Wakers from the Dream of Now: THE VOID, BEYOND THE GATES, DARK DUNGEONS

TWIN PEAKS is happening again. Agent Cooper has returned in different places as different selves; DANGER 5 is no longer on Netflix, but THE LOVE WITCH is. Things from the past come back yet nothing from the moment leaves--the selection is so vast picking something is impossible. So we go back in time to when--if we wanted to see weird shit, sex or gore--we had to go the R-rated movie, or... rent it. Limited by what wasn't checked out, and by circumstance, now we miss that simplicity, the narrowness of options. So we make movies that evoke those golden years of limited selection. If you want to make a movie that looks and feels like it was made 20 years ago then you might be a retro-metatextual, but I won't judge you. I'd have to pick a version of me to do that, and I'll leave that to the professionals serenely rooted in space and time, you know who I mean. 

What's important is that the acclaim for STRANGER THINGS and IT FOLLOWS helped convince a batch of filmmakers to make the kind of stuff they wanted to see back in the day, their child's mind thrilling to the lurid covers at the store, ominous Carpenter synths dancing in their heads. From the recently discussed SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL to as far back as GRINDHOUSE, a kind of borderline nostalgia future-past melancholy has been washing over things to free us all from the terrible burden of the slick but washed-out HD CGI present --wherein STAR WARS films look like video games and video games look like neorealist crime dramas.

Neither feature film discussed below is specifically great (which is why I added a short at the end that is). In fact I'd love to sit them down with each other and have them compare notes. Each has what the other lacks: THE VOID lacks patience, tick-tocakality, self-confidence, and focus; BEYOND THE GATES lacks daring, action and the strength of convictions. One needs the willingness to crank it to eleven rather than constantly dialing back like a repressed schoolmarm resisting temptation; the other needs to dial it down to four and take a deep breath.

THE VOID

(2017) Dir. Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski

**

An art director and make-up artist teamed up for this co-debut that serves a nice showcase for their specific sets of skills. Solid analog/latex effects and a bizarre Lovecraftian mythos (replete with an transdimensional world of floating black pyramids) liven up an 'all in a single weird night' tale of an understaffed hospital, caught in the midst of closing, deep in the meth belt, that gets hit with a very weird outbreak of... tentacles... and cultists. Aaron Poole stars as the shaky sheriff who lets you know how rattled he is by brining a gunshot wound case into the hospital, then shooting him in the head for the crime of weirding him out. Soon, other guys arrive to hold everyone hostage, and then the hospital is surrounded by a cadre of cultists in white robes with black triangles on the hoods. All Hell breaks loose, literally, and quickly and its all a lot of badly edited, misguided overkill. There's way too much shouting and waving guns to even notice the four different Clive Barker and John Carpenter movie borrowings melting together in the hallway trying to get anyone's attention like a bunch of ill-behaved moppets at the grocery store. Elements of THE THING and ASSAULT PRECINCT 13 merge together and then run screaming IN(to) THE MOUTH OF MADNESS with the PRINCE OF DARKNESS, up to the attics of Clive Barker's HELLRAISER, then out to Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND and the Solaris-from-Hell space ship in EVENT HORIZON, there's probably others. These boys don't want you to be bored, so they bludgeon you into an irritated stupor, like the immigrant grandma who mistakes loudness for strength. 

Gillespie and Kostanski clearly have a lot to learn about what makes those films they're borrowing from 'good', like when to use dialogue and when not to, how much dialogue is too much, where to put the camera, when to cut, and how to set up an ominous mood or make effective use of a  synth drone score. They go for a Carpenter vibe but don't have the patience for Hawksian cool or the slow-building relentless dread that is Carpenter's best auteur trait. Instead there are way too many balls in the air at once. Screaming "c-c-calm down!" in a room full of over-acting, under-directed actors for minutes on end doesn't count as plot development. When the film quiets itself long enough to focus on just one or two characters at a time, sun of a gun if it doesn't almost work! But the drawbacks of the 'more-is-less' approach escape the VOID, probably the one chapter of Robert McKee they shouldn't have skipped over.  It's as if all the elaborate monster tableaux are lined up offstage like a make-up artist reel-cum-fashion show and, if they don't keep slithering out, they'll get so backed up the film will end before they can all get their moment.

That's not to say it's all that bad. As one of the nurses is played by Kathleen Munroe (above right), a gorgeous blue-cat-eyed creature in the Famke Janssen x Franka Poetente mold who stole a lot of pieces of my heart as a wild Irish lassie equestrian zombie in Romero's unjustly ignored SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (see my comparison of it with PET SEMETERY + the RNC National Convention). Here, looking all coy in her green scrubs, she reminded me of the cute nurses who gave me Ativan and Librium when I was flipping out at NY-Presbyterian Hospital this past February. Exuding actorly grace and sultry depth, Munroe might have saved THE VOID the way she saved SURVIVAL had the writers allowed her to be a cool Hawksian heroine in the vein of Laurie Zimmer in ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. But that would perhaps take cigarettes and balls and low 'indoor voice' talking voices, which maybe made them nervous. Gillespie and Kostanski prefer yelling and hamming, so you know it's intense!

