schizophrenia that is his children's teenage wasteland.

The best moment is at the end, when mom comes to visit Maxie in the psych ward and finally realizes her daughter is actually the sanest one in the family, just unable to let go of her bipolar schizo "act" because she's both stubborn and a bit of a showboat. By opening her mind to admit her own need for wider perspective, mom and daughter are able to reach each other at last.

In the end, THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is not a condemnation or a celebration, perhaps in that sense it's cinema's most compassionate yet non-corny look at aberrant social behavior until William Blatty's THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980). The moral: LSD can be used as an excuse to avoid responsibility just like any other potentially life-affirming drug or event. Metatextually speaking, the film walks it like it talks it, refusing to go the way of many other cautionary acid tales (i.e. GO ASK ALICE) which fall back on old demonizing myths to generate suspense and pacify the establishment, even if once again the family strengthens itself by ostracizing the father, paving the way for our current plague of either gone or feminized fathers. Now more than ever... we need the 70s dad, for all his sexism and drunken mischief, to return.

There ought to be Freaks. THE SENTINEL (1977)

There's nothing like a neck injury to help you catch up with a backlog of unseen 1970s horror films... especially if you leave the remote painfully out of reach. Now you are paralyzed anyway so it may as well be with fear... Bring on... THE SENTINEL!

I don't know what kept me away so long from this 1977 gem, but I'll never leave again. It's got it all: an overly brassed-out score (by TV composer Gil Melle), super young Christopher Walken; a super young Jeff Goldblum; two PSYCHO co-stars (Martin Balsam and Sylvia Miles); several FREAKS stars sans the compassion of Todd Browning; Burgess 'the Penguin' Meredith as a mincing elderly gay stereotype with a haunted cat; Beverly D'Angelo as a freaky young lesbian stereotype... yeah, you heard me! She and her partner use inappropriate masturbation to creep out our already very creeped-out (straight) suicidal heroine (hot as hell brunette but smize-deprived model Cristina Raines), who's just visiting them like a good neighbor (no NYC-er ever goes to 'visit' neighbors. It's just not done --and we like it that way), a skeevy boyfriend played by Chris Sarandon, with one of those unforgivably waved hair and pencil thin 40s B-player mustache. The score

I can't reveal another detail, the neck pain's just too great, but let me just add some more classic old faces: Ava Gardner, Jose Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy, John Carradine and Eli Wallach, and lastly I must mention scenes in which the lovely Cristina investigates strange noises while wearing a sexy negligee, armed only with flashlight and butcher knife (see bottom last pic) which she holds in the correct manner... but forget it. You don't even need all that, because there are real freaks.

Real freaks. Genius! And quietly appalling in a PC kind of way). When have we seen real freaks outside of 1932's FREAKS (above)? Here in THE SENTINEL, the bizarre parade (gooble-gobble!) of Browning's children comes to its long awaited final stop 45 years later. It's fitting, for THE SENTINEL reflects a time when homosexuality was akin to being a pinhead or a limbless and was all part of the exploitation of deformity and difference on which our circus sideshow culture was and is based. Here this tasteless shockmeistering gets a last, armless bow before the onslaught of liberal PC brainwashing "saves" the freaks by  putting them out of work... one more time.

 As I recall from my childhood street-corner conversations in those pre-AIDS days, when we figured gay people to be like pods from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS --the only way to prove you weren't gay was to talk tough and be derogatory towards gayness, to show how manly you were by accusing your weaker clique members of being 'faggots.' So as knee-jerk conservative as it is, THE SENTINEL is of it's time. The pro-gay flak thrown at the lurid depictions of William Friedkin's CRUISING (1980), for example, makes a nice contrast to the 'why in hell would we pay to see that vileness?' attitude of mainstream suburbia. THE SENTINEL just slides homophobic stereotyping in there amidst a cavalcade of gleefully un-PC shocks, so critics didn't even know where to begin when savaging this movie in their weeklies. But whatever -- we don't come to a ROSEMARY'S BABY-EXORCIST era napper (clearly from an imitative novel, in this case by Jeffrey Konvitz), like this for social uplift. So if it's not quite in the same league as its 1970s compatriots, like LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH or BURNT OFFERINGS, well, what is? THE SENTINEL'll do until some other movie with Bevery D'Angelo as a creepy lesbian masturbating in a leotard comes along.

