Amazon Streams: Five Treasures drug up from Prime's Post-JAWS Riverbed (+ AVALANCHE)

It's so cold here in the New World, one thinks of summer. And the beach and the water, and the sharks, and the river... piranha... up the Amazon.... Prime....  And all of a sudden, many of the streaming prints from Roger Corman's independent label New World and Concorde films have been upgraded to HD anamorphic loveliness. Many of the New World pictures look marvelous, especially the ones from the 70s and early 80s, when the drive-in was still hopping and demanding their fare be shot on 35mm widescreen film. Those were the last golden days before VHS rentals and cable turned low budget filmmakers towards the less pictorial demands of the small screen market. 

While they're not often great, or terribly original, New World pictures are usually wild and wooly, with never a dull moment, flying by in under 90 minutes and most remain still highly re-watchable today. I return to them time and again in times of trouble, and since Prime has so many, I'm compelled like a gratitude-filled Marx Brother after eating that big free dinner in Night at the Opera, to give back, by organizing a musical interlude of manly prose in their honor. Let it commence!

 SCREAMERS

(1979 -aka Island of the Fishmen)
Dir. Sergio Martino

*** / Amazon Image - A+

The great Sergio Martino came off the nortorious Slaves of the Cannibal God before making this film, called Island of the Fishmen, and The Great Alligator in the same jungle location and with the same lead actors, which New World distributed here in the states, with a gory prologue added and re-titled Screamers for some reason . In fandom circles, it's since gotten a bad rap, but seeing it now it's hard to guess why, unless it was badly cropped and scanned for VHS (it's a film clearly meant for widescreen). Now, on the gorgeous new presentation print, its Victorian era 'aquatic research post'-steampunk Jules Verne-y sets impress and the endless supply of weird drug addict fish monsters with their sharp teeth and bulbous fish eyes, do a man good to see. The cast includes Joseph Cotten in a small role as a misguided geneticist, Barbara Bach (in lots of wet clothes) and Martino's go-to hero, Claudio Cassinelli doing his usual self-righteous heroic meddling. The spooky synths of Luciano Michelini's score sting anywhere the pace lags and swaying monstrous shadows darken our heroes cross-island fleeing. Sudden surges of native drums build to a cliffhanger style, rousing and rollicking, very Jules Verne-esque climax with island destroying volcanic eruption and everyone, for the most part, dead. 

But first, a spooky prologue sequence, added in the US by a different director, after Corman found the PG original too tame for American drive-ins. Out of step with the rest of the film but very welcome just the same, it's filmed in the real nighttime on a rolling shore, beautifully lit, with glowing drifting out of a huge cave entrance and the slime of the fishmen claws and half-dissolved but still living corpses really glisten via Prime's HD print. Mel Ferrer (in old age make-up), Beryl Cunningham (whose red coat looks great against the glowing nighttime fog), and Cameron Mitchell (as a scruffy sea captain) row ashore to investigate a cave supposedly containing  a cache of Aztec treasure. Shifty synths thud in warning, and weird, whispery monster breathing creeps into the pockets of the sound mix, the heads start coming off and gory effects have the desired "R" in their sights.

The rest of it is the actual Martino film - beginning on a lifeboat, manned by a dirty dozen of Devil's Island-bound prisoners and ship doctor Cassinelli. The monsters attack their boat, some of the men make it ashore, and in comes Barbara Bach and her husband, the island's mysterious plantation owner--played by that other Martino mainstay, Richard Johnson. Suspicious goings on at this mysterious Moreau-like compound ensue, with the castaway number ever-dwindling down to just Claudio. In one great highlight, we follow Bach through the day-for-night jungle and sees her stripping down to her nightgown to wade out into the lagoon feed green drugs to a bunch of smitten fish monsters! Yes, queen!  Fans of those 60s AIP Jules Verne adaptations starring Vincent Price (like Master of the World and Warlords of Atlantis) should love all the diving bells, ancient treasure, Victorian trimmings, Atlantis miniatures and the big volcanic eruption / rocks falling on burning sets climax. I did! Even Joseph Cotten seems to be awake, and Bach's round-eyed ethereality has never been more vivid (though her lack of participation in her own rescue gets irritating). In short, Saturday afternoon matinee thrills galore!

UP FROM THE DEPTHS

(1979) Dir. Charles B. Griffith

*1/2 / Amazon Image: A

A genre film should deliver some thrills, maybe some laughs, an explosive climax, and as few credits as possible Anything beyond that can either lead to lionization (The Terminator) or the abyss of boredom.  Even the lesser New World monster pics have understood this; They're fast, sexy and thrill-ridden entertainment clocking in under 89 minutes (to save Roger money on film cans). Anything artistic or experimental is usually snuck in by young writers and directors trying out new ideas, almost more for their own termite amusement rather than mainstream recognition; as long as it comes in under budget and delivers the 'goods,' Roger's cool with it.. A perfect example of this, Up from the Depths was edited with a trowel, blocked and shot by a blind man, and has a melange of post-sync dialogue you can sometimes barely understand. And yet, this fractured, drunken style leads, if you're hip, to an archly hip Mad meets MASH (the movie) kind of 'overheard' at the bar vibe that simultaneously evokes dubbed Japanese monster movies, group commentary DVD tracks, and the Armitage/Altman style of improv overlapping tossed-off wit. So it can't be 'all' bad - can it? 

Yes. But then again, it's delivering some laughs and maybe some thrills,  \clocks in at under 90 minutes, and surely came in way under budget. Roger is satisfied! 

The rarely seen monster this time is a giant rabid coelacanth who's been eating up tourists off the coast of a Hawaiian (actually the Philippines) hotel resort. Its stressed manager/owner Mr. Forbes (a terribly hammy Kedric Wolfe) first denies the deaths are happening (it will kill his business!), then blames them all on beach bum Timothy Bottoms and his charter boat captain uncle (Virgil Frye). These two shaggy dudes hang around the resort's outdoor beachside bar looking for guests looking for adventure, selling them to charter the boat and search for a bogus treasure. Frye is fun as the grizzled drunk Tom Waits/Nick Nolte kind of shaggy dog captain; he saves the film, almost, from the harpooning effect of Forbes' relentless 'rabid Franklin Pangborn'-style hissy schtick. Doesn't Griffith realize that his overacting is sinking the whole movie?  It's hardly buoyant to begin with, but it's partly afloat when Wolfe isn't onscreen. Mostly this is thanks to the hip off-the-cuff Altman-esuque overheard conversation overlap post-dub, the gorgeous girls who, as in most Corman joints, are capable professionals. Susanne Reed is the heroine hotel PR maven and possible Bottoms love interest; Denise Hays as a leggy model in town on a shoot, destined to be fed to coelacanth ere long; and; the Phillippines can often look (to me) too umid and grotty, but here the beach scenery all beautifully HD thanks to (I'm guessing) the Shout Factory Corman upgrade.

