So close to Heaven: MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)

Spider women, giant spiders, Angelo Rossitto (and other little people), Dolores Fuller (supposedly), babes with mop wigs and antennae shooting people up with hypos at the telepathic command of Jackie 'Uncle Fester' Coogan (as the mysterious "Dr. Aranya"), a sexy barefoot Latin dancer with lovely big dancer legs doing the tarantella at a vividly-etched cantina: an escaped lunatic with messianic leanings who hijacks a rich man's private plane and--as Michael J. Weldon puts it, does a weird Elmer Fudd impersonation, and some good drinking moments, the sort that seem written by a  drinker, the way Hawks' movies are, (when these actors take a swig out of a bottle, they wince, shiver, and exhale in a gush of sudden medicinal warmth --the sort of shot-taking reactions one almost never sees in movies, alas); befitting the drunk/hungover (or 'drunkover', as in the 'hellevan' that comes with a long 'bingebender'), almost no outdoor scenes are shot outdoors (aside from the desert landing field and a few mesa exteriors), the 'mesa exterior itself is all on a big set which a crashed plane characters walk in and out of. Add these astounding elements together with random disregard for audience sanity and if you're lucky, you get The Mesa of Lost Women! It's by the amazing Ron and Mrs. Ormond, whose tentacles, the Astounding B-Monster notes: "tap into everything from 'adult' sex-dramas, like Please Don't Touch Me, to a string of Lash LaRue westerns released by PRC in the late forties," and evangelical films too. I've seen very few of those but seen Mesa millions of times and love it more every time. It rocks, like the flat-topped tower of stone from which it gets part of its crazy name.

I forget the writer, but someone wrote of the Rolling Stones' 1972 album, Exile on Main Street: "It kicks ass though it can barely stand." Mesa of the Lost Women is like that: it can't walk, though it has eight legs; it's got no bite, yet oozes tasty venom. It's up there with the greats. When I was drinking, I used to watch it over and over, on a 6-hour VHS tape I made that ran as follows: Brain that Wouldn't Die (missing the first 20 minutes), Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, Spider Baby, Mesa of Lost Women, Cat Women of the Moon - the best 6 hour tape ever! rewind - hit it again, laddie, and open another bottle of bourbon, another six hours of spider women, cat women, crazy women... life was so good.

Well, it's still good, even sober. The high is insane; the cool night air of the desert is invigorating. You just need to use it only when needed, as it will get you through any crisis. Just listen to drunken Lyle Talbot's ominous narration and learn how miraculous it was that within the vast wasteland of the Muerto Desert you were found at all. Let the oil prospectors sweep you up into their jeep, give you some water and salt tablets, and hear you spin this woebegone web of a tall 'table land' tale. It's the best elements of both drinking and AA meetings rolled into one. 

The Image DVD I have is apparently sourced from the film's only surviving print, one laden with aesthetically pleasing emulsion damage, jarring scotch tape splices, jumps and scratches at a level of near-Brakhage abstraction. Who knows if any scenes are missing? The music too has a kind of Burroughs-style random tape collage expermental accidental artiness: two-fisted piano bashes it out with a weirdly-miked Spanish guitar. They circle around each other in a mix of slowly giddy creeping around and pouncing on each other with a sudden lurch.  Also used in Wood's Jail Bait, it ranks with the ominous thunder chimes of Elmer Bernstein's Robot Monster score in its ability to trigger a medicinal rush of pleasure to any experienced Woodsman.  I could listen to it all my life, and have!  Though cited as 'bad' by some, it may be, in a lot of ways, just that but it is still worth watching a dozen times.

I could go into detail: Lyle Talbot delivers a stirring voiceover about its perils.  At the oil company office, the girl, Doreen (Paula Hill) sacks out on the couch and the man relates their incredible story to beloved drinking partner Lyle Talbot (in a pith helmet). It's the ragic saga of endocrinolotist Dr. Leland (Hammon Stevens) and his arrival at the mesa of the mysterious Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan). Deep in the middle of La Muerte, Aranya has transplanted glandular secretions and made spiders into tall women and women into giant spiders. Leland is horrified. That's a shame for Leland. 

