Shark Weeks and Triangle Weekends: An Acidemic Summer Reading List

 It's Shark Week on Discovery; and the ingeniously original "Sharkfest" on Nat-Geo (Streaming on Disney+!), in other words, more than ever, it's the right time to stay home in the AC, reaching to the slimy bottom of of your nigh-empty COVID excuse bucket to ward off pool and beach invites. By now you've gleaned summer is my least favorite season, I loathe the sticky heat (being half-Nordic). I am a big fan of doing the Huysmans A Rebors style beach trip, i.e. moving my easy chair so I can doze off with the afternoon sun hitting me square in the face through a (closed) window, coconut oil below my nose (to give the illusion of suntan lotion), eyes closed, the roar of the shark show surf swimming in my ears... the resultant sensory canvas all but gives me that sudden drop ghost feeling you get sometimes while dozing off after spending a long time frolicking in the surf, all with the AC blasting.  So you know the drill. I'm a big fan of the shark week and the shitty-CGI-hottie-scientist Syfy channel shark movies, which have been slyly crushing the Bechdel test right in front of the unwitting faces of 'the Man.' I could write everything I've written all over again, but instead, to make it easy for you, dear reader, I've rounded up a list of everything you need to surf.... safely limb-wise, but dangerously psyche-wise:

Wronger than the Storm: SHARKNADO, THE REEF

(Nov. 2013)

The point is, SHARKNADO comes along, and a Ferris wheel rolls into the side of a four story international style apartment building like it's no big deal. Charlton Heston might drag that Ferris wheel roll out to three hours, but this film rushes along past it. Sharks in the bar, sharks in the traffic jam; "It's like old faithful!" as water shoots up from the sewers. "We're gonna need faith to get through that" over a flooded dip under an overpass. A douchebag boyfriend of the sulky daughter says: "Even if it is the storm of the century, Beverly Hill's rescue services are second to none!" And then he looks out the window, sees a shark in the swimming pool and before he can react a wave crashes through into the living room and his head gets bit off. And there was much rejoicing. If you ever played the game as kids where you had to be halfway up the stairs or on a chair or couch to avoid getting eaten by a carpet shark then yes you are in bad movie heaven. If the leader of the survivors, Finn, is a typical bleeding heart idiot who has to stop to help everyone, even school buses that look empty. "This is your problem, Finn!" bemoans the weary ex-wife (Tara Reid) - and we kind of agree, but then Boom! Turns out --there's scared kids in there, and a TJ Miller-ish bus driver way out of his depth! You saved another busload from the shahks, Finn! (more) 

Micro-Manager Munchausen: THE STRAIN, SHARKNADO 2, and a little bit THE LEGO MOVIE

(August 16, 2014)

That Fin was an ex-lifeguard gave him an excuse for his chronic rescuing out west. His idiot desire to rescue his family before they knew they were in danger was offset with a Hawksian sense of real time and tidal surge momentum. We followed the incoming flood from his bar on the beachfront to the boardwalk, the parking lot, downtown, and inland and up into the Hills. A tangible rainy vibe was to be found in their impromptu getaway car; the windshield wipers and radio traffic delays, snarls and very LA dialogue about traffic ("I hate the 405") meshed perfectly with the conversation on where to go from there, creating a vibe familiar to anyone who's ever left a drunken party with a new maskeshift tribe piling into the car to head off to a second location.  We had John Heard as the comic relief, bashing sharks with his barstool; barmaid Nova (Cassandra Scerbo - above left) brandishing shotgun and shark scar backstory; wingman Jason Simmons helping with the heavy lifting and car rentals; Finn doing the posturing. Together they raced with the inward tide as it filled the streets and stalled highway traffic with sharks and flotsam, leading to exit ramp winch rescues, and various members of his party being eaten. 

In short, SHARKNADO had a lot of things going for it the sequel lacks. (full)

The New Triple Long Pig Dare Ya: 

SHARKNADO 3, CHOPPING MALL

July 27, 2015

Subtextual pro-NRA ultra neoconservative Army recruitment tool or no, watching Tara Reid give birth while falling through Earth's atmosphere inside a giant flaming shark, Fin cutting a whole so the parachutes can get through, it's tough to stay mad at America. Reid's skin looks much better, by the way, than in previous episodes. And it's great to see Nova again, especially all militarized like that. I just hope the Syfy/Asylum brain trust wise up and give Nova her own local girl vs. shark series. She's that old animal flesh creeping back again, a thumb in the eye of the CGI Moreau! Second Amendment 4-Eva! (more)

Shark Week Cools Me

(June 30, 2016)

