Big City Bioluminescent Brutalism: GOOD TIME (2017)

Like a gust of the sort of urban interior air we, the hungry and shaking, used to breathe before cell phones, age, rehab, kids, whatever, curbed our kamikaze uptown list-ditch jonesing searches; the sort of air that used to wheeze through our shallow uneasy, smoke-damaged lungs and coke drip-stripped throats, sabotaging any and all attempts to look nonplussed whilst led from the (relative) safety of the cracked sidewalk, into flickering foyers, lurching, cramped urine elevators, into a snaking coffin-width institutional-glazed hallways, by people we didn't know, people with terrible bridgework --all on the off chance of scoring something strong enough to take the shakes away. It's the sort of air we'd smell again, later, in church basement AA "workshops" the ones set in half-condemned storefronts that never quite not carry the smell of cigar butts, urine, heater coil-baked mildew, and smoky jackets. This, the stalest yet most urgent and memorable of junky air, is the sort of air that fills the sails of the Safdie brothers' kinetic chase scene thriller GOOD TIME (2017) and sets it zipping along for one dizzying, hold-on-to-your-meeting-book urban thrill ride.  Damn it's good to remember the lost dingy smell of the chemically-destitute, without having literally smell it again. Can you feel the clammy sweat in your palms just from my vivid description? Can you taste the electric tang?

Occasionally saturated in the kind Day-Glo psychedelic eeriness that somehow heightens the gritty yet warmly soothing dream-like reality of Bronx streets in the dead of night, and of crowded holding tanks, closed amusement parks, public hospital corridors, and bank teller windows, rather than making them too cartoon-like. Amok on 'anything can happen at any time' energy, the molly-shiver cinematography (35mm!) of Sean Price William sends it over into that either/or landscape where delirious surreal pleasure comes oozing out of the most depressing urban blight, as if a manhole cover Oreo squishing out mint ice-cream into the sewer. Chris Doyle himself could surely no better.

From the first moments of Oneohtrix Point Never's propulsive ambient score we feel we're seeing part of a wild new direction in cinema, (I mean new post-Giuliani), a hyperkinetic snapshot of logical but inexhaustible desperation: one bright little fucker's off-the-cuff quick thinking ever deepening his hole. So catastrophic in its real time results is his effort that it perhaps makes a fine reflection on America's meddling in third world affairs, so insanely desperate to keep their kid brothers away from welfare socialism that we all but destroy their economy. 

The title is what they call good behavior shortening your jail sentence, and so it is for sketchy quick-thinking newly-paroled Connie (Robert Pattinson), about to commence an afternoon-through-to-dawn nonstop hustling efforts to 'rescue' his mentally-handicapped brother (Benny Safdie himself) from the mental health system, and then from jail after dragging him into a bungled bank robbery. It went well, but the teller slipped a magenta dye bomb into the bag and it explodes over them and their Uber. Down the street they go, trailing electric magenta like they just escaped a Burning Man DMT wormhole, racing down the streets of Queens looking for an alley or bathroom to ditch their clothes and see if there's un-ruined money as real-life passers-by (the Safdies didn't steal their shots, but sure made it look that way) gape at the psychedelic blur, and as Oneohtrix Point Never's propulsive retro synths and drowsy ambient pulse drops surge like a cranked up heartbeat guiding them like the current of the third rail guides the 4, 5, Q and R trains.

First winning critical notice with Heaven Knows What, the tale of a junky crustpunk and her quest to score and/or break up with or get back together with her sketchy junky boyfriend, the Safdies obviously know their milieu, the busy urban streets, dilapidated apartments of twitchy girlfriends always starting to crash on whatever was the last of her sketchy stash, and grandmothers you just met on the bus and now talked your way into something between a quiet home invasion and "just being there to use the phone." High-lowlights include a frazzled Jennifer Jason Leigh finding out--in the midst of a panicked Mamet-style shout at the credit card company--her mom canceled the credit card she stole from her purse before Leiigh could even use it. Leigh's escalating tantrum-sub-junky desperation is masterful - she's trying to play her mom and then the credit card company as assiduously as Connie's playing her, to show she's learned from the master, but she's too emotional, too panicked, too easily thrown off. It's easy to let it all crush you, the testosterone-packed precinct holding cell, busy but uncaring late night public hospital corridors, the kind of place where there are so many people on so many different shift schedules, and with no windows and no closing time, the sleep schedule so disrupted that rather than be awake and then asleep at a certain hour, everyone is half and half all the time, helpful in ignoring the junkies and scammers trying to get things they shouldn't all day and night. Connie know (I learned it too) , that if you look like you know where you're going, like you've been there a thousand times you could go there in your sleep, and almost are, you can go almost anywhere. And man, this movie has it all - arcades where kids drop huge amounts of liquid (pre-blotter) acid and play video games; and closed amusement parks, it's got it all, even a momentary pause here and there for some random termite humanity, or a barking pit bull.

This is a certain strata of outer borough living a lot of us 'aging hipster' New Yorkers don't really get to know anymore, not since the advent of cell phones made drug buying a "we come to you" thing, not a "let's take a subway up to the shadiest section of the Bronx and see if that guy who knows that guy is still there' kind of thing, the sort born of wearying teenage invulnerability. But now those neighborhoods are torn down,  rents rise, the lower world dregs are continually pushed farther and farther uptown, and marijuana more and more decriminalized, whole generations of will never know the way these sorts of hustlers sweep you up in their drama so fast that what started as you buying a dime bag and getting the hell back to your friends downtown before you get jumped becomes taking your dealer's friends to a hospital ER waiting room, hoping to get him admitted before the cops show up and you have to run, and you're too young and/or naive and/or nice and/or stoned to figure out how to make your goodbyes and extricate you from this hustler's Jenga hodge podge of quick fixes before it topples down into handcuffs or a bullet. It's a thing that used to happen to us all, once. And if we keep our head on straight, if we're smart, we soak the lesson, and get out fast, apologizing while you're already halfway down the block.

On the other hand it's far more entertaining than most such evenings, more riveting and propulsive, druggy and psychedelic while being utterly real (most scenes shot on the fly in real locations with passers-by who just happened to be in the shot) without the consequences or interminable length or waking up with your wallet and TV gone. It's a headlong zig-zag firefly race into the abyss that shows the devastating dry wit and talent for fly-on-the-wall naturalism the Safdies are second to none, locked in on a street-level substrata that few genuine artists quite penetrate deep enough to feel anything other than a pose. Christ, who would want to go this deep? Only real artists who, unlike so many others, actually may have a flag to plant.

MASKS

The big psychedelic payoff is what puts this movie into the pantheon, including a wild inherently disturbing scene that trades on one's familiarity with the drug so in question. I.e. if you've ever done liquid or blotter LSD ever, you know that pouring a a goodly third or fourth of a full Sprite bottle of pure acid down some poor security guard's throat to render him incapacitated is a Black Mirror kind of evil, the soul trapped for all eternity screaming, even long after they finally come down. If you don't even know you got there or what just happened, you basically ensure they never come back, jumping through fifth story windows to stop the insane visions, even if they pump your IV full of enough Ativan to drop a mating season moose.


Hmmmm - moose-dropping Ativan IV - almost sounds worth it but no matter how much you may love it, if you know its force, the strength of a single drop to send grown men screaming into the ER begging for a 'stick' to ease the demonic rainstorm tearing their flesh and mind apart, then that Sprite bottle reverberates like a the mouth of Hell itself. Suddenly we look around at the glowing, surreal landscape - both beautiful amniotic, terrible and we are totally unmoored. We've let crazy Connie warp our world around him.

In the end though there are four elements that make Good Time work so indelibly well, the first is Pattinson, proving once again he's been criminally underrated as an actor (see this the same night as Cosmopolis and see what I mean). As he did in 2014's The Rover, he knows how to convey the half-strutting/half-defensive body language of a far too tightly-strung marionette hoodrat, but this is a whole new hood for him - you can tell he's been doing research hanging out with ex-cons and visiting prisons as this is leagues away from the usual Hollywood "street"kid. You can see it in the shots below - the wild animal aggression and just fucked-up tiredness of his hustler - the way everything from coming onto older girlfriend Leigh, to scaring people into line his way of thinking - are all just means to an end, something he's so convinced is 'love' for his brother he never questions it even as it turns everyone's life he runs across inside-out, brother included. He doesn't even realize how animal crazy his eyes look when peeking up from the bushes to clock the five-oh. He'd at least be nominated for something for it, but he's too good and too young and famous to be noticed. He'll have to get lionized in France first, like his ex, dear Kristen. 

