All the Missed Mystics: Nicolas Roeg's GLASTONBURY FAYRE (1972)

While Filmstruck is still with us, let's chance upon the few small good things we have before they leave forever (to become expensive DVDs or unavailable). The recently also departed Nicolas Roeg is featured in one of their mini-title collections, and for the intrepid explorer there be his 1972 concert film, Glastonbury Fayre. If you've e'er loved a Roeg (Performance, Track 29) then don't miss it. And if e'er loved thee the psychedelic music festival movies of the late 60s-early 70s, and wondered if the movement e'er survived its American Altamont apocalypse, seek this film and say to yourself, ah there it is! The mystics did not burn out or fade away, they just snuck back to England and just didn't tell their boorish American cousins. Thus, here in Glastonbury 1971, while the wreckage of the husk of Age of Aquarius was still being picked over by Manson biographers across the pond, the cool kids quietly gathered, by a big pyramid stage, correctly situated along the Stonehenge ley line for maximum magnetic current, at the solstice, between two hills...

Shot by Roeg as one of his mystical odysseys, the focus is less on the packaging the hits (there's only one, at the end, via Traffic, at night, the climax of the movie, with a whole mass of dancers in the crowd, reveling, each with enough space to swing their arms if they choose, Roeg's camera straining to find them in the swirl of night) and more on the mystical currents of the landscape, the joining of friendly locals and open-hearted visitors, the ease and beauty with which it all comes together. There's little of the Pennebaker's Monterey Pop chick habit (i.e. showing a distinct sexual gaze by focusing on all the lovely girls, their painted-faces and limbs in fringed sashay, nor the acid-drenched face clawers and drunken bikers of the Maysles' Speedway. Instead of looking for a Big Encapsulation of a Generation, it's enough, more than enough, to feel the solstice, the moon, and mystical movements of planets past the pyramid. These things the camera of Roeg senses and captures, the way the builders of nearby Stonhenge captured earth energy. Hardly surprising from the man behind Walkabout and Performance, there's a truly mystical power at work here - and the camera itself seems tied to the magnetic waves in electric union.

Roeg films the throngs arriving from low angle gliding shots, as if he's a child looking up at some kind of ethereal parents. This is a time when parents were cool, unworried and free, but mere hedonists wallowing in Roman orgy or idealist hippies passing out Marxist pamphlets at anti-Vietnam rallies. This is more some mass impromptu tribal coven; the druidic roots of Stonehenge breathes through them; the Green Man is coming out of a long sleep, shaking off the Roman occupying sloth like a flaky outer crust, like the last 2,000 years never happened; and communicating through the grass and sky and vibrations in the air rather than placards and megaphones. Here festivalgoers form shapes like moving temporary crop circles in some ephemeral alphabet that transcends any one meaning. Similarly, the film offers no words onscreen or introductions to let us know who any of the musicians are; there are no signs and markers we associate with concert festival films--no indication of drugs or overdoses; no backstage chatter; no overloaded bathrooms and crowded freeway helicopter shots. If the guy with the stars in his eyes and the world in his beard is the promoter, his talk of getting a vision of his partner, pulling the car over, calling him and hearing "We have the farm" is delightful, his giddy shrooms-and-lovelight laugh, manic yet rooted. We don't need the backstory behind it, i.e. which farm, etc. The laugh is the thing, the inspiration to pull over and call. The Green Man is at work, sifting the clouds and conjuring images in minds as needed to get this revelry underfoot, putting glowing embers in the minds of initially reluctant farmer neighbors, and this wild eyed bearded guy is in the circuit. He could tell the land was with them, just as those who till it also could. We see young dudes all draped on ominous framework metal bars erecting a giant pyramid stage, wondering how roadies manage to do their dangerous intense work while literally and figuratively high, or how that all works. But work it does, the Green Man acts as a reverse gremlin, causing guys to look again after initially passing an un-tightened screw, or sending a tuft of wind to right a wobbling climber. 

In short, nature decrees it all be perfect, so it might perhaps drink what auric energy it may from the celebration. There is hyst the right number of people (7,000-ish), the right weather (for England), the right acts (including lots of insane howling and warbling and babble), the right time (solstice), all of it humming with love and the power of abandonment. The acts range in intensity and weirdness  from the gentle twee of Fairport Convention, to the open-shirted madness of Gong (?), from flute-noodlin' Hawkwind to the northern soul of Terry Reid or whatever, nothing terribly sticks out, or clashes no one band or pale fiddler is distinguishable from another- there are no stage introductions aside from some concern about the corn fields - but the big moments come in the sense of group dynamics at sunset...

 right before Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come (I looked 'em up).

This is where it all gels:

The place gets eerie quiet. As the sun sets between two hills and the pyramid stands shadowed, a small procession of ominous robed figures enter the frame, silhouetted against the sky. 

They light three crosses on the side of the hill. We think of Jesus, I guess, and the Romans again - but whatever, like those crop circles that form in the area, these symbols are universal, transcending any one meaning.

Roeg is the right man for the job. As with his Walkabout and Don't Look Now we're so subsumed by the land and sky it's as if we disappear; our illusory ego and locus of perceptual identity within the film is unraveled back to basic elements - fire, air, earth... water.



As the solstice light disappears behind the hills and the pyramid stage lights up. It's the climax of Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising, the cumulative gut punch of understanding initiatory mysticism via the Golden Bough or Henry James' Varieites of Religious Experience. The profound feeling you had while breaking the 'bread', sweeping away of the sticks and seeds, in the Houses of the Holy gatefold in high school suddenly makes sense. Shrooming in the graveyard in 1987 I/We felt the pull of the earth and moon in balance, and I/We feel it here, again, now. The band starts: Arthur Brown emerges: a tall strange figure in warped KISS make-up (1), a fusion of the dream cabaret performance rock madness of Alice Cooper, the rooted bluesy grip and star of Zappa, soul of Captain Beefheart, the modulated ominousness of Nick Cave, the paradoxically zany steeliness and falsetto of Foxy Shazam.

Who the hell? How'd I miss this guy? (I think I mixed him up in my mind with Arthur Lee). I looked him up: A frequent opener and collaborator with Hawkwind, The Who, Hendrix, etc., Brown seems to be one of Britain's best-kept secrets. I could swear he wasn't there before, in the counterculture. I read loads about Hendrix and remember nothing of him. Is he me from the future, who went back in the past to save Jimi Hendrix, but then forgot, and wound up here, at Glastonbury, a message to me, here, now? If so, the message is: mission accomplished. Tall, crazy, beautiful in a masculine deep sense, alive with light and lightning, his Spotify roster may be sparse and inelegant, but hey- somehow he stayed pure, beyond big American label signings, maybe be avoiding America's obscene corrupting love (to bend a phrase from the great Nanno Jelkes). I'd never heard of him before, but there he is, somehow seeming to conduct his band and the moon and the crowd and the fire at the same time, ranting and holding wild weird notes. He's what I strived to be in a younger man's dreams and open mics: semi-pretentious/theatrical but genuinely eccentric and fierce with loving Iron John wild man archetypal fire. 
---
It's so fitting then, on a personal level (what else do any of us know, Jedediah, except love on our terms?) that I saw Roeg's Glastonbury Fayre  the night before Thanksgiving, while packing to leave on the early morning train, wondering if it would be the last film I saw on Filmstruck, wondering why the Time-Warner bigwigs in charge of so much of our cinematic heritage hate artistic film, the art house crowd, and anything small enough to only draw a small profit or debit, as if they're just dying to mow down the last museum in town, to undo the historic monument housing protection, to make room for yet another skyscraper housing development or Target - advertised as 'so close to museums and parks,' but then the parks go away for more apartments. After all, the real estate value has gone up due to the presence of all the parks! Ugh! 

Ommm! Center myself... bring it back... t
--

A moment I marked down in my first viewing: Brown is sitting on the side of the stage while the band jams on, takes a pull of some can (can't see the label) and burps --he clearly doesn't know the camera is watching -but he looks calmly over at the drummer and burps suddenly, at firsts unconsciously--as burps are--but as it's about to come he transforms it to the art, he burps fiercely, full of 'walrus through the ice'-roaring joy (5), but not conspicuously, loudly, boorishly, but a man whose warrior soul is calm and in the moment, turning even the smallest, usually unconscious gestures (unseen by the audience) into fierce warrior accents. He's not worrying about if he felt enough in his singing or the is high enough or how he looks, he's not trying to get higher or to recover from a hangover or all the other things that hung up America at the time. He's just in the zone.

Another stand-out is the also-better-known-in-Britain folk singer Melanie (below), whose teary, raspy voice and urgent guitar deliver a strong, moving, dynamic tune ("Peace Will Come") that seems to encompass the beauty of the oceanic moment, tempered with the foreknowledge of its inevitable passing. Triumphant, sad, and hopeful: after the perfect oceanic union passes, our sadness will be tempered by the foreknowledge that such perfect moments--having come once--will come again. I love how it all--audience, nature, band-- quiets to a hush when Melanie starts to play. Everyone seems to be in the same sleeping bag, hushed and reverent, all 7,000 like a single listening being. Even the asleep nod their heads and smile. America's folk singers come off as a bit too protest agenda-ridden, or corny (aiming for  pop appeal or to stop the war), but Melanie cuts through it all, her hair flying in her pretty face, howling beautifully; her music looks beyond all wars and all peace to come. As with Arthur Brown, she made me an instant fan realizing all that American AOR promotion quietly kept out of reach as it didn't fit the pigeonholes. She made me long for a second chance, to go to Britain in 1971, or just 71 AD, for that matter, to find the people that carried the psychedelic torch far past Altamont and Manson (and personal level American demons like mine), and may have it burning somewhere still. Melanie, playing back in time, too, seemed to understand my longing all these decades in the future, the rasp in her voice cutting through time, assuring me as beautifully and strangely as these peaceful moments came before, they'll come again. Trying to stop them only increases the force with which they eventually break through. 
--
I've enough of a continental mind that I've been to one or two literally magical weekend parties, the best of which was held one autumn solstice (c. 1991) at my cool rich hippie friend's Vermont cabin for a weekend of tripping and drinking Jaeger shots after blustery hikes. My ugly Americanism yielded willingly to the older alchemical ways of a huge bearded Brit with huge hair and a pungency of patchouli, a weird girlfriend, and--most vitally--a vial of pure delicious liquid LSD around his neck, dispensing drops into the eyes of the willing (everyone, me included). It was 'the good stuff,' pure gorgeous chemical perfection sending us all into wild dances that became -- due to surrender to the movements--elaborate ceremonial snowflake Pollack morphings I could never duplicate (or probably even notice) their magic in a 'down' state. I left him, and his posse, after coffee on Sunday, the steam from the cups like Monument Valley smoke signals across the vast expanse of the wooden coffee table, as the music of Dennis Wilson's "Pacific Ocean Blue" played on his expensive perfectly modulated stereo system. I would have stayed forever, but the friends I came with had work Monday. I drove back home (to suburban NJ) without a whimper, realizing--as was my kick at the time--that sacrificing great things in the name of love was tragically beautiful. Leaving the best time of your life for another week at the Ortho mailroom was just part of the game. I kept my holy aura for weeks til it faded. I even started going to yoga, which was hard to find in suburban NJ in 1990. In short, I kept the flame... for weeks... but.... hey...

