Sandahl Bergman's SHE (1984) comes to Blu-ray, Swingin'

Finally the great "SHE" starring Sandahl Bergman comes to Blu-ray in a flawless edition from Kino, released the other week. The Image and Sound are sublime, it's never looked better, and with a great interview given for the disc by director/writer Ari Nesher (yes that Aris Nesher), its pedigree as a cult rock-and-roll intellectually distaff comic book adventure can at last loom as medium large as it deserves. Finally we can examine the film in the light of what it is, a wildly imaginative, comic book-style adventure mixing all sorts of genres together to form an idea of what a post-apocalyptic renaissance faire might look like if its inhabitants roamed around and infiltrated other early 80s genre movies. It's a land where boxes of cereal are sold as antiques and one can wander from an underground mutant kingdom to a rich young werewolf pool party dinner/dance orgy in a few connecting woodsy shots, only to later be captured by a bewigged 18th century naturalist in lipstick and a batter's helmet and his tutu-wearing flunky; an insane, reincarnating/multiplying bridge guard who looks like a blonde Paul Thomas in an eyepatch and fringe-covered sailor suit and hat who talks in a constant stream of impressions (Groucho, Mortimer Snerd, Hitler, Popeye, Cagney, Cary Grant, etc. often all at the same time); leftover WW2 surplus canons, a war-torn city run by vicious warlords with funky helmets; a boiler room kingdom run by mummy lepers with Brooklyn accents; an inquisition-style god telekinetic with really hair arms whose eyes glow bright green when he levitates people, and so forth. There's a kinky edge, to be sure, with Bergman's goddess "She" and her right hand warrior woman enduring whippings and other torture, and all sorts of wildly imaginative Alex Raymond-style violence buried in its satiric weirdness and regular visits to the Conan / Escape from New York / Road Warrior well, but feminism always looms larger than sex (there is none). I kind of like that, as in the end, sisterhood wins out. Nesher wanted to make sure women weren't objectified, but man do we become thankfully acquainted with Bergman's incredibly lithe dancer legs. Symbols of great strength as well as grace and beguilement. She does all her own fights and stunts and knows her angles better than she did in Conan, but is just as physical, confident, and committed in her performance, leaping onto the backs of giant knights and driving daggers into the cracks of their armor with a sublime mix of raw fury and the joy of movement. 

Validating its worth as a great cult film, a kind of cross between Alphaville and Flash Gordon (1980) in style, there's an extra interview with Nesher, an Israeli film critic-turned-director/writer who made this in his 20s once out of his obligatory military service. Turns out he's an intellectual Cahiers du Cinéma type who went on to a distinguished career making 'serious' films in Israel like Rage and Glory, but also enjoying keeping his hand in with American genre junk like Doppelganger and Timebomb. -A handsome well-spoken guy who shot the extra while in New York for a retrospective of his Israeli films at (I'm guessing) Lincoln Center, the fact that he spoke so highly of his time making the film (a great anecdote his lunch with Fellini, who was shooting a film one soundstage over and had complained about the constant blaring heavy metal they were playing) speaks to his confidence in his art (i.e. he doesn't look back and cringe at the 80s rock excesses of his youth, the way an artsy American might).

This is what it looked like before the Blu - murky.

Nesher says Bergman spurred her stunt men opponents to use real swords and cutting it real close, getting physical like she trained for in Conan.  Nesher says he loved working with Bergman, and we believe him. Apparently it did well enough the producers wanted him to do a sequel, which is odd since I, a Bergman fan, never heard of this She until a chance catch on Netflix back in 2012 (which I tied in with Meet John Doe here). One issue perhaps is the name. There are just too many adaptions of the H. Rider Haggard novel, and only this one is really any good, but who would think to look for it under that title? 

In its past incarnations this She looked kind of cheap and rundown but now, on this solid Blu-ray transfer the witty genius of the film can really be felt. Bits like Sandahl's being startled into drawn sword-out readiness by the squeak from stepping on a stray rubber duck by the werewolf elite's swimming pool; David Brandon as the glitter-flecked gorgeous Sebastian Venable / Dorian Grey style aesthete; Sandahl's crazy all-in half-naked and bleeding brawl with various huge guys in knightly armor who come bursting out of big cardboard crates and attack her on the way to her deep-cavern bathing pool of immortality. Those fights are something else - unlike those as in Xena or Buffy, where they cut to Zoe Bell or Amy Johnston with hair in their face whirling and kicking, then back to the lead actress with her firsts up, these have the mighty Bergman lunging, parrying and sticking the knives deep, all in long take medium shots and with a unique mix of dancer presence (Every limb is in constant motion). Though lack of stunt men can mean terribly choreographed faux battling (i.e. in Ator, The Fighting Eagle), here, because of Bergman's experience on Conan, the strategy makes the fights seem more real, vivid- there's seldom any doubt it's Bergman doing the swinging, and there's always the possibility in her eyes that she may lose, or get really hurt, or not be able to get to the magic pool to heal her many cuts in time to stop herself bleeding out. If you love girl action heroes like I do, you know how rare that kind of palpable uncertain outcome reality is. Only Lady Bloodfight really comes close.

