Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon: MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1952)

Spider women, Angelo Rossitto, Dolores Fuller and Uncle Fester: add them together with random disregard for audience sanity and what do you got? THE MESA OF LOST WOMEN! A film by the amazing Ron Ormond, whose tentacles The Astounding B-Monster notes: "tap into everything from 'adult' sex-dramas, like Please Don't Touch Me, to a string of Lash LaRue westerns released by PRC in the late forties." I've seen Mesa millions of times and don't remember a single thing about it, except that it rocks, like the stone from which it gets its name. I forget the writer, but someone wrote of the Rolling Stones' 1972 album, Exile on Main Street: "It kicks ass though it can barely stand." Mesa of the Lost Women is like that, but reversed: It can't walk, though it has eight legs. It's got no bite, yet it's oozing tasty venom.

The Image DVD is apparently sourced from the film's only beat-down only surviving source print, unrestored and laden with aesthetically pleasing damage: jarring "missing scene" scotch tape splices, jumps and scratches at a level of near Brakhage-style abstraction. Am I giving too much credit to a film that splices a few Spanish guitar riffs in pounding at a shrill piano and calls it a score? The score is just perfect, for it mirrors the film, with the piano parts seemingly recorded in a different era and spliced in by with enough random atonal frisson to make even John Cage leave the room. The "music" is so pervasive, so repetitive and grating it becomes good enough that Ed Wood re-used it for his JD picture, Jail Bait. Is it brilliant or just bad? What would Warhol say? What would Godard say? They'd just shake their heads at you contemptuously. Mesa of Lost Women needs no justification! C'est un masterwerke!

The story begins with a couple found wandering in the scorching El Muerte desert. A "we dont need no stinkin' badges"-style Mexican brings them into police headquarters where they relate a tragic saga that begins, oddly enough, with the arrival of Dr. Leland (Hammon Stevens)--alone and unwitnessed by said couple--at the mesa of the mysterious Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan). Now right there you're in heaven not just because Coogan was in The Addams Family, but because he was the "H" dealer in High School Confidential.


Years or days later, Hammon escapes the Mexican insane asylum he's been residing at, and gets a very clean drink at a local cantina where a spider woman named Tarantella (Tandra Quinn) does the "Tarantella" for our besmitten heroes. Leland shoots her, interrupting her performance and leaving the audience aghast. Why is he so hostile to black haired beauties with gigantic finger nails? Was he mad that the film, for a few brief minutes, was actually genuinely fascinating, thanks to Aranya's undulations? What's this weird guy's deal? Michael Weldon in the PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM lovingly dubs him "A lobotomized scientist doing a weird Elmer Fudd impersonation."

It's not really a Fudd impersonation, but having read and re-read the review many times as a kid before actually seeing the film, it's tough to think of Leland any other way. Fudd/Leland also becomes the dispassionate existential core of the film, enunciating his words in such a bizarre way the dancing dwarf in Twin Peaks would probably take one look at him and go "Whatchoo talkin' about, Willis?" One Leland quote which always pops into my head at odd moments, is: "Now we will all fly!" He says this while hijacking Allan Nixon's plane, replete with bored millionaire, young trophy wife, Asian houseboy and Leland's own keeper, George (George Barrows), who runs around making sure no one tries to take the gun from "dangerous maniac" Leland.

While in the air, Leland's eerily vacant grin never waivers as he looks at the clouds and notes "So beautiful... so close to heaven." Once crash landed on the mesa, the gang all have a stiff drink and wait by the fire to be scared and killed off by mismatched cutaway shots of leering dwarfs, a giant leaping tarantula, and blank-eyed beauties culled from the very finest Hollywood casting couch. The dwindling survivors wish they had some food, and Leland seems to think he's still at the hospital with a tray of dinner due to arrive any time soon: "George will bring it. He always does."

One of the finger-nailed beauties on the mesa is Ed Wood girl Dolores Fuller! George Barrows is played by the same heroic guy who trudged all over Bronson canyon in a weighty gorilla suit and diving helmet for Robot Monster, made the same year! Lyle Talbot is even on hand as the doctor who tends the surviving couple and narrates. See it at least four times in one evening for proper effect and remember: Now we will all fly!

