Up from the Meyer: GHASTLY LOVE OF JOHNNY X, EL MONSTRO DEL MAR, VELVET VAMPIRE, THE GIRLFRIENDS

The thrilling, dirty-kick drive-in fodder of yesteryear might be all that sustains we, the trash lovers, trapped like frozen rats in the cold digital now, so it's lucky for us the trove seems bottomless, and if we run out, it's possible to even go back into the past and make more. Dig those 'stressed' retro posters above and marvel - neither was made a day before 2010! Can you believe it? No ordinary cosmetic imitations, these! One finds a middle ground between 50s juvenile delinquent musicals and the Roger Corman aliens of Bronson Canyon; the other says fuck the middle ground and crashes a Faster Pussycat Kill Kill bomber into frickin' Loch Ness, like a kid bashing action figures of different scales into each other. Both fusions show a thorough love and knowledge of the films they're homage-ing, to the point that they make a solid post-retro double bill, or even a quadruple bill with two films from the actual drive-in era I discuss herein: a solid entry in the 'foursome of sexy babes hit summer vacation at a sunny lake hoping to score' genre, and a female-directed film about a female bisexual vampire...

But first... a note of caution: Handle with care and don't drop your guard.... . there are a lot of tough and sexy women going on in these films --their flesh soft, their curves wanton. And they will kill you.

EL MONSTRO DEL MAR

(2010) dir. Stuart Simpson

**3/4

Here, at last is a movie that actually delivers what all those lame stripper pole cash grabs like Bitch Slap and Cat Run promise - genuinely bad girls in groups, roaming loose. Starting out in Faster Pussycat black-and-white, the film erupts into color with the ladies' first throat slit (performed on an innocent male), letting us know right off that--while some 'bad' girls spend their time waiting for some sleaze bag to warrant their vengeance-- some girls consider any dude they meet fair game, an in-season blood orgy waiting to happen ---no provocation needed.

None shall escape, not even the kraken....

Needless to say,  we're in Australia. 

Occupying a punk rock zone between John Waters/Russ Meyer girl gang gutter camp and Roger Corman-Jack Hill strong female 'bare-breasted feminism', there's a refreshing amorality at play to help make up for the paucity of budget. By breaking the sanctified arrangement that says women protagonists can't kill without a reason (self defense mainly) and even then they have to cry afterwards, or be somehow damaged from it ("he t-t-t-tried to.... but I, I, I!"), the Monstro women say fuck that, they actually seem to have seen Russ Meyer and Jack Hill movies rather than being directed by them at the time. You can bet they don't carry soft drinks in their cooler, and if you get that reference, then you've probably seen Faster Pussycat Kill Kill! as many times as I have and will like this film. For example, these broads all carry folding knives in their boots, and when they sense danger, they just quiet down and walk towards it, silently reaching down, taking them out, and unfolding them, keeping them out and low as they slink, as naturally and subtly and without big music stings as you could ever hope for. It's so Hawksian I want to cry.

As the dark-haired leader, Baretta, Nelli Scarlett rocks a welcome drag queen edge - evoking Divine, Tura Satana, Mary Woronov, and Shirley Stoler, sometimes all at once; Karli Madden is in the Lori Williams role (the hard-partying semi-innocent still holding onto some measure of compassion); Kate Watts is the Haji (Baretta's right-hand bitch). They're all decked out in that retro 50s Trash and Vaudeville chic--bows, bangs, and black--which all might be too campy by half, but here it seems like their genuine style. Whatever thy are, they transcend time and fakery (this is all of their film debuts and they're joyously free of any kind of trite 'professionalism' or tedious polish). 

Remember your lines

While the it lacks Meyer's punchy editing, wild angles, film quality, and existentially gonzo Jack Moran dialogue ("like a velvet glove cast in iron!"), Monstro recoups somewhat via sheer perversity and the sense these girls must be pretty fun to hang out with in real life: their playful coked-up drunken banter and horseplay is naturalistic and real in the ways Meyer's wasn't. His women were big and strong, but it was clear they weren't deviating from an already gonzo script (the over-the-top acting worked because the lines were great: they could stand the tone-deaf shouting, they still hold up). Here, the lines are just okay but they feel natural, they're said, not read, yet you can feel the love of Meyer's film in their inflections. By the same token, these girls look like they drink a lot, and could fuck a man up no sweat and not even remember it the next afternoon when they wake up.

This kind of naturalism doesn't always work, especially if some old 'pro' joins the cast and can't tap into their same collective vibe. Unlike the great Stuart Lancaster in Faster, here the old man tied to this chair for life (Norman Yemm) is a little too old and dour to fit their rhythm, and so throws off the curve. Lancaster could do wonders with a line like "you girls nudists or are ya just short of clothes?" or "the train's late. Nothing's on schedule today!" he could match the larger-than-life action without overdoing it, and could contextualize and shape the less accomplished performers around him. Lancaster 'got' Meyere's vision perfectly. Here in Monstro it's clear old Yemm doesn't get it, or if he does he doesn't approve. Rather than going with the bend in the material he keeps trying to hammer it back to some kind of normality straightnes, like a dickweed pink instead of a stealth Bob Dobbs, gluing Humpty Dumpty back into an egg shape rather than --as the rest of the cast is making--a Julian Schnabel-style shell bit mosaic