It's all very well paced, relentlessly entertaining and packed with Rick Wakeman's bass-heavy crazy rock anthems, reflecting the bombastic style of European rock, when prog and metal was taking the edge to the limit and avoiding the slick empty synth sounds the AOR guys in the States were convinced every artist needed to have at the time Similarly, the much bigger-budgeted groupthink-bespoiled Red Sonja (where Bergman made the fatal [for the movie] decision to play the villain instead of the lead seems to have, alongside the sequel Conan the Destroyer derailed the Conan train (thanks be to hack director Richard Fleischer-and his PG-minded producers). If only SHE had been freely avail when I was a smitten-by-Sandahl Conan worshipper back in the day, but as far as I know this never made it to the rental store... or other... 'til now. As Anita Pallenberg says in Barbarella, "Crime."

Blu-ray of the year!

Runners-up:  HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD (Kino), THE PSYCHIC (Scorpion) and PORT OF SHADOWS (Kino) and PAGANINI HORROR (Severin).

Prepare for the Coming of the Hillary Matriarchy with these 5 Psychotronic Gems

From fish god cults to a cockeyed MAD MAX: FURY ROAD premake to maternal body horror so unseemly no one's dared try anything remotely like it in 30 years, these five psychotronic films predict the the new world orderless matriarchy of the Scorpio Sun / Pisces rising goddess Hulu-Ree Klinn-Tohn as handily as if they washed ashore with campaign bumper stickers in their rusty talons, and hammers to smash down the crosses from Middle America's fearful Christian churches.

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....

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN

(1988) Starring Sandahl Bergman, Roddy Piper 

**1/2

The lithe and lovely Sandahl Bergman and pleasingly self-effacing wrestler Roddy Piper roam the post-nuclear wasteland looking for wild women to impregnate in this cheeky but irresistible Full Moon hodgepodge. He's one of the few men still able to produce viable sperm (fallout has left most men dead or sterile) in a world kind of the gender opposite of Handmaid's Tale --post-apocalyptic, sterile, now a progressive matriarchy vs. lawless frontier. Put under the thumb (via a remote shock chastity belt) of a 'no nonsense' health official (Bergman), the Pipe's packed off behind border lines to 'liberate'-- and then do his duty upon--a harem of fertile 'passives' currently held captive in a frog mutant warlord's stronghold (a combination abandoned oil refinery and R-rated version of a STAR WARS cantina). And though they drive in a pink 'Medtech' station wagon, there's a badass chick (Cec Verrell) on a .50 calibre sunroof mounted machine as his 'bodyguard' to balance things out. She does a lot of bemused, lustful smirking at Hell's discomfort while cleaning her ordinance.

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.

laugh while you can, monkey boy!

Such a thing might easily devolve into campy parody, but luckily everyone involved here has the good sense to play it straight. Even that semi-twee title is no obscurantist whimsy but strictest present tense fact: Piper's character is named Hell, and Frogtown is occupied by real frog mutants ("created as the by-product of your germ warfare") and the frog makeups/masks are pretty damned good.

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?

Why Hillary: It is foretold in ancient texts: amok liberalism ushered in by a woman prez shall lead to the return of the 70s encounter group /EST craze. The nuclear family unit will be broken apart by an anti-patriarchal shrink who won't let the husband have control over his own wife. It's Canadian but you can argue that the human body being ruptured in The Brood is America itself: "Raglan encouraged my body to revolt against me," notes Silverman, "and it did." Asking why he's suing when he can't possibly prove Raglan's methods gave him cancer, Silverman says he's doing it for revenge! So people will know from the press that "psychoplasmics cause cancer." -i.e., global warming. The title 'brood' are the protestors disrupting Trump rallies. As with the Trump supporters themselves, it's not important whether or not the orange one is a genuine threat, it's enough that the protestors/children get angry thinking about him, and the anger justifies the reprisal. Imagine if all the rage spewed on internet comment sections was able to manifest itself as armies of homicidal moppets?

