My pick of Five Psychotronic Films on Amazon Prime for a new TRUMPMERICA post was such a hit I felt I had to balance the scale, so here it is. Evoking the coming liberal dystopia that can only result when a woman is or isn't elected president, there's less apocalypse and more matriarchy to worry about this time. A more inspiring future of liberal awareness, higher taxation of the rich, and massive un-deployment shall be enforced. With every new dead or symbolically neutered old white male voter we'll be sliding one step closer to socialism until we're so like Canada we'll forget how to pronounce "about" correctly.PS - Dear Hulu: You should have a 'Resume' button. Instead we have to start over every time we press stop and that's crap (at least on my Blu-ray player). Also Hulu is a terrible name for a movie site. Don't try to seem playful! You've got enough dreary 50s-60s international art films on there to send even Ozu scrambling for the channel changer, and Hulu is a Hawaiian term, and some of us have never remembered to forget Pearl Harbor. So change yr name to FROGTOWN, and not just 'cuz there's so many insufferably French films on your site, but because you carry the one.. the only....
(1988) Starring Sandahl Bergman, Roddy Piper
**1/2
Frankly, there's no possible way--at this point--the film could go wrong.
The standout, for me, being of sound mind and a certain age, is the still-lithe Bergman as the health officer Spangle, able to project both carnal yearning and no-bullshit feminist authority (a very difficult combo to do right). This gorgeous, sexily assured ex-Fosse dancer is still as lithe, confident, graceful, strong and open-souled sweet she was six years earlier in Conan. Alas, Rodney's character is a bit on the broad side. Apparently--for some reason no sensible male in the audience will quite understand--Rodney is furious over his enslaved stud position, and keeps trying to escape! What a maroon, as Bugs bunny might say. Bergman merely touches one of her earrings and the explosive chastity belt shocks his nuts, but still he tries. Maybe that's why the scene where Spangle abducts--and then drugs--a wild fertile woman of the wasteland and compels Hell to mount her isn't as vile as it might have been. Instead it gets so ludicrously kinky on so many wrong levels, though, you just may remember, as I did, a whole mess of prepubescent sex fantasies you used to have in the first and second grade, before you really knew anything about sex so it was all tied in with leashes and master-slave dominance (but which the average 50 Shades-style film never gets right). With Hell expected to 'perform' while his two captors/guardian women watch with detached curiosity, ready to zap him at a moment's notice, we have a very satisfying inversion of the recent real life outrage with an all male government panel on women's sexual health. Here we have an all female team considering his phallus literally government property. It doesn't make things right but it's a start!
The big surprise though is Piper's ability to convey a surprisingly sweet and tender vulnerability in his softer scenes. Coming off a bit broad and flat when he's expected to play the sexist dingus, when he finally drops his guard, he becomes the most emotionally open character in the film! He's got a heart as big all outdoors!
If all this male subjugation gets to be too much then relax in knowing the second half of the film reverses the situation. As Sandahl goes into chains as an abducted slave led by Hell on a leash into Frogtown --their cover story is that he's there to sell her into the harem of the Frog warlord. Your feminist umbrage may start to kick in its stall but just know that the majority of the women characters in this bizarre slyly-satiric film are super capable and assertive, more physically agile and gutsier than any of the men, or frogs. In other words, rather than affirm male dominance, the film deconstructs the infantile frustrations beneath sadomasochism, harem-keeping, reptilian (or amphibian) sex slave mind games, and "dance! dance!" warlord cup-banging, revealing them all as pathetic attempts to reclaim the phallus from mighty Woman.
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| laugh while you can, monkey boy! |
That said, it's not perfect: a frog with a fez does a seriously terrible voiceover, there are too many close-ups (not Piper's strong suit) and it sometimes feels under-directed, but for every bad thing a good: Nicholas Worth pours on the sputtering malice as one of the frog warlords, Sandahl gets to do the 'Dance of the 3 Snakes' and lo and behold, there in the midst of the Frogtown cantina who should appear, but western character actor Rory Calhoun, wearing his good store teeth as a uranium miner!. During the big climactic wasteland car chase, when he's dying with his elderly head cradled in the laps of a backseat full of liberated pacifist concubines, a cute blonde warrior driving while a wanderer of the wasteland shoots from the passenger seat-- a horny mutant warlord in hot pursuit in his tricked-out, warrior-bedecked ride across the barren wasteland, you realize suddenly - holy shit! It prefigures the climax of Mad Max: Fury Road! Considering Frogtown is one of that slew of post-Road Warrior apocalypse road trip rip-off homages, it's almost spookily 'full circle' prescient (has George Miller seen this movie?)