Director Stuart Simpson also did his own cinematography (surprise surprise!), and while it's clearly just high-contrast HD video, it's nonetheless a welcome change of pace from that sun-bleached look SOVs take on when transferred to 35mm. His fellow retro-crap auteurs like Larry Blamire (Lost Skeleton of Cadavra) end up delivering what looks like a color video switched to black and white on FCP - there's no contrast or grain or silvery glimmer. Simpson, on the other hand, gives each setting its own look- it's clear he tinkered to get it right as best he could, so good on ya, mate: the black-and-white opener is crisp, the switch to color is cool and appropriate (ala the expanded version of Death-Proof), the scene of the girls stalking a noise through the shrubbery has a dreamy pastoral lushness that evokes Rollin or Malick; the seaside look is high contrast and darkly inviting; the interior of the beach shack feels like a real beach shack, the kind full of garage sale furniture and warped wood. Almost like the back of an Avenue B coffee shop, you can smell the dirty wet sand and sea water.  Moby Dick (Orson at the ship bow altar) is on the TV in one bit; Kyrie Capri who the girls introduce to drugs and alcohol so she'll grow up enough to tell her coward of a grandfather to fuck off (making her way cooler than the ever-cowering Susan Bernard in Pussycat). At night the ladies rock out to a cassette of Pinetop Smith and the monster is a mix of puppet and CGI rather than just the latter so what's not to love...or at least tolerate, como uno venganza? 

THE GHASTLY LOVE OF JOHNNY X

(2012) Dir. Paul Bunnell

***1/4

Bronson Canyon and its legendary 'Bat Cave' is a magical corner of Griffith Park that's been incorporated into hundreds of films, and never more perfectly than in the B-movie sci-fi of the 1950s where it stood in for Mars, the Moon, prehistoric Arizona, and so on, a perfect oasis of eerie prehistoric primordial wilderness in the middle of LA? It's not seen nearly as much these days, as green screens replace the world, but lo! Hark and looky here --out of the cool Bronson Bat Cave darkness and into the California sunshine comes a group of 50s gang members, the types with combs in their back pockets and matching jackets. Only dese guys is from space, hey? Hey, it's the legitimately weird and great retro 50s sci-fi rock musical from Paul Bunnell.

Shot on Kodak's lovely high contrast Eastman Plus-X Negative Film 5231 (Bunnell snagged the last rolls before it was discontinued), The Ghastly Love of Johnny X can stand proudly in that same super classy gorgeous black-and-white retro realm as Tim Burton's Ed Wood  and David Lynch's Elephant Man, which both got their black and white beauty from the same stock. In other words this isn't some Larry Blamire Lost Skeleton-style no-budget homage, where it's just HD video with the color drained out. This looks like a million bucks and it was (two in fact). So we're a long way from the basement.

The question is, how did such a cult classic-in-the-making wind up in the margin's margins? Maybe, like Plan Nine itself, it's just so far behind its time it's still ten years ahead.

The irrepressible De Anna Joy Brooks

Bunnell may not the first modern day auteur to reach into the tar pit of 50s low budget drive-in filmmaking--to fish out some preserved oil-slicked style and true rebellious anarchy still on the bone amidst the wealth of tail fins, tortoise shell sunglasses, tight skirts, jukeboxes, flying saucers and zombie frugging ---but there's no prize for first, especially in retro-homage. And while there's a smattering of musical theatricality with his cast, Bunnell is no fey poseur. His tale never backs down from the kind of dirt in the nice girl's face para-misogyny that would please Victor Jory in Cat Women of the Moon but would make Tim Burton loosen his skinny tie and blush.

You know me: my misogyny radar is rivaled only by NORAD, so if it doesn't go off for a film where a gang leader uses mental powers to force his exes face into the California desert parking lot, and who treats his adoring deserves-better second tier booty call like crap, then it's all good. It's like it would be with, say, John Waters, where the open-chested love is palpable no matter what horrible stuff is going on, so you're never worried or offended. As with Russ Meyer and El Monstro above, women are the strongest characters, like the tough Bobbi Socks (the too-cool Katherine Giaquinto), who (SPOILER) saves the day by dragging a Tor Johnson-meets-Bobby Moynihan skinhead named Sluggo (Jed Rowen) off a cliff. Yes Bobbi was my favorite, but then--as soon as she's off-camera, after dying to save Johnny... and Johnny!...  Johnny forgets all about her so he can mope over some (male) soda jerk too stupid to stay out of switchblade range. I wanted to scream at Johnny through the TV transistors, I wanted to scream "Hey Johnny! If you did sleep with Bobbi Socks and then let her take the literal fall to save you from the loathsome Sluggo then the least you can do is look down there and see if maybe she's still alive. Maybe shed one goddamned tear for Bobbi Socks! (I asked Bunnell about it and he says he kind of forgot about her when writing the script, but Bobbi Socks I got mad love for you! You deserved better). (END SPOILER). 

The main romance for our Johnny though, is the other strong woman, Bliss (De Anna Joy Brooks) a badass chick spouting the kind of tough girl aggressive maneater dialogue that might make even Russ Meyer sit up and take notes.... in his coffin! She's been cooling her heels in Bronson canyon with Johnny, "and his pack of jackals, for forty days and forty nights." She's restless and wants to take a bite out of Chip (Les Williams) the blank-faced soda jerk at a nearby diner, or at least take him out for a spin in her "motor rotor." Kate Maberly (right) shows up later as a moist-eyed young faun, enthralled with the Cramps-zombie Roy Orbison rockabilly star who might be Johnny's biological father (played and sung by ex-Seed Creed Bratton [The Office]); Heather Provost is the cool brassy wife of the club manager King Clayton (Phantasm's Reggie Bannister). There's also a special cameo from Kevin McCarthy (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) as an alien judge in a Devo hat who sentences Johnny to Earth for his rebel ways (though he gets to take his gang with him, not sure if that's a reward or punishment).