 And, worse, after the first chunk of film is over, and all the tableaux in place, Munroe, the one gem in all this dross, is whisked down the rabbit hole of the hospital sub-basement to wait out a few reels before becoming just another imperiled Pauline for our trusty rattled sheriff to rescue. Ugh, hia lame attempt to find her proves way less engaging than the sight of Munroe prowling the empty, quiet hall in search of drugs for a pain-wracked pregnant lady. (They also shoehorn a kind of tired 'mourning a dead child' subplot [the grief broke her marriage with the sheriff], i.e. the kind of lazy screenwriter's shorthand for 'character development' that Carpenter studiously avoids).

Another thing missing that would have helped here: a 'gateway' drug for all the craziness: meth is name-checked (and seems all around) but there's no evidence of it. The source of all this strangeness turns out to be bizarre rituals carried out in some lonesome meth lab cabin.

But where is the meth, damn it?

I don't have much experience with amphetamines, but it seems to me, from what I have experiences, meth would make a great key to Lovecraftian horror evocation. Gillespie and Kostanski might be better prepared to explore this aspect if they'd done any meth. Dudes, write what you know, bros (sniffles) - betcha Carpenter wouldn't be afraid of a little meth 'for research purposes only.' and I bet that cult leader doctor could get his hands on some wonderful drugs - why would he even need to bother with cheap ass meth? Imagine if the bad guy cult leader doctor had synthesized some new drug - a kind of meth-DMT combo that shattered the fourth dimensional wall? I would have loved to see all sorts of directions that could have gone (and it would have, no doubt, if Stuart Gordon, Carpenter, or maybe Matthew Bright were involved). It's not too late. Matthew Bright and John Carpenter, let's collaborate, call me and bring some... 

Ah.... nevermind, I'd probably land right back at NY-Presbyterian.

Another drug-relevant angle: fostering the connection between drug withdrawal and the hell dimension. The high of variation of meth opening their pineal glands the way FROM BEYOND's tuning forks do or my own Salvia Divinorum + Robitussin + light-sound machine + Mingus "Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" journey to the breathing balloon machine elf time-space mandible-weaving beyh\ond-space-time fourth dimension back in '05. Or the anguish of suddenly losing all connection to that bliss as the inevitable pay-back recovery shows us that Hell is as easily accessible as Heaven and that, indeed, one may seldom experience on extreme without inevitably spending time in the other. That, my brothers, would rock. 

These caveats aside, Gillespie and Kostanski do offer some superb sequences near the climax, and it's inspiring that they demonstrate the chops to create their tentacled visions in real analog latex. But--once again--the problem is perhaps lack if real-life experience (they don't know what they don't know). The blurry frenzy of action in THE VOID has the air of fear and doubt, like an insecure painter who just throws all his paint on the canvas and runs out of the room, hoping it passes as art, or who wants to hang with the cool trippers but is afraid to take drugs so figures all he has to do is make weird noises, call everyone 'man' and do that annoying "you're going down a tunnel" hand gesture thing that troglodytes all love to do when they find out you're tripping. A seasoned experiencer would know that a huge tentacled thing erupting out of a dead man's stomach would be plenty great on its own; it doesn't have to occur with a flickering overhead lights, crazy Andy Milligan-style camera movements, cross-cuts to a screaming pregnant woman about to get a C-section (with no anesthesia), an over-acting pre-med intern refusing to help cuz it's too gross, and around ten people yelling at the top of their lungs while shooting and swinging axes. The camera seems half in the way of the action instead of chronicling it and none of these elements help establish any kind of mood, making Carpenter's genius for getting out of his own way all the more remarkable and precious.

Like Hawks, Carpenter took his time to make sure we got properly creeped out by the slow evolution of the THE THING. It was creepy because it was a legitimately fucked-up movie trying to pass as 'everything's cool' normal. At the end of, say, the intense autopsy arm-chomping scene, for example, after noticing the king crab eye stalks and legs sprouting out of the removed, crawling head of the dead man, Kurt's exclamation 'Jesus Fucking Christ" has the natural ring of something we might say while trying not to panic. It's funny and all the more terrifying for keeping it 'real' like that. Carpenter knows horror takes time, suspense must be built piece-by-piece. 

It's like when making out with someone for the first time: the slow build, just one light kiss first, then going back in for more, the teasing push and pull, ebb and flow; the in-between breaths are just as important as the actual kissing. If you just lunge at the person with tongue extended and don't give them a second to breathe, well, honey, it's called 'suffocation.' It's also called THE VOID. There's so much going on in this film, nothing ever has time to happen. Carpenter's movies seduce you into bed, VOID just runs up and starts humping your leg.

Further detriments: a good deep droning retro-analog synth score (as in STRANGER THINGS or IT FOLLOWS) would have helped immeasurably, instead, we get twangy guitar and the usual orchestral pointlessness. There's four different composers used and none can hold a candle to retro-futurist synth gods like Disasterpiece or Umberto. Those guys were probably available! You wanted to ape Carpenter but didn't want an eerie synth score? Do you watch HALLOWEEN and think, if only there was a nice John Williams or Howard Shore orchestral score instead of that annoying theme song? UGH! 

 Next time, boys, instead of just emulating John Carpenter movies, watch the movies he emulates. Watch RIO BRAVO, EL DORADO and THE 1951 version of THING. I've HAD IT! Stumpy, don't make me tell you again. Give Kathleen Munroe a cigarette and a match and punch the first pisher who squawks. 