Why Hillary: One look at the face of the odious frog king and you'll be reminded of a certain amphibious also-runner behind Trump. Sandahl is Hillary being sold to the Middle States ('can she dance?' asks the Frog Prince in he fez before voting/purchasing); the passive, fertile harem are the women voters of swing states looking askance at the brutalizing Handmaid's Tale future awaiting them under The Frog mutant's sway even though they've been trained to submit (one grand dame frog lady takes a shine to Piper and frees him, though it means her death -- she'd be the swing state independent female voting bloc). The matriarchy embodies the idealized Hillary future. Scruffy Roddy stands for the American midwest, reckoning the pros and cons between giving a woman control of the nation's balls, or else letting power-hungry toads run riot over our civil liberties. Some choice.
THE BROOD
(1979) Dir. David Cronenberg
***1/2
If you need a map through this genuinely strange, disturbing Cronenberg picture, I'd say watch his subsequent film, SCANNERS first. That film is a zippy mind-expander with solid acting, exploding heads, Michael Ironside in his best role (his facial expressions when he's scanning are beyond brilliant). Here in BROOD-land things are a little less pleasingly Hitchcockian and more gender/menstrual/reproductive disturbing. Oliver Reed is Dr. Raglan, the controversial creator of a very 70s form of gestalt therapy called 'psychoplasmics.' A method of focusing rage that causes the body to break out in spots... or cancerous tubers or worse, little homicidal blonde moppets, it's the Freudian 'hysteric complex' writ large upon the body (instead of a paralyzed arm, an extra one). Wildly unhinged Samantha Eggar plays Raglan's star patient, so deep into his regressive therapy he won't let her concerned husband get in to see her. Their child, on the other hand, is brought in for weekends, but comes home traumatized and bruised. Weird and kind of ridiculous, it all goes down in another wintry remote experimental clinic (Cronenberg has a thing for private clinics operated in the wintry Canadian byways - socialized medicine, must be nice).I don't want to spoil the plot, but what's going on in the subtext is kind of a post-feminist version of FORBIDDEN PLANET's Monster from the Id, making this a bit like KRAMER VS. FRANKENSTEIN. It's pretty yucky in spots but, for me, the hirsute actor in the beginning demonstration is the most disturbing part. He's so open and needy in that gross kind of harrowingly 'lonely man-boy who goes to 70s encounter groups or ecstasy parties so people will touch him' kind of way he gives me hives. Still, him aside, the scene where a cute possible love interest Ruth Mayer (Susan Hogan with a great 70s elfin hair cut) is hammered to death by two of the monster kids right in front of her horrified kindergarten class is perhaps the most outrageous and deeply disturbing scene in all of 70s horror. Dude, there's always SCANNERS if you're squirrelly. If not, hold on, for once Eggar gets a decent size piece of scenery in her hands she tears it up an industrial wood chipper.
PS - Seeing this again, I recognize my new favorite stealth character actor: Robert A. Silverman (above). Wearing a white towel on his neck to cover an awful mutating psychoplasmic affliction, he's so good in BROOD --and as Hans in NAKED LUNCH (above), and the artist in SCANNERS--well, he just knocks all Cronenberg's films up a notch. Why only Cronenberg seems to know of his genius is beyond me. Toronto experimental theater's gain is the cinematic world's loss?
We'd all be hammered.
DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT
(1994) Dir. Linda Hassani
****
Shot through a haze of red and blue with just the right amount of imagination (neither whimsical nor grungy), this Satanic daughter love story is like THE LITTLE MERMAID x SPECIES with a refreshing lack of qualms about sex, God, or killing. The story begins in Hell: an Old Testament-style marching line of desert-wandering souls (ala STARGATE x PHANTASM) head to their fates, guided by pumping ominous-but-giddy Fuzzbee Morse liturgy. Angela Featherstone stars as the young, wistful demoness Veronica, who's about to come of age and take over torturing the embezzling bankers of Hell, but she dreams instead of seeing the surfaces of Earth and walking under the sky. Even thinking such a thing is forbidden by her sputtering, over-acting demon father (the "psycho's psycho," Nicholas Worth). Undaunted by his furious scourging lashes, Veronica sneaks up to the land of men and immediately fathoms there is much good work to do, tearing the spines and hearts out of rapists and racist cops, feeding their hearts to her dog Hellraiser, and shacking up with a handsome sweet-souled doctor named Max (Daniel Markel). And if any homicide detective tries to get in her way, she just shows him the hellfire behind her glowing eyes while making dire announcements about the grim future that awaits mankind. That's enough to keep him from digging any deeper. Besides, the chief doesn't mind a few less rapists and racists on the streets.