Years or minutes later, Dr. Leland escapes the Mexican insane asylum he's been residing at, somehow (I like to think it's the same one SUSANA escapes from) and gets a drink ("the very best") at a local cantina where a spider woman named Tarantella (Tandra Quinn) does her namesake dance for agog patrons. She has big toned legs like a real dancer and struts barefoot around in the sawdust, her moves corresponding tightly with the music -another rarity.) Leland shoots her. We're not as shocked as the others since he recognizes her from Aranya's lair. Tarantella dies lonely and forlorn while horrified patrons stand around, not helping her, and George (George Barrows), Leland's handler, tells everyone not to rush him as he's a dangerous loon.

In Psychotronic, Michael Weldon calls Leland "a lobotomized scientist doing a weird Elmer Fudd impersonation." It's not really a Fudd impersonation, but having read and re-read that sentence many times as a kid before actually seeing the film, it's tough to think of Leland any other way. And he lives up to and succeeds my years of expectations. With his endlessly off-kilter accentuation, Reid Fleming square nose and a mouth that freezes in a toothy smile in every scene he's in, he becomes the dispassionate existential core of the film. One mis-accentuated Leland quote which always pops into my head at odd moments: "Now we will all fly!" or "this is my order" or "the sick I shall heal!" He makes a good contrast with the other, human, people in the plane: the handsome hero Allan Nixon, the bald older millionaire, bitchy trophy wife-to-be, aphorism-ridden Asian houseboy, and George ("I'm his nurse, miss.")

Once crash landed on the mesa, the gang all have a stiff drink which from the airplane bottle, which ---when you're drinking alone while watching at five AM (the best way to see it)--is a great cheery scene; then they wait around by the fire, exploring strange screams in the darkness, going out to investigate one at a time, or holding hands in a long kind of conga line reminiscent of the constant foreground walking in a row done by the astronauts in Cat Women of the Moon. so they can get killed off by mismatched cutaway shots of leering little people, a giant leaping tarantula, and blank-eyed beauties culled from the dustiest recesses of Burbank. Every time someone else dies the survivors return to the fire and drink some more. Each time it is a great cheery moment to drink along with.  The dwindling survivors wish they had some food, and Leland seems to think he's still at the hospital with a tray of dinner due to arrive any time soon: "George will bring it." 

"He always does."


Suffice it to say, Mesa is the best. The sick it shall heal. 

For more Ed Wood Blogathan, dig also my NIGHT OF THE GHOULS piece on Bright Lights
The Cinema Styles Ed Wood roster is here
Post Script 3/11/16 - Just discovered Doug Bonner's great piece, w/ full movie streaming here)

"The Half-Lit Night of the Insane" DEMENTIA: DAUGHTER OF HORROR

It's not by Ed Wood, but John Parker's 1955 surrealist grade Z nightmare, DEMENTIA (AKA DAUGHTER OF HORROR), is full of poverty row trimmings, with Wood's same weird love for all the seedier elements of late 1950s Hollywood. In fact if Ed was a closeted lesbian schizophrenic beatnik prostitute, this would be his GLEN OR GLENDA (presuming too the whole film was that weird devil dream sequence). If Roman Polanski was a crackhead and making REPULSION for the Finlays in a dingy basement with a young Mercedes McCambridge instead of Catherine Deneuve, well... it's better.

John Parker's only film. His parents owned a few theaters in Oregon, and mom gave him most of the money (I'm sure she was thrilled by the result). If it had made it to Cannes or Greenwich Village, who knows? It might have been a hit. It surely sent linear-narrative-expecting 1955 audiences on some into fits of yawning and/or disgruntled popcorn hurling. Clearly made by someone for whom the grotesque poverty row-style fantasma on display is genuinely "their cup of tea" and not just what jaded producers think will sell drive-in tickets, it has that same outsider art glean only genuine eccentricity can deliver.