Read my NIGHT OF THE GHOULS piece on Bright Lights
and the Cinema Styles Ed Wood roster here

Ed Wood Blogathon: DAUGHTER OF HORROR

It's not by Ed Wood, but John Parker's 1955 surrealist grade Z nightmare, DEMENTIA (AKA DAUGHTER OF HORROR), is full of poverty row trimmings ala Ed Wood, with weird love for all the seedier elements of late 1950s life when you're a closeted schizophrenic beatnik prostitute. It's like a cross between the crazy dream scenes in GLEN OR GLENDA and Polanski if he was a crackhead and making REPULSION in a dingy basement with a young Mercedes McCambridge instead of Catherine Deneuve.

John Parker's only film (his parents owned a few theaters in Oregon, and mom gave him most of the money supposedly - I wonder what she felt about the result), if it had made it to Cannes or Greenwich Village, it might have been a hit, but shown to a bunch of linear-narrative-expecting 1955 folks, it must have sent them yawning and screaming from the theater. With his artistic vision warped by madness and vice, he's a genuine sleaze like Ed Wood, someone for whom the grotesque poverty row-style fantasma on display is genuinely "their cup of tea" and not just what jaded producers think will sell drive-in tickets.

One wonders what the producers thought. The scene in Burton's ED WOOD, where his producer greets GLEN OR GLENDA with shock and outrage (he wanted a sex change film "for the south"). I can imagine such a shock happening with this film, which was perhaps meant to be a teenage gang drama, all the rage in the mid-50s, ala Corman's TEENAGE DOLL and Ed Wood's THE VIOLENT YEARS. But this is no ordinary juvenile delinquent film. Not a word of dialogue is spoken as we follow a woman known only as 'The Gamin' (Adrienne Barrett) on her midnight sojourn through a desolate urban landscape to do what? Turn tricks? Seek kicks? She encounters a drunk, a sadistic cop, and a dwarf (Angelo Rossitto) who sells her a paper, all in the first few agonizingly slow minutes. Later a masked figure leads her to where her dead parents are boozing it up in a graveyard, and in between she is led around to various seedy bars by a rich fat guy with a cigar (Bruno Ve Sota).

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

If it is Ed McMahon it sounds nothing like him, but who cares? Whomever he is, he enunciates every word as if he's getting off on ecstasy while having his toes cut off. It's with the narrated version that the true Ed Woodiness comes roaring out, thanks to Criswell-esque lines like this: "Yes! I am here.. the demon who possesses your soul. Wait a bit... I'm coming for you. I have so much to show you, so much that you are afraid to see." You keep wanting him to add: "Beware of the dragon that sits on your doorstep! He eats little boys! Puppydog tails and big... fat... snails!" Each word is emphasized and dragged on, like the film itself, struggling to stretch a short film into a feature length and only getting as far as around 57 minutes. Perfect for an all-night horror film fest, such as the one visited by the unwitting denizens of Anytown USA in the BLOB in 1958.

Connecting the film with Roger Corman is the presence of Bruno Ve Sota -- he plays a fat capitalist with a cigar who lures our gamin up to his penthouse, where a bartender has been waiting all this time upstairs to serve them. She looks at Ve Sota, quizzically. What is she expecting? Certainly not for him to jump on the piano and start banging out some classical jazz. He's certainly not expecting her to... but wait, I mustn't spoil it. Suffice it to say that the usual "innocent girl down the rabbit hole" stuff (males leering and groping, getting drunk and slapping taunting bitches in furs, etc.) is countermanded by the gamin's own sadism. When a cop beats a drunk who was harassing her to a pulp, she just stands there and laughs delightedly.