 BEYOND THE GATES

(2016) Dir. Jackson Stewart

**1/2

BEYOND THE GATES' musical score on the other hand is the best thing about it: an effective melange of Goblin-esqe synths by retro-analog heavyweight Wojciech Golczewski. Like VOID, BEYOND is not set in the 80s so much as set within a universe clearly indebted to, haunted by, and styled after Videos The Director/s Rented as Impressionable Kid/s. Here however, it's not the Carpenter movies of youth but a video board game called NIGHTMARE. I'd never heard of video bored games before! Now I learn they had real commercials in the early 80s, and everything! Must have been a regional thing because I would have remembered. I'm the type.

And it's because I am the type that I hoped this story would resonate more than it did. A pair of semi-estranged "adult" brothers reunite at their old homestead after their video rental store owner father vanishes. They want to find out where he went, so mull through his old shit back in his office (the store is out of business but still right where they left it, still full of videos, which they exhibit no interest in). Then they find the game.... is it a clue?

The 'dead' video store is a great location for a horror film but it's not utilized nearly as effectively in Beyond the Gates as it is, say, in the Blockbuster/Shining episode of SOUTH PARK. It's barely even used at all, except as a means to put the brothers in contact with the last thing dad was watching. 

Aside from the bitchin' score, the next best thing about the film is the video board game itself, hosted by Barbara Crampton in new wave hair and eye liner, and easily stealing the show. But even that is given short shrift by the moronic brothers. Instead, most of the film occurs in dad's suburban tract home, where things get scary but nowhere near as scary as they would get a dead video store (what that tells us about ourselves is maybe something some of us aren't ready to hear).

Missed opportunities aside, at least--unlike THE VOID-- Stewart's film has a compulsive watchability, due perhaps to taking time to develop the characters, and establishing a mood wherein some dreadful thing seems always waiting around the next corner (not easy to do in a tract home).

Too bad then, that the pair of brothers at the center of the story don't make too much sense. They seem to have nothing in common, not even antagonism. They seem to share no common memories, no shared history, and --though they both supposedly worked at the video store-- and despite of all the time they must have spent in and around it -- they never mention or reference a single film, customer, event, ex girlfriend, or anything remotely video-related. Also, though one brother is coded as kind of cool, it's a bit odd that they're both such pussies that they to stop playing the game the moment it gets the least bit spooooky.  When Crampton mentions they need to find their father, the first thing they do is call their cop friend, like there's anything he can do about an old 80s board game  ("Officer, I demand you place this 80s videotape under arrest!") Would they call the cops if they found a stash of weed back in dad's office too? 

Nothing's worse than a kid who looks and acts cool who turns out to be just another narc.

Also, if any movie seemed to invite some SCREAM-style meta commentary it would be this one. None. Similarly, one is supposed to be sober, but there's ne'er a discussion of their past drinking binges, either together or separate. Now me, I've been sober 20 years (give or take, heh heh -see The Void review above) and that's all my brother and I ever talk about! It's a way to connect across our gravitational reverse polarity. Alcohol is the great unifier, even between sober people and hammered drunkards. But here there's no connection or even a shared joke here (the sort of thing that some improvisation or rehearsal might have brought forth), nor is there family resemblance and there's no real understanding why one brother--the sober anal nerd--seems to have inherited the house and store and the other (Chase Williamson, so good in JOHN DIES AT THE END) just stays a kind of stumblebum afterthought, except to add a kind of EAST OF EDEN foreground to its JUMANJI-ish basement backdrop.

You da man, Chase, you almost finished a whole beer!

My main issue with the film, however, isn't Chase, but the worminess of the square brother (Graham Skipper -intentionally unpictured), a fella so intrinsically unlikeable it makes it impossible to tell why anyone would want anything to do with him (imagining him fooling around with his girlfriend is singularly unsavory). I wanted to smack the glasses off his head and make him do whiskey shots. There are always one or two dorks like Skipper in any given AA meeting, i.e. what we call 'tourists'. They have like a single drink at a single party, get busted by their control freak parents, OR are whisked off to a rehab boarding school the minute mom finds a bag of weed in their sock drawer; OR they just like AA because there everyone has to be their friend OR becasuse their sibling is in it and they're jealous so they need to 'do' AA like they would steal a girlfriend or a soccer ball or an action figure, i.e. some sibling competitive bullshit of the sort they would have to examine in a fearless moral 5th step inventory if they expected to stay sober, but since they're not real alcoholics, they can stay sober without any self-inventory, which they mistake for 'winning'). 

It's not all bad though. In fact GATES works its way to some pretty cathartic fifth step style carnage. When the square brother finally gets around to killing and stabbing everything in sight alongside his cooler brother, it's like a cloud parts. Still, there needed to be more of a character change to believably get there -- a kind of change a slug of whiskey would have brought out, like Popeye's spinach, or the magic elixer from Wang's six demon bag in the climax of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA or like Nick Frost's two-fisted relapse in THE WORLD'S END. Now that's a reunion movie.