The lack of dialogue might be a reason it seems to move backwards and slow time to a crawl. Not a word is spoken as we follow a woman known only as 'The Gamin' (Adrienne Barrett) on her midnight switchblade-strapped sojourn through a desolate urban landscape... to do what? Turn tricks? Seek kicks? Cop a fix? Along her route she encounters: a drunk being beaten to a pulp by a sadistic cop; a dwarf (Angelo Rossitto) who sells her a paper (as Rossitto did in real life--he was a Hollywood Boulevard fixture); a masked figure leads who her to where her dead parents are boozing it up in a graveyard; and in between she is led around to various seedy bars by a rich fat guy with a cigar (Bruno Ve Sota).

The original version was stopped in its tracks via two years of censor battles and was barely released. Later it was picked up by Exploitation Pictures and given a voice-over and a new name, DAUGHTER OF HORROR. Purists rant, but the narrated version is plenty awesome, with heavy breathing lines (supposedly by Ed McMahon) like: "Come with me to the haunted, half-lit night of the insane... for this is a place where there is no love, or hope and the pulsing, throbbing world of the insane mind, where only nightmares are real... nightmares of the daughter of horror!" Hey, he's only saying what we're all thinking.

If it is Ed McMahon, it sounds nothing like him (to my ear) but who cares? Whomever he is, he enunciates every word as if he's getting off on his first hit of reefer and trying not to exhale while he's having his toes cut off. It's with the narrated version that the artsy backwards momentum ennui halts and the true Ed Woodiness comes roaring out. Dig this Criswell-esque number (I had to write it down): "Yes! I am here.. the demon who possesses your soul. Wait a bit... I'm coming for you. I have so much to show you, so much that you are afraid to see." You keep wanting him to add: "He eats little boys!" Each word is emphasized and elongated like the film itself, struggling to stretch a short film into a feature length and only getting as far as around 57 minutes before wheezing to a halt.

Anyway, it's perfect for an all-night horror film fest, such as the one visited by the unwitting denizens of Anytown USA in the BLOB in 1958, where it shows up onscreen (replete with narration) while the kids make out oblivious to the genius before them.

Connecting the film with Roger Corman is the presence of his stock heavy Bruno ve Sota luring our gamin up to his penthouse, where a bartender has been waiting. The Gamin looks at Ve Sota, quizzically. What is she expecting? Certainly not for him to jump on the piano and start banging out some classical jazz. He's certainly not expecting her to, heheh throb her insane mind... but wait, I mustn't spoil it. Suffice it to say that the usual "innocent girl down the rabbit hole" stuff (males leering and groping, getting drunk and slapping taunting bitches in furs, etc.) is countermanded by the gamin's own sadism. When a cop ruthlessly beats that drunk who was harassing her, she just stands there and laughs! How refreshing, to say the least. She'd be right at home running with the Grande boys in TOUCH OF EVIL.

The score is great too: George Antheil's weird orchestral booziness and the wordless eerie whooping of a theremin welded to Marni Nixon's soaring vocals. When our lesbian gamin outlaw hides out from the cops in a dingy basement jazz club, she ends up literally throwing on a cocktail dress and singing with gone-daddy jazz combo Shorty Rogers and His Giants, until her paranoia gets too deep. It's pure Ed Woodsy heaven to watch her open her mouth and then quickly close it while on stage, trying to lip sync to Marni Nixon's wordless and missing the cues, somehow her amateur actress shrugging it off to keep bopping around, maybe blushing just a tad, only makes the whole thing that much weirder. I mean, singers feeling out improvisations do that all the time, so why not the Gamin? And it helps soften her butch beatnik thug vibe just a smidgeon. She's still plenty creepy though, which helps. Meanwhile sleazy dudes grope drunken party girls and lonely old guys with five o clock shadow drink up and look sad and repulsive for the camera. Shorty Rogers and his Giants take up half the basement-- I mean dig, man, it's a real basement; the drummer bugs his eyes and makes goofy faces; the cops shove a dead man's head through the basement window bars, so he can dig the sounds. Everybody's happy and a creepy classic is born... or is it? Do you fear the demon with... the daughter of horror?