It used to be just a hodgepodge of dull oceanographers tagging and mapping trans-oceanic migrations, puncture-aided by AIR JAWS, which was three or four great "strikes" of a whale-sized Great White breaching up and clomping down on a stack of seal-shaped tires, over and over, which is bound to be aggravating for the shark, wasting much energy (I always feel bad - were the sharks compensated for their effort? Were substantial fish subsidies paid from the stern?). But the whole week has been getting better every year, with shit aimed so close to me and stoners of a certain age group that it's like Discovery Channel has been reading our dinosaur minds or admiring the numbers on SHARKNADO. Every year there's more cool shit--including endless tie-in advertisements and cross-channel synergy-- aimed so precisely at my demographic that I feel like I'm getting high with all of America. Eli Roth hosts shark talk shows. Andy Samberg does weird trickster post-modern count-downs. SHARK CITY chronicles dishy encounters between a few residents of the local food chain in and around a sunken freighter. Mmy favorite so far: SHARKS OF THE SHADOWLAND and its trio of badass New Zealand government conservationist divers subjecting themselves to the ceaseless group attacks by weird-looking sharks called sevengills, all in the name of battling sea weed plagues!  (more)

Bechdel and Bikinis: 

Best of Syfy's Shark Movies Part I 

(August 15, 2018)

Consider Angie Teodoro Dick as the wild neopagan she-shaman with the spear (above), leader of the rogue New Orleans voodoo style outpost, who deals with the advancing shark issue by a kind of savage STOMP!(TM) performance on the floating docks, drawing the sharks in so she and her warriors can stab them with old-timey whaling harpoons. The warrior's spirited growling and chanting and thumping goes on about three minutes too long, but the bad vibe created by their eventual senseless shark slaughter is interesting in context.. (more)

Sharktopi vs. Various Things: 

Best of Syfy's Shark Movies Part II

(August 2, 2019)

For reasons known only to them, Syfy isn't deluging us with their Asylum and Offshoot giant and mutant shark movies this summer. Maybe because they don't have a Deep Blue Sea 3- Blewing Deeper, or an Arctic Sharktadon vs. Lobsterdamus (the visionary lobster who predicts a scalding, buttery armageddon), or Sharknado 7 - Drowning Around. It doesn't matter, as no fan of this genre would remember having seen all their back catalogue, even if they had. And most are still either Syfy 'on demand' or Amazon Prime. So just play catch up and leave it to me to make the notes, together we'll remember everything worth remembering... which is nothing. Isn't it (finally) wonderful?..(cont)

Til Human Voices Wake Us: 

THE BERMUDA DEPTHS (1978)

(Sept. 18, 2019)

...if the Jennie the Mermaid element of the film was all done as some kind of Harvey-Walter Mitty style fantasy, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. I would have never watched it. Unless it's Sherlock Jr., I have no interest in movies about the cinematic dream lives of workaday schmucks. Instead, by revealing nothing whatsoever the Depths delivers the full mythic power of an actual dream, the kind spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to. The Bermuda Depths is one of the few films to ever tap fully into the true power of anima projection. The filmmakers know that if there was some big twist at the end, i.e. a mad scientist is behind it all and/or it's a scam (and the scammer would have got away with it if not for those rascally kids), or if the film relied on any rational or even metaphysical 'explanation' for the mysteries, it would be totally lame. But the way it's all filmed, the way the story goes down, it never loses its Jungian "on-the-one" beat, where the film itself is a dream from which there is no waking, only a renouncement of one layer of the dream, which may or may not be a transition to adulthood, for another. (more)

Air Auda Beya Lah: THE BEACH BUM (2019)

(8-12-2019)

"Furthering the sunglasses and turquoise Florida ecstasy-dilated forward kinetic momentum of Spring Breakers, Korine keeps rolling even though he's too old to party with the club kids. They're exhausting, and so violent, so he's moved into the headspace of a grizzled old stoner, bopping down the Keys, click-clacking the words, and spreading poetry instead of violence. Unless you count poetry as violence, or think the occasional cold cocking a disabled person somehow immoral. Moondoggie (Matthew McConaughey) doesn't and if Harmony disagrees, he ain't 'breakin." He and the Doggie are sailing with the ocean wind at full speed and damned the too torpedoed to keep up with the headlong momentum of a poetic madman high on an everything that comes his way,  Swapping out Breakers' Saint Pete for the party-hearty Key West - a 24/7 raging town where everyone knows and loves the Moondog (no relation to the famous NYC street musician - except perhaps subliminally), the mood is strictly amniotic and delusional. Here's a guy famous--in Florida no less--for being a poet!" (full)

Post-JAWS (up from the Amazon) Capsules: 

SCREAMERS, GREAT ALLIGATOR, HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP, 

UP FROM THE DEPTHS, PIRHANA (2/1/19)

(re; UP FROM THE DEEP): Longtime Corman scriptwriter Charles B. Griffith directs with a nice leisurely (i.e. fairly inept) hand, figuring that if he follows the Jaws chalk marks while sneaking in hipster gags and soaking up the tropical charm (it's shot in the Philippines, but set in Hawaii), he can coast by without barely doing a thing at all. But his camera is so sloppily placed it seems like half the movie is going on in the background while the foreground lingers on a couple of tourist stereotypes shooting the shit (post-synced) at the lobby pamphlet rack. The action picks up once the death toll is so high that greedy hotel manager Forbes can no longer hissy fit it away so he ingeniously offers a cash prize for the monster's head, prompting a run on the Tiki lounge's decorative spears; visiting the gun counter at the local pawn shop. That's when it gets real Mad Magazine: a Japanese salaryman busts out a samurai sword, doing moves out on the rocks while two guys in full frogman suits walk backwards down the hotel stairs, and so on. It would almost come off like a savage satire of American second amendment zeal if it was filmed with a bit more panache. (more)