And when the same solstice party was held again in the spring we were all excited - I went with such high expectations! Naturally, it turned on me and I had the terrible bad trip. I felt the sort of cursed emptiness, the 'unable to enjoy the party no matter how high and drunk I got' alcoholic depression Jack Kerouac describes so vividly in the second half of Big Sur. (6) The same people were there, same acid, same everything, but meh. Maybe I didn't bring enough whiskey, nor did I horde what I did bring. (For I was sure I wouldn't need it, so free would I feel). My bottle was all gone in minutes, and the stores all closed and far away and me too high to drive. The weather was vile. But more noticeably, no amount of whiskey, ecstasy, shrooms, acid, and hash brownies could alleviate that terrible want - the expectations of greatness dashed the moment. Instead of bringing the party down the hill to the Ortho mailroom, I'd brought the Ortho mailroom to the party. 

Isn't that what's happening to Filmstruck? The Mailroom --seeing the party as a distraction of its workers -- has squashed it due perhaps to not exceeding high expectations. 

Here goes my stress again - the rage against the --
Focus back to me, Erich - Ommmmmm
--
The people here at Glastonbury are beyond wanting or expecting anything, as is--in most of his films (until the arrival of his beloved Theresa Russell)--Roeg himself.  We see some couples canoodling, but Roeg films them mainly for the the wine glass shaped background behind their bobbing profiles. The men don't seem sex-obsessed like they do in Psych-Out and The Trip (though there they had to bow to the drive-in's licentious demands). The "I Need" of American hippiedom becomes the "I am" of Britain at Glastonbury, becomes the "Aummm" of the eternal, as even that is transcended for the oceanic experience. that which is beyond opposites. The one without a second. 

With an attendance of only 7,000, it's easy to see Glastonbury as one of those rare parties where just the right amount of folks showed up, all able to move into an eerie group mind perfection and not step on each other's towels. Roeg captures it all, or some of it. It's okay if he misses important stuff. He notices the way a simple rhythm brought in to the camp site by a travellin' group of friends on a drum gradually, casually, builds (but not ostentatiously) into a little percussion circle kind of scene happening, aways in the middle ground. Roeg's camera (6) feels no need to pick up his tripod and get closer to the group - he's no amateur - not about to chase the willow the wisp, and maybe miss the next one. With his patient eye he never misses a solar flare or bead rattle that comes his way. Soon a bottomless freak is dancing on stage wailing and screaming, but to a slowly increasing beat, looking out into the crowd their not gawking or video-phoning but clapping along- the rhythm and the spirit overtaking them like a gentle liberation, naked people roll around in the mud in strange childlike joy--as if the adult hang-ups stem from mom stopping us from wallowing in the mud naked as children, and now- we're finally doing it, and there's no mom to shame us, and all hang-ups are liberated. We crosscut to the black priest visitor who notes he didn't feel awkward at all, or sense anything pornographic or wrong about it "I was amazed at myself," he says. 

Nature and crowd and performers merge - The flutter of recorders imitate a flock of hysterical geese sitting joining in with Ornette Coleman and it's no longer possible to tell who is in the band, a performer in the crowd, a flock passing east, or just a reveler caught up in the moment. People cover a rolling naked man in mud, and you feel him surrender to the moment' in his eyes you get the sense he's barely believing he's letting this happen and that it's all okay, and it's surrender to the Green Man's caress. It's not the kind of crazed desperate, froth-at-the-mouth zonked nudity of that big would-be crowd-surfer lady during the Stones' Altamont show in Gimme Shelter or the preachy agrarian bathing of Woodstock, but a genuinely altered druidic freak-out, (10) audience and then reuniting them into muddy mass; the Green Man stirs in the moss. This ground, this mud, is sanctified and rich with history - the same mud the ancients' blood was spilled in, the oxide still in there. Some weird American gets onstage with a chicken on his shoulder to babble about freaks and animals or something --he's a sore thumb. America: this need to elaborate and personify and annoy and turn into a schtick, to somehow commodify and personify, it shows just how young we are. Cosmically immature. 

Upper left is "the Maharishi," but it's not the Maharishi of the Beatles, but a different one- who with his white suit and entourage seems like a kind of Jim Jones but whose borderline incomprehensible English rant fills us not with light and love but suspicion. He seems the most uptight in the bunch - needing to show he's got a limo, his way paved forward in flowers and white runners, dressed like he's about to rescue Scarface from the gallows with a heavy bribe and a last-minute reprieve. Maybe he's holy, who can tell from this distance? 

Shorn of the loud American throng, the ugly tourists, the consumerist mindset, the big swath of the pie, here are people who don't seem to be 'consuming' but being. Chickens are not killed but sung to. This is Burning Man before it became a scene, before seagulls on the charred remains of Police Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward). (3) This is Joni Mitchell's dream of getting back to the garden. And she's not there, and maybe that's why. It's British, it's a thing America (and maybe or maybe not even Canada) would need to shucker loose from half its population to embrace. By the time we got there, it would be over, if it was lucky. When it comes to treading lightly, we're bad news. We bring liquor. We love it. We will destroy you with our boozy woozy love. Your corn will be demolished. Boiled down to grease the pen of the artist.

And yet, maybe I'm just talking about me -I was part of that part that's left behind. I failed the America in the 60s class I took sophomore year. And why? Because my friends and I loved getting high and listening to the music of the 60s too much. We made a video for our final project but remember to list our sources. What we gave the teacher was just a video of our band playing "Purple Haze," "Evil Ways," and "Viola Lee Blues,: spiked with talking head inserts pondering "how the 60s will remember the 80s," (oh shit! I just noticed). And also, Dave's and my guitars were out of tune. And also... mainly we all just talked about how drugs don't make you stupid, and yet, we did not--I now realize--sound very smart... not at all.  It pains me to admit it now - to wonder about the shady character of drugs. If a drug is valuable when used correctly (as they seem to be here at Glastonbury) means any sensible American must immediately overuse them, for we seldom turn our back on the idea that if ten is great, taking twenty is twice as great.

But hey, you can't help being a middle class American white boy with enough alcoholism in your genes that you don't consider it a party unless you can't remember it. You blew it, Billy. Altamont is you (by which I mean me). That's why I found Fayre so reassuring. What's stressed here things that American filmmakers would shy away from: God, magic, pagan symbolism, the transpersonal energies that connect all things. When you or I plummet to earth in pain, strapped to a gurney or shaking uncontrollably alone on our couches for days on end, these are the things that reassure us. Prayer aligns our thinking to a higher power, for some reason why just never seem to remember that until we get really low. Now matter how small, if we stop waving our microscopic cillia against the current, we can expand to ocean size in the celestial current. 

That's why it makes holy sense that I'm seeing Glastonbury Fayre on now on the vanishing Filmstruck as part of the Nicolas Roeg package. How fitting. Bye Nicolas Roeg, RIP... RIP Filmstruck... bye bye. It's a hard world for little streaming services as Lillian Gish says in Night of the Hunter might say. Small profit margins are eradicated the way a giant bank-owned tractor eradicates a dustbowl Okie.

But hey, the art goes on and the past isn't going anywhere. No one is going to come take our DVDs away.... yet.  But we can't take 'em with us, after all. Why have the moon when we can have the stars?

The weirdest part: the inclusion a protestant minister holding a small service in a corner of the parking lot area, a sad-eyed gaggle of older folks (nurses, bakers) and some devoted youth, wearily but peacefully stand around him, which Roeg snarkily intercuts with ecstatic krishna dancing and chanting going on elsewhere in the festval. "The meaning of Christ is very simple isn't it?" notes the minister in his cloudiness / cut to the dancers basking in the sun./ back to the flatline priest: "If we want to live, we must die."

It's a cheap shot, which along with the cross burnings the night before seem to indicate some swirling dark current of Antichristian sediment stirring in the mind as a counter-reaction, which considering the eastern understanding of transcending duality, the rapture that lies beyond the separation of this and that, seems far too short-sighted a mind-set for anyone with any real enlightenment in their souls.  The promoters here are glowing like auric kliegs, so why pick on the easy marks. One can't rightly argue against the priest's prayer for "one whole community" even if it is waterlogged with seminary tradition. Crosscut as you will, the man is there. He showed up, right into the lion's den, the fiery furnace, with no pay check or choir to preach to. 