And the best part is, you can see it in its entirety, for free, on the web right now: Just click here Or are you afraid.... hmmm? Don't worry. John Parker is here... And he has so much to show you!

The Patron Saint of UHF

(Part of the Ed Wood Blogathon). Like many of the older Ed Wood fans out there, I first came to him via those weird circular UHF antennae that existed long before cable and VHS. Back then you had to tune in the UHF channels -- local channels that showed the news, the local TV shows, and lots and lots of great old black and white horror movies -- like you would a radio station. Sometimes the picture was bad, sometimes it was worse, and standing there twisting tin foil around to connect the antennae to the your leg for example, was not uncommon, especially during bad weather.

Many of the horror films they showed regularly were really boring, especially if you were too young to understand 90% of the plot. Many directors for poverty row were drunks and lazy asses, like William "One Shot" Beaudine, so most of the time they just had a newspaper reporter smirking while they tried to keep him in focus. If you were lucky, maybe there'd be a gorilla suit or a guy in a mask towards the end. There was a film they always showed called The Invisible Ghost. The trick title's no lie: ain't no ghost, just Bela waiting until people fall asleep and then killing them by waving his coat over their heads. It's torturous to see that sort of thing on a sunny Saturday afternoon when you should be out playing. Before you learn there's no ghost you have long commercial breaks to wait through and you hold on thinking a monster's got to show up eventually, but one never does... and then dad comes home and flips it to golf.

Ed Wood wasn't like that. He was the bright shining light amidst all that sadness, the patron saint of UHF, cramming enough monsters in every film to rocket any five year-old straight into monster heaven. That was the 1970's, though... and once Wood made it to digital, and we grew up, then what?

In the forgiving fuzziness of bad receptions, the strings holding the UFOs in Plan Nine are invisible; you can't see the folds in the black cloth that constitutes the graveyard turf. In the clarity of DVD, however, Wood's threadbare aesthetic enters a whole new realm of sadness, beyond the bleak heartache of The Invisble Ghost and into some shit so Brechtian even Brecht would cry like a frightened little Deutsche bitch to see it. When you can see every brush stroke on the painted rocks walling Lugosi's laboratory in Bride of the Monster, then you have seen too much, not unlike the witnesses at the real-life Plan Nine of Roswell 1947. It's the bad movie lover equivalent of going into a black hole.

It didn't matter that it looked fake --what came through the TV was blurry enough to begin with. When you're a kid in the 1970s, and CGI is still a few decades off, you don't care that things aren't realistic, you don't even know what real is, you can't tell--unless you mean the bugs you're looking for in the dirt under the porch--everything else is vivid imagination--if it can fill in every creak of the stairs at night with evil boogie man whispers, and can invest a handful of different sized army men with a grand adventure schematic using a twin bed as the cliffs below the Guns of Navarone, then you don't care if the saucers on TV are hubcaps --you barely notice. What you care about is that--while 90% of the monster movies you love is just filler--waiting for the monster to show up--because you don't understand or care about adult 'dialogue' or 'themes' --then when you have Dracula, Tor, a hot chick vampire AND flying saucers and aliens all in one movie--brother, you have a new favorite. With Bela and Tor Johnson together, for example, you didn't even need a giant octopus, that's why Ed Wood was so awesome -- he made sure you got one anyway. PRC and Monogram sure as hell weren't about to sneak into some other studio's prop department and steal an octopus, not when they felt they could get away with Lugosi and an overcoat, some grown dull men in grey fedoras and a few threadbare mansion rooms and then just blah blah blah til goddamned enough time has elapsed to call it a B-.

Like all the other horror films in UHF rotation, Plan Nine and Bride of the Monster were shown usually on early weekend mornings, while you were still supposed to be in bed. Nothing was better than getting up before everyone else on a 70's Saturday morning and finding them waiting for you, hours before the cartoons began-- just you -- no one else probably up for miles all around, but light enough the real monsters in the hallway and closet were all long gone. With the combined fuzziness of the picture and your still half-asleep mind, it was literally a weird kid's dream come true.

