The Shrouds of Soavi: CEMETERY MAN, THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER

Once upon a time in swingin' Italy there was such a deep merging of art with blood and beauty that a beautiful blonde in a fashionable dress could stand on a corner, petulantly smoking against a futuristic glass skyscraper reflecting the ancient bombed-out cathedral across the street, and just that image--coupled to the sounds of traffic and Nino Rota-could knock you into a state of modernist euphoria. The blood was her beauty; you could feel her pulse in the operatic contrapuntal score - she was history, the nail in the crossroad between ancient Rome, the Second World War and the sci-fi Age to come. You'd swoon from her beauty, reflected in the light and breeze.

And then in the same movie, a sun-browned hairy little gnome in an ugly peasant dress (Jeanne Moreau as Marcello's drag of a wife in LA NOTTE) could make your hand reach for a razor or noose on instinct, anything to escape her gravitic buzzkill 'wifey' aura. This was the flipside of the Monica Vitti's eternal sex-spontaneity promise: the vortex of maternal devouring, the endless Catholic maw of guilt and suffocation. Even gorgeous raven-eyed Yvonne Furneaux (below) could seem like an evil clutching graveyard drag, pulling us out of the DOLCE VITA and down below the domestic tedium tombstone, the quicksand tar pit from which no swinger returns. Run, Marcello! She's calling you with suicide threats again and you're just naive enough to believe her, to presume yourself at fault, yourself responsible - after all you had a suffocating mother, too - and still feel bad about having to pry her claws off you with a crowbar just to get out the door and go to school in the morning.

If you do the math however you realize (as I did), that sort of thing is a prime example of emotional terrorism, and you don't negotiate with terrorists. Me, I only figured that out thanks to shrooms, which armored me like Zarkov's memories when my old college (Italian-American) ex-girlfriend tried to keep me from going to one too many parties back in 1987. My own mom was Swedish, so I never had that problem, hence this girl's sticky needy 'mama mia' tentacles were a brand new thing. If the shrooms hadn't rescued me (whispering words of strength and guidance inside my head like the voice of Diana Love to Helene in The Undead).

But everyone's an emotional terrorist in mid-60s Rome. There's not a Swedish mom in sight, unless they're a murder suspect with their steely-eyed coldness. And there ain't a mushroom to be found, only knives; the only way to hear that escape-urging voice was to start slashing. Rome: a land of the lost, the adrift, where the half-built skeleton of an emptily decadent future and the ruins of a recently-bombed ancient demonic past stood literally on the same block like twin skeletons hanging on the wall at an inquisition waxworks. Rome, at the time when gender was juuust starting to slip its rocky encasement. Rome, where you couldn't tell the women from the effeminate men if they wore big black raincoats and gloves and lurked in shadows and all you could see was an outline and a flickering knife blade showing your screaming face reflected like that cathedral reflected in the windows of the modernist high rise. Is it sexist to presume the one in the raincoat was a man and the one in a dress a woman and not a drag queen? The reasoning, Agatha Christie simple - make the killer and all the male actors the same height and approx. weight of the women, to keep the suspects pool large, and to make for an extra twisted denouement. Gay stereotypes mincing at smoky bars may be for freak show frisson, but visibility is visibility. Gawking is the first step to acceptance.

Almost as a side effect to the giallo model, psychosexual freedom!

But... is it art? 

I refer of course to the bloody sexually perverse knife wound, the bleeding begun with Bava's ill-received Blood and Black Lace and finally turned into a virgin spring gusher after Antonioni's Blow-Up helped obliterate the distinction between high fashion, signification chain-disrupting ambiguity and 'maybe' murder. Argento took pages from both films, and swirled it all to a giddy new extreme that felt genuinely dangerous. He launched a whole new genre and suddenly he had 'a team' - a production organization centered around his two mentees, Lamberto Bava and Michele Soavi.

No offense to Bava Jr., but the difference between these two disciples was like hacksaw and hawk, like comparing Ennio Morricone with Ermine N. Goborra, but they all worked on each other's things and years later, thanks to greater technological advances undreamt of in their era, we can appreciate their films as good as they could in their studio screening rooms at the time, more or less, and savor every corner of the widescreen frame and every glowing color. Far better looking than films made today which rely on HD cameras which give everything a wan, washed-out look, these Italian horrors pulse with restored giddy colors that intoxicate even when nothing's happening onscreen.

The diff again: Lamberto directs like a fifteen year-old burnout in art class, saved only by his stoner shop class graffiti touches as if passive-aggressively trying to prove to his father, Italian horror maestro Mario Bava that he should have been allowed to be a veterinarian or heavy metal bassist instead of a filmmaker. Still, if you've ever been a 13 year-old heavy metal album headphones-on bedroom heabanger, you can't help but love him.

Conversely, Soavi is a metatextual satirist who goes to the root source of Argento's work-- the subconscious--and picks the doors to the Antonioni tiger, the door brother Lamberto left untried. He finds the zone where Antonioni meets Bunuel, the same space from which David Lynch dances in a papier mache Bosch Wicker Man mask, there to fool Godard into thinking it's a safe spot for deadpan absurdist dissertations. Then, when Godard starts opening his little red book, Soavi sneaks off to run amok in the fields of cinema fantastique like a drunk dragon.  And there he finds the fissures in modernism's ideas of modern society and widens them to let the madness seep in like nitrous from an amok dentist.

DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE

("Cemetery Man" - 1994)

****

The idea of being trapped in love's absence--a big empty hole in the ground where a coffin goes, and only a fat dumb little brother or neighborhood dork for company--has never been so palpably felt as in Michele Soavi's great opus, DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE, one of the best 80s horror comedies to ever come out in mid-90s. I remember the ads for it (small space) in the Voice when it came to NYC theaters, and thinking: yeesh, just what the world needs, yet another Pulp Fiction / Living Dead first person shooter game with an Italian narcissist hipster pretty boy shooting zombies all day in slow-mo, probably with a shrine to Elvis by his black tie collection and some karaoke in with the terrible dubbing and excessive gore. But this was years before DVD, back when I dismissed Argento as misogynistic and felt that Italian movies had to be in Italian to even think about (for dubbing was a sign of xenophobia and subtitle illiteracy) and so forth.

What a fool I was! DVD has so many taught things to us... to me... multiple language tracks let us know the Italian language track often looks even less synced than the English, and the restoration and beautiful transfers of widescreen HD help us to see at last 'what the fuss was about,' and to better appreciate such things as the jet black dry subtle cineaste termite wit of horror auteur Michele Soavi, and the rich textures and muted sunless palette of his mise en scene. 

Based on an Italian comic book, Soavi's masterpiece is a sensitive jet black satire on death, desire, and adolescent obsession all wrapped up in horror comic trappings. A kind of hipster Alessio nel Paese delle Meraviglie, its protagonist can stand proudly any decade next to Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey in Blue Velvet as far as fearless intrepid truth-seekers uncovering the rocks in his backyard to see what worms, pill bugs, and centipedes are thar. Charging into any mystery or romance that grabs him, even if it takes him over the edge deep into his own psychosexual dysfunctional core, our graveyard keeper hero takes what comes with a shrug and a soft weary moan.