Blu-Summer: 

BLUE CRUSH, INTO THE BLUE, MIAMI VICE

(7/10)

(on BLUE CRUSH) "The common critical response to the film at the time was that the awesome photography more than made up for the trite story and bland acting, but most (male) critics have a hard time accepting truly free girl characters. If you can look past the surface colloquialisms this is practically a Howard Hawks film for young women: overlapping dialogue, strong camaraderie, a good sense of continuity, issues of courage, maturity and professional nobility. Best of all, the issue of romance getting in the way of your dreams–yeah you heard me, ladies: romance getting in the way of your dream, instead of romance being your dreams-–is handled with care and ballsy skill." (more)

Free to Be You vs. Me: SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983)

There's been an exciting upswing in the media presence of trans and/or non-binary young people these days, not merely activists or carpetbaggers but genuinely cool, free, unique types better than both boxes checked together; I wouldn't dare name some and by error omit others, but I think they can perhaps be measured in their coolness by their response to Sleepaway Camp, which in today's climate might be deemed 'problematic' in its association with what is and isn't horrific (or further, how a girl might change her sex due to a boat propellor or if that even fits into anything.) I think it bodes well for the future that the heroine of the film is also a murderer and has gone on to become a kind of gender-bending icon, as well as a kind of de facto female Freddy/Jason for the slasher set. We need more like her! 

There's a lot going on in this strange, intentionally disjointed film we choose to call Sleepaway Camp, especially the much ballyhooed shock ending. I only recently finally saw it, having lifted my self-imposed ban on all early-80s slasher films (the feminizing scars of my squirmish 80s boyhood finally healed) and was amazed how well it captures the vibe of my own experiences at summer camp. Watching one lazy Sunday afternoon, I fell under its spell and began to feel like I was actually there, thanks to its languid pace and crowded mise-en-scene. Most importantly, it gives us the coolest pair of kids in all of camp slasher moviedom: Ricky--played with  tender but unshowy ferocity by Jonathan Tiersten--and his catatonic cousin Angela (the indelible Felissa Rose), who barely know each other but are packed off to summer camp as one unit by their very weird guardian (Desiree Gould, who makes Deborah Reed in Troll 2 seem restrained) after a weird boating accident. 

Summer camp is terrifying until you get through the first few nights; after that it becomes a mix of giddy anarchy, boredom and relentless dirtiness. If you've already been there, maybe you aren't so apprehensive. Ricky was at the same camp last summer -- he's a legacy! He made friends there! But it's the first time off in the boonies for cousin Angela. Not exactly shy or terrified per se, while Ricky renews acquaintances, Angela just sits around, quiet and unassailable as the Mona Lisa, doing, saying, and eating almost nothing. She doesn't even seem to be miserable, she gives the world around her nary a clue as to her inner life, causing most of the other campers and counsellors various degrees of consternation. Initially attracted by her mystery, the more hormonal idiot males circle her like predators, irritated by her lack of reaction to their overtures and provocations. The girls in turn are irritated by the attention she gets from the boys they mistake her impassivity for snootiness. In one way or another, everyone is provoked and then irritated by her serene disinterest. Counsellors try to make sure she's fed and unmolested but even they wind up on the outside. If they push too hard, bad things tend to happen. If they just let her be, no one mysteriously dies.

Ricky, in the complete opposite camp, comfortably ensconced with his rowdy but cool boys-only clique, doesn't care if his cousin doesn't want to engage. Whatever she wants is all right with him. He lets her sit there, and only steps in if someone starts bothering her. He protects but doesn't engage. This rote proximity-respectful chivalry is a great character detail that gives Ricky a kind of untarnished nobility. He doesn't have to understand her. As far as he's concerned, she's all right as she is.

Being a slasher movie, plenty of offensive people at this camp don't respect Angela's space, and soon end up dead. But it's not with the murders that Sleepaway Camp earns props from me; it's not just because of the 'shock ending.' 

For me, it's the curious way the male counsellors are all Italian muscle guys in super tight  shorts and white tube socks (the style of the time). It's the campers, the vivid ugliness of the way white socks look with grubby sneakers and shorts, over legs just beginning to sprout hair; it's the young cast's richly lived-in semi-improv vibe; it's the slovenly look of the group cabins--awash in snack bags wet bathing suits, towels, floor stains, clumps of clothes, late sleepers--and the almost von Sternbergian way kids race in and out of the ratty screen door at the edge of the frame, to quick grab their swim suits or baseball gloves, laughing at something we didn't hear, and then racing out again. The many daytime scenes and lived-in mise-en-scene make it more of a summer camp movie with slashing rather than a slasher movie with camping. Its characters breathe and bicker like actual people and when they die it's not because they have 'transgressed' but because they wandered off the real people reservation. When they cease being original and real and become a camp stock cliches--bully, pedophile, mean girl, date rapist, blackmailer, etc.--it makes the subsequently inflicted violence more rewarding than scary. Unlike most slasher of the era, the moral is not 'stay a virgin' (these kids are too young for that), but stay a true character, fluid and 3/D--keep it real or face the consequences.