Instead, what does this pisher Graham do? Earlier in the film, when cleaning up the house, he finds and then pours his dad's liquor down the sink! Why, to make sure his brother or a guest or his girlfriend can't have any just because he's so righteous and smarmy??? And there's still a whole film to go! I may be back to being sober after my--ahem--6 week Suicide Squad-style work release/vacation-- but my thought was still to kill him! KILL! There's no excuse for such criminal alcohol abuse. In AA we hate hearing about people who commit that kind of drink wasting just to feel smug in judgment of their drunken fathers (it's the sort of thing those tourist siblings I was ranting about a few paragraphs ago love to share about, as if they think it will endear us to them). Instead, "Skipper," why not stash it in case dad comes back, or give it away to some needy friend, like that tweaker at the local pub (go-to dirtbag Justin Welborn), who--incidentally--is right to want to deck you and steal your horny girlfriend (Bea Grant). Urgh.

I wish these girls (from the NIGHTMARE-esque viral trailer
actually were in the movie, they'd have made it a lot better,
but the filmmakers think we'd rather see a
pale buster like Graham Skipper pour liquor down sinks.

Still, much more so than THE VOID, GATES managed to hold my and my co-viewer's attention all the way through, and is helped no end by Barbara Cramtpon as the master of" the game." She looks terrific and seems to be having a pretty good time --more so than anyone else involved. Brian Sowell's elegant low-budget video cinematography finds new roads within GATES' suburban 70s track house milieu and purple/red/blue video game weird color scheme is like an Easter Sunday afternoon SUSPIRIA)]; Golczewski's synth score keeps burbling, throbbing and buzzing; and seeing the brothers bonding by hacking and stabbing undead demon versions of their slain parents and foes is--in the end--quite heartening.

Also, Chase has a fucking beer once in awhile, thank fucking god.

---

and speaking of God....

DARK DUNGEONS

(2014) Dir. L. Gabriel Gonda

***

If you want to see something funny and fleet-footed after these msiguided retro yarns, check out DARK DUNGEONS a 40-minute straight-faced adaptation of Jack Chick's infamous Christian tract denouncing Dungeons and Dragons (as well as books like  Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings) as gateways to Satanism and witchcraft. Come along then as two cute young freshmen girls are lured to the dark side during a LARP (Live Action Role Play) session during 'club' rush week. Debbie (Alyssa Kay) turns out to be a natural spellcaster (with real magic) rising under Mistress Frost's (Tracy Hyland) dark red tutelage to a 'level-eight' sorceress; her budding bestie/possibly experimental lesbian crush, Marcie (Anastassia Higham), on the other hand, hangs herself because she's left behind at level-seven! Poor Marcie! She just couldn't keep up. After that tragedy, and being sent on a mission into the tunnels to other dimensions, Debbie finally realizes her soul is in jeopardy. Will God's love find her in time?

Shot off the cuff, DD has a great zero budget gonzo spirit, a deadpan reverence for the Chick source material, a funny, talented and mostly female cast, and a great deadpan "embrace me, Jesus!" ending. If you've even been out on a deep end-bad trip limb in your younger druggy days, and prayed the 'no atheists in a foxhole' prayer (ala AA) then you'll relate to the god stuff, and maybe even mist up. I don't know the extent to which the ending is meant satirically or not, and I don't ever want to. It's both more inspiring and funnier not knowing; and I respect that the spiritual solution is at least treated with some modicum of respect and real love. I don't think either Satan or Jesus would be offended. I'm so proud of these filmmakers, the Ron and Suzy Ormond of their time ! After a weekend enduring THE VOID and BEYOND THE GATES, I really needed DARK DUNGEONS, Otherwise, I think I would have to stop seeing new indie horror films for at least a year. Instead, I'm back on board. 

Speaking of the Ormonds, know what else can now be found on Prime? MESA OF LOST WOMEN!

See original tract here

PS: Let me also point you towards the following retro-chic gems, all of whom get my personal, higher recommendations:

IT FOLLOWS
AMER
JOHN DIES AT THE END
BOUNTY KILLER 
IRON SKY 
THE LOVE WITCH
BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL

HOUSE OF THE DEVIL

GHASTLY LOVE OF JOHNNY X

EL MONSTRO DEL MAR

LAKE NOWHERE

Condoms are for Quitters: XANADU (1980) and the Death of the Naked Rock Musical

Once a proud and shirtless beast, the rock musical has all but vanished from the landscape. Fringe events like REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA or DR. HORRIBLE or 'jukebox' fare like ROCK OF AGES and MAMA MIA do not count. The first are freak events courting cult status, the latter incorporate only tried and tested tunes written long before their Broadway shows.  CHICAGO, LES MISERABLES or PHANTOM don't count either. But there was a time when the rock musical soared on wings of brilliance. I'm talking of course of the late 60s-early 70s -the age when impassioned singing met electric guitars and funky bass; bi-curious guys in silver make-up and long hair strutted shirtless, and God was not ignored.

This was the era of Vietnam, and Times Square was not a place to bring the kids, at least not at night, for it was rotten with grindhouses, adult bookstores, prostitutes and flashy pimps, bums, hippies, sadomasochists, junkies and--most shocking of all to our Anita Bryant-poisoned minds--queers. A day trip to NYC to see a show with the family often consisted of waiting in line at the TKTS kiosk on the barrier island in the center of the street, ogling (without making eye contact) the passing freak parade in a mix of veiled horror and sardonic faux-blase' disinterest, like a zoo without bars where the animals wouldn't bother you if you didn't make eye contact. After the show, after the family car finally cleared the morass of sordid swamp outer industrial wasteland running between NJ and NY, you sighed in relief to be back in boring old suburbia, like Dorothy at the end of OZ, with a new appreciation of black-and-white Kansas.