Not very tall, but at least better looking than Eric Von Zipper,  Johnny X, (Will "Tromeo" Keenan) has the sunglasses and facial structure of a (Warhol era) young Lou Reed and knows just when to overact and hog the stage and when to underact and let other cast members shine around him. I liked his moment of sad confession to a literally dead-drunk Creed in a truly beautifully-lit backstage dressing room. Shimmering in the deep black of the Eastman Plus stock, the scene glows with the same spooky smoky decay as the back rooms of Kubrck's The Killing.

Ego Plum (Frieda Kahlo's grandson)'s score-- full of theremins, booming brass, crashing timpani, wailing harmonies and lurid synth notes--is enough to make Danny Elfman hide under the bed and vow to never be retro again. As for the songs, they're about what you'd expect for the most part, trailing into fantasy numbers with Johnny and the gang: the choreography's groovy without being showy; the singing voices are properly mixed so you can decipher every lyric (a rarity, even in the best of these endeavors) and everyone's on the same jazzy theater geek page as they dovetail from 'reality' into Off-Broadway Expressionism with a faux-50s Grease (if Travolta's gang were composed of members of the Cramps) patina.

The best (diegetic) music comes from old Creed, who represents all that's wrong, weird and wondrous about this goofy corner of the desert world. His craggy face seems born to play dead under such brilliant black-and-white photography and he brings all his ex-Seeds rock star sadness to bear (and that sadness is mighty, believe you me) to this newly dead creature of the night.

Also worth mentioning: the special effects involving Johnny's crazy astro suit--powered up through the rock club soundboard, and/or zapping people: these effect don't feel CGI at all but retro analog delicious. Even without the stereo on you can feel the power surging in your belly and those rings of lightwaves are truly magical - all the more so for not being overused. In short, if there's a just god in the 50s ceramic oven of heaven, Ghastly Love of Johnny X--that cake of equal parts Wood, Waters and Grease, all wrapped in Roger Corman dough--shall finally rise to sainthood in the cult classics pantheon. Do herself a favor, friend. Go Ghastly.

THE ROOMMATES

(1973 ) Dir. Arthur Marks

***

The "quartet or trio of hottie young things having summer flings across a wide age/class spectrum" genre stretches back to the 30s' Gold Diggers series (and then disappeared some time in the 90s, only seen recently in Tarantino's Death-Proof), but don't let that stop you from believing it all began with The Valley of the Dolls when you're digging Arthur Marks' spritely 1973 masterpiece The RoomMates. The girls even use the phrase "beyond the Valley of the Dolls" in some of the Laugh-In derived, cut-on-the-punchline 'modern women sexual mores' soundbytes. Kind of a Russ Meyer for the normal proportions / hot bare midriff set, Marks knew the sexual oomph an alpine mountain setting could provide, that aggressive female sexuality could be portrayed in a positive way, and how to hit all the right drive-in points without sacrificing momentum, wit, and flair. The RoomMates comes in the middle of a three film roll beginning with Bonnie's Kids and ending Detroit 9000 (all the same year). All of them are good, but best served in the right mood: Detroit is for when you're in a Joe Rocco mood; Bonnie's Kids is for when you're in a Bolling phase; but RoomMates is for whenever you need soothing fir tree-flanked mountain lakes and eye-candy/crush-worthy distraction. 

That's what I need. Here, in fall of 2015, my girlfriend just moved out and the panic attacks a feminine presence never fails to allay come fast and relentless; the autumn darkness comes earlier and earlier; and now, alone now in my haunted mansion, the existential panic kicks in like an old familiar enemy --the blue devil Deborah Kerr speaks of in Night of the Iguana --the eternal nagging constant. 

Luckily, the free-spirited, sexually-active girls of The RoomMates are an eternal balm to that lonesome. And like Russ Meyer, Jack Hill, and Roger Corman, Marks loves strong women, and gorgeous mountain lake scenery. There are groovy 70s cars and giant old growth fir trees, and that decade's wondrously more open-shirted, less dehumanizing, approach to straight sex hookups. so what's not to live for? I went into it feeling cold, self-pitying, isolated and miserable, and by the time it was over I felt like I just got back from a casual vacation in the Catskills. 

So here's a rundown: AIP WIP blonde mainstay Roberta Collins thinks she's found love with an older rich divorced swinger, but she rushes it too much --with predictable results; Marki Bey (Sugar Hill) displays her witty brand of overacting while working for the summer at the local library, where she soon falls for a cool black cop (though it means dumping her white boyfriend - twist!); Pat Woodell sleeps with the same polecat married loser every time she comes up (as he sleazily mentions they've been having these trysts since she was sixteen); her younger cousin (Christina Hart) is staying there for the summer--and drawing the eye of that same sleazy pole-cat, much to Woodell's anger. She takes it out on an itinerant hipster handyman (he tries to get her to let her guard down but the pole cat's left her pretty jaded). And there's a killer on the loose.   

Hottest of them all though (my special crush - left): Laurie Rose - as a counsellor at all-boys camp. She pays 'special attention' to the boy too shy to make friends, but doing so in a midriff and form-hugging hiking shorts shorts camp ensemble, seems like the worst form or torture. What is she trying to do, drive those lads insane? She seduces one of her charges for no other reason than he's shy! What is the phrase about the happy camper? Sigh, remember when winning the heart of a cute older girl was possible solely by being shy and awkward? Oh, 70s, come back!