The second is Williams' photography--35mm, blazing with rich saturated druggy colors that never deviate from the expected but get Day-Glo powder and paint mileage out of the inside of cars and spooky carnival rides at night; third is the sheer momentum, the snaking cool of all-night anything-can-happen urban amok mission following; fourth is Oneohtrix Point Never's score, both nostalgic to the horror films of the 70s and 80s and forward to the post-clubland post-industrial urban Black Emperor future. Never incorporates the ambient sounds of the narrative, the city sounds into the music so much there's a feeling of reality and this ambient post-rock score fusing in ways I usually only feel when driving to the airport at night in the rain listening to trip hop. For example, he incorporates the key of the hydraulic bus lift into part of the score for the scene it's used in: "My thought was that if the music could somehow be in concert with the key of the hydraulic lift, it's going to be subliminally cool. That kind of sonic language embedded in the film also refers to those New York textures. It makes New York feel like this bioluminescent, science-fiction, sentient being, even though it's real brutalist."

Dude's as termite as it gets. So's the film. It begs all sorts of indulgences for lack of higher purpose but then, as the end sinks in and you go about your business, the deeper meanings of all that's gone by in such a rush sinks deep into you. This is the kind of film that manages to do both, be a dirty vivid urgent urban race through acid-drenched nightmare grandeur, but then a truly great, resonant film at the same time. It lingers in the mind until its genius closes like a velvet trap around your cortices, illuminating a strange redemptive figure eight over the holy cross of anonymous acts of selfless kindness. You never know what form it will settle on while you're following crazy Connie through the dead of night system, but you know it's going somewhere new. Isn't that, in the end, why you never made a quick excuse and ran off when dragged into your dealer's scabby shenanigans deeper and deeper? You just couldn't go back to the normal schedule without finding out how deep the grimy rabbit hole goes now while you have a grimy rabbit to follow.

NOTES

1. see also: Lana Turner and the Unscrupulous Doser - my review of The Big Cube - for more on this scary subject)

Easter Acid Cinema Special: MOTHER!

Darren Aronofsky's controversial psychedelic scarring ritual MOTHER finally visited my psyche. Man, what a party. This ain't your mom's hardcore psychosexual "puts the bile back in bible" allegory, so why was I led to be scared of it by a bunch of babies who made me think it was Requiem for a Dream II: The Reckoning?

Sure, Mother! delivers horrific shocks. But not Requiem's slow grinding torture that anyone who knows the horrors of withdrawal, or epilepsy will have a seizure over. Instead, Mother seems to be made a long time ago, before the advent of morality. It's a whole new kind of crazy, far more traumatizing (to some) than even Requiem author Hubet Selby Jr. would think to go in all his grotty Brooklyn exit naughtiness. Relentless forward momentum pulls this Mother so far forward it becomes backwards again, reverse-catapulting Darren Aronofsky into the D.W. Griffith future at the dawn of bible studies Pickfordianism. Darren A. walks the land of the artsy giants of primordial surrealism, a gut-punch Buñuel for the post-irony age. His is a truly organic flowing biblical message, wrapped in an autobiographical treatise on being a famous filmmaker. His scathing view of celebrity hangers-on makes the relentless pawing of the 8 1/2 entourage-barrage seem like the perfectly blended loft apartment full of adopted revelers in Zoolander.  Treading boldly through the thorny throngs of a packed party of lingerers, Darren A. knows that just telling the tales of the Old Testament without sugary dozing-in-the-pew piety will leads to scenes far more lurid than any Cecil B. DeMille might devise for his Sign and The Cross. For Darren, Christians and their Cronus-like cannibal sacraments are far more horrific than any Old Testament burnt offering, hundreds of doves nailed to the temple door-demanding god can hope to equal.

Who else even comes close to this kind of filmmaking? Who has this amount of guts, in both senses of the word? There's Guy Maddin, whose work finds weird new Freudian melting points within his Winnipeg freeform retro-expressionism, but his Canadian decency keeps him from digging down where the titans are chained. There's David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, and Gaspar Noe, sitting with Aronofsky now in a kind of grim 'heedless stare into the screaming void at the center of the human condition.'

A mix of allegorical pretension, slow-building freak-out panic theater group happening, and straight-up horror, MOTHER is a grueling/exhilarating parable about the savagery that is the human reproductive system once it's run shy of predators and herd-thinning pestilence. If Mama Jones can't whip up a plague virulent enough to get humanity down to a manageable population count, we ourselves become the plague. Will we have arrived in paradise when we at last give up the need to procreate a foot further?

"Why did I ever make 'em?"

Chronicling a veritable Old Testament of wrath and vengeance, the NC-17 white person sexualThe Green Pastures, Mother, right. Off-the-cuff savagery is so seamlessly amplified that an ordinary celebration can devolve into a pagan sacrificial rite before you know it, all in one take. The whole history of our presence in 'the house' is succinctly, scathingly surmised here or in the animated opening credit sequence of Soylent Green. (See: Idiot Wind of the Locusts) but also, in real-time, seemingly, it's just how a  Woodstock can become a full-on Altamont fracas before you can find a place to hide your valuables.'s not just the bible getting analyzed and reimagined in Mother, but the messianic complex that results from excessive fame and how it affects the creative process (one can't create in a house packed with admirers following you around, eating your food, and loudly wondering when you're going to create again). In indulging his masochistic shock value yen so completely, Aronofsky pulls his own mask off, showing the mirror the wormy, decaying face therein. We're no longer feeling the sexualized (always) brutality of Man through abused Selby-penned prostitutes. We're feeling imposed on and exploited through the earth elemental that is Mother. Subjected to the relentless neediness of the unwashed masses, hers are the gates crashed in an acid-spurred rush, ala the hippies refusing to pay for tickets and just taking down the fences, overwhelming security with their sheer hippy numbers at the 1968 Isle of Wight Festival. 

Piercing phallically through many layers of subtext, both personal (fame as parasite magnet; perfect artistic creations kill their creator), and sociological (an uncircumcised logocentric thrust deep into morass of chthonic madness), Mother! digs down so deep it's surely the film to goose Camille Paglia in finally finish the second part of Sexual Personae. It's Darren Aronofsky's love letter to his legions of slavering townie fans--a thank you for soiling his lawn with their discipling. It functions like the shin bones of saints in alcoves of Italian churches. Their crucified bodies are rent limb-from-limb by hungry faithful. Chunks of the cross are able to heal the sick, especially the parts with blood stains. It's believed the saint's holy power is preserved at the moment of his holiest agony. Body parts scatter around the world like Osiris's before them. A little finger joint in a shrine in County Cork, Ireland, a metacarpel in Palermo--they are all like connected with earth electricity, powering the two-way radio to God. They are Christianty at its most strange and savage, a call back to the time before the flood

Ala Christopher Nolan or David Lynch, Aronofsky is one of the names even the most casual public viewer has heard of. He's in the trades. He's currently dating Jennifer Lawrence, a younger woman, and doing so right out in the public eye, the public not being too worried about it, since Lawrence can take care of herself and Aronofsky's films are so twisted it's clear he's a relatively sane, safe sort of guy. (It's the ones who make the sane films you've got to watch out for). So hey, if he wants to posit himself as God, I'm all for that. I'm a writer too, and can still be a poet if the ratio of flu and Robitussin is just right (hint hint). Javier Bardem is one of my favorite actors and did a fine job capturing the life of a poet once before (as in his 2000 portrayal of the AIDs-stricken Cuban refugee poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls) and can surely be a god, too, with ease. Both poet and god are difficult roles to pull off, without lapsing into pretentiousness or absurdity--as in all those 60s major films that try to capture the beat era. Bardem never comes close to either pitfall. When it comes to acting, he is a God and his ability to navigate the mounting chaos without losing his fathomless cool is truly inspiring. I've had a mancrush on him since his unforgettable Santeria practitioner in 1997's Perdita Durango (aka Dance with the Devil) so I've been watching his career from the get-go, so I'm so glad to see he's spending his time wisely, eschewing the traditional prestige pics that so often weigh down Oscar winners, in favor of flavors closer to his funky Almodovar roots. (seek out Law of Desire --it'll blow your mind, and whatever else you have laying around). And Mother stands with his best, weirdest work yet.