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! 

In Hell, the cinema has cold, unpadded wood seats. 

DEMONS

(1985) Dir. Lamberto Bava 
**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.

Michele Soavi - showing his good side

Lamberto Bava, though bless him, never was/is a genius, nor even a terribly decent director. I don't envy having the pressure of such an iconic legitimate genius father (Mario) to measure up to, but with no talent for either blocking, pacing, or storytelling, Lamberto must get by with a little help from his talented friends. Argento lends him the brilliant red and blue lighting gels from SUSPIRIA; a selection of MTV-ready rock songs by Billy Idol, Rick Springfield, and Mötley Crüe adds just the right note of 80s 8th grade 8-ball of crank snorting dirtbag shop class idiocy; Soavi himself plays an enigmatic robot with his human mask half-gone (or a human with half his robot mask gone). Meanwhile, a carload of coked-up punks drive around downtown Berlin, eating up the running time with out-the-window-B-roll as they snort their coke through a straw in a Coke cup. Is that genius or idiocy? Exactly. Once a full-size helicopter drops through the ceiling of the auditorium after the surviving couple have ridden a motorbike riding up and down the aisles killing demons with a samurai sword, then you finally realize maybe you love this dumb film. It took over an hour to get there, but there you are. For me, though, the best section is the slow lead-up to when the first victim in the film-within-the-film and the first killing offscreen match up in their anguished noises, and a giant close up of a flashing blade on screen seems to be cutting the (normal size relative to the audience) 'real' girl's head off. But once the film-within-a-film runs out, and everyone realizes they're trapped, that kind of meta weirdness fades in favor of long stretches of typical (but nonetheless diverting) demon attacks. There are way too many special effects shots of facial postules dripping food coloring green goo, but stick around. And don't leave during the credits - the film just keeps on rolling.

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.

As a fan of the original story, I balked at the substituting contemporary Spain for olde New England but the language barrier actually adds a nice gateway frisson New England would lack. In the terror and confusion of panic in a weird town, the locals may very well start to resemble fish monsters even in the best of circumstances. I was lost in Prague once and the same thing happened!

All in all, DAGON comes as close as any adaptation yet as far as capturing the eerie mood of the fish god cult mythos, and the feeling that some wild recurring dream is coming true and that, between these nightmare wafers, is a wet (literally) dream cream filling, the sort of nightmare magic that happens when the dreaming male's conscious ego meets his mermaid-esque unconscious anima (Macarena Gómez) and it's as if time stands still and you 'wake up' from reality. The truth of the dream and the moment stretches across all time and space; the world around you vanishes; the dichotomies of dreams and waking, of past and future, real and surreal, are momentarily--maybe permanently, fatally--transcended. All dichotomies re-submerged: childhood and adulthood / life and death / male and female / mammal and cephalopod...

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:

 SHIVERS

(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.

THE DESCENT
(2005) Dir. Neil Marshall

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS

(1970) Dir. Jaromil Jireš

GINGER SNAPS
(2000) Dir. John Fawcett

SHE 

(1935) Dir. Merien C. Cooper

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"I wrote 'fertilizing the eggs,' Gene."

Sandahl Bergman vs. the Helots: SHE (1984)

I don't care what the haters say, BATTLESHIP (2012) is awesome. Maybe it's because I stayed home sick the day I saw it, so was both more relaxed and delirious than usual, or because I had a tolerance for the awesomely named Taylor Kitsch but I haven't seen a junk film with a greater sense of how to rock this cocktiquely since GI JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA (my praise here). But I didn't come to talk about expensive board game-based sci-fi cinema. I'm here to talk about SHE. No, friend, not the 1935 SHE starring Randolph Scott as a dull Arctic explorer resisting the alleged charms of snooty Helen Gahagan and I don't mean the 1965 Hammer SHE starring a genuinely charm-packed Ursula Andress dealing with a flock of snooty Brits. I mean the Italian 1984 SHE, the one you've probably drifted past a dozen times on Netflix's streaming list, with poor Sandahl looking up from a dingy corner of the cover, sword ready, waiting to be helicoptered into your field of  vision. Well, drift past no more! The helicopter stops here. This is the SHE for me.