Alas, it ended. We--the hungover Americans (the ones, 'sigh' I came with, I apologize again for Jason's behavior)--just walked/staggered home, draped in our Glastonbury 71 bootleg shirts, declaring "we did it." We "did" the festival scene. Time to curl up with a good book... on tape, and leave the --what is it called now--raves?--to other people's children. Stay hydrated, kids! Peace will come. As for us, Hendrix is dead, man. Altamont was a mess. But it's done. They (the onslaught of bums, pervs, freeloaders, skeeves, speed freaks, psychos, poseurs, dipshits, murfs, horndogs, frat boy rapists, snickering sexually frustrated raincoat brigades, wannabes, and wallies that swarmed the free love buffet once the word got out) ruined any chance for real transformation. We--the cool ones who 'did' the festival scene and supped full at said buffet--drink at home now with the TV on / and all the houselights left up bright, (9). We prefer our community in abstract, via the safety of the screen. 

Click

We only come up for air during the credits. And commercials. But now on other streaming services, there are no commercials, and episodes of our current binged series link up with a 'click to skip credits altogether. So... We do not come up for air anymore--

Not until the season is demolished. Turn Turn. 

But hey, that's later - seasons go as fast as they come. Now, other things than us are going, one by one, a reverse ark, so... one more time. So glad you made it.

Just watch the end again of Glastonbury Fayre if nothing else, before midnight this Thursday... - all that hair shaking through the night, thousands of people bopping up and down to Traffic jamming "Gimme Some Lovin,'" happy as larks, beautiful, free, with room to swing a cat, and all the cats swingin'. Steve Winwood, tall and majestic with cigarette; drummers and keyboardist rapt with the groove-beatific focused smiles. I'd forgotten all about that perfect rapture. I'm so glad it lasted as long as it did, if not forever. Then again, nothing is, not even its absence. The trashy sadness of our present is but a bathroom break in the scheme of the cosmic binge watch. Somewhere too ancient to be totally silenced, I'd wager the Green Man is planning something, but this time less friendly. Ask not who stands within the wicker man's hollow head... Next time, we're all burning. 


PS - 7/19 - Well, good news - Glastonbury is now on Prime; and the Criterion Channel is pretty awesome. So once again, the Lord, in whatever prog rock form you salute Him, cometh thru)

1. We've ascribed that black and white devil clown make-up forever to KISS, which is very American of us, but there you are, it's KISS even if you don't really like KISS.
2. I can't judge man, for I too went this way, from that first glorious rush. They only today announced conclusive proof shrooms treat depression, man I could tell you the stories, that black and white Kansas misery finally opening up into Technicolor OZ in Cinerama. It was my freshman year of college, waking up to joy only to inevitably succumb to the shuddering bad trip misery of not being able to stay there; chasing hit after hit with whiskey after whiskey just trying to feel less like I was in self-conscious hell, never mind about good, while being pawed at by girlfriends and jonesers or, maybe,worse, left alone. Home and stranded, to be terrified by the TV showing Flatliners, tuning in halfway through while having a shroom anxiety attack, thinking death had overtaken me and this movie was like a gateway pamphlet announcing to me, gently, I was about to die. Or was dead.
3. ref. The Wicker Man 
5. That was my power animal mantra during some intense shroom trips in 1987 -the warrior roar, the lone bull walrus breaking through the ice mantle in the Arctic sea, the only living thing for miles in all directions of snowy wasteland, but roaring - wild and proud and free - I am alive! Without fear or loneliness or panic, the warrior roar that makes life your bitch no matter what may come. 
6. The biggest nightmare a drunk can have is when the 'click' never comes (as per Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) no matter how drunk you get - you could be so sloshed you feel it coming up into your eyeballs but are still sober as a judge, and beyond miserable. It's remembering those experiences that help keep up drunks sober through the tempting times. That and the impossibility of stopping once we start, without going into withdrawal (i.e. the DTs) and needing hospitalization. 
9. "The Last Time I saw Richard" - Joni Mitchell 

10. Voodoo is actually part Celtic, part African ritual - as Celts and African slaves were mixed together on Caribbean islands in ancient maritimes. (Hence the similarity too between Irish and Jamaican accents.) 

Miss Chthonic Temple: SUSPIRIA, SABRINA (Chilling Adventures of)

We're finally there, at the point in time wherein women have eclipsed men as their own worst enemy. The Apollonian phallus has crashed into the sea like a blood-caked sandcastle; from its Uranus-ish foam splashback emerges a whole new tower: the blood-soaked erect white goddess totem, Tamm-Pon!

Symbolizing birth, the shedding 

of the unfertilized eggs, Tamm-Pon!

The eclipse of the moon that recom-

mences the cycle, Tamm-Pon!

See it rise! 

Amphitrite! Kali! Asherah! 

See its bloody exit unleash!

Tamm-Pon!

Paglian chthonic floods, 

coastal regions washed off 

Gai's once pristine uterine coasts

In theaters: the SUSPIRIA remake, made by the guy who did Call Me by Your Name. Netflix is a show called THE CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA, something that by far was America's Halloween post-trick-or-treating binge of 2018.  Earlier this year there was Hereditary. What else do you need, sister? To write your own story yourself?  Did you think men would be so naive as to let a girl write the story of a woman's magic triumph? These shows cost money, little lady. Munn--nay! Go ask your husbands for some and take a good look at it - men are on it! Menn--nah. 

We men haven't listed to a voice other than our own in so long, we can't really pass the talking stick of our own volition. So, sorry, but that's one phallus you'll need to actively pry from our metallic grip. It'll take more than beach erosion and asteroids to end this ceaseless filibuster we call dinosaur patriarchy!

But hey, women star and feminine sensibilities pervade, rather fearlessly in fact, relative to past witchcraft movies. I gleaned from the imagery presented, for example, a dark feminine secret: that bedknobs and broomsticks might be associated with witchcraft because they are items--always close to hand as part of her womanly 'duties'--a young girl may safely 'employ' towards her first orgasm (alone at night, or alone in the house, incorporated during the day's chores, presuming the menfolk out of moaning range). And her first orgasm never really stops once it starts, does it, grrls? It's a fire that can destroy the whole 'phallic thing' with a single 'O'. Is this not why censors of the past so feared it? 

Maybe they were right!



Several of my film geek friends love the new SUSPIRIA --and the Erich-targeted Alamo Drafthouse ads on my Facebook never shut up about how much their own geek contingent adores it, too. For my sins, I saw it, right there at the Alamo, a mere week after seeing Climax, which was a much better Suspiria remake, less plot similarity but more aesthetic similarity which is way more important. And I like that it's (Suspiria, I mean) totally boy-free: there's no romance, no sex, no pregnancies, no walks of shame, not even a throw-away glance from a pretty young houseboy like we had in the original! This new version switches from a co-ed ballet academy to an acclaimed modern dance troupe (in other words, halfway between the original's ballet and Climax's street dance troupe) and unlike the original there's actual dance performances, with audiences. But something that made the original great is lost --the lurid, nightmarish color and sense of genuine menace. Terror, bold artificial color and loudness have been replaced by body horror, Eastern European drabness, and long-winded yet still muddled psychosocial allegory. The threat now is not to the soul and the skin but the ligaments, and joints. The scharzwald Hansel and Gretel primary color and rock and roll death rattles of the original are replaced by gray rundown 1977 Berlin that already feels nostalgic for the gold grey misery of the Wall (it stands here right outside the Hene Markos Dance Academy, replete with tasteful graffiti) and idiosyncratic and wildly misguided Thom Yorke alt-wimp balladry. In order to properly justify its political ambitionz, this remake is an extra hour longer than the original, making it perhaps the longest horror film since The Shining, just with all the scary parts and cool aeshtetics tastefully extracted to make room for more strained political metaphor-whoring.

Further differences abound: the exposition-history-relating professors and psychiatrists played by Udo Kier (at his most devastatingly handsome) and Rudolf Schündler in the original are now combined into one old duffer played by Tilda Swinton in good old man make-up but an unconvincing falsetto voice. S/he spends great swaths of time reading the diagram-packed diary of a missing dance student patient (Chloë Grace Moretz --whose insane babbling in his office apartment is one of the few highlights) and wasting our time watching from on high as he putters back and forth across the Berlin wall to his country house while Yorke moans in the background, mistaking relentless melancholy for enigmatic portent. 

The reason it's set in 1977 soon becomes apparent: so we can overhear lots of TVs on in the background of scenes set in hotel lobbies, apartments, and bars as German terrorists try to free the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof quartet via a plane hijacking (as seen in Uli Edel's Baader-Meinhof Complex.) Shoehorn that in and surely critical acclaim--and some kind if discernible point--must follow! 

It's interesting that the film presumes there are connections to be made, yet never really makes them, as it finds out too late that there is no real link between the aetheric consumption of Suzy Bannon's youthful vigor by the evil unseen Helena Markos and the crunching up of a generation of pro-Arab anarchists (c. 1965-75) rebelling agains their parents (1945-65) who are pro-Israel as a rebellion against their own, i.e. the Nazis (1933-45). Back and forth we go, grandchildren uniting with grandparents against the middle- a tale as old as time, but one completely lost on Guadignino

Ferrara's Addiction got deeper, farther, in 1/20th as long with 1/00th the budget just from filming a trip to the 1995 NYC Holocaust exhibit; and even then it was perfectly contextualized within the the vampire grad student plot. Here, instead of actually making new connections, or even borrowing old ones, the film just hopes this old duffer's puttering around drab streets and reading diaries full of arcane markings, and cafes with terrorist TV and shots of the Wall, will somehow cohere into something profound. Like throwing a bunch of unopened ingredients into an oven and expecting to pull a cake out. Perhaps Guadignino presumes we'll one day be pausing and doing a close reading on all these hand-written open pages, to unscramble archaic clues the way those David Lynch pronoiacs do on Twin Peaks. In my case, good sir, Luca presumes in error. All I'm going to do is point and say "look, the director has no cake; the oven's not even on!" 