I was only five when The RoomMates came out, the slasher boom was years away, but Marks saw ahead: a killer at Camp Arrowhead makes for a great half-way through semi-side plot, offering both a genuinely scary (lots of good deep dark night shots) midnight knife chase and later a hilarious sniper massacre at a groovy country club party on the veranda. You'll guess the killer early if you're an astute cineaste, but it doesn't matter; the party never stops and everyone has enough material when they head back to school to "write ten books!" Yeah, says Collins, "but have we really suffered?" Weird last line, considering the massacre, but hey, those killings spice it up, aren't too vile or misogynist in their executions (rather reflecting yet another maladjusted attitude towards sexual desire), and the callous way that a rash of murders does nothing to dampen anyone's glib resort town spirit prefigures Scream and makes all Brody's fuss over closing beaches and mayoral meddling seem like girly hysterics.

The Gorgon Blu-ray (doubled with Marks' inferior --but still pretty good-- A Woman for all Men) is flawlessly restored, so Harry J. May's peerless photography and the gorgeous lakefront scenery can really reach out and smooth even the most ruffle-damaged of feathers, and I should know. Laurie Rose Laurie Rose... you are the 70s to me, just as seductive, just as natural, and just as gone.

THE VELVET VAMPIRE

(1971) Dir. Stephanie Rothman

***

The box office success of Hammer's 1970 Vampire Lovers proved to even the most conservative backers that the world was finally ready for an openly sexy lesbian vampire movie; and so they came, a cloud of blood-drinking bats opening the veins of 1971. Nearly ever one of them is an adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 lesbian vampire novella Carmilla (it pre-dated Stoker's Dracula by 26 years!). Like Dracula is now, at the time, Le Fanu's piece was public domain, so there was a pre-set blueprint. But of the many variations, The Velvet Vampire (AKA Cemetery Girls) is the only one I know of that's directed by an actual woman, Corman company regular Stephanie Rothman. That makes it special to begin with, and then it goes from there.

Celeste Yarnall plays the (bisexual) vampire, Diane LeFanu (!). She can move around in the daytime, which saves a lot of money on lighting (see also Franco's Vampyros Lesbos) and she likes couples rather than just girls, which ensures her take-out order for the weekend includes the interested and hunky Lee (Michael Blodgett) as well as his reluctant girlfriend Suzy (Sherry Miles). They meet at mutual friend Stoker's (!) gallery show and are promptly invited for a wild weekend to Diane's remote desert hideaway. Suzy is not keen on going to some mysterious femme's pad in the middle of nowhere. Neither would we, of course, in her shoes; but Lee's hooked, and Suzy doesn't want to seem either square or permissive.

I relate to her woeful misgivings about the situation. Especially since getting sober, I'm terrified of being stranded in the middle of nowhere. bored out of my skull but unable to escape, as some lecherous comfortable-in-his-own-skin host makes the least veiled moves on my girlfriend (or vice versa). (Mine was in Cordoba, Argentina. You know who you are).

Anyway, the drive out is very interesting, as the world of LA disappears in endless flat scrub brush and desert hills. Yarnall isn't the sexiest vampire lesbian (or even the coolest) but she can ensure some communal wild dream sequences which--a rarity--prove as important to the story as the film's core reality. They also succeed in proving that a floor length mirror standing in the middle of the desert is worlds of cool (though Rothman apparently borrowed it from Jack Hill after working with him on Blood Bath). If you add a Touch of Evil headboard, and Diane LeFanu in flowing red robes watching you in the conscious world through a two-way mirror sitting next to a skull as you sleep, you got a nocturnal blur between worlds I can get into. Perhaps a meta-echo of Rothman herself watching the rushes, layering her hungry staring together with their desert mirage-dream (which they wake up and share, realizing they had the same dream, like the lovers in Midsummer Night).

This film aired frequently on early Saturday morning TV when I was growing up and I never understood what was going on in it, though the title promised a lot. I'm sure it was edited near to death and there was very little 'monsterness' as my dad called it, neither velvet nor vampires to be found, and I was too young to get any references, sapphic (which would have been edited out) or otherwise. All I remember is the yellow dune buggy and the blonde haired lad (Michael Blodgett) and his doleful girlfriend, lolling in bed, and the glare of the red dress amidst the desert scrubs. Now on a great Shout DVD, the red dresses worn by Diane and the yellow of the dune buggy really pop amidst the desert gold and brown, and the score--a haunting Jimi Page-style Middle Eastern slow tempo cycling acoustic guitar (an unbilled Grass/Dollarhide) with some rushing whoozy blood thinning synth drones--tap a deep psychedelic plaintiveness that makes those weird dreams vibrate on a whole other level. There's also a great old blues man (an unbilled Johnny Shines) singing "Hellhounds on my Trail" at Stoker's art opening.

All in all, Rothman brings a unique feminine energy anyone can relate to even if it throws some of us male viewers off our game. We're not used to seeing the gender reverse of Universal horror templates, with the heavy-lidded beauty of Michael Blodgett kind of put forth as the object of desire (ala say the shirtless boys in Twilight), and his girlfriend just the frosting, so to speak, rather than the cake itself. And the chief 'sadistic gaze' supplied by an ageless woman. 

What's more noticeable now, too, is how Lee's slowly mounting, increasingly desperate attempt to escape the house goes from distractedly dismissing Suzy's worry as mere veiled jealousy, to trying to steal Diane's dune buggy; Blodgett ably outpaces David Manners' similar escalation of panic in The Black Cat and this sequence proves itself the most indelible bit of the film, acting-wise. If you've ever spent a weekend as part of a couple invited to someone's remote house and then couldn't escape for whatever reason (I have), then you'll agree: Rothman's film gets it all very right. There's also a cool nocturnal chase climax that leads from the desert to the bus back to LA, and through the bus station as Diane relentlessly, patiently, stalks her prey.