You would think it's based on the H. Rider Haggard novel, but this trip follows its own drummer the way BATTLESHIP follows theirs, and only touches on the Milton Bradley source. Here we have post-apocalyptic post-modern meltdown world full of every prop they could scrounge: leftover World War Two ordinance, plastic fangs, and feathers and the feeling a lot of this was shot in the producer's back yard and orgy room section of his mansion. Anachronistic sights include: a bunch of youthful aesthetes listening to an old-fashioned gramophone and having a big Roman orgy before waking up in the middle of the night with plastic fangs to eat their guests; a swimming pool with unattended beach balls; girls with swords; goth rockers operating like Humongous times Caligula; a giant dude in a tutu and feather boa who keeps people trapped in bird cages; flagellants; fog machines; tuxedos, gladiatorial combat arenas, guns.... And there is great dialogue:

Shandra: "This doesn't make sense"

Aisha: "Shandra, this has nothing to do with sense."

I know I'm not alone in my "appreciation" for SHE. On the trenchant lurple.com, DF Dresden says: "Like me, you’ll be wondering how much LSD was dropped during the writing of this cheap, crazy post apocalyptic production.’" I didn't have to wonder, lurple. I just knew.

Indeed, for in addition to its borrowings from just about every corner of the prop department, SHE has a countercultural vibe that recalls another post-apocalyptic sci-fi film, GAS-S-S-S (1971). The last thing Roger Corman directed before he left AIP to form New World, which later produced a bucketload of films like SHE in the wake of CONAN's success, it's got GAS-S-S's nicely deadpan hip anachronistic tone (after the bomb, there is no more linear progress, so all centuries of fashion are fair game). Both are full of "wait, did he really just say that?" kind of moments, perfect to share with real or invisible Robotripper friends. And there's hot chicks from the era before plastic 'enhancements' turned every New World rack the same, if you'll forgive the expression. SHE's a trip, all right!

What SHE of course lacks that GAS-S-s-S had in spades are long stretches of music by Country Joe and the Fish, but that's a good thing. Instead there's Motörhead and lots of fuzzed-out Rick Wakeman synths. Much "better".  Still, GAS-S-s-S would make a good double bill with SHE, though, and Godard's WEEKEND (1967). All three have that episodic anachronistic structure, where heroes wander the post-apocalyptic landscape encountering various seriocomic factions and anachronistic historical characters they must battle or get held prisoner by, or fall in love with, terrorized or tortured by, or lectured to by... about communism.

 

The thing is, we know Corman's funny, clever, hip and Godard is all those things and more, but the makers of SHE are an unknown quantity. GAS-S-S-S had Edgar Allen Poe on a chopper; MONTY PYTHON had a limbless black knight still game for a squabble; SHE has a sailor-suit wearing bridge guard who looks like Paul Tomas (yes, that Paul Thomas) with an eye patch, yellow bandana, and the word 'Texas' written on his forehead, doing impressions of (I wrote them all down, impressed and aghast): Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields, Popeye, Mortimer Snerd, Adolph Hitler, Walter Winchell, Jackie Mason, Harry Von Zell, Senator Cleghorn (from the Fred Allen Show!), James Cagney, the Black Knight (from Monty Python and the Holy Grail!), in that order. He also becomes a whole chorus line, because he keeps multiplying. Oh yeah, and he sings a snatch of the theme from "Green Acres."

"Great" as all that is, without Bergman, wearing an array of sexy and cool costumes, showing off all the sword skills she learned for CONAN and generally making you sometimes believe she's in a better movie, it would be one hell of shitshow. But as I wrote in my praise of CONAN, Sandahl was the love of my adolescent life, and if you were like me--a Bergman fan who made super 8mm CONAN-inspired movies very similar in found object aesthetic to SHE--then it's SHE you I will. (That's a Yoda impression--hey where are you going?!)