Charles B. Griffith, longtime Corman script writer, directs with a nice leisurely (i.e. fairly inept) hand, figuring that if he follows the Jaws chalk marks while sneaking in hipster gags and soaking up the tropical charm, he can coast by on fumes. But his camera is so sloppily placed it seems like half the movie is going on in the background while the foreground lingers on a couple of tourist stereotypes shooting the shit at the lobby pamphlet rack (though I guess this too evokes Altman, who--confidentially--I find sexist and overrated - shhhhh).

The action picks up once the death toll is so high that greedy hotel manager Forbes can no longer hissy fit it away so he--in a moment of ingenious inspiration-- offers a cash prize for the monster's head, prompting a run on the Tiki lounge's decorative spears and the local pawn shop's gun section. That's when it gets real Mad Magazine sight gag-crazy (thus rewarding your sticking with it so long): a Japanese salaryman busts out his kitana, doing moves out on the rocks, probably presuming the coelacanth will shortly jump out of the depths and impale itself, while two guys in full frogman suits walk backwards down the hotel stairs with harpoon guns, and so on. It would almost come off like a savage satire of American 2nd amendment zeal if it was filmed with a bit more panache. 

But where Depths really deserves its 2.8 imdb rating is in the total wash of an ending (there hasn't been a more 'whoops we ran out of $$' climax since Cat Women of the Moon's) but fans of the New World will forgive it, especially when Bottoms uses their chewed up icthyologist friend (Charles Howerton) as bait, stuffing his wetsuit with plastic explosives while Susanne Reed protests indignantly (shades of Shriek of the Mutilated!). As the resort's publicist, co-star Reed can seem professional even when she's jaw-drop alluring in a bathing suit and grass skirt. She endures Forbes' hammy conniption fits too easily though; and seems pretty naive to go alone to an uninhabited island with some skeevy German amateur photographer so she can get his sleazy 'camera club'-style rocks off. The counterweight to her sober ease and come-and-go passivity is Denise Hayes, who gets the best lines as the stoned supermodel there to shoot a magazine spread. ("How do you like Hawaii?" asks a reporter as she disembarks from her limo, "I've never been there.")

And Hey! Guess what else is on Prime? Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), also written (not directed) by Griffith. A sublime example of his brand of deadpan comedy done right (i.e. in Papa Roger's capable, swift  directorial hands). The pair make a great late night double bill, with a combined time still shorter than Jaws and twice as funny. See 'em together on a late-late Saturday night and feel the ocean rocking you to sleep as moments of genuine idiocy mix with moments of genuine wit until one can't tell which is which. In way they are the harbinger of all the tongue-in-cheek Asylum monster movies on Syfy to come! Rejoice, brother! 

3. PIRANHA 

(1978) Dir. Joe Dante
Writer: John Sayles

***  / Amazon Image: A

Some New World Jaws don't make much a splash (get it?) but here is the enduring feel-good classic that put Joe Dante on the map. Heather Menzies-Urich stars a the sexually liberated PJ Soles-ish detective who hikes up the mountain in a big woodsy forest area, recruiting local drunk Paul Grogan (Bradford Dillman) to help her find two hikers who made the mistake of swimming in the wrong seemingly-abandoned government research water tank. In typical John Sayles pinko style (he scripted), the detective thinks it's her right to trespass at the station and then dump what could have been any kind of chemical poison into the pristine river just to see if there are skeletons in there, then beat up Keven McCarthy when he tries to stop it. And THEN she gets all high and mighty about the military's ghoulish irresponsibility! And THEN the coup de gras, Grogan opens up the valves on a smelting plant to dump all sorts of toxic waste into the river to kill them, never worrying that with this final act he's utterly destroying the river system that provided for this mountain nigh over a million years. Along the way they find time to assault a police officer, and commandeer a police vehicle, all while never doubting their moral superiority. Meanwhile Grogan leaves his young daughter behind at the post-summer camp bloodbath, and leaves Keenan's dog to just stand there at his dad master's shack, helpless and lost, rather than rescuing it and bringing it along on the raft and all subsequent adventures. Only the ever-Satanic Barbara Steele, as a badass scientific researcher teamed up with the military, comes out of this mess looking good (once we wise up to Sayle's script's stealth socialist sanctimony). 

Skunked again, eh, Grogan?

In case you can't tell, I am not as big a fan of this movie as some, but Dante is clearly loving this chance to break out of editing trailers for Corman (his only feature film up to that time had been the old New World-footage-heavy Hollywood Boulevard, with fellow-trailer editor Allan Arkush). You can tell from his framing alone that he's going to make it big, laying out the style which will be his signature - a mix of monster fan reverence for the classics (insider jokes, cameos, icon casting (i.e. Steele) and a deft ability to etch surprising depth and maturity into relationships with very little screen time (he'd do it even better with his big break-out hit, also penned by Sayles, The Howling). Subtext aide, this one has it all: prison escapes, scuba-diving, 70s-style casual hook-ups, Paul Bartel as a summer camp director determined to make Grogan's hydrophobic daughter learn to swim, and even an evil general throwing kids in the bloody water so they don't swamp his raft! Want more? How about Dick Miller as a nervous resort owner? No presumed crank call about a lot of killer fish is going to disrupt his gala lakefront opening! G'head Dick Miller! You got this. 

4. HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP

(1980) Dir. Barbara Peeters

**1/2 (Amazon Image - A)

It's a kind of Jaws from the Black Lagoon with an Alien chaser as horny mutant salmon/men infiltrate a Pacific Northwestern coastal town to nonconsensually mate with human women (and kill their surprised boyfriends). Townie bigot Vic Morrow blames the incidents on the local Native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), who's been waging a one man-tribal war against the planned installation of a fish cannery (were they borrowing that hackneyed eco-suplot from the previous year's big studio budgeted-- but largely forgotten--Prophecy?). "Good" fisherman Doug McLure and his liberal Mark Hammil-ish son say no, Johnny is a good boy; but they also support the cannery and even take its reps out fishing. Morrow and Johnny Eagle blame each other for their dead dogs (why are dogs always the first to suffer?) and there's a brawl at the town hall dance. The next day McLure's Luke-alike son and his hot girlfriend go have a beer down at Johnny's shack to show solidarity and learn a thing or two about treaties while Morrow's rednecks paddle quietly up with Molotov cocktails.