---

TIRADE ONE:

WHEN I WAS A KID, WE WERE TOUGH AND BLAH BLAH CIGARETTES AND FIGHTING

Ricky, especially, never falls into cliche- and he stands as a refreshing holdover from the kids of the 70s movies, who were often badass little punks (see CinemArchetype 23: the Wild Child), like Matt Dillon, Jodie Foster, and Jackie Earle Haley, i.e. the days when characters like that were the good guys. This was a time when junior high schools had student smoking areas. It wasn't until E.T. that kids all became doe-eyed saints. Before then we would have taken Tobey Maguire and kicked him into a trash can. It's no wonder most of us (male moviegoers) wind up conditioned to wince whenever a new boy shows up for his first day of school in a movie. He's generally pushed into a locker before he even gets to his first class. Never is there a boy we can identify with and admire and trust to take care of himself regardless of whatever new hell he's packed off to. But now and again we have a scrawny nerd who relishes the chance to throw down against some idiot twice his size--ala Dreamcatcher, Over the Edge, Bad News Bears, Brick --and man, it's such a relief! A kid like this may get their ass kicked, but they never lose their moxy or our respect. All bullied kids need to see such things, to learn it's not if you win or lose it's that you're not cowering, or avoiding, or pussying out--that cowardly avoidance echoes throughout the remainder of your life as the default settings for your behavior when forced into any threat or conflict. Even picking himself out of a trash can, Bad News's little blonde Tanner (Chris Barnes) is more of a badass than all the Karate Kids combined because no matter the size or number of the other kids, he won't back down. They have to throw him in the trash just to be sure he doesn't follow them and slash their hamstrings with a homemade shiv.

Nowadays, this fighting spirit is so repressed and shunned it can only explode in ballets of high school gun violence. Even then it's only by armed loners, never by fed-up masses of kids determined to fight back against curfews and petty institutional persecution or over-parenting. In fact, these kids today, they don't know how bad they have it, because they're whisked into child therapy the moment they fight back. 

For my generation--who ran wild in the 70s with a degree of freedom that would terrify parents and children of today--badass kids in films gave us ideals to strive for; they provided a compass for the chaos. Jan Michael Vincent teaching Jackie Earle Haley to drink beer and to drive a futuristic tank-trailer in Damnation Alley; Jackie Earle Haley tooling on his dirt bike,  and smoking a cigarette in Bad News Bears; Claude pounding a 1.75 liter of bourbon on his way to a party in Over the Edge... Nowadays? the Haley equivalent can't get on a motorbike without a helmet and elbow pads, even if the diegetic child protective services is long-since nuked.

A lot of the lamer adult filmmakers think kids identify with, and like to see, other kids in movies. It's one of the great tragic mistakes of pop culture history (and that goes double for sidekicks - i.e. Robin, Short-Round, etc - any kid who has a poster of Short Round, or Robin, or Superboy [1] on his wall - run.). There's only one kid we--as kid viewers or badass adults who remember being kid viewers--want to identify with:, the Wild Child. We saw them running amok in films like Logan's Run and--of course--the "Bop! Bop!" street gang in Star Trek. We don't want to identify with the goody-two-shoes kids our own age. We want to be older. We wanted to be Han Solo, not Luke. We may identify with the scared first day kid getting passively shoved against the lockers, but we don't want to. And we'll hate any movie that tries to shove this little pisher down our throats. The badass wild child, on the other hand, he's all right. He's got guts, and sometimes guts is enough, even if he ends up getting beat up and shoved into a trash can, he's all right. 

===

END TIRADE (sorry, ahem)

Why this is all worth mentioning is to praise by contrast a dirt-encrusted kid like Ricky, who can get along with most of the kids without being either the showboat center of attention or a bully, is a great fresh air blast in a sea of one dimensional stock kid types; he had a girlfriend the previous summer, and she's back but dating another dude, so he's hurt but tells her off and gets over it. He holds his own against the bully contingent--he bullies the bullies, if you will. Neither a nerd nor a Ferris Bueller smartass, Ricky quickly re-establishes his pack of cronies and starts going about his summer camp activities, keeping his troubled cousin always within eyeshot, but always leaving her to do her thing, which is...what? Sitting still and watching? It's her thing, man, leave her alone!

Is she in a kind of fugue state? What's Angela's deal?  Is she doing some weird act in a VC Andrews style plot? It's as if the camera hypnotizes her in place. She only comes alive when the camera isn't looking for her or at her, at which point the killer's POV takes over, craftily hiding in tight spaces and waiting for the perfect macabre "accident"opportunity to present itself: a drowning, a hornet nest tossed into the shower, scalding vat of hot corn-cob boiling water in the camp kitchen... all befalling the deserving. When it can't be blamed on freak accident anymore, the knife comes out. People get it right through the thin lining of shower stalls. Meanwhile Angela's taciturn disaffect seems like a red flag cape, inviting hormone-amped teens to charge at her, which in turn gives valid reason for their deaths. It's a kind of hormonal Mona Lisa Venus fly trap of projector screen anima-bivalence.