The score is great with George Antheil's weird music and the Yma Sumac-style upper register wordless eerie whooping of Marni Nixon. When our lesbian gamin outlaw hides out from the cops in a dingy basement jazz club, she ends up dressed singing with Shorty Rogers and His Giants, until the paranoia gets too deep. It's pure Wood to watch her continually open her mouth and then quickly close it, trying to remember when Nixon's vocals come on in the mix. She's trying to lip sync and keeps starting to make Marni Nixon noises and stopping when she realizes Nixon's voice isn't coming, meanwhile sleazy dudes grope drunken party girls and lonely old guys with five o clock shadow drink up and endeavor to look as sad as they possibly can. Meanwhile the big jazz band takes up half the room; the drummer bugs his eyes and makes goofy faces. The cops shove a dead man's head through the basement bars, so he can dig the sounds. Everybody's happy and a creepy classic is born... or is it? HAHAHAHA!

And the best part is, you can see it in its entirety, for free, on the web right now: Just click here

Spirit of Ed Wood Blogathon: Wood Before Cable

Like many of the older Ed Wood out there, I first came to him via those weird circular UHF antennae that existed long before cable and VHS: there was the regular antennae, which got the three major networks & PBS, and you "switched" that channel, but then there was a dial part, like FM radio - you tuned in the UHF channels -- local channels that showed the news, the local TV shows, and lots and lots of great old black and white horror movies. Sometimes the picture was bad, sometimes it was worse, and standing there twisting tin foil around to connect the antennae to the your leg for example, was not uncommon, especially during bad weather.

Many of the horror films they showed regularly were really boring in that regard; many directors for poverty row were drunks and lazy asses, like William "One Shot" Beaudine. If you were lucky, maybe there'd be a gorilla suit or a guy in a mask, but that was it. There was a film they always showed called The Invisible Ghost. The trick title's no lie: Aint no ghost, just Bela waiting until people fall asleep and then killing them by waving his coat over their heads. It's torturous to see that sort of thing on a sunny Saturday afternoon when you should be out playing -- you have long commercial breaks to wait through and you hold on thinking a monster's got to show up eventually, but one never does... and then dad comes home and flips it to golf.

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

It didn't matter that it looked fake. When you're a kid in the 1970s, and CGI is still a few decades off, you don't care that things aren't realistic, you don't even know what real is, unless you mean the bugs you're looking for in the dirt under the porch. If you can have hours of fun with a few army men and a rubber alligator, you don't care if the saucers are hubcaps. What you care about is that you have Dracula, zombies, a hot chick vampire AND flying saucers and aliens all in one movie, with very little kissing and comic relief, just the good stuff. With Bela and Tor Johnson together, for example, you didn't even need a giant octopus, that's why Ed Wood was so awesome. PRC and Monogram sure as hell weren't springing for an octopus, not when they felt they could get away with Lugosi and an overcoat.

Like all the other horror films in UHF rotation, Plan Nine and Bride of the Mosnter were shown usually on early weekend mornings, while you were still supposed to be in bed. Nothing beat getting up before everyone else on a 70s Saturday morning and finding Plan Nine from Outer Space waiting for you, hours before the cartoons began. With the combined fuzziness of the picture and your still half-asleep mind, it was literally a weird kid's dream come true.

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

(Read my Christmas 2008 celebration of Plan Nine here)

RIP, Angel Baby...

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

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

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

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

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

Osaka on His Mind

Godzilla Raids Again (AKA Gigantis the Fire Monster) was the 1955 sequel to the original Godzilla. Like it's admittedly superior predecessor, its in stark, grainy black and white and suffused with a dark post-war melancholy, an almost solemn edge of nouvelle vague fatalism. And in the beautifully restored prints available on DVD at the moment, the photography is gorgeously bleak, with great deep blacks and grain to spare.

Since the events of the first film are still fresh in the minds of the humans in the film, no one doubts the two fishing company pilots when they report seeing Mr. Zilla tussling with an ankylosaurus-style monster (the suits in the film call it "angilosaurus" or Angilas, or sometimes Anguirius, for short). In fact, a tearful and defeated military advisor played by Takashi Simura (who starred in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai the year before) comes on and trying to be a brave boy, starts to cry and notes that Godzillas are indestructible; if the monsters come to the mainland, Japan is doomed. This is so cool because a) Americans never name their monsters, aside from Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World. The Beast from 2,000 Fathoms, Them, It Came from Beneath the Sea, Tarantula, all bespeak a lack of respect, which the Japanese definitely have for this gigantosorically leviathenesque behemoth. Imagine if John Agar called the giant tarantula something crazy like "Dr. Enoch"? Look out, Dr. Enoch is coming! But no, we're too snobby.