Enough with the liberal soapboxing! This is New World, so chop chop make with the monsters. A cannery-sponsored genetic scientist (Ann Turkel) shows up to investigate. I'm sure you figured out that, like Steele in Piranha, she's not exactly shocked by what's going on. But hey, this was directed by a woman and the monster rape scenes were played down (so Corman had extra breasts and violence added, oh Roger!). While offensive, the monster rapes are too over-the-top sleazy to traumatize my sensitive feminist soul and while one might bemoan their shitty taste in men, the girls never lose their dignity or resourcefulness -- even the scantily clad Miss Salmon (Linda Shayne) stops screaming long enough to bash her attacker's brains out with a rock. And it's all leading somewhere we might well guess, considering the Alien was being ripped off in addition to Jaws.

To me, actually, the most objectionable thing in the film is that a smirky toe-headed ventriloquist (David Strassman) almost gets it on with a girl in a tent, his puppet poking suggestively through the zipper of his bag over terribly snarky post-sync double entendre about his "woodpecker." Was this the crap that was shot later, like by Jim Wynorski or Fred Olen Ray? Little things like the way the cannery rep calls Turkel a "great little scientist," and the way high school creep Jim slobbers over his date, leave a bad 80s-heralding taste in the mouth. In 1980 we could still find trashy movies without those varsity jacketed little shits in them but-- like unspoiled rivers, or drive-ins--they were getting scarce. Wynorski and Olen Ray were taking over, like those scabby kids Phillip Baker Hall brings to Jack's 1980 New Years party in Boogie Nights.

Whatever, it's trashy, no one's arguing that, and though I do like the way Dr. Turkel bosses around her co-worker Edward, even she mispronounces 'coelacanth.'

And then without further ado, all hell breaks loose in one of the best monster attacks on a local waterfront salmon festival in cinematic history. It goes on and on through the night, monsters crashing through the boardwalk, marauding like a pack of rapey vikings, with no music just endless screaming. The monster suits themselves are both funny and scary. With their long arm extensions and habit of swaying back and forth like seaweed-dipped Igors, their incessant sexual aggression becomes almost refreshing in its pre-cognitive innocence, like it's creating some new genre in being so blatantly free of subtlety. And hey, how can anyone not like a movie where Doug McLure's young wife (Cindy Weintraub), home with the baby, eviscerates her own slimy attacker long before he lumbers to the rescue?

James Horner's eerily familiar score of eerie strings and harp glissandos evoke John Williams's Jaws horns and Jerry Goldsmith Alien woodwinds stabs and the moody Daniel Lacambra cinematography captures a nicely overcast Pacific Northwest. What's not to love, aside from that woodpecker bit? 

5. THE GREAT ALLIGATOR 

(1979) Dir Sergio Martino

**1/2 / Amazon Image: B-

Sergio's next feature after Island of the Fishmen / Screamers (above), this hybrid of the post-Jaws 'amok nature' and cannibal massacre genres takes place at a newly-opened African safari/jungle resort (it was filmed in Sri Lanka, though the natives look alternately Aborigine and African-American). Barbara Bach and Claudio Cassinelli plays a self-righteous photographer at the resort to shoot promo shots with a leggy black model (who quickly disappears after going on a midnight boat tryst with a local boy). Bach is the resident anthropologist, who speaks the language of the primitive locals and tries to balance out the greed of her boss (Mel Ferrer)--who's sunk too many millions into this dubious venture for it to go belly-up now, alligators be damned--and the sanctimonious alarmism of Cassinelli ("we have to evacuate, now!"). Building a hotel so close to the native's huts isn't very smart it turns out, for either side; and dynamiting palm trees to make room for bungalows along the water wakes up a giant alligator god that's been sleeping for generations. Bach wonders how an alligator got to Africa in the first place, instead of crocodiles, but she never finds out. The sole survivor of an old batch of white missionaries alone knows its might firsthand. He's been hiding from it in a cave behind a waterfall for nigh under forty years, making a truly impressive totem sculpture in its honor. 



Soon enough, the first group of guests arrive and then it's dinner time. The natives are pretty pissed that their angry god has been woken up so once night falls they start killing off every white person in sight. In one long grand dusk-to-dawn stretch there's a 40-foot Alligator killing everyone in the water and natives killing everyone on land, so the tourists are caught in between. 

That alligator really tears in, and it's quite gratifying to the soul to see. Martino never resorts to stock nature footage inserts for his gator attacks. Sure the oversize big gator itself might by only marginally convincing (its legs don't move, the miniature used in the long shots looks like a rubber toy I used to have) but its still awesome - the full-size giant jaws go up and down atop screaming tourists, all splashing and screaming and trying to climb over spiked fences whereupon their shot by flaming arrows, and Martino knows how to film the melee so it's easy to follow, with lots of screaming close-ups and quick cuts.

What a film! There's even a helicopter fished out of water, Bach offered on a raft for human sacrifice, and a big underwater dynamite climax. The soundtrack mixes Stevio Cipriani's cocktail score, replete with funky electric guitar and loping bass, with a beguiling tapestry of thumping diegetic jungle drums,  chanting, birdcalls, screaming that might or might not be human, and then ---suddenly -- a tiny splash....and silence.

I wanted to keep this all in the New World/Concorde/AIP family, but there's no sign of ALLIGATOR (1980) the Lewis Teague-directed, John Sayles-scripted, Robert Forster-starring classic, on Prime. Luckily Prime does have Forster in a different kind of hybrid eco-disaster replete with a denial-ridden resort owner and a preachy naturalist Chicken Little, also produced by Corman....

AVALANCHE

(1978) Dir. Corey Allen

**1/2 / Amazon Image - B

Once they ran out of aquatic monsters, 70s filmmakers were forced to move inland for their threats, thus came The White Buffalo, Prophecy, and the mighty Grizzly. And from there it's a short fall to disaster threats like skyscraper fires, virus outbreaks, insect swarms, demonic totems and, when all else fails, AVALANCHE! Millionaire idiot hotel owner Rock Hudson refuses to heed the dire warnings of hip conservationist/photographer Robert Forster, so process with cutting down the tall mountain firs that usually break up avalanches in order to make his dream house. It's only a matter of time. Mia Farrow is Rock's ex-wife, willing to try give their marriage another chance (if he can get off the phone for five minutes). A tomcattin' ski champ, Bruce (Rick Moses), a foxy figure skater Peggy (Annette River) coached by Corman regular Anthony Carbone, and Rock's fur-encrusted mother (Jeanette Nolan!!?) round out the immediate side stories.