The most remarkable sequence however is surely the one in Diane's bedroom where she seduces each member of the couple in turn, using the exact same rap, with the exact same sincerity, one after the other. Remember it the next time you see Tim Curry's sweet transsexual pull the EXACT same thing on Janet Weiss and Brad in Rocky Horror Picture Show a few years later. So way to go, Stephanie Rothman! This film may not achieve any notable greatness, or have a Rocky Horror cult pedigree, but it's just as gender-bent transgressive in its own way. Rothman gets top marks for being the first lady director of the Corman's New World, give a few slyly Byron-esque pointers on smoov to sweet transvestites from Transylvania, and going deep into the heady world wherein seduction and destruction are inseparable, even under blazing sun of the desert in the mirror, or the dead of day-for-night.  (2)

NOTES:
1. Five aces, partner (that's a whaddaya call a finesse)
2."I'm very tired of the whole tradition in western art in which women are always presented nude and men aren't. I'm not going to dress women and undress men – that would be a form of tortured vengeance. But I certainly am going to undress men, and the result is probably a more healthy environment, because one group of people presenting another in a vulnerable, weaker, more servile position is always distorted" - Rothman (1973 interview)

Druggie Vampire Women of B&W City: A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, THE ADDICTION, NADJA

Like so many broken down NYC artists and writers before me, I've submissively followed my vampire anima--my creative muse-- like a doting Renfield, scooping up any fly turns of phrase or spider ideas she cares to drop behind her, protected from direct harm (her rabid fangs of madness) only by some half-remembered Hegel quote kept around my ravaged neck. Lonely in the throng of my fellow lonesome vampire secretaries--all of us aging and dying as we're drug from one Annexia to the next while our vampire muses stay young and lush and flush in their coffin pages and occasionally celluloid--I simultaneously crave and fear the isolation she needs to emerge from her hairy coffin. 

The East Village where I used to live now can only be afforded by the rich or older-than-me bastards with rent controlled apartments. But back in the 80s-90s you could live in downtown NYC for only $500 a month, and there was a sudden outbreak of female druggie downtown vampire artists onscreen, serving well as metaphors for the city itself, and AIDs, drug addiction, and art's constant struggle for fresh blood. Anonymous thirsty youth prowling a city that never sleeps just waiting for a bite = ideal vamp habitat. Now we live in squalor in Park Slope and make double what we used to but can't afford to go to a bar and buy $15 drinks, so everyone's in bed by midnight; we can barely afford a gallon of Coke Zero, 2 packs of cigarettes, fifth of bourbon, and gram of weed a day habit. No vamp can find us now - and our anima slumbers out of reach, deep in the Demeter's rat-infested hold.

But there's always the 90s to revisit, and now, thanks to a genius female Iranian director, there's an indication some element of the 90s black-and-white druggy urban vampire dream lives on, in a sub-section--west side-- where it's always balmy, where it's forever the past, and LPs and cassette mix tapes are still the hard currency of connection. Iran's Bad City (aka Bakersfield, CA) a town located between the grime of Bleeker Street and the clankety-clank of Eraserhead. 

THE ADDICTION

1995- Dir Abel Ferrara 

****

"Dependency is a marvelous thing," whispers Lili Taylor to her NYU thesis advisor as they shoot up together. "It does more for the soul than any formulation of doctorate material." Of course she's going to give him more than just dissertations and heroin, she's going to give him eternal hunger in exchange for his opiated blood --basking in the satisfaction of two cravings being satisfied in one suck. She rules her space, this guy may be a teacher but he's at her feet. Yet before long she's trapped in the loft of a pompous male vampire who drinks her blood and leaves her to contort the day away in agonizing anemic double-withdrawal, giving her the gift of a copy of Burroughs/ Naked Lunch to help her learn to control her junky cravings. Ferrara leans in on Taylor's prolonged, agonized day --maybe the most extended, harrowing depiction of drug withdrawal I've ever seen, or felt (though mine were from alcohol-- probably only about 1/10 as agonizing but very similar movements and breathing). She finally makes it into the service elevator and down to the street, as we all do, to get her fix, the city barely noticing how messed up she is, which is both its best and worst habit.

Naturally someone helps, giving more than the Red Cross would ever ask and she's fine again. 

The Addiction, in other words, in a 90s black-and-white horror movie that's about a lot more than just stakes and exsanguination, it's got interesting things to say--both out loud and in the coolest voiceover narration in all of cinema, a veritable doctoral thesis on evil-cum-advocacy for drug addiction, whispered by Lili Taylor, so glassy-eyed perfect for the part it's like you're overhearing while nosing around some downtown NYC bookstore. 

This is no bullshit vamp psychobabble or empty LA posturing, It's real NYC, real philosophy in action, courtesy a script by Ferrara's long-time "more Catholic-junkie synergy than a dozen Jim Carrols" screenwriter Nicholas St. John. And Taylor brings just the right mix of whispery conviction to the words--a sublime mix between the idealistic and jaded, the philosophy-mad young Ritalin prescription-owning liberal arts NYU sophomore, made instantly seasoned cool by a few semesters of literary salons under Washington Square's ever-popping space needle. Cognizant of language's inadequacy even when stretched to the limit, yet unable to stop talking, she's the ideal doctoral candidate, i.e. she's annotated. She's able to back up being full of herself with memorized quotes. Following her thesis to its "the horror, the horror" nadir/pinnacle, she embraces madness, and physical decomposition (i.e. the rotting teeth so common to heroin addicts) as par for the course when transcending the dichotomy of life and death, pleasure and pain, being and nothing. 