Presented in a kind a tumble down overflow of macabre black humor romantic episodes, the film speeds so merrily along from event to event it could easily have been fleshed out into a full season of its own TV show. The overarching theme is how hot young things stay loyal to their rotting cannibal corpse lovers even as they're being eaten or beheaded (and vice versa) by said zombie lover, all in an effort to escalate the DSB of our young protagonist for some hell-centric reason. All told, while episodic and hard to pin down it's a sublimely dream-like odyssey into how death never dies and desire's fulfillment was never born.

And as a sublime anima, playing many roles, returning again and again in different guises, like Liz Taylor in Doctor Faustus (1967) or Isabelle Adjani in Possession, or Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway, gorgeous Anna Falchi dies and comes back in numerous guises as his anima/object of desire. So gorgeous and sexy she could melt the 'thing' out of the Arctic all by herself, Soavi makes full use of the way such shocking hotness has an uncanny frisson to melt an already overheated mind. In true anima form, she's the sort of girl a young sexually frustrated young man dreams about almost  making it with, only for there to be some distraction or calling away before it starts or ends, leaving the man in a kind of exquisite frustration, loping after her as the backgrounds shift and envelop so that circumstance seems to use her allure as some horrifically just-out-of-reach carrot (her absence as the whip). At first she's a grieving young widow, seen in the corner of his eye, who comes alone every day to the cemetery to mourn her much older, goofy-looking husband (his picture's on the tombstone), whose love-making skills are constantly mentioned like a dagger in our hearts, mocking us in ways you may have to be a smitten lovelorn dude listening as the girl you like goes on an about how attractive some toothless scraggly idiot is, like you--in your finery and wit--don't even exist! Everett's Dellamorte is smitten of course, as would anyone be, and soon they have some great death-evoking moments, kissing with full protection (their lips and full heads wrapped in burial shrouds); when they do finally get into it, it's atop of the husband's grave, prompting the old man to reach up through the soil and take a bite out of her, thus interrupting things... again! Sprites fly around them as they make love, disembodied souls seeking moments of conception the way hermit crabs seek the right empty shell. It's always something.

Cross-addicted

Like his same-initialed Donnie Darko or Dylan Dog, Dellamorte doesn't deign to separate fact from fantasy, so why should we? Certainly the town's chief detective would never suspect him of murder, and later even outright refuses to, as when he stumbles on the mayor's daughter's severed head keeping house with Dellamorte's dummkopf assistant. That episode, and a hilarious bit between an undead biker and his haughty young deb ("I shall be eaten by whomever I choose!") are folded in between the many guises of Falchi, and her tragic death/s and Dellamorte's visits with the cryptic and strangely tolerant local detective.

Falchi is so gorgeous that after she's dead - and she goes early on- you feel the ache for her, a real sense of loss perfectly summed up in DD's rote distraction performing his dead killing duty, so that when Falchi comes back all wreathed in vines we're so glad to see her we don't even care if she rips him to shreds. It's more than beauty or her surprising gift for balancing dark dry deadpan drollery with a constantly shifting array of moods--from melancholy depth to necrophiliac ecstasy, from undead vindictive succubus to suicidal prostitute to local student (?), etc-- Falchi genuinely seems like an array of different people, all cursed as they may be by the kind of impossible beauty that makes normalized relationships with men almost impossible.

Funny, profound, surrealistic, deeply sad and subversive, DD gets over its lack of forward momentum through an endless parade of weird cool touches, such as Death appearing in broad daylight out of burned phone book ashes, all done in a very clever analog style, the sort of thing Terry Gilliam's tried all his life to achieve with the same nonchalant virtuosity but he ends up overthinking and spending too much money; or that Michel Gondry does with too much knitted nerd twee and not enough subversive darkness. Soavi tosses such bits off like riffs that always lead back to the graveyard, capturing that lonesome isolation we feel as virgin teenage boys living with our idiot little brother and clueless parents, all of them blind to the dead coming back everywhere, while we yearn for the phantom girl we keep seeing beckoning to us, and always from whichever window we're farthest from.

It's hard to believe this came out after CGI and Jurassic Park as it could easily be from the 70s or 80s. Its knowing winks to Evil Dead 2, Clockwork Orange, Polanski's The Tenant, and Zulawski's Possession put it in that category of cult cinema so packed with in-joke references that they will only appeal to the cult of weird cinema, leaving the banal and average filmgoer out of the loop, ensuring a very narrow demographic. But I do the same thing here in this blog - so what the fuck ever. If you're reading this, you are one of the "chosen few"  Soavi even refers to us, the chosen, in the next big classic of his we'll be discussing:

LA SETTA

(Aka THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER / Aka DEMONS 4 -1991)

***1/2

Among the other things that marks the quality difference between Lamberto Bava and Soavi is the dubbing. In Soavi, the voices match perfectly and the soundtrack pumps. To compare this as just a third Demons film is like calling Raiders of the Lost Ark a sequel to Treasure of the Four Crowns (1). As with so many of its ilk, good or bad, La Setta draws liberally from the Italian devil movie pool of "influences" and influenced - i.e. Rosemary's Baby, The Omen, Exorcist, The Sentinel, the (real life) Manson murders, even Argento's own Phenomena and it even works as a sort of quasi-prequel to The Visitor. There's a Manson-esque desert canyon drifter named 'Damon' (Tomas Arana) who opens the film by freeloading a meal off a pair of traveling hippie families, and then sacrificing them all (kids included) to feed the need of a slowly gathering Satanic overthrow, but not before introducing himself via lyrics (spoken) from "Sympathy for the Devil" and assuring the blissfully unaware brood that the Stones' lyrics are profound and meant for "only a chosen few" as if angry one of the hippie dads would dare recognize his plagiarizing.

Forward ahead a bit and into Frankfurt (like Dellamorte this was filmed in Germany) and a killing or two and then we see old man Herbert Lom leave his Frankfurt hovel and take to the road with his mysterious package (you'll never in a million years guess what's in it). Soon he's standing in the small town in the heart of Black Forest road and nearly hit by Miriam (Kelly Curtis --Jamie Lee Curtis's sister), a sweet guileless young (single) elementary school teacher who ill-advisedly takes him and his strange package home to her cluttered little apartment, one of those little German townhouses split down the middle so she has an upstairs, basement access, and an attic but each floor is small and Soavi gets lots of cool shots bearing down the stairs at each floor like some guest taking the only seat left at party, on the stairs between floor, giving it all some terrarium look, mirrored--hilariously--in the POV of her white rabbit. In grand late-80s style, Miriam is kooky and single with no husbandly prospects (her wedding couple snow globe lets you know she's wishing for one) and a nagging best friend who's always trying to set her up on dates. For awhile it seems like she's following in the footsteps of Anita Skinner's character Dee-Dee in one of my favorite discoveries of the last few years, Sole Survivor (1983) in that she hooks up with a young doctor who helps her even if he doesn't quite believe her crazy story... etc. And in Terminator echoes (which as I've said has Halloween echoes), the bunny equals Sarah Connor's iguana, and her slutty friend ends up dead (like Sarah's bouncy roommate with the headphones, or Dee-Dee's strip poker-playing neighbor, or Halloween's PJ Soles). And there's the Curtis sister connection... Dude, it's all connected.