I was a fan of Godzilla as an indescriminate child, and then once I "grew up" wasn't much into him ("so fake, man"), annoyed by bad dubbing and cropping for television, and faded colors, and indecipherable editing in of American actors. With these glorious new DVDs from Media Blasters, I've come to realize that all of those problems are long gone. All the movies are presented in both versions: the original Japanese and the American butcher jobs (for those who really hate reading subtitles). To crazies like myself who are always trying to balance an inbred love of schlock and learned artsy pretensions, Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again (in their original Japanese versions, with new subtitles) are the alchemical mostest.

Raids Again flows with long scenes of pilots in the air and slow long shots that show empty black sky with the factories and temples way down at the bottom of the screen, humbly blowing up in big white gas explosions for your viewing pleasure. In the composition of these shots one senses the unspoiled artistic eye of a child, for whom the ground is always a brown line across the bottom of the page, the sun is always in the upper right and a blue bar running along the top of the page, parallel to the ground, indicates sky. Even when monsters aren't onscreen, the camera is always waiting and watching from a safe distance - it's a good trick, because the close-ups of each monster look rather ridiculous (though strikingly puppet-poetic in the high contrast blacks and grays).

This being a sequel, the Osaka militia knows about Godzilla's problematic invincibility, they know they need to play it cool, they need to pretend they're not home when Godzilla comes calling. Everybody turn out the lights and hide! They coordinate a total black-out and when he comes trudging ashore, amidst the sleeping docks of Osaka, he's at first quite confused. From looking at footage from the previous film) the Japanese officials know he follows and attacks mainly sources of light (due to H-Bomb trauma, they theorize). So while the city blacks out and stays deathly quiet, the planes shoot a barrage of flares back out to sea, and Godzilla stands there looking one way, then the other, his animal brain endeavoring to figure out what's going on. But then, explosion she wrote!

The guys at Stomp Tokyo aren't particularly kind to this movie; the touching camraderie of the fishing company is completely lost on them:

"Somewhere along the line someone decided that devoting twenty minutes to the reconstruction of the fishing fleet and Kobiyashi's brotherly devotion to Tsukioka would increase the human interest in the story, but the results fail miserably. It’s tough to imagine any viewer who wouldn’t be waiting for the next monster scene to start.

Yet here I am, Mister Sparkle! Anything set in Hokkaido, renowned for its countless soap factories, is all right with me.

According to Stomp Tokyo, the film bombed and Godzilla disappeared from the radar for almost a decade. I don't think that's quite fair. The scenes of quiet blackout in the empty city carry a ghostly melancholic charge and though the battles are sped up instead of slowed down at least they're not boring and best of all are always presented from a safe spectator's distance. When everyone is quiet, hoping Godzilla will go back to the sea quietly, the film has an in the moment hushed, waiting suspense quality reminiscent of the first Infernal Affairs or certain scenes in Michael Mann's Heat.

The music too is tastefully restrained, aside from the Japanese pop hit title track--but the subtitles include the lyrics, fitting the nouvelle vague trend of subtitling chansons. There's poetry in this crazy flick, I'm tellin' ya! If you go into this expecting an all-out monster fight you'll be disappointed sure, but if you go in assuming it's a proto-new wave film about the loves and losses of some pilots at a fishing corporation, then it's a pretty far out narrative disruption once giant monsters arrive, like Only Angels Have Wings meets the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. The puppet-like nature of many of the monster close-ups make it all a kind of a fractal loop where the very small (children's rubber monster toys) are also very very big. It's all connected, all summed up in a cup of sake and a churning sea... and a rubber suit with your name on it.

There ought to be Freaks.

There's nothing like a back injury to help you catch up with their backlog of unseen 1970s horror films... especially if you leave the remote painfully out of reach. Now you are paralyzed anyway so it may as well be with fear... so bring on... THE SENTINEL!