It all starts when--just a normal grad student heading home-- she's accosted on the street by sexy vampire Annabelle Sciorra, who leads her into an alley (back when NYC had those) and says "tell me to go away" (the equivalent of "you don't want any part of this, kid" or "just say no") before throwing her against the wall and giving her the reverse fix that sets it off. Scared but turned on, Taylor just can't say no to Sciorra's hot, exotic promise. Who could? We've all seen her in Jungle Fever. Therefore, it's all the victim's fault, but is that rationalization on the vamp's part--a way rapists take advantage of fear-paralysis-- or one of those lore things, like they have to be invited in or can't cross your threshold?

Taylor's subsequent journey from shame to rapture includes an expanding wealth of widened perception--brain opening up to encompass all the horrors our conscious minds usually suppresses. As her brain opens, her body decomposes. Like Jeff Goldblum's Brundle in Cronenberg's Fly, she notes her corporeal changes a dispassionate theorist's eye, succinctly elaborating on the strange joy involved with divesting oneself from ones' own fate. They let their known parameters of self be outmoded. If the pursuit of knowledge means they morph into some unknown creature, what else is life for? Only emotion makes it all bad or tragic.

Well I remember, around the same mid-90s period, scaring girlfriends and co-workers with my own drugged-out wild-eyed rants about how I could see through time, and how space was an illusion. I saw their concern and silence as if from a distance. Taylor's fellow doctoral candidate and study buddy Edie Falco, for example, is similarly horrified by how far off the deep-end diving board her once-sober and similarly timid friend has fallen/risen. Taylor, in terse retort sneers: "Your obtuseness is disheartening as a doctoral candidate." Hot damn! She said obtuseness! From then on, it's clear just who's gonna ace their thesis dissertation, who's just going to 'pass'. Falco hurries along the dotted lines of the known, buried in books, made sexless as a side effect of proximity to the fumes from old library glue. But Taylor's huffing the solvents of the opiated beyond--seen beyond the veil--waltzed past all the old dead men still wrestling with phony differentiations between past and present, free will and destiny--and she still has the finely-etched hyper-perspicacity to succinctly elaborate--well within the parameters of dead philosopher quotations--these new paradigms to the thesis committee. The addiction has organized her life, broadened her perspective, cinched her doctorate, and made her as full of moral decay and intellectual flourish as New York City itself.

With its Weegee-style black and white photography, The Addiction manages on a flop house budget what Coppola's Dracula couldn't with all its smoke and mirrors, which is to harken all the way back to the vampire film's mythopoetic Murnau roots. Nosferatu's dissertation on the hydra polyp finds parallel with Taylor's My Lai massacre microfiche montage. The invasion of disease-carrying rats in Mina's hometown finds parallel in The Holocaust exhibit, visited by Falco and Taylor at a local museum--mass Europen death happening in the moment-- the 3-D space of 2D photos from the camps like an intrusion of the past, of death divorced from history and time, made current through the seeing of it.

No one actually dies in this vamp universe, there's no time and they were never living anyway, for one doesn't live below 14th Street. They just drag themselves around Artists and academics alone are smart enough to know that, unless they say yes to dangerous experiences (unprotected anonymous sex, heroin, vampire biting) they'll have nothing interesting to say in their art or thesis and they'll wind up just another flyover college part-time faculty hack. Receiving the disease was their decision, like a "welcome to the disease which there is no cure for" bathroom mirror urban myth. For some that's a death sentence, for others, it's a diploma. 

Throughout the film, Taylor is so sublimely low-key, sexy and very convincing in the lead she seems to become almost legitimately supernatural. She owns the role, the film, the city--she conquers with nothing but her low height and a purring whisper that seems born to say Nicolas St. John's clear-eyed lines. Abel must have lost his shit when he saw how good she was, how great this film was gonna be. Too bad more people can't get behind it, perhaps from their own lack of experience with STDs, drugs, philosophy. history, pretentious salons, or New York and its flea-bitten artsy undertow, its stolen shot seediness, which Abel captures better than anyone else. 

Also, it's hard to find. Not even legal in the US anymore, no region one to be found. Though I'd love to see it delivered in deep Criterion blacks, the fact that my copy is a semi-legal all-region non-anamorphic version (from Romania!) makes perfect meta commentary sense, as the film itself seems semi-legal, capturing a pre-ordinance-choked mid-90s Greenwich Village NYC, a Bleeker Street that's still wild and woolly; every storefront a decaying mass of failed punk band stickers, air pumping with ghetto blaster hip hop blaring from broken speakers. (PS 6/22- it's since come out on Blu-ray! Yay!)

Look, it's not perfect. Some of the dialogue about persecuting war crimes and living according to one's own blah blah is pretty naive (on the other hand, they are in college). Russell Simmons was a producer, which might explain the music not always being perfect (i.e. the tacky, soulful Temptations title theme song). Often the guerilla-style stolen street shots can get pretty shaky/woozy, and the whispering is sometimes hard to hear. But how often does a film about NYC college life really have such an authentic grasp on both grad school babble and heroin culture, so much that it swims in decadent drugginess and high-falutin' concepts rather than merely dipping a toe in and then skittering away, giggling or screaming? Even Roger Avary's heroin users comes off looking anemic by comparison. The Addiciton is in fact the only film of its kind, the only one to blend philosophical theory with folklore/vampirism, AIDs, addictive drugs and draws such a clear line between the four their differences vanish and they align like three identical transparency overlays. Kids need to learn --it's no longer enough to make out with your thesis advisor to be 'radical'. Shoot up for the first time, and drink his blood! Do the reading and then you can pass judgment on it (likening the smell of the NYU library with the rot of a charnel house) on your way out. 