At this point I'd say if you haven't seen it, stop reading and see it first. As it's got so many great WTF moments I don't want to spoil them for you. It's on youtube (for now) in a decent print (where I saw it) and so while we wait on a region 1 Blu-ray, maybe you can enjoy it now - it's manna,... for the chosen few, the type who geek out when they recognize one of the sleazy truck drivers (Richard Sammel) as the Wermacht soldat who gets his head beaten in by "ze Bear Jew" in Tarantino's Basterds.

Okay, whacked-out film, right? WRONG! It's grounded like a deep well, even the Satanic impregnation aspect has roots in ancient Greek myth: instead of bedding the devil (as in Soavi's previous film, 1989's THE CHURCH), we have an updating of Leda and the Swan, though instead of Zeus as a rapist swan, Curtis is impregnated by a Satanic (dig that malevolently intelligent black eye) pelican-ish creature at the bottom of a deep well underneath her house, but instead of sex it just pecks out the brain-eating bug larvae nesting in her neck. If taken alongside the Leda myth it's suddenly as if we're realizing Satanism is just the ancient Greek pantheon gone hopelessly shady from the lack of sun (after hiding out from Christian zealots for centuries).

What makes all the weird bug-up-nose strangeness work of course is that--and this is especially true as far as the score is concerned--this shit is serious. Composer Pino Donaggio merges sustained vocoder, funky bass underwriting great Satanic chanting, and abstract drumming as if summoning some ancient evil Lovecraftian behemoth. Little details accrue alongside the dark comedy--the main evil cult member brings his face ripping tools, but won't let anyone else touch them, like they're some high-toned guitar; the cult uses reflected full moon in vanity mirrors to light facial surgery down by the creek during one of their ceremonies. How or why a new (woman's) face would reanimate Herbert Lom. no sane person cam guess but the mundanity of the ceremony (if the placement in the flow of the river isn't aligned they'll be at it all night, notes the doctor wearily), the rabbit's final declaration of Satanic mischief --it's all absolutely deadpan termite. Once the bug goes up into her brain we get an interior view, into her dreams, as if the bugs POV includes access to her third eye subconscious like a two way radio. Bits of Antonioni-style alienation affect include the doctor risking his job leading her down into the morgue corridors deep in the antique hospital basements, a long hallway, the come to a doorway - he mentions the guards as if worried one will approach and then tries to kiss her against the wall so a passerby would think they're just down there for privacy and oblivious to the world.

That kind of set-up cover moment occurs a lot in cinema, as if danger itself is the key to busting the first move, but this time there's no security guard and she rears back from his ill-timed attempt. In true termite fashion it's just another knowing deadpan inside toss-away joke. Earlier the doctor mentions he's allergic to Miriam's rabbit and jokes about it being the devil, kinda ("There's nothing wrong with my rabbit," / "That's what he wants you to think!") but it turns out he's right, since it knows how to work a TV remote, and later nibbles his fingers at a key moment causing him to fall down the well; and when he opens the seal on the coffin, under the lid, it's sealed, like a sardine can (I guess they do that?), and in poking it open the doctor gets squirted in the eye. When Miriam's water isn't working we see her looking up into a mysterious pipe--and we get the water's journey from the poisoned well up through all the arcane old German Schwarzwald plumbing to her sink in a style way prefiguring Fincher's in Panic Room--Miriam barely misses getting squirted in the same way when she turns away at the last possible second.

Meanwhile old Herbert Lom stays totally inscrutable - is he good or bad? We don't know for half the film--he could be either a Castavet in ROSEMARY or a Merrin in EXORCIST. But either way, we worry about Miriam's boundaries. Avoiding bringing Herbert Lom home is the first thing parents teach children, so she's definitely an orphan and definitely missed a lot of key survival tips most kids glean before they graduate the sixth grade. Mockeries of things like the Shroud of Turin (a dirty hanky on his face later kills people through suffocation); a girl crucified, one frightened by a snake, the kids wearing weird WICKER MAN-style pagan masks, a mysterious Asian lady in red trying to steal the dirty shroud hankie and Curtis fighting to keep it with all her might, though she can't possibly want it, all proving if nothing else that like Argento, Soavi has seen BLOW-UP a dozen times, if one can really be said to have seen it, or anything, really....

As in ROSEMARY'S BABY there's a weird disconnect as it turns out this apartment has whole vast chambers Miriam never dreamed were there. Characters have cool names like Moebius and Martin Romero ("Martin" being that lesser known--and recommended if you can find it--Romero vampire flick), they're the kind of oblique in-jokes that someone like Joe Dante or John Landis would need to underline, but Soavi just buries them under everything... not unlike the elaborate ironwork that's clearly (presumably) merely found basement pre-war janitorial relics, though who the fuck knows?

The Black Forest atmosphere is sublime and Donaggio's moody score brings in everything Argento's films were totally lacking by then--laden as they were with Heavy Metal and ill-chosen composers like Rick Wakeman. Even Donaggio could be the wrong choice, sometimes, totally missing the tone of some American movies he worked on (like Tourist Trap- which he scored as if some childhood carnival whimsy) but maybe his not knowing English was part of that.

Stole many a man's soul and face

Meanwhile, what of Argento? He co-wrote this, and one wonders if he was just spreading himself thin. He'd lost, by '91, his most important collaborator, the Debra Hill to his Carpenter, the Gale Ann Hurd to his Cameron, wife Daria Nicolodi (and Asia's mother) and seemed to perk up only for the chases and hardcore misogynist killings and snoozed through the rest. In 1991, American horror movies had given up trying to be stylish and riffing on tropes and capturing that dusty gray sky, muted colors and strange textures (as opposed to Argento's preference for bold colors and slick modernism) and his wickedly subversive sense of deadpan humor. What makes it so very Soavi is the... whoa.. made myself dizzy.

Hope you guessed his name

After this, Soavi went onto Italian TV shows with unpromising names like "Anti-Drug Squad"- easier to finance and finish, he says, and no distribution headaches. I'm sure, but they'll never be STAGEFRIGHT: AQUARIUS. This is the dawning of something all right, but it's not the age of anything but looking down the rabbit hole spiral into the infinite(ly recorded) past.... For the chosen few, this Stone's at you. 

Curtis family (L->R) Tony, Jamie Lee, Kelly, Janet Leigh

Kelly and Jamie Lee at father's funeral, a fraction of a millennia later

the before and after.....

NOTES:

1. no offense to the Demons, they're plenty meta, I just shy away from endless static camera gross outs, watching the pustules appear, swell up one after the other and drool fizzy food coloring leak from fanged mouths, it's like 7th grade lunch period all over again. 