And as for the poor freaks, I am sure they appreciated the humanitarian concerns of not being exploited anymore, but they probably missed the money, and isn't it sad this great American institution is gone forever leaving only a bunch of insane but non-deformed humans hammering nails into their noses and swallowing swords down at Coney Island's Sideshow by the Seashore?

THE SENTINEL is one of those great last gasps of 1970s split-level thinking: we're meant to recoil from the lesbians as if Robert Aldrich was directing, and to recoil from the freaks as if they're demons from hell, validating the patron's conservative "wholeness" in contrast to, say, a filmic celebration of the grotesque and abject ala Browning's 1933 film. In 1977, NYC was still where the family went to recoil in horror from X-rated film marquees, wobbly-heeled hookers and urine-stained winos until the theater started seating them for A CHORUS LINE, "I can do that / that I can do!" We wouldn't have dreamed it would all turn into Disney Stores and Nike flagships--and THE SENTINEL's not trying to impress you with its liberal bias, it's trying to scare you and creep you out, like a day trip to what NYC used to be--one giant sideshow up and down Times Square. See Ratzo Rizzo, half rat, half man! See Jackie Superstar! She thought she was James Dean for a day! Step right up! See the colored girls who have considered suicide go doo doo doo do doo.

There is a rationale for re-evaluating films like SENTINEL, for when used as a measuring stick these films reveal our current culture to be more progressive than we sometimes give it credit for. Being publicly skeeved out by the thought of gay sex is on its last gasp now, in most civilized states, but still a permissible reaction in the 1970s, up until movies like CRUISING (w/ Pacino, pictured above) pushed too far and caught gay rights flack. THE SENTINEL played on similar attitudes but it was in service of a hackneyed demonic documentary, but in the process they helped audiences grow acclimated. If familiarity breeds tolerance, it's repetition-compulsion disorder that breeds familiarity, and it's shock and horror that breeds repetition-compulsion disorder, therefore: shock = repulsion = repetition = eventual tolerance = problem solved once some new shock-repulsion comes along.

After all, even more skeevy than deformity and homosexuality back then was the most commonly used "free" horror effect: old age!  First introduced in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and the 'horror hag' subgenre, then finding a resurgence in ROSEMARY'S BABY, the idea that old age was inherently demonic--as in emaciated corpses with shambling gaits and nightmarish dentures--faded in the all-drenching teenage blood wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th, but man old folks used to scare the shit out of us! We recently saw David Lynch use old people for creepy effect in MULHOLLAND DRIVE, but you have to be a certain age yourself to be afraid of the elderly, and now Lynch is. Just as Niagara Falls is lovely from a window, but terrifying if you're stuck in the current; it's a matter of proximity.

So what is left now that old age, homosexuality and deformity are all no longer allowed to be horrific in and of themselves? Instead of "one of us! one of us!" we have ghosts coming through the computer screen and no parties to go to that aren't flooded with blue lights and lamp-trashing tripping douche bags. Instead of horror we have horror signifiers strung together cheerlessly like gold dollar signs in a rap video. Add an an eye through a key-hole, water leaking in the basement, a girl with dark hair drawing, thunder, a chainsaw, a girl in a shower seen from outside the steamy stall door, Satanic graffiti, hands scribbling in a journal while monks run down stone staircases, partial nudity highlighted in thick felt markers, and golden-hued car commercial subtext, and all bathed in a sugar crust of flashy editing and served with nu-metal flatware, and then the credits: please exit quickly the next show's about to start there will be no refunds step right up and God damn the different! (and what else is damnation if not the sincerest form of repetition?)

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Read Tenebrous Kate's valuable take on Cruising here
and the Costuminatrix on The Sentinel here.