You could fold images of Taylor in her shades (below) right in with Warhol's
black and white Edie Sedgwick,Velvet Underground, and 'moving portraits'
 factory footage and not miss a mink-lined "beat." That's good, as
 their music that's this film's only real precedent (just the Hold Steady is their only real antecedent).

Re-watching Addiction lately for purposes of this post, I started writing down relevant quotes and found myself wanting to write down the whole script, each line like manna to any starving/thirsty liberal arts graduate alcoholic or autodidact drug addict wandering the wilderness: "Existence is the search for relief from our habit, and our habit is the only relief we can find." --I lived by those words while drinking myself into oblivion all through the mid-to-late 90s. Watching Taylor convulse on the street in withdrawal reminded me of when I was so far gone it would take hours for me to get myself together enough to get downstairs to the liquor store--which was, literally, right next door. With a twenty dollar bill taped to my shaking hand, I'd try to be too fast to stumble, trying to get my bourbon and make it back up to safety of my apartment without falling, vomiting or convulsing on the street and winding up at Bellevue in the care of old Bim. It being important too that I go and come back soon- before the real shakes and DTs start.

"... little turkeys in straw hats."

So yeah, this is right up there with The Lost Weekend for the authentic NYC 90s addict-alcoholic experience, all the better for being, as is traditional for Ferrara, void of preachy sober resolutions. Instead, it's a call to luxuriate inside your sickness. "Self realization is annihilation of self." Its a way to excuse, rationalize, and forgive the self-destructive tendencies clotting human history's arteries with war crimes so vile they crash time's mainframe, and to forgive, forgive, and rationalize our own self-poisoning.

Oh yeah, Skooly D, a longtime Ferrara collaborator, appears and scores. Christopher Walken shows up for a few killer moments as already mentioned; Onyx, Cypress Hill beatboxes the soundtrack with druggy raps pitch-shifted through blunt smoke: "I want to get high / so high" while Ferrara's camera prowls the graffiti-caked turf, and if you were a big partier in NYC in the 90s, then damn, this be like a muhfuggin' scrapbook.

Today, well, junkies, your city is gone (from downtown anyway; the Safdie Brothers can still find the pulse in the back alleys of the outer boroughs). Luckily, the buzzy flashback of that first ecstasy and cocaine highball stroll at dawn after an all-night sesh lingers---just ask the drug-dealer alien in Dark Angel [1990] AKA I Come in Peace == that's the best shit there is.

NADJA 

1994 - Dir Michael Almereyda 

***1/2

Like Taylor in The Addiction, Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) talks incessantly, albeit far less philosophically, with much less contentment with eternity. "I want to simplify my life," she blathers at a downtown bar to some future victim, "even on a superficial level."  The dude buys her another drink, as if hearing nothing she's saying, and she's barely saying anything, except that compared to NYC, all Europe is a rural village, and that the city actually gets more alive and exciting after midnight (no shit). Born "in the shadow of the Carpathian mountains," she's East Village Eurotrash from old Transylvanian money, currently grieving her father, Dracula (Bela Lugosi, seen via ingeniously overlapped and incorporated images from [the public domain] White Zombie), even though she hated him because he made her "eat butter." Van Helsing (Peter Fonda) has finally staked him, only after finding him strung out on drugs (like the real Bela), "old, confused, surrounded by zombies," notes Helsing, "he was like Elvis in the end."  Van Helsing's nephew (Marin Donovan)--the most fey boxer ever--is married to Nadja's new love interest (Galaxy Craze). They meet when Galaxy asks her for a cigarette at a nameless coffee house and we fall in love too, right off, with Craze's strung out 'love child of Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy' look. We can tell she would make a great vampire --her speech already half-forgotten, vaguely slurred but very open, like she's talking to a therapist while trying to hide that she's bleeped on Oxycodone courtesy the chick from Liquid Sky. David Lynch is the morgue attendant in charge of Drac/Bela's body. He helped produce the film --he's playing Mel Brooks to Michael Almereyda's version of himself forThe Elephant Man. Lots of video art with Pixelvision cameras making snow look Atari; Nadja walks down the street at night, digging the flakes, smoking and gliding, and then Portishead starts, "How can it feel / this moment?"  That's when Craze, looking super androgyne sexy in her lumberjack coat, asks for a light; the water starts to whistle in the kettle. She tells her his brother wants to destroy her."Does he live in Carpathia," Craze asks, concerned. Nadja looks at her coldly, "no - Brooklyn." The sound in these dialogue scenes is crisp, you wish like hell barroom chat could be this writerly with concrete details and deep analytical acuity. "The pain of life is the pain of fleeting joy." with the only music that which you put on the jukebox yourself, trippy 90s Lynch style post-noir trip-sludge, over which you might slide the words of your forceful Euro-style assertions of fleeting joy monologue like slotted spoons. 

Crazy keeps a tarantula as a pet, "he scares most people." The dialogue is pretty great; Nadja is impressed when Craze runs to grab the tarantula so she doesn't crush it in her freaking out over a Dracula puppet going off on their Christmas tree. You realize you would hang out with these people intensely for days after you met them, unable to tear yourself away, if you banged into them. As you wonder if the whole cast is matching Craze's zonked disaffect out of a kind of filial love (ala the men with Mina Harker in the novel of Dracula, or Helen "Mina Harker" Chandler in The Last Flight.)