10 Reasons: THE CAR (1977)

Nobody said living in a post-JAWS monster landscape was going to be a busket of clacks and thistles, because--no matter how far above sea level you may park your groovy one-hearse town--the scythe, she a-come a swipin'. This is the high-octane truth learned by one unlucky black customized Lincoln when it innocently incurs the ire of a small posse fronted by one wife-beating demolitions expert (E.G. Marshall), a Burt Reynolds imitation motorcycle cop (James Brolin), a relapsing alcoholic deputy, and a cadre of various out-of-order western bit characters in THE CAR (1977). But hell, before it's dispatched to that great infernal pit-stop down below,  this one-of-a-kind low ridin' custom Lincoln learns a valuable lesson and wreaks some unleaded vengeance upon several no-good hippies, a few cops, and even an innocent lovely brunette, in the process giving literality to phrases like 'drive through' and 'dust-devil'.

The ne plus ultra of land-based Jaws rips, the CAR rocks so hard it rattles like a spray paint can in an echo chamber. You can imagine the Universal Studios bigwigs, intrigued by all the money earned by JAWS, and THE OMEN, the nationwide yen for the occult and Detroit muscle cars, watching the script for a demonic souped-up black town car terrorizing a small desert town all but write itself. As if they needed proof, SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT came wizzin' by two weeks after THE CAR. 

Alas, it passed right on by with nary a victory honk. And so THE CAR was razzed off the road and left to its wild red yonders, leaving us kids to wonder if those red yonders weren't really right behind us, ready to flash their brights in the dead-of-night highway half-asleep moment. We kids loved it! I remember staring at the novel at Woolworth's, fascinated, imagination revving up. 

Well, in them days, the sorrows of small box office returns were the joys of prime time TV. I remember  my parents, me and brother watching it on its happy Friday Night Movie premiere, happy as clams, mom making popcorn and pouring ice-cold coke, my dad all whiskey sour-cheery and sharp-witted, my little brother and I flanking him, lobbing witticisms like blind shells at the screen (and if we actually made dad laugh it was like scoring a major victory). THE CAR was the kind of movie you could follow real fine even drunk or sugar and salt-addled. Good times. This blog's roots lie in night like that one. It maybe explains maybe why I hate Mystery Science Theater (it tries to steal my dad's affection) and why now, thanks to DVD, THE CAR glows in mine eyes like Rosebud roasting on an open fire in a KRAMPUS snow globe full of (blank).

Yeah I been watching a lot of MATCH GAME 78 on Buzzr.... for the same reason I love this film. Wanna make somethin' of it?

Blank: it's not just a space to be filled, it's a goal in itself.

Revisiting it for this post I noticed that, even now, I like THE CAR better than a lot of more than some of the more highly praised post-Jaws monster genre creations. I like it better even than Joe Dante's PIRANHA. 

And I love PIRANHA. 

1. Car Design

The problem inherent in just transposing the 'rogue shark besieges small tourist town' blueprint onto the Great American Western highway is that there's very few places for a car to hide where we won't see it coming. (It can't exactly leap up from under the asphalt.) At night the thing can turn off its headlights, and then snap on the brights at the right psychological moment. During the day it's hidden only by its blurring speed and the occasional tunnels or brush. Ingeniously--rather than trick the car out with air brushed horns and fangs (the way, say, Rob Zombie would)--THE CAR's designers bring Lewtonesque shadows to its outer chassis. Painted a dull matte grey-black, it looks like a miniature even though it's life size; the big grinning grille / front fender / headlights alternate looking vaguely like bull horns, teeth, or --to my crazy eyes--the glowering lamps of the mollusk in THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD (1959- below-left), which featured a similar bucolic western America setting facing an existential but localized threat.

Recently I took a frame-by-frame look at a few dark splotches in Val Lewton's 1942 CAT PEOPLE to try and figure out, at long last, what's going on in the shadows of the famous pool scene. You know it: Irina walks into the corner while her rival treads water in the middle of the pool--and then the shadow of a black cat emerges. When she crouches down into the darkness, now that it's all in HD, we see something is forming in between the shadow of Irina, the shadow of the corner of the pool, and the shadow of a cat, but it's just an indistinguishable animated ink blob; it's that rare kind of subliminal animation actually blocks imagery out rather than fleshes it in. It's just a half second or so of inked out darkness - blacker than the black shadows of a dark corner of an unlit pool room, but the effect is uncanny. Paul Schrader didn't get that concept for the remake, so had to use the whole make-up latex blood and placenta schtick, to far less effect.

CAR director Elliot Silverstein knows the reason JAWS worked such a number upon our popular imagination in the summers of 75-6 was the opaqueness of the water...As kids playing in the surf we were always weirded out by the fact that we couldn't see our feet (it wouldn't work near as well in the clear turquoise water of the Caribbean) so we could be about to stand on a crab pincer or get stung by a jellyfish or step on a gross slimy patch of seaweed. This experience makes deep impressions on the unconscious mind, i.e. the dark Lewtonian shadow. What we can't see right below us is simultaneously terrifying and intriguing. Similarly, the interior of the devil car is the mystery; we can't see who's driving, if anyone, nor can we totally know for sure why the car is even there (some Native American return of an ancient evil spirit idea is batted around) and that's part of its effectiveness. I'd have preferred we didn't get even the small interior view of the empty driver's seat (I have a feeling it was insisted on by the producer), but then again not showing anything carries its own penalty too. It makes literal-minded people ornery. Films like Blair Witch Project and Duel go out on a limb, knowing the ambiguity is either going to hit--and make a classic--or piss people off. 

2. UTAH!

Silverstein's original conception of the film was more Lewtonesque - with the idea that the car would be zipping around at high speed with its headlights off in the dead of night, flashing on its brights right before running someone down or totaling their car (ala Stuntman Mike). BUT hey, there's a few moments of that, to some fine effect, so don't worry. And THEN, in the daytime, we see Utah's gorgeous national parks with all the canyons and Mars-looking red rock piles and glory therein. Thanks to recent DVD and Blu-ray remastering it's now no longer just a "fun" film but a breathtaking lure to anyone who's become sick to death of big city life and longed to escape to where everyone knows your name and the closest thing to evil is EG Marshall.

Escape, the lure, the road west... Gerald Hirschfeld's camera never gets too over-the-top with art, just delivers the vistas. Hell, it's not rocket science.

The climax with its early dawn thing; the sun just coming up from between the far off mountains-- that's hard to get just right when capturing all the Utah scenery - but Hirschfeld does it. And the final shot with the smoke and the sun coming up like a big round eye of God... man, that's just totally the shit.