In fourth grade, I remember running home to get a baseball glove on a sunny, lovely fall afternoon and noticing BRIDE OF THE MONSTER was on. One look at those crazy tentacles and suddenly I had to stop and stay, ignoring my friend's angry calls and the pull of the sunshine. In that key moment, the dark path towards this blog was begun. When I saw Nightmare of Ecstasy on the shelves randomly at a bookstore in New Hope, PA, around 1991, I thought I had died and gone to sweet velvet curtained hell. No one was really celebrating him much at the time. Tim Burton must have felt the same way, because that book became the basis for the movie. I remember clenching my flask on a dim routine Saturday matinee of Ed Wood, and when the crowd cheered as Bela tossed the bottle and jumped boldly atop the lifeless rubber octopus, the whole audience broke into applause. I cried. My basement hero had made it to the top of the tower. Say what you will about his later years penchant for alcoholism and pornography, Ed Wood was a king among men, his strange stories real and true. He stuck to his weird guns and now he's immortal. And don't even doubt that he's an American hero. Landing at D-Day is one thing, but doing it in ladies underwear, now that's guts! Sometimes guts is enough.

And liquor.

(Read my Christmas 2008 celebration of Plan Nine here)

RIP, Angel Baby...

In all the anguish and rush of celebrity obits of late, it's Farrah who goes under-celebrated. Karl Malden is gone but it was certainly his time; Michael Jackson is gone and perhaps he is happier now that the spotlight is finally out of his eyes. For me, Farrah Fawcett's departure is the true tragedy of the last few weeks.

She was a genuinely mythic goddess, ruling in the final decade where goddesses still commanded archetypal mystique, before videotapes made the remoteness required for such ascendancy completely impossible--the 1970s. You might even say she was the 1970s.

I remember buying her poster when it first showed up at 7-11. It was one of the first posters ever. BUT it scared the shit out of me. Never mind that nipple, take a look at her deranged eyes and anguished smile, like Marlene Dietrich after 30 takes of the same scene with Sternberg (I'm so traumatized I can't even show the poster ). I liked her on Charlie's Angels, as Jill Munroe her fearlessness and athletic prowess made her much more than a pretty face and agile mind. Where angels feared to tread, Farrah charged in. She even scuttled her contract with Aaron Spelling to go the feature film route, where she promptly bombed and fell out of favor, like David Caruso after her. If Saturn 3 (pictured below)--her big sci fi feature co-starring Kirk Douglas--had been better, she might have been a huge movie star. It wasn't her fault it bombed, but that's show biz

Instead she kind of disappeared until returning as a serious dramatic actress in The Burning Bed and The Apostle, a decade or so later. It doesn't matter that she later won respect as a hard-bitten actress capable of drama and flighty comedy (she played the racist wife of Danny Glover in The Cook-Out if you care, and you should). All that matters is that she was a goddes of the 1970s and everyone dug her hair, I mean everyone. All that horrible "pouffy" hair in the 1980s might even have been her fault, in a way, the mutated evolution of her feathery wisps writ large and gaudy on the newly emerged MTV generation. Even the second season of Charlie's Angels fell in. You can suddenly see the Farrah hairdo all over the extras, the bit players, and Jaclyn Smith.

It's a tragedy that we lost her, and a tragedy that her death's been overshadowed by Michael Jackson's. I don't mean any disrespect to Mr. Jackson, who perhaps united more of the world and for longer in his rein than Farrah did or could or probably would ever want to. While Jackson's mythic presence spans his own lifetime since childhood, Farrah's is rooted in a single pop cultural moment, but it's not a race, at least not a race anyone wants to win. In fact we're all walking as slow as we can towards that inevitable credit roll finish line, but now, wherever we're going, we can hope our angel Farrah will be working the reception gate like it's a Honolulu airport, ready to set our nervous hearts at ease with a lei, a flash of a smile and a shake of her golden feathery tresses.