I don't know what kept me away so long from this 1977 gem. I'll never leave again! It's got it all: super young Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum in bit parts; Martin Balsam and Sylvia Miles together again; Burgess Meredith as an mincing elderly gay stereotype; Beverly D'Angelo as a freaky lesbian stereotype, using masturbation as a weapon of uncanny frisson to creep out our already-very creeped-out (straight) suicidal heroine (Cristina Raines), who is very naturalistic, and sexy, and screams well.

I can't reveal another detail, but let me just add some more classic old faces: Ava Gardener, Jose Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy, John Carradine and Eli Wallach, and I must mention a very hot scene in which Cristina investigates strange noises while wearing a sexy negligee, armed only with flashlight and butcher knife (see bottom last pic)...all that in and of itself is great, but forget it. You don't even need all that, because there are real freaks.

REAL freaks. Genius! When have we seen real freaks outside of 1932's FREAKS (above)? That's right, here in THE SENTINEL, the bizarre Thanksgiving parade (gooble gobble!) of Browning's children--begun in 1932--comes to its final resting place 45 years after. THE SENTINEL is our last look at the exploitation of deformity and difference on which our circus sideshow culture is based, it's a last bow before the onslaught of liberal PC brainwashing.

I could swear I recognized one of the pinheads from Browning's 1933 film--looking suitably older--in amidst the madness. Had these poor souls been traveling the carny back-roads all this time? Suffice it to say, this film provides a nice breather from political correctness not just in its callous exploitation of freak frisson, but of homophobia as well. As I recall from my childhood street-corner conversations in those pre-AIDS days, the very idea of same sex kissing and fondling was considered stomach churning (hence the pro-gay flak thrown at the lurid depictions of William Friedkin's CRUISING [1980], for example, which plays up the same sideshow affect; but we had already matured as a cinema going public by 1980 to the point where the perceived "freaksploitation" of homosexuality drew outrage instead of titters.

If it's not quite in the same league as its 1970s compatriots (like LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH), THE SENTINEL'll do until some other movie with Bevery D'Angelo as a creepy lesbian masturbating in a leotard comes along. And as for the poor freaks, I am sure they appreciated the humanitarian concerns of not being exploited after this film, but they probably missed the money. And isn't it sad this great American institution is gone forever leaving only a bunch of insane but non-deformed humans hammering nails into their noses and swallowing swords down at Coney Island's Sideshow by the Seashore?

THE SENTINEL is one of those great last gasps of 1970s split-level thinking; we're meant to recoil from the lesbians as if Robert Aldrich was directing, and to recoil from the freaks as if they're demons from hell, making this a conservative horror pic when all's said and done, which is the true freak show vibe, the validating of the patron's conservative "wholeness" in contrast to the sideshow's celebration of the grotesque and abject. Remember NYC was still where one went to recoil in horror from X-rated film marquees, wobbling hookers and urine-stained winos--not Disney Stores and Nike flagships--and THE SENTINEL's not trying to impress you with its liberal bias, it's trying to scare you and creep you out, like a day trip to what NYC used to be--one giant sideshow up and down Times Square. See Ratzo Rizzo, half rat, half man! See Jackie Superstar! She thought she was James Dean for a day! Step right up!

There is underlying it all a rationale for the use of lesbianism and physical deformity as signifiers of horror--at least in the past--for when used as a measuring stick these films reveal our current culture to be more progressive than we sometimes give it credit for: Being publicly skeeved out by the thought of gay sex was on its last gasp but permissible in the 1970s, and movies like CRUISING (w/ Pacino, pictured above) and THE SENTINEL played on that, but in the process they helped audiences grow acclimated: if familiarity breeds tolerance, it's repetition-compulsion disorder that breeds familiarity, and it's shock and horror that breeds repetition-compulsion disorder, therefore: Repulsion = tolerance.