When their later film versions came around, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, GODSPELL (all 1973), THE WIZ (1978) and HAIR (1979) all had to be toned down (though porn star Paul Thomas shows up in JCS). Meanwhile crazy Brits like Ken Russell gave us wild album-based spin-offs like TOMMY and films that tried to become a hair musical film without being a show first (like 1975's LISZTOMANIA) and Broadway was cutting out the love child rhapsodizing and playing up the nudity right on the billboard, as in the all-nude musical revue OH! CALCUTTA!

Surrounded by the sleaze of Times Square, CALCUTTA and its ilk managed to stay somehow clean by contrast and so showed Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public that those scruffy homeless kids on the street might be disguised angels, so go ahead get aroused but don't judge. Books like Erica Jong's Fear of Flying with its ode to the "zipless f-ck," the tawdry glam gossip of Rona Barett, and the cute old lady sex specialist, Dr. Ruth (below, right), all created a sense that women should be enjoying their newly-appointed orgasms. Extramarital swinging and casual sex were now as healthy and normal as going to church or making dinner for your family --and as a result, the world was just a little less uptight (especially compared with today, sigh).  All the while, we kids were listening in, soaking up the loose parental prana with our hungry spinal snake-sponges. It all seemed very tawdry to us, though. Like everything after you turned 18 was going to be one of those depressingly sordid Seka movies. No wonder we jumped on the CONAN train and started bashing orgiasts in mid-feast. It all seemed so scary that swords and carnae was less traumatizing to imagine.

But that carnage-preference only came in the 80s, after VHS dulled us to the adult sex mystique. Going back to the 70s, now, and remembering how it ended, self-destructed, we recall that in midst of all the tawdry Broadway sex came the arrival into the mainstream suburban swinger lexicon of my least favorite drug, cocaine. And as coke became 'hip' so did disco and at last kids and adults found something to agree on.

We kids loved disco. You could dance like a maniac to it, jumping around and jive talking and every other kid in town had parents or siblings with the Saturday Night Fever (1977)  soundtrack, a mainstay at every birthday party I went to, it was as present in parental and older sibling record collections as Frampton Comes Alive. Disco was crossing boundaries the Christian-pagan decadent arias of Broadway and the best-seller list never could, for the homosexual and coke aspects were sublimated deep by the time it all got to prime time TV, and we kids loved the spangly costumes and were learning disco moves in gym class.

BUT HOW DID THIS COKE-FUELED DANCE MUSIC CROSS OVER TO KIDS? (Answer: at left, Vinnie Barbarino)

We kids had long pondered the electric strangeness of the Hair and Sgt. Pepper's album covers in our parents' record rack. And yet we were afraid to play them. But we loved John Travolta from Welcome Back, Kotter, so seeing him on the Saturday Night Fever cover made everything all right. He had the working-class Italian vibe we were now familiar with via ROCKY, and the Fonz (and the hated Cha-Chi, and tolerated Carmine) but he could also sing and act stupid with a winning smile that let you know he was far smarter than he'd ever let on. As long as he was connected to it, disco could cross over to suburbia, where, as I've said before, we loved The Village People because they were dressed like all our favorite icons as kids - cowboys, Native Americans, motorcycle cops - and not one of us ever imagined they were, you know...

We also found the relative sexlessness of, say, TV variety shows like The Captain and Tenille, Donny and Marie, and Shields and Yarnell very soothing, a buffer from all the sordid sleaze and electric shocks. I recall that towards the end of the 70s, when I was 12-13, sex was starting to get on my nerves. I had a lot of 'pent-up' energy by then. Not that anyone molested me, on the contrary - I initiated what would now be considered minor molestation with two babysitters, my dad's secretary, two of my mom's friends, and one very nubile young daughter of one of said friends, all before I was 12 years-old. And in the malls I would sneak into Spencer's Gifts and marvel at the dirty novelties and thumb though Fear of Flying and get massive 10 year-old boy hormonal surges. But being only ten or so I had no orgasm, or even knew about them. I had been led (thanks to some Judy Blume book) to think that the orgasm discharge was a gush of blood, and thus I was terrified to even try. And while sex was considered normal and healthy at the time, masturbation was considered a deranged, sad act. Wet dreams were discussed, in terrified tones, at the playground, and widely considered far more humiliating than merely wetting the bed.

It was only natural with all that stored venom that when the right bad influence friend came along I would give up girls and turn my attention to WW2, and with war arose the need for 'clean' home front entertainment, time to organize our HO scale SS Panzer divisions, time gather the other barbarians and clean out Thulsa Doom's sex dungeon.

And as we were gathering up our fear and loathing... XANADU did a stately 80s pleasure-free dome decree.