SHE came out in Italy the same year as CONAN did, which on its own shows you 1) no one makes imitations of successful films faster than the Italians, and 2) There's no real 'market' for excellent dancers in genre movies unless post-modern peplum sashays back into popularity, and 3) Bergman's typecasting as a sword and sandal type served her in rapidly diminishing returns. But even diminished she shines. Heroines like Xena, Buffy, and Beatrix Kiddo today just get stunt woman Zoe Bell to do their more dangerous work (once you notice their hair is always in their face for the high kicks, it's hard to notice anything else -- so don't), but Bergman did all her own fighting in CONAN, and it makes a huge difference; seeing her size up two opponents with her scimitar, for example, you know from her look she's got the strength to wield it, that it's not some plastic wavy little shard; she's amazingly toned, and when she swings into action her hair's not in her face; we see the fury and dancer's tolerance for muscle tension in her eyes. She snakes through the whole film with such a lithe grace that we get mighty, mighty mad when she's killed. The vengeance is sweet in the way it seldom is in the more staid and formulaic revenge excuse scenarios. We genuinely wanted her in the picture longer, we wanted more scenes. And so to see her so quickly typecast and forgotten as someone who doesn't really have a future outside of the Conan cultist realm or in little dance parts here or there (ala XANADU) hurts us like a Thulsa Doom asp. Oh Sandahl, why why WHY did you choose to play the boring villainess Queen Gedren instead of the (also boring, but more active) lead in RED SONJA? Was this your version of Lugosi refusing to do FRANKENSTEIN and thus forever marking him in producer's secret ledgers as 'obstinate' and ensuring a long downward spiral of crappy parts in crappy pictures? Was it because your features didn't work with red hair? We would have been find with a SANDY BLONDE SONJA I assure you. Either way You left that movie like a snake without a head.

On the other hand, SHE is world's better than RED SONJA, no matter which role Bergman would have played. SHE's sense of agape jaw aesthetic arrest is helped, not hurt like so many claim, by the backyard junk post-apocalypse post -modern cheapness. The relatively big budgeted ($18M) Richard Fleischer-directed RED SONJA on the other hand is a dud no matter how sick you are while staying home from work. Believe me, I've tried.

For example, consider the helot. I'm referring of course to Frank Capra's MEET JOHN DOE and Walter Brennan's rant about the helots when trying to convince Gary Cooper to give away the fifty dollar bill he's received. As you read the upcoming quote (spoken with great gumption by old Walter), imagine he's talking about the freedom of making a low budget no-CGI early 80s Brechtian free-for-all like SHE vs. enduring the producer interference and studio pressures that come with all the millions it takes to craft bigger budgeted junk action movies out today, like THE AVENGERS (the BBC one) or CONAN THE DESTROYER:

"All right. You're walking along, not a nickel in your jeans, your free as the wind, nobody bothers ya. Hundreds of people pass you by in every line of business: shoes, hats, automobiles, radios, everything, and there all nice lovable people and they lets you alone, is that right? Then you get a hold of some dough and what happens, all those nice sweet lovable people become helots, a lotta heels. They begin to creep up on ya, trying to sell ya something: they get long claws and they get a stranglehold on ya, and you squirm and you duck and you holler and you try to push them away but you haven't got the chance. They gots ya. First thing ya know you own things, a car for instance, now your whole life is messed up with a lot more stuff: you get license fees and number plates and gas and oil and taxes and insurance and identification cards and letters and bills and flat tires and dents and traffic tickets and motorcycle cops and tickets and courtrooms and lawyers and fines and... a million and one other things. What happens? You're not the free and happy guy you used to be. You need to have money to pay for all those things, so you go after what the other fellas got. There you are, you're a helot yourself."

Were SHE made today it would no doubt have endless CGI dragons and some fresh-out-of-helot-school rich man's son producer who would insist director Avi Nesher pick an aesthetic - make it ancient or post-apocalyptic, but not this weird limbo where WW2, hippy counterculture, the Inquisition, and ancient Rome all live side by side. But it was made 1982 (the height of my own post-apocalyptic barbarian moviemaking career) and so the tactile delights of using actual props and monster makeup are just baller enough to steer SHE into the timeless, anti-establishment, no-CGI forbidden zone where films which kill careers and get no love anywhere are suddenly aged into anti-helot relevance. With an American star, Israeli director and mostly Italian crew, SHE is one of those rare international productions that turns its tower of Babel culture-drain into an advantage. When your movie is going in six different directions at once, don't reign it all in, shoot for twelve more!

On that note you might make an all night anti-helot Netflix stream festival with Nesher's SHE as the middle feature between GAS-S-S-S and the amazing Caroline Munro-starring sci fi (Italian Star Wars ripoff) STARCRASH (1979), and top it all off with a GHOSTS OF MARS or THE WARRIORS chaser, and at last you will know that the aesthetic of super 8mm backyard cinema lives on, as Big Daddy Mars, or a Baseball Fury, or a Joe Spinell, or a Texas-branded Paul Thomas clone impressionist, or any other kind of gaudy patter-spewing, scary make-up sporting gunsel... so don't fuck around with us Nork, and keep your pecker dry and the world will turn... into a post-modern/apocalyptic thrift store prop wasteland... where Sandahl lives.