Man, those socks are so on point.

Ricky is no saint either - and in a unique centerpiece we see him and his boys play a very relaxed softball game that seems to go on for about ten whole diegetic minutes of the movie without building to a victorious climax or agony-of-defeat downer one way or the other (it's lulling without being dull). Getting the real rhythm of a summer camp softball game is hard--the way the distances between players necessitate different styles of throwing, the hit-or-miss at the bat, the satisfying 'thwump' of a base hit, etc., the bucolic real time of it casts a nice mood we wouldn't get in either loudly-scored exaggeration like Bad News Bears or misty Rockwell nostalgia like The Sandlot.  We're spared even the cliche of the kid busy playing his electronic game and missing the key fly!  Here he actually manages to put his boxing game away and go "oh shit!", put his glove on and catch the fly -- all without slow motion and cheering and swelling horns.  If anything, the victory is in the way it captures the leisurely stillness of an actual game, the peculiarly laid-back rhythm of the sport itself. In fact, to make it all the better, Ricky's a bit of a bad winner, rubbing the losing team's face in their gambling loss, deliberately inviting retaliation from the other camp's team so he can have something to retaliate back to, getting into a brawl for no reason other than the game's yin demands an uproarious yang. Watching I could feel that itchy constant of phantom wet socks under grass stained pebble-soled Keds. 

I don't know how or why Hitzik figured a slasher film could really benefit from all this real time softball business, but it works. Each daytime scene is crowded with kids running around in and out of the frame in an almost Von Sternberg level of movement from all directions and angles; every cabin is laden with a very real-looking color-blind melange of socks and discarded camp shirts, sleeping bags and kids crashing in and out of the front screen door to pick up or drop off jackets, change into swimsuits, etc. Campers race into the bunks to either shed a sweater or grab one depending on the weather change, then zip out as if they're keeping a game waiting, all hopped up on kid energy for the activity at hand. Friendships are struck or missed out on in each brief contact. On the whole, these campers are nice, normal, trying their best. Most make an honest effort to break through Angela's haze, and don't hold it against her that they can't. It would be much easier to just have a few campers in each shot, but this camp is thriving and on the whole, benevolently run without being mawkish or overly "nice." The head counsellor, is a muscle-bound Italian-American dude in tight shorts who looks like he should be bullying a guy named Eugene or combing his hair in a gas station mirror but he's actually a stealth sweetheart who makes a concerted effort to find Angela something to eat in the kitchen after she refuses to eat anything at dinner. He seldom leaves a medium or wide shot, just materializes in and out of frame to try his best to make Angela comfortable, then sails on in a seamless Hawksian flow. 

Even the few bad apples are--a few loathsome creeps aside--really just restless, seething with hormonal surges they can't control, taking out their energy in a way that, deep down, is probably well intended. Her enigmatic silence proves such a challenge to the hormonally unhinged older male campers they all but try attack her yet they barely make a dent on her serene distance (not sure if that was written into the character other than making it seem like actress Felissa Rose was struggling to keep a straight face. It's so refreshing not to worry about either of these two groovy wild kids: they take care of themselves just fine. We're put in the position of feeling bad for boisterous, creepy, bitchy, and horny idiots who unwittingly sign their own death warrants just because they can't abide that sphinx impassivity. It's so refreshing it's like a plunge into a cold lake after seemingly decades trapped in stale unairconditioned cliche classrooms.

Other characters in the film also defy cliche: I like that the camp manager Mel (Mike Kellin) with his cigar is cool without being callous, and amiable without being soft ( He watches the boys fight while talking to some counsellor girl - barely interested in either the fight or chat with the girl but keeping an eye on everything- to let the drama play (he'd probably intervene if they brought out weapons or he saw real blood). 

That's another great thing, the welcome anti-pedophile sadism, as when the scalded would-be rapist cook screams in agonizing pain and the other cooks and the camp manager just kind of stare glassy-eyed--without knowing for sure he had it coming just sensing it by the unseen audience's rapture-- and all the doctor can do is leisurely imagine the agony he must be in, lamenting that his morphine can't cover all the pain at hand. It's icky but soooo much nicer than getting there through the cathartic engine most exploitation filmmakers rely on, wherein they have to 'out-traumatize' each other in depicting misogynistic ultra-violence in order to 'earn' the climactic cathartic revenge (as in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Here we get the correct ratio - a pound of retribution for an ounce of offense. 

Us cool nice dudes know that being castrated in the movies invariably implies you deserved it.

To paraphrase Naveen Andrews line in Planet Terror: We don't need the reason, sweetheart, just your balls.