While we wait for the big dump to fall, we may gaze in amazement at Hudson's dashing grey-tinged rug and Mia Farrow's unconvincing long hair extensions. She's way too short and meek for a gigantic man like Rock. Looking up at him with big saucer eyes, she denotes "you're a force of nature." We agree, and no way he'd make it with this fragile waif without doing some damage to her hips. A much better fit is Forster,  who actually 'sees' her for who she is, whisking her up to his cabin for a tryst after Rock acts like a jealous ass during the big pre-avalanche party in the lounge (where there's a very groovy rock band so we get to see Rock dance!).  Bruce (the tomcat skier) fools around with Peggy (the naive skater), though he's got a much hotter girl named Tina (Cathy Paine) up in their suite. Tina runs out into the snow in her negligee after walking in on them in bed! "Tina put that apple down or throw it at me!" he demands the next morning before she vaults into a hysterically jealous/insane/gibbering fit. Great stuff! You can tell Corman added it for a little mid-film spice, as it's a nifty variation of a similarly gratuitous interlude in Corman's St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Corman, you're a genius. He surely wasn't happy it was rated PG, despite the obligatory New World nude scene (in Rock's very groovy 70s shower/steam room). PG was a big tent back then.

After the gratifying and strangely hilarious avalanche (lots of miniatures, dissolves, and 2-D stills) comes the long dig out: Rock's mother and that assistant are trapped inside a windowless room, but there's a piano so they can try to sing before succumbing to the gas leak; Tina's TV newsman husband (she gets around) and some kid are stranded up on a teetering ski-lift; and the odious Bruce ponders his tomcattin' sins while buried upside down under 20 feet of the same snow he's so blithely skied over all his life. Ever mindful of our patience, producer Corman can't resist making the whole thing clock in at under 91 minutes even though the average disaster film is at least 2 1/2 hours long. We're not complaining! Whole reels of drab drama between Farrow and Hudson seem to have been shorn away, perhaps waiting for us in hell if we continue to make the same ecologically irresponsible choices.

Here it.... comes... 

So... that's Avalanche ... it's not good or bad, but it delivers enough stunts and snow you don't feel cheated. For Corman devotees of a certain age and predilection, it's comfort food. When I needed it, it came to me. There's plenty of Corman's sly black humor (a lot of characters die even right as they're being rescued; emergency workers hoisting black bagged bodies in rows atop a flatbed truck punctuate the 'unsuccessful' attempts) and fine examples of Corman's brand of sexy, strong women  Former kid actor Corey Allen directed and no one would be surprised if Corman hired him just to get his name ("Allen") on the poster, to subliminally evoke the disaster-synonymous Irwin Allen, who was like the big name in big budget disaster films. If so, it's genius. GENIUS, Roger! Though filmed on location in Colorado with lots of gorgeous Rocky mountains in the background, there are backgrounds that are obviously projected photos, while the Amazon image quality is pretty good, it's not HD, and the colors are kind of washed out but it is rather white up there anyway so what do I expect?  Don't fight it, Erich. Let it wash over you in a comforting narcotizing.. freezing... weighted white blanket.

A screenshot from Devil Fish to show Prime ain't picky

and a lot of its titles look like they were transferred from an old VHS rather

than a 35mm negative. 

Avoid the DEVIL FISH, matey!

Pick the cleaner sandy 35mm shores...

that's why you need me as your captain. Argh! Where's that bottle? 

10 Reasons: THE CAR (1977)

Nobody said living in a post-JAWS monster landscape was going to be a busket of clacks and thistles, because--no matter how far above sea level you may park your groovy one-hearse town--the scythe, she a-come a swipin'. This is the high-octane truth learned by one unlucky black customized Lincoln when it innocently incurs the ire of a small posse fronted by one wife-beating demolitions expert (E.G. Marshall), a Burt Reynolds imitation motorcycle cop (James Brolin), a relapsing alcoholic deputy, and a cadre of various out-of-order western bit characters in THE CAR (1977). But hell, before it's dispatched to that great infernal pit-stop down below,  this one-of-a-kind low ridin' custom Lincoln learns a valuable lesson and wreaks some unleaded vengeance upon several no-good hippies, a few cops, and even an innocent lovely brunette, in the process giving literality to phrases like 'drive through' and 'dust-devil'.

The ne plus ultra of land-based Jaws rips, the CAR rocks so hard it rattles like a spray paint can in an echo chamber. You can imagine the Universal Studios bigwigs, intrigued by all the money earned by JAWS, and THE OMEN, the nationwide yen for the occult and Detroit muscle cars, watching the script for a demonic souped-up black town car terrorizing a small desert town all but write itself. As if they needed proof, SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT came wizzin' by two weeks after THE CAR. 

Alas, it passed right on by with nary a victory honk. And so THE CAR was razzed off the road and left to its wild red yonders, leaving us kids to wonder if those red yonders weren't really right behind us, ready to flash their brights in the dead-of-night highway half-asleep moment. We kids loved it! I remember staring at the novel at Woolworth's, fascinated, imagination revving up. 

Well, in them days, the sorrows of small box office returns were the joys of prime time TV. I remember  my parents, me and brother watching it on its happy Friday Night Movie premiere, happy as clams, mom making popcorn and pouring ice-cold coke, my dad all whiskey sour-cheery and sharp-witted, my little brother and I flanking him, lobbing witticisms like blind shells at the screen (and if we actually made dad laugh it was like scoring a major victory). THE CAR was the kind of movie you could follow real fine even drunk or sugar and salt-addled. Good times. This blog's roots lie in night like that one. It maybe explains maybe why I hate Mystery Science Theater (it tries to steal my dad's affection) and why now, thanks to DVD, THE CAR glows in mine eyes like Rosebud roasting on an open fire in a KRAMPUS snow globe full of (blank).

Yeah I been watching a lot of MATCH GAME 78 on Buzzr.... for the same reason I love this film. Wanna make somethin' of it?

Blank: it's not just a space to be filled, it's a goal in itself.

Revisiting it for this post I noticed that, even now, I like THE CAR better than a lot of more than some of the more highly praised post-Jaws monster genre creations. I like it better even than Joe Dante's PIRANHA. 

And I love PIRANHA. 

1. Car Design

The problem inherent in just transposing the 'rogue shark besieges small tourist town' blueprint onto the Great American Western highway is that there's very few places for a car to hide where we won't see it coming. (It can't exactly leap up from under the asphalt.) At night the thing can turn off its headlights, and then snap on the brights at the right psychological moment. During the day it's hidden only by its blurring speed and the occasional tunnels or brush. Ingeniously--rather than trick the car out with air brushed horns and fangs (the way, say, Rob Zombie would)--THE CAR's designers bring Lewtonesque shadows to its outer chassis. Painted a dull matte grey-black, it looks like a miniature even though it's life size; the big grinning grille / front fender / headlights alternate looking vaguely like bull horns, teeth, or --to my crazy eyes--the glowering lamps of the mollusk in THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD (1959- below-left), which featured a similar bucolic western America setting facing an existential but localized threat.