Thanks to the pre-show videos at the Alamo, I knew before the movie started that its screenwriter David Kajganich had done research by watching videos of and by female European modern dance choreographers from the same era, soaking up their worldly artistic views and goals, before and after the war. A lot of the choreography, credos and sociological underpinnings seem imported wholesale from those videos. The dancing in the film, the movements we do see seems legit, like they worked at it. Dakota Johnson especially gives it 100%, and there is some really excellent sound design: her every sexy breath and the whoosh of air from her movements can be felt in the collective audience's solar plexus. But the director and editor seldom trust a single dance movement, a jump or a spin, to play out in a simple medium shot, i.e. so we could actually see the whole body begin and complete a movement, as the choreographer intended. That doesn't give them nearly enough to do! So  they can add thirty crosscuts to random things like faces of those watching, strange angles, other movements by other people in other areas of the school, stranger's faces feeling the magic of the movement, occult artwork, architecture, close-ups of bending limbs, feet, hands, eyes--and then, maybe--if we're lucky--back to the dancer finishing their movement. It's the kind of thing that would probably make Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly so mad they'd put on masks, sneak into the bay and cut off the editor's fingers with a razor edged clapboard. 

That's not to say there aren't moments where this rapid-fire cutting works, just not very many. There's one sublime moment: while teaching her a movement, Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) touches Suzy Banon's (Johnson's) shoulder blades, arms, and legs before she does some difficult movement in practice, injecting some matriarchal chthonic oomph into her muscles, the force of which --while invisible to the eye--is felt via clever sound design (where we feel air currents in our lower chakras--a real advantage to seeing this in the theater with a good sound system) and quick cuts to clued-in dancers and instructors all throughout the building, as some (dark) matriarchal force blows through the building like a puff of wind.  That sort of thing is eerie-sexy-cool, but then while she dances we cut to seeing the girl who tried to escape being contorted with breaking bones in linked puppet agony mirroring Suzy's movements, and back to those dancer and instructor's faces as the magic happens, and on and on until it's like beating a dead horse back to life for no reason other than to beat it to death again. 

The original Suspiria murders were grand, terrifying, artistic and disturbing, because Argento knew to keep the camera focused on the action. He didn't feel the need to crosscut to five other things. In the first murder, for example, we only cross-cut between the murder, close-ups of the knife going in, and the roommate pounding on their neighbor's doors, screaming. In the remake we'd probably also cut to the interior of every single neighbor's apartment as they debate answering or calling the cops, as well as Suzy back in her cab driving to a hotel, and the janitor out having a smoke, and the guards on the wall, until all the dread and shock was drained out, replaced by some half-assed grand statement about the Cold War, feminism, or something. 

What this remake reminded me most of, actually, was the recent Atomic Blonde starring Charlize Theron. The point of that film may have been that 70s Berlin was a mess, or that James MacAvoy is a drink best served on a short leash, but it was also about how intoxicating Theron and Sofia Boutella look under red and blue lights, in loose-knit sweaters, kissing in a neon-drenched club bathroom foyer (left). Similarly, this Suspiria remake's point might be that 70s Berlin was a mess but it's really about how sexy Dakota is when she's writhing around on the floor, her grey-white-peach accented skin making a warm counterpoint to her brutalist gray gym clothes, her breathing creating a nice swooshing circular sound design like she's conducting great swaths of air in and around herself in some shamanic ecstatic circuit. 

One thing that made the original, as well as Halloween and Psycho, so iconic, was the presence of a female voice behind the scenes, to correct, perhaps, countless irritants as to what women would or wouldn't say in a situation and how they would say it. Daria Nicolodi, Debra Hill, Paula Pell, Alma Reville, Gale Ann Hurd all helped make the films they worked on the classics they are. We see what happens to Argento when Daria isn't there (in his later work), he just goes in for gory murders without much style or interest in the rest. Daria supplied him with a needed Jungian counterbalance that made good films into classics. In the documentary accompanying the film (on my DVD), it's clear she brought the Jungian fairy tale weirdness, the dreamy Alice in Wonderland-esque haunted quality to Suspiria' and after they split up, that kind of magic begins to fade away from his work like a dream. In the remake there might be a lot of women in the cast, but few behind the scenes, thus we have to wait for the big climactic reveal which--upon closer examination--makes little sense--for any kind of chthonic payoff. Don't think twice, it's all over! Good lord, let's go get a drink at a bar with service faster than the Alamo's, where your refill isn't likely to come until the credits. 

For all it's length, half of the story in Suspira seems left out, things we'd have rather seen than all this 90s mope rock Mennonite funeral wandering and old man notebook reading, precinct-bothering and wall-traversing. A good woman behind the scenes could have ripped out at last 1/2 the script, and maybe added some things that actually made sense. Oh and some occasional forays into scariness would be nice. 

That's not to say the sheer abundance of grand old German broads in the cast isn't a great thing, or that the men who made this Suspiria don't love and appreciate strong women, but maybe that's the problem? A woman writer would know how and why women are both scared and scary; they'd go places a man--even a misogynist-- wouldn't dare without a woman leading the way. The male auteur voice here hems and haws around the edges, a squeamish virgin trying to work up the nerve to plunge deep into the menses pool if he wants to finally break his seal. We see the coven carousing and swilling food and liquor at the local restaurant, but from behind the window, out in the street, unable to hear what they are saying-- as if small children left out of adult conversations. We don't get to see female-empowered evil as an unknowable, strange otherworldly force but as a kind of henhouse pyramid scheme, where young women sacrifice their youth so that their elders can act like five year-olds at ein Kindergeburtstag. In the original, the presence of evil was like an ice cold razor blade, we could feel it slicing through the coiled kundalini serpent down at the base of our spine. Every shard of rain in the opening scenes of Suzy's first night arrival in Germany cut deep. It was like long thin razors were falling between the tall trees, like we were leaning over a ledge, plunging down an old elevator, or imagining being dragged along concrete. This frisson transcended misogyny or the body or any kind of normal human fear. It was the fear of a real abstract maternal threat. Here the pain is all dancing, twisting Red Shoes misery. It's so over the top and abstracted it becomes numbing. It's not evil as a malevolent force but as mere Saw-style sadism. The rain doesn't sting it just wears you down. Thom Yorke does not howl and rattle metal sheets and whisper "witch!" in a pursed hiss through the echo chambre, instead he just does Radiohead sans energy, proving without the band to goose him out of his shell, there's just a mopey little boy trying to seem as sad as Elliot Smith.

 There is nothing to fear here in this new Suspiria, only to mourn. We mourn for fear.

On the other hand, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina now on Netflix, at least has the willingness to look under the dark rocks. The story of a young witch in a Salem-like town about to have the occult version of her blood-spattered bot-mitzvah, Sabrina builds up to her big moment of womanhood: signing Satan's book during a deep woods midnight ceremony that involves--among other things--the sacrifice of a goat. The catch? Sabrina is only half a witch. Her mom was human. And she balks at the last second, even though the goat's already been killed... and why? Because she has some pie-eyed faux-Wahlberg chump of a human boyfriend at her human high school named (dark lord have mercy), "Harvey Kinkel" (grown-Disney kid Ross Lynch) and she doesn't want to have to give him up and go to a new school. Oy! Girls can be real stupid. 

But, in a show that positions boys so far to the side they're as superfluous as wives in a war movie, we're put in a very unique spectator position.  The presence of this Harvey, this lump of proletariat Jungenfleisch, makes an interesting en verso to all the buzzkill fiancees in films like Gunga Din. The whole show seems to want this boy gone. Even his dopey name signifies what our reaction should be. He's the Ralph Bellamy to Satan's Cary Grant. Sabrina clings to him like a security blanket while the Satanic magickal side of her nature--where our interests lie-- ever beckons, luring her and therefore the show away from banal Archie-ism into something sexy and October-dark and cool.  We really don't need another show about a girl who turns her back on her own blossoming career/powers to support some half-written half-witted, 100% sincere 'perfect' big eye-lashed boy. Harvey doesn't even have a motorcycle! I mean, his dad works/worked in the local mine. How townie can you get? Gurl, he gonna knock you up and drag you down, like Lo's new husband Dick in Lolita. 

There's an unwritten cardinal rule when writing female protagonists, something--alas--many showrunners and writers only learn the hard way--no one likes the boyfriend of the heroine. The only way we like him is if she meets him for the first time when we do, i.e. over the course of the film or episode. If she starts out with a boyfriend, we don't like him. And if we like him, we don't like her. This is always true, in life and in TV/movies. Thus, this Harvey character--while innocuous and sweet--is her albatross, a sash weight affixed on a fledgling hawk so it can't escape the nest. Anyone who loved a beautiful girl in college knows him well, for her hotness makes it impossible for her to not have had a handsome stupid townie boyfriend in high school, the type who was popular in their small town, and so never bothered to grow up or apply to colleges. A major downside to dating a hot girl (or guy) is that you have to constantly stay on your A-game, as everyone will hit on them wherever you go, all the time, and some of them are bound to be better options for her, so just fighting with her at a party is an opportunity for three guys to jump in as her knight in shining armor. There's not much you can do, since if you fight or act jealous you just make it worse. The Harvey townie human boyfriend from highschool therefore, was always a good source of exploitation. He'd buy you drinks and bring back bottles to kind of ingratiate himself amidst his (semi-ex) girlfriend's new suitors. Instinctively trying to pull her down from her limitless horizons into his same go-nowhere small town quicksand he's stuck in, the last straw is the chocolate diamond engagement ring (he went to Jared!) he brings up to her one weekend, the last desperate swing. And if it works, holy shit, she really is as dumb as he is. Maybe it's destiny. 