The counsellors (the nice Italian stallion head counsellor Ronnie --Paul DeAngelo-- is in the red track suit)

The killer of Sleepaway Camp operates on a modus even more precise than the alienation caused by watching your friends or older siblings drift off for casual sex, leaving you--the only one who senses danger all around as you're not yet blinded and deafened by horomones-- alone at the campfire, or out swimming, or trick-or-treating. This hormonal call was Jason and Michael's trigger switch, their knifing and slashing marked a steadfast refusal to enter the realm of adult sexuality, either as an a priori rejection or a post-shaming after some fumbling attempt to alleviate their budding biological imperative. (The final girl's own pre-sexual wariness made her more aware of the killer's).  Blaming the killer's socially stunted sociopathic inhumanity on stunted sexuality is to get it backwards. What makes us 'human' is our resistance to the harsh whip and carrot of our body's biological urges. The scourge laid onto our backs is never consistent enough to become mere background noise. Our only salve is sex or killing, either is a welcome relief. Meanwhile, grace of kindness and support comes from somewhere more benign, not a carrot but a salve that reminds us we're more than just sex drives and latent violence. Like Ricky watching out for Angela--a higher power keeps us from reverting fully to the savagery our body relentlessly craves. 

But at the same time, why else are we at this stupid camp if not to kill kill KILL? Angela gets that. In the end, she is us, and her own spectator, which is why her kills are all conveniently POV. We can't even be sure she did them. There's more than one way to get a head.... or other appendage. 

NOTES
1. Marvel doesn't have kid sidekicks --Stan knew the score, there's almost no recurring children characters in the whole MCU

Acidemic presents: Erich's 4 AM Favorites - on Youtube!

Erich Kuersten's "4 AM Favorites" as 4 AM is a curated list for the magic hour whether you are just waking up or staying up all night. People not alive to the moment are asleep, There is no pressure to do or be something as the people who pressure people are absent. If they woke up they'd try and drag you to bed with baleful eyes. Film bingers well know this hour, it's often where we first saw an Ed Wood film on TV in the 60s-70s. Stewed to the gills, hopelessly high and twisted, coming home from a night and early morning on the town or waking up as a child to sneak downstairs because you can't sleep, it's all the same. We 4 AM film watchers are all in it together. For me, it's the best time of all to be alive and in front of the screen. Your superego checks out at three AM prompt. Now you got nobody to shout over. Magic is afoot.

Here are some of the weird and wondrous films meant for those hours, now culled onto a youtube list, so you can just press play, open the browser window wide, bust another jug, tune up the couch and let the magic flow... and flow... til dawn and beyond. Perfect for on the road traveling, when all you got is a laptop or phone. Not as good as having the DVDs and a big screen, but sometimes emergencies. Sometimes there is no DVD to have, as in some of these like GET CRAZY, NADJA, MURDER BY THE CLOCK and the 1957 TV version of HEARTS OF DARKNESS. Sometimes there's a buggy. Etc. 

(PS none of them were uploaded onto youtube by me. I'm just curating! My own films--LACAN HOUR, QUEEN OF DISKS, et al-- are elsewhere, on the Erich Kuersten channel. It's different, and I do mean different.)

PPS - The original posting of this list was removed by either youtube or my employer (it was on a work gmail, oops!) So I had to redo the channel, which means it's not exactly the same as it was, more streamlined for the weird and the not readily available elsewhere, a perfect combination. I kept the original line-up in the links below (you can always find those films on the tube if so inclined). If you subscribed to the old one you may have to resubscribe to the new one; I am sorry!

Also, been reading the new BLEEDING SKULL book (on 90s), so adding some recent finds (thanks to the book's high praise) here, like Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo and Empire of the Dark, which has the funniest running by the most miscast leading man in the history of 35mm movies. 

RELEVANT LINKS:

Subject to change (as stuff is taken down by the man) but here are some writings on the films on my super

suede channel:

HEART OF DARKNESS (1957)

DEMENTIA (1955)

SPIDER BABY (1968)

BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE, THE (1962)

MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)

CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)

ROBOT MONSTER (1953)

CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS (1962)

FASTER PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL (1965)

HONEY WEST

SHIP OF MONSTERS (1960)

THE UNDEAD (1957)

INCUBUS (1966)

KILL BABY KILL (1966)

SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS (1973)

BETTY BOOP: SNOW WHITE (1933)

BATTLE OF THE WORLDS (1964)

THE GREEN SLIME (1968)

VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN

THE QUEEN OF BLOOD (1966)

FLASH GORDON (1936)

SALVADOR DALI: A SOFT SELF-PORTRAIT

THE ADDICTION (1995)

NADJA (1994)

THE ETERNAL (1998)

MODERN VAMPIRES (1998)

THE BLACK RAVEN (1943)

SH! THE OCTOPUS (1937)

NIGHT OF THE GHOULS (1959)

STAR MAIDENS 

GET CRAZY (1983)

SHE (1984)

CAT CREATURE, THE (1973)

CRUISE INTO TERROR (1978)

DEMONOID (1981

VIY (1967)

SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (1964)

SECT, THE (1991)

DARKTOWN STRUTTERS (1975)

FRAULEIN DOKTOR (1968)

MESSIAH OF EVIL (1973)

SOLE SURVIVOR (1983)

PONTYPOOL (2008) - since removed

MURDER BY THE CLOCK (1931)

THE GHOUL (1933)
THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)

THE CROOKED CIRCLE (1933)

PHANTOM, THE (1931)

SCARED TO DEATH (1947)

NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (1941)

BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU, THE (1942)

BLACK AND TAN FANTASY (1929)

HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD (1961)

ADVENTURES OF HERCULES (1983)

THE BLACK CAT (1989)

PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

CHARIOTS OF THE GODS (1970)

FINAL CURTAIN (1961) - review coming soon! 