After all, even more skeevy than deformity and homosexuality back then was the most commonly used "free" horror effect: old age. First introduced in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962) and ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968), the idea that old age was inherently demonic--as in emaciated corpses with shambling gaits and nightmarish dentures--faded in the all-drenching teenage blood wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th. We recently saw David Lynch use old people for creepy effect in Mulholland Drive, but you have to be a certain age yourself to be afraid of the elderly, just as Niagara Falls is lovely from a window, but terrifying if your stuck in the current, it's a matter of proximity.

So what is even left now that old age, homosexuality and deformity are all no longer usable as horrific in and of themselves? Instead of "one of us! one of us!" we have ghosts coming through the computer screen. Instead of horror we have horror signifiers strung together cheerlessly like gold dollar signs in a rap video: an eye through a key-hole, water leaking in the basement, a girl with dark hair drawing a pentagram, thunder! a chainsaw! a girl in a shower seen from outside the steamy stall door; Satanic graffiti, hands scribbling in a journal while monks run down stone staircases, partial nudity highlighted in thick felt markers, and golden-hued car commercial subtext-- all bathed in a sugar crust of flashy editing and served with nu-metal flatware, and then the credits: please exit quickly the next show's about to start there will be no refunds step right up!

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Read Tenebrous Kate's valuable take on Cruising here
and the Costuminatrix on The Sentinel here.

Last year at Marien...something something

"This shows how far we are incapable of looking at (I wont even say understanding) an incident without interpreting it and without our look added to the amalgam, a mixture which by nature belongs as much to the documentary image as it does to the fiction with which we envelop it. All this boils down to saying that you cannot read reality as you might a novel, you read into it." - Andre S. Labarthe (Cahiers du Cinema, Sept. 1961)

"Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" - Chico (disguised as Groucho) Marx (Duck Soup. 1933)

Everyone has their own take on the formally modern jigsaw puzzle that is Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), soon to be released on a beautiful DVD by Criterion, is it the story of a repressed memory of possible sexual assault? Or is it just a collection of images that Resnais relies upon the viewer to make sense of? Or is it just...bad?

For me it's a horror movie, where everyone concerned is in hell: the audience plays its own part as stuck in the hell of pretentious wankery, the characters are in a hell of art, located in the center of a pyramid bordered by Carnival of Souls (1962), the Shining (1980), and Jess Franco's Succubus (1968).

There's even a few unofficial horror sequels, Daughters of Darkness (1971, pictured above), in which Delphine Seyrig, now an old lesbian vampire, wanders the halls of a decaying empty old European-style resort and does a "I've always known you" gaslight on the sweet young thing of a Polanski-esque scumbag. In Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) there are similar editing schemes (such as the justly famous sex/dressing afterwards montage), a desolate grand hotel and a similar "You were here before" gaslight this time worked on the man (Donald Sutherland) by two batty psychic sisters. All these films operate on at least a few of Marienbad's ghostly frequencies--particularly the "living corpse" analogies and the possibly supernatural origins of the female protagonists' husband or "keeper", and most need to be seen more than once to be fully understood, films like Don't Look Now, Succubus and The Shining actually only begin to get enjoyable with the second or third viewing. With Marienbad, Resnais makes sure to show us the film several times all at once, so we can get over that hurtle and really enjoy it, which is to perhaps come to the realization that we have never actually enjoyed it, or even seen it... again.

The first time through is fairly taxing, but by the second you've prepared counter expectations. In modernist form ab abstractum tediorous, one longs for some circus freaks to parade by, ala Bergman or Fellini, just to liven things up, but this film is totally static, it's the nucleus, the center for all the aforementioned horror movies to rotate around, gaining meaning and resonance with every revolution. Ultimately it's about the impossibility of memory and perception, with every image reflected and refracted, and Seyrig as the ultimate vampire queen at the center, the one person who provides the illusion of a soul, of depth behind the facile masks, is the one person who is, in fact, completely soulless.