Either way, among things Sabrina will do other than sign the book is--as the series progresses--raise Harvey's brother from the dead (just because her dear Harvey misses him) despite it being one of those "sometimes dead is better" deals-- and slit a fellow witch's throat to do so. Why? Because she doesn't want Harvey to suffer. Of course she ends up making it way worse. We're clearly meant to realize she's not nearly as perfect as she thinks she is. Those familiar with youth dystopias will surely remember Katniss running high and low like a nervous mom to protect her little Peeda in The Hunger Games. But while Lawrence invested Katniss with a kind of dour humorless resolve, at least she didn't expect us to back her up and presume she was 'right' to do so. Kiernan Shipka, on the other hand, cocks her heads and purses her lips with a kind of false pride in her own smug cutesy poo morality, as if confident she will always be judged 'adorable' by a jury of her peers; and we're regularly put in the position of morally ambivalent observer, relishing the evil around her for its style and cool, rather than rooting for Sabrina with her smarmy Sullivan's Travels/Barton Fink-style weepiness over the glory of the common man. What's not to celebrate in one of her rival's enjoying a luxurious orgy before her sacrifice at the hands of the Satanic coven as the pièce de résistance for their horrifyingly literal combination of Thanksgiving and Catholic communion? If Sabrina thinks we're going to side with her third wave feminist virtue signaling over their Nietzschean exultation, she best think again!

And that's what makes this show great. Aside from the sprawling, beautiful art direction and framing which takes full use of HD's ability to clarify darker color schemes, it's unafraid to go pretty frickin' dark in its deeds, while never putting on the dour self-important face of something like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones. There's plenty of dark comedy but it's all played deadpan straight. The witches here make no bones about being aligned with the Devil and it's not condemned overtly as morally wrong (since the humans are even worse - hanging witches from trees, even in their current township). In sum, this isn't Tabitha and Dick York; these bitches got a hotline to Hell. Satan himself pops up now and again to suck the soul right out of an unlucky miner. Hell is literally a place under their feet and the honesty and directness of that, evidenced in the Satanic statue adorning the foyer of Witch School, and the way Sabrina doesn't want to turn her back on evil, totally (since it's 'her heritage') is the film's great strength. The Comics Code Authority would shit themselves if they saw this back in the day, and still should. Let what they did to EC be done unto them! Hail our half-inflated Dark Lord!



As with the pro-occult 'overdosing makes you so cool'-subtext of Twilight, humanity is seen as rather anemic and dull by contrast to the supernatural. There it was the vampire trying to keep her from changing ("you don't want any part of this" as they say); here it's the reverse. Why she keeps hanging around that drip of a human boy instead of spreading her limitless wings with kids more in her league, only her writers know but hey --it keeps us watching. The idea that anyone would cherish that life (homework, sock hops) over the supernatural is absurd. We, as moral humans, don't need to be 'saved' from evil like Katniss needs to save lil Peeda. We need to be saved from the forces trying to save us. We already know what it's like not to sign Satan's book: life bubbles thick and sludgy, one 'blurp' at a time. There's nothing noble or 'decent' about it. It's why we've escaped to this show in the first place. The human side is so lame on this show that not even a non-binary Lachlan Watson as an Amelia Earhart-ish ghost ancestor of one of Sabrina's human friends can save the mortals from an unenviable torpor.

And most importantly, the evil witch adult cast is sublime: Michelle Gomez (above), as Satan's evil henchwoman, hangs back from the action in the guise of Sabrina's (human) school counsellor, to make sure Sabrina has enough rope to hang herself, and so be lured into the fold. BBC Dr. Who fans of course know how awesome Gomez is at playing characters who inhabit her body, rather than 'are' it --she was the female incarnation of the Doctor's long-time archetypal shadow, 'The Master,' and it's perhaps Gomez's brilliance in the role that led to the new Dr. Who being reconstituted--alas rather lamely in some social preachiness as Jodi Whitaker; and she's even better here, as the sexually alive deep-breathing agent of Satan. Apparently her master (she's really "Lillith"), the Dark Lord is taking the long way around to win Sabrina into signing the book, and it's this arc that constitutes the general thrust of the show. Gomez is, as Pauline Kael would say, a dirty kick, luxuriating in her own evil. We root for her wild schemes every step of the way since they're so much cooler, and find Sabrina's smirky hypocrisy and sense of busybody superiority more and more insufferable by contrast. . 

At the same time, we realize this is a topsy-turvy realm where we can almost suspect some masonic secret message encoded in the tree bark, gearing us all towards a kind of meta-Satanic paganism. The rush of evil, in other words, transcends the screen, and just as Sabrina is being systematically corrupted and morally compromised, so are we being trained to see wrong as right, up as down, darkness as light, square as round... If Sabrina cannot survive corruption, what chance have we? And why indeed, would we want to? Jack Chick pamphlets must be fluttering up from their landfills at this mainstream 'come true' conspiracy. A thousand paranoid conspiracy web sites all converging on some magical date of doom, when the evil no longer hides and wrong is officially made right. 

According to Suspiria's big climax the best we can wish for, as humans marooned outside the Satanic Coven of Cool, is either blessed forgetfulness or peaceful death. And maybe there's no difference (we can't remember).

With evil, at least, there's dancing.*


. 

Speaking of Witches (respectfully, for they are always listening) do check these out: 

Erich K's HEREDITARY Witchcraft Conspiracy DSM-IV Reader (Sept. 18, 2018)
Bell, Book, and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH (Feb 23, 2017)

Age of Asherah: ROSEMARY'S BABY (May, 2014)

Genealogy of Flies: HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, LORDS OF SALEM + My Own Witch Ancestry (2012)

Behold with Terror, and Weep with Joy: THE UNDEAD (1957) (June 2012)

* Erich Kuersten is still getting over the bitterness he feels towards Giuliani after the brutal implementation of NYC's Cabaret Law in 1998.

Fresh Picks: 13 Newly-Added Horror Movies on Prime (Halloween-curated Marathon Festival for Lost Causes and Autumnal Catalepsies)

Halloween is here! And out east things are autumnal like they never were last year - it feels like it actually is Halloween and I'm excited to... well, sit around and watch tons of horror films, because here in NYC there's too many screaming kids during the day and vomiting amateurs at night. But luckily Amazon's got our number. For horror films alone, Amazon Prime RULEZ.

Especially now that Filmstruck is going to be shut down (to either make bigger Xmases bonuses for their top execs or because they hate art, because art reminds them too much of how swinish and short-sighted they are), Amazon Prime is more essential than ever. Prime doesn't have Criterion or a lot of of older bigger studio films but they have some (like THE AWFUL TRUTH and WIZARD OF OZ) and if they don't have something now, they'll have it tomorrow. The other day I was reading about INITIATION OF SARAH, the CARRIE-inspired 1971 TV movie starring Kay Lenz. I was thinking hmmm - I'd like to check it out, but it wasn't on Prime and I don't dig watching films on youtube (too blurry). I debated options and then literally the next day there, viola! There it is in a brand new beautiful restoration on Prime, just for me, like Prime heard I was interested via some Siri interconnected listening device (or noting I did a search for it). More and more crazy great stuff keeps coming like that, every week more and more and more. Prime hears me! It hears us all! Praise Prime!

"bad weird, like Trenton" (from Return of the Living Dead)

As I always preface, though traipsing down Prime's vast alleyways can be addictive, beware! The amount of new independent shot-on-video horror film nowheresville nonsense is almost incomprehensible. If it was a video store, Amazon Prime's streaming horror collection alone would be the size of Trenton, and, like Trenton itself, mostly the wrong kind if scary. Trust your guide and don't make eye contact with anything shot on video unless you're actually in the film, or I tell you different. Stick with me, man, and hold on tight. Things is gonna get weird. But not bad weird, not like Trenton. Or misogynist, like Camden. Good weird, like Scarfolk.

(PS - As always, all images are screenshots taken from Prime for quality assurance.) Many Halloween favorites that are listed as seeable on Prime--City of the Dead, Horror Express, The Terror, Messiah of Evil--are actually in awful formats, taken from blurry video source material; others, like Seven Deaths in a Cat's Eye and Phenomena are from fine sources but the transfer is jumpy. The ones listed here are all bonny to the quick so fear not in that. Fear not... in that.

 1. THE COMPANY OF WOLVES

(1984) Dir. Neil Jordan 

*** / Amazon Image - A

A weird hybrid of "Red Riding" variations and Freudian-feminist horror, written by Angela Carter (author of the classic feminist Bluebeard revision, "The Bloody Chamber"), with the basic original fairy tale plot being meta-abstracted through more consciously menstrual filters into a series of stories-within-stories, dreamed by Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) about a wolf beset village a long time ago, in which a series of Red Riding variations are experienced or told as fairy tales by her, her older sister (Georgia Slowe), her father (David Warner) and her kindly grandmother (Angela Lansbury). Wolf girls come out of wells, severed paws turn into human hands, and through it all Rosaleen comes to power by using her womanly warmth and wiles to get the better of predatory male sexuality. All the exteriors are shot on a vast indoor soundstage and hauntingly lit and filmed, for maximum ethereal/earthy fairy tale mystique. Huge gnarled old growth tree roots rap around jagged rocks and twisted paths lead through all sorts of hazards where wolves and handsome foreign dandies with long teeth may be lie in wait to charm poor Rosaleen as she travels to and from grandma's remote but cozy cabin.  Stephen Rea cameos in a rather lumbering story-within-the-story involving a pregnant spurned gypsy girl crashing the wedding of her upper class lover and turning everyone into wolves (its feminist vengeance angle is soon subsumed in transformation make-up overkill) and--though I don't remember him it at all--Terence Stamp has a cameo as 'the devil.'

The real Halloween selling point for my money isn't the wolf transformations, which go on far too long, and then end with a bunch of actual dogs running around, but the brilliant sun-dappled old growth atmosphere of the sets, all giant gnarled tree roots, jagged rocks and other strange little impasses that make travel a matter of a kind of Jungian deep penetration into the unknown of the self, where every trip beyond the borders of the village means you may or may not find your way back, either in one piece, or ever. And the Amazon streaming quality is first rate, capturing a cozy amount of film grain in the image that makes it all feel alive on a movie screen midnight show full of strange little beings and forest mist.

Cons: The curly-haired local boy (Shane Johnstone) who follows Rosaleen around, like a lovesick townie woodsman: I confess I have an irrational loathing for curly-haired boys, especially those who pester the young hottie childhood sweetheart, now grown cool and sophisticated, and so clearly destined for things way beyond his narrow townie ken. I get that go-nowhere hometown school exes are a part of any cute woman's maturation, as is dealing with the unpleasant task of ditching them and moving onto better prospects. Unfortunately we spend way too much screen time with this one, like we're somehow supposed to root for his dopey stalker 'sincerity' rather than the dashing and destructive wolves about. 