Somebody's Sins: SAINT MAUD (2019), VIY (1967)

One subtopic of horror cinema that never grows stale (when done right) is folktale-sourced religious mania. I don't mean the dull misogynist witch burning and repressed hysteria, I mean the hallucinating, stigmata-and-schizophrenia ecstasy and torment of the holy fools. I also like the literal interpretations of bygone era's living mythology, ala 2015's The Witch, transferring to the audience the mentality that may well leave us all to believing witches were real. and the Catholic Inquisition saved humanity from a pervasive barbarous pagan evil that might otherwise have rendered mankind into a state of perpetual fear and savagery (instead of just being sexually frustrated maniacs unable to tell when they're projecting because Freud is still centuries away). 

Myth is more alive than ever in our age of instant dissemination: just check out the supernatural documentaries on the Tavel Channel. The plethora of ghosts, aliens, shrouds of Turin exposed to radiation, miracles and youtube videos all runneth over and then repeat along with talking head commentary. Like all good myths, ghosts, demons, sea serpents, yetis, and aliens hover ever on the edge of consensual reality. Like true mythology, the best shows never quite cross over to pure fiction (and easily dismissed as hoaxes, paredoloia, reflections) or scientifically-consensual reality (which would move us wholesale into some world-shattering new reality paradigm). As long as there's no ultimate signifier 'real' to contrast our protagonist's experience, we never know what is real or imaginary (i.e. if Shelly Duvall walked past the Gold Room and saw Jack at the bar, talking to an empty Shining air, for example).  Without that outsider/sane viewpoint, the first person experience of our main character has to be taken as real, in a vivid way we can safely experience in the safety of the theater or couch. We can, during this sacred temple space/time, believe everything we see, kind of. The best campfire tales are the 'true' ones, the ones that happened to a friend of a friend; your friend's friend swore it was real, that it really happened. When we know for sure you just made it up, that you're making it up on the spot--it loses a lot of its cachet. Even if there's just a .001% it could be real, then it's myth instead of fiction, truer than reality, wilder than anything the conscious mind can create. Watching a film that taps into this, we can feel it's real even when clearly fiction, ala The Blair Witch Project. The same does not hold true in direct experience, which we don't feel is real even when it clearly is. You can see this in the presidential election, where the middle American votes not from the bland truth of what must be done to save the budget, yes mom, okay mom, I I will mom; but instead hei votes his grandkid's oxygen right into the wallet of the robber barons, trusting that he, too, will become one, once the lottery comes through. He's already mentally spent half the money. Even if there's just a .000000000000001% chance it could happen, that's enough. That's not myth, though--that's fantasy, and there's a huge diff. 

In myth, death becomes externalized and thus we become immortal, weightless, enraptured and divine. When there's no chance it's not real, our mortality crushes down on us like a great weight. We may not believe we have a good chance of winning the lottery, but if there was zero chance, it would crush us just as much as learning all the supernatural videos we watch are fake, or worse, real.

Myth, then is truer than reality, because it creates a coherent language out of the randomness of direct experience. In myth, the devil literally lurks within every temptation, appearing in a cloud of smoke when someone mentions selling their soul for a drink. Considering the reality of that (a night of heavy drinking being the perfect analogy: a night of loud bliss paid for by an eternity of flaming hangover). Just because he acts invisibly, his dark energy infusing its way into one's soul via fermentation rather than sulfur and smoke, doesn't make him any less real. The extremes of light and dark breathe in myth the way they never do in reality (unless you're manic, schizophrenic, insomniac, tripping, and/or an alcoholic). I can't speak for schizophrenics, but I've been, or am, all the others on that list, and have seen both angels and demons, I've ridden the snake and walked inside the dragon. I even experienced that super rare 'pink cloud' where a flickering rose-tint infuses personal perception. Any AA member who sticks the landing long enough to find the 'pink cloud' can tell you the same thing: the same Monday night meeting that was initially a kind of a sad shuffle of nicotine and bad coffee-scented boredom suddenly glows with a pink-hued love that makes just being there akin to paradise. It's the same meeting, bro. So which impression is 'real'? It's not the same meeting at all, is it? 