Recently I took a frame-by-frame look at a few dark splotches in Val Lewton's 1942 CAT PEOPLE to try and figure out, at long last, what's going on in the shadows of the famous pool scene. You know it: Irina walks into the corner while her rival treads water in the middle of the pool--and then the shadow of a black cat emerges. When she crouches down into the darkness, now that it's all in HD, we see something is forming in between the shadow of Irina, the shadow of the corner of the pool, and the shadow of a cat, but it's just an indistinguishable animated ink blob; it's that rare kind of subliminal animation actually blocks imagery out rather than fleshes it in. It's just a half second or so of inked out darkness - blacker than the black shadows of a dark corner of an unlit pool room, but the effect is uncanny. Paul Schrader didn't get that concept for the remake, so had to use the whole make-up latex blood and placenta schtick, to far less effect.

CAR director Elliot Silverstein knows the reason JAWS worked such a number upon our popular imagination in the summers of 75-6 was the opaqueness of the water...As kids playing in the surf we were always weirded out by the fact that we couldn't see our feet (it wouldn't work near as well in the clear turquoise water of the Caribbean) so we could be about to stand on a crab pincer or get stung by a jellyfish or step on a gross slimy patch of seaweed. This experience makes deep impressions on the unconscious mind, i.e. the dark Lewtonian shadow. What we can't see right below us is simultaneously terrifying and intriguing. Similarly, the interior of the devil car is the mystery; we can't see who's driving, if anyone, nor can we totally know for sure why the car is even there (some Native American return of an ancient evil spirit idea is batted around) and that's part of its effectiveness. I'd have preferred we didn't get even the small interior view of the empty driver's seat (I have a feeling it was insisted on by the producer), but then again not showing anything carries its own penalty too. It makes literal-minded people ornery. Films like Blair Witch Project and Duel go out on a limb, knowing the ambiguity is either going to hit--and make a classic--or piss people off. 

2. UTAH!

Silverstein's original conception of the film was more Lewtonesque - with the idea that the car would be zipping around at high speed with its headlights off in the dead of night, flashing on its brights right before running someone down or totaling their car (ala Stuntman Mike). BUT hey, there's a few moments of that, to some fine effect, so don't worry. And THEN, in the daytime, we see Utah's gorgeous national parks with all the canyons and Mars-looking red rock piles and glory therein. Thanks to recent DVD and Blu-ray remastering it's now no longer just a "fun" film but a breathtaking lure to anyone who's become sick to death of big city life and longed to escape to where everyone knows your name and the closest thing to evil is EG Marshall.

Escape, the lure, the road west... Gerald Hirschfeld's camera never gets too over-the-top with art, just delivers the vistas. Hell, it's not rocket science.

The climax with its early dawn thing; the sun just coming up from between the far off mountains-- that's hard to get just right when capturing all the Utah scenery - but Hirschfeld does it. And the final shot with the smoke and the sun coming up like a big round eye of God... man, that's just totally the shit.

3.  Leonard Rosenman's para-diegetic score 

America was used to talking cars and intelligent VW Bugs thanks to TV comedy shows like HERBIE and MY MOTHER, THE CAR, but the way this devil car communicates is solely through engine revving and a horn from hell, a rising and falling  death rattle blast that Roseman's hip-but-never-ostentatious score gamely enfolds in the fabric of his score. He also great use of the desert wind whistling through idle band instruments as elementary school marching band parade practice temporarily halts out on a lonely track field, and the way that cacophonous sound gradually shifts into a lower octave as "the Car" rolls into view. The mounting engine drone, the cacophony of the instruments, the roaring wind, the children's panic, all fuse into the score. Great churning bassoons and oboes tap their way through Grieg's Mountain King's hallways and ye olde funeral dirge "Die Irae" (later heard in Wendy Carlos' Shining) and the long scary drones of octave drooping thunder; the piercing top note sustains and clanging cymbals merge flawlessly with hell's own car horn as it revs up for the kill and exults in triumph, Rosenman is clearly trying something new and cool, merging diegetic/ambient and score together in a way that has our ears always sifting around through the melody, in search of that telltale horn...

4. Kathleen Lloyd as Lauren

You can call the film derivative if you want--another JAWS-DUEL-EXORCIST hybrid ripoff--but there's no cash-centric mayor ranting about starting a panic and scaring off tourists ("so some car ran over a few hippies? Don't make a big thing about it and scare away the tourists?"); no defrocked alcoholic priest working as an auto mechanic who alone can stop it ("Someone's gonna have to climb inside that car and hang a cross around the rearview mirror, and I reckon it's gonna have to be me."), not even obsessive Ahab-like FBI agent with a tire tread scar across his face from when he was run over by the same vehicle in Alamogordo last month ("I'll get that car if it's the last thing I do!") etc. What the film does have, however, in spades, is a long, "boss" (1) ) scene wherein sheriff James Brolin's girlfriend, elementary school teacher Lauren, taunts the car from the dubious safety of the church graveyard to try and protect her terrified class. It's a real stunner of a scene and Lloyd brilliantly acts a full range of emotions, moving very palpably from terrified, to mad, working herself up to sneering provocations, and even branch-throwing, trying to goad whomever's driving to come out and show himself.  Her eyes getting dark and shark-like, glistening from fear-adrenalin but voice cracking from the dust stirred up by the furiously revving car, Lloyd gets the shake in her voice exactly right. She's ageless in this moment - with her big head and short sleeves she could be a fifth grader herself, or my fifth grade teacher from the same approx. time, Miss Zackon.



Her big moment here is so unusually human! It's the first time we've really cared or rooted for someone so much cooler and complex than we originally thought --and it's a girl! In JAWS, we like Mrs. Brody but she doesn't get much to do, shark-wise, and even in THE BIRDS (1963), Melanie and Annie merely help the children run to safety. But Lauren not only helps the children run to safety she gets out and, so to speak, throws rocks at the crows.