2. TWINS OF EVIL

(1971) Directed by John Hough

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A

Their Draculas and Frankensteins aren't on Prime, but we got a few beautifully transferred early 70s side dishes from Catsle Karnstein, i.e. sex and violence-streaked Carmilla-ish vamp films like Twins of Evil. My problem with Hammer, and so many British films, is often that use way too many exterior countryside scenes, and the stillness, wan sky and muddy fields of the British countryside looks mighty depressing even when the colors aren't faded to muddiness. Now, finely transferred to HD, the old growth forest is dappled with thin rays of light through the mist betwixt the old growth and tombs and girls in nightshirts scampering hither and yon, and the HD deep blacks of the cobwebbed crypt recesses... man, this is what Halloween is all about, whether they have it in England or not. Here Peter Cushing stars as a repressed pastor who likes burning corrupted peasant girls at the stake rather than daring risk the king's displeasure by doing the same to the real evil in the village, the local lord, Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas), who always has an eye out for any local lovelies willing to leave the banal daytime exteriors behind and join his vampy coven. Cushing's borderline-perverse over-protectiveness towards his sexy twin nieces (Playboy playmates Madeline and Mary Collinson) drives one to run away and join Karnstein's kinky vampire club. The other daughter is 'good' which means she obeys the patriarchy and clutches crosses (a habit that later saves her life). Kathleen (Sister Ruth!) Byron is the twins' devoted nanny; David Warbeck is the music teacher at the local girls' school, fighting to keep the 'Brotherhood' from burning up all his students.

The real star though is the lavish Satanic atmosphere, including some very impressive Gothic sets, spookily lit and cobwebbed) and the twins are sexy in a fresh, American kind of way, gifted with the usual crisp upper crust voices that makes every Hammer heroine seem so capable, sultry, imperiously intellectual and swaggericious (were they dubbed? Hammer won't tell). So if you've a yen to get into the era when Hammer was taking advantage of looser censorship but hadn't yet given up on solid writing, acting and vivid Gothic atmosphere, know that 1971 was the magic lesbian-vampire year, and Twins is one of the two best of Hammer's non-Drac vamp films. May it compel you to seek out the other of the year's entrants in Hammer's Karnstein/Carmilla trilogy, The Vampire Lovers. And then, backtracking to 1960, the best of all the Hammers (even though Dracula does not appear), The Brides of Dracula. (Neither is on Prime streaming, but Vampire Circus is, and recommended though the transfer quality is very uneven).

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

(2012) Dir. James Watkins 

*** (Amazon Image- A)

My one main caveat with Corman's Poe films is that the sets were never dark enough to be scary. You could see every corner as if AIP feared that --unless every patch of screen was filled--viewers might want their money back. It was the same with early Hammer films. In fact Halloween and Friday the 13th were the first films in awhile to show how extra-creepy it is having darkness seem to swallow the characters from all sides. And now, he's a new Hammer film, offering interesting proof how truly effective pitch blackness can be in spooking up old mansions. Suddenly all the portentous gloom hinted at in gothic texts read in the dead of night to feeble illumination, comes slamming home. It all makes sense. Here we get that as our hero, a young lawyer sent to catalogue a recently deceased widow's estate, stays alone in a vast dark mansion, with only a single candle for company, zipping back and forth from strange sound to strange sound, the flickering candles every swallowed on all sides by the imposing inky dark.

 Though heavily indebted to The Ring as far as the old "unravel the mystery and give her missing corpse a burial and maybe the killings will stop before they get to your doorstep" storyline, what counts here is that--despite the immense attention to Edwardian period detail--enough to suffocate any ordinary picture--is that Woman in Black is never stuffy and really rather ripping in its moody, familiar way (making excellent use of that modern advancement, the motor car, as a key plot hinge). Daniel Radcliffe is surprisingly solid as the junior solicitor and the setting- a dark decaying mansion perched in the midst of a thick mucky tarn, in a remote, fearful hamlet where kids are dying like flies--is vividly, unforgettably etched. There's a great metaphysical shocker ending involving a speeding train, and the woman in black turns out to be a vindictive wraith like Eva Graps and her ghost daughter. She's a genuine fright, albeit one with the bad habit of opening her mouth far too wide too fast when she starts screaming, as if that was somehow scarier than her just quietly smiling or very... slowly.. creeping forward... or slowly beckoning one out into the tarn to be sucked under, or a dozen other possibilities rather than the old 'freakishly super wide open / loud scream' trick which is by now so played out it's a bummer Watkins didn't trust the already strong sense of Lewtonian less-is-more genuine creepiness he was getting from the darkness alone. That said, it's easy to forgive, because the darkness is so all-consuming.

This is especially due to a ripping extended sequence wherein Radcliffe is alone in the house trying to sort through the estate papers, ever distracted by strange noises, never sure if he's imagining it, if its the wind (in one broken window, a crow got in and started a nest on the bed). You get the eerie feeling in this stretch that you usually only get when you're alone for a long time in a very empty quiet house and suddenly you realize night has fallen and all the lights are off. Radcliffe feels totally alone in these moments, we don't even feel like we are there. The darkness never lifts beyond a thin gray, and Watkins wisely refrains from using any music in this whole stretch, so that the silence and the little noises in it gradually swell in our brains and we see faces in the dim reflections of the wallpaper and shadows; we feel Radcliffe's mounting fear as he runs from one weird noise to the next. And when he finally gets an ally in the darkness-shrouded town (Ciarán Hinds) with whom to have glass of whiskey, it's only then that the darkness begins, ever so slightly, to lift. Screenplay is by Jane Goldman, based on a novel by Susan Hill! And it's not long.

4. THE EVIL 

(1978) Dir. Gus Trikonis

*1/2 (bad movie rating: ***1/2) - Amazon Image - B

An undersung New World bad movie gem from 1978, The Evil is clearly meant to ride the late-70s obsession with Jay Anson's 1977 runaway bestseller The Amityville Horror (beating the movie version into theaters by a year). A tale of a big Civil War-era mansion sitting on the trapdoor to Hell, Richard Crenna stars as an off-center youth center therapist planning on opening a school/halfway house there, bringing in some of his counsellors to help clean it up (which seems very uncool of him). Things go wrong early on as the boiler incinerates the drunk caretaker (Ed Bakey), and soon everyone else is rolling around pretending to be rocked by malevolent house quakes, or given freak electrical shocks (pin scratches on the celluloid), and--because it's New World--there's an attempted ghost rape of a girl (Lynne Moody) trying to take a nap on the upstairs cot.


As the Crenna's girlfriend and fellow counsellor, Joanna Petit (right)-- rocking some of the grooviest clothes, hair and two-shaded lipstick of the entire 70s decade--is open enough to the spirit realm that she bothers to read the ancient journal that spells out what's going on (and has an accompanying 'good' ghost to guide her), but Crenna won't believe her or even entertain the idea. He's too busy mansplaining reality and, eventually, like Pandouchebag's box, opening the locked door in the basement floor. Wind rushes up, the Satanic laughter echoes, all the doors and windows lock shut, and Crenna has to think fast to explain it all aways as wind gusts. Fan favorite Andrew Pine--that quintessentially 70s laid-back lanky hipster (Grizzly)--is one of the more pro-active counsellors who tries to facilitate an escape over the side of the third floor balcony once it's clear Crenna has led them all into a locked box of doom yet still can't quite accept who's actually behind it (prefix a the letter 'D' if you're at all confused what 'the evil' is).

Sure, it's not a good film and it take a few beats too long to get started (old Bakey seems to wander around that old building, taking a gallon of slugs from his half-pint hip flask, through lengthy opening credits) but-- once that trapdoor opens-- the action just keeps getting faster, wilder and weirder until you're shrieking with delight (I refuse to give away the totally out-there ending, so you'll just have to trust me). In other words, it's the best kind of bad there is, and so 70s you can set your watch by it. The Amazon print is fine, if a little faded but hey, aren't we all? (If you want to find more of the 'possessed mansion killing guests one-by-one' movies that were all the rage in 1978, might I be so bold as to recommend The Legacy).

5. INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN

(1957) Dir. Edward L. Cahn

** / Amazon Image - C-

In case you don't know, this was once a TV perennial much liked by we kids (it even had our beloved Riddler, Frank Gorshin), then it disappeared into the legal twilight never to be heard from on VHS or DVD ever. Not unlike Corman's The Undead and Bert I. Gordon's Amazing Colossal Man it appeared only occasionally on AMC back in the 90s, when they still showed older movies. And Now - viola! Here it is, on Prime. You may not know it, but baby, it's a miracle!

The bad news: it turns out that, unlike Night of Terror, Saucer Men isn't very good after all. Most of it is spent with not terribly charismatic "teenagers" trying to convince the adults of their hick town that little green men are running amok in the cow pastures they trespass on for use as a lover's lane (must smell so romantic). While the military tries to cover it up (and to break into the saucer using blowtorches), these genius aliens kill teenagers by injecting them with alcohol through retractible hypodermic fingernails and are adept at hiding the evidence of their crimes to make it look like the work of drunk teens. Also, their hands detach and crawl around on their own, (with eyeballs on the top).  A bull has a blast though when he runs into one, but for the audience it gets old pretty quick watching as they try and explain all this to the cops (we spend way too much with a charismatically-challenged young couple who take it on themselves to good samaritan their way into official military business, and not nearly enough time with the aliens.)

It's too bad, since the aliens are actually pretty effective, especially from a distance as they bobble around in the dark (filmed at night rather than day-for-night, which makes a huge difference). Looking not unlike what the real greys have been described as (child-size, with bulbous heads -above right), seeing them all bobbing around in a group in the middle of the field lit only be headlights is pretty creepy, like if you've been abducted and had your memory wiped, maybe it would trigger total recall. The whole angle of the military covering it all up is on point too. Was this movie made with government assistance as disinformation, to make anyone who sees little green men seem crazy? Officer, why won't you believe me? Bruce Rux, he knows! 