Great Films of the 80s: CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

What a time 1982 was to be a comic book addict and Robert E. Howard-ophile with a shellacked completed jigsaw puzzle of Frazetta's "Death Dealer" up on his wall and a stack of paperback reprints on his shelf (including Howard's non-Conan stuff, like all those grisly stories about sailors' bare-knuckle boxing). Suffering the 15 year-old virgin blues in a world gone mad with headlines rabid with neighborhood pedophile sex rings (careers and parents wrecked forever by hypnotized children witnesses who only later proved tragically unreliable) and tales of LSD-using hippies microwaving babies and tucking the turkey into the crib, for us Howard was like a proto-punk rocker, bidding us keep working the wheel of woe until into this hell might ride a horseman to deliver. Herald of the new world! Conan! The Thulsa Doom serpent cult was a perfect analogy for the hippie movement (which we were too young to be part of) with its focus on converting young people to blood orgies and training them to kill their parents and ignore us--their little brothers-- and the whole twin serpent motif was very pagan and old school unchristian, (everything seeming serpentine and reptilian in nature is a common line of hallucinations in psychedelic drug experiences, and exist today in our conception of the double helix and in the symbol of the American Medical Association). For kids, wondering why they weren't growing up drowned in orgies like they saw their older brothers do in the 1970s, the Thulsa Doom crown was the perfect demonization tool. We didn't do orgies by choice, not because we weren't invited. In fact, we'll crash yours, knock over the punch bowl, steal the vodka, and--while you're all too stoned to fight back--set you on fire and drag our half-naked drugged-out older sister home by the hair to face mom and dad's mighty scolding.

Directed by John Milius from a script he co-wrote with Oliver Stone, the movie was better than we could hope. You could fit the dialogue in this movie on the back of a bar napkin, but every jewel, rune-covered sword handle, and jade pendant has a whole progression of deep meanings; the orchestral score probably took down a whole old-growth forest on its own; the deceptively ornate (rich with unique Italian artistry that's never gaudy or showy) costumes change and morph naturally over the film's passage of time (we can read into Conan's progress by the upgrades in his chain mail). These are some of the reasons why it works so well as a repeat viewing mythical rite. Conan doesn't even say a word until his famous answer to the question 'what is best in life" -- "To crush your enemies, to see 'dem driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of der wimmen." 

Seeing the film for the first time with my buddy Alan (between us we had most of Marvel's Conan comics (though we pronounced it "Con-An" (like Con Air), I remember we both laughed at this first sign of Arnold's German accent and thrilled to it in a kind of pre-stoner rapture.

Still, the film would be a thunder-headed ponderous downer if not for the lively, lithe and lovely Sandahl Bergman as Valeria. She had a whole arc of her own in the Marvel comic books, where she had black hair and was a pirate captain (and looked a bit more like Catherine Zeta Jones). The Valeria of the movie is blonde, and not in it nearly enough, but that's why the film works so well as a revenge scenario, since we experience the horrible pain of Conan's childhood for the first half hour of running time--forced into slavery, forced to kill like a pit bull, forced to watch his parents be murdered and his people destroyed by Thulsa (James "Vader" Earle Jones)--and then the next ten or twenty minutes swooning as he finds this weird kind of outlaw love, and then--after kicking ass and trashing Doom's orgy room in one of the best sequences in all movies, Conan loses Valeria, also to Thulsa, this time via a serpent arrow. Oh man but seeing this for the first time as a 15 year-old, damn right you're pissed at old Thulsa by then! "I am the wellspring from which you flow," Doom tells him, and he's right. In killing him, Conan loses his entire reason for being and so the movie ends mainly watching him watch the massive stairway set burn and light up the darkened desert. And then we see a shot of him much later, during the King Conan era (a whole separate Marvel comic, from when he's older and established). We're promised, by Mako's narration, a whole series of films to come, even moodier and more adult than this one. All the more tragic, they would not come.

Though time has worn my vengeance-craving edge down to a dull memory, the scars of being a sexually frustrated, physically un-mighty teenager linger on, as does the memory of the exaltation I felt watching Conan, the sense of vindication (which would not come again in any movie until Fight Club) for my masculine angst. Finally, here was a hero we teens could get behind. He was swinging for our team, crashing our older sibling's orgy and trashing the joint, and if there's any place that howls of bloodlust are still okay, it should be in the theater, with the old ladies behind you going "sshhhh!" We may not have been raised pushing a dumb wheel in the middle of nowhere for seemingly no reason, but we could relate, in our hatred of school, of third period geometry class. Conan was our liberator. School's Aowt foah Summah!