Sandahl Bergman at far right

1979: GREASE had broken the mold on 'the past' (it played in theaters for years) and Happy Days was a huge hit with kids in TV. In other words, at the very end of the 70s, the 50s were cool again (ayyyyy!) and the 40s dance club variety show schtick of the 70s--brought up like the Titanic for XANADU--was out. Some piece of crap called "Disco Duck" was a hit on the chart, the guy who 'sang' it (Rick Dees) wondered what to do for a follow-up. He came out with "Disco Gorilla" - i.e. "Discor-illa" (It's so cheesy I can't even post it but you can check it out here). Disco was almost solely in the realm of children by now. And even we sneered at his Disco-rilla. It died, and dragged disco down with it. Yes, Rick Dees killed disco, but it had been already dying. Coke kills, man. The intensity of a craze was directly in proportion to the speed in which it burned itself out.

Meanwhile, whatever 'free love' had represented before the mid-70s was being swallowed up into blue collar triumphs (ROCKY in 1977) and old school nostalgia, reaching back too far, past the greasers and do wop (which GREASE and Billy Joel had initiated along with HAPPY DAYS) and to see how far they could take it, producers reached into the dusty attic of Gene Kelly and Glen Miller. Hordes of films set in the 20s, 30s, and 40s had saturated the theaters. THE STING won best picture in 1973 (see my piece The Period Piece Period), but that was back in the early part of the decade; now the only nostalgia we cared for was 50s working class suburbia, or Brooklyn street gangs, and lo, in came WELCOME BACK KOTTER and John Travolta.

Cleaned Travota on Captain and Tenille

Some Scientology angel was looking out for Travolta, because he made a vast fortune just from appearing on the cover of both the Grease and Saturday Night Fever albums. They were beyond huge and sold consistently for years. But while the film of Saturday Night Fever was dingy and depressing in its lower-strata blue collar seediness, Grease was smartly moved the story out of the actual realm of the regular (misogynist/rapist) Italian-American guys in the post-greaser era, and into the sunny safety of Burbank, making the greaser haircuts and cigarettes and unwanted pregnancies little more than rich kid slumming. Fine with us, we in the suburbs didn't know the difference, only that the environment of Grease didn't make us want to kill ourselves from depression over graffiti and urban blight the way the movie of SNF did. On the other hand, the album of SNF was way better.

Anyway, it was a monster hit. And so why not merge the GREASE with the NIGHT and add the then-emerging roller disco craze? Throw in a fantasy element and an old duffer or two, and whammo! You do for the 40s big band zoot suit sound what GREASE had done for the 50s do wop.

That was the plan.... for XANADU! 
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Terrible plan! 1980 was not 1978. And while he was great as Swan (from THE WARRIORS), Michael Beck was no Travolta, and he was not believable as a frustrated artist forced to reproduce album covers for a living (ala Travolta's frustrated dancer forced to tote paint cans in SNF). Olivia Newton John played the literal muse who inspires him and old duffer Gene Kelly joins forces with them both to open up a post-modern roller-rink, where time collapses and wartime big band sound collides in a roller skating accident with ELO, the Tubes, and lots of static long shots where you can see the edges of the sets and the studio darkness all around the backdrop.

Just compare the two stills below - the top one from DOWN TO EARTH, a 1947 comedy musical that XANADU more or less remade, notice the inept blocking of XANADU's shot, which leaves a ton of dead space at the right and left of the backdrop, leaving the widescreen shot looking inept in every detail.

(below: Xanadu - What were you, blocked in a barn?)

You can smell the weird blend of child-friendliness, coded homosexuality, old character actors eking out a living in cameos, nearly empty sets, and cocaine. Xanadu took all the ingredients that made these sorts of musicals uniquely ahead of and behind their time (at the same time), and swished them together like a Hail Mary from a terrified Iron Chef contestant. ELO and The Tubes jam unsuccessfully with a Glenn Miller-style ghost ensemble and Olivia sings "Forget about the blues / tonight!" --it's like a TV remote control battle between your older brother and grandmother, yanking the dial between Lawrence Welk and Soul Train while your parents are off playing bridge.
 

Top: New York, New York (1977); 1941 (1979)

Even today it's hard to imagine what they were thinking, presuming if the 30s worked in the early 70s, just move to the 40s as the decade ends. The mishmash of styles in Xanadu could have been meant to tie-in with the expected blockbuster success of Spielberg's zoot suit-encrusted mega-shrillfest 1941 which came out the year before, and Scorsese's big band ego-fest, New York, New York (1977). But that was the wrong horse to bet on. While 1941 was not a total flop it wasn't a hit either, and neither was NY, NY -- and for the first time since he broke big, Spielberg had laid a non-golden egg and Scorsese's critical darling status was stopped dead in its tracks.

What happened in a sense was America's taste in retro memories was flattening out. The age of three channel TV was ending, and with it the need for 'variety' shows that appealed to children, the elderly, and adults all at the same time. And without long hair and sleaze to produce rock gravity, the empty glitz of disco was just another toot up nostalgia's porous straw. By the time it got to us, disco had become sexless, leaving us with no choice to find the stuff straight from the source.

And so it was that, as children, our interest in sex was rekindled with the rise of the VCR.