Seen through my adult eyes, today, that "why won't you believe me??" nagging at cops and parents gets really old and tired, but as a kid who loved this film I remember I really related to their frustration and desperation. Still, I never understood why people who see aliens and UFOs call the cops. What are the cops gonna do, arrest a gaggle of hyper-advanced aliens with detachable crawling hands and retracting hypodermic needle fingernails? They probably don't have fingerprints. The cops can't enforce crimes that don't exist. Either way, existence or not, good or bad, dull or dynamic, I'm glad it's finally back from the void.

6. JEEPERS CREEPERS

(2001) Dir. Victor Salva

*** / Amazon Image - A

I know this one's pretty well-known, but I wanted to give it a little shout anyway, as it doesn't quite get the respect it should as modern pastiche classic that offers one of the more pleasantly scary slow-burn opening stretches in recent horror movie memory. It all starts innocently during a long car ride down a single lane highway through the South to (or from college), a brother and sister (Gina Phillips and Justin Long) bicker like any normal pair of siblings who've practiced the same time-killing license plate-naming games over and over on shared long car rides since they were kids; casually running razzing and nerve-grating gags on each other while obliquely discussing personal events like mom's depression and big sister's break-up (his made-up on-the-spot country song about her boyfriend is hilarious). The writing and acting is so good, the real-time tick-tockality so well-orchestrated, we feel like we're kickin' it in the backseat, staring out the window, half-listening, half-guessing what hick stretch of almost totally-deserted one lane highway they happen to be on. Then... they drive past some scary looking guy grabbing what looks like a human body wrapped in a bloody sheet out the back of his truck. From then on.... the tension and weirdness starts accruing, but so well-measured over what feels like real-time that we're never not 'in' it with these two kids.

So many memorable moments and details: the grinding of the car gears; the tied-down trunk; the sudden wing erupting from the roadkill demon; the head landing on the hood; Justin beholding the vast amount of missing persons notices on the police bulletin board; the termite attention paid to the precinct's cops and denizens, and the eccentric locals: the people at the diner; a surprise cameo from Eileen Brennan as the shotgun-toting cat lady; the sad-eyed psychic with her strangely calming terror; the tracking shot along the jail where they do the head count "show me some skin" (the bird being flipped just gets a fine "Thank you, I love you too" from the good-natured cop); the way enough shit happens in front of them that the cops can't dismiss the siblings' wild claims (thus avoiding that tiresome 'the adults won't believe us!' plot point).

The ultimate in Texas Chainsaw Massacre x The Terminator combos, Jeepers also benefits from one of the great stealth talents of his generation, Justing Long. You can taste his fear after being run off the road by the crazy killer's car, his glaze of sweat and frenzied yelling, the metallic tang of it. Sssshssshiss. There's a vividness to his plight made all made the weirder when considering the personal history of its director, whose proclivities perhaps find the perfect artistic sublimation subject in the saga of a monster obsessed with certain bits of a young man's anatomy (the sister naively assumes any self-respecting demon would prefer her royal hotness to her yucky brother). Yikes. Whatever, Salvo did his time; maybe he's still a monster at least now it's all sublimated nice and proper onscreen, making this a blast from start to shortly before the finish (for it ends on quite the downer note - be warned!)

7. THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD

(1985) Dir. Dan O'Bannon

***1/2 (Amazon Image - A)

The realm of post-Romero zombie movies is unaccountably vast -- thankfully it's now dying out, so to speak-- but in the midst of the "shoot 'em in the head"-rules morass stands this mighty exception--a mythos all its own (where nothing kills them)-- directed by Romero's co-writer on the original 1968 classic, Dan O'Bannon (who also wrote Lifeforce, below). The recently-departed and much beloved James Karen has one of his best roles as a medical supply company clerk who--on the first day of training amiable punk rocker Freddy (Thom Mathews)--tries to freak him out by telling him the movie Night of the Living Dead was based on a real, hushed-up event and that--in a typical military blunder-- the dead were put in holding containers and shipped to this very medical supply company where they still are... Meanwhile, Freddy's punk rock friends wait for him to get off work in the nearby cemetery; Linnea Quigley's death-obsessed party-naked punk chick strips on a gravestone (a fanboy highlight) and fantasizes about being ripped apart by a bunch of old, dirty men, a bad thing to express early on in a zombie film.

As if this couldn't get any better, there are also ace comic turns between Clu Gallagher as the supply company owner and Don Calfa as the funeral parlor owner next door. Together with James Karen, these three adults somehow manage to be way cooler, funnier, and more punk rock than the punk kids without even trying. And it's scary while being so funny: in addition to its elimination of the 'one shot to the head' rule; this is the one where they talk and shout "more brains!" but it's more than just some mindless metaphor, language brings it all into the realm of addiction/withdrawal. In other words, there's no escape, not even in language. The metaphor for addiction becomes all consuming. You've been wasting your life if you've never seen it, and if you haven't seen it again, now's the chance - it holds up like grey matter splatter on sticky wallpaper.

(For more Groovy Punk Rock 80s horror comedy on Prime - see TERRORVISION and LIQUID SKY)

8. LIFEFORCE

(1985) Dir. Tobe Hooper

*** / Amazon Image - A

Make it a Dan O'Bannon double feature! Thanks to Cannon Films and Tobe Hooper, his script for this stupid-brilliant film gets full gonzo wings to fly fly fly. A full roster of capable British male thespians like Peter Firth, Michael Gothard, Patrick Stewart, Frank Finlay, and Aubrey Morris scream, scream and scream in terror at the presence of gorgeous, naked Mathilda May, a soul energy-vampire whose ship travels in the tail of Halley's comet (it was passing around this time, and sci-fi films like this and Night of the Comet were making the most of it). Raiding planets as they pass, storing up souls for the winter, the lead vampire girl uses Jung's concept of the archetypal unconscious anima (the female ego of the masculine unconscious) to take her luscious form. Steve Railsback is the Yank astronaut from whose mind she takes her idealized shape (though really, she could be taken from the unconscious desires of any straight male in the audience). Without her hot Mathilda May make-up comes off, so to speak, she's a giant Basil Woolverton-style bat monster, but what are ya gonna do? Just stay drunk, Steve! It's a pretty intriguing idea (the vampire myth originates from the past visits of Halley's comet) from a novel by Colin Wilson and featuring knowing nods to an array of movies like SHE and THE BLACK CAT (as per her blue ray aura above). It's easily the best film in Cannon's short-lived but memorably crass and entertaining oeuvre, and the Amazon print is sublime, though I'm not sure if it's the longer, better British cut or not. Either way, it's a hilarious three AM must. (See Ten Reasons)

(for more cult sci-fi horror so recommended it's great if not good, on Prime - Galaxy of Horror)

9. THE RAVEN

(1965) Dir. Roger Corman

**** / Amazon Image - A+

You'd be a fool not to make this a Halloween perennial, for Vincent Price alone --when he's clearly having a blast making a movie, it's impossible not to have one too. Add Peter Lorre, Karloff and Jack Nicholson, plus Hazel Court as the buxom Lenore--they all vibe together tremendously well-- and some beautiful massive art direction, with sprawling atmospheric Gothic sets, and there you are, the best AIP Gothic horror comedy of all time. I was trying to just focus on lesser-known works for this list, but who's to say who's seen what anymore? The canon is too sprawled out, and no one watches the same thing at the same time like we did back in the 70s, man, when this was on afternoon TV with some regularity, to every kid's flipper-flapping couch somersault delight. The Mickey Mouse-ing score by Les Baxter may get a little too pleased with itself in spots, but it does certainly cast a mood when it wants to and Lorre, Nicholson and Price especially invent all sorts of funny weird little bits of business as they go. Watch it again and feel yourself at the delightful center of Halloween ground zero, the ultimate in cool spooky parties. (See: Mephisto from Missouri)

10. SUGAR HILL

(1974) Dir. Paul Maslansky
*** (Amazon Image - A)

This dusty AIP gem from 1974 is a wry, clever blaxploitation New Orleans zombie urban revenge film that knows how to take it easy and enjoy itself, arranging voodoo deaths for deserving honkie mobsters with a refreshing lack of scruples. Marki Bey stars as a sweet, sexy, witty fashion photographer Sugar Hill. Her voodoo-themed nightclub-owning boyfriend won't sell out to a bunch of syndicate thugs (led by Count Yorga-star, Robert Quarry) so he's beaten to death in his own parking lot, giving her motive to return to her ancestral swamp homestead and see about getting some old-school voodoo revenge with the help of her conjure woman grandmother, Mama Maitresse (Zara Cully) and the heartily-laughing Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley), who then shows up in different stereotype-satirizing disguises during the elaborate juju sting operations. Great touches, like the zombies being still-shackled 19th century Africans rising from the bayou, having died on their way to America and been dumped there by slave ships. With their silver ping-pong ball eyes, a dusting of gold glitter and cobwebs, and brandishing machetes and big evil grins, these monsters aren't necessarily convincing or 'realistic' or whatever that means, but who the fuck cares, they're awesome. More than most, it's just great to see black on white violence so freely and joyously celebrated. The deeper they go into their cake walk style display of how genteel black folks ought behave while luring the clueless mobsters to their doom, the more relish they seem to feel when they laugh at their deserving thug victim's inevitable display of raw terror, and the deeper our own sense of macabre catharsis.