I confess: l loathed Aronofsky after Requiem for a Dream. I feel like that movie violated me. Yet I loved The Wrestler and have seen Black Swan six times. I tried to watch Noah and couldn't get past the idiocy of the first six hours and The Fountain -good god that's some pretty-lookin' twaddle. But Jesus, Requiem captured the insanity of a brain tortured by the twin fires of addiction (which distorts time and space) and withdrawal (which is literal hell) ... that's just handled too damn well. I know that pain-- every anguished tick of the heart clock is like a punishing jolt of electric current and institutional patriarchal malice. And with that brilliant, but utterly traumatizing, strobe light sexual editing style, it's like getting raped through the eye.

2. Forgiving REQUIEM

But Mother! is a film about forgiving the people who trespass against you, suggesting that the whole reason trespassing occurs is to create something to forgive. It's an old trick God pulls on us: making things so very, very terrible because otherwise forgiveness wouldn't have the same epiphanic kick. By middle age you either have to forgive the world unconditionally or open fire on it (though I know that's not 'in' right now). So I forgive Darren his eye-rape trespasses. And instead I blame  the people who said Mother was way worse than Requiem, which is why I waited so long to see it instead of racing breathlessly to one theater after another, with a dirty stuffed rabbit in my hand, going "have you seen my daughter! Her name is Jenny! JENNY!!!" but then running away, tittering like a maniac before the cops came.

Instead I was led to believe that people were walking out in shock during screenings for the same reason I had to leave during Wolf Creek. And maybe it is as disturbing if you're a 'normal' family man/woman with a baby instead of a recovering addict or alcoholic. If you're all normal and don't know the profound terror and relentless despair-soaked agonies of drug or or alcohol withdrawal--a feeling that just gets worse and worse, like a hangover that doubles in intensity every hour you don't take a medicinal 'hair of the dog' drink, until you're in such distress that submitting to a night of base group molestation by a horde of filthy old perverts is nothing if you end up re-supplied for the week. You'll even dip your hand in a Rio Bravo barroom spittoon for a silver dollar just to get a drink enough to take the shakes away even for an hour. It's why they use heroin in the white slave trade. It's mind control at its most horrific, 

That was where Aronofsky went for Requiem, the Pulsing 'in/out-in/out' "ass-to-ass" electro-shock so callously done to speed freak Ellen Burstyn until she's foaming at the mouth, synced in epileptic seizure cross-cuts, with the super demeaning and depressing and terrifying "ass to ass" grinding of dear Jennifer; Marlon Wayans undergoing withdrawal in a southern jail cell, and Jared Leto getting his arm amputated, all done in a series of brutalizing rhythmic crosscuts like being raped simultaneously in four separate time zone orifices.

Walking out of that movie on shaky legs, I was so mad at Darren Aronofsky I wanted to go his house and break some windows. I was not alone in feeling violated. Walking up the aisle after it ended, we saw a woman literally unable to get up out of her chair because she either had had an epileptic seizure or panic attack as we walked past. If Darren had gotten up to take questions and our legs weren't wobbly from the ordeal, I'd have rushed the stage and beaten him up (like my buddy John LaGreco and his brother Chuck used to do when they went to the same elementary school, something I never tire of reporting because Requiem upset me so badly).

When Requiem came to theaters, in 2000, you see, we still had some of our souls left to lose. Though every last scrap was being optioned for whatever shock value was still left to wring from it, every name-for-himself auteur amping up the ultra-violence for their own special narrative purpose, making sure we felt the pain of the victims, the turbulent brutality of a man on speed or coke, his empathy eaten away, relishing in the pain of the other. The more of this stuff we watched the more desensitized we became, until--like some James Wood TV station owner--you'd have to watch Japanese hentai or torture porn just to feel alive. Man, the anti-porn crusaders turned out to be right, and now we're fucked. 

Am I hero for being sickened by Requiem but not Mother!? Definitely not. How dare the 'people' steer me away from Mother! which is clearly one of the best films of last year, maybe this decade's Mulholland Drive? At the very least its our Viridiana! It's not about addiction, but about what it's like to be sober and sane while everyone around you is drunk and destroying your apartment, or being at a rock concert where you everyone around you is packed in, struggling to get closer to the stage, screaming and singing and swaying and grinding off each other in the cult-like adoration of the band onstage and you're trapped up there with 'em. You just came to score shrooms and don't really like the Dead (aside from some of the Jerry-sung better, earlier songs, "China Cat," etc.) and hate crowds and now the drugs are really kicking in and you couldn't fight your way out if you wanted to. I know that feeling. And it's about being impotent (or suffering premature ejaculation), maybe secretly gay, maybe middle-aged and definitely Viagara-less, with a wife who just wants to get into bed with you, clinging and needy, her whole beautiful body like a dangerous lure that frightens you with its raw desire. It's like when you're just wanting to get loaded and your girlfriend is trying to drag you home, restless and anxious, trying to steer you away from the booze and weirdness into her tedious arms. "You've had enough!" she scolds. But the yawning fear is still there, the fear of her chasm of need. "You give and you give," notes  Michelle Pfieffer's character, "and you give". 

Like Saint Joan of Arc, I forgive Darren. I understand. I absolve. It kills me to do so, but Jesus will catch me before I fall too far into the flames. 

2. Jonesers Overrun the After-Party (Fame)

(Semi Slow-SPOILERS ahead) What makes the first half of the film, with its esoteric bits of symbolism and Lynchian soundscape manipulations, so worthwhile is a truly crazy second act. Occurring over a single night, it moves seamlessly from Jennifer's Mother Nature trying to have a quiet night at home with her man (she's serving a very special dinner for two), to an impromptu party full scale riot, and onwards from there to even darker extremes. It's perhaps the most terrifying and exhilarating extended 'real time' sequence since the surreal Khatyn-esque massacre finale of Elem Klimov's 1985 film, Come and See. It perfectly captures the nightmare that occurs when your small acid trip get-together that turns--against your wishes but you're too high to protest.-- into a full-on call the cops Saturday night townie party. What was once a cool quiet evening 'encounter' in a safe space ends up a mob scene, everyone inviting everyone else's friends over, looking to get in on the psychedelic love session whether you want them around or not, because hey, it's supposed to be a loving safe share-everything environment, so let's share everything we got; I got nothing, bro - you can have your fill of my empty pockets. So what do you got? Gimme gimme! Now you got nothing, too! Bro, lets you me go share everything we got with someone else. 

Man, as we say in AA, I think I still have some lingering resentment, all amped up with bad acid trip PTSD.  Forgive them, Erich... omm.

Jesus mobbed by lepers - Jesus Christ Superstar 

Mother seeks solace from the brushstroke of her whiteness 

Forgive them, counsels the Man. That's the ultimate thing, through it all, Javier's poet is beyond all materialism. The masses' horrible feverish neediness--a million ravenous mouths piling up around a dozen nipples until all is gone. 

But Javier's god points beyond the apocalyptic wasteland, gesturing at the distant heavenly horizon that waits once one has finally crawled beyond the valley of duality and ego. Forgiving and loving the million claws and clockwork grinding gears that rend your agonized body / soul to shreds can earn you some serious wings. 

Is this what is left then, when all is taken? The only thing that is eternal? Unseen until this crust of impurities are washed away you cannot see it. That's faith. Only the soapy water that first cleans the feet of a million hungry rats can wash away the muck from around your blazing lighthouse beam.

Ugh, but what a mess for the maid on Monday.


3. Psychedelic Set and Setting - Interrupted

One of the more terrible ideas, in my mind, has always been the way acid, ecstasy and shrooms, i.e. the 'major' psychedelics are most which is at big raves and college parties and the worst time is late night, for energy. Any big college party, especially one on Friday or Saturday night, has a stretch of 2-5 hours--from around 12-2, where the great unwashed filter through. Usually this means long chains of nervous boys trailing their alpha like a centipede of nervous, hungry glances, leaving a choking trail of Axe body spray. a lame approximation of bravado is affixed to their faces, but they got no game or humility. An unrealistic media-instilled sense of entitlement pollutes their every action. They've been taught by a thousand movies that college parties are where you get 'laid' and do keg stands. But they can't find the keg, and are scared to ask, and girls--forget about it. Girls, even single ones, seldom stay long enough for these boys to get traction, so around 3 AM it ends up being a dude fest, the alcoholics (you) and the people too fucked up to find the door. There you are, tripping your face off, surrounded by pale normie packs of jonesers, wallies, and moochers sitting around, taking up valuable couch space, waiting until the night pays them what they think they're owed for coming out, forcing their way into your chambers to beg drungs or ask for a number from your cool platonic female friend roster. Neither of which you give. 