Like some Satanic bible school instructional video, this confusingly-titled (there are about 100 shows and movies named Dark Angel) female-directed little miracle has become one my go-to favorites the last few years, thanks to its dreamlike grungy fairytale threadbare quality, its incongruity of set and setting (everyone speaks English but it was clearly filmed in Romania), its Shelly Duvall-meets-Val Lewton-in-Ed Wood's basement mythopoetic aesthetic, its great cast and its dusky red and black color scheme (ala another favorite, Ghosts of Mars). Sure, Featherstone isn't the greatest actress in the world, but what she lacks in chops is surpassed by what she has--the ability to project complete confidence and emotional vacancy at the same time--is unteachable. Her flatline reading of dialogue like "I've always wanted to witness people coupling, Max, but I never thought it would move me so much," is so spot-on you realize better (or worse) actresses would never be able to match it. They'd either try to be sexy (and come off campy), imperious (and come off stuffy), mean (and come off bitchy) or tough (and come off jokey), but Featherstone's assertive confidence and deadpan demeanor is so despite-itself sexy she gets away with the actor equivalent of murder, which is just right for Matthew Freeway Bright's genius script (full of great lines like: "I don't require the blessing of the one true church to engage in sexual relations, Max.") And when she unfolds her true form--wings, horn, tail--after orgasm--while luxuriating out in the bed, it's somehow very reassuring, as is her matter-of-fact way with wrapping human hearts in newspaper to feed Hellraiser. I've only ever seen that kind of deadpan female genius--commanding both adoration and respect--in German science fiction film female characters from the 70s (as in STAR MAIDENS in the west, ELEOMA and IM STAUB DER STERNE in the east). It's sad America has never been able to duplicate it. Even Featherstone and Hassani had to go Romania to show it. Why there wasn't a sequel (judging from the title more than one was planned) I don't know, unless of course it's the damn patriarchy, the same one that stops STAR MAIDENS or those other films from being released, yet gives us no end of sequels to horror films starring men and/or puppets.Why Hillary: One of Veronica's first assignments down in Hell is to come up with creative ways to punish the lawyers and bankers, mirroring Hillary's promise to clean up Wall Street. When Veronica kills two racist cops after they beat up on a black guy she mirrors Clinton's support of Black Lives Matter. Predictions of a hellfire future for sinners mirrors Hill's certainty that global warming will haunt the future of big oil consumers. Also, Veronica tells a nun "she cannot enter a church" as she "would surely combust' --depending on whom you ask, neither can Hillary!
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| In Hell, the cinema has cold, unpadded wood seats. |
DEMONS
(1985) Dir. Lamberto Bava
**1/2
**1/2
In the land of Trump it's all about the thermonuclear family, be it ever so "humbly" nouveau-riche (I don't want much," as Groucho Marx would say, "just a little place where I can phone my wife and tell her I wont be home for dinner.") But this Italian film, shot in Berlin, in the 80s, sums up life in conquered Axis countries after the death of disco. It's the story of a demonic theater showing a film about a silver mask triggering a demon outbreak, and there's a promotional display silver mask in the theater lobby that actually causes a demon outbreak. When a brave prostitute seeing the movie with her cool pimp tries it on, the mask pricks her skin and she becomes patient zero for an outbreak of demons running around in the theater ala MONSTERS CRASH PAJAMA PARTY.If you saw DEMONS in the same theater as the characters seeing the movie in the film, with the same actors all in the theater (as might be at the premiere) then I can imagine this might freeze your hard drive with its meta refraction, i.e. the folks at the advance screening midnight show of DARK KNIGHT RISES in Aurora, Colorado. But at home, decades later, it's just a dumb hair metal stoner kind of good time. Produced and co-written by Dario Argento, with the help of director Michele Soavi (STAGEFRIGHT), featuring sublime boom operation by Angelo Amatulli (SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS), and music from Claudio 'Goblin' Simonetti, it's truly an Argento-Goblin-Bava Jr. family affair, by which I mean nowhere near as good as 70s Argento but nowhere near as bad as 00's Argento, and still nowhere near as meta as the best Soavi.
Genius is fleeting --even in the best of us.