Back to Valeria for a moment. When she and Conan bond in a luxurious fur-covered tent after robbing the tower of serpents, we feel him finally beginning to relax, and the whole unbearably rough and dismal film unclenches its fists for the first time and our heart melts as these two orphaned lone wolves find a temporary peace. Though we see lots of Bergman's hot dancer thighs, some breast here and there, and of course Schwarzenegger's acres of muscles, Milius clearly doesn't intend their sex scene should titillate so much as warm our hearts a bit, sincerely and without mawkishness. Bergman is pretty in a rough sort of way, she doesn't know her angles, doesn't wear noticeable make-up; her nose is a big long and in some frames her neck kind if disappears under he chin, but she's beautiful and desirable to us. That's why when she talks about wandering alone and cold watching lovers silhouettes behind their tents in the night, you believe her, and so it's one of the best sex scenes of all time. She's a realistic 'girlfriend zone' beauty, with just as much detail on faces and textures--furs, fires, tent walls, jewels--as nudity and moaning, and it's all "earned" so to speak, through character development. Valeria's newfound love comes with a fierce devotion. We too, in the theater know what it is to pass lovers in the night, that's why it breaks our hearts, no matter how many times we see it, and when Conan leaves her to pursue his quest for vengeance we understand her sorrow and still understand his quest, because, in this case, Valeria's reasons not to ride against Doom aren't based on fear of death, but fear of losing this love so soon after she found it. 

Laugh all you want, but this was our Titanic!

Re-visiting it on DVD is cool, because there's a lot of stuff a boy who saw this film a million times on duped, cropped VHS would finally get to see again after the one time in the theater. I was always pissed that the visceral early raid on Conan's village, which blew my mind in the theater, was cropped to the point it was impossible to follow on the pan and scan. Did I only remember it that way? No. And now it all seems new, especially in the new remastered extended (!) version, which includes a monologue wherein Conan remembers picking blueberries with his father, and in it he seems for the first time both eloquent and at peace, a bit straight out of The Seventh Seal but that's okay --it's earned, even if it does kill the mood of slowly building menace (and we understand why it was removed, it's a bit labored, like a shout-out to Von Sydow who plays the king who sends them on their quest). My sharper adult eyes and the high res of DVD now notice the importance of a huge jewel stolen from Thulsa Doom, which Conan gives to Valeria which she wears around her neck from then on, and which he later takes back and wears after she's killed; and the way Doom's riders in the beginning of the film know to take off their helmets in respect to Conan's mom, via admiring the handle detailing of an animal skull on her slain husband's awesome sword. In its weird militaristic way (Milius is a great one for armor and warrior codes) this nearly dialogue-free film is stunningly eloquent. Is there a more perfect fit for Howard's prose, his love of ancient military history? If we doubt, we can just compare with the relatively shitty Richard Fleischer-directed PG sequel. 

Because of all the hack job imitations that followed in the wake of Conan's box office success we've become conditioned to dismiss 'sword and sorcery' (as it was known the) as juvenile tripe, and indeed most of the other films in its wake came weighed heavy by contemptuous screenwriters, low budgets, and incompetent directors who can't afford fight choreographerr. Some of these imitations are made with wit and mythic savvy (mostly from the Corman camp, like Deathstalker or Jack Hill's Sorceress), some are made with money but no care (i.e. the two Richard "make ten million dollar budget look like two" Fleischer Conan sequel and Red Sonja). But John Milius has respect, knowledge of ancient military history and pre-Christian iron age weaponry, budget, and Jungian mythic savvy to spare. Despite (or maybe because of) his crazy militarism, he's not just a close collaborator of artsy fuckers like Coppola and Paul Schrader, but a genuine NRA badass, and producer Dino De Laurentiis was able to give the film a huge budget. Every cent is up there on the screen: thousands of extras, vast beautiful serpentine sets, dozens of horses, a huge temple exterior staircase on a hilltop and a vast interior mountain cave with a marble orgy chamber that looks like something out of a genuine nightmare (designed by Ron Cobb, of Star Wars and Alien fame). Whatever happened to beautiful, boldly original art direction like this? What have we lost since 1982? I think I know, but if I told you, I'd go to hell, or PC jail.