Among other things the VCR brought a chance for us all--parents and kids alike-- to finally see X-rated movies. As with any huge sea change, the censors and critics need time to catch up and for awhile, freedom reigned and for awhile every child above 12 saw all there was to see, all at once. Our first rental ever, in the afternoon one day while my dad was out of town, was Clockwork Orange. I'd never even seen nudity outside of the occasional Playboy. All that aversion therapy violence Alex is subject to was very apropos to how flattened the movie left me (13 years-old), as well as my brother (ten), and our mom watching it in the middle of a Saturday.  Censorship had chastened TV for so long we felt protected from anything it could deliver on our invulnerable home screen , so we weren't about to admit any of the ultra-violence phased us. But looking back I'm confident that the huge paranoia witch hunt outcry against pedophiles and Satanic child molestation ring that began around the same time was no doubt inspired by parents and children finally seeing--together--all those films we'd been afraid to see at the drive-in or inner city theater back in the day. In the 70s we had never been ashamed of our bodies or our desires, perhaps because we just never really saw them so nakedly depicted.

You're dead sons, get yourself buried: Sgt. Peppers, Can't Stop the Music

So that's why now XANADU seems so hopelessy cheesy and antiquated in 1980. Old people--as embodied by Gene Kelly--were supposed to now be cool? Everyone was invited to the roller rink, ala GREASE inviting us to the 50s diner, drive-in, and hairdresser, but we didn't want to go to the roller rink. Still, in loyalty to GREASE (which I saw three times at different birthday parties), we dutifully trudged as massive multiple family packs to see XANADU, and then fell asleep. While the older kids were disappearing into midnight showings of THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME (1976) we in the too young for R category had (also) dutifully seen SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (above, 1978) starring the Bee-Gees, but that was at the drive in, so if something sucked you just got out of the car and rode on the swings and then alater fell asleep in the back seat. XANADU we saw in the theater, so there was no escape.

When we emerged from XANADU, sick from popcorn and Olivia Newton John sweetener, we found the world had changed. Disco was dead, crushed in the roller rink stampede (for a brief period, the roller derby and roller skating movie was super popular). Rock and roll would mutate into hair metal with the rise of cable and MTV, but disco was over. Cocaine gives you a terrible hangover... and you can see a little of it in Olivia Newton John's sickly yellow aura and devil eyes below. Surely we could do better... we needed to renounce our sins! We needed to 'phone home...' and ET was summoned.

Meanwhile, Alan Carr--one of the key figures behind  GREASE (and on Broadway, LA CAGE AU FOLLES), had troubles of his own, namely a huge disco flop centered around the Village People, Bruce Jenner, Nancy "You're soaking in it" Walker, hottie Valerie Perrine and struggling songwriter (and tight white pants enthusiast) Steve Gutenberg, known as CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC (1980). Like XANADU it cost $20 million, but bombed even worse. And in the case of both of them there's very little of that money visible on the screen. Sure there's dancing and glitz but the blocking, pacing, and acting are a mess. I'm just speculating, based largely on a book I'm reading about Carr, but I'd venture to guess where a lot of that 20 million went, and it certainly wasn't into hiring a good DP, editor, art designer, choreographer or continuity editor. Nothing translates more poorly to film than a hack's sweaty coke-fueled ego trip delusions of spectacle.

On the other hand, this was still the age of multi-generational 'family entertainment' - variety shows on all the major networks. And the people with the kids and $$ to buy tickets remembered fondly the 50s. Any further back and no one really cared, except old people who got senior citizen discounts anyway so they didn't impact the box office. The days of romancing a past decade with music and glamor were over, at least until the 90s when suddenly the 70s looked like the last great, free unprotected moment America was ever going to have.

Friday the 13th Killed my Childhood (at the time)

I was a kid in 1980 when the first Friday the 13th came out in theaters, and it was a tragic fuckin' time in cinematic history to be 13 years old and already a squeamish feminist. I grew up a horror fan, but more of the classic monsters variety, and frankly the whole murders for the sake of murdering thing scared me in a sort of pretentious "I fear for our common humanity" sort of way. I was a 70s guy. I dug the ladies, and here the ladies were getting chopped up, and the whole groovy yellow submarine was sinking.

If you too were a kid in the 1970’s then you likely remember how pervasive classic horror and science fiction was. Old movies were always on local UHF TV. There was no VHS or cable or TV, so if you missed a show, that was it, so shit like Famous Monsters of Filmland filled the gap. It was sold on every newsstand. CARRIE, THE OMEN and EXORCIST were the hot topics on the playground when being R-rated meant something truly terrifying and forbidden --we pretended we could understand the novelizations, but looked at the photo inserts (in the middle) when at the K-Mart or King's with out moms. UHF classic horror was a constant, like the radio, comforting. DRACULA immunized us to real fear, we'd laugh at the fakeness with our dads on a rainy Saturday afternoon. But if I was alone and a commercial for TORSO or SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT Came on, I felt really threatened. As kids we saw the adults do all sorts of fun weird stuff--drugs, swinging-- and none of it was considered "evil." Scary, yes... but in an exhilarating, life-affirming way. R rated films were ultimately outside our realm of true understanding, and therefore life-affirming. The first of the modern slashers, HALLOWEEN, was still that way, but its open ending left a never-healing wound. With its popularity, horror stopped being sexy-funny and started being ugly. The slasher wave crushed the sex wave underfoot, and sex’s mangled corpse washed up in the surf. Standing demurely atop that corpse, like Venus on the half-shell, was Jason Voorhees' crazy mother.