She's also a great example of what I call the 70s hot shiksa movement as that decade saw a whole slew of cool complex Jewish or Italian-American girlfriends. They're now much harder to find due to Hollywood's red head obsession. Lloyd was also the romantic interest with Jack Nicholson in THE MISSOURI BREAKS - and was brilliant there, too. Here she sounds exactly like you'd expect a schoolteacher to sound: playful but grounded, fun but no pushover; her slightly plain-spoken voice hinting she talks to kids a lot (so has to be loud) but never talks down to them. Maybe she sounds a little infantile herself at times herself, but countermands it with a maternal toughness that lets you know you better do as she says or or she'll flatten you cold with a few measured words or grab your nuts (below camera) --while she rocks a Cagney impression, no less!

Her last scene has a hushed Val Lewton kind of magic. It's night after the incident at the church; she's being dropped off by the Navajo deputy Feeling the wind beginning to stir, recognizing it as the same unearthly wind from the attack, she runs up to call Wade. It's all very hushed and eerie, indicating the direction Silverstein originally wanted to go --that sense of enveloping darkness, the shot where the headlights start out super small down the road -- the kind of single static camera shot both Tourneur and Hitchcock alike would have been proud of. 

5. BOSS STUNTS

Right off the bat there's a totally impressive stunt --a cyclist falling off this super high-up suspension bridge over a river, flailing limbs so you know it's not a dummy. It's the kind of thing CGI would handle now, but this is stuntman territory, out in Native American preservations and uninhabited swaths of Utah, away from prying Highway Safety eyes. So when we see a tiny flash of light off in the distance at the parade ground we know what's coming, we don't need cutaways to insert dodgy overlays. When cowboys fall off their horses while distracting the car away from running children, they really do fall right by speeding tires. The car really does smash right through that house.

There is one scene though that's dodgy: where the car pulls hard turn speeding at the two cops cars in a game of chicken, then starts rolling over on itself, rolls over the passing cars and smashes in the roofs killing everyone - say what you want (we never see the car land)--and it sure is ridiculous, but we also see the cap really flip over... and all the quick cut shots of blood and fire are awesome if nothing else.

6.  Faithfulness to the Satanic Western Genre (70s)

This was the era of cowboy character donning pentagram covered black robes and sacrificing folks like William Shatner (DEVIL'S RAIN) or Warren Oates (RIDE WITH THE DEVIL), or transmigrating into random kids (BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN). These films realized--as only Jack Arnold had before (in TARANTULA and It CAME FROM OUTER SPACE)--that the strange alien landscape of the American Southwest had a disturbing, eerie, almost Satanic, majesty. Native American shamanic curses and otherworldly savvy suffused the mise-en-scene. 

The closest thing to a religious resource in THE CAR are Navajo legends. There are no Catholics priest Baptists, not even Mormons. There's an old church/ graveyard but it's long empty There is a quote from Anton La Vey in the beginning and a cross on the alcoholic deputy's neck--but why not? He's probably in AA - which equals spirituality without religion. 

This town itself, with its rugged western faces and wide-eyed children (cool kids, cute but not sweet or saintly), is almost like the 70s itself, needing to let go of all its dysfunction or embrace them. There's ultimately no explanation why that weird car is showing up at all, let alone why here, of all places. There is no 'gotcha' moment, or man vs. machine John Henry moral. The car is there because it's a gorgeous stunning vista-ridden area - and most of us who've been in that part of the country have only driven through on their way to the coast, going out of our way to get super high and drive through Utah's alien landscape, listening to Pink Floyd's "Meddle" album and going, "wow, man." In other words, the car is us, the drivers passing through to California or New York. We're the ones running over pedestrians and going "Oops, just keep going."

After all, if the devil was to drive through any part of the country, wouldn't it be here? The rocky canyons and otherworldly terrain could have been allowed to manifest as demonic if given the right atonal avant-garde drone and deep focus landscape at dawn shots (like 2001 or the beginning of THERE WILL BE BLOOD). We don't get them, but they tried and it's almost there, and the rocks are still weird enough.

(For a satiric look at how mainstream pagan/devil-worshipping was in the UK in the 70s- be sure and check out Scarfolk)

7. Cool (70s) Kids

Real life sisters Kyle and Kim Richards (they'd grow up to be real-life aunts of Paris Hilton) are the daughters of sheriff Brolin, and you know I hate kids on principle except in the 70s (I was the same age when THE CAR came out as they are here). It was the last decade in which kids ran wild all over the neighborhood from the age of five onward. We grew up wild and free and these two kids are great examples of why that was a good policy. Smart, cool, they have a good playful rapport with Brolin. Together they have that kind of lion with his cubs quality that, say, Brody and his brood had in JAWS. He drives them both to school on the back of his motorcycle! He makes them wear helmets but he doesn't wear one himself. In other words, he's one of those great 70s dads I'm always writing about, the ones able to inspire love and independence without micro-managing, hovering, fretting, or sacrificing their own happiness and freedom on the altar of their children's "safety."

8. Believably out-of-their-depth local cops:

The local cops mean well, and try hard, but they're not prepared for an indestructible devil car. Things get fouled up with their communication and their lack of experience is a real hindrance. They've barely had to draw their guns in the line of duty before, and now this? 

Though strictly small town, these are not bad guys (as they'd be in FIRST BLOOD) or buffoons (SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT). For Luke (Ronny Cox), celebrating his two-year sober anniversary, the unreality of it all is just too good a reason to relapse. Hell, I'd do the same, even though his spacey state of shock results in the attack on the parade grounds (he forgets to cancel it).

I like that, after their roadblocks fail, these cops just frankly don't know what to do, and for once it's not frustrating as they're not deposited as heroes held back from performance by some greedy mayor in a tacky sport coat --they're just plain outgunned by Satan's engine. In fact, they're a bit like the police in TWIN PEAKS if agent Cooper wasn't there --they even have a tall Native American tracker type (Eddie Little Sky), mainly so an old medicine woman from his tribe can bear witness to the running over of the local old NYC character actor on the force, Chief Everett (John Marley), and inform him the car has strange magic.

Everett's actually a pretty cool older character. "Are you gonna stand there philosophizing or are you gonna buy me a drink? You're not smart enough to do both," he says. "You know what your father once said to me," he tells Wade as they stroll across the street to the town's one bar (never seen in interior), then he forgets, "ah I was gonna make it up anyhow."  And he gets pretty furious with the local wife beater, ever-trying to convince the wife to press charges. "Be anything you want, just don't be a bully!"

Was there ever a more succinct encapsulation of 70s philosophy?

It's not Everett's death however, but Lauren's--inevitably the reprisal for her taunting--that makes it feel personal and the surviving fuzz are finally fully rallied and we're rooting for them all the way. There's a great long single static shot, no music or dialogue, of the cops sitting around Lauren's wrecked living room in a state of angry fugue shock and rage. No words, no real movement, no music--the moment is allowed to land. Then, back at the sheriff office they grab the demolition man wife beater out of the jail (EG Marshall) and Brolin just says "you." Marshall smiles an evil but reassuring grin - he'll at last get to use his violence for the good of the group. It's a galvanizing moment--and all the more potent for being done without meddling emotional telegraph scoring.