3.  Leonard Rosenman's para-diegetic score 

America was used to talking cars and intelligent VW Bugs thanks to TV comedy shows like HERBIE and MY MOTHER, THE CAR, but the way this devil car communicates is solely through engine revving and a horn from hell, a rising and falling  death rattle blast that Roseman's hip-but-never-ostentatious score gamely enfolds in the fabric of his score. He also great use of the desert wind whistling through idle band instruments as elementary school marching band parade practice temporarily halts out on a lonely track field, and the way that cacophonous sound gradually shifts into a lower octave as "the Car" rolls into view. The mounting engine drone, the cacophony of the instruments, the roaring wind, the children's panic, all fuse into the score. Great churning bassoons and oboes tap their way through Grieg's Mountain King's hallways and ye olde funeral dirge "Die Irae" (later heard in Wendy Carlos' Shining) and the long scary drones of octave drooping thunder; the piercing top note sustains and clanging cymbals merge flawlessly with hell's own car horn as it revs up for the kill and exults in triumph, Rosenman is clearly trying something new and cool, merging diegetic/ambient and score together in a way that has our ears always sifting around through the melody, in search of that telltale horn...

4. Kathleen Lloyd as Lauren

You can call the film derivative if you want--another JAWS-DUEL-EXORCIST hybrid ripoff--but there's no cash-centric mayor ranting about starting a panic and scaring off tourists ("so some car ran over a few hippies? Don't make a big thing about it and scare away the tourists?"); no defrocked alcoholic priest working as an auto mechanic who alone can stop it ("Someone's gonna have to climb inside that car and hang a cross around the rearview mirror, and I reckon it's gonna have to be me."), not even obsessive Ahab-like FBI agent with a tire tread scar across his face from when he was run over by the same vehicle in Alamogordo last month ("I'll get that car if it's the last thing I do!") etc. What the film does have, however, in spades, is a long, "boss" (1) ) scene wherein sheriff James Brolin's girlfriend, elementary school teacher Lauren, taunts the car from the dubious safety of the church graveyard to try and protect her terrified class. It's a real stunner of a scene and Lloyd brilliantly acts a full range of emotions, moving very palpably from terrified, to mad, working herself up to sneering provocations, and even branch-throwing, trying to goad whomever's driving to come out and show himself.  Her eyes getting dark and shark-like, glistening from fear-adrenalin but voice cracking from the dust stirred up by the furiously revving car, Lloyd gets the shake in her voice exactly right. She's ageless in this moment - with her big head and short sleeves she could be a fifth grader herself, or my fifth grade teacher from the same approx. time, Miss Zackon.



Her big moment here is so unusually human! It's the first time we've really cared or rooted for someone so much cooler and complex than we originally thought --and it's a girl! In JAWS, we like Mrs. Brody but she doesn't get much to do, shark-wise, and even in THE BIRDS (1963), Melanie and Annie merely help the children run to safety. But Lauren not only helps the children run to safety she gets out and, so to speak, throws rocks at the crows.

She's also a great example of what I call the 70s hot shiksa movement as that decade saw a whole slew of cool complex Jewish or Italian-American girlfriends. They're now much harder to find due to Hollywood's red head obsession. Lloyd was also the romantic interest with Jack Nicholson in THE MISSOURI BREAKS - and was brilliant there, too. Here she sounds exactly like you'd expect a schoolteacher to sound: playful but grounded, fun but no pushover; her slightly plain-spoken voice hinting she talks to kids a lot (so has to be loud) but never talks down to them. Maybe she sounds a little infantile herself at times herself, but countermands it with a maternal toughness that lets you know you better do as she says or or she'll flatten you cold with a few measured words or grab your nuts (below camera) --while she rocks a Cagney impression, no less!

Her last scene has a hushed Val Lewton kind of magic. It's night after the incident at the church; she's being dropped off by the Navajo deputy Feeling the wind beginning to stir, recognizing it as the same unearthly wind from the attack, she runs up to call Wade. It's all very hushed and eerie, indicating the direction Silverstein originally wanted to go --that sense of enveloping darkness, the shot where the headlights start out super small down the road -- the kind of single static camera shot both Tourneur and Hitchcock alike would have been proud of. 

5. BOSS STUNTS

Right off the bat there's a totally impressive stunt --a cyclist falling off this super high-up suspension bridge over a river, flailing limbs so you know it's not a dummy. It's the kind of thing CGI would handle now, but this is stuntman territory, out in Native American preservations and uninhabited swaths of Utah, away from prying Highway Safety eyes. So when we see a tiny flash of light off in the distance at the parade ground we know what's coming, we don't need cutaways to insert dodgy overlays. When cowboys fall off their horses while distracting the car away from running children, they really do fall right by speeding tires. The car really does smash right through that house.

There is one scene though that's dodgy: where the car pulls hard turn speeding at the two cops cars in a game of chicken, then starts rolling over on itself, rolls over the passing cars and smashes in the roofs killing everyone - say what you want (we never see the car land)--and it sure is ridiculous, but we also see the cap really flip over... and all the quick cut shots of blood and fire are awesome if nothing else.

6.  Faithfulness to the Satanic Western Genre (70s)

This was the era of cowboy character donning pentagram covered black robes and sacrificing folks like William Shatner (DEVIL'S RAIN) or Warren Oates (RIDE WITH THE DEVIL), or transmigrating into random kids (BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN). These films realized--as only Jack Arnold had before (in TARANTULA and It CAME FROM OUTER SPACE)--that the strange alien landscape of the American Southwest had a disturbing, eerie, almost Satanic, majesty. Native American shamanic curses and otherworldly savvy suffused the mise-en-scene. 

The closest thing to a religious resource in THE CAR are Navajo legends. There are no Catholics priest Baptists, not even Mormons. There's an old church/ graveyard but it's long empty There is a quote from Anton La Vey in the beginning and a cross on the alcoholic deputy's neck--but why not? He's probably in AA - which equals spirituality without religion. 

This town itself, with its rugged western faces and wide-eyed children (cool kids, cute but not sweet or saintly), is almost like the 70s itself, needing to let go of all its dysfunction or embrace them. There's ultimately no explanation why that weird car is showing up at all, let alone why here, of all places. There is no 'gotcha' moment, or man vs. machine John Henry moral. The car is there because it's a gorgeous stunning vista-ridden area - and most of us who've been in that part of the country have only driven through on their way to the coast, going out of our way to get super high and drive through Utah's alien landscape, listening to Pink Floyd's "Meddle" album and going, "wow, man." In other words, the car is us, the drivers passing through to California or New York. We're the ones running over pedestrians and going "Oops, just keep going."

After all, if the devil was to drive through any part of the country, wouldn't it be here? The rocky canyons and otherworldly terrain could have been allowed to manifest as demonic if given the right atonal avant-garde drone and deep focus landscape at dawn shots (like 2001 or the beginning of THERE WILL BE BLOOD). We don't get them, but they tried and it's almost there, and the rocks are still weird enough.

(For a satiric look at how mainstream pagan/devil-worshipping was in the UK in the 70s- be sure and check out Scarfolk)

7. Cool (70s) Kids

Real life sisters Kyle and Kim Richards (they'd grow up to be real-life aunts of Paris Hilton) are the daughters of sheriff Brolin, and you know I hate kids on principle except in the 70s (I was the same age when THE CAR came out as they are here). It was the last decade in which kids ran wild all over the neighborhood from the age of five onward. We grew up wild and free and these two kids are great examples of why that was a good policy. Smart, cool, they have a good playful rapport with Brolin. Together they have that kind of lion with his cubs quality that, say, Brody and his brood had in JAWS. He drives them both to school on the back of his motorcycle! He makes them wear helmets but he doesn't wear one himself. In other words, he's one of those great 70s dads I'm always writing about, the ones able to inspire love and independence without micro-managing, hovering, fretting, or sacrificing their own happiness and freedom on the altar of their children's "safety."