With the 13th opening the floodgates to the slasher cycle we were forced to see that true terror lay not in the supernatural of our UHF TV creature features but in its opposite... in the bland tedium of a world without "magical thinking." Not having access to free love anymore (due to AIDS panic and other factors like the dawning of pedophile sex ring hysteria) made people spiteful and anti-sex. What was Jason and his mom but an early and earthy version of Ken Starr? The 1970s swingers thought they had permanently killed off the knee-jerk repression of the 1950s, but here it was, back from the grave and stalking underclad women with a hacksaw. John Lennon was shot the same year FRIDAY came out it and free love froze in its tracks and slunk home, suddenly realizing they had left the kids in the microwave, manned by an LSD-addict babysitter. The neo-counterculture was born. People had failed the test (everyone else, not us) of freedom. "No" become the new yes. No to drugs, no to sex, no to drunk driving, yes only to survival in the most mundane sense.

To this day I have seen only a few slasher films, though I love almost all other horror sub-genres. I’m disturbed and a little depressed by the slasher cycle, to be honest, especially as I've been educated to see them all as misogynistic, foolishly thinking this would get me girls. Though as I write this I begin to see that my distrust of slasher films really a lot less to do with my hatred of misogyny and frat boys and more to do with the creepiness of the moment in time when they were all the rage in theaters and I was a depressed virgin. If I'd have gone with a date, or a pack of friends, maybe I could have figured it out, but just the way they talked about the murders of these girls made me want to never be friends with anyone at my school.

America was only beginning to homogenize itself at the time; the whimsical eccentricities of “Main Street” were just beginning to lose out to the pre-fab sterility of “The Mall” and I embraced the ensuing ennui and depression. The economy soon grew dependent on our newfound addictions, we drove long distances to malls rather than bike to 7-Eleven. There were no sidewalks anymore. If parents have to be hanging around us, we may as well get them to buy us comic books and Atari and then lock ourselves in our rooms and slowly gain weight and succumb to suicidal ideation.

Nowadays it's all but unthinkable, but In the 1970s kids of any age ran loose all over the neighborhood. If you were old enough to walk, say four or five years old, you were not only allowed to go off on your own and explore as far as you could walk (as long as you were in shouting earshot for dinner), you were often forced to do so so parents could catch a break. In the 1980s that freedom was removed thanks to hysteria over pedophiles and sundry other neighborhood menaces played up by news headlines and TV's America's Most Wanted. For some of us, it was the answer to our prayers, even though our prayers led us to become couch potato hysterics. Now we didn't have to play, no we could watch TV, and now we could tape our favorite shows, the VCR had come.

Along with the slashers, AIDS and the shooting of Lennon came the national furor over sexual molestations at day care centers, outrage over drunk drivers and just say no to drugs. Parents stopped going out. We barred the doors and windows. For us kids old enough to remember how cool things were just a few years earlier, the sense of despair was sudden and unrelenting; it arrived with all the force of a second national puberty. It felt right to be doing this, curtailing our liberty... it felt safer.  Jason Voorhees sprang from our forehead fully formed, not as a golem-like avenger of the unjustly persecuted but as a manifestation of the egoic infantile rage we'd been suppressing through the 70s in favor of groovy vibes and love and tolerance. Suddenly there he was, like Walter Pidgeon’s Monster of the Id in FORBIDDEN PLANET or the kids in THE BROOD. In our idle dread, we welcomed him.

Of course this rotten state of affairs didn't last. The story has a happy ending. The internet! Mac notebook computers! DVDs! It's a cool world! The slasher film now provides retro delights for fun, brilliant writers like Stacie Ponder at Final Girl. I became a rock star in 1987, sobered up in 1998 and now live happily ever, with a DVD library of at least 500 films. Time and Netflix heals all wounds! What goes around comes around, so can a second summer of love be lurking right around the corner? I believe it can. And if Richard Beymer was here, I'd ask him to sing "Who Knows?"


So what’s the future of horror? What new bloody thing can Jason do? I’d like to leave you with the idea of death coming full circle and horror movies going through the carwash of the abyss and coming out about the dawn of life instead of onset of death. Imagine FRIDAY THE 13TH PART XX: JASON THE MIDWIFE! Picture Jason delivering babies! Gore in reverse! A slew of baby-delivery horror films -- FX shots of placenta becoming a standard "money shot" for every horror film, along with cesarian sections, torn vaginal walls, umbilical cords covered in alien slime… Jason grabs his mighty garden shears and severs the umbilical connecting the newborn slacker from his cozy womb of nonexistence. Another kid born screaming into this world of garden tools and tooth decay.

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POSTSCRIPT: 10/'14 -- I've changed my rabid anti-FRIDAY stance recently, when a random viewing on IFC made me realize how wrong I was -- that the first one at any rate is innovative with great use of darkness (no streetlights) and rain merging together to create a sense of isolation like the woods are swallowing people up, and the incessant water on canvas sound muffling any strange noises, etc. The camera work borrows all the right things from Carpenter's HALLOWEEN, and like that film, it takes its time building things up with tick-tock momentum!

More than the film it was the attitude of the other kids my age at the time, who all cheered the violent deaths of sluts like they were a bunch of puritan Neros. They were the problem, not the film. End.