 9. Better at being a Stephen King adaption than most Stephen King adaptions

Like so many good horror novels, especially King's, we get a weird vignette of each recognizably small town American victim before they're slaughtered, and we either mourn or cheer their demises. We do wish there was more time with cute girlfriend and less of the abusive demolitions expert husband down the road--but each have an important part in the Americana tapestry. When the alcoholic deputy reacts to the weirdness of the car invasion by sneaking a fifth of whiskey out of his trunk on the day of his two-year sober anniversary, the event is given the proper shadowy ominousness--the sort King, a recovering alcoholic himself, would definitely add if this was one of his books--instead of being made light of or indirectly encouraged (welcome back!) or judged as mere character weakness (can't you just drink a beer and stop like everyone else?). All in all, rather than just painting the roadkill residents in dumb broad get-it-over-with strokes, the mood and low key vibe of the thing is really honed in on. These are people we know from our own lives, or would like to, and quickly come to care about, not generic lazily-written 'types.'

Everyone involved in the cast is smart enough to know we in the audience are going to find the premise of devil car absurd, so they wisely play it dead straight. As a result, it's fine fun and lacks the endless train of shitters and bullies that, to my mind, marred CHRISTINE --both the book and the film--in mean-spirited overkill and too many on-the-nose rock songs ("Bad to the Bone" ugh). THE CAR doesn't deign to mess in such overly-paddled waters. Like the recent Netflix hit, STRANGER THINGS, THE CAR explores the good parts of King horror novel style without the cliches and ugly American small town swath-cataloguing and cheap way to get our blood up as readers.

10. Brolin Brolin Brolin

My dad considered James Brolin the worst actor in the history of the world. That's etched in my mind (PS- dad's worst actress: Ali McGraw). Well, James fathered one of my favorite actors of our day, Josh Brolin, so he's all right with me. And you see the resemblance right off, and it makes James' films bolder and more resonant in hindsight. Both of them Brolins them look like they belong in the American Southwest (in films like this and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. They have a smattering of the noble savage about their features--like Jame's grandpa could have been the son of the Native American princess and Dewey Martin in THE BIG SKY. As with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson, that droplet of Native American ancestry in their DNA helps them look as rugged and grounded as the great American Southwest itself. Their voice just clinches it. These are men who didn't have to learn to ride a horse or shoot a gun for their first western. 

As for his character, Wade "Parent," (how associative!), we don't often see such a mix of well-meaning lummox and laconic rebel in horror movie fathers anymore. Today they are either perfect dads, seeping intelligence warmth and compassion like puss from glowing sores, or tortured-by-the-killer-who-got-away divorcee cops always late to their children's custody hearing--the haggard ex-wife glowering at him as he stumbles into the courtroom, spilling lame excuses. Today, too, child actor babyface stunted growth prettiness and 'good' masculinity have become intertwined to the point even country stars have to be clean shaven burly but baby-faced Christians rather than hairy good old boys full of swamp-bred sass, nicotine deep vocals, a moonshine twinkle in their blue eyes, and a 'stache big as all outdoors. 

But Brolin's Wade is one of the great 70s dads, fulfilling the linkage to his son Josh's portrayal of a great 70s dad, in PLANET TERROR.  Just taking his two little girls to their elementary school on the back of his motorcycle should give you some kind of a clue. This is not a man who's going to turn this devil car case over to the Feds or State Patrol--though he knows deep down he probably should. He probably doesn't even have the FBI's phone numbers. But he's certainly got the 'stache, and the moxy, and a dim cognizance of his own limitations coupled to the courage to sally forth anyway is what makes a man a man's man.

If that's the trade-off--"competence and dull safety-first responsible clean-shaven rules-follower" instead of 'mustache ridin' badasses who need to fall apart before they can be re-glued'-well then... at least we got the movies to remember the real men by. Isn't that why we're all here, to make sure we remember the things we left behind when we were booted from our comfy local highway drag strip to make way for the god-damned highway with its speed limit and tolls?

And remember: in the 70s no one used seat-belts, even in the front. EVER! Dig.

It's a slippery slope, all that life-saving is murder on our Social Security and pension funds. Honey don't think about it. Just press play and drive fast, furious, and over and over... the hippie... one more time.

NOTES:

"Boss" was the adjective we kids of the 70s used a lot, i.e. "Boss iron-on, Cheryl! Where'd ya get it?"

SHARK WEEK Cools Me

It comes every year, with the same self-aware post-macho summertime cachet that James Bond week used to carry in the late 90s on TNT (even getting a name check in American Beauty). We never have to worry what's on--no matter where we are- during this precious time. We have a resource (presuming we have cable and get the Discovery Channel) what will chill us out before going off to a date or put us in the mood while canoodling at the Ramada, or cooling our stressed brain and body after work or a workout or a beat-down or a fascist rally or a night on the town. Whatever we disenfranchised Straight White Men aged 20-50 need to recover from (I mention my demographic because most of the commercials during shark week feature 20-something white males with beard stubble, a dog, and khakis. The Independence Day-Twizzlers tie-in, for example, or the smug endomorph talking about how car buying was always supposed to be [this is Tru-Car]). We straight white males age 20-50 can still cultivate detachment instead of fury as our watch as the dominance we never knew we had is suddenly pointed out to us so compoletely that we know we'll never get an invite to the Eyes Wide Shut masquerade. Luckily, as some of us learned from our dads in the 60s-70s, when the bombs come there's no point in hiding. Just go up on the roof with lawn chair and a cooler of beer, and watch the show...

World War Three never happened, but the graveyard whistle is still up there and for now we're still number one on the top ten most-dangerous, biggest bite-radius countdown!

Heil yeah, boyy! We Flava Flav 90s catch phrase co-opting white dudes are worse than lionfish, or sargassum. Say, anyone still listen to Kid Rock? I've noticed ZZ Top have sashayed their way out of the valley of oblivion (between the 'new charts' and the 'retro-cool') so can Bob Segar be far behind? Speaking of which, that Blake Lively is a real honey and supposedly rocks it in THE SHALLOWS at a theater in a mall in a town near you! Hell yeah, man! I am reeled in. 

Do you have a time to fill out a small response card based on your reaction to my previous paragraph? Don't try to escape me, dear reader! Millions of years of evolution have made my fins react with lightning speed to the tiniest glimmer of consumer dissatisfaction. Aus Kommen der Hai Woche!