8. Believably out-of-their-depth local cops:

The local cops mean well, and try hard, but they're not prepared for an indestructible devil car. Things get fouled up with their communication and their lack of experience is a real hindrance. They've barely had to draw their guns in the line of duty before, and now this? 

Though strictly small town, these are not bad guys (as they'd be in FIRST BLOOD) or buffoons (SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT). For Luke (Ronny Cox), celebrating his two-year sober anniversary, the unreality of it all is just too good a reason to relapse. Hell, I'd do the same, even though his spacey state of shock results in the attack on the parade grounds (he forgets to cancel it).

I like that, after their roadblocks fail, these cops just frankly don't know what to do, and for once it's not frustrating as they're not deposited as heroes held back from performance by some greedy mayor in a tacky sport coat --they're just plain outgunned by Satan's engine. In fact, they're a bit like the police in TWIN PEAKS if agent Cooper wasn't there --they even have a tall Native American tracker type (Eddie Little Sky), mainly so an old medicine woman from his tribe can bear witness to the running over of the local old NYC character actor on the force, Chief Everett (John Marley), and inform him the car has strange magic.

Everett's actually a pretty cool older character. "Are you gonna stand there philosophizing or are you gonna buy me a drink? You're not smart enough to do both," he says. "You know what your father once said to me," he tells Wade as they stroll across the street to the town's one bar (never seen in interior), then he forgets, "ah I was gonna make it up anyhow."  And he gets pretty furious with the local wife beater, ever-trying to convince the wife to press charges. "Be anything you want, just don't be a bully!"

Was there ever a more succinct encapsulation of 70s philosophy?

It's not Everett's death however, but Lauren's--inevitably the reprisal for her taunting--that makes it feel personal and the surviving fuzz are finally fully rallied and we're rooting for them all the way. There's a great long single static shot, no music or dialogue, of the cops sitting around Lauren's wrecked living room in a state of angry fugue shock and rage. No words, no real movement, no music--the moment is allowed to land. Then, back at the sheriff office they grab the demolition man wife beater out of the jail (EG Marshall) and Brolin just says "you." Marshall smiles an evil but reassuring grin - he'll at last get to use his violence for the good of the group. It's a galvanizing moment--and all the more potent for being done without meddling emotional telegraph scoring.

 9. Better at being a Stephen King adaption than most Stephen King adaptions

Like so many good horror novels, especially King's, we get a weird vignette of each recognizably small town American victim before they're slaughtered, and we either mourn or cheer their demises. We do wish there was more time with cute girlfriend and less of the abusive demolitions expert husband down the road--but each have an important part in the Americana tapestry. When the alcoholic deputy reacts to the weirdness of the car invasion by sneaking a fifth of whiskey out of his trunk on the day of his two-year sober anniversary, the event is given the proper shadowy ominousness--the sort King, a recovering alcoholic himself, would definitely add if this was one of his books--instead of being made light of or indirectly encouraged (welcome back!) or judged as mere character weakness (can't you just drink a beer and stop like everyone else?). All in all, rather than just painting the roadkill residents in dumb broad get-it-over-with strokes, the mood and low key vibe of the thing is really honed in on. These are people we know from our own lives, or would like to, and quickly come to care about, not generic lazily-written 'types.'

Everyone involved in the cast is smart enough to know we in the audience are going to find the premise of devil car absurd, so they wisely play it dead straight. As a result, it's fine fun and lacks the endless train of shitters and bullies that, to my mind, marred CHRISTINE --both the book and the film--in mean-spirited overkill and too many on-the-nose rock songs ("Bad to the Bone" ugh). THE CAR doesn't deign to mess in such overly-paddled waters. Like the recent Netflix hit, STRANGER THINGS, THE CAR explores the good parts of King horror novel style without the cliches and ugly American small town swath-cataloguing and cheap way to get our blood up as readers.

10. Brolin Brolin Brolin

My dad considered James Brolin the worst actor in the history of the world. That's etched in my mind (PS- dad's worst actress: Ali McGraw). Well, James fathered one of my favorite actors of our day, Josh Brolin, so he's all right with me. And you see the resemblance right off, and it makes James' films bolder and more resonant in hindsight. Both of them Brolins them look like they belong in the American Southwest (in films like this and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. They have a smattering of the noble savage about their features--like Jame's grandpa could have been the son of the Native American princess and Dewey Martin in THE BIG SKY. As with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson, that droplet of Native American ancestry in their DNA helps them look as rugged and grounded as the great American Southwest itself. Their voice just clinches it. These are men who didn't have to learn to ride a horse or shoot a gun for their first western. 

As for his character, Wade "Parent," (how associative!), we don't often see such a mix of well-meaning lummox and laconic rebel in horror movie fathers anymore. Today they are either perfect dads, seeping intelligence warmth and compassion like puss from glowing sores, or tortured-by-the-killer-who-got-away divorcee cops always late to their children's custody hearing--the haggard ex-wife glowering at him as he stumbles into the courtroom, spilling lame excuses. Today, too, child actor babyface stunted growth prettiness and 'good' masculinity have become intertwined to the point even country stars have to be clean shaven burly but baby-faced Christians rather than hairy good old boys full of swamp-bred sass, nicotine deep vocals, a moonshine twinkle in their blue eyes, and a 'stache big as all outdoors. 

But Brolin's Wade is one of the great 70s dads, fulfilling the linkage to his son Josh's portrayal of a great 70s dad, in PLANET TERROR.  Just taking his two little girls to their elementary school on the back of his motorcycle should give you some kind of a clue. This is not a man who's going to turn this devil car case over to the Feds or State Patrol--though he knows deep down he probably should. He probably doesn't even have the FBI's phone numbers. But he's certainly got the 'stache, and the moxy, and a dim cognizance of his own limitations coupled to the courage to sally forth anyway is what makes a man a man's man.

If that's the trade-off--"competence and dull safety-first responsible clean-shaven rules-follower" instead of 'mustache ridin' badasses who need to fall apart before they can be re-glued'-well then... at least we got the movies to remember the real men by. Isn't that why we're all here, to make sure we remember the things we left behind when we were booted from our comfy local highway drag strip to make way for the god-damned highway with its speed limit and tolls?

And remember: in the 70s no one used seat-belts, even in the front. EVER! Dig.

It's a slippery slope, all that life-saving is murder on our Social Security and pension funds. Honey don't think about it. Just press play and drive fast, furious, and over and over... the hippie... one more time.

NOTES:

"Boss" was the adjective we kids of the 70s used a lot, i.e. "Boss iron-on, Cheryl! Where'd ya get it?"