On widescreen DVD, so much more is revealed: I never realized there actually lots of corpses hanging upside down along the walls in the orgy scene, though you'd expect an orgy scene to be more smoky and with more writhing. But I love the special effects here, which occur without rupturing the soundtrack, which plays almost nonstop thunderous versions of De Falla's El Brujo and doesn't break from the track to announce, ala John Williams or Mickey Mouse, "hey look, Doom is turning into a snake!" (i.e. it's what Carpenter calls a carpet score). Thus we, like Conan, don't know how to react when a giant snake starts to stir in the background. The effects are never grandstanding. For example, consider the sandy wind surrounding Conan's crucified body--covered in writing ala Kwaidan to protect him from evil spirits---is writhing like shadowy reptoid men with long wind tails. The animated bits are slight and beautiful, clearly frame-by- frame hand-painted, using the actual sandstorm wind in the scene as the jumping off point for whirling figurative specters (see below). Not since Forbidden Planet and never since has this sort of thing been done with such class.

Nothing quite illuminates that you're old like, so many decades since you were 15 in that theater, realizing the last time you saw Conan you saw him and Valeria as adults and now you see them as children. Arnold's youthfulness and pre-catch phrase sincerity make him quite charismatic; this is the film he made before launching into superstardom with The Terminator and as with that film, it's a true original, made with lots of care and imagination and research, that should never be confused with the imitative junk that followed.

A lot of us Conan fans were initially wary that a German body builder who'd never starred in a major film, Pumping Iron as himself, would be too flippant, too jovial, too A-Team, if you will, to be a good Conan. We figured he'd make sure through his contract that he doesn't actually kill anyone, just beats them up and tells them to drink milk and stay in school and don't do drugs. So we were all surprised by the gleeful amorality and downright thuggishness of his barbarian. That's one of the things that makes Conan great -- he ain't no role model. On two different occasions Conan basically breaks into someone else's party, trashes the joint, kills loads of frightened security guards, kidnaps a girl and/or kills a priceless pet snake and steals jewels, all without direct provocation. He doesn't wait for them to draw first; he kills people in cold blood, punches out a camel who was just standing there (Conan bumped into him), pushes beggars, steals property and throws witches into the fire.. And he doesn't just conk them on the head and then lament about killing to Gabrielle, like Xena used to do. He chops off their heads and kicks over their candelabras. He's been dealt a raw deal by fate and he's out to steal and kill to his heart's content, as he's entitled. And there's no dutiful cop trailing him, determined to take him down; there's no annoyingly liberal captain of police telling him to do things "by the book." Conan is not asking for the liberal government's help in getting his revenge --he's a true conservative antihero, ready and able to lead us out of the 70s, beyond even the range of Clint's .44 Magnum.

And so, to our surprise, we loved Arnold to death. Every line he speaks in the film became cherished and repeated endlessly: "Can we go over theah? Wheah the others do not see?" / "Crom, I have never pwayed to you befoah!" / "Oil the sowahd... and feed the hoahse." Man, we could crack up for hours saying lines like that in our German Arnold voices, even well past college. I don't mean that at all as a put-down. We all love Arnold. And he does a great job. He invests himself. He does most of his own stunts, as do Sandahl and Gerry Lopez. It makes a difference.

Time doesn't permit me to praise Lopez, also a fountain of quotes ("Dinner for wolve"). A surfer Milius bonded with making Big Wednesday. Lopez speaks in the broken English expected of an Asian-looking actor at the time, but isn't stupid and when he occasionally breaks into Cali bro-style enunciation, it's a joy. With Schwarzenegger a bodybuilder, Bergman a Fosse dancer and Lopez a surfer--none of the are three actual trained actors--there's a kind of outsider status amongst the three that binds them to each other and works beautifully for conveying their outsider status within the film. They are not just "high adventurers," not bland actors cast for their looks or accomplished stars burdened with a sense of responsibility for their good guy image. They're just young, motivated, physically fit people willing to try anything. They rejected society but it rejected them first. They have their own code of honor as bodybuilders, surfers, and dancers - each an insular world with its own codes and mores. They were as we felt we would become once our goddamned schools were burned forever to the ground and the world became divided by lawlessness, and warring gangs of the road had to be fought by whatever weapons one could steal from the dead. Until that day came, we would wait, and watch Conan the Barbarian over and over, and stockpile shields and swords, and later, thanks to the NRA, guns.

It would be only a matter of time before Columbine.