Shark week: Now that we all have giant HD TVs of the sort our ancestors only dreamed about, the deep blues like a 3D aquarium, Shark Week is the best next thing to being there, on some gorgeous remote Australian beach, pink sand and waves lapping from clear aquamarine slowly into deep indigo and purple--wait, purple? Where is all the red coming from to mix with the.... Oh right, your leg's missing. Shark week! And with at least two channels (DISC and NGEO) running two different sets of shark-related programming (on Nat-Geo it's "Sharkfest".... not as cool, Burger King!). I like to pretend my TV is a window into the pool behind my James Bond villain lair; the camera man in the water with the sharks was dropped in there through a secret door because the one thing SPECTRE will not tolerate is failure!

It used to be just a hodgepodge of dull oceanographers tagging and mapping trans-oceanic migrations, puncture-aided by AIR JAWS, which was three or four great "strikes" of a whale-sized Great White breaching up and clomping down on a stack of seal-shaped tires, over and over, which is bound to be aggravating for the shark, wasting much energy (I always feel bad - were the sharks compensated for their effort? Were substantial fish subsidies paid from the stern?). But the whole week has been getting better every year, with shit aimed so close to me and stoners of a certain age group that it's like Discovery Channel has been reading our dinosaur minds or admiring the numbers on SHARKNADO. Every year there's more cool shit--including endless tie-in advertisements and cross-channel synergy-- aimed so precisely at my demographic that I feel like I'm getting high with all of America. Eli Roth hosts shark talk shows. Andy Samberg does weird trickster post-modern count-downs. SHARK CITY chronicles dishy encounters between a few residents of the local food chain in and around a sunken freighter. Mmy favorite so far: SHARKS OF THE SHADOWLAND and its trio of badass New Zealand government conservationist divers subjecting themselves to the ceaseless group attacks by weird-looking sharks called sevengills, all in the name of battling sea weed plagues! 

Finally there's a sense of a real danger, of something's at stake other than the usual marine biology-cloaked quest for samples and footage, tagging and abducting sharks and releasing them back into the water to deal with their cover memories, nightmares, disbelieving friends ("they pulled me up on a big craft and  poked me with an implant rod, I swear!") and constant surveillance beeps screwing with their ampules of Lorenzini. None of that, bro! These sevengill sharks are killers and this is New Zealand, where official government conservation teams consist solely of two cool Kiwis with dreads and a cute girl with a North American accent. Man, I love these guys!!

Knowing at least one government in the world is so chill and keeping itself pristine really cheers me up, because I've been suffering from too much excess empathy for our imprisoned creatures and the natural world, which seems now to be almost as trashed as I am. I've been writing lots of stuff that I can't seem to finish. I just keep making it longer, and longer and always it winds back around to my personal issues, the various dead ends of middle age, the realization of everything that's holding the world back from utopia, The Great White... Straight... American... Male. I'm the Ahab of the future Waterworld, the broken consul passing out under the super volcano. I only know of one place that hasn't heard of my kind of empathy-plagued freak, the deep ocean, where the great white, the sevengill, the tiger and the bull still think they're King frickin' Apex Kong. Time to fuck 'em up.... without hurting them.... from the safety of our A/C couches.

I hate summer in general -- too disgusting in the city, too buggy in the country. If I go somewhere like a cookout or camping, either I'll be totally miserable or have such a good time that coming back to my apartment afterwards fills me with antsy despair. I've never loved summer except for the air conditioning. I love it and I'll seize any chance to use it. I'm too big to enjoy flying coach, legs crushed in a torturous pen for six hours just to go through sweaty customs, all to relax on a beach. The best I can do is either drink myself into a tizzy or, if sober, take a long AC-nap in the hotel as soon as I arrive, just to get me back to par, to get the stress of the plane ride and airports out of my system so I'm as relaxed as I would be if I never left in the first place. If I do achieve some kind of deep relaxing on the trip, it's gone by the time I've arrived home, after flights and shitty airports all over again. It's sisyphusian! 

 But I do like to travel from the safety of the AC at home, to 'visit' other realms and far-off shores via the transdimensional consciousness that is HD TV these days. Old movies are a solace, but alas TCM often fritters away the 5-7 PM slots of the week with saccharine musicals from the post-code era --movies so white and bland you can feel the PBSD (Post-Boredom Stress Disorder) of a generation of captive Sullivans and children dragged to their seats by churchy matrons who just love nonthreatening squeaky kids MGM musicalzzzz, the type so white and fascist innocent they freeze the blood. Yikes, TCM, this week thou art losing me to the sharks! 

If you're a gloomy Swede with a dark sense of humor, no Faro to call your own, and you need something else, to cool down from der werkaus and are too tired to surf, and you want to find something with some bite that's not going to trojan horse in bad vibes (like the news), something you can detox to and soak up a kind of sense memory vacation via, then scroll your way to the sharks. Boom, you're out of the city, out on the ocean, swimming with photographer Andy Casagrande and a bunch of sharkologists. You don't have to smell any chum or brine or get sea sick or bored and ansty with that kind of trapped feeling one may get when they can't just escape to their car the moment things get too iffy. You don't have to stay, you don't have to go, the footage is reusable, the biological tidbits imparted throughout cross the boundaries of the shows, no need to wonder. 

Take a trick I learned from JK Huysmans-- put a dab of cocoanut suntan lotion on your nose and cheeks, sit where you can catch some rays of setting sun through the window, and put on the sharks. Seeing the HD deep-blue water, smelling the cocoanut oil, you might suddenly feel the ocean beneath you or around you, that bobbing and dragging forward and back through the waves as you lay back on the couch and let yourself drift into a nap. The sharks are there.... they are eating anyone who tries to remind you you're not Australian, or that it's trash night... and dishes... and commercials showing us starving kids in Africa one minute and factory farming atrocities the next, not getting the realization that the two cancel each other out - you can't save both. That's what we need the sharks for, chum!

Oops, see I went there again, urban socialist environmental angst boiling over, all this excess projected empathy for the suffering - I can't get the suffering of "Sophia in the shoe" out of my brain, useless empathy suffocating me, the exhaust fumes of my futile rage weakening the senses of my Zen coordination, so once again it's time to paddle back ceaselessy against the tide, to the Shallows, to the Deep Blue Sea, to the Shark Week.. The next red you see won't be my anger.... because if they're showing endangered shark eco-atrocities one one channel, the other one's gotta have Eli Roth showing shark attack re-enactments, and the thought of anything eating us back cools my misanthropic rage like a blast of endless Swedish night.

Blake Lively, coaxing my demographic off our recliners and into THE SHALLOWS.