Angels of Groovy Death #IV: Lynn Lowry Special Edition

With her big cat eyes, button nose, wide toothy smile (innocent yet terrifying), long straight hair, and knack for being cast in future iconic cult gems, Lynn Lowry was a kind of unofficial poster girl for the post-Manson hippy- horror micro-genre of the late-60s/early 70s. She was the quintessential gone-homicidal-flower-child, the girl who Middle American viewers dreaded drawing as a babysitter. She was too sweet to say no to, but.... something about her made you uneasy - like she could charm an elderly neighbor at the front door while letting a coven of knife-wielding satanic bikers in through the back. She glowed with a kind of worldly ephemeral inner luminescence that somehow kept her innocent and free even as she was being gunned down by soldiers or cutting off a housewife's hand with an electric carving knife.

We, the small kids of the early 70s, all knew and loved a girl like her. When she babysat us, anything could happen: fun board games, seduction, arson, smoking-- all kinds of mischief, all with a spontaneous air that let us know any second-guessing or hesitation at one of her dares and she'd leave us behind, forever. You either ran with her giddy madness or got left behind to die in the dull roar of the TV flames. We learned to just say yes, no matter what.

Girls like her carried a bad rep. This was the era of a very popular urban legend of the hippy babysitter who was so high on LSD she microwaved the baby and tucked in the chicken. That may sound farfetched, and one presumes it was, but the legend was so embedded in popular consciousness of the time that it shows up in TV movies like Go Ask Alice (1973), in the scene wherein Alice finds out she's been dosed while on a babysitting job by vindictive ex-drug buddies, so rather than risk the baby's safety by succumbing to the lure of the Radarange, she locks herself in the closet. That the film doesn't even need to explain why she does this testifies to that legend's prevalence.

We kids weren't afraid, though. We wanted to have her over every chance we got. So when mom was making the calls, we prayed for all her first choices to fall through.


This innocent serpent flower child was a new kind of femme fatale. Not the sort to go framing you for murder or shaking you down with blackmail like in the 40s-50s; she wasn't even a new version of the old spoiled nympho drug addict waif like Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep. This new homicidal cultist was never spiteful or mischievous --her heart was too full of love; acid had burned out those small minded reptilian fear-desire tail-biting instincts that befell lesser mortals with base fears and wants. And it's this freedom from the usual fears and desires, above all else, that made her so dangerous and unpredictable. Along with everything else, acid dissolved away the morality and impulse control the rest of us took for granted. These tripping waifs belonged more in a comfy psych ward where they couldn't have long fingernails or access to sharp things like pointed scissors... at least until the drugs wore off. But instead of chasing butterflies through leafy fields they were trying to make popcorn --heating lots of oil in a big pot on the roaring stove while we hovered immediately below.

But we were innocent too, and in our love for her, all sense melted away.

Consider this, especially if you're a straight male: Look at that picture below left, for a few seconds, long enough to get a read on all three of their faces. Now... consider if these three girls were to come onto you in, say, the park while you were alone reading the paper on a bench on a sunny 'frisco day. You know that you'd have no problem resisting the ones on the left and right, they're more like sisters or aunts, but the girl in the middle, man, she's cute. If she wanted to go home with you, you'd take her. And you'd be dead by dawn, and she'd wake up snug in your entrails with no knowledge where she was or who you were. Then she'd shower off the blood, eat enough acid to send a rhino to the psych ward, then fingerpaint on the walls with your coagulating blood while softly singing "tralalalala." Does that make her evil? Or are you dumb for letting beauty blind you to danger signs? Were danger signs even there? If evil isn't present, merely a lysergic 'lack' of moral partitioning, then it's just 'temporary insanity' and that's nowhere near the same thing.

"We have no jelly donuts for you today... only death."

The 'Manson Girls,." singing and chanting as one, had become national figures around this time trials (1971) and though I was too young to remember the courtroom hooplah I do remember the fear associated with the words 'Helter Skelter', the baby/microwave thing, and the fear some crazy swinger devil worshippers down the block would put razors in your apples on Halloween. (So we all had to 'check' any fruit, not that we ever got any - if you gave out apples, you were automatically suspect).

This fear of hippies, and the serpent under the hippie flower, so to speak, goosed the 70s along and gave seemingly helpless little barefoot waifs selling peace buttons on the corner a kind mobster street gang clout. No one dared mess with them. And as a kid nosing through mom's record albums, the ones with similarly clad babes (like Peter Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas) all had a queasy bone-chilling dread about them that wasn't there before, and didn't last very long (by the time I became a hippie myself in the late 1980s, I'd forgotten all about it).

Then again, my aunt on my dad's side in Chicago ran off and joined a commune, and we went to visit when I was five, and man that was a hairy place - I tried cat food for the first time, and ran through lots of beaded doorways, and still remember the groovy art, and so forth. My aunt was dating her fourth guy named Randy... four Randys.... in a row... the mind boggled. My grandmother had disowned her.

My parents were just a few years too old for that scene, Ours was like in Mad Men, that bridge club wife swap 70s middle-class golf game / kids walk to school of our own accord / freedom to roam just stay within "Dinner!" earshot type.

We ran amok. We molested the babysitters, not the other way around.

And if you grew up kind of crushing on Susan Dey even if you rarely watched The Partridge Family (Danny was gross; the music horrific), then she might be who comes to mind the first time you see Lynn Lowry; with that downturned lip and sultry eyes and wavy straight hair, Lowry strikes me first as if she's Dey crossed with a cute alien hybrid drawn by a Disney animator unwittingly dosed by a CIA operative. Someone sure should have dosed the Partridge Family. God I hated that redheaded kid Danny, that plagiarizing ginger with his unheimlich neediness.... and wasn't too crazy about Shirley Jones and her sister-wife collars and androgynous hair. She was like that mom who eavesdrops as you try to pick up her daughter than snidely puts you in your place, loud enough for everyone to hear, so that you blush and stammer and run home to sulk with your comic books, and then you never come over again. People, c'mon get happy, yeah right --quit tellin' us what to do. You could tell Mrs. P was one of those hovering mothers that never questions why she's always grabbing things out of her daughters' hands and lavishing them on Keith, whether Keith wants them or not. Feeling badly, Keith waits til mom goes off to pray or something, then gives sis back her shit.

Nice, sweet doomed Keith. He'd make a good sacrifice for the solstice.

On the other hand, Marcia Marcia Marcia was also pretty hot, and had similar straight blonde hair. And that whole family was way cooler, way less locked in their Mormon incestuous death grip. Much healthier sexually. If Mrs. Brady saw you clumsily putting some moves on fair Marcia, she wouldn't shame you, she'd probably just call you into the den, give you some hands-on sexual advice and then kick you back downstairs with a strip of condoms in your hand and lipstick on your forehead like a governmental seal of approval.

Why? Because unlike Mrs. Partridge, Mrs. Brady got laid, really laid. Even us kids could tell that, and her sexually satisfied glow kept the decade alight with a special baseline magic. Mrs. Partridge, if she ever saw how happy they were, would probably call Child Protective Services and make up some lurid lie.