I know that if you're reading this then you are one of the cool ones. You get it. And you know tripping your face around those creeps and their blank-faced wally coteries, is the worst --all their amped-up rapey insecurity and normie blandness, their terrible townie teeth, or--on the flip--their nerdy smarm-clouded insecurity wherein they think a single beer makes them bold, yet their insights are like lead balloons hanging on your would-be airborne dosed soul.

Forgive them. 

Thanks to the flush of psychedelic awakening, you lose your discernment and become all godlike and forgiving them their trespasses, trying to quickly amp up their style, even giving them articles of your cool raiment, for you move so quickly beyond attachment when properly dosed, you transcend the need to own anything. The power of psychedelics being such that it can override your own discerning ego's judgment, their normie plight can move rather than disgust you. But that disgust has a purpose, as you will find out later.

 Jesus was nice to these people too, and look where it got him!

I'm horrified by abuse of psychedelics, which are God's special glasses that let us behold heaven and hell in advance. When I see youtube videos of idiot kids smoking salvia in the living room, with the TV blasting some obnoxious after school MTV reality show while the smoker twitches on the floor and the idiot camera person zooms in and out on their face, an offscreen voice going oooooh and everyone snickering, I'm deeply horrified. It makes me understand perhaps why parents worry about their children and try to make everything illegal. How about a little respect for the human mind? Salvia, done right, is a spiritually transformative tool. if not, it's just ugly, scary -- teenagers tramping all over Salvia's interdimensional garden (if you do it right, you meet her, raising her children from pots like Troll 2. 

Imagine if instead of all that it gets used in church. The priest trains the young in proper respect for psychedelics, lessens their fear, so that when they are old and afraid of dying, the priest can give them shrooms or ecstasy, making the beyond seem beautiful and inviting. Instead, parents, in demonizing all drugs, seeing no difference between good drugs like shrooms and bad ones like coke or meth, give this huge power to any profit-mined drug dealer. The result? Some scabby hep-C sleazebag peddles ecstasy to your daughter and she thinks he's frickin' Jesus and wants to marry him. Pot wasn't a gateway because of its effects, but because the parental hysteria over it--which made trying it so scary to you at first. If that fear was unfounded for pot, it must be unfounded for everything else too. So a career criminal becomes her parent, her teacher, shaping her psychedelic expansion like some Manson-esque guru. In short, legalize it or your children are MINE!

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4. Unforgiven Trespasses (The Gulls Descend)
(Jesus Christ Superstar - Jesus had the right idea, fuck 'em)

I'm glad this came around on DVD and I could post this right before watching JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR live on ABC, as that musical and MOTHER share that subtext: the idea that opening your arms in love leads to having your organs harvested. Opening your house to strangers leads to a home invasion that, once begun, never ends until every last thing of value in your house is trashed and/or stolen, including your own children and you are leftsick and wild-eyed as the sun comes up and they finally drive away (to Mars to start with?), leaving your floors awash in toxins. After Jesus Christ Superstar watch Mother! and you have a real scathing sad truth to any spiritual enlightenment humility trip. No matter how much wine your drained corpse produces, how many loaves and wafers your flesh can be diced into, the masses never stop coming forward making "pan! pan!" gestures like those Suddenly Last Summer beach boy sea gulls. Save yourself! Or trust your Osiris saint parts will electrify into a whole new world after you are rended limb from limb. 

The beggars Viridiana invites to dinner--as she's so Christian and noble.

5. Art is Violence: Forgiveness is Divine in direct proportion to the Unforgiveableness of the Offense/s

This is the "it" at the core of all truth - the art, once created, turns back around to rend the artist limb from limb with its inconceivable needs. The Frankenstein Monster, loosed upon the world thus changes it, and the reaping returns to his creator, the shocked doctor/artist The doctor suddenly wakes up with an electric jolt, realizing he's been dead and is now strapped down to a table while God stares at him, dolefully. "He's horrible!" he shouts. But then, he turns around and loves him anyway, like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein. 

Oliver Stone has been sued by the victims of a child who rampaged with his girlfriend after watching Natural Born Killers; Kubrick worked to pull A Clockwork Orange out of circulation in England after a rapist sang "Singin' in the Rain", Judas Priest was dragged into court by the bereaved parents of a hideously burned child who heard the Satanic messages in their music. Is this the takeaway message here? Be careful of what you create? Should Aronofsky be chased up the windmill or dragged there by his own creation?

If you're going to make something, better make sure you forgive yourself in advance for the sin of having made it. Madness awaits the judging sober critic at the loud raucous rock show. Take it from me, who wound up rent to the marrow by the ceaseless thirst of his own pain-wracked body.

Before it's too late, thank yourself for your own advance forgiveness of your future offense. It's the only way you're ever going to finish what you started... so you can start again.... again. 

-

PS - Believe me when I swear: I was once sincere in my desire to forgive the seagulls, recognizing them as manifestations of my own sick addiction by visiting my meditation / holy babble poetry site: MEDSITATION. Seems, though, by the tenor of this piece, I'm far from that shore these days.

See also past Easter Acid Holiness:
GREEN PASTURES (1936)
JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977) 
BROTHER SUN, SISTER MOON (1970) 

And the Psychedelic Scrooge Satori!

See also:

the entire chronicle of my deliverance (and subsequent carnivore disillustion): Remembering my 2012 Galactic Alignment Euphoria, Non-Duality, Quetzlcoatl Visions, Cult Leadership, and Inevitable Fever

I love you, always.
Long as you're clean, and don't mess up my carpet.

As the great Harry Dean Stanton once said  "I don't want no commies in my car.
And no Christians either! "

Vanishing Caloric Density: QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958)

Before her there was only Peggy Hopkins Joyce. After her came all of cable TV. And now our first lady may be a secret Soviet 'handler' for a mole Raymond Shaw-style presidential sleeper agent blah blah, but who cares? She looks marvelous, darling. That bitch can wear a dress. Has a first lady ever been this glam?

In such an age as this, can we really afford to forget about Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Barely two years dead, seldom seen outside a scarce handful of cult movies (and a few forgettable 'good ones' like We're Not Married) it's easy to forget that her unique brand of 'empty' celebrity was once unique in pop culture. Well, we forget her at our own risk: she's the preface chapter to all of trash TV today. But she herself was not trashy. Along with her sisters and mother, she was Hungarian and a socialite and she got rich divorcing rich old men husbands and got famous for being famous without having anything to be famous about, which has been such a constant for so long now it's not even a novelty.

And yet, there's no one remotely like her today because she had that high-toned class that usually was seen in society pages rather than heard on game shows. She came from a time when TV was campier but less shrill, with relatively little of our current reality show 'loudest voice wins' 'diamonds-that-shine-like-rhinestone' ugliness. Instead, the blurriness of analog color TV signal and the Vaseline on the lens catching her every diamond sparkle, Zsa Zsa drifted along the talk show airwaves like a fabulous pillow feather caught in a cold Nordic draft. Witty enough to be engaging, beautiful enough to be beguiling, but nothing else, we jokingly imagined her as the harbinger of the TV future, the equivalent of what the food industry calls vanishing caloric density, her melt-in-your-mouth hungry ghost illusion left us with nothing, not even the illusion of fullness - only the vague epiphany that fullness itself was an illusion. She knew to play herself dead-on straight, like she didn't get the joke; she was able to be that paragon of social high-toned class that Joan Rivers, in her acres of furs, was a sly riff on. But Zsa Zsa knew she was playing a 'type' as stereoed-in as Charles Nelson Riley or Rip Taylor, yet it worked because she pretended she didn't know it. We were left to fathom what percentage of her schtick was pretense, and it's that which made her interesting. We could keep it up as long as she could.

The epitome of composed class and elegance: gowns and lashes for the ladies and gays, impressive cleavage for the straight boys, she was the sort of lady you bring to Vegas on your arm and know she won't embarrass you by getting hammered and pestering you to go upstairs, and if she has any 'needs', she'll make sure they're met, in austere Eastern European style (via some dashing parking attendant from Brazil who conveniently speaks no English). Her vanity and insecurity over her leggy competition might drive you to a nervous breakdown (as it did to the director of the film we're discussing today) but you don't have to worry about her mental health: you could bounce a truck off her old world European composure and worry only about the truck.