Knowing these things can happen from firsthand experience, it make sense that the best movies I've seen in all of COVID--the age of internationally mandatory cabin fever--are about saints and spiritual pilgrims. The 2019 Irish horror film SAINT MAUD, one of the few newer films I've seen lately, is a slow-build minor masterpiece (written/directed by the improbably- named Rose Glass!) about a home care nurse (Morfydd Clark) sent to live with and care for Mandy, a terminally-ill dancer/choreographer (Jennifer Ehle) in a big artsy seaside mansion. Deeply lonely and an undiagnosed, the ascetic Maude gets these sexual current waves of pleasure when praying to her Catholic god; when the waves stop, she falls into a harrowing depression and puts broken glass in her shoes or kneels on pebbles for atonement, olidifying with ascetic intensity the link between modern self-cutting high schoolers and Middle Ages flagellants.  When Mandy grows afraid in the dead of night she she momentarily rides the Maud god train, and even catches one of the waves (maybe) while they kneel together. Taking this as a sign, Maud takes it on herself to ward off the dancer's partying lesbian hustler (a kind of anti-Maud) in a move I'm sure she doesn't realize is the sort of thing abusive caregivers do. But if you think she's going hobbles and starves Maud, or and makes her write with a broken typewriter or serves her cold parakeets, you're mistaken, I'm glad to say.

So where is this going. Maud, what are you up to? 

 We can never be sure 100% she's not a modern day Joan of Arc since we see only see and hear what she sees and hears. Thus we know there's no evil in Maud, just what we presume is her unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic hallucinations, misinterpreted as godly messages and interventions (as they often are). We feel for her especially if we've suffered from manic-depression or drug or alcohol addiction. She's addicted to the thrill of the touch of God, and when it dries up, she reaches out for booze and sex like she's drowning. 

Saint Maud veers with deft drunk savant brilliance out of the path of the typical cliches and snags that so often ensnare neo-horror psychotic female-protagonists, avoiding--though exploring--torture porn obsessions with, auto-mutilation / self-cutting (The Skin I'm In, Thirteen), romantic desperation (May), performance/ persona intertwining (Persona, Always Shine, 3 Women, Clouds of Sils Maria, Mulholland Dr.) or incapacitated victim/mentally-ill caregiver endurance tests (Baby Jane, Misery), Saint Maud's only cliche'd element are the usual smash cut ruts (1). The film's dusky cinematographic beauty and wild, cathartic transfigurative ending makes up for any stale passages. And if we've recently seen Dream No Evil (1970) and longed for a Ridley Scott cut (i.e. remove the pedantic voiceover).

VIY is the other of my new mythic religious faves, a 1967 Russian comic-horror piece about a young monk and a witch he winds up ensnared by after a spring break sleepover at a peasant barn.  Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol, Viy has the rock hard power of genuine myth behind it and a great, wild-eyed hero in clowning Leonid Kuravlyov. A monk in seminary school (with the terrible bowl cut and burlap robe to prove it) he finds himself forced to read prayers over a beautiful dead girl by a cossack landowner whose word is basically law, at her dying request. It does not go well, and by the third night the witch is calling out the big guns, enough trippy demons coming out of the walls to trigger any bad salvia flashback. Luckily, there is an endless supply of vodka... at least if you live until the cock crows. 

Though we can see it working just as well in a trilogy ala Black Sabbath (1963), this short film (70 minutes) never seems dull even during the many day and morning scenes of the Philosopher's incessant escape attempts. The Russian folk horror detail is rich we feel like we're hearing this told by the fireside after a hard day at the harvest somewhere deep in the vastness of rural Russia, where the closest law enforcement might be a three day ride away. Scenes such as when the Philosopher (as he's called by the cossacks) is ridden by an old hag across the sky like a human unicycle, have a fairy tale surrealism that both beguiles and amuses but proves genuinely unnerving, from her enigmatic stares and his own knee-jerk reactionary drunk monk-ishness. There's an almost Hemingway-esque--contrast between the cool, ghost-filled nights of terror and the idyllic pastorale of central Russian farm life: singing, whining, and napping in the warm sun, with big peasant food spreads laid out and a never-ending supply of breakfast vodka. The Philosopher keeps trying to escape, but there's only emptiness outside this weird daytime paradise/nighttime Hell. 

The only drawbacks to Viy are perhaps its length, it's not really a feature length story, and the over-the-top English dub (which is the only option on streaming). Me, watching it on Shudder inspired me to get the Blu-ray so I could watch it in Russian - much better. It reminds me of those days at camp, the way fear of the Goatman in the dark made us laugh and sing in the daytime, made Jesus alive in our hearts. We all slept with our bibles (it was that kind of camp) and the power of the Jesus made us alive with the kind of love and light that only those truly terrified of the dark old growth forests can have. We heard the Goatman in every rustle of leaves, every noise in the night; we never saw him directly, but no doubt he was there.  Viy and Saint Maud both get it, both know he was there, too. Believing is seeing, claiming it's the other way around shows you don't know human perception really works, and how the warm glow of the pink light just can't exist without the cold dark night of the soul.

NOTES

1. You know what I mean, where boy meets girl with a kind of impersonal hello at some dingy bar and we smash cut to the last few seconds of some joyless hand job or mutually demeaning doggy style. Yawn. Maud, you're better than that!!