David Lynch would make great use of this terrifying yet sweetly innocuous smile.  Lowry alone knows how to make her untrampled flower child joy indistinguishable from a flesh-rending maenad frenzy

I mention all this only to illustrate how the Partridge Family vs. Brady Bunch dichotomy provided parameters for our collective 70s pre-sexual psyche, and maybe that's partially the idea a Susan Dey archetype untethered from her prim bitch overprotective mom and ginger brother, running away with a Satan-worshipping boyfriend and winding up rabid (ala 1970's I Drink Your Blood --her first movie role) or foaming at the mouth thanks to some new STD (Shivers), chem warfare agent (The Crazies)--or just really speedy acid--rang so many popular unconscious gongs. The times demanded a girl who could slice off a woman's hand with an electric carving knife and still be an innocent, a free spirit cranked to eleven, a girl so pure the needle spins all the way around to the other extreme- batshit homicidal. If you've ever known and partied with the type then you know how rare and intoxicating they are, the sweet sudden shock of dread when what was once a feeling of smitten love and devotion to her sweet beauty becomes sickening blood-chilled dread, the realization you were so far on cloud 9 you made the mistake of letting her get between you and the exit.

give the lady a hand

A sweet, sweet Scorpio (born Oct. 15), she's the kind of friendly animal a Pisces like me would let ride on our back as we swim the channel, but I'm too savvy to ask why she'd sting me to death halfway across - it's not even cuz a man or a sexually transmitted parasite or water-spread virus told her too, or because of acid, it's just her nature. Her long straight hair like wind-stirred gossamer over a denim jacket picturesquely dabbed in a cop's blood, when she starts slowly laughing at the carnage going on down the hill in The Crazies there's a weird schism that marks a great unexplored middle ground between the sane heroes and the 'changed.'  Rather than turn zombie or something, where the line is clearly drawn between normal and 'possessed' or us vs. them, Lowry extends the 'in between' with her contracting and expanding organic circular breathing. She's already scans a "little" crazy, so going all the way crazy is no great stretch, nor is it quite clear the extent to which her incestuous dad's behavior is a result of Trixie (the virus) or just habit. Eventually she's too crazy to know to hide when the military comes. They end up surrounding her, guns drawn, like she's a dangerous maniac, even though all she's doing is offering them flowers and singing, just another flower child protester with no concern for her own life as she marches towards the bayonets with a flower in her hand.

Like some Innsmouth elder royal Neptune princess

With that air elemental aura (she'd make a great Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest), Lowry is both uncanny and inviting, innocent and corrupting, the babysitter from the 70s my little brother and I prayed for as my mom made her round of early evening phone calls. We only got her around 1/3 of the time but when we did our stomachs sank with queasy dread. Whether she'd be in the mood to play her dangerous Go Ask Alice-style games with us rather than staying on the phone all night or hanging out on the porch with some sketchy boyfriend was another story. But if Jupiter aligned with Mars and she was ready to focus her loving laser beam attention upon us, then it was like some magic new dimension was opened in the Kuersten house, like she alone had a key to a secret door in the hallway wall that led to where all the cool stuff was.

Lowry has that same vibe, an open book of forbidden but benign ambivalence that puts her past our reach even while making her as accessible as all outdoors; she can dive merrily into the depths of depravity and horror and escape unscathed, like Daniel in the lion's den. As long as we don't try to pull her out of it, no harm will come to either of us. If we step in, we'll get hurt.

Shivers - during the transformation from sexually available but professional nurse to uninhibited maenad orgiast.

Toots, my darling, I was only eight years-old and didn't understand but I still hated the implied ascension to older man leering implied in the your acceptance of a quasi-derogatory nickname (I was always trying to come up with a different one) clearly given by a much older man, like a pissed off patron of a table she's waiting on at a roadside diner. Toots, I hated having to say that name to address you, my froggy voice stringy anchored by sublime pre-sexual adoration.

Mom stopped volunteering at that runaway shelter when we moved to NJ in 1980, a fitting analogy. I was 13, so bye-bye cool wild flower power kiss you-on-the-mouth babysitters and hello slasher craze sober virgin final girls making sure we did all our homework and went to bed on time and then we lay  awake, terrified anyway. The early 80s: devil worship wasn't 'fun' with denim babysitters anymore, but the province of icky child molesters at day care centers. The slasher craze had even formerly-louche grade school swingers afraid to go upstairs at night unless mom was already up there, her sewing machine humming the "all clear". Only WW2 saved me from that fear. I stopped thinking about slashers with knives and started thinking about Sgt. Rock, Sherman tanks vs. Panzers, Messerschmidts, Spitfires, B-17s. I was invulnerable when being shot at over Berlin. Figures.

Was it some kind of EC/DC House of Secrets/Tales from the Crypt, post-code/pre-code comic book comeuppance, all this terror and tub-thumping? It didn't matter which side of the censorship barrier, what was once shag carpet and wood panelling vivid--once Thulsa Doom snake cult decadent--was now just postage stamp size color pictures in the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and John Buscemi Conan the Barbarian reprints. And that was how I wanted it. Whether the one led to the other, in grand macabre twist payback paperback style I don't know. But if both sides want a thing, at least on some level, and if no one else is involved or hurt, can it still be evil, even if it kills them?

It might depend who you ask, but frankly I'd trust Baudelaire as a babysitter over Cardinal Richelieu any day, for he who writes of evil needn't express it, physically. Either way, whether we felt it was evil or not, the fall-out was the same. We may wonder what happened in that Tenderloin peep both in THE HOWLING that caused Dee Wallace to repress her memories. Did that Fiona Apple "Criminal" MTV video cause me to revert back to savagery in the early 90s? Maybe, but by then I was an adult, strung out on a melancholy from never being able to get that delirious first MDMA peak high moment back again. Apple had that certain Lynn Lowry mix of childlike glee and physical corruption. Calvin Klein ran ads that looked intentionally like they were taken in some pervert's basement to send into Flesh World.  The important thing to understand is that dirty old man perversion of today was the gold chain hedonist swinger of yesterday, and if the girl is over eighteen and broke and hot and really into doing your drugs, is it a crime to get involved? Some people sure think so, irregardless. Lynn Lowry--or at least her archetypal hippie Mansonite--doesn't. She forgives you in advance.

We, who were just in elementary school at the time, can't remember if those days were really that deranged, but there's magic and power in the wicked but sweet, terrifying but absolving cat sister mile of Lowry on film which will never fade. Whether succumbing to the mad slavering ecstasy-overdose insane group orgy hysteria of Shivers or giggling in progressive waves of insanity in The Crazies or playing with an electric carving knife in I Drink Your Blood, this strange wondrous actress evokes that 70s post-Manson 'girl next door' anxiety with a flair unrivaled. Some girls are just never far enough away from the fire to know they're burning. Bless them for that, and even if following them drowns you in cop bullets, hitting you like scorpion knife flicker stinging flames of razor wire cat o'nine tails water, how can you keep from singing? Tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....

FURTHER LOWRY READINGS:
"That's how you play 'Get the Guests'" SCORE!
SHIVERS! (capsule review)