Television today has set the bar for glamor is so low it's down in the sub-basement. "Reality" stars sip Napoleon brandy mixed with Mountain Dew and end up splashing it on each other to signify a fight that will keep us watching past the next add for butt augmentation --but that's inevitable. That's science. It has to do with intelligence, education and the bourgeois pretentiousness of intellectuals, writers who never notice how their 'talking down' to audiences makes less educated audiences desperate to feel smarter than someone, anyone. While it's annoying being surrounded by idiots, maybe it's worse being an idiot surrounded by smart people. Reality TV is the chance for even idiots to feel superior. Happy now, smart person, knowing the success of Honey Boo-Boo and the election of Trump is partly y'all's fault? 

Problem is, those shows about dumb yokels are made by smart people, and the contempt they feel for their subjects is hard to hide, and contagious, and addictive. Brainy Harvard snob writers eventually start to show their contempt too broadly, like the smirky New York intellectual Walter Matthau in 1957's A Face in the Crowd (left), writing the corn pone slop in Lonesome Rhodes' show like he's doing anyone a favor when in reality his cynicism is what's dragging the world down around his ears. Watching that movie you start to think yeah, Lonesome Rhodes is a monster, but I don't want to punch him in the face as bad as I want to punch you, Matthau. This type of character, so common in the late 50s-early 60s, that thinks a pipe, white skin, glasses, a suit, college education gives them dominion over women, children, the 'working class,' and dogs. They don't respect the savvy craftiness of street smart 'hicks' or the intuitive 'soft touch' of women (though they presume their lascivious attention is always welcome). Their father can help get them any job they want and they presume they deserve them. These privileged 'wits' end up enforcing a straight white male intelligence on their non-white, non-straight, non-male and non-college educated subjects, who naturally suffer in strait-jackets of passive aggressive 'dumbing down' dialogue, the sort that used to be so common it was a kind of invisible normal that might make you slowly go insane but you were never sure why. 

It's cuzz city slicker douchebags with them pipes keeping us thinking each other is super dumb by writing our thoughts for us on TV, is why! Fight the real enemy. This asshole:

Slap the pipe out!
(from top: Matthau, A Face in the Crowd; Anthony Eisley, Wasp Woman

Another example: Anthony Eisley of 1959's The Wasp Woman who continually treats his boss--the CEO of his company--Janet Starlin, like a child who needs constant supervision lest she sell the empire for a magic bean. With his unlit pipe and bougie bow-tie it's only natural we pray a certain wasp stings him rotten.

Think I'm just free-associating? Our current shitty national situation, Zsa Zsa Gabor, empty fame, snobby Harvard writers --what do they have in common? QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958).

This is CinemaScope

As a fan of bad 50s horror and sci-fi movies (especially Mesa of the Lost Women and Plan Nine) as well as the wry work of Ben Hecht (who wrote the story, not that it's very original) and Charles Beaumont (who adapted it), I am supposed to automatically love this Queen, this presumptive sci-fi shaggy dog classic, this veritable remake of the story filmed first in 1953 (as the far 'superior', Cat Women of the Moon) then also in the same year (1958!) but in black-and-white, as Missile to the Moon. 

 (from top) the heavenly beatnik jazz dancer troupe of CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON; the celestial moon goddesses of MISSILE TO THE MOON; the tired front line of broads from QUEEN 

I love Cat and like Missile but loathe Queen. Meanwhile those films never show up on TCM when its time to fill some campy sci-fi slot in their schedule. Probably because it's in color and has Zsa Zsa Gabor. But I'd rather watch the surly sniping of Kip (Victor Jory) over Helen (Marie Windsor) being with dopey Laird (Sonny Tufts) instead of him, and the way they all play it totally straight, Jory's prima donna macho so 'itself' it becomes poetry, like watching Shakespeare act out his 14 year-old kid's metal album. The winky 'hey gang!A rocket is a phallic symbol nyuk nyuk' of Queen is the real enemy to bad movie lovers. I want to slap the pipe out of its smug Walter Mathau Face in the Crowd-mouth.  I like both its writers and love the film from which Queen 'borrowed' its wardrobe (the uniforms and a sparkly minidress from MGM's sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet) and it's got babes and a giant spider (there's also a giant spider in Missile and in Cat Women and even Mesa) but most of the time it's just Cinemascope-length assemblages of under-directed actors standing around on opposite ends of a crumbling high school theater stage, ever ready for either a attendance roll call or old-school rumble that never happens. The film plays like a box of cake mix, unopened, with an egg broken over it, left it a cold oven by a director who's too busy hiding in his trailer to avoid one of Zsa Zsa's on-set rages to light the pilot. Instead he lets the soundstage fill with gas, like Monty Clift under a Place in the Sun canoe. Maybe Hecht and MacArthur are just too intellectually snotty to take this seriously, lest their Algonquin friends accuse them of reading Weird Tales instead Ezra Pound. So they embed a satyric wink so overwrought not even a near-sighted bourgeois patron of the arts could miss it.

The plot you know even if you don't: a shipload of smirking virile Earthmen head to a planet of all women where they help the good leader (Zsa Zsa) overthrow the bad one (Laurie Mitchell [who played a similar role in Missile to the Moon]) whose mask is even uglier than her ugly face. Va-Voom! Lots of girls in terrible MGM costume drama hand-me-downs getting freaky, guys makin' moves, and the captain tackling the biggest lay of his life.

sharp eyed fans may recognize Davis in Alta's 'decent' frock from F. Planet

Sounds like I'd love this film if it let me. But it loves its own smirky self too much to let anyone else share. Some of the girls are great (like Lisa Davis (right; below left) who rocks great lipstick and smoldering Gillian Anderson eyes) and the writing seems a decent framework for a more straight-faced mature approach (which would allow the magic of camp to cohere better). The problem is in the misogynistic direction and frat boy acting by the men, that pipe puffing smug-snarkiness where (SWM) actors and director think themselves too smart for their material so they think adding some bawdy audience winking will help put it over, which shows how wrong they are. Such smirky douche bag superiority has poisoned the film to never be a true cult favorite except in the smirkiest, douchiest, winkiest, most patriarchally self-important of ways. (The title + the star = a tourist version of camp, and not one to make a lifetime fan of it).

What makes the 'good' bad versions of this same plot (Cat Women of the Moon in particular) work so well as enduring 'camp' classics on the other hand, is the intent to do something straight and good but without the know-how or budget or the talent to make it, but with a genuine love of strong women. When these films are good we get the genuine eccentricity of lower rung Hollywood really trying to make nothing into something and of genuinely liking women. Unknowns and outsider artists mix with actors shunned or forgotten by the Hollywood elite and up and comers ready to try. They all take this last or first chance grab and nobly fight to stay in character as the set collapses around them. These oddballs and has-beens and non-starters are--to we classic horror / sci-fi fans--our family. They're the equivalent of the Bad News Bears, or the bar full of flea-bitten drunks in The Iceman Cometh, they're waiting us for us to come watch them again with Hicky eyes anew, to buy them drinks so they can live through the alcohol that is our eyes. They get that it's all over in well under 90 minutes, win or lose but so is the effect of an average double highball. Only the drunks survive, because thirst never dies. And neither does DVD. 

Maybe this is why (white male) barflies and has-beens tend to have more respect for women and minorities, since the men in these Z-grade films are as disenfranchised and thus less afraid they'll lose anything by portraying women as the badass goddesses they are. I know for myself, alcoholism humbled me down to the roots, made me forever grateful and in awe of the women who rescued me. And that's why we drunks, drag queens, punks, and other outsiders that make up the bad film-lover community aren't going to be drawn to such puerile contempt for either women or the sci-fi and horror genres. And thus no character in Plan Nine leers at Vampira and says some inane shit like "my coffin or yours, baby." No one in that cantina says to Tarantella in Mesa of Lost Women, "I bet you got a real sticky web." If there were such quips these films would be as ignobly remembered as this Queen. It's the celebration, the worship, of female strength, that makes them endure with stoic grace in the face of incompetence. It's there in John Waters, it's there in Russ Meyer, it's there in Roger Corman. It's not there in Queen of Outer Space. 

The 'space women need men' subgenre always has a giant spider - Analyze its symbolic meaning, write down your answer, then look at the oeuvre of artist Louise Bourgeois to see if you're right!

Only a few elements in Queen from Outer Space take the outsider/sublime approach vs. the Matthau-in-Face in the Crowd attitude, and one of them---believe it or not--is Zsa Zsa Gabor.