It's the hell of the endless party out of time, where Candace Hilligoss (left), Jack Nicholson, Donald Sutherland, and Faustine all end up; hell is not after all a land without enjoyment, but a land where enjoyment is never allowed to cease... as in the old Disney cartoon of Satan's helpers force-feeding naughty children on conveyor belts, but it's the hurdy gurdy trappings of the bourgeoisie that are inescapable here--the way a child who doesn't understand witty banter might feel being dragged to a French film without subtitles, the decaying crumbling land where perfume ads really do come true, and once inside you can never escape. As with Hiroshima Mon Amour, Resnais uses repetition of imbecilic phrases over and over to make some kind of post-hypnotic point and like Hiroshima Mon Amour it's damned irritating to anyone not easily enthralled by a strain of modern art that takes itself too seriously, that hasn't pre-empted hoots and hollers from the back row by having a stooge wandering through occasionally slipping on a banana peel. Godard's satiric edge and short attention span saves his films from the abyss where Resnais doesn't fear to plummet.

That the picture on the Criterion disc is so beautiful and pristine is probably not entirely positive as it leaves no room for improvement: One might look at an old crappy Koch Lorber disc and think, "Well, perhaps if the picture were better, it would be a kind of work of art," but with Criterion's beautiful disc, there's no longer room for doubt. As Seyrig puts so eloquently, "I don't know that room, that silly bed, that fireplace with the mirror. There's no mirror over the fireplace. It's a painting." Oui, mademoiselle, at's a no painting, at's a spinach.

This movie is what might have happened if there never were a Marx Brothers, who knew how to deal with these types of posturing jokers back in 1930 's Animal Crackers. I kept hoping Chico would run into the room and go, "that's a no painting, that's a fish, a flitsk..." as he steals a priceless Bogarde oil painting by cutting it out of the frame during a blackout. But the Chico never comes: that's my nightmare, that's my hell, crawling across a straight razor. There's nothing wrong with that if it works. What does Marienbad mean? Whatever it does, it's meaning it now.

The shattered glass effect is also one of the process of filmmaking itself, which involves watching the same scenes over and over, different takes, different edits, while compiling a feature films. Some of the jump edits here in Marienbad are sizzlingly witty, but some are just headache inducing, the artsy version of a kid flicking the light switch on and off really fast to freak his little sister out. Alain Resnais! Quit it this instant and go to your room. Luckily no such emotions intrude on the airless triangle that constitutes Marienbad. No children. No nudity. Not even ice cream. One longs for the ghost of Groucho Marx to inhabit Seyrig's body and do his "strange interlude" impression from Animal Crackers: "How happy I'd be with either of these two, if both of them just went away."

The rationale here of course is that Resnais is being French and focusing on French cinema and architecture rather than delving into American pop iconography with the kid in a candy store glee of Godard, The modern salts in the Marienbadbath have no American counterparts, they are purely French in the way Yankee tourists in Paris feel slighted by; the pretentiousness without the naturally self-effacing wit which the French don't even realize they have, inherent in the poetry of their language. The completely self-serious bourgeoisie posing at work in Marienbad is something we in America are only used to seeing from behind velvet ropes or through the jaundiced eyes of Billy Wilder, the stuff that makes the henpecked husband roll his eyes while his matronly wife applauds, wide-eyed, respecting anything which she can't understand. It's a representation of a bourgeoisie we in America have been trained from our Max Sennett birth to deal with by either a) throwing pies (if it's McCarey) b) sending a Barrymore up to steal their jewels (if it's a Lubitsch), or c) showing them the error of their ways through a moving speech (Capra).

Left to their own devices, the ennui-ridden ghosts of Marienbad and their sordid modernist loops of romantic betrayal are un-signifiable, they are inherently obscurantist, they are for someone else to like, not us, but someone who actually reads Gertrude Stein, and in that sense Marienbad cries to be adapted by a modernist multi-media troupe like NYC's Wooster Group, with three different video screens alongside a bawdy vaudeville show. I'd go. Twice, and be secretly bored each time, though twenty years later I'd boast about it (did you know I saw the Wooster Group's The Emperor Jones--with the amazing Kate Valk in blackface drag and dressed as a samurai back in 1995?) It's true, matey. And let me tell you one thing I learned from art school, just because a film is so boring it makes you get up, leave your seat and go to the bathroom and then go to have a cigarette outside and then not come back doesn't mean it was bad. It just means its modern. Forget it Jake, it's Marienbad!