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| Michele Soavi - showing his good side |
And give thanks to Hulu, now you can watch it on your phone in perfect safety (the screen is too small for any demon to climb through).
WARUM DIE HILL? Filmed in Germany, that land where a single demonic prick started an outbreak of inhuman violence that swept the continent, it's waiting for just the right moment to bubble up and burst anew upon the acne-scarred facial landscape. And, to make it all about this moment in America, a woman starts all the madness off by insisting on trying on the mask in the lobby (cuz ladies always be tryin' on strange display masks in lobbies, am I right fellas?)
DAGON
(2001) Dir. Stuart Gordon
***1/2
We of the Lovecraft cult have become quite used to being disappointed by big screen adaptions. Maybe it's because the pantheon of his elder Gods like Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath and their hideous half-human offspring--all summonable via the unholy bible of black magic, the Necronomicon--reverberate far deeper than ordinary mind's eye boogeymen. No 2D or 3D representation can compare. Seeming to cohere out of the electric blur behind our eyelids, these indescribably leviathans urge us forward through Lovecraft's prose as if his writing had its own dark power to transcend the very limits of fiction, so that just reading the story we might waken the elder behemoths from their slumber in the timeless ocean below our archaic collective unconsciousness. Naturally no film is going to be able to capture that feeling. Carpenter's IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS was about that feeling, but didn't create it, and suffered from bad 90s clothes, hair, and acting. Corman made a decent stab at it with Vincent, but the results weren't quite up to his Poe stuff. Thank the Mad Arab, then, for Stuart Gordon, whose FROM BEYOND and RE-ANIMATOR are easily the two best Lovecraft adaptations. In each he wisely keeps the events flowing in something like real time, over a single night or weekend, so there's seldom time to get or need a 'third eye' complete picture. Seeing protagonists being chased along progressively more surreal avenues without ever stopping for a dissolve captures just what the stories are like: snapshots of Hell barely developed before they're already burning, the terror of nightmare momentum, racing across a dangling rope bridge over the yawning chasm of alarm clock death/waking.For DAGON, Gordon adapts Lovecraft's quintessential "Shadow over Innsmouth" moving the locale from New England to an ancient Spanish fishing village, and having the action go down over one long rainy afternoon into late rainy evening, capturing the strange disorienting nightmare of trying to procure help after a freak storm rolls in and hurls a passing yacht--helmed by American investment wizard Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden)--onto a rocky outcrop, trapping him under the onrushing flood of water from the hull. Guests Paul and his Spanish girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Meroño) rush ashore to get help, are immediately separated by a seemingly friendly priest and... well, the weirdness never lets up for a moment, nor does the rain.
Wait what was that last one? Kiss me, baby, and never mind.
POR QUE HILÁRAYE K'LIHN-TOÑ: An evil fish god cult priest incites the elders to smash the iconography of the Christian church? The locals kill a Rupert Murdoch-esque yachtsman (offscreen)? Hell yeah. And the open ending suggests the future depends on the Democratic Party's ability to adapt to weird new paradigms as the only viable answer (vs. the Republican Party's resistance to change). As with the other films on this list it's ultimately about a sort of high Precambrian matriarchy. The plethora of Spanish speakers stands as a mockery to the the anti-immigrant Trump supporters who consider it a violation of their civil rights if you try to explain the difference between Spain and Mexico.
+ 5 RUNNERS UP:
(1975) Dir. David Cronenberg
***
I disgust la SHIV in an oilier post but fack it. Spiked with livid, funny gross outs and a red kidney thing hopping inside any old orifice, here's a 'careful what you wish for' example of 70s singles swinging rather too successfully. As the wild orgy heats up, maybe ask yourself: is this how the red states really think we behave up here in the blue beyond? Or is it just how they would, were they not good decent Christians? Either way, you may never want to have sex again, and--on behalf of our stressed planet--thank you for that. Looking almost sex ed film crummy, it really should be shown in every high school health class, for it would chasten the louchest Hefner. The performances are deceptively brilliant; the moments of freeze frame slow motion unique and effective; the scenes of orgies breaking out in the halls and stairwells remind me of drug parties I've... heard about... on Fox News. Just thinking about Fox News in fact should answer your question why this film is 'Hillary-esque'! After it's over, you'll be grateful for all the repression that makes social order of any sort possible.
(1970) Dir. Jaromil Jireš
SHE
(1935) Dir. Merien C. Cooper
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"I wrote 'fertilizing the eggs,' Gene."