No matter what happens, she plays it dead straight. She should have been the evil queen- as the title and billing suggests, with her beauty being the mask and the ugly scarred face appearing after the face cracks off because she's too busy making out with the captain to moisturize. Instead, as the chief scientist and leader of the resistance, she brings that same feathery class to bear she'd bring to any 'real' social event only here it looks like the event happened five years ago and no janitor has stirred therein to sweep up. And the event was an afternoon ladies-only coffee clatch fashion show with a vague Robin Hood theme.

If it's not going to offer anything else, the casting of Zsa Zsa was brilliant touch just for marquee value alone, making Queen of Outer Space live in high camp infamy, a touchstone name easily recognized by programmers who know nothing of the genre. But it's not worth the camp adulation, for it is the kind of self-hating sci-fi that feels the need to leer and roll its eyes every five minutes.  They don't get that it's not 'fun' to presume a planet of all women is going to roll over the minute some douchebag puts on a moth-eaten blue powder and struts in like the kingdom can now relax - a man is here to take charge. It's offensive, man. You can't put women in masks deformed enough to scare Picasso out of the brothel (left) and expect them to thank you for it. You can't think some young captain bucko can topple an empire just by toying with the affections of a mask-wearing broad on Venus and have it not be so misogynist I could just scream! You can't!

Grandma, what uneven eyeholes you got

Real camp would go the opposite way - it heaps a dozen dead male spacemen at the feet of its evil goddess. Great camp celebrates strong, badass broads. It loves them. It even gives them a magical beatnik free jazz dance to quietly haunting Elmer Bernstein flute music. For Queen the contempt is so thick they don't even have the decency to put some ornamental Vishnu statuary around the place, nor to attach the painted boards that make up the evil queen's mean-spirited rocket launch control platform, the kind of thing that would earn a frown from any high school drama coach. But to not even bother to make the eyeholes symmetrical on the glittery masks the queen and her coterie wear? Unforgivable even in elementary school.

Well, either way - if we don't like it- we have two others just like it for solace, each worse than the other and far better in their worseness as a result. Today, maybe the times have changed - we've been to the moon. We know there's no babes there. Or if there are, they're fast asleep (or as Rutledge says, their "condition: not dead, not alive"). Alien women are here, instead, on Earth, and their masks are human, but just barely. Sometimes I pass one on the street - they have deep light blue dazzling eyes and blonde hair, impossibly elfin. And I send them a telepathic message of the sort one passes to celebrities spotted in a crowd ("I know who you are, but I won't blow your cover by saying hello") The alien babes I spot don't answer me, but that's show business. Maybe I'm not smart enough to be worth 'sending' to. My genes aren't worth harvesting, so no cool sexy abductions or long snogs. I am not mad or jealous and I'm not out to topple any kingdom, certainly not a matriarchy, even if it's run by a puppet doofus via his hot Russian handler. I'll write whatever I have to in order to earn my sanity, to feel observant enough about the shit I watch that I somehow contribute to the collective evolution of dude-kind. Pass me my pipe and let's get the show started, and then cancelled! And take me with you when you go back to space, long as I can bring a DVD player, can count on constant normal gravity, and Cat Women of the Moon! 

It's because I know you won't bring me that I don't want to go. Hail Alpha! 

Greetings from the Bilderberg Jamboree

See also:
CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)
MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)
--
Acidemic #8 The Brecht / Godard / Wood issue

Old Dark Capsules IV: NIGHT OF TERROR, THE CROOKED CIRCLE, THE UNHOLY NIGHT, THE 13TH CHAIR, A STUDY IN SCARLET

Black and white old dark house films are the perfect balm for miserable rainy days like this, or the advent of spring (pollen/allergies) contesting grey winter's turgid encore as the sky clears. Cobwebs, shadows, candelabras, sudden black-outs, howling winds, shifty-eyed conspirators, pouring rain, sheet metal thunder, suits of armor that fall at odd times, cats, clocks striking midnight, readings of the will punctuated by lightning strikes, daggers in backs, spooky seances, fog-enshrouded stalking, spying through keyholes, secret passages, hidden laboratories, gorilla suits, disembodied death masks floating in the darkness - it's all manna. If you grew up at all in the 60s-70s then you remember too the ghosting of the UHF antenna signal (highly susceptible to cloud cover) when these movies showed on local TV Saturday afternoons; how a spooky old film was almost always, somewhere to be found out in the white noise wilderness, deep in those films that were deep in the white noise wilderness, Bela Lugosi waited like a UHF Kurtz, hamming it up in whatever role he got, be it a brooding vampire or just another enigmatic butler.

Back in the 70s, before the advent of VCR, one's ability to see old movies was tied to the whims of TV programmers and the the cloud systems of a fickle God. With only a circular antennae and rabbit ears to move around in vain, atop the set, every second of one of these films that was visible became a sacred text written on the snapchat wind. At any moment a cloud might pass and wipe out the signal, which had bounced in off a storm cloud from Wilmington Philadelphia, and leave you stranded, never knowing what it was called, or how it ended. Thus you basked in the hoary atmosphere while you could, read your Famous Monsters of Filmland like a holy writ, imagining that, one day, you'd be able to watch the movies those photos were from right there on the page of the magazine, as if a screen could one day be as flat and light and book-sized.

You know the rest --that dark birthday wish come true ( I spent a recent jury duty in the waiting room watching Invisible Ghost, The Ghoul and The Black Raven on my Kindle thinking damn, my wish came true, then again, they all have, eventually) and when it's too pollen-saturated or soaking wet and freezing to go outside without sneezing like a machine gun, what can you do now but watch thy old dark house collection from the sanctity of your germ-free bubble, and remember how precious every signal-reception moment used to feel when it was all so ephemeral. The narcotizing effect of these old gems transcends mere pre-sci-fi nostalgia. If you've ever stayed over in a huge dark mansion and tried to find the bathroom in the dead of night, no sound but the rats in the walls and the tick of the grandfather clock and.... what's that creaking?... then you know how great it is to live in a small NYC apartment on a high floor with three padlocks on the one door. Nothing makes you feel dryer than a raging storm onscreen. And if you're a Lugosi fan, then you know.

NIGHT OF TERROR 

(1933)

*** / Amaon Prime Image - B-

A long-unavailable old dark house swirl of a thriller melding in some pre-slasher movie signatures, the Bela Lugosi-starring NIGHT OF TERROR is violent pre-code melodrama that more than lives up to its lively reputation. Highlighted by an unusually lurid string of murders by a knife-wielding madman, who grins impishly from the bushes in and around a rolling, fog-enshrouded estate, then creeps in on his unsuspecting victims, stabbing them, then leaving his calling card - a headline of one of his killings - pinned to the back of each new body. From the opening scene of him crawling into a lover's lane convertible to stab a pair of necking lovers (top) it's clear this ain't your average 30s old dark house film, more like a 70s-80s slasher movie. Inside, a dotty scientist (George Meeker) plans to test his new 'suspended animation' death-duplicating drug by burying himself alive for two days--mixing Houdini and medical science together under the watchful eye of an eminently murderable board of directors. His fiancee (Sally Blaine) is too 'animus-dominated' to argue with her gullible dad (Tully Marshall) who encourages the marriage and bankrolls the experiments. She's so passive about it, she even tolerates social climbing reporter Wallace Ford's pushy come-ons. She'd probably get into a car with the killer too, if he had a bag of candy. She might even vote Republican.

The dad is, thankfully, murdered. Heirs gather for the reading of the will; the killer offs them by the dozen; Ford and the cops need to figure out if he's working for one of them (the will's split between heirs, so the fewer the inheritors the more $$) or if it's just a mad killer 'coincidence.' A no-good brother and his cash-hungry wife arrive out of nowhere and try to push everyone else out. The mysterious Hindu servant Degar (Lugosi) and his spirit medium-housekeeper wife (Mary Frey) are also in for a share, though the scheming brother and wife don't think belong in the will and plan to contest it - better hurry up, schemers!

Playing the very first of his long line of red herring butlers, Lugosi's role is pretty central to the action (he's more than just a comic relief macabre sidebar) and--considering what a lean year 1933 was for him (in the doghouse at Universal for refusing to do Frankenstein)--he seems glad to be working and manages some real malevolent around-the-corner stares through doorway cracks. Meanwhile the mad killer's body count rises and the black chauffeur (Oscar Smith) alone is smart enough to want to skedaddle. Naturally there's a mysterious climactic seance (always turn out all the lights in a big first floor open window and ajar door-filled room when a maniac who's already killed four people that night is still at large in the house) and a final act escape down a secret panel to a scary basement.