Galaxy Craze

Nadja's writer-director Michael Almeyreda displays a clear love of the good things in life/death: cigarettes, Universal horror (particularly Dracula's Daughter), Jean Cocteau, and the lesbian vampire movies of the 70s, and cool, wry black and white art films like Lynch's, Madin's, and Kern's. He wondrously fuses the downtown grit of NYC with the Universal pre-code Expressionism of Karl Freund within a narrative structured like a loose remake of the 1935 Universal horror classic, Dracula's Daughter, (the 'first' lesbian vampire movie) crossed with the more overtly sapphic Vampire Lovers and Daughters of Darkness. The occasional lapses into pixelated imagery, culled from a then-the-rage Fisher Price Pixelvision movie camera, create a feeling of dreamy disconnect, reflecting perhaps the Nadja eye view (especially when she disappears into parallel dimensions, becoming in a sense one of the unseen audience) and making the rest of the film's grainy video-ish look seem like high grade nitrate by comparison. It's under the Pixelvision we're treated to one of the hottest lesbian bite scenes ever. It's subtle, beautiful, strange, and it outclasses Jean Rollin at his own game in one button (though Rollin would never throw away the hottest parts for such low pixel rates, and maybe that's the problem.) Even if heterosexuality triumphs in the end, it's hard to hate Martin Donovan for--like even Jared Harris here, all young and ravishing, as Nadja's doom-slinging twin brother--he's truly man-crushable, and he does have a pretty good reason, by then we're so far beyond either the hypocritical prudishness that undoes most vampiric/sapphic trysts. (See also: Almereyda's classy and underrated The Eternal.) And stick around to the end credits music cuz it's Spacehogg! Remember them? How a movie made in Manhattan in 1994 could know in advance how to make itself a perfect time and coolness-level capsule baffled the imagination of everyone but those of us who know the answer: Almereyda.... Almereyda. 

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT

2014 Dir Anna Lily Amirpour
****

At last! An Iranian vampire love story, told in resonant black and white and set in the 80s (at least music-wise) in the fictional but familiar "Bad City," (actually Bakerfield, CA), run-down and littered with ever-pumping skeletal oil derricks (pumping up "blood" as Daniel Plainview would say). There's nowhere to run but out in the depressed Bad City, the only people on the street are hustlers and drug-dealers; the only thing worth having is a car; the days are marked by a junkie father's itchy paranoia. First-time director/skateboard star Amirpour makes a big entrance with this film--positing herself somewhere between Sofia Coppola and Abel Ferrara--as does star Sheila Vand, as strange and cool a specter of feminist vengeance for oppressed Middle-Eastern women as you could ask for. Wrapped in her black hijab like Dracula's cape (or Nadja's hood), she preys mainly on male predators, usually waiting until they've shot up heroin or done some lines of coke before making her move--all the better to get high off the blood (though this is never spelled out, it will be clear to any one of a drug-using nature). Her hunting pattern is to silently stalking her and mirror her (male) quarry, gauging whether to kill them based on their response. The wrong responses get killed, some just get passed by, the glass slipper right response comes from the young, insecure but semi-cool Arash (Arash Marandi), a go-getter forced to give up his prize car to dad's evil drug dealer, a giant, buff, coked-up, abusive tattooed pimp with a habit of sticking fingers in girls' mouths (big mistake). Even though Arash's blood is rich in MDMA (after a costume rave where he dresses as Dracula), our heroine holds off indulging, instead bringing him up to her room and engaging with him in an extended slow-motion shared moment below a madly whirling disco ball, with White Lies' "Death"-- playing on her record player. A perfect song to bring them together, as it builds slowly to an emotional grandeur all the more special for seeming to be coming so guilelessly true to their shared moment ("I love the quiet of the nighttime / the sun is drowned in deathly seas") Amirpour lets the moment completely land and for that moment the film becomes the Let the Right One In-verse of Sixteen Candles,

A lot of movies use pop songs, but how many 'get' the heady deep tissue impression pop music makes on the young, how the right songs come pouring from radios like poems conjured from their own unconscious, there to linger and associate this moment, this now, which has completely stopped, or at least slowed way down, with this song?  Dazed and Confused, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Rushmore, The Big Chill, Lost in Translation i.e. not very many. Most just try to force new songs from sister corporation labels down the synergy pipe--they don't get it. Kids dazzled by surging hormones are way better at feeling then analyzing or conveying their desires, so music fills the gap like a translator-cum-DJ wedding planner, and each song that does this hangs in the person's history like a combination scrapbook photo and emotional high replay. A Girl Walks Home Alone might be the first where pages of unspoken dialogue beams out between two quiet characters who barely move as the music plays.

Slight as it is, Amirpour's film sits nicely inside the druggie black and white vampire girl genre, it's the Tom Waits graveyard at the edge of the 'down and out' black and white 16mm post-neorealist movement between Jarmusch's early work and the early 00s Argentine new wave (as in Bolivia and Suddenly). I would have dug it if the film slowly turned to color during the ecstasy scene, then slowly back down to black and white for the come-down. I'm always hoping more films will try that kind of thing. So few do, besides Coffin Joe's Awakening of the Beast (1969) and Wizard of Oz. God damn it.

Either way, the film does nail exactly what ecstasy is like, capturing the rush of blood in the ear and the way a teasing hottie will surround you with auric tentacles of come-hither, leading you on, only to brush you off the instant you bust a move, sending you reeling with the double kick of heady intoxication and sudden, short-shock shame. And in its own way, Amirpour's White Lies moment does all that one better, the slow motion really reflects the temerity of the moment, and so it does later as well, while we wait for Anash's hand to come out of a glove compartment--wondering if a gun will come out-- and the slow drone music drives us onwards into the oil-black future, tapping our typewriter train ride way to Annexia, Zentropa, and on and on, loyal as Oskar, doomed as Håkan before him, ready for our William Tell routine, one goddamned Seward asylum fly at a time... but no drug so sweet as to turn the city again to color...