I love any movie that trusts us to not be narcs or prudes and just to ride with a confident heroine into the moral abyss, especially if she's smart and badass enough that I don't have to worry about her getting beat up, sexually assaulted, imprisoned, outsmarted, or turning soft at the last minute, etc. (i.e. "there's been enough killing, today!" throwing down of guns, letting the villain live, et al.) None of that for Sugar Hill, a stone fox who puts on an endearing Morticia Adams-style thrill in her voice when lunging for the kill, as if having a blast making fun of how white people talk almost to the point she's cracking herself up. Yes, it's great to be able to root for a murderous voodoo priestess and not have to worry she's going to develop a conscience thanks to burgeoning love for a dashing black homicide cop so naive he genuinely can't understand why the African-American local community would hesitate helping him, even though the murdered mobsters have been terrorizing them for years. But don't worry about that cop, or how crude the production values may be --Mama, Sugar and the Baron don't need fancy props and sets to work their dark miracles and no handsome cop's going to foil Sugar's game. So take Blacula back with ya; I'm ridin' Sugar's shotgun 'til the doll's enflamed! (full)

Sugar Hill, with her zombie

12. NIGHT OF TERROR

(1933) Dir. Ben Stoloff

*** / Amazon Prime Image - B-

A long-unavailable old dark house swirl of a thriller with proto-slasher movie signatures, Night of Terror is violent pre-code melodrama highlighted not only by an unusually florid Bela Lugosi performance but by an unusually lurid string of murders, all committed by a knife-wielding madman, who grins impishly from the bushes with knife raised, prowling unmolested in and around a rolling, fog-enshrouded estate, ramping up a body count in the double-digits. From the opening double murder of a necking couple in a convertible down in Lover's Lane, it plays more like a 70s-80s slasher movie collided with a hoary old 30s mystery. Weirder even than that is a a dotty scientist (George Meeker) planing to uses test his new 'suspended animation' death-duplicating drug by burying himself alive. Even weirder still: he has inexplicably earned a fiancee (Sally Blaine) the rich heiress endangered by a tontine-style will of her kooky, clearly delusional (and murdered) father. She's so passive she even lets herself be pawed by Wallace Ford as--what else?--a nosy reporter. The mysterious Hindu servant Degar (Lugosi) and his spirit medium-housekeeper wife (Mary Frey) --who sees death in the future!--are also in for a share of the dead man's fortune, so they're either in danger too, or the murderers. The black chauffeur (Oscar Smith) alone is smart enough to want to skedaddle.

This rare Columbia B-movie gem was one that, as a dyed-in-the-purple Bela Lugosi fan, I'd been looking for since forever. Oh, ever so long I waited. Suddenly it's on Prime in a decent if fuzzy SD print after never being on VHS, DVD or local 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 and the way the killings just tumble along one after the other, the killer mugging to the audience like some insane off-Broadway ham. (Full review here)

13. THE GHOUL

(1933) Dir. T. Hayes Hunter

*** / Amazon Image - B

To be a classic horror fan is to get excited at any movie that features both Karloff and Ernest Thesiger (they co-starred in two James Whale classics: Old Dark House and Bride of Frankenstein). Here they're home in England, at Gaumont, but with Universal horror in their wind. Karloff stars but gets almost no lines as an eccentric, dying Egyptologist living in the eerie, fog-enshrouded ever-dark English countryside. Most of his remaining fortune has been spent on a huge mystical emerald which he thinks will bring him back from the dead... if its buried bandaged in his hand (and not stolen at the last minute by any quick-thinking pallbearer). After he dies, and his eerie Egyptian-style procession to the strains of Wagner's immortal "Siegfried's Funeral March" is concluded, the real show begins. The first person to break in finds the gem already missing, thanks to nervous but well-meaning butler (Thesiger) but there's also Ralph Richardson as an overly-friendly parson; Cedrick Hardwicke as a grumpy Dickensian lawyer; the great Harold Huth is Aga Ben Dragore, the art dealer who sold Karloff the jewel --after stealing it. Dorothy Hyson and Anthony Bushell are legal inheritors, cousins who bicker over old grievances, but then stand "shoulder to shoulder" against the spooky goings on.  Kathleen Harrison provides the comic relief as Hyson's pal who comes along for moral support and ends up swooning over Dragore's tales of whipping slave girls for miles across the desert on his camel. It all takes place over a single, wild night (my favorite kind of movie). Naturally Karloff come back from the dead and skulks about the mansion search of his expensive emerald. The bit where he carves an ankh symbol on his chest has been restored! 

Long just a streaky duped public domain blur, available only on second-hand dupes, The Ghoul as since been spiffed up and now is a personal favorite that's just oozing with delicious spooky Universal-does-Edgar Wallace atmosphere (with dabs of The Mummy). As with all the best horror movies, there are no daytime exteriors. It mostly takes place over a single long foggy night. Pure 30s horror / old dark house mood it is, with enough fog to carry it through to the giddy end. And if you lose track of who has the jewel, or where it's hid, or where everyone else is relative to everyone else on the grounds, don't worry, just vibe on the old dark house glory of it all, and watch it again later. It gets better, and easier to understand, with every viewing... now that you can see what's going on, kind of, in the fog. 

11. THE ASTOUNDING SHE-MONSTER

(1957) Dir. Ronnie Ashcroft
**1/2 (Amazon Image - B-)

One of my new old Ed Wood-school insta-favorites, this kidnappers-vs.-alien in the deep woods saga was never on UHF late night/early morning TV in the 70s the way its confederates like Plan Nine and Bride of the Monster were, and I didn't have it on tape during my drinking years, god knows why not. Lord knows I've tried, in recent years, to fill the gap, recently pushing my number of viewings into the double-digits. I would have loved this, also, when I was drinking in the 90s. It would have fit perfectly between The Thing that Wouldn't Die and Cat Women of the Moon if there was room. So many wasted hours wasted! Oh well, it's here now, on Prime. So are Thing, the Ed Woods, Cat Women of the Moon and Mesa of the Lost Women. They don't tumble one after the other like one of my auld 6-hour tapes, so you have to choose them of your own free will. But that would be foolish. Anyway, there they are, waiting, a click away. Do you dare? 


The Astounding story riffs along the old crooks on the lam hole up in a mountain cabin and reluctantly ally with the resident to tangle with monster route, but is great anyway as it occurs mainly almost in real time over a single night, has both Kenne Duncan and Robert Clarke, and has a great monster. With her extreme eyebrows and glittery body stocking adorned with big beatnik medallion, glowing in the dark as if the lens is wet from her awesomeness, Shirley Kilpatrick evokes everyone from Ann Francis to Divine (when she's on the rampage at the end of Multiple Maniacs), Shirley Stoler (The Honeymoon Killers) and Tura Satana (Pussycat). Her whole attack style is to just slowly advance towards people to try and kill them with a radioactive touch. (She also polishes off various wildlife stock footage). Duncan's alcoholic moll (Jeanne Tatum) polishes off one whole bottle and is eager for the next during the course of the film (my kinda gal - man I wish I'd been drinking to this movie). Their blonde heiress hostage (Marilyn Harvey) sports the sexiest blonde hair / black eyebrow combination since Jean Harlow in Hell's Angels. The same soaring, eerie but Wagnerian library cue music Ed Wood used for Plan Nine soars ominously and repetitively. Clarke's cute collie (Egan!) deserves better than to, as always, get zapped early. Don't all dogs suffer cruelly in horror movies? Aren't they the real heroes? Even kidnapper Kenne is nice to Egan because he "likes dogs as much as the next guy." So why, Ronnie Ashcroft? Why not let Egan live! 

The Amazon image is just OK but then again, you should really see this with bleary eyes to get the full effect - i.e. be as drink as Jeanne Tatum's moll. Either way, it's short so afterwads, find Mesa of Lost Women, Cat Women of the Moon, The Thing That Wouldn't Die and Plan Nine from Outer Space (not the colorized one), all now on Prime, and two of them at least lookin' pretty good. See 'em all back-to-back. You can't possibly go righter. 

That's all for now, kids. Don't watch these all at once - unless you're the Man who Fell to Earth

More Weird and Spooky PRIME Picks:

10 Swingin' Monsters of the 70s

15 Cool/Weird Horror/Sci-fi Films

12 Weird/Cool Italian Films

10 Fairly Bad Sci-Fi Gems

13 Best or Weirdest Occult/Witch movies

12 Nifty Vampire Films

These might not all still be on there, but honey, you're bound to find something... or some... thing waiting just for you to open its dusty case and set it free to lope... and slither...

More of EK's Obscure/Cool Halloween Recommendations:

Last October's Prime Viewing List (most still avail.)
(Oct. 2017)
10 Halloween Quintessentials

(Oct. 2015)

24-Hour Curated Halloween Horror Festival (via Netflix -2014)

13 Suggestions for an Uncommon Halloween Viewing Experience

(Bright Lights Film Journal - Oct. 2014)

13 Obscure Horror Films to watch this Halloween (Slant 2013)

New and Old Favorite Horrors:

A Carpenter Kind of Hush: IT FOLLOWS, SOLE SURVIVOR (1983)

Quaff this Kind Nepenthe: THE RAVEN (1935), WEREWOLF OF LONDON

Bitches' Sabbath: Alex di la Iglesia's WITCHING AND BITCHING (2011)

Pharmageddon! - JOHN DIES AT THE END (2011)
DAWN OF THE DEAD: Twilight of the Betamax

10 Reasons: THE LEGACY (1978)

+ Misc.
Women are the Fathers of Horror (tumblr)
October Capsules: Oculus, Shivers, Detention, Mimic 2, The Howling
Mysterioso Blu: Pumpkinhead, Legend of Hell House
A Stoner Shall Rise: The Loved One, Shrooms, Cabin in the Woods

The 2012 Acidemic Chthonic Reader

+ Audio, Books, TV etc:

HAUNTOLOGY for a De-New America (2015)

American Horror Story Season 1

American Horror Story Season 1 "Smoldering Children"

American Horror Story Season 2 "Asylum"

The Dead Files (2012)

From Dusk to Dawn, Penny Dreadful - Season 1

GATES OF HELL (documentary)

Guide to TV's Paranormal / Ghost Hunting TV Shows

The Strain (2014)
Twin Peaks

+

FULL HORROR FILM REVIEW INDEX