This rare Columbia B-movie gem was one I'd been looking for since forever - so when it recently surfaced online (I think it's on youtube) and on Prime after never being on VHS, DVD or shown on TV. That I'm actually not disappointed after all that expectation (35+ years of waiting) says a lot. What sets this apart from so many other old dark houses is the wild pace and the abundance of little macabre touches. Man, that lunatic really racks 'em up. I think he even makes it to double digits. I love the blackly comic way no one seems able to alter their schedules, beef up security, turn on some lights, or lock their doors even knowing the killer is right in the same block radius - it's the sort of suicidal eloi passivity--that immunity bubble--that causes so many car fatalities due to people's inability to stop texting.

In a very strange cool ending the killer threatens the audience with death upon divulging the trick ending. It's weird how often that must have happened at the time - because we see that same thing at the end of The Bat Whispers, and so many others. SPOILERS - believe it or not, underneath that weird make-up, the killer is gravel-voiced Edwin Maxwell (Dr. Emile Egelhoffer in His Girl Friday). 

--

20. A STUDY IN SCARLET

(1933) Dir. Edward Marin

*** / Amazon Image: D

My favorite early 30s Sherlock Holmes (pre-Rathbone) film, this has Anna May Wong and plenty of Limehouse fog and that's all I need. Some purists decry Reginald Owen's Holmes as too bulky and slow (he played Watson opposite Collin Clive the year before) but--though he's probably my least favorite Scrooge (in the 1938 version)--I like him. More forceful and less dotty than, say, Arthur Wotner, he's also less keyed-up and fey than Rathbone. The Watson dynamic is inversed too: Nigel Bruce's Watson tended to lag along behind Rathbone's gamboling Holmes like a shopping bag-encumbered mom after her sugar-addled five year-old, is replaced by Warburton Gamble, bouncing off the terrarium walls while Holmes sits motionless like a gecko perched above a watchful cricket, and then--- zap! the cricket has disappeared in a slight blur of pink tongue. Cool rather than fey, assertive rather than snide, Owen's Holmes has more than just a keen mind, he has gravitas. And Watson has more than just bumbling devotion, he has our respect.

When, for example, his close study of a crime scene leads him from the murdered man's desk out to the front yard, we see Watson and Lestrade (Alan Mowbray) just standing off to the side, resignedly watching him nose around the desk's minutiae. Neither is doing the usual dimwitted jumping to conclusions Bruce and Hohl do in the Universal films, as if feeling the need to spell out every misconception for the slow-witted audience members. Owen's Holmes doesn't spell out all his 'elementary' observations either. When Watson points out the resemblance of Thaddeus Merrydew's shoe size and cigar brand to those of the murderer they're hunting, Holmes just looks at him like a patient teacher guiding a student towards an already established insight: "Is that all you observed?" Holmes points out there were a hundred more details Watson missed, but then he doesn't go into them! Still waters run deep with this Holmes and we come to appreciate the carefulness with which Owen keeps the water clear enough to see all the way into his character's purple depths. These long pauses give those sudden whiplash gecko tongue movements extra snap, like when he counters Merrydew's feigning of ignorance over a widow's trust with a simple "it won't do" that chills the blood.

Another highlight is a local tavern out in the country wherein a nice old Col. Blimp-style officer strolls in, buys a bottle, and beguiles the local carriage driver with tons of whiskey before hiring him for a trip out to a for-sale mansion. Owen is so thoroughly buried in his role that we're not quite sure which of the two men is Holmes, if any; we just enjoy the idea of being kind of hard up for another drink, being low on funds, and having a friendly stranger come into the pub and bring over a whole bottle on a foggy moorish morning. We watch in awe as Holmes deftly avoids drinking his share while plying the driver, and how expertly he soon starts searching all over the mansion, locating secret panels, and sending the maid out of the room after feigning a heart attack. 

As in all the best Rathbone Holmes' (The Scarlet Claw in particular) it's the rich foggy night atmosphere that sells the mystery, especially in and outside the gang's Limehouse hideout, where many a chase, sudden shot and skulking suspicious walk occurs. Wong plays one of the inheritors of the bloody tontine (based on some sequestered jointly stolen jewels), alongside the innocent June Clyde and saucy scoundrel J.M. Kerrigan (the guy toasting "King Jippo" in The Informant). She doesn't have much to do but she still generates plenty of intrigue and suspicion with some hooded glances. An invigorating climax finds Holmes, Lestrade and a gang of detectives show up at the county pub for a quick one to bolster the blood before trundling off through the moors for the big climax. Hail Britannia! We wouldn't see a 'quick stop at the local before the showdown' scene again until Straw Dogs! 

 Clearly a labor of love for Owen (he produced and co-wrote the script with Robert Florey), it doesn't have anything to do with original Conan Doyle novel of the same name (Owen had optioned the title only, not the actual story) but they did a bang-up job whipping something together that feels proper and correct, with British atmosphere is so thick you may be forgiven for presuming it came from Gaumont rather than long-lost LA poverty row outfit Tiffany.

THE CROOKED CIRCLE

(1932) Dir. H. Bruce Humberstone 

*** / Alpha Image - **

This 'campy mystery' was the first film ever broadcast over TV airwaves, back in 1933! - and what better choice? Old dark house films thrive with a fuzzy picture. Combined with the inherent staginess and strange rhythm you may get the delicious impression you're somehow not meant to see it, that you're stumbling onto a secret broadcast meant for other eyes. We open on a circle consisting of several men and one woman in black hoods, sitting a skull on round table deep in some basement. They close their clandestine meeting with the chant: "the fight to the knife and the knife to the hilt!"  The way the circle draws cards to see who does each murder "in a manner already prescribed" evokes Robert Louis Stevenson's "Suicide Club." H. Bruce Humberstone, the man behind most of the Fox Charlie Chan movies, directed it, which may explain why it hums and pops.

The suspects all gather around 'Melody Manner', an abandoned, creepy split-level haunted-ish mansion that's just been rented out by the leader of the Sphinx Club, a group of amateur sleuths. Soon the one long night is populated with a rogues gallery of kooks ("before you got here, a queer-acting hunchback brought over a basket of tomatoes"), mysterious violin sounds ("didn't I say death would come with a string?"); killers pop in and out of attics, grandfather clocksl; backyard graveyards have tomb-top chutes down to basement trap doors. There are some genius touches of the sort I haven't seen until the more recent Good Time (like a burglar (Robert Frazer) forcing the homeowner he's holding at gunpoint to change clothes with him, before the cops arrive) and never a dull moment cross-cutting in an all-in-a-single-night small time frame (the mark of a good old dark house movie; daytime shots are a bore).

Irene Purcell--her alabaster Norma Shearer-esque arms as lovely as ever--is the heroine. The eminently forgettable Ben Lyon is her nominal fiancee. Stealing the movie with some elegant 'against-type' aplomb is C. Henry Gordon in a rare good guy turn, sporting a turban as the enigmatic foreign detective Yoganda; fellow Sphynx Clubber Roscoe Karns nibbles on whatever comedy relief isn't chewed down to the nub by mugging Zasu Pitts' terrified housekeeper and James Gleeson's rattled traffic cop ("oh, a wise guy, eh?"); Robert Frazer, Christian Rub, and Spencer Charters are various spooky eccentrics flittering in and out out frame. Before you know it, the Crooked Circle are being unmasked and it all ends too soon but do what I do and just press 'play from beginning' at the first sign of credits, because I guarantee you won't remember a goddamned wonderful word of it even if you watch it twice, back-to-back, in the same evening. It's just that good because--in the words of Zasu Pitts, repeating the warning given her by the toothless violinist early on-- "something always happens to somebody." She ain't kiddin'.

THE THIRTEENTH CHAIR

(1929) Dir. Todd Browning

**1/2/ (TCM image - ***)

Often remade (to no real effect) this is one of those 'have your cake and denounce it too' seance exposé old house hybrids so popular in the days before DRACULA made the legit supernatural cool. Initially a barnstorming stage melodrama, no one has been able to make a good movie out of what is essentially a single room-set play. Margaret Wycherly stars as Madame LaGrange, a soft-spoken medium hired for a party of British diplomats and swanky ex-pats in India. Demonstrating the mechanisms behind spirit raps and table raising, LaGrange seems intent on demystifying mysticism and bumming everyone out, all in the service of finding out who killed a friend at a party the previous year. Summoned to perform on the anniversary of their collective friend's death, Wycherly makes a half-hearted attempt to access real magic for the climax (her familiar is "Laughing Eyes" an old Native American shaman) and in the process shames hardened carnies like director Todd Browning, whose eagerness to expose the seamy underbelly of the seance racket seems mean-spirited (maybe he did it to impress Houdini -dead only three years at the time - or was he?).

Until Dracula two years later proved the public was ready for fantasy, Browning shied away from the straight-up supernatural, thinking the public preferred Chaney's endless stream of 'deformed sideshow contortionist loves circus waif' masochism vehicles. So in this case, the old dark moody billing is a cheat as the medium's calling on her fake familiar for real help seems quite absurd and eventually her dated sentimental schtick plus the elaborate disclaimers combine to kind of swamp the picture.

Ah well, you can always fall in love with Leila Hyams in her seductively diaphanous art nouveau Adrian gown, as I did. The jagged ruffles of her flapper-y skirt alone are as unforgettable as the window treatments in Deep Red. You don't blame mopey Conrad Nagel for mooning over her (though eventually you will want to slap him, too). The Calcutta setting lets art director Cedric Gibbons indulge in the most luxuriant exotica, and Bela Lugosi is great as the local Indian police inspector, masterfully using his aristocratic bearing to boss around the snotty British and the big surprise climax is not without its spooky charm.

Nonetheless... as with other mysteries from the period (like Secret of the Blue Room) it gets too hung up on its final act twist, becoming almost too contrived to be believed. And oh man does Wycherly's schtick stick in the craw. It's clear Browning is as taken with her as Hitchcock was with Lila Kedrove in Torn Curtain, or Anderson with Peter Ustinov in Logan's Run. Browning should have known by then that you can't let elderly characters actors run away with a scene, because they will take twice as long to walk half as far. And then they will be all we remember, and we'll never want see it again, anymore than we want to go to the old lady's home and visit granny. She's a swell old girl, but... just the thought of that place kind of gives us a claustrophobic, buried-alive feeling. Hyam's diaphanous art nouveau gown and Lugosi's imperiousness can compensate for only so much.

On the other hand, twenty years later Wycherly would turn her saintly homespun mom schtick on its head as Cagney's terrifying mother in White Heat, and don't say 1929 mysteries don't age well, because there's one old dark house movie from 1929 with the same basic seance murder mystery structure, and it rocks, and it's up next on the hit parade:

THE UNHOLY NIGHT 

(1929) Dir. Lionel Barrymore

**** / unavailable 

This MGM old dark house thriller gets a bad rap for being--like most early sound films--awash in crackles, hisses, stiff acting, and literal and figurative static. That's all actually plusses for an old dark house fan, for it gives the impression the air of the early sound era was something we could hear and see, like a special alternate form of liquid perfect for late night/early morning dipping. And The Unholy Night may offer the coziest example: everything seems to be taking place underwater seen through some magical submarine window as, under the protective anonymity of London fog, a killer is strangling unwary ex-British military officers. They're dropping like flies in a wild opening montage. Lord Montague (Roland Young) is nearly strangled too, but he manages to get rescued and at Scotland Yard proceeds to start pouring the brandy and sodas to steady his nerves, and he doesn't stop 'til the whole mystery's wrapped up (announcing each new glass is "my first, today"). Turns out he and the dead men all served together at Gallipoli in the Great War in the same regiment so Scotland Yard suggests they round them up at Montague's mansion for a an impromptu reunion and their own safety and thus protect them with some plain clothes guards and get to the bottom of things. What with all the drinking and WWI existentialist undercurrents you can bet it was written by Ben Hecht, and there are so many creepy seances, ghosts, mass murder tableaux, walking corpses, and British army buddies singing drinking songs that it becomes the perfect film to watch as the sun comes up after a wild night of revels.

The cast is rich with strange faces: Montague's sister (Natalie Moorhead) goes in for seances in a big way, and seems a harmless enough pastime to her doctor fiancee (Ernest Torrance) but is it? Hardworking character actor George Cooper is Montague's loyal servant from the war - he's sure happy to see the regiment back together for a weekend, happier than he can say, and knows just what kind of drinks to serve and when to bring another round (which is immediately); Boris Karloff is a foreign lawyer with shady motives and a strange will; Polly Moran is kept on a short leash as the maid (she can really ham it up... if... if encouraged); the disfigured Major Mallory from their old regiment dies in the other room while the gang are mixing up "a bowl of wine" - a concoction of everything but wine, let aflame and carried around while singing "drink it down / drink it down."

Things really shift into high gear with the dramatic arrival of the Turkish-British Lady Efra (Dorothy Sebastian -above, center), the daughter of an officer who was drummed out of the regiment for cheating at chards and who vowed revenge and is now dead.... maybe. She might be in town because she knows about father's will, a tontine, i.e. where the fortune is divided up equally amongst "surviving" members of the regiment, set up as some vengeance-minded rich folks as part of a byzantine revenge plot (i.e. encouraging so-called loyal friends to kill each other). Lady Efra has her own plot in mind probably via 'tricks of the ancient orient' - like hypnosis, sex and suggestion (ala Thirteen Women, another Erich favorite). Naturally the news of the tontine leads to some hammy moments of alibi-challenging, confessions of being broke or in debt, and going "crazy" from the strain (it sure doesn't take long!). Naturally though, this being England rather than some godforsaken corner of the heathen orient, brotherhood prevails and some pretty rounds of "Auld Lange Syne" put it al perspective, eventually. That night the doctor boyfriend slips the nervous Efra some tranquilizers upstairs and asks if she can identify the voice she heard conspiring with Karloff the night before, and the brother officers all mill around outside her door cockblocking one another and thinking of lame excuses to knock.

Yeah, I love this movie to death. I've only seen it a few dozen times, usually late at night, drunk, or sick, all the better to not remember it for the next time. (It is key, really, to enjoying these old murder mysteries over and over again- make sure your short term memory is off, so you forget who the killer is as soon as it's over). I do recall that, considering her possible yen for killing them, the men milling around her boudoir don't seem at all wise. And I remember  Karloff's weird mix of abashed lovelorn discomfort and silken sinister motives during his scenes, but not exactly where he fits in to anything (he's not even in the credits). I remember a great grisly morning tracking shot past numerous strangled victims, lots of hamming. My favorite moments--the one I remember most--occur earlier, a rattled Lord Montague in Scotland Yard after almost being strangled in the London fog, shrugging off his fear with a succession of brandy and soda (his first today!), and when Lord Montague, leading Scotland Yard into his mansion, opens the parlor door to investigate a scream, and finds the lights out and his sister and a gang of folks mid-seance, spooking maid Moran. It's total darkness while the disembodied head of Sôjin Kamiyama whirls around the room, chanting in a hideous deep voice! Oops! Oh well, nothing to worry about. As a viewer it's such a great WTF moment it stays in the unconscious like an eclipse stays on the retina. Well, gentlemen, let's to the study and have another round. Another regimental drinking song if you please and another brace of brandy and sodas. Our first today! Well, you know what I mean. When it comes to how drinking is done by gentlemen, Ben Hecht never forgets!

PS - Good luck finding it - it's not on any DVD or VHS.  TCM occasionally shows it - usually very late at night. Could you please demand they make a DVD, maybe part of a pre-code old dark house five movie DVR set? Suggest they add Murder by the Clock, Night of Terror, Supernatural, and a decent print of Crooked Circle! I'd appreciate it.

See also:
Old Dark Capsules: THE GHOUL, CAT AND THE CANARY, THE MONSTER WALKS, THE OLD DARK HOUSE, THE BLACK RAVEN

Old Dark Capsules II: PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD, THE BLACK CAT (1941), HORROR ISLAND, ROGUE'S TAVERN, ONE FRIGHTENED NIGHT

Old Dark Capsules III: THE GORILLA, WHITE COCKATOO, WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT, BULLDOG JACK, SHADOW OF DOUBT

Grave Diggers of 1933: THE INTRUDER, SECRET OF THE BLUE ROOM, BEFORE DAWN, TOMORROW AT SEVEN, SUPERNATURAL

NOTES:
1. Adapted in 1936 (see: Russian Orthodox Roulette: Lindsay Lohan, THE DEER HUNTER, TROUBLE FOR TWO)